2020 Books
2020 was a rough year for everyone! I didn't get my first case of COVID till the late summer of 2021, and I wasn't particularly impacted economically by the shut-down, but it was just so much sitting around. I remember driving to the library in Silver Lake- not even my own local library, and picking up brown paper bags filled with library books just to pass the time. I read most of the Booker longlist in 2020- I think I had just discovered that you could these titles as E-books through the library even if they didn't get a physical release here.
It's also clear from these titles that I was seeking to escape my surroundings by reading books that had little or nothing to do with my circumstances. It is an underrated aspect of books- aren't they original virtual reality?
Published 1/2/20
Point Omega (2010)
by Don Delillo
If you had asked college-age me who my favorite contemporary authors were, I probably would have included Don Delillo in my top five, basically because I had read Underworld (1997) and White Noise (1985). I'm now about six books in with nine more to go, and I've targeted Delillo as a good candidate for Audiobooks because reading him in print isn't a priority- been there, done that, and I don't believe he is one of those authors where reading the book in print makes a big difference.
Even with all that effort expended, I haven't grown to love Delillo, and these days I wouldn't even put him in a top twenty list. Point Omega did nothing to shake those negative feelings- I'm pretty sure that, at 110 pages, the only reason the publisher thought they could get away with marketing it as a stand-alone novel was Delillo's over-all literary reputation, and as I listened, it felt more like a short story or at best, a novella. The nearly plotless book concerns Richard Elster- a Bush era public intellectual engaged by the President to justify post-9-11 acts of "rendition" based on his earlier work on that exact subject (specifically the word "rendition.")
Elster contains echoes of several Bush the younger era scholars, but mainly he resembles a cross between Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo, the Harvard educated lawyer who was the responsible author of the so-called, Torture Memos, which provided a legal justification for torturing non-state opponents of the United States. Even though I probably have more than average interest in this subject, I found myself drifting while listening to Point Omega. Nothing much happens- the action high point is when Elster's adult daughter goes missing, and much of the dialogue skips around the central issue of justifying torture by the United States government.
by Don Delillo
If you had asked college-age me who my favorite contemporary authors were, I probably would have included Don Delillo in my top five, basically because I had read Underworld (1997) and White Noise (1985). I'm now about six books in with nine more to go, and I've targeted Delillo as a good candidate for Audiobooks because reading him in print isn't a priority- been there, done that, and I don't believe he is one of those authors where reading the book in print makes a big difference.
Even with all that effort expended, I haven't grown to love Delillo, and these days I wouldn't even put him in a top twenty list. Point Omega did nothing to shake those negative feelings- I'm pretty sure that, at 110 pages, the only reason the publisher thought they could get away with marketing it as a stand-alone novel was Delillo's over-all literary reputation, and as I listened, it felt more like a short story or at best, a novella. The nearly plotless book concerns Richard Elster- a Bush era public intellectual engaged by the President to justify post-9-11 acts of "rendition" based on his earlier work on that exact subject (specifically the word "rendition.")
Elster contains echoes of several Bush the younger era scholars, but mainly he resembles a cross between Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo, the Harvard educated lawyer who was the responsible author of the so-called, Torture Memos, which provided a legal justification for torturing non-state opponents of the United States. Even though I probably have more than average interest in this subject, I found myself drifting while listening to Point Omega. Nothing much happens- the action high point is when Elster's adult daughter goes missing, and much of the dialogue skips around the central issue of justifying torture by the United States government.
Published 1/8/20
No Friend but the Mountains (2018)
by Behrouz Boochani
No Friend but the Mountains was the surprise winner of the 2018 Australian Victorian Prize- a newish but lucrative Australian publishing centered event. At the time of his win, author Behrouz Boochani was still being held at the Australian prison colony of Manus- which was finally closed after Boochani wrote his book, about being imprisoned at said Australian prison colony of Manus.
Manus Island is the product of an Australian immigration policy that states any person found on a boat bound for Australia seeking to evade immigration authorities is forever banned from setting foot in Australia. As a policy it worked, but it created a class of people- Boochani included, who were trapped in a truly Kafka-esque situation where the choices were to either be settled permanently on the Papua New Guinea island of Manus, or return to from whence the came.
Anyone concerned with the global issue of north-south immigration needs to check out No Friend but the Mountains. Boochani finally escaped after he won the Victorian Prize- to New Zealand, where he remains. Fans of 20th century totalitarian prison literature will find a deep resonance in the policies of Australia circa the early 2000's. It's not like people are being tortured or murdered, but the treatment certainly resembles a kind of psychological torture. Many of the people affected by the draconian Australian policy had no idea that it was in force when they were captured, making them more or less innocent victims of a perpetual detention with no end in sight.
Finding No Friend but the Mountains as an eBook in the Los Angeles Public Library system was a major coup- it's the kind of international book that is tough to find in an actual book store in the United States, and no Audiobook edition, so eBook is the only choice, and it works well because parts of No Friend were actually transmitted by text message- the poetic interludes that he uses.
No Friend but the Mountains (2018)
by Behrouz Boochani
No Friend but the Mountains was the surprise winner of the 2018 Australian Victorian Prize- a newish but lucrative Australian publishing centered event. At the time of his win, author Behrouz Boochani was still being held at the Australian prison colony of Manus- which was finally closed after Boochani wrote his book, about being imprisoned at said Australian prison colony of Manus.
Manus Island is the product of an Australian immigration policy that states any person found on a boat bound for Australia seeking to evade immigration authorities is forever banned from setting foot in Australia. As a policy it worked, but it created a class of people- Boochani included, who were trapped in a truly Kafka-esque situation where the choices were to either be settled permanently on the Papua New Guinea island of Manus, or return to from whence the came.
Anyone concerned with the global issue of north-south immigration needs to check out No Friend but the Mountains. Boochani finally escaped after he won the Victorian Prize- to New Zealand, where he remains. Fans of 20th century totalitarian prison literature will find a deep resonance in the policies of Australia circa the early 2000's. It's not like people are being tortured or murdered, but the treatment certainly resembles a kind of psychological torture. Many of the people affected by the draconian Australian policy had no idea that it was in force when they were captured, making them more or less innocent victims of a perpetual detention with no end in sight.
Finding No Friend but the Mountains as an eBook in the Los Angeles Public Library system was a major coup- it's the kind of international book that is tough to find in an actual book store in the United States, and no Audiobook edition, so eBook is the only choice, and it works well because parts of No Friend were actually transmitted by text message- the poetic interludes that he uses.
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| Rwandan-French author Scholastique Mukasonga |
The Barefoot Woman (2018)
Scholastique Mukasonga
It is great that the National Book Award added a category for works of translated literature- following the lead of the Booker Prize, which switched it's every two years author recognizing award to a yearly award honoring a specific work two years ago. So now readers have a UK centered longlist and a United States centered longlist of yearly prize-nominated translated fiction. The Barefoot Woman- translated from the 2008 French language edition, about the experiences of the author growing up in a Rwandan refugee camp populated by Tutsis- deported by the majority of Hutu's after the French left the area after World War II. Mukasonga alludes to the fact that many of the characters would be massacred in the genocides of later years, but this is a "before" novel, not written by an urbanite or exile but from the perspective of an inhabitant of these reservations/deportation camps.
Mukasonga got out in 1992, but left behind many who did not, including her Mother, who is the major character in the narrative. The Barefoot Woman is a memoir but it reads like a novel, other than the bare observations that various characters were murdered in the genocide, the plot flows forward as a single narrative. Mukasonga's perspective is unusual since she is neither part European nor a member of an urban elite (or child of such a person.) Also remarkable is her Mother's determination to get her daughters educated as a single parent. All in all The Barefoot Woman is remarkable for an every-day depiction of a very unusual time and place.
Published 1/13/20
Growing Things and Other Stories (2019)
by Paul Tremblay
Horror is a genre of genre fiction, below crime novels and science fiction but above romance in the hierarchy of literature/fiction. Canon level authors are rare in the genre- Stephen King is a solid number one, H.P. Lovecraft is a second and then you'd have to skip back to 19th century titles like Dracula by Bram Stoker and Frankenstein. And then you've got Paul Tremblay a writer of horror with aspirations towards literary fiction- just read the stories in Growing Things, which are chock a block full of explicit references to David Foster Wallace and have several instances of metafictional trickery/fuckery that would make an MFA student blush.
Tremblay, like Stephen King, is from New England, and many of his stories take place in working-class New England towns. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, home of Lovecraft, and like most horror writers with any kind of aspirations towards literary fiction, Lovecraft haunts Tremblay like a spirit. I think, if you look at Lovecraft as a dead-bang canon member, it opens up a slot for a post Lovecraftian horror writer- not Stephen King, who is the kind of protean force that surpasses all influences, but a third writer of American horror-fiction who combines the Lovecraftian psych-horror with the existential dread of writers like Thomas Pynchon or Don Delillo.
Growing Things contains some evidence in favor of Tremblay as a potential psych-horror successor. It was a good Audiobook pick- plenty of different voice actors for the many different stories. Tremblay starts off working post-apocalyptic scenarios- which I believe is his wheelhouse, but then widens out for more self consciously literary efforts, filled with self-reference. Tremblay scores an absolute zero on the diversity meter- most everyone is a dude. I guess the specifically New England locations and general tendency to writer working class protagonists merits some diversity points.
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| Author Tope Folarin |
A Particular Kind of Black Man : A Novel(2019)
by Tope Folarin
The New York Times book review for A Particular Kind of Back Man: A Novel was, "A Nigerian-American Bildungsroman, in Mormon Country." That sentence tells you a lot about A Particular Kind of Black Man, as does the part of the title that reads "A Novel." It is not entirely clear that Folarin wrote a novel, rather than a memoir. Tunde, the narrator and protagonist, bears a clear resemblance to Folarin, who grew up as the child of Nigerian immigrants in Utah.
My rule of thumb is that every distinct perspective gets its own bildungsroman. Folarin is working in the well-trodden field of the first-generation American immigrant, which has been spawning bildungsroman's for close to a hundred years if not longer. Irish immigrants, Jewish immigrants, Italian immigrants, Chinese immigrants, Japanese immigrants, immigrants from Latin America. These days, South Asian and African immigrants are adding to the list of American bildungsroman. The novelty comes less from the Nigerian-American side of the equation and more from the Mormon country part. Utah is itself under-represented in literary fiction- though perhaps over represented in non-fiction, where the Mormons and the "West" have drawn a disproportionate level of attention from writers.
As it turns out, Mormon country isn't that interesting, really they could be anywhere in small-town Mountain/West America. Tunde, on the other hand, is very interesting, and the value of A Particular Kind of Black Man lies in the possibility that this is just the first act for a writer with strong potential. I thought his treatment of his mother, who becomes mentally ill when he is a young boy, was notably strong.
Published 2/4/20
Submission (2019)
by Michel Houellebecq
These days, when people ask me for a favorite author, more likely than not I say it's Michel Houellebecq, even though I'm still 50/50 on pronouncing his last name accurately (It is pronounced close to Wellbeck.) There is just something about Houellebecq and his contempt for humanity, and his repeated reliance on narrators who are succesful men who don't have children and suffer from a creeping sense of ennui, that rings my bell.
I actually bought a copy of Submission, his 2015 pan-European hit, in anticipation of reading his most recent book Serotonin (2019). Submission is his book about a world where the Muslim Brotherhood, in alliance with the Socialist party, win the French parliamentary elections and take power. When it was was published, Submission brought the usual level of controversy that Houellebecq evokes, entirely from the left, on the grounds that... well... really where do you start. The idea that the Muslim Brotherhood could win a French election? That the French Socialists would partner with the Muslim Brotherhood to maintain their relevance? That Houellebecq is a racist who hates Muslims, or perhaps that he is a nihilist who doesn't fear Muslim political strength enough. I was ready to have all those opinions, but I thought, all in all, Submission was even handed for a work of near-future speculative fiction.
Houellebecq has always tread close to misogyny in his fiction, and here he has common ground with his fictional would-be Muslim political class: Removing women from public life is the bedrock foundational principle for the politically savvy Muslim Brotherhood, and as the book progresses, Francois, the professor of literature who narrates Submission, is remarkably unsurprised to see the lack of resistance of French women to their removal from public life.
Submission (2019)
by Michel Houellebecq
These days, when people ask me for a favorite author, more likely than not I say it's Michel Houellebecq, even though I'm still 50/50 on pronouncing his last name accurately (It is pronounced close to Wellbeck.) There is just something about Houellebecq and his contempt for humanity, and his repeated reliance on narrators who are succesful men who don't have children and suffer from a creeping sense of ennui, that rings my bell.
I actually bought a copy of Submission, his 2015 pan-European hit, in anticipation of reading his most recent book Serotonin (2019). Submission is his book about a world where the Muslim Brotherhood, in alliance with the Socialist party, win the French parliamentary elections and take power. When it was was published, Submission brought the usual level of controversy that Houellebecq evokes, entirely from the left, on the grounds that... well... really where do you start. The idea that the Muslim Brotherhood could win a French election? That the French Socialists would partner with the Muslim Brotherhood to maintain their relevance? That Houellebecq is a racist who hates Muslims, or perhaps that he is a nihilist who doesn't fear Muslim political strength enough. I was ready to have all those opinions, but I thought, all in all, Submission was even handed for a work of near-future speculative fiction.
Houellebecq has always tread close to misogyny in his fiction, and here he has common ground with his fictional would-be Muslim political class: Removing women from public life is the bedrock foundational principle for the politically savvy Muslim Brotherhood, and as the book progresses, Francois, the professor of literature who narrates Submission, is remarkably unsurprised to see the lack of resistance of French women to their removal from public life.
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| The degree to which Offred figures in The Testaments, Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, is a minor spoiler. |
The Testaments (2019)
by Margaret Atwood
What to say about the decision by the Booker Prize committee to "split" the award between The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's television-success inspired sequel (though different from seasons two and three of the show) and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. It really calls into question the whole point of handing out an award. I, for one, think it is cowardly and it delayed by inevitable encounter with The Testaments. I like Margaret Atwood, but I don't love her. The Handmaid's Tale is one of the most significant works of dystopian fiction in the 20th century, right up there with 1984 and Brave New World, but neither of those books have sequels.
Celebration of The Testaments inevitably reflects the fact that everyone feels guilty over The Handmaid's Tale needing to wait a generation to find a truly mass audience. Atwood's return to The Republic of Gilead is told through a variety of "sources"- a diary kept by one of the major characters from the first book, and "witness testimony" taken in the aftermath of the fall of Gilead. I sensed that Atwood felt like she needed to counterbalance the overwhelming totalitarianism of the first book with a more tempered perspective that emphasized resistance from within, so to speak.
But I listened to the Audiobook- a big budget affair with Hollywood actress Bryce Dallas Howard voicing one of the major characters. I rushed to finish it, at times almost blushing to the degree that Atwood's story mimicked conventional best-selling thriller motifs. The Testaments is, more than anything else, a conventional best-seller.
Published 2/13/20
Dancing in the Dark:
My Struggle: Book 4 (2015)
by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Four books into the six volume My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgaard, we have heard alot about Knausgaard and there are some things we know about him:
1. His dad was an alcoholic and drank himself to death.
2. His relationships with women are complicated!
3. He despises the ordinary and yearns for greatness.
4. He has some strange hang ups about sex.
In Dancing in the Dark, Knausgaard hones in on a period that has been mentioned in the first three volumes: the year Knausgaard spent in the north of Norway as a teacher- he was 18, and apparently that is something you can do in Norway, graduate from high school and immediately get a job as a temporary teacher on a short term contract in one of many schools that are perpetually understaffed.
The major plot line in Book 4 is Knausgaard and his attempts to lose his virginity despite being afflicted by premature ejaculation, a situation compounded by the fact that he never masturbated. In the era of 5G internet connections and Pornhub it's hard to imagine a male Norwegian making it to 18 or 19 without a single experience of masturbation, but it wasn't incredibly unusual back in the day. There are at least four excruciatingly described scenarios where Knausgaard fails to close the deal despite having a succession of willing would-be partners.
An episode where he recalls the beginnings of his father's descent into mid-life alcoholism locates Book 4 within the father heavy narrative of the first three books, but his Dad doesn't dominate this volume the way he does in others. Book four also gets into his beginnings as an (unpublished) writer, and by the end he is getting ready to enroll in a serious writing program.
Published 2/25/20
Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004)Dancing in the Dark:
My Struggle: Book 4 (2015)
by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Four books into the six volume My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgaard, we have heard alot about Knausgaard and there are some things we know about him:
1. His dad was an alcoholic and drank himself to death.
2. His relationships with women are complicated!
3. He despises the ordinary and yearns for greatness.
4. He has some strange hang ups about sex.
In Dancing in the Dark, Knausgaard hones in on a period that has been mentioned in the first three volumes: the year Knausgaard spent in the north of Norway as a teacher- he was 18, and apparently that is something you can do in Norway, graduate from high school and immediately get a job as a temporary teacher on a short term contract in one of many schools that are perpetually understaffed.
The major plot line in Book 4 is Knausgaard and his attempts to lose his virginity despite being afflicted by premature ejaculation, a situation compounded by the fact that he never masturbated. In the era of 5G internet connections and Pornhub it's hard to imagine a male Norwegian making it to 18 or 19 without a single experience of masturbation, but it wasn't incredibly unusual back in the day. There are at least four excruciatingly described scenarios where Knausgaard fails to close the deal despite having a succession of willing would-be partners.
An episode where he recalls the beginnings of his father's descent into mid-life alcoholism locates Book 4 within the father heavy narrative of the first three books, but his Dad doesn't dominate this volume the way he does in others. Book four also gets into his beginnings as an (unpublished) writer, and by the end he is getting ready to enroll in a serious writing program.
Published 2/25/20
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
When it comes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Audiobook library, you've basically got his big hits, and Memories of My Melancholy Whores, a novella about a 90 year old who decides to fuck a 14 year old virgin(!) because it was published in 2014. Absent are his six short story collections, which seem like an obvious Audiobook pick for a Nobel Prize winning author who is still widely read. None of his Non Fiction is in Audiobook format- he published nine volumes over decades of activity.
It's the kind of story that might be Me-Tooed out of existence if it had been published a couple years later, or maybe it wouldn't have been translated, let alone released as an English language Audiobook. Particularly disturbing was the fact that the narrator- a revered journalist- resembles, at least biographically speaking, the author.
There are points during the relatively brief run time (about four hours as an Audiobook, 128 pages in print) where I thought maybe the 90 year old fucks a 14 year old virgin was just a hook for some other subject, but no, the book is about this 90 year old basically buying this poor young girl and then working up the nerve to actually fuck her. And while I'm not a big fan of woke/politically correct culture, there are limits to be reached, and a book entirely concerned with a 90 year old man obssessed with fucking a 14 year old child is worth excluding solely on grounds of plot and theme.
Publishe 2/25/20
Fall, or Dodge in Hell (2019)
by Neal Stephenson
I actually bought this book with a Barnes and Noble gift card because it was fifty percent off and basically the only book in the entire store that I had any remote interest in reading. Weighing in at a solid 883 pages- which is all book- no notes, end essays- Fall, or Dodge in Hell is further proof that Stephenson gets to publish whatever he wants, and that he may be great or terrible, and during this book is frequently both.
Describing the "story" in anything but the broadest terms is like trying to describe the plot of Dickens novel, but the themes are the idea that people can have their brains/bodies scanned at the time of death and brought back as Avatars in a world where they are "alive," except, inexplicably to my mind, for their entire stock of memories of the "real" world. Stephenson engages in some mind boggling shifts of tone, writing half a novel set in a more-or-less recognizable near-future with a dystopian edge before he abandons it and dives in for another four hundred pages set entirely in the virtual life-after-death world.
It's all bat shit insane, and the occasional pleasures of the dystopia-light near future disappear in the second half for what turns into a literal mythic quest set in the after-life which showcases Stephenson's either intentional or unintentional inability to write a compelling fantasy scenario to save his immortal soul. I'm not sure how to read the second half of a book other than as a cack-handed critique of Christianity and celebration of the Devil- I am NOT making this up. Ultimately, I'm thankful that it wasn't published as TWO books, which it very easily could have been.
Fall, or Dodge in Hell (2019)
by Neal Stephenson
I actually bought this book with a Barnes and Noble gift card because it was fifty percent off and basically the only book in the entire store that I had any remote interest in reading. Weighing in at a solid 883 pages- which is all book- no notes, end essays- Fall, or Dodge in Hell is further proof that Stephenson gets to publish whatever he wants, and that he may be great or terrible, and during this book is frequently both.
Describing the "story" in anything but the broadest terms is like trying to describe the plot of Dickens novel, but the themes are the idea that people can have their brains/bodies scanned at the time of death and brought back as Avatars in a world where they are "alive," except, inexplicably to my mind, for their entire stock of memories of the "real" world. Stephenson engages in some mind boggling shifts of tone, writing half a novel set in a more-or-less recognizable near-future with a dystopian edge before he abandons it and dives in for another four hundred pages set entirely in the virtual life-after-death world.
It's all bat shit insane, and the occasional pleasures of the dystopia-light near future disappear in the second half for what turns into a literal mythic quest set in the after-life which showcases Stephenson's either intentional or unintentional inability to write a compelling fantasy scenario to save his immortal soul. I'm not sure how to read the second half of a book other than as a cack-handed critique of Christianity and celebration of the Devil- I am NOT making this up. Ultimately, I'm thankful that it wasn't published as TWO books, which it very easily could have been.
Published 3/4/20
Serotonin (2019)
by Michel Houellebecq
The International Booker Prize Longlist for 2020
Red Dog by Willem Anker (Afrikaans – South Africa), translated by Michiel Heyns
The Enlightenment of The Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar (Farsi – Iran), with an anonymous translator
The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (Spanish – Argentina), translated by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh
The Other Name: Septology I – II by Jon Fosse (Norwegian – Norway), translated by Damion Searls
The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili (German – Georgia), translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin
Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq (French – France), translated by Shaun Whiteside
Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann (German – Germany), translated by Ross Benjamin
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (Spanish – Mexico), translated by Sophie Hughes
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (Japanese – Japan), translated by Stephen Snyder
Faces on the Tip of My Tongue by Emmanuelle Pagano (French – France), translated by Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin (Spanish – Argentina), translated by Megan McDowell
The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (Dutch – Netherlands), translated by Michele Hutchison
Mac and His Problem by Enrique Vila-Matas (Spanish – Spain), translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes
Published 3/11/20
City of Ash and Red (2018)
by Hye-Young Pye
Originally published in Korean in 2010, City of Ash and Red straddles genre and literature, speculative fiction and metafiction. It was marketed in the United States as speculative fiction, but it reads more like literary fiction, evoking Kafka and Ishiguro more than any genre speculative fiction author. Set in "City K" inside "Country C" City of Ash and Red is about a man- called "the man" throughout who arrives in a city just in time to be quarantined as part of a pandemic- the type of pandemic isn't identified, but rats are carriers. Things go from bad to worse when he receives word that his ex-wife has been found murdered back in his home country- inside the man's own apartment- which leads him to abandon his rented apartment and become a vagrant inside Country C.
City of Ash and Red functions as a parable about man's alienation from contemporary society, but it also features several realistic depictions of life under an enduring pandemic that echoes our current situation with Covid 19.
Published 3/11/20
Border Districts: A Fiction (2018)
by Gerald Murnane
Australian author Gerald Murnane is one of those writers that only other writers read. He's little read- not only outside Australia, but inside Australia as well. In 2018, the New York Times called him "the greatest English language author most people have never heard of." I was on that list of folks until last year, when I read Inland (1988)- which was added to the second 1001 Books list in 2006. Murnane is an admittedly difficult/experimental writer. After reading Inland he put me in mind of W.G. Sebald, and that was an impression reinforced by Border Districts, a similarly abstract exercise about landscapes, and I don't know, human emotions and shit. Two Murnane books is enough for me! Unless he wins the Nobel Prize, which seems unlikely, although he's still alive, so it is still a possibility.
