2024 Books: January to May

 2024 Books: January to June

Published 1/5/24

Prophet Song (2023)

by Paul Lynch

   Every year there are a few Booker Prize nominees who see their US publication delayed until after the announcement of the longlist, shortlist or winner.  It's a frank admission that a Booker nomination is the best thing a writer of fiction from outside the United States can have to appeal to an American audience.  I would guess its the difference between logging low hundreds of sales vs thousands, based on my experience with independent music.

   My money this year was on The Bee Sting, by another Irish author, but of course, I couldn't read Prophet Song without buying a UK copy, so I couldn't fairly judge.   Prophet Song is a work of political fiction with a lowercase "p" about a near-future Ireland making a slouching decent into EU style bureaucratic fascism.  The narrator is  Eilish Stack, a health care industry analyst married to an Irish trade-union official- a quasi-governmental role in normal times.  Her husband is disappeared in the opening chapters, leaving the mother-of-four to face the encroaching future alone. 

   What Prophet Song mostly reminded me of were the opening sequences of Children of Men, where Clive Owen is struggling with day-to-day life amidst the collapse of a tottering regime.  It's clear to see the appeal of Prophet Song to the Booker panel- this book is both political with a small p- the best kind of political in literary fiction AND a big P in its depiction of a nascent fascist state.  It is both domestic- a single mother of four narrator/protagonist AND highly literary in style- with paragraphs that go one for pages at a time. In other words, it is the perfect Booker winner and another example of how the expansion of eligibility- Irish books were first included in 2018 and Americans and other non-Commonwealth authors published in the UK became eligible in 2014- has impacted the nominees and winners.

   Most of what I enjoyed in Prophet Song were here face-to-face interactions with the people working for this new, fascist government- referred to as "the party" throughout.  It reminded me of my own interactions with government officials within the criminal justice system.  I've often thought that it would be easy enough for many of these people to enforce injustice as so-called justice, and this book seems to be exactly about that observation.  

   

Published 1/9/24

The English Understand Wool (2022)

by Helen DeWitt

   The English Understand Wool is a novella published in 2022 by New Directions as part of their Storybooks project- which is designed to feature shorter novellas that are written with the idea that they can be read in a single sitting.   Success! This short book about a stunning 17 year old girl is, indeed, as the promotional materials claim: a heist story, an ethica; treatise, a send-up of media culture, a defense of education and an indelibly memorable character portrait.  I agree with all of that language.  I simply could not put The English Understand Wool  down and I did read it at one go.  It is one of those books that will lose power if you know the plot going in, so it's best just to say, read it- it shouldn't take you more than an hour back to front...

Published 1/9/24

Personal Observations on the Conduct of the Modoc War (1874?)

by William Henry Boyle

Edited by Richard H. Dillon from the original manuscript in the Bancroft Library

300 Copies Printed by the Westernlore Press, Los Angeles, CA.

  It's true I don't write fiction, but I think about the writing of fiction plenty.  I think about what I would write IF I wrote fiction.  One conclusion is that any fiction I write would not proceed from the start point of a bildungsroman/roman a clef/family saga perspective.  I'm a cis white Jewish guy from an upper middle class family in the Bay Area and I can tell you that no one in the publishing world needs another book like that.   I would say the other path is a work of historical fiction with literary fiction ambitions.  That's an approach that allows the author to write characters of different race, class and economic background without touching on the authenticity concerns that dog any attempt at a bildungsroman/roman a clef type book, where the identity of the author is assumed to match the characteristics of the protagonist. 

   I think the idea with historical/literary fiction is to identify an episode- a set of historical facts that can be laid down.  Second would be to develop your characters, including a solid understanding of their background- these are like, things I would write down before I actually write any prose.  Finally I'd want to have the idea of the physical locations involved- like separately written down.   With those three pieces in hand, I would then attempt the first draft, revise, etc.   I'd want to write a very short story first but the idea is always towards the working of a novel of about 200-300 pages (250-300 words a page). 

  Anyway- I've always been interested in the Indian Wars from far Northern California because 1) they aren't well understood 2) they happened near the end of the Indian War period and near the geographic end of the North American continent and 3) the indians won some big battles.

   I think the Modoc War is the best bet for a couple reasons.  Captain Jack, leader of the rebellious Modoc band of 300 odd people, managed to kill about 100 US soldiers with something like 30 fighting men.  I think there is an interesting backstory- that the Modoc were already fighting to preserve their way of life from other indians before the arrival of the whites and an interesting afterstory, the surviving Modocs were relocated from the California/Oregon border to Oklahoma after their leaders were hung.   I think the idea would be to take a slightly anachronistic approach and include a journalist or scholar character who fully empathizes  with the Modocs while serving with the whites.  Also I think including a chapter showing inter-Native conflict before the arrival of the whites would be useful and interesting.   

  I'm interested in Native characters who are not passive victims of fate- the idea of a Captain Jack figure as the ultimate American anti-hero: murdering and mutilating the agents of the American government and any of its citizens.  Playing up, rather than running away from, the torture and mutilation of the dead, America, after all, loves torture porn and mutilation. 

   The one scene that left me thinking in this particular account is the murder of about thirty American soldiers who were waiting to set up a Howitzer gun with which to attack Captain Jack and his band.  Boyle describes finding thirty dead men in an area less than one hundred square feet- the victims of a surprise attack by Captain Jack.   They were essentially shot like fish in a barrel.   Haunting. 

Published 1/10/24

Eastbound (2023)

by Maylis de Kerangel

Translated by Jessica Moore

  I checked out this new book by French author Maylis de Kerangel because of the positive reviews I read online in some end of the year book round-ups.   It's a short book about an encounter between a French woman fleeing a failed romance and a Russian conscript heading east on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The prose as translated by Jessica Moore is sharp and Kerangel accomplishes much with few brushstrokes, drawing the reader in to the mini drama that takes place entirely on a train.

Published 1/11/24

Yellowface (2023)

by R.F. Kuang

   I love fiction about the writing of fiction, particularly the business side of writing fiction.  The ideology of the romantic artist-creator is so entrenched in the western culture of creativity that finding fiction that talks about the publishing process is rare, the major exception being roman a clef type books written by young women who have worked in said industry.  Yellowface, then, is a rare treat- a wickedly funny satire(?) about the writing and publishing of literary fiction.

    At the start of the book we are introduced to June Hayward, a recent Yale graduate struggling to make it as a writer.  She's put out one book of YA fiction and... it wasn't a hit.  Her only tie to literary success is her university classmate and frenemy Athena Liu, an R.F. Kuang type (both author and character wrote their first novels while undergraduates) and the opening chapters recounts their troubled "friendship."  Everything take a turn when Athena, giddy about the recent optioning of her first novel for a prestige television/film adaptation, chokes to death on pancakes inside her apartment, with June as the only witness.  June doesn't struggle that hard with her decision to swipe Liu's just completed manuscript, a work of historical fiction about the Chinese Labor Corps during World War I.   

