The Last Days of New Paris (1998) by China Miéville

 Audiobook Review

The Last Days of New Paris (1998)

by China Miéville

  I'm a big fan of science-fiction, less so of fantasy.  Sure, when I was a lad I played by fair share of Dungeons and Dragons and read all the fantasy classics.  As an adult I enjoyed the Game of Thrones television series, but beyond that, regular fantasy just seems so tedious with its magical creatures that recreate the cultural preoccupations of whichever author is behind the keyboard.  I am, however, intrigued by the writers of the "New Weird" movement a genre that lands somewhere in between fantasy, science fiction and literary fiction.

  Chief among these is English author China Miéville.  The Last Days of New Paris is an alternate-history/fantasy novella about a group of surrealists resistance fighters battling Nazi's and otherworldly demons conjured up by a detonation of an "S-Bomb."  The thin plot, which involves running around a ruined Paris and fighting Nazi's who are seeking to capture control of the free-ranging apparitions wandering around post-war Paris with the help of Demons they've conjured from hell, is also an opportunity for Miéville to write about the history of the surrealist movement and animate some of those characters.

  I found it all pretty incoherent as an Audiobook, and I couldn't even make it through the Appendix, where Miéville pedantically explains all the surrealist references among his characters and his monsters- which often take their shape from the psyche of their surroundings(!?!).   The thing about fantasy is that you always know where it's going to end up- there is going to be some kind of a quest and the protagonist either does the thing or fails heroically.  It's like, people never sit down for a meal and a chat in fantasy novels.  

The Known World (2003) by Edward P. Jones

 Book Review

The Known World (2003)

by Edward P. Jones

  Pulitzer Prize winner The Known World by Edward P. Jones was the highest ranked novel on the the recent Best Books of the 21st century book that I hadn't read(#4).  I can't believe that editor Susan Straight didn't include it in her Virginia chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, perhaps because she picked one of Jones' other titles for the Washington DC chapter.   Having now read The Known World, I found the exclusion baffling and I can't explain it except as an example of the firm one author/one book rule that seems to be operative within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Similarly, editor Straight left off Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, which is set in South Carolina and also seems to be a victim of the one author/one title.

  Surely the one novel in American literature that covers the experience of African American slave OWNERS in the upper south is worth including in a project that shows the different experiences of Americans?  Looking into Edward P. Jones and his legacy, I understand how I missed it the first time around- Jones has the lowest of low literary profiles and never wrote a second novel.  Having read The Known World, I can understand why.  If you totally nail such a huge subject and everyone agrees that you nailed it and it is the best book on the subject, why bother trying to top it?

Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) by Jacqueline Woodson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Brown Girl Dreaming (2014)

by Jacqueline Woodson

Greenville, South Carolina

South Carolina: 3/13

   South Carolina is a geographically distinct state- the southern equivalent of Rhode Island on a bigger scale.  If you look at the map you can see that unlike Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, South Carolina is cut off to the point where it basically looks like a city-state surrounding Charleston.  It's not hard to imagine some alternative history where South Carolina extends across what became Northern Georgia, but the Spanish and French presence in the South precluded expansionism early on, and then Georgia took that part of the US for itself. 

   Brown Girl Dreaming is one of only four South Carolina titles that takes place outside of the Charleston/low country area- Greenville is located in the northwest corner of the state and I had to look up its Wikipedia page to find out that it has a population of 1.5 million.   Brown Girl Dreaming was another easy target- a four hour long Audiobook which is "written in verse"- not poetry, exactly, but not prose- really a succession of very short chapters telling the story of the eponymous protagonist/narrator, the daughter of a single mom from Greenville, who is herself the child of Jehovah's Witnesses. Mom doesn't observe the faith, but the kids do, particularly after Mom decamps for New York City.  Her children eventually follow her up there, and this is another example of a 1,001 Novels title that could be placed on more than one location on the map.  Here, I thought the perspective of a Jehovah's Witness was interesting and I believe the first book which touched on that particular experience but this book didn't add much to my understanding of South Carolina or Greenville- basically all the narrator does in Greenville is hang out with her grandparents and go door to door with her fellow Jehovah's Witnesses. 

   Like many novels written from the perspective of pre-adolescent children, there is, simply put, a limit to how interesting a child under the age of ten can be in the pages of a book- and it's an even sharper limit if the author adheres to anything close to realism.

Jim the Boy (2000) by Tony Earley

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Jim the Boy (2000)

by Tony Earley

Rutherfordton, North Carolina

North Carolina: 8/20

   Jim the Boy  was an easy mark- under 200 pages, written from the perspective of a prepubescent boy growing up in the 1930's.  Earley was named one of Granta's Top 30 Writers Under 30 at one point but the only novels he ever published was this book and a sequel published in 2008.  As with all of the authors I hadn't heard of before the 1001 Novels project, I checked out his New York Times coverage and found a really detailed review for this book and a somewhat less detailed review for the sequel and then a review for his most recent collection of short stories, published in 2014.  I guess it's not exactly a disappearing act but you'd hardly call him a household name.

  The most distinct aspect of Jim the Boy is the author's rejection of complexity that is inherent in choosing a 9/10 year old boy as the narrator and protagonist.  Like many of the protagonists and a few of the narrators, Jim isn't a complicated fellow.  This isn't a trauma narrative, but the opposite, a non-trauma narrative where the emotional peak is a back-alley confrontation in a small North Carolina town where Jim and a buddy are threatened by local streets toughs, and rescued by a friendly African-American.   In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of another book within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project that is so gosh darned wholesome. 

  The New York Times critic made a big deal out of the style back in 2000, which makes this book sound like a purposeful rebuttal to the frenzied Y2k era, but a quarter century later we have gotten no less frenzied.

Indigo Girl(2017) by Natasha Boyd

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Indigo Girl (2017)

by Natasha Boyd

West Ashley, Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 2/13

   I'm running two or three states ahead of reading physical books, so I'm listening to Audiobooks set in South Carolina and reading books set in Virginia.  That figures to be the major dynamic going forward since I'm almost positive I will close out all the Audiobooks from this chapter months before I finish reading the rest.   I liked Indigo Girl because it is set in the Colonial/Pre-Revolutionary period- when I started the 1,001 Novels project it was clear in New England that the editor favored contemporary stories over historical stories, and I accept that, but all things being equal, say a plot that is a bildungsroman about a young woman in a rural area of America, I'd rather read about the past than the present. 

  The protagonist of Indigo Girl is the oldest daughter of a British Naval Officer who is sent to fight the Spanish in the Caribbean. Daughter endeavors to save the family plantation by growing indigo, which has never been tried before in the Carolinas.  This character is a historical person- she ended up marrying Charles Pickney who was the father of one of the signers of Declaration of Independence.  The author added an afterword where she noted how she used historical artifacts- letters by the real version of her character- to give voice to her story. 

Indigo Girl was also interesting to me because it was set in the period before the slave rebellion's in Haiti solidified white opinion against a more genteel form of slavery.  One of the plot points in this book revolves around the fact that in the timeline of the story, South Carolina has recently made it a crime to teach slaves to write, though they did not make it a crime to teach a slave how to read, a fine point picked up on by the heroine and her husband to be, lawyer Charles Pickney. 

  It's not literary fiction, but as historical fiction goes it is well suited for its depiction of early Colonial Charleston.