Published 3/16/20
by Maaza Mengiste
Published 3/16/20
She Would Be King (2019)
by Wayetu Moore
She Would Be King is a reimagining of the birth of Liberia, a country founded by freed African American slaves from the American South in the mid 19th century. Liberia had a terrible 20th century- Moore's own family fled from the violence when she was a child, settling in the USA, but I've always thought that the experience was unique and I remember seeing images of American-Liberians from the early part of the 20th century, dressed like plantation owners in the South and being puzzled and amazed. She Would Be King is billed as a magical-realist re-telling of the birth of Liberia, but it is more the case that only the end of the book gets into the formation of the Liberian state, and the rest is about three outcasts: Gbessa a red-haired African who is expelled from her tribe for being a witch, Norman Aragon, the son of a Jamaican planter and African slave and June Dey, a slave on a Virginia plantation.
The three "origin" stories are told separately, giving the first half of She Would Be King a fractured feeling. The three finally come together, only to be separated almost immediately, and Gbessa is taken in by proto-Liberians, while Dey and Aragon split up, and basically drop out of the second half of the book. Only Gbessa, who ends up marrying the newly minted head of the Liberian army, remains central to the narrative, and while I enjoyed She Would Be King, I didn't think the story really hung together. Particularly the shift from telling the origin story of the three outcasts- who all have magical powers- btw, into them adventuring together for a brief period, into the portion where Gbessa joins the Liberian colony and June and Norman disappear.
Published 3/21/20
A Sand Book (2019)
by Ariana Reines
I haven't read a book of poetry since high school, but I feel like I should branch out after reading so many novels and works of nonfiction. Poetry is, after all, literature. Going into my mid 40's, I finally met a handful of poets who I respect, so at the very least I owe it to these acquaintances to acknowledge the validity of poetry as a form of literature. I did enjoy A Sand Book by Ariana Reines. She peppers her poetry with contemporary references to sex, drugs and celebrities, and it isn't hard to figure out her point of view.
Here is one example of a her style:
Or another:
Reines is also a studio and performance artist, and I wouldn't be surprised to see her write a novel or at least a book of short stories. A Sand Book is a good book of poetry for people who don't read poetry.
Published 3/25/20
Optic Nerve (2014)
by Maria Gainza
The 2019 English translation of Argentinian author Maria Gainza's 2014 debut novel Optic Nerve was widely hailed as the arrival of a major new writer. Gainza's prose evokes Enrique Vila-Matas, W.G. Sebald, and John Berger combining the knowledge of an art critic inside the structure of a novella. Passages of acute observation about painters ranging from El Greco, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gustave Courbet. The narrator emerges in glimpses and art and experiences entertwine in her consciousness. Not all of the art discussed is painting- she includes this memorable description of the original Point Break:
Published 3/25/20
The Factory (2020)
by Hiroko Oyamada
Japanese author Hiroko Oyamada is a hot young writer in Japan, The Factory is her first novel translated into English. It is a gentle tale about two temps, a woman who is charged with paper shredding, and a man in charge of cataloguing different types of fungus in the factory environment. The obvious comparison, given the tone of The Factory, is to Kafka. Oyamada's factory does not mirror any conventional set of physics, since it is often described as an entire land, replete with forests, rivers and towns.
The setting of "temp world" is well familiar in the literary fiction of USA, in Japan, temps play a less prominent role, so I can see where The Factory would have made more of a splash inside Japan. Outside of the observations on the vagaries of temp life, you've got the gentle surrealism, focused mostly on a flock of unidentifiable birds.
Published 4/2/20
The Mercies (2020)
by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Author Kiran Millwood Hargrave has a good sale/critical track record in the field of ya books- The Mercies is her adult lit debut. Hotly tipped, you could call it, and it isn't everyday you get a work of LGBT flavored historical fiction about witch trial in Northern Norway circa early 17th century.
I checked out the Audiobook from the Los Angeles Public Library after a months long wait. I wasn't disappointed, exactly, but I wasn't transported to a different place and time, either. Northern Norway isn't the most alien landscape I can imagine- even in the 17th century- I've been making my way through Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard six volume series and there is an entire volume set in the same general area as The Mercies.
There is nothing too graphic, but The Mercies is 100% not YA fiction with graphic depictions of marital sex/rape and the frequent discussion of ways to kill a witch, and killing of witches. The plot isn't great, an average reader will see events spooling out well before they occur. After all, witches, early 17th century Norway, a village of women where all the men died in an unfortunate storm (no doubt part of the little Ice Age of the 17th century!)... you can see where this is going...
Published 4/6/20
Deacon King Kong (2020)
by James McBride
James McBride won the National Book Award in 2013 for The Good Lord Bird, a work of historical fiction set in Civil-War era America. Deacon King Kong is set in 1969, in a fictionalized version of the Brooklyn housing project where McBride grew up (McBride first came to the attention of a national audience with his 1995 memoir, about growing up in Brooklyn as the son of an African American minister and a (converted to Christianity) Orthodox Jewish mother.
I managed to check out the Audiobook version of Deacon King Kong- which is an excellent product- but I'd also recommend the book itself, because Deacon King Kong is the kind of book that comes to live in your hands. At time, I actually regretted not being able to read the sentences the narrator was intoning. The plot is an elaborate, though not confusing web following the travails of Sportcoat, a down and outish deacon at a Brooklyn church, who makes his living as a part time handyman and full time drinker- King Kong is the name of the local home-brew.
The plot is set into motion when Sportcoast shoots his former baseball protege and current heroin dealer, Deems Clemens. Before things come to rest, McBride expands his story to include the whole neighborhood, Irish cops, Black cops, Italian gangsters, Irish gangsters, Black gangsters, all brought vividly to live by McBride in a way that simultaneously evokes the "great American novel" and the grand Hollywood tradition of storytelling a la Robert Altman, Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese (McBride has collaborated with Lee on two films). Surely a contender for another National Book Award or the Pultizer Prize, Deacon King Kong is not to be missed.'
Published 4/9/20
Moderan (2018)
by David R. Bunch
Published by New York Review of Books Classics
Moderan is a collection of futuristic science fiction short stories that were originally published in the early 1970's in a variety of sci fi focused magazines. Except for two, they were never reprinted, and the New York Review of Books Classics collection published in 2018 is the first attempt to collect all the stories in one place since 1971. The collection arrived complete with an introduction by Annihilation author Jeff Vandermeer:
Vandermeer later admits that the tales are, "wild, visceral and sui generis" which is a nice way to say that they are at times impossible to understand. Basically, the stories in Moderan are as just experimental literary fiction as they are science fiction. The use of a distinctive dialect by his cyborg narrator echoes the Russian influenced dialogue of A Clockwork Orange. The environment that Bunch describes sounds like the post-Skynet environment of the Terminator films. Bunch eschews the kind of narrative tricks that would give the reader any context- you just have to put it together for yourself.
Still, there are some clues in the back and forth:
Fair enough. What about the human emotion we call love?
Published 4/20/20
How Much of These Hills is Gold (2020)
by C. Pam Zhang
This debut novel by Zhang- about a brother and sister of Chinese ancestry who are trying to survive in a gently alternative-history version of the 19th century American west, passes the first test of readability in contemporary American literary fiction: Is the book about rich, well educated white people and their sad problems or is it about something else? If it's about something else, that is good. Lucy and Sam are sisters- Sam is what you would call a tomboy, Lucy a more conventional girl- just on the edge of their teens- when their coal mining father dies in the gold fields of the West. The coal mining is one of the several gently alternative history type details of the not-quite Gold Rush west where the book takes place. There are also Buffalo in them thar hills, and maybe a tiger or too. Readers who aren't overly familiar with the history of the old west might not even notice these touches, but for those who do it is a hint that How Much of These Hills is Gold is something more complicated than a Chinese-American 19th century bildungsroman.
Indeed there is much to admire about How Much of These Hills is Gold, but from the perspective of this blog and its concerns, it Zhang's ability to craft something that is both accessible and also deeply "literary" in a way that escapes much of recent American literary fiction. How Much of These Hills is Gold is a stand out debut, and Zhang is surely a writer to be followed.
Published 4/23/18
The Overstory (2018)
by Richard Powers
Richard Powers is one of those rare authors who manages to combine critical acclaim with a decent sized audience. The Overstory, his twelfth novel, was a real hit- the kind of book that makes a publisher go back and re-release older, less succesful novels, with the caption of "By the author of newly published, large selling novel." I've read Powers on and off for decades- Galatea 2.2 came out in 1995- I was in college- I'm sure I read a paperback copy bought at a mall book store or on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, Caliofrnia. Then Gain came out in 1998- about an American corporation- I read that at the time and thought it was great. I went back and read the The Gold Bug Variations (1991) at some point. After that I lost track- haven't read The Echo Maker- which one the National Book Award in 2006.
The Overstory was a book I felt determined to ignore- objectively, the fact that I simply haven't bothered to keep up with Richard Powers begs the question of what I'm trying to accomplish here. I actually like Powers- his idea driven literary fiction comes close to the idea driven non-fiction and speculative fiction that I like to read as well, and the awards speak for themselves, establishing a prima facie case for canonical status. There is already a strong argument- based on success experienced both in and out of the United States- that he is a multiple book canon represenative.
If you go from the early/classic/late-capstone formulation of canonical selection- the early pick is unclear, but for "classic" you've got several good options- Galatea 2.2, Gain and The Echo Maker all fit within the category of mid-careeer stand-out. The Overstory could be included in that category, or it could be the late-career, capstone sort of book. Winning the Pultizer was a big push- and the widespread sales success is probably even a bigger push. Obviously, a Booker Prize win or the Nobel would be huge- but I'd think his chances of winning a Nobel Prize are basically zero. The Booker prize seems to be in his grasp. The Overstory was shortlisted in 2018.
Like all of his fiction, The Overstory is strongly about ideas and showcases a depth of research that would also qualify Powers to write non-fiction about the same subject. Here, the focus is on the interconnectedness of trees, particularly big trees in old, untouched forests, and the ways that this impacts a cross-section of Americans in their lives, impacting the choices they make over decades. The Overstory certainly shows that Powers is at the top of his game. The capable deployment of a half dozen protagonists across decades of American history shows deep sophistication in terms of technique, and a book that I had always imagined would be boring (as I imagine others of his books I still haven't read) it was not. The ability to write a not boring book about trees is a rare one, Powers did it.
Published 4/27/20
The King at the Edge of the World (2020)
by Arthur Phillips
The King at the Edge of the World is one of the last Audiobooks I completed before I stopped being able to go anywyere. Set at the end of Queen Elizabeth I (1601), Mahmoud Ezzedein is a Doctor who has travelled with an Ottoman embassy to London. He is, to his deep regret, left behind, never to return again to his wife and child. As England roils with speculation over the succesor to Queen Elizabeth, namely will he be Catholic or Protestant, Ezzedein is recruited as a spy to prenetrate the court of King James of Scotland, nominally a Protestant and the first in line to succeed Elizabeth I.
If this plot appeals to you, by all means, The King at the Edge of the World is worth a read, though as far as contemporary fiction set in the late 16th/early 17th century it is hard not to compare any book with Hilary Mantel's trilogy of books about Thomas Cromwell.
Published 4/29/20
My Struggle: Book Five: Some Rain Must Fall (2010)
by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Book Five was my favorite of the six book series. It actually felt like an ending, and the first of the five books that resembles a conventional 20th century bildungsroman: Knausgaard attends university, maintains an adult relationship for several months and yes, after thousands and thousands of pages of "it was no good" and generally bemoaning his lack of talent, finds his voice as a writer, spurred by the death of his father. Considering the extent to which the death of his father dominates the first four volumes, it will come as no surprise that the actual death and Knausgaard's writing breakthrough are linked.
After Book Four, with the major theme of Knausgaard's inability to consummate sexual intercourse, Book Five is easier to endure- endurance being a major asset for any reader who actually wants to make it through the six book series. Book Five was also the first book I actually read vs. listened to as an Audiobook. I remain of the opinion that the six volume Audiobook set narrated Eduardo Ballerini is one of the most impressive literary accomplishments ever, but it was nice to see all the names in print, even as heard Ballerini's voice in my head- he will forever be linked with Knausgaard in my mind, even when he narrates other books.
Particular highlights in this volume- other than it being the book that establishes his breakthrough as an author, include a sojourn in Reykjavik, where he hangs out with Bragi from the then unknown Sugarcubes and parties in Bjork's apartment:
In true Knausgaardian fashion, he throws up in her bathtub. He also makes to England, rhapsodizing over the same era of popular culture that I found so compelling around the same time:
by Elmore Leonard
"Father" Terry is a mook from Detroit hiding out in Rwanda, pretending to be a Catholic priest, trying to wait out an indictment back home from an ill-advised stint smuggling cigarettes across state lines. He returns to settle the case and falls in with Debbie, a Private Investigator/Stand Up Comedienne fresh out of state prison, where she did three years for running down her cheatin' boyfriend with a Ford Escort.
Said boyfriend is now a succesful restauranteur with a heavy mob connection. Debbie wants revenge, and the money her ex stole from her, Terry wants to raise money for Rwandan orphans- the Pagan Babies of the titles. Together they come up with a plan that seems particularly nonsensical, and from there it is double-cross till you die. Cool title and premise aside, this was my least favorite of the Leonard novels I've read so far. The heist plot is so lame that I had trouble believing that it was appearing in an Elmore Leonard book.
The experience was somewhat salvaged by an interview between Leonard and Martin Amis, where Amis repeatedly calls Leonard "The Dickens of Detroit." (What if I was from Buffalo, Leonard responds, "The Balzac of Buffalo," Amis replies.) I would recommend putting this book on the skip list.
I did pull this nicely formatted Leonard bibliography from the back of the book:
Published 5/11/20
Hurricane Season (2017)
by Fernanda Melchor
Hurricane Season by Mexican author Fernanda Melchor is the last of the 2020 Booker International prize short-list tile that I'm going to read before they hand out the award. My pick for the win is The Enlightenment of Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, but this was a strong year, especially for the short list. Hurricane Season is another strong work- maybe not a prize winner because of the dark subject matter: graphic incest, copious drug taking, graphic gay sex, homophobia and every other vice you could imagine.
Set in an unnamed Mexican slum/village, Hurricane Season starts with the death of a local eccentric everyone calls "the Witch," and the question is, who killed the witch and why. Actually, not really, Hurricane Season lacks any of the "who dun it" category of fiction, rather it is a series of stream of consciousness (no paragraphs) narrations by different associated characters from this place: drug addled teens, old hookers and drug addled teen prostitutes, all. Hurricane Season is a must for fans of Roberto Bolano and the literature of the underclass, and Melchor is an exciting talent.
Despite being a slim volume, Hurricane Season isn't an easy read because of the lack of paragraphs, but at least the narrrative is easy to follow and the connections between the characters are clear.
Serotonin (2019)
by Michel Houellebecq
The International Booker Prize Longlist for 2020
Red Dog by Willem Anker (Afrikaans – South Africa), translated by Michiel Heyns
The Enlightenment of The Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar (Farsi – Iran), with an anonymous translator
The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (Spanish – Argentina), translated by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh
The Other Name: Septology I – II by Jon Fosse (Norwegian – Norway), translated by Damion Searls
The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili (German – Georgia), translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin
Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq (French – France), translated by Shaun Whiteside
Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann (German – Germany), translated by Ross Benjamin
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (Spanish – Mexico), translated by Sophie Hughes
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (Japanese – Japan), translated by Stephen Snyder
Faces on the Tip of My Tongue by Emmanuelle Pagano (French – France), translated by Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin (Spanish – Argentina), translated by Megan McDowell
The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (Dutch – Netherlands), translated by Michele Hutchison
Mac and His Problem by Enrique Vila-Matas (Spanish – Spain), translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes
The International Booker Prize Longlist was announced last week. The prize is so new that there has to be an element of "career achievement" in picking winners, even if they've converted the prize from being author to specific work based. Looking at the long list, trying to make out the shortlist, the starting point should be authors who already have an international profile: Houellebecq is at the top of that list, followed by Daniel Kehlmann, Enrique Vila-Matas and Samanta Schweblin- who was nominated in 2017. Most of these books aren't even available in the United States- The Memory Police came out last year, and Serotonin was always going to be published everywhere, but other than that it is a low profile batch of publishers- that was the aspect of the longlist that garnered the most notice in articles accompanying the announcement.
Serotonin was a pretty pedestrian affair for Houellebecq compared to the high-concept shenanigans of Submission. Florent-Claude Labrouste is a classic Houellebecq narrator- 40 going on 500, single, alienated from women, alienated from family, no friends, well off enough to be able to indulge in full-tilt misanthropy. The hook, I guess, is anti-depressants: Labrouste, who is sad after his relationship with a Japanese woman twenty years his junior, decides to disappear from his own life, quitting his job (he is an agronomist) and eagerly accepting a prescription for antidepressants. Of course, this compromises his sex life, which if you know anything about Houellebecq and his characters, is going to be a huge deal.
As Serotonin drifts towards the middle and end, events begin to happen, you may be shocked, but not if you've read his other books. All told, it isn't his best, but his middle is pretty darn good.
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| Korean writer Hye-Young Pye |
City of Ash and Red (2018)
by Hye-Young Pye
Originally published in Korean in 2010, City of Ash and Red straddles genre and literature, speculative fiction and metafiction. It was marketed in the United States as speculative fiction, but it reads more like literary fiction, evoking Kafka and Ishiguro more than any genre speculative fiction author. Set in "City K" inside "Country C" City of Ash and Red is about a man- called "the man" throughout who arrives in a city just in time to be quarantined as part of a pandemic- the type of pandemic isn't identified, but rats are carriers. Things go from bad to worse when he receives word that his ex-wife has been found murdered back in his home country- inside the man's own apartment- which leads him to abandon his rented apartment and become a vagrant inside Country C.
City of Ash and Red functions as a parable about man's alienation from contemporary society, but it also features several realistic depictions of life under an enduring pandemic that echoes our current situation with Covid 19.
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| Australian author Gerald Murnane |
Border Districts: A Fiction (2018)
by Gerald Murnane
Australian author Gerald Murnane is one of those writers that only other writers read. He's little read- not only outside Australia, but inside Australia as well. In 2018, the New York Times called him "the greatest English language author most people have never heard of." I was on that list of folks until last year, when I read Inland (1988)- which was added to the second 1001 Books list in 2006. Murnane is an admittedly difficult/experimental writer. After reading Inland he put me in mind of W.G. Sebald, and that was an impression reinforced by Border Districts, a similarly abstract exercise about landscapes, and I don't know, human emotions and shit. Two Murnane books is enough for me! Unless he wins the Nobel Prize, which seems unlikely, although he's still alive, so it is still a possibility.
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| Ethiopian author Maaza Mengiste |
Published 3/16/20
by Maaza Mengiste
The Shadow King (2019)
Like everyone, I plan to have plenty of reading time on my hands, as a lawyer with his own office and no kids, I'm relatively insulated from the most dire impacts of the epidemic like the closing of schools and losing my job, but just the elimination of sports adds a dozen hours a week. Here in Southern California, the libraries have closed, so I'm making my way through a stock of books I actually bought and I've really stepped up my "Ereading" with the purchase of a fifth kindle, which allows library books checked out via the Libby app.
I bought The Shadow King earlier this year at Eso Won Bookstore, located in South Los Angeles, the oldest African-American bookstore in LA, during the Martin Luther King Day Parade. The idea of a novel about the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian war, with an emphasis on the female participants on the Ethiopian side, intrigued me. The fact is that I prioritize new releases written from unfamiliar viewpoints and even though I've always found Ethiopia interesting since I learned about the existence of Ethiopian Jews in Hebrew School, I'd be hard pressed to identify a single piece of literature that takes place inside Ethiopia. Same for film and television. When it comes to music, I'm a little better off thanks to the widespread post-internet era distribution of Ethio-Jazz, but it's a thin level of familiarity.
It is important to know for the purpose of reading this book that Ethiopia was a colonial power WITHIN Africa for centuries, and the modern nation-state of Ethiopia historically comprised a panoply of ethnicities who were united under Emperors from the Amharic ethnicity. This Empire maintained a continuous existence from the 12th century, with many links to the deeper past. Amharic, the language, is part of the Semitic family of languages, close to Arabic and Hebrew than other African languages.
Which is all to say that when Italy invades Ethiopia, one should not expect the typical narrative of sophisticated Europeans decimating an over-matched, poorly organized native population. Quite the opposite! As depicted in The Shadow King, the Ethiopians were well organized, even in the absence of their Emperor, who decamped to Brighton in England during the war.
The Shadow King approaches the conflict from a variety of perspectives. She's got the Emperor Haile Selassie, Kidane who leads a rag-tag group of Ethiopian soldiers in a cat and mouse game with an Italian soldier leading his armored column through the highlands. Kidane is married to Aster, a proud woman from a noble family as well as Hirut, more or less a slave to Kidane and Aster. The Italian soldiers are also represented, through the Captain and a staff photographer with Jewish parentage, worried about being recalled to Italy. My familiarity with Ethiopian names made keeping track of the characters difficult, it reminded me of reading Russian novels in high school. Mengiste, whose family emigrated after the socialist dictatorship took over, packs her second novel with details, almost to overflowing, but doesn't give you any lengthy exposition or background to help the reader situate the struggle.
The Shadow King isn't without its ugly moments, particularly the relationship with Kidane and Hirut, which features several scenes of out and out rape, the overall message being that heroes can have terrible flaws and villains their good points. For example the Italian captain, an otherwise despicable characters, protects his ethnically Jewish photographer.
Like everyone, I plan to have plenty of reading time on my hands, as a lawyer with his own office and no kids, I'm relatively insulated from the most dire impacts of the epidemic like the closing of schools and losing my job, but just the elimination of sports adds a dozen hours a week. Here in Southern California, the libraries have closed, so I'm making my way through a stock of books I actually bought and I've really stepped up my "Ereading" with the purchase of a fifth kindle, which allows library books checked out via the Libby app.
I bought The Shadow King earlier this year at Eso Won Bookstore, located in South Los Angeles, the oldest African-American bookstore in LA, during the Martin Luther King Day Parade. The idea of a novel about the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian war, with an emphasis on the female participants on the Ethiopian side, intrigued me. The fact is that I prioritize new releases written from unfamiliar viewpoints and even though I've always found Ethiopia interesting since I learned about the existence of Ethiopian Jews in Hebrew School, I'd be hard pressed to identify a single piece of literature that takes place inside Ethiopia. Same for film and television. When it comes to music, I'm a little better off thanks to the widespread post-internet era distribution of Ethio-Jazz, but it's a thin level of familiarity.
It is important to know for the purpose of reading this book that Ethiopia was a colonial power WITHIN Africa for centuries, and the modern nation-state of Ethiopia historically comprised a panoply of ethnicities who were united under Emperors from the Amharic ethnicity. This Empire maintained a continuous existence from the 12th century, with many links to the deeper past. Amharic, the language, is part of the Semitic family of languages, close to Arabic and Hebrew than other African languages.
Which is all to say that when Italy invades Ethiopia, one should not expect the typical narrative of sophisticated Europeans decimating an over-matched, poorly organized native population. Quite the opposite! As depicted in The Shadow King, the Ethiopians were well organized, even in the absence of their Emperor, who decamped to Brighton in England during the war.
The Shadow King approaches the conflict from a variety of perspectives. She's got the Emperor Haile Selassie, Kidane who leads a rag-tag group of Ethiopian soldiers in a cat and mouse game with an Italian soldier leading his armored column through the highlands. Kidane is married to Aster, a proud woman from a noble family as well as Hirut, more or less a slave to Kidane and Aster. The Italian soldiers are also represented, through the Captain and a staff photographer with Jewish parentage, worried about being recalled to Italy. My familiarity with Ethiopian names made keeping track of the characters difficult, it reminded me of reading Russian novels in high school. Mengiste, whose family emigrated after the socialist dictatorship took over, packs her second novel with details, almost to overflowing, but doesn't give you any lengthy exposition or background to help the reader situate the struggle.