   June submits the manuscript as her own, and we are off from there, as the book is picked up  and June is left to deal with the consequences of her actions.  Kuang is often wickedly funny- I found myself laughing out loud, but I also found myself cognizant of the fact that Kuang's publishing material feels more like what her audience expects than what actually occurs.  But the book is a huge hit, and it's good, so that's really all one needs to observe.

Published 1/16/24

A Man With Two Faces (2023)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

   I was late to The Sympathizer (2015), which was Nguyen's debut novel AND the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner.  I didn't actually read it until 2021, just after its sequel, The Committed, was released.  Unsurprisingly I loved The Sympathizer- which is like, the perfect work of literary fiction- combining an interesting point of view (Vietnamese immigrants in Southern California) with an interesting plot (immigrant sent to spy on anti-Vietnamese government activists) and plenty of action, set pieces and dynamic plot mechanics.  You put all those elements together and you have a winner!

  Similarly with the The Committed, which is just as good as The Sympathizer, which is rare/unheard of for a sequel in the world of literary fiction.  But what, one might reasonably ask, does Viet Thanh Nguyen REALLY think about the immigrant experience in America?  A Man With Two Faces is his answer to that question- containing the kinds of truths that only Pulitzer Prize/MacArthur Genius grant winning types get to share over the platform of a major publishing house.   Unfortunately, Nguyen's publicity campaign was derailed by his pre and post 10/7 support of the Palestinian people.  As a supporter of Israel and a Jew, I have to say I didn't find anything offense in his comments, revolving around the general issues with bombing children and abject treatment of the non-Hamas Palestinian people. I mean, don't we all kinda feel that way?  Not, I guess, the people who book literary appearances. 

  A Man With Two Faces is what you call real talk- Nguyen coming to terms with his complicated relationship with his immigrant parents and the white supremacy he believes lurks in the heart of the American Dream.  Nguyen is only a few years older than me and he also grew up in the Bay Area, which is not considered to be a racist part of the US, but, as Nguyen and other writers have shown, can be just as racist as the rest of the US and often in shockingly casual fashion. 

   I found A Man With Two Faces to be a thought-provoking read, certainly not as fun as his two novels, but a great book for those grappling with the role or racism in American society.

Published 1/22/24

Gunflower (2023)

by Laura Jean McKay

   Australian author Laura Jean McKay won the Arthur C. Clarke award for her debut novel, The Animals in That Country in 2021. That win caught my eye, and I promptly checked out a copy from the library.  It was good, not great, but interesting enough to merit attention to the author going forward.  Late last year she published her follow-up, an entirely predictable book of short-stories compiled from her previous 20 years of writing.  Some of the stories echo the themes of The Animals in That Country, an early story delves into the family dynamics of a cat ranch (Yes, a cat ranch.)  Other subjects are prosaic/banal- like the lengthy story told from the perspective of supermarket clerk who makes a stand for the rights of smokers to take their hourly smoke break.   The Guardian called this collection virtuosic but the New York Times didn't even mention it.  It did get a US release back in October but with essentially no press- the Amazon product page only has seven reviews and Goodreads has 70 ratings, basically the equivalent of many books that haven't been published. 

    Published 1/22/24

The Modocs and Their War (1959)

by Keith A. Murray

University of Oklahoma Press

Civilization of the American Indian Series #52

   American Indian history has been pretty risible until very recently.  The Civilization of the American Indian Series from the University of Oklahoma Press represents the longest running effort in this genre, but most of the books, while well meaning, are dated in terms of attitudes and approaches to Native American history.  This book is pretty good from a 1950's perspective, in that it isn't openly racist, but it still reads as one sided.  All the sources are white people who were fighting the Modocs or contemporaneous accounts written by white journalists.  There is a brief mention of the ghost dance phenomenon but the Native characters are poorly drawn and one dimensional.  Captain Jack, the leader of the band of Modocs who gave the US Army their greatest beating in an Indian War- and killed a US general to boot, is portrayed as a vacillating coward.  Considering the Captain Jack Modocs were actually removed to Oklahoma, you would think that Murray could have talked to someone there and gotten a different perspective. 

   There's also no context about the Native environment prior to the arrival of the whites, which, to me, anyway, seems relevant to describing the Modoc experience.  But, if you are just looking for dates, names and a general description of how this war went down, Murray's book is an inoffensive starting point.

Published 1/24/24

Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (1987)

by Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. 

Harvard University Press

   I go to Boston twice a year because my partner is from there and she fucking loves it.  I don't like it as much as she does but there is plenty to appreciate.  First off, the history- which- even in the shittiest, nothing small town in New England typically extends back to before the American Revolution.  There's Boston itself, which is a world-class city.  One of the things I've found interesting about the city is that Boston is like this shining crown jewel and then you go 30 minutes out of town and there are these super sad industrial suburbs- Lowell, Lawrence that are like caricatures of depressed-working-class towns.  What happened, exactly?  

  Fortunately I found this book on the shelf at the Boston Library and was able to check it out from the LAPL.  Voila, all my questions answered.  It turns out that the first wave of industrial capitalism in New England was started by a small group of interlinked family members who then relocated to Boston and turned their fortunes to improving the civic institutions that bore their names.  The lives of the people living in the towns they founded to put their factories- not so much.  Not at all, in fact.  One of the major points that Dalzell makes is that these guys (they were all men) were interested in community welfare but had a narrow definition of "their" community.  At its greatest, that encompassed everyone in Boston before the Irish showed up.  

   A later chapter on political involvement shows how narrow their appeal was- with men from the Lawrence family losing elections in Lawrence, the city they founded for their textile factories.  Dalzell points out that this was nothing close to what one would consider a "modern" industrial operation even though they were pioneers in the use of the corporate form to limit liability among owners. Most notably these textile factories didn't retain much capital instead handing out large dividends rather than reinvesting in the business.

Published 2/5/24

North Woods (2023)

by Daniel Mason

1,001 Novels: Revised

  Like the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die project, I believe the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is best conceived as a project that is meant to be revised.  In the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die, the first revision (2008) was to go back and introduce additional diversity via increased representation of women authors, authors from the global south and generally reducing the number of picks for those authors with more than one book.

  So far, I haven't come across any duplicated authors in the 1,001 Novels project.  Editor Susan Straight is clearly on top of representation in a way the original editors of the 1,001 Books project were not.  Thus, I think the primary concern in revising the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is simply to make it better.  That brings me to North Woods, a novel about a patch of woods in Western Massachussets that made several year end best lists- I finally checked out the Audiobook after it made the New York Times books of the year list.  The fact that this is a book about a piece of land in the United States makes it particularly relevant for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America since it is an approach not embraced by any of the books I've read thus far.