The Shadow King isn't without its ugly moments, particularly the relationship with Kidane and Hirut, which features several scenes of out and out rape, the overall message being that heroes can have terrible flaws and villains their good points. For example the Italian captain, an otherwise despicable characters, protects his ethnically Jewish photographer.
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| Liberian-American author Wayetu Moore |
She Would Be King (2019)
by Wayetu Moore
She Would Be King is a reimagining of the birth of Liberia, a country founded by freed African American slaves from the American South in the mid 19th century. Liberia had a terrible 20th century- Moore's own family fled from the violence when she was a child, settling in the USA, but I've always thought that the experience was unique and I remember seeing images of American-Liberians from the early part of the 20th century, dressed like plantation owners in the South and being puzzled and amazed. She Would Be King is billed as a magical-realist re-telling of the birth of Liberia, but it is more the case that only the end of the book gets into the formation of the Liberian state, and the rest is about three outcasts: Gbessa a red-haired African who is expelled from her tribe for being a witch, Norman Aragon, the son of a Jamaican planter and African slave and June Dey, a slave on a Virginia plantation.
The three "origin" stories are told separately, giving the first half of She Would Be King a fractured feeling. The three finally come together, only to be separated almost immediately, and Gbessa is taken in by proto-Liberians, while Dey and Aragon split up, and basically drop out of the second half of the book. Only Gbessa, who ends up marrying the newly minted head of the Liberian army, remains central to the narrative, and while I enjoyed She Would Be King, I didn't think the story really hung together. Particularly the shift from telling the origin story of the three outcasts- who all have magical powers- btw, into them adventuring together for a brief period, into the portion where Gbessa joins the Liberian colony and June and Norman disappear.
Published 3/19/20
Dead Astronauts (2019)
by Jeff Vandermeer
The phenomenon of an artist having a broad, popular hit and following it up with a less popular, more "artistic" flop is as old as the phenomenon of "hits" itself. Dead Astronauts, is one of those efforts, by a writer with a lot of money in the bank and a publisher who is willing to publish whatever on the strength of profits already earned from his earlier work. Calling the narrative of Dead Astronauts fractured does not do it justice! Who are these Dead Astronauts from the title? When do the events of Dead Astronauts take place? Why can the animals talk? What is the City? What is the Company? What the fuck is going on?
More or less, the Astronauts hate the Company which produces genetic-engineering monstrosities and deposits them on the outskirts of the City. After I finished reading the book, I went online and read the reviews from last December, and confirmed that I didn't "miss" anything. I mean, I will freely admit that I didn't really have an idea as to what, exactly happened, or care enough about anything to think about it beyond the time I spent actually reading the book. I do question whether Dead Astronauts is more of a prose poem than an exercise of genre-literary fiction. Several of the chapters just consist of various Company created monstrosities invoking the same phrase for pages and pages of text.
I waited...three months to read the Ebook, and I just wasn't buying it.
Dead Astronauts (2019)
by Jeff Vandermeer
The phenomenon of an artist having a broad, popular hit and following it up with a less popular, more "artistic" flop is as old as the phenomenon of "hits" itself. Dead Astronauts, is one of those efforts, by a writer with a lot of money in the bank and a publisher who is willing to publish whatever on the strength of profits already earned from his earlier work. Calling the narrative of Dead Astronauts fractured does not do it justice! Who are these Dead Astronauts from the title? When do the events of Dead Astronauts take place? Why can the animals talk? What is the City? What is the Company? What the fuck is going on?
More or less, the Astronauts hate the Company which produces genetic-engineering monstrosities and deposits them on the outskirts of the City. After I finished reading the book, I went online and read the reviews from last December, and confirmed that I didn't "miss" anything. I mean, I will freely admit that I didn't really have an idea as to what, exactly happened, or care enough about anything to think about it beyond the time I spent actually reading the book. I do question whether Dead Astronauts is more of a prose poem than an exercise of genre-literary fiction. Several of the chapters just consist of various Company created monstrosities invoking the same phrase for pages and pages of text.
I waited...three months to read the Ebook, and I just wasn't buying it.
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| Poet and artist Ariana Reines |
A Sand Book (2019)
by Ariana Reines
I haven't read a book of poetry since high school, but I feel like I should branch out after reading so many novels and works of nonfiction. Poetry is, after all, literature. Going into my mid 40's, I finally met a handful of poets who I respect, so at the very least I owe it to these acquaintances to acknowledge the validity of poetry as a form of literature. I did enjoy A Sand Book by Ariana Reines. She peppers her poetry with contemporary references to sex, drugs and celebrities, and it isn't hard to figure out her point of view.
Here is one example of a her style:
Witness me as I draw this X
Everything your eye touches is the content of your kingdom
The crown slides down over my eye
The world exposes its egg to the Sky
man It will be Thursday again
Ashton’s skateboard face and Demi’s skull face will be bathed in severe sun
People Magazine will go up in flames
Or another:
wanna feel the heat of a woman who knows pain
Yazidi women and girls call each other comrade
I’m not at all certain this is true
I met Pussy Riot at Richard Hell’s one night, proceeded to not write about it
Richard had just read a thing in public to make him look like no friend to women
Reines is also a studio and performance artist, and I wouldn't be surprised to see her write a novel or at least a book of short stories. A Sand Book is a good book of poetry for people who don't read poetry.
Published 3/24/20
Agent Running in the Field (2019)
by John Le Carre
John Le Carre is 25 novels into his career. He averages between three and five novels a decade. Agent Running in the Field was his fourth between 2010 and 2020. What is amazing about his career, besides maintaining both genre and literary audiences for a half century, is that the end of the Cold War didn't even put a hiccup in his output. Le Carre managed to neatly pivot to a post Cold War reality, and he didn't even need to abandon Russia as a primary antagonist.
Like Elmore Leonard, another genre/literature cross-over author, reading a new Le Carre novel mostly consists of checking the boxes: Eccentric English spy who is into badminton, set in London, double cross is at the hands of which Government agency... In fact, badminton is the real takeaway from Agent Running in the Field. Everything else about Agent Running in the Field seemed uninspired to me, but of course, reading Le Carre is always a pleasure because his characters are closer to the type you find in literary fiction vs. genre fiction, but at the same time you get the exciting plotting of a spy novel, and relatively few scenes of English characters talking in a drawing room over scotch (though you also get some of that.)
Agent Running in the Field (2019)
by John Le Carre
John Le Carre is 25 novels into his career. He averages between three and five novels a decade. Agent Running in the Field was his fourth between 2010 and 2020. What is amazing about his career, besides maintaining both genre and literary audiences for a half century, is that the end of the Cold War didn't even put a hiccup in his output. Le Carre managed to neatly pivot to a post Cold War reality, and he didn't even need to abandon Russia as a primary antagonist.
Like Elmore Leonard, another genre/literature cross-over author, reading a new Le Carre novel mostly consists of checking the boxes: Eccentric English spy who is into badminton, set in London, double cross is at the hands of which Government agency... In fact, badminton is the real takeaway from Agent Running in the Field. Everything else about Agent Running in the Field seemed uninspired to me, but of course, reading Le Carre is always a pleasure because his characters are closer to the type you find in literary fiction vs. genre fiction, but at the same time you get the exciting plotting of a spy novel, and relatively few scenes of English characters talking in a drawing room over scotch (though you also get some of that.)
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| Argentinian author Maria Gainza |
Optic Nerve (2014)
by Maria Gainza
The 2019 English translation of Argentinian author Maria Gainza's 2014 debut novel Optic Nerve was widely hailed as the arrival of a major new writer. Gainza's prose evokes Enrique Vila-Matas, W.G. Sebald, and John Berger combining the knowledge of an art critic inside the structure of a novella. Passages of acute observation about painters ranging from El Greco, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gustave Courbet. The narrator emerges in glimpses and art and experiences entertwine in her consciousness. Not all of the art discussed is painting- she includes this memorable description of the original Point Break:
There is a film I come across occasionally when watching late-night TV that never fails to hypnotize me. It’s about a group of American surfers who rob banks wearing ex-president masks. These are surfers with a cause, spiritual gangsters who read the Old Testament and proclaim the coming of Jesus. (Now that I think about it, Jesus was the first ever surfer, the first to walk on water . . .) The police set out to infiltrate the group, and though the officer they appoint finds himself seduced by its mystique, all is going according to plan until some girl trouble moves us swiftly on to the denouement. In the final scene, the officer confronts the leader of the surfer bank robbers, a messiah figure obsessed with catching the wave, the one that appears as the result of a hundred-year swell in the oceans. On the day of the storm we see the two of them on a beach in Australia: the police officer has followed him there, I think rain is falling, and beyond them in the distance the water begins to rear up.
I mean honestly, the comparison to Vila-Matas, Sebald and Berger should be enough to sell anyone who is read all three of those writers, and if you haven't, you probably won't be interested. I'd love to read more by Gainza.
I mean honestly, the comparison to Vila-Matas, Sebald and Berger should be enough to sell anyone who is read all three of those writers, and if you haven't, you probably won't be interested. I'd love to read more by Gainza.
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| Japanese author Hiroko Oyamada |
The Factory (2020)
by Hiroko Oyamada
Japanese author Hiroko Oyamada is a hot young writer in Japan, The Factory is her first novel translated into English. It is a gentle tale about two temps, a woman who is charged with paper shredding, and a man in charge of cataloguing different types of fungus in the factory environment. The obvious comparison, given the tone of The Factory, is to Kafka. Oyamada's factory does not mirror any conventional set of physics, since it is often described as an entire land, replete with forests, rivers and towns.
The setting of "temp world" is well familiar in the literary fiction of USA, in Japan, temps play a less prominent role, so I can see where The Factory would have made more of a splash inside Japan. Outside of the observations on the vagaries of temp life, you've got the gentle surrealism, focused mostly on a flock of unidentifiable birds.
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| Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies |
The Mercies (2020)
by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Author Kiran Millwood Hargrave has a good sale/critical track record in the field of ya books- The Mercies is her adult lit debut. Hotly tipped, you could call it, and it isn't everyday you get a work of LGBT flavored historical fiction about witch trial in Northern Norway circa early 17th century.
I checked out the Audiobook from the Los Angeles Public Library after a months long wait. I wasn't disappointed, exactly, but I wasn't transported to a different place and time, either. Northern Norway isn't the most alien landscape I can imagine- even in the 17th century- I've been making my way through Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard six volume series and there is an entire volume set in the same general area as The Mercies.
There is nothing too graphic, but The Mercies is 100% not YA fiction with graphic depictions of marital sex/rape and the frequent discussion of ways to kill a witch, and killing of witches. The plot isn't great, an average reader will see events spooling out well before they occur. After all, witches, early 17th century Norway, a village of women where all the men died in an unfortunate storm (no doubt part of the little Ice Age of the 17th century!)... you can see where this is going...
Published 4/2/20
House of Stone (2020)
by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
This is another first novel out of the Southern Africa diaspora- following The Old Drift from last year- by Zambian writer Narwali Serpell. House of Stone is a auspicious debut by Zimbabwean-by-way-of-the-Iowa-Writers-Workshop author Novuyo Rosa Tshuma. Tshuma comes from Matabeleland, a region inside modern Zimbabwe. Matabeleland is basically the western half of Zimbabwe. The majority there are the Ndebele people, a Bantu group that comprises 2.5 million of Zimbabwe's total population of 14 million. The Ndebele's were the victims of one of the lesser known attempts at genocide at the hands of Robert Mugabe and his supporters, who were members of a different ethnicity, the Shona. These massacres of Ndebele's at the hands of the majority Shona was called the Gukurahundi and it took the form of a series of grotesque massacres against unarmed civilians who were accused of supporting the losing ZAPF party in the struggle for Zimbabwean independence.
It is important to understand this aspect of the region's history because Tshuma does not spend significant time with any exposition. Her unreliable narrator, Zamani, refers to historical events but does not explain- there is no omniscient third person narrator to guide the reader through the unfamiliar- part of the greatness of Heart of Stone. Zamani has returned from abroad as the boarder for Abednego and Agnes, a Ndebele people who have directly experienced the Gukurahundi in traumatic fashion. Zamani is obsessed with these events, for reasons made clear in the course of the plot, but Tshuma deftly weaves her narrative in a way that keeps the reader guessing until close to the end.
House of Stone was a stand out for me- one of my favorite books I've read this year.
House of Stone (2020)
by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
This is another first novel out of the Southern Africa diaspora- following The Old Drift from last year- by Zambian writer Narwali Serpell. House of Stone is a auspicious debut by Zimbabwean-by-way-of-the-Iowa-Writers-Workshop author Novuyo Rosa Tshuma. Tshuma comes from Matabeleland, a region inside modern Zimbabwe. Matabeleland is basically the western half of Zimbabwe. The majority there are the Ndebele people, a Bantu group that comprises 2.5 million of Zimbabwe's total population of 14 million. The Ndebele's were the victims of one of the lesser known attempts at genocide at the hands of Robert Mugabe and his supporters, who were members of a different ethnicity, the Shona. These massacres of Ndebele's at the hands of the majority Shona was called the Gukurahundi and it took the form of a series of grotesque massacres against unarmed civilians who were accused of supporting the losing ZAPF party in the struggle for Zimbabwean independence.
It is important to understand this aspect of the region's history because Tshuma does not spend significant time with any exposition. Her unreliable narrator, Zamani, refers to historical events but does not explain- there is no omniscient third person narrator to guide the reader through the unfamiliar- part of the greatness of Heart of Stone. Zamani has returned from abroad as the boarder for Abednego and Agnes, a Ndebele people who have directly experienced the Gukurahundi in traumatic fashion. Zamani is obsessed with these events, for reasons made clear in the course of the plot, but Tshuma deftly weaves her narrative in a way that keeps the reader guessing until close to the end.
House of Stone was a stand out for me- one of my favorite books I've read this year.
Published 4/6/20
Travelers (2019)
by Helon Habila
Travelers is the new novel by Nigerian (living in the US) author Helon Habila, about the interconnected lives of a small group of African migrants- some legal, others not, living in Europe. Travelers is divided into six parts, linked by a nameless narrator, an African academic, working in the United States who has travelled to Berlin to work on his thesis. There he falls in with a group of undocumented migrants. Other memorable characters emerge in subsequent sections, Manu, a Libyan doctor of sub-saharan African descent, working as a bouncer at a night club that caters to older white women looking for younger, foreign companions, while he looks for his wife every week at Checkpoint Charlie after they are separated crossing the Mediterranean. Then there is Portia, the daughter of a professional dissident poet who is looking for answers after her brother is murdered by his wife, a white Swiss woman. There is the story of Karim, an Eritrean who has fled through Yemen, Syria and Turkey. All of the tales are memorably described, and Travelers has a way of making the migration situation in Europe come alive in a way that straight forward news fails to achieve.
Travelers (2019)
by Helon Habila
Travelers is the new novel by Nigerian (living in the US) author Helon Habila, about the interconnected lives of a small group of African migrants- some legal, others not, living in Europe. Travelers is divided into six parts, linked by a nameless narrator, an African academic, working in the United States who has travelled to Berlin to work on his thesis. There he falls in with a group of undocumented migrants. Other memorable characters emerge in subsequent sections, Manu, a Libyan doctor of sub-saharan African descent, working as a bouncer at a night club that caters to older white women looking for younger, foreign companions, while he looks for his wife every week at Checkpoint Charlie after they are separated crossing the Mediterranean. Then there is Portia, the daughter of a professional dissident poet who is looking for answers after her brother is murdered by his wife, a white Swiss woman. There is the story of Karim, an Eritrean who has fled through Yemen, Syria and Turkey. All of the tales are memorably described, and Travelers has a way of making the migration situation in Europe come alive in a way that straight forward news fails to achieve.
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| American author James McBride |
Deacon King Kong (2020)
by James McBride
James McBride won the National Book Award in 2013 for The Good Lord Bird, a work of historical fiction set in Civil-War era America. Deacon King Kong is set in 1969, in a fictionalized version of the Brooklyn housing project where McBride grew up (McBride first came to the attention of a national audience with his 1995 memoir, about growing up in Brooklyn as the son of an African American minister and a (converted to Christianity) Orthodox Jewish mother.
I managed to check out the Audiobook version of Deacon King Kong- which is an excellent product- but I'd also recommend the book itself, because Deacon King Kong is the kind of book that comes to live in your hands. At time, I actually regretted not being able to read the sentences the narrator was intoning. The plot is an elaborate, though not confusing web following the travails of Sportcoat, a down and outish deacon at a Brooklyn church, who makes his living as a part time handyman and full time drinker- King Kong is the name of the local home-brew.
The plot is set into motion when Sportcoast shoots his former baseball protege and current heroin dealer, Deems Clemens. Before things come to rest, McBride expands his story to include the whole neighborhood, Irish cops, Black cops, Italian gangsters, Irish gangsters, Black gangsters, all brought vividly to live by McBride in a way that simultaneously evokes the "great American novel" and the grand Hollywood tradition of storytelling a la Robert Altman, Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese (McBride has collaborated with Lee on two films). Surely a contender for another National Book Award or the Pultizer Prize, Deacon King Kong is not to be missed.'
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| Cover of the original 1971 collection of Moderan stories by David R. Bunch |
Moderan (2018)
by David R. Bunch
Published by New York Review of Books Classics
Moderan is a collection of futuristic science fiction short stories that were originally published in the early 1970's in a variety of sci fi focused magazines. Except for two, they were never reprinted, and the New York Review of Books Classics collection published in 2018 is the first attempt to collect all the stories in one place since 1971. The collection arrived complete with an introduction by Annihilation author Jeff Vandermeer:
IT’S BEEN hard to get your hands on David R. Bunch’s best-known work for almost half a century now. Most of the Moderan stories—linked, fable-like tales written in an experimental mode, set on an Earth ravaged by nuclear holocaust—were published during the 1960s and ’70s in magazines and later gathered, along with several additional stories, in Moderan, a collection put out by Avon in 1971. Outside of specialist circles, Bunch has been all but forgotten, the original Moderan volume long out of print. Yet in the years since his most prolific period, the nightmarish dystopia he imagined has begun to look increasingly prescient, even prophetic. In Moderan, men who have violently transformed themselves into cybernetic strongholds battle across an Earth paved over with plastic and tunneled under with living quarters.
Vandermeer later admits that the tales are, "wild, visceral and sui generis" which is a nice way to say that they are at times impossible to understand. Basically, the stories in Moderan are as just experimental literary fiction as they are science fiction. The use of a distinctive dialect by his cyborg narrator echoes the Russian influenced dialogue of A Clockwork Orange. The environment that Bunch describes sounds like the post-Skynet environment of the Terminator films. Bunch eschews the kind of narrative tricks that would give the reader any context- you just have to put it together for yourself.
Still, there are some clues in the back and forth:
“Now, to answer your question about the scraped-off rolled-down land, the jammy-rams and the plastic: You see, we’re moving down toward where you came from. We’ll get it all in time. Surely you must know that the earth is poisoned. From what I’ve heard, where you are from is not only poisoned, but wrecked and cindered as well. We stopped just short of that havoc up here; therefore there is this place for you from Old Land to come to. But our land was poisoned by science ‘progress’ as much as yours was. So we’re covering all with the sterile plastic, a great big whitey-gray envelope of thick tough sterile plastic over all the land of the earth. That’s our goal.
Fair enough. What about the human emotion we call love?
“Once, long ago, in an age of horror, living conditions were as your mother has let you hear on the old tot tubes in that abandoned nursery. People lived together in clusters of rooms, whole families lumped not only in each other’s consciousness, but together in sight and smell as well as feel. Their personalities were untrue; their characters developed twisted; they were walking nightmares of contradictions because they warped one another by their proximities. They even ate together, food such as, thank all the powers of Thinking, you have never seen—sustenance that often times came in great chunks which they took by mouth and actually had to chew and swallow by their own power. Now, who would have time for that today, what with the need for power mentalics and the overriding necessity for using all our abilities for Universal Deep Thinking? And remember. THEY WALKED IN THE WEAKNESS OF FLESH ALL THE DAYS OF THEIR LIVES!”
You get the idea. Moderan very much seems like a book that would interest the people who read this blog. Or the bots. Both groups, really. Another great example of why I'm drawn to the New York Review of Books Classics line- that much competition for these titles within the Los Angeles Public Library system. For me, the act of taking an author like Bunch and giving him a new platform a half century after the original publication- that is at the heart of what interests me.
You get the idea. Moderan very much seems like a book that would interest the people who read this blog. Or the bots. Both groups, really. Another great example of why I'm drawn to the New York Review of Books Classics line- that much competition for these titles within the Los Angeles Public Library system. For me, the act of taking an author like Bunch and giving him a new platform a half century after the original publication- that is at the heart of what interests me.
Published 4/17/20
The Memory of Fire Trilogy (2014)
by Eduardo Galeano
Originally written and published in Spanish by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano between 1982 and 1986, The Memory of Fire Trilogy a true revelation via the revised 1001 Books list. The Memory of Fire Trilogy isn't a novel- in format it consists of hundreds of single page entries each detailing a different episode in the extended history of "the New World" starting with Native American groups before contact, and continuing up until 1981, in chronological order. Each entry is cross referenced with a different source, and then the sources are listed in the back, so if you want to follow up on a particular passage you can.
I was genuinely moved both by the book itself, and the achievement it represents. I was also struck by the unique perspective of a Uruguayan journalist- which is not a viewpoint you often see expressed in the English language, and it's not a huge literary culture within the greater Latin American landscape. Any reader will be dazzled by some of the episodes- especially those involving American malfeasance in Central America- episodes which have basically been expurgated from the official version of American history. It is those lesser known episodes- the time America invaded Nicaragua in the early 20th century, the brutal civil war between the Mayans and the Mexican government- again in the mid 19th century- where The Memory of Fire Trilogy really ignites, but the fact that it is in page length chapters, and proceeds chronologically, makes it more accessible then a reader might expect from a thousand page, three volume set.
I actually read The Memory of Fire before I read The Conquest of the New World- and it was Galeano, not Diaz who brought to life Malinche- Cortes' native "wife" who was also his interpreter:
What about the story of Opchanachanough- a native aristocrat from Virignia who travelled to Spain, returned with the Jesuit mission that was set up in Virigina forty years before Jamestown (!) apparently destroyed the mission, and was then involved in the interactions between Jamestown and the Powatoan's:
His description of the Mayan/Mexican civil wars of the mid 19th century:
I was actually there a couple years back- saw these plantations, read about the war- and didn't really get it until I read it in Galeano's words.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy (2014)
by Eduardo Galeano
Originally written and published in Spanish by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano between 1982 and 1986, The Memory of Fire Trilogy a true revelation via the revised 1001 Books list. The Memory of Fire Trilogy isn't a novel- in format it consists of hundreds of single page entries each detailing a different episode in the extended history of "the New World" starting with Native American groups before contact, and continuing up until 1981, in chronological order. Each entry is cross referenced with a different source, and then the sources are listed in the back, so if you want to follow up on a particular passage you can.
I was genuinely moved both by the book itself, and the achievement it represents. I was also struck by the unique perspective of a Uruguayan journalist- which is not a viewpoint you often see expressed in the English language, and it's not a huge literary culture within the greater Latin American landscape. Any reader will be dazzled by some of the episodes- especially those involving American malfeasance in Central America- episodes which have basically been expurgated from the official version of American history. It is those lesser known episodes- the time America invaded Nicaragua in the early 20th century, the brutal civil war between the Mayans and the Mexican government- again in the mid 19th century- where The Memory of Fire Trilogy really ignites, but the fact that it is in page length chapters, and proceeds chronologically, makes it more accessible then a reader might expect from a thousand page, three volume set.
I actually read The Memory of Fire before I read The Conquest of the New World- and it was Galeano, not Diaz who brought to life Malinche- Cortes' native "wife" who was also his interpreter:
She does not need to hate her mother. Ever since the lords of Yucatán made a present of her to Hernán Cortés four years before, Malinche has had time to avenge herself. The debt is paid: Mexicans bow and tremble at her approach. One glance from her black eyes is enough for a prince to hang on the gallows. Long after her death, her shadow will hover over the great Tenochtitlán that she did so much to defeat and humiliate, and her ghost with the long loose hair and billowing robe will continue striking fear for ever and ever, from the woods and caves of Chapultepec.