    The book was critically acclaimed, and I enjoyed the Audiobook, though the episodic approach- switching from character to character over the course of hundreds of years, necessarily made it a choppy listening experience.  I'm sure that this would be a book to select for any revision of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project... specifically, one of the books from the Massachussets portion of the list, which looks like this:

1)Moby Dick by Herman Melville

2)The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

3)The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn

4)The Wedding by Dorothy West

5)The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat

6)Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

7)Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

8)Promised Land by Robert Parker

9)The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

10)We Love You Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge

11)White Ivy by Susie Yang

12)Unraveling by Elizabeth Graver

13)Leaving Pico by Frank X. Gaspar

14)Born Slippy  by Tom Lutz 

15) Beyond That the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash

16)Union Dues by John Sayles

17) Faith by Jennifer Haigh

18)April Morning by Howard Fast

19)An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England(2007) by Brock Clarke

20)Caucasia by Danny Senza

21)Vida by Marge Piercy

22)Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

23)The Wishing Hill by Holly Robinson

24)Father of the Rain by Lily King

25)The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin

26)The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

27)Don't Ask me Where I'm From by Jennifer de Leon

28)Meeting Rozzy Halfway by Caroline Leavitt

29)The Giant's House by Elizabeth McKracken

30) Illumination Night by Alice Hoffman

  My natural inclination is to just pull one of the books out of the bottom three- I think Meeting Rozzy Halfway  by Caroline Leavitt makes sense, but that also moves the place for that slot from Boston to the west of Massachussets.  Not much of an issue in this case, but I'd be concerned about dropping a more geographically underrepresented region of the country.

Published 2/6/24

Audiobook Review

The Orchard Keeper (1966)

by Cormac McCarthy

    

  This was Cormac McCarthy's first novel and if you don't think it sounds like Faulkner then you have not read Faulkner.  I'm not a huge fan of Faulkner but I'm generally appreciative of his influence on American literature.  He is, first and foremost, a literary modernist in that his books are difficult to understand in terms of the narrative/temporal techniques he deploys.  He is also the first and arguably only great modernist of the American South, which is not a region that generated a ton of modernist artists.  Literary modernism represents a kind of apex of the divide between an artist and their prospective audience. If you want to find readers of difficult modernist authors in 2024, you are going to have to go to an American university- and not an undergraduate class, but the graduate school, to find people who are "into" any kind of 20th century modernist author. 

 On the other hand, these writers have had a huge influence on the audience of future authors of literary fiction.  In fact, it is fair to say that "serious" literary fiction in 20th century America came to be synonymous with the deployment of these complicated narrative techniques to a greater or lesser degree. However, in the terms that this blog uses, The Orchard Keeper was clearly not a hit.  It was an interesting first novel by a promising young writer, but there is nothing necessarily in this book to indicate that the author would go on to write his Western Trilogy, The Road and No Country For Old Men twenty years later.  If you've read those books, you know that he abandoned complicated literary modernism in favor of a spare brand of prose that is more like literary minimalism.   I don't think he gets enough credit for that shift.

   That doesn't help The Orchard Keeper, which I found just as incomprehensible as any of Faulkner's books.  Certainly not a good pick for an Audiobook since the modernist technique practically requires interlineation on a page of text to keep track of the plot.  Like, when I read the Wikipedia description to prepare for this post I recognized what had happened but wouldn't have been able to tell you that as it was going on.

  On the other hand, if you have some kind of interest in the prose style of Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper is invaluable because it is the point of departure.  The reader can already pick up his trick of using simile and metaphor to elevate the description of a bleeding hillbilly to something approaching biblical reverence. 

       While there are some feints at the later McCarthy heart of darkness, The Orchard Keeper is a pretty light hearted affair.   There's no sense of the mythical in The Orchard Keeper and it weakens the impact of the prose.  Also the story is confused because of the literary technique- which is clearly something he figure out later in this career.

Published 2/7/24 

Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition 

(Southwestern Writers Collection Series, 

Wittliff Collections at Texas State University)(2013)

John Sepich and Edwin T. Arnold

   Here are my highlighted quotes from this book:

Meanwhile, Blood Meridian‘s readership continued to grow, as did academic interest in the book and its author. Harold Bloom’s proclamation in 2000 that Blood Meridian was “the authentic American apocalyptic novel” and that “Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner” was the imprimatur that finally ushered the book into the realm of the modern classics.

Two possible influences on Outer Dark, apart from the obvious spirit of Flannery O’Connor, are Eudora Welty’s Robber Bridegroom (1946) and Madison Jones’s Forest of the Night (1960).

Bartlett writes of the New Almaden cinnabar mine located thirteen miles from the bay of San Francisco.

  Mostly what I harvested from Notes on Blood Meridian is a better idea of the primary sources that McCarthy likely used in preparing to write this book.  One of the issues that McCarthy clearly faced was the potential demystification of his work.  All artists face a potential "disenchantment" process that is linked directly to the production, evaluation and consumption of art-products by different audiences.   The classic posture of this art production dilemma is the artist who rails at false critics and later lives to regret it when there are no critics, not even false ones, describing their art.

  McCarthy managed to side step this problem by never talking to anyone about his work.  But that doesn't mean the work remained undone.  I was able to locate a host of primary sources- most related to the violence between American settlers and Native Americans in the American west and southwest in the mid to late 19th century.  Blood Meridian is very much about this world- the American southwest of the 1850's/60s/70s and McCarthy appears to have approached it much as a historian would. He pulled many ideas and minute details from the historical sources and then accreting is own artistic inspiration.

   I found many of these inspirational titles available in the LAPL and checked out a handful, but unfortunately they are almost all uniformly long and hard to read, so not sure how far that will go, but I'm very interested in the later history of the wars between the American Government and Native American tribes in the west in the 1860's and 70's.

Published 2/14/24

Audiobook Review

The Other Name (2019)

by Jon Fosse

  I guess one of the advantages to awarding the Nobel Prize is you can give it to your homeboys- like how Norwegian author/playwright Jon Fosse, who won in 2023.  Fosse is just about as un-hip a choice for the Nobel as you could possibly imagine.  True, his prose tends to be stream-of-consciousness style and his plots convoluted BUT he also writes incessantly about God and about characters who are broken and isolated from the world.

  Like many(few?), his Nobel win last year was a cue to actually tackle some of his books, so I started with the Audiobook of The Other Name which are parts I and II of his six volume Septology.  Septology is about a pair of Norwegian painters- both named Asle. One is an alcoholic drinking himself to death, the other is newly-ish sober and a convert to Catholicism.  Excited yet?

 I was glad to be tackling the Audiobook instead of the book- book- seems like the actual book would have been intolerable. 

Published 2/26/24

Cahokia Jazz (2024)

by Francis Spufford

   I was so excited when I read about this book for the first time: An alt history Native American 1920's detective noir written by English author of note Francis Spufford.  It is, one might say, up my alley, since the abandoned Native American city of Cahokia and possible connections to the Meso-American civilization of the Aztecs et al was a subject of interest to me long before I heard about Cahokia Jazz. When I read the Guardian review I had high hopes that this would be a smash hit, but thus far the American response has been tepid.  The New York Times review suggested that readers don't have time for the "world building" aspect of the book and I've noticed a tone in casual reviews on Amazon and Goodreads that American readers are inherently uncomfortable with the idea that there exists some version of reality where elements of the Native American community held their own against the colonial west. 

  I've noticed that attitude for years- since I clerked at California Indian Legal Services when I was in law school 25 years ago.  Suggest to a contemporary American- even those who consider themselves progressive on matters of social justice- that America should "give back" stolen land to Native American tribes and you will elicit wide eyed looks of amazement.   I found the world-building elements of Cahokia Jazz intoxicating, and I was frankly offended by the New York Times reviewer who suggested that the full backstory behind this alternate world was incoherent and impossible to explain.

   In fact, Spufford does a great job with brief interstitial historical documents that chart the path of the independent Catholic-Native American state of Cahokia from its conversion to Catholicism through its intervention in the American Civil War and ultimate accession to the Union.  Spufford provides an alternate map of the United States- one where the Mormons are still independent, the Navaho have their own state,   England held on to more of the Pacific Northwest, and Russia kept Alaska.  It's really not that complicated if you have a rudimentary understanding of ACTUAL US history.  If on the other hand, you don't know the ACTUAL story of US history Cahokia Jazz is likely to bewilder you as much as it did the New York Times reviewer. 

  Hopefully the story will get picked up by a premium TV streamer- easy to see a big budget version on Apple TV, HBO or Amazon.  It's also easy to see said version going very wrong, since period detective films/tv shows are tough to get right. 

Published 2/29/24

Audiobook Review

You Dreamed of Empire (2024)

by Alvaro Enrigue

   I convinced my book club to read this book this month (March 2024)- I was very excited when I read the description- which is- a compression of the meeting between Conquistador Cortes and Montezuma, the Aztec emperor.   This is a specific subject I often think about- a "Roman Empire" for me, to use the current meme.   What, exactly, happened that allowed the Aztec empire to be defeated by what can only be described as a rag-tag bunch of adventurers, albeit ones with firearms, cannon and horses- which play a central role in this book (the horses), specifically, Enrigue proposes that Montezuma wanted to get his hands on the horses also that he was high on mushrooms the whole time and had essentially become obsessed with the Aztec religion, to the detriment of his empire.

   I thought the whole book was very good- great even- and I agree with reviewers who said that Enigue is a major talent.  Can't wait to see what he does next, and I'm going to read the hardback in addition to listening to the Audiobook- which wasn't great, even though the book was.  For some reason they hired an Audiobook narrator who spoke in Spanish accented English, which seemed kind of dumb to me.  If anything he should have had an Aztec or Mayan accent, based on the ethnicity of the narrators. 

  I would call You Dreamed of Empire a must for readers of fiction in translation and maybe one of the best books of the year. Certainly the best book so far this year.  Don't listen to the Audiobook though, read the book.

Published 3/1/24

Audiobook Review

Golden Hill (2016)

by Francis Spufford

  Fair to say I've been sleeping on English author Francis Spufford.   I ignored his last book- Light Perpetual, because it just didn't sound very fun, but it did very well.  Tons of people read it, and it landed on several year end best-of lists  but I just couldn't get into it.  I did, however, get very excited when I read about his newest book- Cahokia Jazz- which is an alternate history noir set in a jazz age Cahokia city where Native Americans never lost control.  Reading that book spurred me to go back and revisit Golden Hill which was a smash hit by the standard of literary/historical fiction, and is set in 18th century New York to boot, making it a candidate for the revised 1,001 Novels list.

  It's clear that Golden Hill is a work of historical fiction inspired by the fiction of that era- specifically Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding. Along those lines, I found myself waiting for the plot to really blast off, but it never really does, just muddles along to a neat and tidy resolution.  It is a book that contains surprises so describing the plot isn't a good idea, but it's a fun romp through pre-American New York City.  

Korean author Bora Chung

Published 3/1/24

Audiobook Review

Your Utopia (2023)

by Bora Chung

  I really enjoyed Cursed Bunny, the debut collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung, which was published in translation last year and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Translated Fiction.  I was eager to read Your Utopia, her new collection of short stories, particularly after I saw a stand up display(!) in the local Barnes & Noble- not a real huge supporter of translated literature in my experience.  

   Whereas Cursed Bunny seemed more like a collection themed around "body horror", Your Utopia feels more like an excursion into a world of post-human literature.  A couple of the stories feature robot/non-human narrators, and the longest is a zombie-spaceship cross-over situation.  I found the stories with non-human narrators to be the most interesting.   In one story, the narrator is an elevator looking after an elderly woman with Parkinson's, in another a Wall-E type robot wanders a planet deserted by their human "masters."  Everything moves along at a good clip, as you expect in a book of short stories, and I'm left wondering when and if Chung is going to publish a novel.

  I listened to half of Your Utopia as an Audiobook, and the other half I read on my Kindle. 

Published 3/5/24 

Massacres of the Mountains:

A History of the Indian Wars 1815-1875 (1886)

By J.P. Dunn jr.

Archer House Press

  Near as I can tell this is a 1956 reprint edition of this 1886 classic, which I believe is the first "historical" effort to write about this series of events in something other than a histrionic, anti-Native fashion.  Author J.P. Dunn Jr. was not a professional historian- the very concept of history was in a primitive state in even the most advanced locales, and 19th century Ohio, where Dunn lived, was not one of those.  I found this title when I was reading Notes on Blood Meridian- McCarthy allegedly read about the group he called the Glanton in here, and there is indeed a page dedicated to the Gallantin gang in this book that fairly describes the plot of Blood Meridian from the point where the gang starts scalping Mexicans as Apaches and ends up getting into it with the Yuma's at the ferry crossing.  Mind you, that is one page in a nearly 700 page book.

  There are also some interesting descriptions of what you might call "savage Native American atrocities" on whites and other natives.  These descriptions have been written out American history by writers with a variety of motives.  I think the primary motive has been an attempt to sanitize historical content for the teaching of school children- you aren't going to tell a bunch of fourth graders that the Sioux would open a man up, set a fire in his insides and then stoke it to extract the maximum amount of pain from the still living, still conscious victim, or retell stories about white women being passed around like communal property after being kidnapped.  Of course, advocates for the Natives have all kinds of reasons to ignore these tales ranging from them being out right falsehoods to a desire to escape the vile stereotype of the savage indian.

  As you would expect from any American author writing in the 1880's, Dunn has a limited understanding of Native American civilization, though he does often sound sympathetic to Native Americans and frequently critiques government policy and individual government representatives.   All of his descriptions of the battles- massacres only apply when Native Americans kill whites, battles are when whites kill Native Americans, even if the murdered Natives are defenseless women and children- as happened in California in the 1850's- where 150 Native people were mass murdered for no reason whatsoever. 

    Mostly, this book made me wonder what was left out.  

Published 3/5/24

Audiobook Review

Same Bed, Different Dreams (2023)

by Ed Park

   American author Ed Park didn't do himself any favors with the reading public when he dropped Same Bed, Different Dreams at a length of 577 pages.  Most of the readers I know- and I'm talking about serious readers of literary fiction, the type who might be tempted into reading Same Bed, Different Dreams, are going to bail when they see a 577 page book.   Personally, I checked out the Audiobook, which is so long I had to check it out twice on the Libby library app.  It is a well produced Audiobook, as you might expect from an author who was the executive editor at Penguin Press

   Same Bed, Different Dreams is a Pynchonian take on the 20th century history of the Korean peninsula, as relayed through the lens of the (semi?) fictious Korean Provisional Government, a loose band of rebels devoted to the independence of and unification of Korea.  Park had me running to check Wikipedia as he described various historical episodes surrounding Korean independence efforts.  At the same time, he weaves together several disparate story lines involving an African-American author of a series of science-fiction novels, an author-type figure working for an Amazon-like company in New York City and a host of minor characters as well as a book-within-a-book (the dreams of the title.)