What about the story of Opchanachanough- a native aristocrat from Virignia who travelled to Spain, returned with the Jesuit mission that was set up in Virigina forty years before Jamestown (!) apparently destroyed the mission, and was then involved in the interactions between Jamestown and the Powatoan's:
Opechancanough had once lived in Spain and in Mexico; he was then a Christian known as Luis de Velasco, but no sooner was he back in his country than he threw his crucifix, cape, and stole in the fire, cut the throats of the priests who accompanied him, and took back his name of Opechancanough, which in the Algonquin language means he who has a clean soul.
His description of the Mayan/Mexican civil wars of the mid 19th century:
Porfirio Díaz has examined the henequén plantations in Yucatán and is taking away a most favorable impression. “A beautiful spectacle,” he said, as he supped with the bishop and the owners of millions of hectares and thousands of Indians who produce cheap fibers for the International Harvester Company. “Here one breathes an atmosphere of general happiness.” The locomotive smoke is scarcely dissipated when the houses of painted cardboard, with their elegant windows, collapse with the slap of a hand. Garlands and pennants become litter, swept up and burned, and the wind undoes with a puff the arches of flowers that spanned the roads. The lightning visit over, the merchants of Mérida repossess the sewing machines, the North American furniture, and the brand-new clothes the slaves have worn while the show lasted. The slaves are Mayan Indians who until recently lived free in the kingdom of the little talking cross, and Yaqui Indians from the plains of the north, purchased for four hundred pesos a head.
I was actually there a couple years back- saw these plantations, read about the war- and didn't really get it until I read it in Galeano's words.
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| Novelist C. Pam Zhang |
How Much of These Hills is Gold (2020)
by C. Pam Zhang
This debut novel by Zhang- about a brother and sister of Chinese ancestry who are trying to survive in a gently alternative-history version of the 19th century American west, passes the first test of readability in contemporary American literary fiction: Is the book about rich, well educated white people and their sad problems or is it about something else? If it's about something else, that is good. Lucy and Sam are sisters- Sam is what you would call a tomboy, Lucy a more conventional girl- just on the edge of their teens- when their coal mining father dies in the gold fields of the West. The coal mining is one of the several gently alternative history type details of the not-quite Gold Rush west where the book takes place. There are also Buffalo in them thar hills, and maybe a tiger or too. Readers who aren't overly familiar with the history of the old west might not even notice these touches, but for those who do it is a hint that How Much of These Hills is Gold is something more complicated than a Chinese-American 19th century bildungsroman.
Indeed there is much to admire about How Much of These Hills is Gold, but from the perspective of this blog and its concerns, it Zhang's ability to craft something that is both accessible and also deeply "literary" in a way that escapes much of recent American literary fiction. How Much of These Hills is Gold is a stand out debut, and Zhang is surely a writer to be followed.
Published 4/22/20
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2019)
by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2019) by Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the inaugural National Book Award for Translated Fiction. The English translation was published by New Directions- one of my favorite houses. It is easy to see why it won, because this is the kind of book: difficult and complicated to follow, that prize juries love. Just completing it feels like an accomplishment because of Krasznahorkai's style: Pages long paragraphs, page long sentences, a half dozen narrators, shifting between narrators between paragraphs and a surfeit of events within the book that take place off the page, leaving the reader to piece together what happened.
The basic idea is that Baron Wencknheim- a dissoulte Hungarian royal who has spent his entire adult life in exile in Argentina, returns home to small-town Hungary, where the locals await him with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. The Baron is a bit of a wastrel, but no one in Hungary knows this, and the clash between expectation and reality provides much of the impetus of the pot.
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming isn't an easy book to describe, other than the characteristics mentioned above, but this description, written from the perspective of the Baron, should give a prospective reader an idea of the vibe:
It is also worth noting that at 512 pages, this is not a short book. Baron Wenckheim is the third Krasznahorkai book I've tackled, and all three have kept to the same experimental style.
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2019)
by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2019) by Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the inaugural National Book Award for Translated Fiction. The English translation was published by New Directions- one of my favorite houses. It is easy to see why it won, because this is the kind of book: difficult and complicated to follow, that prize juries love. Just completing it feels like an accomplishment because of Krasznahorkai's style: Pages long paragraphs, page long sentences, a half dozen narrators, shifting between narrators between paragraphs and a surfeit of events within the book that take place off the page, leaving the reader to piece together what happened.
The basic idea is that Baron Wencknheim- a dissoulte Hungarian royal who has spent his entire adult life in exile in Argentina, returns home to small-town Hungary, where the locals await him with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. The Baron is a bit of a wastrel, but no one in Hungary knows this, and the clash between expectation and reality provides much of the impetus of the pot.
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming isn't an easy book to describe, other than the characteristics mentioned above, but this description, written from the perspective of the Baron, should give a prospective reader an idea of the vibe:
the train had already pulled away into that great chaos of the intricate construction of railway switches, detours, and intersections, loop lines and wyes, switch plates, distance signals, waiting bays, and overhead lines — the platform on which those people could have followed the train was no more, and in particular they weren’t lucky, because they found him in the last, that is to say the first carriage, just as, in their moment of discovery, the train pulled away from the last few meters of the platform, so they couldn’t do much more than take some pictures of the train itself: there would be documentation that the train was here, he was on it, exactly as the Austrian news agency had stated in its report this morning, namely he was en route to his primary destination...
It is also worth noting that at 512 pages, this is not a short book. Baron Wenckheim is the third Krasznahorkai book I've tackled, and all three have kept to the same experimental style.
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| Author Richard Powers, currently teaching at Stanford University, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Overstory (2018) |
The Overstory (2018)
by Richard Powers
Richard Powers is one of those rare authors who manages to combine critical acclaim with a decent sized audience. The Overstory, his twelfth novel, was a real hit- the kind of book that makes a publisher go back and re-release older, less succesful novels, with the caption of "By the author of newly published, large selling novel." I've read Powers on and off for decades- Galatea 2.2 came out in 1995- I was in college- I'm sure I read a paperback copy bought at a mall book store or on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, Caliofrnia. Then Gain came out in 1998- about an American corporation- I read that at the time and thought it was great. I went back and read the The Gold Bug Variations (1991) at some point. After that I lost track- haven't read The Echo Maker- which one the National Book Award in 2006.
The Overstory was a book I felt determined to ignore- objectively, the fact that I simply haven't bothered to keep up with Richard Powers begs the question of what I'm trying to accomplish here. I actually like Powers- his idea driven literary fiction comes close to the idea driven non-fiction and speculative fiction that I like to read as well, and the awards speak for themselves, establishing a prima facie case for canonical status. There is already a strong argument- based on success experienced both in and out of the United States- that he is a multiple book canon represenative.
If you go from the early/classic/late-capstone formulation of canonical selection- the early pick is unclear, but for "classic" you've got several good options- Galatea 2.2, Gain and The Echo Maker all fit within the category of mid-careeer stand-out. The Overstory could be included in that category, or it could be the late-career, capstone sort of book. Winning the Pultizer was a big push- and the widespread sales success is probably even a bigger push. Obviously, a Booker Prize win or the Nobel would be huge- but I'd think his chances of winning a Nobel Prize are basically zero. The Booker prize seems to be in his grasp. The Overstory was shortlisted in 2018.
Like all of his fiction, The Overstory is strongly about ideas and showcases a depth of research that would also qualify Powers to write non-fiction about the same subject. Here, the focus is on the interconnectedness of trees, particularly big trees in old, untouched forests, and the ways that this impacts a cross-section of Americans in their lives, impacting the choices they make over decades. The Overstory certainly shows that Powers is at the top of his game. The capable deployment of a half dozen protagonists across decades of American history shows deep sophistication in terms of technique, and a book that I had always imagined would be boring (as I imagine others of his books I still haven't read) it was not. The ability to write a not boring book about trees is a rare one, Powers did it.
Published 4/27/20
The King at the Edge of the World (2020)
by Arthur Phillips
The King at the Edge of the World is one of the last Audiobooks I completed before I stopped being able to go anywyere. Set at the end of Queen Elizabeth I (1601), Mahmoud Ezzedein is a Doctor who has travelled with an Ottoman embassy to London. He is, to his deep regret, left behind, never to return again to his wife and child. As England roils with speculation over the succesor to Queen Elizabeth, namely will he be Catholic or Protestant, Ezzedein is recruited as a spy to prenetrate the court of King James of Scotland, nominally a Protestant and the first in line to succeed Elizabeth I.
If this plot appeals to you, by all means, The King at the Edge of the World is worth a read, though as far as contemporary fiction set in the late 16th/early 17th century it is hard not to compare any book with Hilary Mantel's trilogy of books about Thomas Cromwell.
Published 4/27/20
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau (2020)
by Michael Zapata
This debut novel by Michael Zapata should be evoking plenty of comparisons to The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz' break-out 2007 novel. Both book combine a modified bildungsroman with fillips derived from post-modern literary fiction and genre-level popular culture. I'm going to steal the description of the set up from this NPR Review of the book:
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau (2020)
by Michael Zapata
This debut novel by Michael Zapata should be evoking plenty of comparisons to The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz' break-out 2007 novel. Both book combine a modified bildungsroman with fillips derived from post-modern literary fiction and genre-level popular culture. I'm going to steal the description of the set up from this NPR Review of the book:
On the surface, it's a straightforward literary mystery: In the early 2000s, Saul Drower is an Israeli-born Jew who works in a Chicago hotel, and he receives a package that his recently deceased grandfather had been trying to get into the hands of a physicist in Chile named Maxwell Moreau. Saul opens the package to find an unpublished manuscript from almost a hundred years earlier, a hallucinatory science-fiction novel titled A Model Earth that might fit on the shelf perfectly between the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Italo Calvino. It was written by an author he'd never heard of named Adana Moreau, the mother of the now-elderly Maxwell. Saul, an avid science-fiction reader, and his old friend Javier embark on an investigation into the manuscript — and its connection to Lost City, Adana's first novel, published by a small press in 1929 but ignored over the decades despite being a literary sensation when it first appeared.
The phrase "on the surface" tells you that what is "really" going on in The Lost Book of Adana Moreau is more complicated, and the reviewer is right. The Lost Book of Adana Moreau is an auspicous debut from a writer who seems to understand the right balance between serious and fun- a good omen for his career, and I wouldn't be surprised to see this book get a prize nomination or two.
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| Photo of Bergen, Norway, where Knausgaard spends most of Book Five attending university. |
Published 4/29/20
My Struggle: Book Five: Some Rain Must Fall (2010)
by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Book Five was my favorite of the six book series. It actually felt like an ending, and the first of the five books that resembles a conventional 20th century bildungsroman: Knausgaard attends university, maintains an adult relationship for several months and yes, after thousands and thousands of pages of "it was no good" and generally bemoaning his lack of talent, finds his voice as a writer, spurred by the death of his father. Considering the extent to which the death of his father dominates the first four volumes, it will come as no surprise that the actual death and Knausgaard's writing breakthrough are linked.
After Book Four, with the major theme of Knausgaard's inability to consummate sexual intercourse, Book Five is easier to endure- endurance being a major asset for any reader who actually wants to make it through the six book series. Book Five was also the first book I actually read vs. listened to as an Audiobook. I remain of the opinion that the six volume Audiobook set narrated Eduardo Ballerini is one of the most impressive literary accomplishments ever, but it was nice to see all the names in print, even as heard Ballerini's voice in my head- he will forever be linked with Knausgaard in my mind, even when he narrates other books.
Particular highlights in this volume- other than it being the book that establishes his breakthrough as an author, include a sojourn in Reykjavik, where he hangs out with Bragi from the then unknown Sugarcubes and parties in Bjork's apartment:
I had nothing to say, nevertheless I was happy, Bragi handed me a beer, I sat looking at the motley, outré selection of people around me, particularly at Björk of course, it was hard to take your eyes off her. The Sugarcubes were one of the best bands in the world at the moment, right now the room I was in constituted the epicenter of rock music. I was already looking forward to telling Yngve.
In true Knausgaardian fashion, he throws up in her bathtub. He also makes to England, rhapsodizing over the same era of popular culture that I found so compelling around the same time:
I loved the Empire that had declined but was still proud, and those who grew up in this dismal grayness captivated us all, first the sixties generation, pop, the Beatles and the Kinks, then the seventies heavy rock, all the evil bands from the metalworking towns in the Midlands, filthy rich in their twenties, then punk, in the mountains of uncollected garbage in 1976, then post-punk and goth rock, the enormous seriousness they brought to their music, and then, now, Madchester, raves, colors, and beat. England, I loved England, everything about England. The soccer, what more could you want than a tired old stadium from the beginning of the twentieth century, filled with ten to twelve thousand grim-faced, fiery working-class men, the mist over the heavy muddy field, and tackles so hard they echoed between the advertising billboards? The dark houses with wall-to-wall carpets everywhere, even on the stairs and in pubs.
It seems clear, that for all my efforts to embrace alternative voices, I still revel in the voices that resemble my own- another fact that became increasingly clear in Volume Five, where Knausgaard discusses his own frustrations with literary post-modernism that echo my own, less coherent critiques.
Published 4/30/20
Pagan Babies (2000)It seems clear, that for all my efforts to embrace alternative voices, I still revel in the voices that resemble my own- another fact that became increasingly clear in Volume Five, where Knausgaard discusses his own frustrations with literary post-modernism that echo my own, less coherent critiques.
Published 4/30/20
by Elmore Leonard
"Father" Terry is a mook from Detroit hiding out in Rwanda, pretending to be a Catholic priest, trying to wait out an indictment back home from an ill-advised stint smuggling cigarettes across state lines. He returns to settle the case and falls in with Debbie, a Private Investigator/Stand Up Comedienne fresh out of state prison, where she did three years for running down her cheatin' boyfriend with a Ford Escort.
Said boyfriend is now a succesful restauranteur with a heavy mob connection. Debbie wants revenge, and the money her ex stole from her, Terry wants to raise money for Rwandan orphans- the Pagan Babies of the titles. Together they come up with a plan that seems particularly nonsensical, and from there it is double-cross till you die. Cool title and premise aside, this was my least favorite of the Leonard novels I've read so far. The heist plot is so lame that I had trouble believing that it was appearing in an Elmore Leonard book.
The experience was somewhat salvaged by an interview between Leonard and Martin Amis, where Amis repeatedly calls Leonard "The Dickens of Detroit." (What if I was from Buffalo, Leonard responds, "The Balzac of Buffalo," Amis replies.) I would recommend putting this book on the skip list.
I did pull this nicely formatted Leonard bibliography from the back of the book:
All by Elmore The Crime Novels:
The Big Bounce (1969);
Mr. Majestyk (1974);
52 Pickup (1974);
Swag* (1976);
Unknown Man #89 (1977);
The Hunted (1977);
The Switch (1978);
City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit (1980); (Review 2016)
Gold Coast (1980);
Split Images (1981);
Cat Chaser (1982); (Review 2020)
Stick (1983);
LaBrava (1983); (Review 2017)
Glitz (1985);
Bandits (1987); (Review 2020)
Touch (1987);
Freaky Deaky (1988);
Killshot(1989);
Get Shorty (1990); (Review 2017)
Maximum Bob (1991);
Rum Punch (1992);
Pronto (1993);
Riding the Rap(1995);
Out of Sight (1996);
Be Cool (1999);
Pagan Babies (2000);
“Fire in the Hole”* (e-book original story, 2001);
Tishomingo Blues (2002);
When the Women Come Out to Dance: Stories (2002).
The Westerns
The Bounty Hunters* (1953);
The Law at Randado* (1954);
Escape from Five Shadows* (1956);
Last Stand at Saber River* (1959);
Hombre* (1961);
The Moonshine War* (1969);
Valdez Is Coming* (1970);
Forty Lashes Less One* (1972);
Gunsights* (1979)
Cuba Libre (1998);
The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories* (1998).
The Big Bounce (1969);
Mr. Majestyk (1974);
52 Pickup (1974);
Swag* (1976);
Unknown Man #89 (1977);
The Hunted (1977);
The Switch (1978);
City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit (1980); (Review 2016)
Gold Coast (1980);
Split Images (1981);
Cat Chaser (1982); (Review 2020)
Stick (1983);
LaBrava (1983); (Review 2017)
Glitz (1985);
Bandits (1987); (Review 2020)
Touch (1987);
Freaky Deaky (1988);
Killshot(1989);
Get Shorty (1990); (Review 2017)
Maximum Bob (1991);
Rum Punch (1992);
Pronto (1993);
Riding the Rap(1995);
Out of Sight (1996);
Be Cool (1999);
Pagan Babies (2000);
“Fire in the Hole”* (e-book original story, 2001);
Tishomingo Blues (2002);
When the Women Come Out to Dance: Stories (2002).
The Westerns
The Bounty Hunters* (1953);
The Law at Randado* (1954);
Escape from Five Shadows* (1956);
Last Stand at Saber River* (1959);
Hombre* (1961);
The Moonshine War* (1969);
Valdez Is Coming* (1970);
Forty Lashes Less One* (1972);
Gunsights* (1979)
Cuba Libre (1998);
The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories* (1998).
Published 5/4/20
The Topeka School (2019)
by Ben Lerner
Congratulations to Colson Whitehead, who won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Nickel Boys- his second win in a row after The Underground Railroad won in 2017. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner was a runner up- they only list two books besides the winner. He also just won the Los Angeles Times Award- which was the reason I decided to read The Topeka School after consciously avoiding it since it was released.
Set in 1990's Kansas, The Topeka School is a bildungsroman about Adam, a high school debate champion and son of two psychiatrists who work at the school of the title, actually more of an institute for the study of mental health, with a historic connection to the first wave of Freudian inspired psychoanalysis. Adam splits narration duties with several associated characters: His Mom, a psychiatrist who has found fame in the world of mass-media self-help books, his less famous father, a disturbed class mate who is treated at the Topeka School, etc.
There is an obvious appeal to the audience for literary fiction in the United States, many of whom no doubt have some familiarity with subjects like mental health counseling and high school debate protocol but it didn't grab me for the same reason I avoided reading it when it came out: Rich, well-educated white people and their problems in late 20th century/early 21st century America, particularly if they involve child-parent relationships, are not the stories I want to read in fiction/literature.
The Topeka School (2019)
by Ben Lerner
Congratulations to Colson Whitehead, who won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Nickel Boys- his second win in a row after The Underground Railroad won in 2017. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner was a runner up- they only list two books besides the winner. He also just won the Los Angeles Times Award- which was the reason I decided to read The Topeka School after consciously avoiding it since it was released.
Set in 1990's Kansas, The Topeka School is a bildungsroman about Adam, a high school debate champion and son of two psychiatrists who work at the school of the title, actually more of an institute for the study of mental health, with a historic connection to the first wave of Freudian inspired psychoanalysis. Adam splits narration duties with several associated characters: His Mom, a psychiatrist who has found fame in the world of mass-media self-help books, his less famous father, a disturbed class mate who is treated at the Topeka School, etc.
There is an obvious appeal to the audience for literary fiction in the United States, many of whom no doubt have some familiarity with subjects like mental health counseling and high school debate protocol but it didn't grab me for the same reason I avoided reading it when it came out: Rich, well-educated white people and their problems in late 20th century/early 21st century America, particularly if they involve child-parent relationships, are not the stories I want to read in fiction/literature.
Pubished 5/5/20
Sea Monsters (2020)
by Chloe Aridijs
Chloe Aridijs is a Mexican author who lives in London and writes in English. She is the daughter of the Mexican ambassador to the Netherlands, and has this amazing description on her Wikipedia page, "she has a doctorate in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from Oxford University."
Sea Monsters recently won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction, which moved it onto my radar. Sea Monsters is a bildungswoman about a the high school aged daughter of a wealthy Mexican couple, obssessed with Brit Pop and Lautremont's Chants de Malador, who "runs away" to the beach coast of Oaxaca with a classmate. A prospective reader can take a good measure of Luisa, the narrator and protagonist, by this description of her "go back":
Nervous nellies need not worry, Luisa's adventure is PG-13 and she isn't traumatized in any way by her choices. Sea Monsters has the making of a generational classic for young adults, if only they hear about it.
Sea Monsters (2020)
by Chloe Aridijs
Chloe Aridijs is a Mexican author who lives in London and writes in English. She is the daughter of the Mexican ambassador to the Netherlands, and has this amazing description on her Wikipedia page, "she has a doctorate in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from Oxford University."
Sea Monsters recently won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction, which moved it onto my radar. Sea Monsters is a bildungswoman about a the high school aged daughter of a wealthy Mexican couple, obssessed with Brit Pop and Lautremont's Chants de Malador, who "runs away" to the beach coast of Oaxaca with a classmate. A prospective reader can take a good measure of Luisa, the narrator and protagonist, by this description of her "go back":
I had packed my bag the night before—a sun hat; red lipstick; two T-shirts, a little dress, and a wraparound skirt; my black bikini; a pair of sandals; a miniature sample of Obsession; the Penguin paperback of Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror that Mr. Berg had lent me; my Walkman and, after great deliberation, a selection of tapes (Depeche Mode’s Speak and Spell, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Tinderbox, the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Barbed Wire Kisses, the Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Tender Prey)
Nervous nellies need not worry, Luisa's adventure is PG-13 and she isn't traumatized in any way by her choices. Sea Monsters has the making of a generational classic for young adults, if only they hear about it.
Published 5/6/20
Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (2017)
by Eka Kurniawan
There is nothing better than opening up a new category of literature with a new country, language or perspective. Eka Kurniawan is the first Indonesian writer I've read, and the first writer translated from Malay. Indonesia's prior presence in the western canon is mostly limited to early 20th century Dutch authors and Joseph Conrad, and I'm unaware of any other contemporary Indonesian authors translated in any language. There is much to enjoy in Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, about an impotent street thug who has to learn to live and love in the slums of Java.
The translated prose is graphic, pulpy, fun to read, and the style of the novel is cinematic, with discreet scenes spanning the childhood and adult life of Ajo Kawir, the main character.
Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (2017)
by Eka Kurniawan
There is nothing better than opening up a new category of literature with a new country, language or perspective. Eka Kurniawan is the first Indonesian writer I've read, and the first writer translated from Malay. Indonesia's prior presence in the western canon is mostly limited to early 20th century Dutch authors and Joseph Conrad, and I'm unaware of any other contemporary Indonesian authors translated in any language. There is much to enjoy in Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, about an impotent street thug who has to learn to live and love in the slums of Java.
The translated prose is graphic, pulpy, fun to read, and the style of the novel is cinematic, with discreet scenes spanning the childhood and adult life of Ajo Kawir, the main character.
Published 5/8/20
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017)
by Shokoofeh Azar
Iranian author Shokoofeh Azar emigrated from Iran to Australia, where Azar wrote The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree in Farsi. It was then translated into English- the translator has remained Anonymous- and this year the translation was nominated for the newish Booker International Prize for Translated Fiction. It made the long list, and I am here to tell you that The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree has the look and feel of a winner, a dazzling, multi-cultural tour-de-force which blends magical realism with the hard, decidedly non-magical realism of post-revolution Iran.
Like other works of magical realism, Azar chooses the ghost of a dead 13 year old girl as a narrator. This ghost witnesses the trials and tribulations of her family- a non-religious, wealthy family of urbanites and intellectuals who are literally forced to flee to the country in a (vain) attempt to avoid the persecution of their kind that followed. Of course, the revolution soon finds them in their remote village. The eldest son is arrested, tortured and murdered and the others suffer through other traumas and mental distress. Azar combines the literary tradition of magical realism with the real-life tradition of pre-Islam Iran, when Persian Zoroastrianism was the religion of a massive, poly-ethnic empire. Remnants of that tradition remain in the hinterlands of Iran, but the official line of the government has been to pretend that this world never existed.