   There is so much going on in the pages of Same Bed, Different Dreams it is hard to describe. The best I can do is: Korean secret history with plenty of contemporary American characters, 600 pages long.

Ghanian author Kobby Ben Ben

Published 3/7/24

No One Dies Yet (2023)

by Kobby Ben Ben

   This is a debut novel by an exciting new voice in literature, Ghanian author Kobby Ben Ben.  No One Dies Yet was released in the UK last year, but the US edition just dropped.    Set in 2019, Ghana's Year of Return, No One Dies Yet is many things at once:  A fierce depiction of the difficulties of LGBT life inside Africa, the book culture of social media, a satire of African-Americans and others who arrive as tourists in Ghana expecting a transformative experience no matter the reality/truth of the matter, a wry commentary of the expectations of the western publishing industry as it relates to emerging African voices and a riff on world of literary serial killers/murders found in books like the Talented Mr. Ripley, American Psycho and yes, My Sister the Serial Killer.  

      No One Dies Yet is both an astute work of literature that can be read on its own terms and a sly work of meta-fiction that provides a cogent critique of the literary world itself and its expectations.  I found it to be astonishing, so much so that after reading a library copy on my Kindle I went out and bought the book itself so I could recommend it to friends and acquaintances.  I loved everything about No One Dies Yet except the many hot gay sex scenes, but I'm sure many readers would love those bits, and it's not like I disliked them, since they very much relate to the themes of the book and play a significant role therein. 

  Without belaboring the point, I want to give No One Dies Yet my highest recommendation- check it out for sure!!!

Published 3/8/24

Outer Dark (1968)

by Cormac McCarthy

  You can divide Cormac McCarthy's bibliography into three periods.  First period- Southern Gothic with this book, his first book, The Orchard Keeper (1965) and the two books after this one, Child of God (1973) and Suttree (1979).  After that you've got the southwestern period- starting with Blood Meridian in 1985 and the Border Trilogy.   Last period is The Road, No Country For Old Men and the two books published in 2022- The Passenger and Stella Maris, call it his modern/post-modern period. 

   Anyone who reads The Orchard Keeper can see the  strong Faulknerian influence but McCarthy was already moving away from the obscure modernism of Faulknerian prose into something resembling the mythic/biblical idiom that would eventually propel him to stardom.  Outer Dark, in many ways recalls Blood Meridian- which at this point was three novels and twenty years down the road, both in terms of the language and directly in certain plot points.  Its funny, because I read Notes on Blood Meridian last month and the author didn't point either of these correspondences out in his book.

  First, there is a critical scene that takes place at a ferry crossing, directly resembling the ferry crossing action in Blood Meridian.  Second, there is an extensive scene involving the herding of hogs which go plummeting off a cliff in a scene of manic disorder- which, is something that happens in Blood Meridian as well, just not with hogs.  It suggests that the inspiration for incidents in Blood Meridian may have come from McCarthy's own books. 

    There's also a glimmering of the character of the Judge in the form of a murderous Reverend- it's a sketchy resemblance to be sure, but there are similarities. 

Published 3/15/24

Foxfire 5 (1979)

by Eliot Wigginton

   There is an elaborate scene in Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy where the Glanton gang is being pursued by Native Americans in the desert.  They are out of gunpowder and facing certain doom.  The character of the Judge leads the group to a nearby dormant volcano, where he creates gunpowder with the help of guano (bat poop) and human urine, leading the gang to surprise the attacking Native Americans.  In Notes on Blood Meridian by John Sepich, references this book, Foxfire 5 as the source for the recipe the Judge uses to manufacture the gunpowder.

 

 I was intrigued- Foxfire 5 doesn't sound like an academic journal.  I looked up the Wikipedia entry and found a copy in the LAPL system.  Foxfire was a journal put together by high school students(!) and their advisor, Eliot Wigginton.  The first issue came out in 1966.  The subject was documenting back-woods life in Northern Georgia.  A book version was published in 1972 and Foxfire became a national sensation.  Unfortunately, in 1992 founder/teacher Eliot Wigginton was convicted of some pretty horrific child sex allegations going back decades, and amazingly, got a sentence of one year in jail and twenty years of probation.  

  I surmise that was it for the national profile of Foxfire, though the Wikipedia page notes that it has continued under new leadership.  Anyway, Foxfire volume 5 is largely about iron making and gun making, which are both pretty interesting subjects but not seven hundred pages long interesting, at least to me.  The portion that relates to Blood Meridian is maybe ten pages long- it's actually a letter they receive from a certified Mountain Man living in far northern California about he makes gunpowder with his own urine and going into the different ingredients and such.  It seems clear that this, was, indeed McCarthy's source.

  The rest of the book are these hundred page long oral histories where these old coots are talking about the post-Indian removal settling of northern Georgia, and it turns out that manufacturing iron and gun-making were pretty important to the white settlers of this area.  It was/is extremely specialized knowledge and kind of incredible to visualize this process of building the first iron foundry in a given geographic area.

Published 3/15/24

You Glow in the Dark (2024)

by Liliana Colanzi

Translated by Chris Andrews

    I was intrigued with the New York Times book review that described this book by Bolivian author Liliana Colanzi as being suffused with an "Andean Cyber Punk" ethos and read its 144 pages on the Kindle app on my phone over the weekend.  It's a set of connected short stories based around the Goiania accident in Brazil, which happened in 1987.   The Goiania accident happened when radioactive materials were stolen from an abandoned Brazilian hospital by a couple of local hoodlums who wanted the encasing metal unit for perceived scrap value, they dismantled the machine and then pulled out the radioactive material and passed it around the neighborhood like a real bunch of ignorant slum dwellers.  People died before it got all sorted out.

  Anyway, this isn't spelled out in the book till the end and the characters certainly don't know what is going on, so it does have a cyber-punkish air for sure.  The fact that Colanzi doesn't provide a birds-eye overview of the sequence of events and keeps to the understandings of the characters gives each story an air of mystery. 

Published 3/25/24

The Last Samurai (2000)

by Helen DeWitt

 Last month The Atlantic published a 136 Great American Novels list to coincide with a book fair in New Orleans.  The list starts in 1925 with the  The Great Gatsby and it ends last year with Biography of X.  I took a quiz and it said I'd read 70 of them.  I understand the cut-off of 1925, it is pretty normal to call the period from the late 18th through the end of World War I the "long nineteenth century," and picking The Great Gatsby as your starting point establishes 20th century mass-media/celebrity culture as an important boundary line. 

  I paused when I saw The Last Samurai ensconced in the 2000's.   I already had The Last Samurai in my ebook queue at the library after reading her 2022 novella, The English Understand Wool, which I found intoxicating. DeWitt writes with the kind of maximalist elan that has been out of style since David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest became a meme punchline, but personally, I think readers and reviewers are just jealous because most folks just can't keep up with a 500 page novel about a precocious child and his autistic mom or a thousand page novel about tennis.   There is a real audacity to any author/publisher combo that puts out a novel in excess of 450 pages- there are certain genres, fantasy, multi-generational family histories, that regularly exceed that limit, but few within those genres that are taken seriously.  

  I mention that because The Last Samurai is not just a 530 page novel, it is a 530 page debut novel about the relationship between a single mom and her brilliant kid.   After I read and loved The English Understand Wool, I went back and tried to figure out how I missed The Last Samurai for over 20 years.  First answer is that is because no one I know or spoke to mentioned it.  Second answer is probably my own unconscious bias in not thinking that a 530 page novel about a single mom and her child could be utterly brilliant.  I mean, I've read plenty of novels about the difficulty of being a single mom, it sucks, and life is a struggle.  This is not that kind of book about being a single mom.

  Above everything its a linguistic marvel- DeWitt apparently being some sort of language savant-with the text going from Greek to Japanese orthography in the space of a paragraph.   Like I said, I thought it was brilliant.  DeWitt is just too good. And a debut novel! Wow! A Great American Novel, indeed.

Published 3/26/24

Audiobook Review

I is Another: Septology III- V (2021)

by Jon Fosse

   I'm sure almost everyone outside of Norway groaned when they first learned that Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2023.  By "everyone" I mean the international community of readers who does things like going out and reading the best known work of the Nobel Prize in Literature winner each year. I know one such cat- he's an adman and poet who lives in London- he went to Oxford- he tried to "keep up" on these things like me- he made the mistake of buying a paper copy.  I, on the other hand, went the Audiobook route- which really pays off once you realize that Fosse writes without paragraph or much punctuation and the entire Septology is a single paragraph interrupted only by roman numerals and line breaks.   Thus, what is an undoubtably "difficult" read in the meaning of 20th century literary modernism turns into a rambling but thematically cohesive Audiobook, and it is a clear example of why the New York Times has recently started reviewing Audiobooks separately.   I can now tell you that five volumes in, Septology starts in the present, with narrator Asle interacting with his friend Asleik, a hopeless alcoholic.  The action in the present involves Aselik collapsing in an alcoholic stupor on this way to the pub, and Asle helping him out.

  Once the reader arrives at Septology III- V, the story within a story, about Asle and his mysterious double Asle 2, comes into focus as Asle-the-narrator continues to deal with Asleik and prepares for a "final" show with his gallerist, Breyer.  There is, I confess, a mesmeric/hypnotic quality to Fosse's prose, particularly his unyielding use of the introduction "I think"- which must be uttered a thousand times over these pages.  The clear comparison is with Proust and his Remembrance of Things Past, which, come to think of it, would be a great Audiobook to tackle since I ain't never going to read the whole series in print.  However it is hard not to think about the My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgard, since Fosse appears throughout that series in thinly fictionalized form as Knausgard's  literature professor.  Also the fact that both the Septology and My Struggle have six volumes.  Now Knausgard remains an international literary celebrity who has moved on to a series of supernatural thrillers and Fosse has his Nobel Prize in Literature and people outside Norway will continue to largely ignore him because his books are difficult to read. 

  No, I would not be listening to the Septology in Audiobook nor reading it were it not for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but I'm not bummed at spending the time.  The books aren't that long- something under four hours a piece in Audiobook format, and he's basically telling a single tale from the point of view of one narrator, so without the difficulty of making it through the print copy, it has been easy sailing. 

Published 3/26/24

Audiobook Review

House Made of Dawn (1968)

by N. Scott Momaday

   I checked House Made of Darn out of the library (Audiobook) after I read his New York Times obituary, published back at the end of January of this year.  Momaday was the first Native American author to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1969, for this book.  Again, I found myself bemused that despite a twenty year more-or-less active interest in literature penned by Native American authors, I'd never heard of the first Native American author to win a Pulitzer Prize.   Momaday published his whole life, in a variety of disciplines: prose, poetry, memoirs and essays but House Made of Dawn is the only book that has endured as a hit.

    House Made of Dawn is chock full of modernist technique- like many serious writers of his era, Faulkner is a major touchstone- Momaday throws different narrators, time periods and events together in a thoughtfully constructed jumble and leaves the reader to piece it all together.  Also like many prize winning books from this era, there's a heavy element of the existentialist/European novel of ideas.  There are also a hatful of cringe inducing female characters.  Abel, Momaday's protagonist, leaves the reservation, joins the army, washes up in Los Angeles, drinks, fights, kills a white man, goes to prison, gets out and heads back to the Southwest.  In between these events we get reminiscences by Abel about his past, and the past of this forefathers/mothers (one of the most memorable passages involves Abel relating his Grandmother's memories).

   I get the sense, after listening to the novel and reading the New York Times obituary, that Momaday really said what he had to say in his first novel and spent the rest of his career refining his message. 

Published 3/27/24

A Woman of Pleasure (2024)

by Kiyoko Murata

Translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter

  This is the first English translation of a book by Japanese author Kiyoko Murata, over there she's well known as the 1987 winner of the Akutagawa Prize, which is just about as old as our Pulitzer Prize.  What will be shocking to any reader outside of those extremely well versed in Japanese history is that this careful portrait of life as a traditional Japanese prostitute takes place in the 20th century.  The promotional copy emphasizes that this is base on real historical events, though it is equally hard to imagine a reader thinking that Murata was somehow making things up.   Murata's protagonist Ichi is a 17 year old girl from Okinawa who is sold to a brothel by her fisherman father.  She is then compelled to work off her father's debt as property of her father.  If that sounds like slavery to you, well, yeah, it sounded like that to many Japanese, and A Woman of Pleasure depicts the end of the period when women were forced to remain in debt peonage, even when they tried to leave and even after the national legislature/Emperor passed laws supposedly emancipating these women.

  Linguistically, much is lost in the English translation, since Ichi, a girl from the south (Iwo Jima as we know it in the US), speaks a dialect that is borderline incomprehensible to the main-islanders where her brothel is located.  Much of the activity in this book centers around an industrial school where the prostitutes are allowed to attend in order to learn to read, write and perform simple math.  Her teacher, herself a retired prostitute, also plays a protagonist level role in the plot and the scenes set in the school are narrated from her point of view.  Thus the culturing of Ichi- the process by which she is indoctrinated in the proper way to talk and write, is lost in the English language translation.

   What is left is a very good example of ways in which contemporary Japanese literature wrestles with the moral ambiguity of the Japanese past- this is a major theme in Japanese literature but rarely does Japanese fiction focus so squarely on the lives of such an oppressed class.  It's also true of Japanese literature that women authors have lagged behind in domestic and international recognition, so Murata finally getting one of her books translated into English is a good step in that direction.