That is a darn shame- many argue that Zoroastrianism was the inspiration for the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and it is a historical fact that much of the important tenets of Judaism took place while Hebrews were in exile inside Persia. This is a lost world, and Azar deserves credit for bringing it to the light. It was hard not to cry for her suffering family. The loss of the traditions of ancient Persia are a loss for all of us, and it is good to be reminded that this world existed. I would expect this book to win the Booker International Prize this year. It is very much worth seeking out.
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017)
by Shokoofeh Azar
Iranian author Shokoofeh Azar emigrated from Iran to Australia, where Azar wrote The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree in Farsi. It was then translated into English- the translator has remained Anonymous- and this year the translation was nominated for the newish Booker International Prize for Translated Fiction. It made the long list, and I am here to tell you that The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree has the look and feel of a winner, a dazzling, multi-cultural tour-de-force which blends magical realism with the hard, decidedly non-magical realism of post-revolution Iran.
Like other works of magical realism, Azar chooses the ghost of a dead 13 year old girl as a narrator. This ghost witnesses the trials and tribulations of her family- a non-religious, wealthy family of urbanites and intellectuals who are literally forced to flee to the country in a (vain) attempt to avoid the persecution of their kind that followed. Of course, the revolution soon finds them in their remote village. The eldest son is arrested, tortured and murdered and the others suffer through other traumas and mental distress. Azar combines the literary tradition of magical realism with the real-life tradition of pre-Islam Iran, when Persian Zoroastrianism was the religion of a massive, poly-ethnic empire. Remnants of that tradition remain in the hinterlands of Iran, but the official line of the government has been to pretend that this world never existed.
That is a darn shame- many argue that Zoroastrianism was the inspiration for the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and it is a historical fact that much of the important tenets of Judaism took place while Hebrews were in exile inside Persia. This is a lost world, and Azar deserves credit for bringing it to the light. It was hard not to cry for her suffering family. The loss of the traditions of ancient Persia are a loss for all of us, and it is good to be reminded that this world existed. I would expect this book to win the Booker International Prize this year. It is very much worth seeking out.
Published 5/8/20
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (2020)
by Deepa Anappara
The biggest problem I have with contemporary literature coming out of the Indian subcontinent is the lack of economic diversity among the characters and subjects. If the characters in Indian fiction don't belong to the upper-upper classes, they belong to the struggling middle class. It's easy to understand why, the Indian upper and middle classes fit neatly into the Audience for literary fiction in the English speaking world, where readers are often interested in "diversity" as long as it isn't too challenging. Deepa Anappara deserves credit for expanding this world with Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, about a group of Indian friends living in an urban slum who decide to take it upon themselves to solve the mystery of friends and classmates who are disappearing at an alarming rate.
Jai-Jai, the narrator lives in a 'basti' a mid-range urban slum in an unnamed Indian city. Jai-Jai is a fan of television detective shows, so when a classmate of his disappeared mysteriously, he assembles a rag-tag group of friends to solve the case. As they begin their search, more people disappear, not just small children but college age women as well. Given the use of child narrators, you could make an argument that this is a YA title, but the very adult themes of what happens to disappeared children in Indian makes an inevitable appearance, and although Anappara eschews the most graphic descriptions there are plenty of themes that would be troubling for school age readers.
I listened to the Audiobook, narrated by a reader with a genuine (to my ears) Indian accent- it actually was difficult to understand at times, so points for authenticity in that regard.
by Deepa Anappara
The biggest problem I have with contemporary literature coming out of the Indian subcontinent is the lack of economic diversity among the characters and subjects. If the characters in Indian fiction don't belong to the upper-upper classes, they belong to the struggling middle class. It's easy to understand why, the Indian upper and middle classes fit neatly into the Audience for literary fiction in the English speaking world, where readers are often interested in "diversity" as long as it isn't too challenging. Deepa Anappara deserves credit for expanding this world with Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, about a group of Indian friends living in an urban slum who decide to take it upon themselves to solve the mystery of friends and classmates who are disappearing at an alarming rate.
Jai-Jai, the narrator lives in a 'basti' a mid-range urban slum in an unnamed Indian city. Jai-Jai is a fan of television detective shows, so when a classmate of his disappeared mysteriously, he assembles a rag-tag group of friends to solve the case. As they begin their search, more people disappear, not just small children but college age women as well. Given the use of child narrators, you could make an argument that this is a YA title, but the very adult themes of what happens to disappeared children in Indian makes an inevitable appearance, and although Anappara eschews the most graphic descriptions there are plenty of themes that would be troubling for school age readers.
I listened to the Audiobook, narrated by a reader with a genuine (to my ears) Indian accent- it actually was difficult to understand at times, so points for authenticity in that regard.
 |
| Mexican author Fernanda Melchor |
Hurricane Season (2017)
by Fernanda Melchor
Hurricane Season by Mexican author Fernanda Melchor is the last of the 2020 Booker International prize short-list tile that I'm going to read before they hand out the award. My pick for the win is The Enlightenment of Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, but this was a strong year, especially for the short list. Hurricane Season is another strong work- maybe not a prize winner because of the dark subject matter: graphic incest, copious drug taking, graphic gay sex, homophobia and every other vice you could imagine.
Set in an unnamed Mexican slum/village, Hurricane Season starts with the death of a local eccentric everyone calls "the Witch," and the question is, who killed the witch and why. Actually, not really, Hurricane Season lacks any of the "who dun it" category of fiction, rather it is a series of stream of consciousness (no paragraphs) narrations by different associated characters from this place: drug addled teens, old hookers and drug addled teen prostitutes, all. Hurricane Season is a must for fans of Roberto Bolano and the literature of the underclass, and Melchor is an exciting talent.
Despite being a slim volume, Hurricane Season isn't an easy read because of the lack of paragraphs, but at least the narrrative is easy to follow and the connections between the characters are clear.
Published 5/12/20
The Resisters (2020)
by Gish Jen
Gish Jen combines a dystopian surveillance state with baseball to create an offbeat novel about a teenager and her struggle to come to terms with her place in a world where automation has rendered large segments of the population "surplus"- paid a basic income and told to consume food which may or may not be "winnowing" them. Don't feel like consuming or otherwise playing by the rules? That's fine, Big Brother, or "Aunt Netty" as she is called, may use her Auto-Judges to turn you into a cast off, forced to live on the increasingly high seas.
I enjoyed the way Jen mingled the imagined architecture of total surveillance with the potential consequences of automation. I enjoyed less the style of the book- The Resisters is narrated by the father of the nuclear family at the center of the plot, but the protagonist is Gwen, his daughter. It makes for some awkward prose, particularly the portion of the novel where Gwen is lured away from her surplus family to an elite university (so she can play baseball) and the Father continues his narrating duties through a combination of remote surveillance and... carrier pigeon? It remains unclear to me why Gwen doesn't get to narrate what is essentially her own story.
I listened to the Audiobook version, which was good but not great. Generally speaking, the entire book is like dystopia light, and the resistance stops short of what Aunt Netty and her bots deserve. Jen leaves The Resisters in the space between YA and adult literature- maybe by design, but I wouldn't call it a success. Interesting, but not a hit. Just to give one example- when Gwen attends Net U, she has a relationship with her coach, but as I write this I couldn't tell you whether they had sex or not- it simply doesn't come up.
Indeed, sex is entirely absent from The Resisters, which is fine, but you would think a permanent underclass paid a basic income to survive would be sex obsessed. What else is there to do?
The Resisters (2020)
by Gish Jen
Gish Jen combines a dystopian surveillance state with baseball to create an offbeat novel about a teenager and her struggle to come to terms with her place in a world where automation has rendered large segments of the population "surplus"- paid a basic income and told to consume food which may or may not be "winnowing" them. Don't feel like consuming or otherwise playing by the rules? That's fine, Big Brother, or "Aunt Netty" as she is called, may use her Auto-Judges to turn you into a cast off, forced to live on the increasingly high seas.
I enjoyed the way Jen mingled the imagined architecture of total surveillance with the potential consequences of automation. I enjoyed less the style of the book- The Resisters is narrated by the father of the nuclear family at the center of the plot, but the protagonist is Gwen, his daughter. It makes for some awkward prose, particularly the portion of the novel where Gwen is lured away from her surplus family to an elite university (so she can play baseball) and the Father continues his narrating duties through a combination of remote surveillance and... carrier pigeon? It remains unclear to me why Gwen doesn't get to narrate what is essentially her own story.
I listened to the Audiobook version, which was good but not great. Generally speaking, the entire book is like dystopia light, and the resistance stops short of what Aunt Netty and her bots deserve. Jen leaves The Resisters in the space between YA and adult literature- maybe by design, but I wouldn't call it a success. Interesting, but not a hit. Just to give one example- when Gwen attends Net U, she has a relationship with her coach, but as I write this I couldn't tell you whether they had sex or not- it simply doesn't come up.
Indeed, sex is entirely absent from The Resisters, which is fine, but you would think a permanent underclass paid a basic income to survive would be sex obsessed. What else is there to do?
Published 5/18/20
Braised Pork (2020)
by An Yu
Author An Yu was born and raised in China, but left at 18 to study at NYU, where she got her undergraduate degree and an MFA in creative writing. Braised Pork, her debut novel, was written in English, but it set entirely in China among Chinese characters and has no claim to American literature aside from the English language and Yu's NYU degrees. Jia Jia, the protagonist, wakes up in her post Beijing apartment-condo to discover her husband is dead. The rest of the book is about how she comes to term with that fact, and the impact it has on her life.
Her journey takes her from a series of upper-middle class locations in Beijing to Tibet and back, painting the portrait of a fully Chinese experience in the contemporary world shaped by the Chinese Communist Party. There is nothing political or controversial in Braised Pork. In fact, I'm not sure the government even comes up. Yu has a smooth writing style and Braised Pork avoids the pratfalls that analogous characters in these sorts of books written about American women of the same age.
Braised Pork (2020)
by An Yu
Author An Yu was born and raised in China, but left at 18 to study at NYU, where she got her undergraduate degree and an MFA in creative writing. Braised Pork, her debut novel, was written in English, but it set entirely in China among Chinese characters and has no claim to American literature aside from the English language and Yu's NYU degrees. Jia Jia, the protagonist, wakes up in her post Beijing apartment-condo to discover her husband is dead. The rest of the book is about how she comes to term with that fact, and the impact it has on her life.
Her journey takes her from a series of upper-middle class locations in Beijing to Tibet and back, painting the portrait of a fully Chinese experience in the contemporary world shaped by the Chinese Communist Party. There is nothing political or controversial in Braised Pork. In fact, I'm not sure the government even comes up. Yu has a smooth writing style and Braised Pork avoids the pratfalls that analogous characters in these sorts of books written about American women of the same age.
Published 5/19/20
A Thousand Moons (2020)
by Sebastian Barry
Irish novelist/poet/playwright Sebastian Barry has written a whole series of books following an Irish family as they emigrate to the United States, and the lives of those folks after they get there. There are three books in the "McNulty Family" series:
1. The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998)
2. The Secret Scripture (2007)
3. The Temporary Gentleman (2014)
Published 6/24/20
Published 6/24/20
Published 6/29/20
Published 7/2/20
Published 8/12/20
by Don Carpenter
by Bernardine Evaristo
A Thousand Moons (2020)
by Sebastian Barry
Irish novelist/poet/playwright Sebastian Barry has written a whole series of books following an Irish family as they emigrate to the United States, and the lives of those folks after they get there. There are three books in the "McNulty Family" series:
2. The Secret Scripture (2007)
3. The Temporary Gentleman (2014)
That series is followed by the Days Without End series (Days Without End (2016) was the first book, and A Thousand Moons is the second. I loved Days Without End, narrated by Thomas McNulty, about his adventures in the south and west as a soldier in the United States army and his relationship with John Cole. The end of that book found them settled in western Tennessee, having adopted the daughter of a Sioux who was murdered during the military campaign documented in Days Without End. Ironically, Days Without End was a big success in the UK, where it won the Costa Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize, but it didn't make a splash in the US. I would have at least expected some kind of movie/prestige tv version, but no.
A Thousand Moons picks up in Tennessee where the last book left off. The new narrator is Winona Cole- I listened to the Audiobook- which is winningly narrated by Kyla Garcia. Winona is now a young woman, well educated, working for a lawyer and living with McNulty and Cole. Unlike Days Without End, A Thousand Moons eschews the epic landscapes of the west for the semi-rural town life of post- Civil War Tennessee. This was a time when Native Americans weren't citizens, and needless to say life is perilous both for Cole and the freed African Americans of the area.
The story revolves around this peril, and Barry's plot makes it difficult to talk about details without risk of spoilers, but A Thousand Moons is another winner and Barry is a terrific writer. It's a shame that his LGBT friendly rewrite of American historical fiction hasn't found greater purchase inside America itself.
Published 5/21/20
Little Eyes (2019)
by Samanta Schweblin
I read Mouthful of Birds, Schweblin's break-out short story collection, when it was released last year- it was a book club pick. I really enjoyed Mouthful of Birds, even though I never posted a review- I find it hard to write about short story collections, even as I've become more amenable to reading them. Mouthful of Birds was, above all, weird- the title story is about a teenage girl who will only eat live birds. Creepy! Little Eyes continues the creepy vibes. Little Eyes is being marketed as a novel, but you could really call it a book of intertwined short stories about a device called a Kentucki, basically a furby with wheels, that is paired with a real human being, creating a relationship between the watcher and the Kentucki owner.
If you've read Mouthful of Birds, you should have a sense that things are going to get dark, and quickly, and Schweblin doesn't disappoint. The parings tend to be Kentucki owners in the global north with watchers in the global south- one of the major stories is the relationship between a young German woman who owns the Kentucki and the Peruvian grandmother who watches. Another major player is a school age boy in Antigua, obsessed with snow, who is paired with a shopkeeper in Scandinavia, stuck in a shop window and then "liberated."
Little Eyes was first published in 2018 in Spain as Kentuckis, I'm glad it got an English translation so quickly. Schweblin's approach reminds me of last year's Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, in that her books are not grounded in one specific place, but reflected a larger, global culture.
Little Eyes (2019)
by Samanta Schweblin
I read Mouthful of Birds, Schweblin's break-out short story collection, when it was released last year- it was a book club pick. I really enjoyed Mouthful of Birds, even though I never posted a review- I find it hard to write about short story collections, even as I've become more amenable to reading them. Mouthful of Birds was, above all, weird- the title story is about a teenage girl who will only eat live birds. Creepy! Little Eyes continues the creepy vibes. Little Eyes is being marketed as a novel, but you could really call it a book of intertwined short stories about a device called a Kentucki, basically a furby with wheels, that is paired with a real human being, creating a relationship between the watcher and the Kentucki owner.
If you've read Mouthful of Birds, you should have a sense that things are going to get dark, and quickly, and Schweblin doesn't disappoint. The parings tend to be Kentucki owners in the global north with watchers in the global south- one of the major stories is the relationship between a young German woman who owns the Kentucki and the Peruvian grandmother who watches. Another major player is a school age boy in Antigua, obsessed with snow, who is paired with a shopkeeper in Scandinavia, stuck in a shop window and then "liberated."
Little Eyes was first published in 2018 in Spain as Kentuckis, I'm glad it got an English translation so quickly. Schweblin's approach reminds me of last year's Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, in that her books are not grounded in one specific place, but reflected a larger, global culture.
Published 5/26/20
Cuba Libre (1998)
by Elmore Leonard
Cuba Libre is the great outlier in the Elmore Leonard bibliography, set, of all places, in Cuba immediately before, during and after the Spanish American war. Martin Amis, in his 1998 interview of Leonard at the Writer's Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, singled-out Cuba Libre as astonishing, and told Leonard he had trouble believing Leonard had written it. Reading that interview (included at the end of Pagan Babies in Ebook format, and indeed, after the end of this book as well, also read in EBook format), piqued my interest in Cuba Libre, so here I am.
Calling Cuba Libre sui generis isn't exactly accurate. Leonard did have his early period of Western fiction, but Cuba Libre represented his first non-contemporary crime fiction novel in over twenty years. At its heart, Libre has a plot that mirrors other common elements of Leonard's capers: A crime that involves ripping off bad guys, double crossing, a male protagonist with many strengths but a troubled past, and a female love interest/femme fatale/partner in crime who is young and sexually adventurous.
As the outlier of his recent bibliography, Cuba Libre is worth pulling out of chronological sequence if you are making your way through the Leonard ouevre, but it ends up reading similar to his other books in terms of plot and character.
Cuba Libre (1998)
by Elmore Leonard
Cuba Libre is the great outlier in the Elmore Leonard bibliography, set, of all places, in Cuba immediately before, during and after the Spanish American war. Martin Amis, in his 1998 interview of Leonard at the Writer's Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, singled-out Cuba Libre as astonishing, and told Leonard he had trouble believing Leonard had written it. Reading that interview (included at the end of Pagan Babies in Ebook format, and indeed, after the end of this book as well, also read in EBook format), piqued my interest in Cuba Libre, so here I am.
Calling Cuba Libre sui generis isn't exactly accurate. Leonard did have his early period of Western fiction, but Cuba Libre represented his first non-contemporary crime fiction novel in over twenty years. At its heart, Libre has a plot that mirrors other common elements of Leonard's capers: A crime that involves ripping off bad guys, double crossing, a male protagonist with many strengths but a troubled past, and a female love interest/femme fatale/partner in crime who is young and sexually adventurous.
As the outlier of his recent bibliography, Cuba Libre is worth pulling out of chronological sequence if you are making your way through the Leonard ouevre, but it ends up reading similar to his other books in terms of plot and character.
Published 5/26/20
A Children's Bible (2020)
by Lydia Millet
I'd never heard of American author Lydia Millet before I got into her new apocalypse-lite novel, A Children's Bible. The lack of knowledge surprised me- she's been publishing well-reviewed, minor prize winning books that combine contemporary issues with dark humor for over twenty years. A Children's Bible is a pretty low stakes take on "the end of the world," narrated from the point of view of a teenage girl who is at a summer rental with her parents and a group of friends. The parents are a feckless bunch- nameless, referred to only as "parents," they spend most of their time inside the vacation rental, taking drugs and sleeping with one another.
The kids, on the other hand, seem to be a capable bunch, and they begin the book in active rebellion against the parents, camping out on the beach by the ocean and befriending the children of another group who visit the same area on a yacht. As you would expect, Millet's voice is confident and assured, and she does a good job of sketching a portrait of this particular milieu of parents and children (pre pandemic of course.) The apocalypse, when it begins, starts with a storm, followed by another storm, and events escalate from there.
There are horrors, but they lack the punch of other examples from the genre and readers are likely to find themselves entertained but not overwhelmed.
A Children's Bible (2020)
by Lydia Millet
I'd never heard of American author Lydia Millet before I got into her new apocalypse-lite novel, A Children's Bible. The lack of knowledge surprised me- she's been publishing well-reviewed, minor prize winning books that combine contemporary issues with dark humor for over twenty years. A Children's Bible is a pretty low stakes take on "the end of the world," narrated from the point of view of a teenage girl who is at a summer rental with her parents and a group of friends. The parents are a feckless bunch- nameless, referred to only as "parents," they spend most of their time inside the vacation rental, taking drugs and sleeping with one another.
The kids, on the other hand, seem to be a capable bunch, and they begin the book in active rebellion against the parents, camping out on the beach by the ocean and befriending the children of another group who visit the same area on a yacht. As you would expect, Millet's voice is confident and assured, and she does a good job of sketching a portrait of this particular milieu of parents and children (pre pandemic of course.) The apocalypse, when it begins, starts with a storm, followed by another storm, and events escalate from there.
There are horrors, but they lack the punch of other examples from the genre and readers are likely to find themselves entertained but not overwhelmed.
Published 5/28/20
Barn 8 (2020)
by Deb Olin Unferth
I use feedly to find new books to read, particularly in the area of new literary fiction. Major sources are the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and Publishers Weekly. Usually I don't actually read the review/write up, I just figure out the subject matter of the book and base it on that. The category of contemporary literary fiction differs from canon level literary fiction in many ways- it is shorter, on average. There are A LOT of books written about the lives of wealthy and well educated white westerners and their problems. That category is probably over 50% of every work of fiction reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. Everything else is the other 50%, maybe less. If a book fits into that second category I give special attention to books translated into English- which is- an incredible accomplishment worth careful consideration. Next is books written from diverse western perspectives: middle, working, underclass, immigrants, children of immigrants, LGBTX perspectives. For that group it's like, even if I don't like it, I'm learning something new. The final category is everything else: historical fiction and speculative fiction mostly.
Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth fits squarely into diverse viewpoints but it also has a strong issue emphasis in the vein of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, or more recently, The Understory by Richard Powers, which had a strong vein of eco-terrorism in its braid of plots. Here, the viewpoint is Midwestern working class, with a protagonist who finds herself stranded in the agricultural midwest after her Mom dies in a NYC car accident. She is marooned in the Midwest, a young latinx, alienated from her deadbeat dad and dour Midwestern surroundings.
She obtains a job as a agricultural auditor, and become the major engine in a plain to heist a million hens from an industrial sized egg farm. Unferth has plainly done her research in the area of industrial egg farms- the research reminded me of Ian McEwan.
Published 5/31/20
This Mournable Body: A Novel (2018)
by Tsitsi Dangarembga
This Mournable Body is the third book in Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga's trilogy about Tambu, a woman who escapes her war-torn village in post-independence Zimbabwe for mixed results in the capital of Harare. Nervous Conditions, the first book in the series, published in 1988 (and the first book published in English by a Zimbabwean woman), covered Tambu's youth and education. The Book of Not, picks up where Nervous Conditions left off, with Tambu working at an advertising agency in Harare. I haven't read the second book, but I was genuinely excited to see This Mournable Body had an Audiobook version, so I checked it out from the library.
This Mournable Body is written in the second person- I can't think of another novel I've read in the 2nd person "You wake up in the morning, you go downstairs to have your breakfast." This Mournable Body picks up with Tambu in retreat after leaving the advertising agency where she was working. She finds a room in the house of a widow looking for extras money after the death of her wealthy business-man husband. It perhaps goes without saying that Tambu's desire to lead a fairly normal, upwardly mobile existence in modern Zimbabwe is enough to drive her to the edge of madness and beyond. The simplest facts a university educated woman in the West (or for that matter, much of the East), the ability takes for granted: to support oneself from an "office job," the ability to date around and find a suitable husband and the opportunity to carve out an independent space for herself are impossible in post-independence Harare.
I suppose it is progress that This Mournable Body got an American release (via Graywolf Press) and an Audiobook edition, which was good- I recommend it. With thirty three years between the first and last books of the Tambu trilogy, Dangarembga's bildungsroman represents a career long achievement. It would be nice to see a prestige television version for Americans, but it seems unlikely given the general lack of interest in African subjects here.
Published 6/5/20
Enter the Aardvark (2020)
by Jessica Anthony
Alexander Paine Wilson, Republican Virginia, is an up-and-coming Congressman with a Ronald Reagan fetish and a pretty big secret: He's gay. Enter the Aardvark covers a hectic week in his life: First his on the down low lover commits suicide and soon after he receives an enormous stuffed aardvark in the mail. Author Jessica Anthony intertwines this story with a historical gay relationship between the taxidermist in charge of stuffing said aardvark and his deceased secret lover. She also wraps a third layer, involving the history of the aardvark itself, which cleverly introduces the true story of the German proto-genocide of the Herero people in modern day Namibia. The Herero genoicde isn't exactly unknown to writers of English language fiction- it plays a role in V and Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, but it is an exotic strand to twist into the rope of the plot.
It's not an exact fit, but Enter the Aaardvark does share some territory with Less, the 2018 Pultizer Prize for Fiction winner by Andrew Sean Greer, which also featured a sassy gay protagonist struggling to control and escape his romantic past. Only 190 pages, Enter the Aardvark is a easy, light read that bats above its length in terms of the depth of the reading experience. I've read many reviews that discuss how "wierd" this book is, but from my perspective it was pretty run-of-the-mill, and not particularly dark or odd.
Published 6/8/20
The White Tiger (2008)
by Aravind Adiga
Indo-Australian author Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize in 2008 for his debut novel, The White Tiger. Talk about an auspicious debut! Since then he's published four other novels, none of which have been published in the United States. That is pretty typical for a Booker Prize winning author who writes about Indian subjects. As far Australian publishing goes, it might as well be an obscure non-English speaking European country for all the good it does it's native authors in the United States. Basically, you can get your book published inside the United States if you win a major literary prize, otherwise, good look.
The White Tiger takes the form of a bildungsroman as a series of letters written by the narrator, Balram, to the Chinese Premier on the occasion of the later's impending visit to Bangalore, where Balram is a succesful entrepreneur of an unspecified variety and also a fugitive of the murderous variety. Every letter recounts a different chapter in Balram's journey, from his childhood in an Indian village in "the darkness" (Balram's name for the underdeveloped parts of India) to his adulthood in the "light" of modernizing Bangalore. Balram finds work as a driver with a family of landlords from his village. They have relocated to Delhi where they are in coal mining. This enterprise requires copious amounts of "lubrication" of the proper government officials, and Balram finds himself learning about bribes paid via sacks of cash. His master is Ashoka, the American educated younger son of the family and his wife, Pinkie Madam an American born Christian Indian who is under the impression that they are only supposed to be an Indian for a short stay before returning to New York.
It is, indeed, the kind of book that you can see winning a Booker Prize, though even the Wikipedia page notes the same authenticity issue I've noted in contemporary Indian fiction- books written about working class/underclass/untouchable types by authors who are educated and live abroad, writing in English as their primary language. It isn't a deal breaker, obviously since there simply are no novels actually written by writers from those backgrounds in India- at least not available in English, in the United States, but it puts Adiga in the category of a 19th century author like Dickens.
Of course, I picked up The White Tiger audiobook simply because it was a Booker Prize winner narrated by John Lee- the voice of Orhan Pamuk and Kazuo Ishiguro- basically I'll listen to him read just about anything, and I was interested to hear his Indian accent. He didn't disappoint, but then again, I wouldn't be able to identify an authentic working class Indian accent in a million years.
Cover of Threshold by Rob Doyle
Published 6/12/20
Threshold (2020)
by Rob Doyle
Threshold is one of the best new releases I've read in 2020, certainly a top 10. Irish author Rob Doyle successfully combines Sebaldian elements with a counter-cultural sensibility to create a memorable volume, filled with sex, drugs and Berlin techno.
There is also a strong meta-literary element, with many of the chapters featuring excursions into the work of other writers. E.M. Cioran, a Romanian/French author I'd never heard of before reading Threshold, Bataille and Roberto Bolano. And don't forget about the drugs, of which there are plenty. Sex, less so, but still enough to keep things interesting in that department. Threshold has all the makings of an international underground classic- pity that it was released just before the Pandemic drew everyone's attention away from new books of literary fiction. Highly recommended!
Published 6/15/20
The End: My Struggle Book Six (2011)
by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Here we are! The final volume of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the English translation was published in 2018. The End follows: My Struggle: Book One, which covers the death of his alcoholic father- the central event of the entire series. A Man in Love: My Struggle, Book Two, mostly concerns Knausgaard's "present": Life with his wife Linda, and their three children, and the difficulties of perusing his artistic vision within a framework of quiet domesticity. Boyhood Island: My Struggle, Book Three- which I heard as an Audiobook but did not read, revisits his childhood- his young childhood. Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle, Book Four covers the year he spent teaching in Northern Norway after graduating from High School. Some Rain Must Fall: My Struggle, Book Five is more or less a conventional bildungsroman about how Knausgaard finds his voice, and it ends with the publisher accepting the manuscript for Volume One.
In many ways, the series ends with Volume Five, and Volume Six serves as a lengthy (1100 pages!) post script, filling in some of the philosophical blanks and giving a conclusion of sorts to his relationship with his wife Linda. The middle of Volume Six is filled with two lengthy literary essays- one about poetry- which I confess, I skimmed/skipped, and a second about Adolf Hitler, which I thought was sensational, though it seems independent of the book, like it could have been published somewhere else. Besides Knausgaard finally addressing the fact that his books share a title with Hitler's most famous publication, I was left waiting for his wife to have her breakdown- which doesn't happen till the very end of the 1100 pages.
Most of the writing about Hitler concerns "young Hitler," Knausgaard making the point that Hitler didn't really become "total evil" until he actually made the decision to move forward on the Holocaust, and if you go back to his days in Vienna and Linz, which Knausgaard does, in detail, you find a would-be artist who resembles many bohemian youth of yesterday and today:
Where did the notion of becoming a painter come from? There were no artists in the family or its milieu; the closest Hitler came to art must have been what he saw in the churches and what he read about in books. Yet this is what he wants to be when he grows up. Not a soldier, not a priest, not a teacher, not a civil servant, but the absolute opposite of a civil servant, an artist. That Ludwig Wittgenstein should become a philosopher is not in the slightest bit odd or surprising, his world was awash with art and culture, the very finest the contemporary age could offer. But Hitler could draw, and may have been encouraged, he wanted something quite different from the life that surrounded him, so perhaps art seemed to him to be a way out.
Of course, Hitler had a strong, domineering father- Knaussgard draws many parallels between this relationship and the relationship other writers of the era had with their fathers- also strong and domineering, because that was the vibe in that place and time.
I'm still not convinced that Volume Six was required- the essay about Hitler could have been inserted into one of the earlier books, and Linda's descent into madness is glossed over considering the attention he devotes to his father's decline and fall, which is of course the central event of the entire series.
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| Irish author Naoise Dolan |
Published 6/17/20
Exciting Times (2020)
by Naoise Dolan
The elevator pitch for Exciting Times by first-time Irish author Naoise Dolan could be, "Normal People meets Crazy Rich Asians with an LGBT twist." I thought it delivered on my hypothetical elevator pitch. Ava, the narrator and protagonist, is a recent "uni" grad from Ireland who has relocated to Hong Kong to teach English to the children of wealthy Hong Kongiese. Ava falls in with Julian, a child of privilege from England- he went to Oxford and works in banking doing something that Ava doesn't understand. Things progress with Julian in some ways: they have decent sex and Ava moves into his apartment. In other ways things do not progress: they never formally "date." When Julian leaves for a several months work trip to Frankfurt, Ava stays in his apartment and begins a relationship with Edith, a native daughter of a Chinese businessman and a Singaporean mother.
I liked Exciting Times, loved it even- I recommend it, even for those who try to stay away from rom-com type lit.
Published 6/18/20
Rocannon's World (1966)
by Ursula Le Guin
I find myself in need of escape these days- particularly when I am out running, I just can't focus on heavy stuff. Rocannon's World is the first book in Ursula Le Guin's pioneering Hainish Cycle, one of the first works of modern science fiction to incorporate the social science insights of the post-war world into science fiction/fantasy. Le Guin was the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, a pioneering anthropologist who studied under Franz Boas at Columbia University and is part of the group of social scientists associated with the field of "cultural relativism."
Less developed than the sophisticated sociology of The Dispossessed- generally considered to be the best of the set- Rocannon's World still shows a well developed appreciation of what you might call "alien sociology." Kroeber was well known for his work with Native American tribes, and Le Guin shows a sensitifity to the differences between "advanced" and "primitive" civilizations that is sadly lacking in much science fiction/fantasy up to this point (and indeed well beyond) where alien life forms are often imaged as a terrifying/mindless "other," and a threat to be destroyed.
Rocannon's World makes the point that genre science fiction can establish interesting sociological observations while adhering to rote tropes of middle ages derived knights and Tolkienian hobbits.
Published 6/18/20
Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (2016)
by Cho Nam-ju
Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, written by Korean author Cho Nam-ju, is an international sensation- with the kind of domestic impact (frank discussions about the treatment of women in Korean society) that inspires foreign audiences to take notice. Surely a book that will figure in next years (or this years remaining?) translated fiction awards, Kim Ji-young appears to be deceptively simple, lulling the audience to sleep before delivering a satisfying conclusion it is hard to see approaching.
There is no trace of the macabre, but otherwise her style reminded me of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, the 2016 International Booker Prize winner, emotionally vague while being extremely descriptive- to the point of providing footnotes for observations about women in the Korean workplace. The banality, it seems, would be the point, were it not for the satisfying conclusion.
Published 6/19/20
The Knowledge (2014)
by Lewis Dartnell
I'm not a prepper, but I've been apocalypse obssessed for decades, Back in law school, when I had trouble getting to sleep because of too many "study aids" I would imagine an asteroid smashing into the Earth and ending it all for everyone. Since then, I've maintained a semi-avid interest in genres that trade in end of the world scenarios, particularly when those concerns make their way to into literary fiction, which is frequent.
The Knowledge is a semi-serious attempt by author Lewis Dartnell to explain how one would go about reconstructing civilization, pitched at a general audience reader, though there is a fair bit of chemistry involved. Dartnell sets up his scenario by specifying his apocalypse: Some sort of virus/disease that wipes out 99.9% of the world but leaves the infrastructure intact. Survivors are able to piggy back their efforts on top of the remnants of the old civilization- the detritus plays an enormous role in providing the raw materials survivors would require.
The reconstruction begins after the winnowing period, so that a smallish group of survivors- ten thousand or so to provide sufficient genetic diversity- operating in an environment that provides no external threats- The Knowledge does not include any information on how one would build and defend a walled fortress to protect against roving gangs of criminal/survivors/mutants. He also starts from the assumption that land will be readily available- to implement his plan you will need a location outside a major city, with access to water, fresh or otherwise (instructions for large scale water purification is included), trees, for wood and for chemical byproducts required for fertilizer etc and a supply of "heritage" crop seeds- Dartnell points out that the wheat crops planted nowadays are genetically engineered by Monsanto to prevent them being reused.
Dartnell provides a primer to farming in the era before the industrial revolution- serious preppers would want to locate books on this subject before shit goes down. Basic chemistry is huge- survivors will have to make fertilizer for their crops, Weaving is similarly important- Dartnell suggests raiding history museums for old looms. You might also want to hit any local "historical reenactment" type locations. The Knowledge is an interesting starting point for those considering the mechanics of survival after the apocalypse, though just getting to the starting point- surviving the initial 'unpleasantness" of a world wide collapse, might merit it's own book.
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| Paperback cover of Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin, the second book in her Hainish cycle |
Published 6/24/20
Planet of Exile (1966)
by Ursula Le Guin
Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Cycle is a great Audiobook listen- genre enough to go down easy, inventive enough to hold attention. Le Guin herself was critical of the idea of a Hainish "cycle" when interviewed. The books exist in a shared universe, but they take place in radically different places and times. It is never made clear whether this is an "alternate future" or actually a future/past from "our" world. The major links between each book are the shared timeline- The Hainish "seeded" humanity on several worlds through the galaxy, then lost their ability to travel between worlds, then picked it back up and recontacted the civilizations which had sprung up in the meantime- including "our" Earth, called Terra. The reconnected human worlds form a tenuous alliance and start exploring the galaxy together, then they are attacked by aliens and reform under a different name later on.
The pattern of contact between humans and "HILFs": highly intelligent lifeforms take place under what might be called "Star Trek" constraints: No intervention unless there is a decision made to elevate an existing HILF group into interstellar civilization. This point is quite crucial in the first two books- both of which take place on isolated planets cut off from the wider interstellar civilization.
In Planet of Exile, the second book in the series, a smallish colony has been cut off from the wider civilization after an unspecified attack- an event unknown to anyone in the book. The interstellar "humans" have picked up the the ability to communicate telepathically- a trait which was "discovered" in the course of the first book, but wasn't a skill of the interstellar humans. On their exiled planet the interstellar humans are slowly going extinct due to long term incompatibilities between colonist and local DNA/biology. The remaining colony faces a "long winter" due to the local planetary arrangement, and a seasonal onslaught by uncultured barbarians fleeing the harsh northern winter.
Alongside the colonists are the Tevar, a herding people who can build stone cities and look down on both the Gaal, who they see as barbarians, and the "Outlanders." Once Le Guin gets her pieces in place events unfold along genre lines, but the set up is way beyond the complexity that you see in similar books.
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| Cover of The Down Days by South African writer Ilze Hugo |
Published 6/24/20
The Down Days (2020)
by Ilze Hugo
The Down Days is like a cross between a sober work of literary fiction about a near future, virus stricken South Africa and a Die Antwoord album. In the aftermath of an annihilating outbreak of a virulent type of "laughing sickness" a la the 1962 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic, the residents of a not-Cape Town remained "Sick City" are struggling to survive. Travel in and out of the city is forbidden, residence within the city is linked to a daily testing system designed to prevent spread of the laughter illness- which ends with the liquidation of the victim's internal organs- so, not so funny.
Laughter, it goes without saying, is forbidden. The remnants of South Africa's rainbow nation have moved beyond race and any kind of recognizable 21st century cultural identity. I felt reasonably sure about identifying some Dutch/Boer patronyms and a couple of characters who were identified as white, but the disease born threat of destruction seems to have eliminated our current race/class based divisions. In the case of class, it is clear that everyone who had the means left, characters squat in abandoned sea side mansions, etc.
Unfortunately The Down Days was written before our current global pandemic and published during said pandemic, making it hard to really appreciate either as science fiction genre or literary fiction. The Down Days is not particularly science fictiony, and the actual story- which has something to do about ghosts and a young girl trying to find her lost brother. The Down Days is an enjoyable ride, but there isn't a big pay-off at the end. I'm actually somewhat surprised it got a United States release.
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| American author Marie-Helene Bertino |
Published 6/29/20
Parakeet (2020)
by Marie-Helene Bertino
The elevator pitch for Parakeet, the new novel by American author Marie-Helen Bertino is, "Bride to be surprised when Grandmother returns from the grave as a Parakeet and tells her to call off the wedding." And indeed, that does describe the first chapter, but Parakeet is actually much stranger than the idea of a bride's dead grandma coming back from the grave to tell her to call off her wedding. Other elements include an estranged playwright brother who won the Pultizer Prize for a play based on her life, which he wrote without consulting her; her job as a biographer for a personal injury lawyer who helps sufferers of brain trauma, her own trauma and various hallucinations of the more and less lucid variety. There's also a decent amount of drug abuse and some ok sex scenes, all in a sprightly 240 pages.
Parakeet is a easy recommendation for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Olga Tokarczuk (she won the Nobel Prize last year.)
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| Cover of Ornamental by Juan Cardenas |
Published 7/1/20
Ornamental (2020)
by Juan Cardenas
Translated by Lizzie Davis
Published by Coffee House Press
It was great to read something by a small press- to see it available at the library level as an Ebook and to read about it in the New York Times- I think. It would be great to just get a list of translated literary fiction in Ebook format with a one line summary- when it comes to smaller presses it is tough to keep track of the new releases, especially widely available ebooks. I've noticed that most of the contemporary literary fiction I find available through the library in electronic format comes either from the major publishers, new directions and new york review of books and that is it. No academic publishers, few regional presses, etc.
Ornamental is a slick 124 pages, about a Medical researcher in an unnamed Columbian city working on a new pharmaceutical that only works on women. The specific effect it has on women is like a milder, but still intense form of mdma, with no hang over. At first, I assumed the medical researcher/narrator was working for a pharmaceutical corporation, later in the book, they sound more like a drug cartel, or the "legit" wing of a drug cartel. That's a point not mentioned in the Times review. Cardenas eschews proper names, "The Doctor," "The wife" and then four test patients, "Patient One, Two" etc. Patient Four emerges as the key figure, with her own set of stream of consciousness monologues inserted between chapters written from the perspective of the Doctor.
Cardenas has an international voice, emphasized by a writing style that eschews the minute, specific detail in matters of place and time- no music is played, nothing takes place that specifically tags the action to a particular time.
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| Canadian-Laotian poet and author Souvankham Thommavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife |
Published 7/2/20
How to Pronounce Knife (2020)
by Souvankham Thommavongsa
The Laotian Canadian community is one tenth the size of the Laotian American community- twenty thousand compared to two hundred thousand. This larger community has its own ethnic divisions- I know from living in California that the Hmong are a group that emigrated to the United States from Laos but are not themselves Laotian. Almost all of the Laotians passed into the United States via refugee camps in Thailand, and there is some overlap between the Laotian diaspora and Thailand. Like many of the second generation immigrants, Thommavongsa wasn't born in Canada but emigrated when she was only a year old- this is a common experience for children of the South East Asian immigrants from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia who emigrated after the Vietnam War.
It is a distinctive voice- different from other Asian communities in that Laotians- especially the Hmong, come from a rural, farming background, they didn't come over with a lot of education or sophisticated work skills and the immigrants tended to work dead end jobs and have problems learning English. There was alot of war related trauma in the immigrant population, and some of that has been passed down, with the second generation suffering from some of the community based ills- gangs are a problem- seen in other disadvantaged America populations.
Thommavongsa is the first Laotian writer I've come across, and her collection of short stories ring true, with a variety of different familial and employment scenarios coming in to play, but all of them linked by a certain level of poverty and material insecurity. In many ways, the Laotian families carefully depicted in Thommavongsa's short stories more closely resemble 19th than 20th century immigrants. Sure to eye opening for any reader- since the Laotians are so infrequently depicted in literature, television, film, etc, I would guess that Thommavongsa has a bright future in literature.
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| Author Megha Majumdar |
Published 7/13/20
A Burning (2020)
by Megha Majumdar
Audiobook read by Vikas Adam, Priya Ayyar, Deepti Gupta, Ulka Mohanty, Sonella Nankani & Neil Shah
It is easy to understand why A Burning by Indian/living in America author Megha Majumdar is such a hot ticket, a New York Times best-seller, impressive for a debut novel that takes place in India, Majumdar has a five star resume for a debut author of literary fiction- raised in Calcutta, studied at Harvard, working as an editor at an indie press, published by Alfred A. Knopf- she really ticks all the boxes.
I was excited to get the Audiobook from the Los Angeles Library- another example of one of those books where the right accent really makes the story jump- it's almost like listening to a radio play of the book, even though it's just people reading the printed page. Majumdar is already a pro: Her tale, about a young woman in Calcutta who becomes embroiled in the aftermath of a terrorist incident in Calcutta after she makes an ill-advised status update on Facebook criticizing the government. The number of narrators contributing to the Audiobook gives you an idea of the number of narrators- you've got a gym teacher who gets involved in local politics, an Hijra character who is thoughtfully drawn and a half dozen non narrators who get into the mix of voices.
Majumdar smoothly transitions from an elevator pitch that borders on the YA to a conclusion that puts her into major literary contender status- quite a segue for a first novel. There can be no doubt that there will be- probably a television- version and it allows Majumdar to publish a bildundsroman inspired by her own life as a SECOND, rather than a first book- a trait I think bodes especially well for a new novelist, where the danger is that the only good idea a young author has derives from his or her direct experience- that isn't really what a great novelist does, but it's the easiest way to score a hit with your first book.
I think because I listened to the Audiobook instead of reading the hard copy, it didn't really dawn on me just how good A Burning was as a book- I was just listening to the story. After I had time to reflect, the craft of it really stuck me, and it seems to me that Majumdar has a very bright future in front of her- I can see her writing an excellent bildungsroman, a historical epic, dabbling in genre or trying to land a major best-seller- probably a marriage plot- which I wouldn't begrudge her.
Published 7/14/20
Maximum Bob (1991)
by Elmore Leonard
Despite it being a late career success- winning the first Hammett Prize when it was released and inspiring a seven episode television miniseries on ABC, best-seller, etc. I think Maximum Bob is one of Leonard's worst, and a clear indication that after the success of Get Shorty, he began to "go Hollywood" as they say. Here, the strong evidence is Leonard's repeated characterization of Judge Bob Gibss- dubbed Maximum Bob by Newsweek (!) for his strict sentencing policy, as "looking like Harry Dean Stanton." That is a pretty specific reference point, and a weird one, considering Stanton's status as a muse for David Lynch during his most productive period.
Beyond that, the plot is classic Florida-period Leonard, with some particularly cringey details beyond the repeated references to the main character looking like Harry Dean Stanton. Specifically, the wife of the Judge is a spiritual channeler who is frequently possessed by the spirit of a 10 year old African American girl who lived before the civil war. She is the only African-American in the book. It's...awkward.
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| Cover of the 2004 Penguin Classics Lord Dunsany compilation- the first- over a hundred years after he started publishing stories. |
Published 7/17/20
In the Land of Time (2004)
by Lord Dunsany
Lord Dunsany is the greatest fantasy writer you've never heard up. Even if you haven't heard of him:
Dunsany can nevertheless be seen as the source and inspiration of much of the writing that followed in his wake; such figures as H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Moore herself are deeply in Dunsany’s debt for the example he set as a prose stylist and as a creator of an entire universe of shimmering fantasy.
The strongest look is between Dunsany and Lovecraft. Dunsany's breakthrough came with The Gods of Pegaana, 1904- self published. The achievment is described S. T. Joshi, who provides the introduction:
What Dunsany had done was to create an entire cosmogony, complete with a pantheon of ethereal but balefully powerful gods—a cosmogony, however, whose aim was not the fashioning of an ersatz religion that made any claim to metaphysical truth, but rather the embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s imperishable dictum, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”
His secret, it turns out was a combination of a style derived from the English translation of the Old Testament with the classic-revivalism of Nietzsche:
Dunsany read Nietzsche in 1904, just around the time he wrote The Gods of Pegaāna, and we can detect the presence of the German iconoclast in numerous conceptions and perhaps even in its ponderous phraseology, so similar to the prose-poetic rhythms of Thus Spake Zarathustra. In effect, Dunsany was seeking to fuse the naïveté and spirit of wonder that had led primitive humanity to invent its gods with a very modern sensibility that recognized the insignificance of mankind amidst those incalculable vortices of space and time that modern science had uncovered.
Joshi also addresses one of my favorite questions, "What happened?" Dunsany was huge in his day- though Joshi points out that his best work was published early, and the stories from the end of his career including the sadly Wellsian Jorkens stories, published towards the end of his career. Joshi has this to say on the subject of "what happened" to Dunsany's literary reputation:
How did a writer so well known in his time, and so showered with critical acclaim, lapse so far into obscurity? A number of factors having nothing to do with the merit, or lack of it, of Dunsany’s work conspired against him. First, fantasy has always been relatively restricted in its appeal, and in the course of the twentieth century it gradually dropped out of mainstream fiction and became a narrow “genre” somewhere between science fiction and horror fiction, and incurring the critical disdain that those literary modes suffered. Second, Dunsany’s ambiguous involvement with his Irish literary compatriots—to say nothing of his Unionist sympathies at a time when most leading Irish writers were Nationalists—caused his work to be either scorned or deliberately ignored by those who should have been acknowledging it as a distinctive contribution to the national literature. And third, Dunsany, like so many writers, wrote too much.
There is a strong argument that only the first two sections, Pegaana and Environs and Tales of Wonder. The rest of it- including his "prose poems" is more for the completest than the casual reader of the antecedents of weird fiction.
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| Cover of the 2008 reprint of Inverted World by Christopher Priest |
Published 7/21/20
Inverted World (1974)
by Christopher Priest
A city called Earth on tracks is pulled ever north, pursuing a never obtainable "optimum" for reasons opaque to Howard Mann, an apprentice in the city's medieval-like guild system. Is this an alien world? Who built the city? It's all very unclear. The afterward by John Clute argues that Inverted World is the first English example of the subgenre of "Hard Sci Fi" featuring mostly masculine heroes seeking the answers to complicated questions involving future science, interstellar travel, looming disaster, etc. Like many examples of excellent genre fiction, the pleasure of the book is bound up in the ending, and any discussion of the narrative structure or the plot risks that payoff.
Published 7/22/20
Missing Persons (1978)
by Patrick Modiano
Originally published in 1978, Missing Persons won the Prix Goncourt(the French Pulitzer) and established himself as a major literary talent inside France (he was five novels in to his career). It is also- surprise surprise- the most accessible of the four books of his I've read. Missing Persons actually takes the detective story by way of European existentialist format common to all of Modiano's novels and takes it somewhere- giving the reader a narrator who is investigating his own identity- having been found without memory as a young man in the aftermath of World War II. Missing Persons is the Modiano to read first!