  

Author Tommy Orange

Published 3/28/24

Wandering Stars (2024)

by Tommy Orange

    I loved There There the debut novel by Oakland native Tommy Orange, about the "urban indian" population of the Bay Area.  I thought he had a fresh voice, that the book was exciting, and that it was an interesting subject.   The critics (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Winner PEN/Hemmingway prize) agreed, the reading public (New York Time bestseller), agreed.  Nothing to do after a showing like that but wait for the next book, and here we are.  In Wandering Stars Orange expands his vision and brings in the history of his own tribe the Cheyenne and Arapaho, for the first time.

  Wandering Stars shares an interest in the same family who was at the center of There There, the extended intergenerational clan of Opal Bear Shield and Jacquie Red Feather.  Unlike There There, Wandering Stars goes back in time to the aftermath of the Sand Creek massacre, when the peace seeking members of what were then the Cheyenne and Arapaho were ruthlessly massacred- including women and children, by a rogue US military officer who later claimed to have misunderstood his orders.  In the aftermath, the surviving men were interned at the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine Florida, where their treatment became a template for the so-called "indian schools" who existed to strip Native Americans of their tribal identity. 

   This historical context, and the chapters that take place after the Cheyenne are released and relocated to Oklahoma really create the atmosphere for the rest of the book, which more or less covers the same subjects of intergenerational trauma and substance abuse in the urban Native American community.  As a sort of super-fan of Native American lit, I was hoping for more historical stuff, but I can see what Orange is doing- he's trying not to overwhelm his audience- which reminds me of Colson Whitehead and the approach he takes to history and story telling.  Don't overwhelm the audience with sad historical facts, just give them enough to give present characters a basis for their behavior.  Here's hoping he wins the Pultizer Prize or National Book Award!  I think he deserves either prize for Wandering Stars.

    

Australian-Indigenous author Alexis Wright

Published 3/29/24

Praiseworthy (2024)

by Alexis Wright

  I was excited to read a rave review for this new novel by Australian/Indigenous author Alexis Wright. It goes without saying that 90% of Australian literature that gets out of Australia is written from a white, Anglo-British perspective with the remaining 10 percent being immigrant type lit from European and non-European immigrants. Before reading Praiseworthy I don't think I'd ever read a book, seen a movie, listened to a song, where the artist was an indigenous Australian. 

  Praiseworthy is not what I would call a crowd pleaser.  It's over 600 pages long and written entirely in stream of consciousness format, with the narrators being muses, one per hundred page chapter, telling the story of a more-or-less nuclear indigenous family- patriarch Cause Man Steel, who is obssessed with harnessing the power of donkeys to replace fossil fuel based transport, his older son Aboriginal Sovereignty and younger son Tommyhawk.   The time is 2007, after the Australian Government passed the Intervention act, which banned indigenous Australians from possessing alcohol and pornography(!).   The language is flowing and entrancing- I've often found the saving grace of 500 page plus stream-of-consciousness style novels is that not much actually happens since every character takes 50 pages to take a dump or walk down to the mailbox.  Also almost all stream-of-consciousness writing follows the template of stating a thought or observation and then having the character go on elaborating and expanding on that exact thought until they come to their next thought.  

  These rules hold true in Praiseworthy, but I wouldn't call it a fun read.  Vital, yes.  Important, yes.  Prize winning, possibly, but not fun. 

Published 4/1/24

Audiobook Review

Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories (2023)

by Amitav Ghosh

  Indian author Amitav Ghosh is best known for his Ibis Trilogy, three books of historical fiction set during the first Opium War.  In India and the UK he is a well known prize winner, in the US he's basically known for the Ibis Trilogy- the first book of which has over 4,000 Amazon reviews.  The only book by Ghosh I've read is The Shadow Line (1988), another work of (partition era) historical fiction that takes place in the UK and in modern day Bangladesh.  I checked Smoke and Ashes out from the library because I've often had the feeling during my visits to Boston that Boston must have been balls deep into the Opium trade back in the day, but you never read anything about it.  Compare the treatment of the opium trade to the treatment of the slave trade- those participants have long since been outed, their statues sometimes removed, etc.

  Certainly you can learn from this book among other that when perpetrating immoral activity for great profit it is best to handle the immoral activity far from home and then bring the riches back.   Ghosh is no historian, though as he points out repeatedly, his technique for writing historical fiction closely mirrors the method of the historian, minus having to learn other languages.   Thus, Smoke and Ashes is hugely entertaining, and largely focused on the task at hand but with some digressions, including several chapters on the current opiates crisis in the United States and its roots/historical ironies in the history contained in this book.  I found most of those observations obvious and the kind of thing that would only be interesting to a reader with no grasp of current events in the US.

  On the other hand, his material about the production and export of opium from Bengal to China is very interesting since, as Ghosh points out, the British took great pains to conceal their activity.  There are, for example, hardly any pictorial depictions of the giant opium factories that provided the lions share of British overseas revenue for generations.  You would think that an Empire so interested in promoting its empirical triumphs would be a model of an Opium Factory in Trafalgar square.  In the end, the thesis is depressing and familiar to anyone familiar with the past half millennium of global capitalism: From great crimes come great fortunes.

Published 4/1/24

Audiobook Reviee

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2023)

by William Egginton

   I'm always surprised when a genuinely intellectually challenging book makes it to a major release level- something that gets a New York Times review even though the audience for a such a book must surely be limited.  Such is the case with The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, which makes three different approaches to the idea that "reality" exists from some third-viewer perspective, a single, knowable thing.  Borges, Heisenberg and Kant all radically questioned this assumption at different times and places and through different disciplines- Borges, the 20th century author who labored in obscurity for decades before he became an international literary star,  Kant, the 18th century philosopher  and professor and Heisenberg, who really makes the whole book possible with his uncertainty principle, which crystalizes the idea that the observer impacts the event by their viewing of the event.

  Really, nothing in the book makes sense without Heisenberg, and what Egginton appears to be doing is linking the "discovery" of the uncertainty principle to prior philosophical and literary foreshadowing.   Like the New York Time reviewer, I was certainly put in mind Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, which features Heisenberg as a central fictional/non-fictional character. 

  As to my choice of listening to the Audiobook instead of reading an E-version:  MISTAKE.  There were many times where I felt comprehension slipping, to the point where I found myself slowing down the pace, going back several minutes to re-listen to different passages and pausing the book when I just couldn't keep up- I would not recommend the Audiobook.

Published 4/2/24

Audiobook Review

Martyr (2024)

by Kaveh Akbar

  The strength of the novel as an art form is that EVERYONE wants their own bildungsroman and their own inter generational family saga written from their own particular POV.  The market place agrees- both publishers and audiences are eager to embrace the "first" or a novel POV.  I'm not complaining about it- I'm in favor of it.  I love the flexibility of the novel, the bildungsroman and (to a lesser degree) the intergenerational family saga.  Please, let me read about people who aren't wealthy white urbanites.  Martyr is an Iranian-American, LGBTQ themed bildungsroman with a genuine plot twist- the kind of book that earns attention from both publishers and audiences.  It's one of those books that is diminished the more you try to explain it- an occasion of a book being more then the sum of its influences.   I was dubious almost halfway through the book, but third act really gave me an appreciation for the sophistication of the author.  You think it's one thing, and it is that thing, but it is also something else.   Better if you just read it, rather then spend time thinking about whether you want to read it.  Just do it.