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| Original cover for The Word for World is Forest (1976) by Ursula Le Guin |
Published 8/24/20
The Word for World is Forest (1976)
by Ursula Le Guin
This is the penultimate book in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, a loosely affiliated series of novels about a universe where the Hainish seeded the human race throughout the galaxy before disappearing for a million years, then reestablishing contact with the colony worlds- including our Earth- called Terra in the Hainish cycle. The Word for World is Forest is the most overtly allegorical book of the Hainish Cycle. The stroy is about a Terran colony which has set up shop on a forest planet inhabited by "humans" who have widely diverged from the universal norm- they are about a meter tall and covered in green fur. They lack a word for "war" and spend have their time dreaming while awake.
The Terrans are there for the wood and they don't shy away from enslaving the natives- who they refuse to recognize as human. The attitude is at shocking variance with the philosophy expressed in the rest of the books by the pan-human alliance- a kind of Star Trek prime directive of gradual interaction and no coercion- which is brought into focus when a post-alliance space ship shows up with a brand new ansible- a device used to instantaneously between worlds. With instantaneous communication comes new orders from Terra/Earth- lay off the natives. Unfortunately, in a scenario that will be very familiar to fans of 20th century history, the natives are pissed off, and have learned about violence from their Terran captors.
Clocking in at 189 pages, The World for World is Forest is called a novella, but it's a novel- just a short novel- and the anti-colonialism message is nowhere near as controversial than it would have been fifty years ago.
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| Map of the Ukraine, location of the apartment building at the center of Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva |
Published 7/15/20
Good Citizens Need Not Fear (2020)
by Maria Reva
Good Citizens Need Not Fear is a fun collection of inter-linked short stories about the lives of a group of apartment dwellers living in a decrepit building in Ukraine in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR. I listened to the Audiobook which was great- the variety of characters calls out of multiple voices- accents I couldn't approximate with an specificity. Author Maria Reva was born in the Ukraine but raised in Canada, before studying (and living in the US) and Good Citizens Need Not Fear was written in English , not translated from Ukrainian- which is an increasing trend in international literary fiction, but usually taking the form of immigrant authors writing in English, less often in French, German or Spanish.
Reva draws story points from what feels like articles you might have read in magazines like the New York, Harpers, or Atlantic- you've got the Bone Records- which was widely written up as a phenomenon in the western press, the late Soviet era adoption of the western style beauty pageant, the plight of Ukrainian orphans and the general decrepitude of post-Soviet life, which seems like an increasingly deep well for literary fiction, and arguably includes the main work of two of the last five Nobel Prize in Literature Winners- Olga Tokarczuk (2018) and Svetlana Alexievich(2015). It's pretty easy to see where Penguin-Random House was coming from when the decided to give Good Citizens Need Not Fear a fancy Audiobook and press push.
Many reviewers and the publisher have called it "Kafkaesque" but really that just reflects the content of any book written near the end or after the end of the Communist Era- it was all Kafkaesque- still is.
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| The cover of Death in Her Hands: A Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh |
Published 7/16/20
Death in Her Hands: A Novel (2020)
by Ottessa Moshfegh
I'm a big Ottessa Moshfegh fan- I think My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a classic- it anticipated our year long virus quarantine by two years, and I thought it was a classic even before it gained new, post-quarantine relevance. After I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation (for book club, no less) I went back and tackled her back catalog- McGlue, her LGBT meets Melville historical novella about a murderous sailor and Eileen, her first novel. Death in Her Hands is her latest book, a Novel, as the title proclaims, though I believe she had it written before she wrote My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Other reviewers have noted the eerie similarities between the set up for this book and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Olga Tokarczuk. As it turns out, there isn't much more beyond the general set up: The narrator, and elderly woman living alone in the woods, stumbles upon a murder mystery which she endeavors to solve... or does she. They both revolve around a classically unreliable narrator, but considering the thematic similarity between this book and Moshfegh's other books, it seems far more likely a case of parallel inspiration by writers with similar outlooks than any kind of nefarious theft.
It's easy to describe Death in Her Hands: A Novel a literary take on the detective novel, but in that regard her inspiration seems more European- more Patrick Modiano than Paul Auster, to give two examples from the literary-fiction-detective-novel subgenre. Of course, writers of literary fiction are forgiven endings that drift between inconclusive and maddening- not something that writers of genre detective fiction get to do- and Moshfegh takes full advantage of her freedom, with an ending that left me cold.
I deeply regretted listening to the Audiobook- the narrator is an old woman from New Jersey living in what I think is supposed to be New England, so there isn't anything to be gained from accent, and it felt like listening to this book took forever. Nothing about Death in Her Hands changes what I think about Moshfegh as an author, I think her publisher was like, "Let's publish whatever you've got while you figure out your next book." That's fine.
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| Nigerian-American author and Harvard Professor Teju Cole |
Published 7/22/20
Open City (2011)
by Teju Cole
I recommended W.G. Sebald to a friend and she responded by mentioning Teju Cole, the Nigerian-American writer (and Professor of Creative Writing at Harvard University) and his debut (and only) novel, Open City, which was widely compared to W.G. Sebald when it was published in 2011. The comparison is apt, though there is more structure and character development in Open City than in any of Sebald's work. The combination of observational geography and cultural essay is coupled with a genuinely engaging story about the Nigerian-American psychiatrist, Julius who narrates Open City.
I listened to the Audiobook which was great- I guess the print edition eschews punctuation and paragraphs, something I didn't notice listening to the Audiobook, which flows like you are listening to someone speak to you- not a common quality for contemporary literary fiction.
The 2020 Booker Prize longlist was announced yesterday. Hilary Mantel has to be the heavy favorite last year. She has won for her last two books in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, and The Mirror & The Light, the concluding chapter, has been well reviewed. The other major headline is the return of American based writers- largely absent last year.
Diane Cook (USA) The New Wilderness (Oneworld Publications)
Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe) This Mournable Body (Faber & Faber)
Avni Doshi (USA) Burnt Sugar (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)
Gabriel Krauze (UK) Who They Was (4th Estate, HarperCollins)
Colum McCann (Ireland/USA) Apeirogon (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Maaza Mengiste (Ethiopia/USA) The Shadow King (Canongate Books)
Kiley Reid (USA) Such a Fun Age (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
Brandon Taylor (USA) Real Life (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)
Anne Tyler (USA) Redhead by The Side of The Road (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)
Douglas Stuart (Scotland/USA) Shuggie Bain (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
Sophie Ward (UK) Love and Other Thought Experiments (Corsair, Little, Brown)
C Pam Zhang (USA) How Much of These Hills is Gold (Virago, Little, Brown)
So far this year I've read three of the longlisted titles- This Mournable Body, The Shadow King and How Much of These Hills is Gold. Only This Mournable Body struck me as a potential shortlist/winner type title. Dangarembga is the first Zimbabwean woman to have a novel published in English, and This Mournable Body is the end of a trilogy of novels about her protagonist. The Shadow King, about female soldiers fighting the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and How Much of These Hills is Gold, about a pair of Chinese-American orphans struggling to survive in the American old-west, were both interesting, but neither struck me as shortlisters/winners.
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| Apeirogon: A Novel by Colum McCann |
Published 8/12/20
Apeirogon: A Novel (2020)
by Colum McCann
Apeirogon: A Novel is a member of the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist. It's about two men- an Israeli and a Palestinian who have both lost their innocent daughters in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The novel is based on the real life friendship of the two main characters, Bassam Aramin, the Palestinian is a veteran of the infitadah who spent several years in prison, after his release he becomes dedicated to peace. Rami Elhanan is his Israeli counter part, a former tank mechanic and son-in-law of a famous Israeli General who became equally famous for his peace efforts. Both men are controversial in their own communities and McCann does an excellent job of not simply retelling the deaths of the two daughters, but also building context through the use of short chapters of non-fiction about the area- history and geography.
The literary technique deployed by McCann is exemplary- I can see where the combination of subject matter and storytelling skill drew the attention of the Booker Prize committee, but it still seems like a prize WINNING book with this kind of story would be written by a Palestinian (we all know the Booker Prize wouldn't give the award to an Israeli, ha-ha.)
Published 8/17/20
The Red Head by the Side of the Road (2020)by Anne Tyler
This is the first Anne Tyler book I've read- despite the fact that she is one of those rare authors who combines prize-winning literary excellence AND big sales. My ignorance of her bibliography is tied to her genre- literary realism- not my favorite, and her subject matter, white Americans and their problems. The Red Head by the Side of the Road seems like a pretty typical Tyler novel by those standards, about a free-lance tech repair guy living in the Baltimore suburbs, and his difficulty with relationships. The stakes are low- there are no deaths, no family dysfunction, no blow out fights- just a guy, his free-lance tech business and his trouble maintaining a long term relationship. Given Tyler's reputation I wasn't exactly waiting for someone to get by a car or die from a heroin overdose, and she didn't disappoint.
I read The Red Head by the Side of the Road because of the Booker long-list nomination, and it didn't seem like a shortlist pick, and indeed it was not.
Published 8/18/20
Who Killed My Father (2018)
by Edouard Louis
Translated by Loren Stein
Part biography, part polemic, Who Killed My Father was published in 2018 in France, written by Edouard Louis. The New Directions English translation, published in 2019, suggests that fans of My Struggle will be enthralled. Well, I'm a huge fan of My Struggle, and reading that Edouard Louis burst upon the scene with a book about Pierre Bourdieu doesn't turn me off. Also, a friend of mine recommended it during a discussion of the "Me Too" movement, and he is no Parisian intellectual. Really, the recommendation was enough.
The diagnosis of French working class ennui is over a century old- Emile Durkheim was writing about it in 1897 (Suicide: A Study in Sociology), and its also been succesful recently- Nicolas Matiheu covers similar territory in Their Children After Them- which won the Prix Goncourt the same year Who Killed My Father was released. Louis' thesis is that his father, a classically working class, husband, father and violent abuser, is a victim. First, his wife leaves him, then he suffers a terrible accident at work which permanently disables him.
It's a very post-modern attempt to rehabilitate this character- someone who is typically the bad guy in contemporary literature, if not in sociology. The major difference between this and a hundred over non-fiction books on the subject is that Louis forthrightly points his finger at the French state and their inhumane policies towards injured workers like his father. Or something to that effect, but the answer to the question asked in the title is, "The French state, specifically it's inhumane attitude towards long time disability."
Published 8/20/20
Man Tiger (2015)
by Eka Kurniawan
Translated by Labodalih Sembiring
Man Tiger is another interesting novel from Indonesia's most popular author in English translation, Eka Kurniawan. The Verso Publishing product page calls Man Tiger "wry and affecting" but doesn't really delve into the darkness of the plot, about a young man growing up in poverty along the Indonesian coast. When he commits a horrific act of violence (it happens on the first page, so no spoiler) the book becomes an inquiry into the how and the why- similar to a century of underclass lit, from the kitchen sink realists of the British Isles to African American fiction starting in the mid 20th century.
What stuck me is simply the factual description of the way people live in Indonesia- which is always the most interesting part of reading fiction in translation. The very fact that a reader is able to read a work translated into English means that the Author has managed to arouse uncommon interest from a culture that has little interest in other cultures by mimicking a tradition which already resonates with English language readers. Anything too strange or different wouldn't make it into English in the first place.
Published 8/27/20
Machines in the Head(2020)
Machines in the Head(2020)
by Anna Kavan
Anna Kavan is a good example of a writer who is due a revival- which will no doubt be helped by this New York Review of Books Classics edition of her stories- published this February- which is a big step up in visibility for all of her work except Ice, which has a Penguin's Classics edition. Her stories are all over the map thematically, from tales of hospitalization and addiction, to fragments of futuristic dystopia and experiences of World War II. Kavan wasn't big on plot!
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| Author Bernardine Evaristo, her 2019 novel Girl, Woman, Other split the Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood's Handmaids Tale sequel. |
Published 9/1/20
Girl, Woman, Other (2019)
Girl, Woman, Other (2019)
by Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Evaristo's eighth novel, Girl, Woman, Other split the 2019 Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood. I guess, splitting it is better than giving it just to Atwood for a bloody sequel, but I would have preferred they give it to Evaristo alone. There is simply no way the SEQUEL to Handmaid's Tale deserved the Booker Prize. Girl, Woman, Other is, on the other hand, a perfect Booker Prize winner- Evaristo- the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize (!) and the book itself is excellent.
Evaristo weaves the stories of twelve different women, eleven black and one white, moving backwards and forwards in time to show the different experiences of black women of different sexualities and socio-economic status as they attempt to navigate England between the end of World War II and the present day. Evaristo is clearly a writer at the top of her game- you can see her balancing the stories of her characters with the dictates of the international marketplace for literary fiction. I know that balance isn't important in the romantic artistic sense, but as a reader of international literary fiction, I appreciate it on a personal level. It's a major theme of this blog- the balance between art and commerce as expressed by literary fiction.
I listened to the Audiobook- which was outstanding- with all the different voices and accents. After that I bought the American edition (paperback, regrettably- I don't think it got a hard cover release in the US out of the sheer desire to reward the author for her good work.
Published 9/1/20
Real Life(2020)
by Brandon Taylor
This hot literary debut by American author Brandon Taylor nabbed a Booker long list nomination this year. That's impressive for any author, but especially so for an American- American writers have only been eligible for the Booker Prize for a few years now, and after a year or two where the was American dominated, fewer Americans are making it to the long list. The one sentence elevator pitch: A gay African American from Alabama experiences joys and sorrows during his time doing post-graduate work in chemistry at an Iowa university- doesn't do Real Life justice.
Real Life is one of those books where excessive description will inevitably diminsh the pleasures (and challenges) that face the reader- but I thought Taylor's take on his subject was very nuanced, and it shows sides of both the LGBTQ and African American experience that you don't often see in literary fiction. Trust me though, that Real Life is not boring, even if the description doesn't sound adventurous, plenty of adventure lies within. I understand why it would be a long list book and not short list but Brandon Taylor is a writer to watch going forward.
Published 9/1/20
The Book of Eels(2020)
by Patrik Svensson
It's hard to believe that a memoir/non-fiction title about the European Eel, written in Swedish, would arrive in 2020 on American virtual book shelves bearing "#1 International Best-Seller" on its cover. What, exactly is a #1 International Best-Seller I asked myself, but I guess it's besides the point. The fact is, I would LOVE to read a book about Eels.
Eels, as it turns out, are wild creatures- still poorly understood today. For example, no one has ever seen an eel give birth. They won't give birth in captivity, and all reproduction takes place in the Sargasso sea, and no one has ever managed to see them give birth, or find a pregnant eel. The eel has an exquisite pedigree within the deep streams of western culture- Greeks and Romans both were fascinated, and they performed a substantial portion of Roman cuisine. My personal experience with eels prior to reading Book of Eels was of their appearance in history books, as a running gag during trips to England (where people still eat eel) and in sushi restaurants, where eel sushi is common- it's meaty.
The Book of Eels isn't just historical background and contemporary anecdotes about modern eel culture (they are big in Basque country, in Northern Europe, where Scandinavian's have harvested them since time immemorial) but I suppose the real draw is the memoir bit about the relationship between Svensson and his father, a devoted fan of the eel. There is nothing dark or shocking about either part of the book. He doesn't really get into eel slime- which is- just google hagfish slime (hagfish are akin to eels), but I think the idea is to make eels less, not more disgusting in the mind of the reader.
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| Author Abi Dare |
Published 9/2/20
The Girl with the Louding Voice (2020)
by Abi Dare
This debut novel by Nigerian author Abi Dare tells the harrowing tale of Adunni, a 14 year old girl living in rural Nigeria who flees an arranged marriage with a much older man, only to find herself a virtual slave to Big Mama, the wealthy owner of a Lagos area cloth factory. The most remarkable aspect of the prose of the book is that it is written in broken English, complete with non-standard grammar and vocabulary. It made for an excellent Audiobook- hearing the actual VOICE of Adunni made a huge difference for me, really drawing me into the story.
Dare does a decent job of developing her plot, but once Adunni escapes her arranged marriage (really more of a sale) the trajectory of the story of a maid of the underclass escaping her fate becomes predictable. It's obvious that Dare is not herself an escaped Adunni, her biography more resembles a wealthy woman who becomes Adunni's patron to escape the clutches of Big Mama. But you know that Adunni is going to win in the end- it's clear. Honestly, it's the only thing that made the excessive cruelty suffered by Adunni at the hands of Big Mama bearable over the length of a novel.
Published 9/4/20
Tender is the Flesh (2020)
by Agustina Bazterrica
Tender is the Flesh arrives in English translation as an Argentinian sensation, winner of the Clarin Award for Best Novel. Imagining a near-future where the only meat is human flesh, the narrator has adapted to the most dystopian of dystopias, trading his skill in butchering cows to butchering humans for consumption. In fine genre tradition, much of Tender is the Flesh takes places in lengthy procedural's, a walk down the factory floor, an interview with prospective employees, trips to the (human) leather factory and the animal experimentation lab. Marcos is still a man with modern problems, his dad is in the end stages of dementia at an expensive nursing home- Marcos wants to make sure he isn't eaten when he dies.
After the death of his infant son, his wife has lapsed into severe depression, so severe that she is forced to retreat to her parent's home in the country. Marcos is at alone, at loose ends, when he receives a "gift" of a "genetically pure" human female- tongueless- meat humans have them removed close to birth so they can't talk, but still with her limbs- one factory specific detail from Tender is the Flesh is that pregnant meat humans have all their limbs amputated to prevent from killing the fetus inside them.
Horror is piled upon horror, and Tender is the Flesh works equally well as commentary of factory farming, which is immoral by any neutral standard, as well as commentary on international capitalism. Bazterrila develops her plot carefully, and she never abandons the explaining impulse, with new and even more horrific details about the post-eating human society emerging all the way until the last chapter.
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| Cover art for the New York Review of Books Classics edition of Hard Rain Falling. |
Published 9/10/20
Hard Rain Falling(1957)by Don Carpenter
Hard Rain Falling is a "lost classic" of American crime fiction, rescued from out-of-print status by the New York Review of Books Classics edition published in 2009. If you wanted to trace the roots of American crime fiction, you would want to go back at least until to the 1730's, when English painter William Hogarth did his series of a Rake's Progress, dramatizing the decent of an 18th century dandy into degeneracy and sin. The major evolution between then and now is the decoupling of crime fiction from some kind of ending which provides moral uplift- this being the major difference between Hard Rain Falling, written in the mid 1960's, and You Can't Win by Jack Black- published in the 1920's, where the uplifting ending or reform is required.
Jack Levitt is the main protagonist- he shares time with Billy Lancing, a light skinned African American who Levitt befriends, later loves (when they are together in San Quentin) and loses (Lancing is killed in prison.) Levitt is an orphan- the introduction is a brief description of the circumstances of Levitt's birth, and this experience colors his subsequent experience- since he is basically turned loose on the streets of Portland at 14. He commits crimes big and small, and is eventually done in by a kidnapping and statutory rape case out of a county resembling Sonoma County, after he's found in a San Francisco hotel room with the under-age daughter of a local dignitary. It's a classic tale, old as time. His prison story isn't as harrowing as the more naturalistic accounts that would later occur, but it is a realistic depiction of prison life- interesting in the 1960's, when people were just becoming interested.
Published 9/11/20
Blonde Roots (2008)by Bernardine Evaristo
After I finished Bernardine Evaristo's Booker Prize winning Girl, Woman, Other earlier this year, I went and looked at her previous novels. Blonde Roots, an exercise in alternate history where Africans call Europe the "grey continent" and export white slaves to "New Japan" obviously appealed to me, since it combines elements of genre with literary aspiration. One of the critiques I read of Blonde Roots is that it was too enraptured with the details of world building that the story never really takes off, and I guess that would be a judgment of the marketplace as well, since Blonde Roots wasn't a hit. Still, I found it very interesting, and it was a very interesting audiobook, since the characters speak with accents that are essentially, made up.
Doris, the white slave from the "Cabbage coast" is the major narrator, though she splits duties with the orotund prose stylings of her master, Bwana, who addresses the reader in a mirror universe of the white planters of 18th, 19th and 20th century prose fiction. Obviously, the book is written in English and Bwana comes from the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa and it's great capital city of Londolo. It's not clear when Blonde Roots takes place- slavery is very much in place, but crowd scenes often have the tinge of the 20th century- mohawks and political slogans. So yeah, maybe Blonde Roots isn't a stone-cold prize winning classics, but it is a wild Audiobook and worth tracking down simply for the listening experience.
Published 9/16/20
The Discomfort of Evening(1967)
by Mareke Lucas Rijneveld
Everybody loves an auspicious debut, and they don't come more auspicious than The Discomfort of Evening, by first-time Dutch novelist Mareke Lucas Rijneveld. The Discomfort of Evening just won the Booker International Prize, just in time for the American edition to be published. I feel like maybe someone must have tipped them off?
The Discomfort of Evening is a harrowing coming-of-age story about a young woman (just turned 13) living in a contemporary community of Reformed Church members- which seems like a very strict, almost Amish-esque kind of Calvinism. Her father is a dairy farmer (Rijneveld allegedly still works on a dairy farm) and her brother has recently died in a swimming accident, leaving her alone with said parents and her younger sister.
There is nothing totally horrific in The Discomfort of Evening- some of the reviews hinted at really disturbing material, but you know, it's a farming family, so animals die and fathers try to cure their daughters chronic constipation by putting pieces of soap up her butt. Normal farm family stuff, I surmise. I had a feeling, based on the buzz around the British edition, that this a serious contender for the Booker International Prize and now having read it I can see why. The only shortlist title I didn't get to this year was The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Camara.
Published 9/17/20
Herbert (2019)
by Nabarun Bhattacharya
Bengali author Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948-2014) came from a left leaning family that already counted several authors among its members. Nabarun seems like the rebel in the family- an avowed Marxist who has been mostly (entirely?) ignored by English language audiences because none of his books were in translation. That has changed with Herbert, his 1994 classic, which I believe is the first of his novels to get an English translation.
It's an interesting story- about a low-rent psychic who is tapped by an impresario for "bigger things." Increased attention leads to increased woes, as he is quickly targeted by an anti-psychic group for exposure. It is a bracing story, crackling with more life and energy than many other books coming out of India. Highly recommended- more of his books ought to be translated into English.
National Book Award 2020 Longlist for Fiction
Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind
Christopher Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts
Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half
Randall Kenan, If I Had Two Wings
Megha Majumdar, A Burning (Review July 2020)
Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible (Review May 2020)
Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain
Vanessa Veselka, The Great Offshore Grounds
Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown
Booker Prize 2020 Shortlist
Diane Cook - The New Wilderness
Tsitsi Dangarembga - This Mournable Body (Review May 2020)
Avni Doshi - Burnt Sugar
Maaza Mengiste -The Shadow King (Review Mar 2020)
Douglas Stuart - Shuggie Bain
Brandon Taylor - Real Life (Review Sept 2020)
The 2020 National Book Award fiction longlist and Booker Prize shortlist were announced the this week. The biggest headline is the omission of Hilary Mantel, who will be denied the chance at a win for all three books in her Cromwell trilogy. Maybe it's a bit of a hangover for the "split Booker" handed out to Margaret Atwood last year for the sequel to A Handmaid's Tale.
Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind
Christopher Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts
Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half
Randall Kenan, If I Had Two Wings
Megha Majumdar, A Burning (Review July 2020)
Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible (Review May 2020)
Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain
Vanessa Veselka, The Great Offshore Grounds
Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown
Booker Prize 2020 Shortlist
Diane Cook - The New Wilderness
Tsitsi Dangarembga - This Mournable Body (Review May 2020)
Avni Doshi - Burnt Sugar
Maaza Mengiste -The Shadow King (Review Mar 2020)
Douglas Stuart - Shuggie Bain
Brandon Taylor - Real Life (Review Sept 2020)
The 2020 National Book Award fiction longlist and Booker Prize shortlist were announced the this week. The biggest headline is the omission of Hilary Mantel, who will be denied the chance at a win for all three books in her Cromwell trilogy. Maybe it's a bit of a hangover for the "split Booker" handed out to Margaret Atwood last year for the sequel to A Handmaid's Tale.
Scottish writer Douglas Stuart is the only author on both lists- I'm reading Shuggie Bain, about a Glaswegian working class family, right now- and it could be a Booker Prize winner for sure. I'm not as sure at it's National Book Award prospects. I didn't particularly like either A Burning by Megha Majumdar, about an Indian teen who gets wrapped up in a social media induced nightmare or A Children's Bible, Lydia Millet's apocalypse-light take on the end times from the perspective of some upper middle class teens. I thought The Shadow King was good but not great. Both Brandon Taylor and Tsitsi Dangarembga have written books that could win- a Booker win would be timely for Dangarembga, who has faced arrest and persecution over her political activity in Zimbabwe.
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| Author Raven Leilani |
Published 9/22/20
Luster (2020)
by Raven Leilani
Luster is a smart debut novel by American writer Raven Leilani, about a young African-American woman working on the edges of the publishing industry. Edie, her protagonist and the narrator, represents a non-traditional character beyond her race and gender. She is the daughter of Jehovah's Witnesses from upstate New York, so not an urbanite by birth, though Luster takes place in New York City and its environs. Edie didn't graduate college, but she isn't part of the disenfranchised underclass either- the beginning of Luster finds her drifting, barely hanging on to her shitty job and beginning an app inspired relationship with Eric, a forty something white guy with an "open" marriage, and as, it turns out, an adopted African American daughter who is only a decade younger than the young twenties Edie.
Fate throws Edie a series of curve balls: First she loses her job, then she loses her apartment. She ends up moving into the house of her erst-while fling, Eric, when he encounters his wife, a pathologist who works for the VA. There is no doubting Edie's status as an outsider's outsider, but it is equally true that Leilani's literary voice appeals to a broad swath of the audience for literary fiction: She is vulnerable and knowing, witty and emotionally damaged. The story really kicks into gear once Edie is ensconced in Eric's suburban manse. The fact that she ends up mentoring the couple's adopted teenage daughter while fucking her dad ends up being not as big a deal as one might think.
Published 9/28/20
The Disaster Tourist(2020)
by Yun Ko-Eun
I'm always on the look-out for contemporary Korean literature- I think you could probably find popular genre fiction- romance and the such, but I'm interested on the serious side, which is great because Korea is producing a ton of those books, including The Disaster Tourist, about an unhappy employee of a travel agency who finds herself stuck on a quasi-tropical island reliant on "disaster tourism," packaged tours marketed to Koreans seeking proximity to great, and recent, natural disasters. Sometimes it can be hard to mark the line between what we might call literary and genre fiction- even a play by numbers work of romantic fiction might strike an average reader as English language literary fiction as literary simply by virtue of the unusualness of reading about Korean social mores in such detail.
There can be no such mistake with The Disaster Tourist, which has enough fillips of surrealism and absurdity to place it squarely in the category of literary fiction. Ultimately though, the work The Disaster Tourist brought immediately to mind was Platform with Michel Houellebecq: Both books use the tourist industry as a vehicle to make a deeper critique about the negative impact tourism can have on the tourist AND the place they travel to on vacation.
Published 9/28/20
Sisters (2020)
by Daisy Johnson
English author Daisy Johnson made international headlines when her 2018 debut novel Everything Under made it onto the Booker Prize shortlist. Sisters didn't make either list for the 2020 prize, but it did receive an international release, so I was able to pick it up from the library. As one might guess from the title, Sisters is about a pair of sisters, July and September, living with their mother, an author of children's books, in an isolated farm house (inherited by the mother from her dead father.) Johnson has cited Stephen King as one of her favorite authors, and it seems entirely possible that she will make a move for giant commercial success at some point, which would seemingly put her on a similar trajectory as Ian McEwan, who was called Ian Macabre in his earlier, scarier period.
Published 10/6/20
Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time (2020)
by Ben Ehrenreich
I'd imagine that a potential reader knows whether they would be interesting in reading Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time by how they react to the title. If, like me, the desert and the end of time are subjects which frequently occur their thoughts, that potential reader would leap at the opportunity. On the other hand, a potential reader NOT interested in 1) the desert and 2) the end of time wouldn't even get beyond the title.
Ehrenreich is what you might call a freelance alternative-weekly style journalist (even though alternative weeklies are few and far between these days). Desert Notebooks takes the familiar form of New Yorker/Harpers style creative non fiction, combining non fiction research with personal reportage, most of it from the Joshua Tree/Las Vegas axis. I had almost 100% personal congruence with his non-fiction subjects: Mayan mythology, Walter Benjamin, the experience of Native Peoples in North America, the industrial revolution, etc. So I wasn't surprised by much of what I read, but I was impressed by the blend of that material with Enrehreich's own perspective- one similar to my own.
Desert Notebooks was also an above-average audiobook. The creative non-fiction/hybrid format adapts well to the Audiobook format because there is typically a wide variation in material and a single authorial voice.
Published 10/8/20
Shuggie Bain (2020)
by Douglas Stuart
Hotly tipped Shuggie Bain by Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart has made a splash on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK it is a current shortlist pick for the Booker Prize, and yesterday it received the same honor in the USA, where it made the National Book Award: Fiction shortlist. I don't think it a stretch to say that it could be the first dual win for a writer. I believe Stuart, though Scottish, is eligible for the National Book Award because he lives in New York City and had an American publisher.
The setting for this dark bildungsroman is Glasgow in the early 1980's. Not a great time! The coal mines have closed, and almost the entire population is out of work, certainly the mood among the working classes depicted in Shuggie Bain can be described as "extreme existential despair." Although the book is about Shuggie- shown in the first chapter as a newly independent "adult" aged 14 or 15 and then spun back in time, it is his mother, Agnes Bain, who is the star.
Agnes has the misfortune to appear slightly nicer than her surroundings- she speaks the Queen's English, not the Glaswegian dialect, and although her own parents are members of the same working class as the neighbors, Agnes has higher aspirations of some sort. You could say she fancies herself better than her neighbors. In the early chapters, Agnes quickly ditches her predictable, well meaning husband with whom she has two kids for Hugh "Shug" Bain, a flashy, and older, taxi driver with the gloss of sophistication she's been looking for. They have a son in addition to the kids from Agnes' prior marriage (Shug has prior children of his own but they are kept off-stage), the son is called Shuggie.
After a rough couple of years living with her parents, Agnes and Shug get their own place, a decrepit stand-alone shack in a housing project opposite an abandoned heap of coal slag. It's not the 20 story plus apartment nightmare of popular imagination, but it is, as it turns out, equally able to induce despair in the residents, Agnes included. Abandoned by Shug and eventually her two oldest children, Agnes and Shuggie struggle to survive as Agnes succumbs to alcoholism.
Not the kind of plot that screams fun, but it is a compelling ride, and Stuart writes in an international style of English that eschews the slang heavy patois of Irving Welsh (and other Scottish writers of internationally consumed literary fiction) in favor of non-geographically specific vocabulary, word choice and spelling. But make no mistake Shuggie Bain is SCOTTISH AS FUCK and the Booker Prize doesn't seem out of the question here.
Published 10/8/20
Machine Learning: The New AI (2016)
by Ethem Alpaydin
I earn a decent amount of money some years by using Google Ads to attract business as a criminal defense lawyer. I've been doing it for a decade, but only as a supplement. It's never been a focus for me because the type of business you attract from the internet or just advertising generally, involves a lot of sales work and lead sifting. It's as much about telesales as anything else, a major turn-off for me. But I've kept with it intermittently over the years because I think it is pretty obvious that one only needs to advertise on Google to capture a significant portion of the audience of people who want to hire a criminal defense lawyer.
So I'm a dabbler, but it still adds up to tens of thousands over the past decade, so I try to develop my understanding of the principles behind Google Ads, which is hard for me because I'm not a computer guy or a science guy, and I basically dropped economics when it reached statistics in college. The major theoretical concepts behind Google Ads are auction theory and, as of, like, last year, machine learning. Every Google Ads account has a "strategy" to achieve a certain end within the ad program. Historically, much of what Google Ads professionals DID was make the decisions to pursue a specific strategy within Ads. As of like, six months ago, Google is telling people, "Just click this button here and let Machine Learning do it."
Left unexplained is what is machine learning. I turned to this book, part of the MIT Press Essential Learning Series to find out. Here is what I found out. Machine Learning essentially abandons the traditional "goal" of AI: Simulating Human Thought, for a more achievable goal based on using rules extracted by algorithms from vast amounts of data. Alpaydin, who is the author of a widely used textbook that is used by students in the field, takes a lay reader through each of the components of this statement to give a better understandings of the idea of Machine Learning.
The main thing for a layperson to understand based on the whole book is that machine learning requires ALOT of data, the more data the better. Google Ads represents the best possible world for that idea, since it is basically a monopoly for internet search traffic all over the world, and certainly here in Southern California. The second thing to understand is that there is no "intelligence" or guiding that takes place- the machine learning does what it does, and then you measure whether it is effective or not.
Finally, there are the more sophisticated implications of these basic ideas- which largely eluded me, especially because I was listening to the Audiobook.
Published 10/12/20
If I Had Your Face (2020)
by Frances Cha
If I Had Your Face by Korean born, Brooklyn based author Frances Cha is about the intertwined lives of five Korean women living in a converted "office-tel." There are two pairs of roomates: Kyuri and Miho- a cocktail hostess and up and coming artist as well as Ara, a mute hairdresser and Sujin, who is working her way up the same cocktail hostess ladder as Kyuri. Rounding out the cast is Wonna, the lonely wife of a typical salaryman. The characters do not equal space, with Kyuri and Miho- who appears to be the stand-in for the author, occupying most of the narrative, including a riveting flashback from when Miho was studying in New York.
It's hard to make a case for If I Had Your Face as anything but a work of Korean literature, except for the fact that Cha wrote it in English- I'm not even sure if there is a Korean language edition. I enjoyed the Audiobook, Cha, writing in English, integrates a lot of Korean-specific vocabulary in a way that her English language audience can understand. I went back and forth on whether the experience was more like literary fiction or "chick lit" and until the ending I was going to say literary fiction, but the ending put me on the other side of the fence.
Published 10/14/20
The New Wilderness (2020)
by Diane Cook
I think the shocker of the Booker Prize shortlist this year is The New Wilderness, the debut novel by American author Diane Cook. I'm not expecting Cook to win the award, but a Booker Prize shortlist for a debut novel by an American author is a win in and of itself. The set up for The New Wilderness sounds promising, a vaguely described dystopia where a group of twenty Americans have been selected to participate in an experiment in "the Wilderness State," which sounds like it exists in the eastern portion of the Pacific Northwest and Idaho. The Wilderness State is a place where no one, save the group are allowed. They are policed by the Rangers, a surly bunch of government employees tasked with enforcing the draconian rules under which the group are allowed to exist: Leave no trace, don't stay in one place for two long, no outside goods, etc.
At the center of The New Wilderness is Bea, the wife of the organizer of the experiment and her daughter, Agnes. Bea, a succesful interior designer in "the city" is driven to join because Agnes is dying, a victim of the foul city air. The New Wilderness picks up in situ, with Bea burying her prematurely born child at the edge of the campground. From there, Agnes and Bea swap narrating duties back and forth- it's their relationship at the center of the book.
Cook takes her time to get where she is going- there are distinct first, second and third acts with surprising twists and turns. It's clear that Cook has done her research, much of it derived from the reconstruction of pre-contact Native American hunter-gatherer culture.
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| Indian, Tamil language author and intellectual Perumal Murugan |
Published 10/15/20
The Story of a Goat (2019)
by Perumal Murugan
I was surprised by the picks for the National Book Award in Translated Fiction finalists. Pilar Quintana over Fernanda Melchor, Anja Kampmann over Linda Knausgard. Not a commercial hit among them. The Story of a Goat, the first book by controversial Tamil author Perunal Murugan since he was hounded out of Indian literature, did not make the list of finalists, but it was a longlist pick. The Story of a Goat is exactly the type of India literature I'm looking for, not written by an expatriate who graduated from Oxford or a member of the Indian elite. Murugan, 53, is now 'back' and the backstory is as interesting as that of any author on a translated literature shortlist, more akin to something you'd expect from a Nobel Prize winner.
Murugan gives a deft, and welcome tale about a childless, elderly farming couple living in rural Tamil Nadu. One night a ridiculously tall stranger gifts them a goat, and promises an extraordinary provided they care for the goat. Murugan also writes from the perspective of the goat itself, which seems pretty radical, if not unprecedented within the precincts of Indian literary fiction. Most of the domestic Indian literary fiction I've read eschews the techniques of magical realism, which seems like such a natural fit going by the success of Salman Rushdie internationally, but Murugan gets pretty close in The Story of a Goat.
Published 10/30/20
The Telling (2000)
by Ursula Le Guin
The Telling is the last full length novel of the Hainish Cycle. The Cycle also includes two collections of short stories, one published before and the other published after The Telling- both of those compilations are included as volumes in the over-all cycle. The Telling reprises the most familiar narrative structure of the Cycle: An observer, here from Earth just after it joined the Ekumen, travels to a prospect planet and gets involved in the local scene, giving Le Guin to work out some of her anthropological/sociological ideas.
The further the Cycle progressed, the more obvious the comparison to current events. For example, The Word for World is Forest appears to reflect the American experience in Vietnam. The Dispossessed mirrored the struggle between Capitalism and Communism in the 20th century. Here, the reference point is the Cultural Revolution in China, with the protagonist attempting to discover the "real" culture of the visited planet.
Published 10/27/20
Auctions (The MIT Essential Knowledge) (2016)
by Timothy P. Hubbard
I never got into math, science, computers, technology, despite growing up in the Bay Area and going to law school in San Francisco during the first tech boom. I attended law school without a laptop, for example. I've always been prone to motion sickness, and using a computer or video game system for too long made me sick the same way.
BUT it occurs to me that the way technology is going, even if you aren't a tech/computer person, you want to find some way to use technology to ensure your continued existence. I like to say that, when the robots take over, I'd like them to keep me around, for whatever reason. My main interaction with that universe has been my use of Google Ads (formally Adwords) over the past decade. I like, but don't love Adwords. Obviously, it costs money to use it- traditionally criminal defense lawyers do advertise, but more traditionally they derive business from word of mouth, so I've never focused on building up my Google Ads usage, but relied on it as a supplement.
What is interesting about Google Ads is that no one really understands how it works. I mean they do, but the program is constantly evolving, and the features keep changing. One change I've mentioned on this blog is that traditionally, using Google Ads meant setting budgets, bidding on keywords, like, doing actual stuff. Within the past year, Google Ads has added machine learning to make those decisions. Very helpful for someone like me, a professional who doesn't have a "department" but think about all those people who make their livings making those decisions!
What I'm trying to do is learn more about the concepts that underlie Google Ads. The principles, if you will. The first topic was Machine Learning, which I tacked in the corresponding volume from The MIT Essential Knowledge series- which I highly recommend for non tech people who want to understand these subjects. The second subject is the idea of Auctions, which is what Google uses to sell keywords within Google Ads. Traditionally, one set a bid price and adopted a bid strategy for each keyword within Google Ads. Now, the machine learning/AI sets that amount, but it is still the same system.
Auctions are viewed through the analysis of economics- I have an undergraduate minor in the subject, so I understood the basics. Auction theory is closely related to "Game Theory," though as this book anticipates, it has increasingly been viewed as it's own subject. See, for example the winners of the Economic Nobel Prize this year. I imagine what economists love about auction theory is that it involves the efficient distribution of goods, which is a subject near and dear to their hearts. Every auction is a chance to study the efficient distribution of goods.
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| American author Charles Yu |
Published 11/3/20
Interior Chinatown (2020)
by Charles Yu
Interior Chinatown is a National Book Award finalist this year. Author Charles Yu has the kind of resume that sounds like a stereotype for the high-achieving second generation Asian America, undergraduate at Berkeley, where he studied molecular biology, law degree from Columbia University and then stints at Sullivan & Cromwell and Bryan Cave (two of the largest law firms in the world) and then jobs as in-house counsel before he started devoting himself full time to fiction. Interior Chinatown is Yu's second novel and it is easy to see why it might be a National Book Award finalist, combining shimmering modernist technique with a narrative that investigates the inner life of second generation Americans growing up at the margins of society.
Interior Chinatown takes the form of the screenplay- which- I listened to the Audiobook, and while I sensed the interesting format, I couldn't really see it- it does make for a more interesting than average listen. Yu, I think has a shot at the National Book Award. He clearly has more to say than Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) and Lydia Millet (A Children's Bible)- both of which seem a little too on the nose since they revolve around the end of the world. I thought Shuggie Bain was a better book, but it is set in Scotland, and it seems unlikely that an American Book Award would award it to a book that takes place outside of the United States. I haven't been able to locate the last National Book Award Finalist, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw (and published by West Virginia University Press!)
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| Taiwanese-American author K-Ming Ching |
Published 11/4/20
Bestiary (2020)
by K-Ming Ching
This is a capital L capital F debut work of Literary Fiction by Taiwanese-American author K-Ming Ching, about three generations of Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American women, Daughter, Mother and Grandmother. The fiction of Taiwan isn't totally unknown to me- I've read two books by Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi, but I K-Ming Ching is the first Taiwanese-American author I've read.
Despite plentiful usage of plot devices that are firmly in the literary magical realism (Daughter has a tail, for example, Grandmother tells frequent fairy-tales that have dark twists and turns) Ching is closer to the gritty experience of the Hmong immigrants of Souvankham Thommavongsa (How to Pronounce Knife) and light years distant from the more bourgeois experience of second generations immigrant writers from China, Korea and Japan.
One of the distinct aspects of Taiwanese/Taiwanese-American is the dynamic between several discrete ethnicities- an exception in largely homogenous East Asia. First, there are indigenous Taiwanese. Next, there are groups of Chinese who began settling from the mainland during the European Middle Ages. Between the end of the 17th century and the end of the 19th century, Taiwan was part of China proper, so there is a difference between the Chinese settlers who came before and after that divide. In 1895 the Japanese took over, hanging on until the end of World War II. In a final twist, Taiwan became the last and enduring refuge of the mainland Chinese Nationalist Part after they lost the mainland to the Communists. It's this last bit which spurs the emigration of Grandmother to the United States (her family is murdered by arriving Nationalist soldiers after World War II.)
I recommend the Audiobook- which is partially narrated by famous Hollywood actress Sandra Oh (who is Korean-Canadian)- this is the kind of book where you want to hear the accents without having to do them in your head.
Published 11/5/20
The Emissary (2018)
by Yoko Tawada
I randomly checked The Emissary by Yoko Tawada out of the library because I was looking through recently available titles by New Directions. A tip for navigating the e-world of the American library system is that books that are translated into English are less popular than those books written originally in English, so if you are willing to read literature translated into English, you will never be forced to wait long to check out a title. Compare that to the average wait time for popular works of American literary fiction- three months is not an uncommon waiting period for a prize-nominated title or major book club pick.
I'd never heard of Tawada- a Japanese author who decamped to Germany after graduating from university in Japan (with a degree in Russian literature.) She is unusual in that she writes in both Japanes and German, sometimes switching between chapters in the same book. This is a challenge for those seeking to approach her work. New Directions has taken up the challenge, and they were rewarded when Tawada won the inaugural National Book Award for translated fiction a couple years ago. After reading The Emissary, it feels like more of a lifetime achievement award. The Emissary is only 130 pages, and in unquestionably closer to a novella. I gather that Tawada is more a prose stylist than storyteller.
While the set-up to The Emissary is appealing: A future Japan where the environment has rendered all children feeble, leaving the maintenance of society to people over the age of one hundred, there is no story of which to speak. Which is fine- this is capital L literature, after all, but The Emissary wasn't as nearly as fun as I had hoped.
Published 11/11/20
Snow (2020)
by John Banville
by John Banville
Irish author John Banville is a favorite of the 1001 Books editors- they included five of his books in the first edition. None of them were cut for the revised edition in 2008- which I think leaves him close to the top for number of books for a single author in the 1001 Books series. Banville wrote detective fiction for years under a pseudonym- Benjamin Black. Snow is the first work of detective fiction written under his own name.
I was interested in the fact that Banville deigned to publish this work of genre fiction under his own name AND in the fact that the Audiobook I listened to was narrated by my favorite Audiobook narrator, John Lee. Snow gives Lee a chance to bust out his Irish accent, which I'd not heard him use in the past.
The story in Snow is paint-by-the-numbers type stuff, set in rural Ireland in 1957. St. John Strafford is sent from Dublin the investigate the murder (and castration) of a Catholic priest at the country-house of a member of the erst-while Anglo-Irish aristocracy. The suspects line up in predictable order: The redheaded house boy, the risque teenaged daughter, the sullen firstborn son, the wacked out second wife. There was nothing remotely surprising about anything that happened. The writing is, of course, excellent but I thought there was a real lack of interesting ideas.
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| Japanese- Korean author/playwright Yu Miri, author of Tokyo Ueno Station |
Published 11/13/20
Tokyo Ueno Station (2020)
by Yu Miri
Tokyo Ueno Station by Japanese author Yu Miri is another finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature- it's actually the only finalist I can actually find- I checked out the Audiobook(!) edition from the Los Angeles Public Library. Unusual for Japanese literature, Tokyo Ueno Station is written from the perspective of a homeless older man, living in the park opposite the titular station- a kind of Gare du Nord for the Tokyo area, if I understood the book. In expert fashion, Miri toggles between the prosaic reality of homeless life in Tokyo (The local restaurants and neighborhood do-gooders make sure they stay fed, but they periodically get swept out of the park because a member of the royal family wants to come and take a gander) and a retrospective of the life of the narrator, his humble beginnings and even more humble life as a kind of migrant laborer.
His life, of course, is marked by tragedy, namely the untimely death of his college-age son- who he never got to see because he worked so far away from home. In my experience, Japanese literature is a thoroughly bourgeois affair- more so than in the West, where the ties between native aristocrats and western modes of literature is stronger. In Japan, the elites were more concerned with traditional Japanese modes of artistic expression, and it was left to the rising bourgeois to champion western styles of art, particularly the novel and film.
To be fair, there aren't many books written about the homeless in any language, or films. I recommend the Audiobook- under four hours and makes for an interesting listen that doesn't make you feel like you are missing out on reading the text of the actual book.
Published 11/24/20
The Pale King (2011) by
David Foster Wallace
There are two pop-culture/artistic suicides that have impacted me memorably- the first is the death of Kurt Cobain- I was a senior in high school, driving through the rain en route to a weekend in Mendocino with my girlfriend- somewhere in Marin or Sonoma- when I heard the news on the radio. The second was David Foster Wallace. He killed himself in September of 2008. I was living in San Diego. Hearing the news took my breath away- I had figured Wallace as THE epochal author. He was one of the first writers of contemporary writers of American literary fiction I discovered on my own, and I'm still struck by how closely his parenetical writing style mirrors my own. The fact that he struggled with depression, and ultimately lost the struggle, is as haunting an example of the hollowness of artistic success as I can imagine.
The Pale King- published posthumously and assembled by this editor with the help of Foster's widow, is by all accounts a bit of a mess, but it is a highly thought out mess, and frankly, it is all we have left. The Pale King mostly takes places in and around and IRS tax processing facility in downstate Illinois- outside Peoria. Most of the book describes the lives of several employees in excruciating, Foster Wallace-esque detail, interspersed before and after a lengthy portion which purports to be by Foster Wallace himself- based on his year working at said tax facility.
Honestly, there wasn't enough tax stuff- I thought there would be A LOT more tax stuff. Instead, The Pale King is heavy on childhood recollections, including a lengthy monologue by a female tax employee at the end of the book that is almost cringey, post- me-too era.
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