  Also, I listened to the Audiobook, which was good- it works because the narrator is also the protagonist and the chapters that go back to Iran are themselves narrated by the particular family member who is the subject of the flashback.

Published 4/3/24

Change (2024)

by  Édouard Louis

   The Édouard Louis universe continues to grow apace with Change, his latest work of auto-fiction, this one focusing directly on his education and reinvention into a nascent litterateur.   Louis is, at this point, an international sensation, with his books getting a contemporaneous translation out of French and into a galaxy of languages- something that took French Nobel Prize winning author of auto-fiction Annie Ernaux years to accomplish.   Louis is known for this upbringing in small-town northern France, the French equivalent of growing up in a small town in the rural south, surrounded by racism, bigotry and poverty.  As he has written many times before, all he wanted to do was escape, if only to build an international literary career by going back again and again to the circumstances of his upbringing. 

  Louis chronicles said escape, with the familiar wreckage of lost friends and spoiled relationships, sacrificed in pursuit of a goal he at times seems to hardly understand.  It's called ambition, though Louis has that "only in France" type that is defined by academic success. 

  The New York Times kinda trashed it, but how can you blame an author for giving his audience what they want?  Like he's supposed to turn around and write a six hundred book of historical fiction?  Let the man live. 

Published 4/4/24

America is in the Heart (1946)

by Carlos Bulosan

  I was turned onto America is in the Heart by A Man of Two Faces by Viet Tranh Nguyen.  In A Man of Two Faces, Nguyen draws on his experience as an English professor to generate an alternate list of "Great American Novels" that don't normally get listed.  America is in the Heart is written by Filipino-American author Carlos Bulosan.  Just looking at the publication date, it isn't hard to see why it had trouble garnering attention. America certainly wasn't looking to re-evaluate its (very) recent racist past the year after World War II ended.  

  It was republished in the 1970's by the University of Washington press- the library copy I checked out was from the sixth edition, published in 1984.  Amazon put out a Kindle classics edition in 2022 but it is way out of print in physical form, with used copies going for sixty bucks on Amazon.    America is in the Heart is part novel, part memoir and part history lesson, about the experience of Filipino immigrants in the period before the beginning of World War II.  Filipino's had an unusual legal status in the United States:  They were allowed to come but were not citizens. As depicted by Bulosan they were the frequent victim of racist violence, not only at the hands of whites but also via Japanese and Chinese Americans who often stood one level higher in the socio-economic pyramid of inter-war California. 

   Bulosan depicts a peripatetic life of farm labor and rootlessness, spurred by the frequent outbreaks of violence and job and housing discrimination.  Bulosan got heavily involved with the farm labor movement and much of the action of the book involves him going from part of the west coast to another, interacting with different activists and workers, and then getting chased out.   One aspect of Busolan's experience that may surprise modern residents of the US is the utter absence of Filipino women in this book.  Today, the concept of the Filipino nurse/medical worker is entrenched to the point of stereotype but before World War II it seems like the only Filipino's in the US were men.

   Unlike many other books of this type (Great American Novel/Immigration story), America in the Heart does start with Bulosan being brought to the US by his parents as a child.  Rather, he emigrates as an adult, and the entire first portion of the book recounts his life in the Philippines.   Even if the reader is familiar with the anti-farmworker violence that plagued California in the 20th century, the violence in America is in the Heart may seem shocking.  It shocked me, as did the open, virulent racism directed specifically to Filipinos. 

Published 4/5/24

Audiobook Review
Undiscovered (2023)

by Gabriela Weiner

   Undiscovered is first up from the 2024 Booker International Prize longlist.  There is already an Audiobook out, and I put my hold in when the list was announced.  Weiner is a Peruvian writer who lives in Spain.  She was writing about polyamory before that was much of a thing and she works as a journalist. Undiscovered is an appealing work of auto-fiction about Weiner and her relationship with her real-life family founder Charles Weiner, a man who was famous in his day but is today remembered as the explorer who almost rediscovered Machu Picchu.   Undiscovered flips between narrator Weiner on a trip back to Lima to mourn the passing of her father and her life in Barcelona as part of a flailing "throuple"- Weiner, her cis husband and her lesbian/bi lover. 

   Much of Undiscovered deals with Weiner's unresolved feelings about race, her existence as a dark-skin, educated, professional-class woman in multiple societies where dark skin is equated with poverty.  She explores it in terms of her family background and her erotic desires.  Finally, she explores the actual truth surrounding her family attributing their genealogy to the famous explorer Charles Weiner, readers of contemporary auto-fiction will not be surprised to learn that all her explorations end in ambiguity.

Published 4/5/24

Lost on Me (2023)

by Veronica Raimo

Translated by Leah Janeczko

  Lost on Me is another title from the 2024 International Booker longlist- the shortlist arrived next week.  Lost on Me arrives in translation on the strength of its status as an Italian best-seller.  It is, surprise, surprise, a work of Auto-fiction/bildungsroman about a woman growing up in Rome.   Nothing in Lost on Me really stood out to me, even in comparison to other works of auto-fiction longlisted for the Booker International Prize in 2024.  Specifically, I thought both The Details and What I'd Rather Not Think About were better and were also auto-fiction written by young women.  I'd be totally surprised to see Lost on Me make it through to the 2024 Booker International shortlist. 

Published 4/8/24

The Details (2023)

by Ia Grenberg

Translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson

  I have to say that I've come to believe that Scandinavian auto-fiction exists as an exercise of privilege.  How secure must ones place within society be to the point where you can write openly about the most intimate of your private moments and family secrets without the risk of alienating the world around you. I do find it compelling- the literary equivalent of TMZ clips online or 80's talk shows where freaks bared their nasty souls to a studio audience. 

  The interesting angle in The Details is that Swedish author Ia Grenberg does not talk about herself so much as her relationships, starting off with three sexual/romantic partners and ending with her Mom.   I feel like the last six books I've read from Scandinavia feature mentally ill women, often as the narrator or primary protagonist.  Here, at least, the narrator is the sane one.  Grenberg makes the case, obliquely, to be sure, that the mental health challenges of ones own parents manifest themselves in ones own romantic explorations.  It's not a revolutionary take, but I blazed through The Details- partially because the Audiobook is only four hours long but also because I found The Details fascinating.   This could be a shortlister/winner- seems like Grenberg might be poised for a leap onto the international literary stage.

Published 4/8/24

Crooked Plow (2020)

by Itamar Viera Junior

   Last 2024 Booker International Prize longlist review before the shortlist is announced tomorrow, April 9th.  Crooked Plow is another title that made it into translation out of Brazil on the strength of a domestic prize win.  It's a work of realist historical fiction about the lives of of the freed slaves Brazil after 1888.  These people, who were often of mixed African/Indian decent were simply waved off the land where they had been enslaved and told to go elsewhere, with the result that many, such as the family in this book, simply walked for a couple days and took of residence as tenant farmer at a similar plantation. 

  The plight of the peasant farmer isn't exactly a new subject in Brazilian literature but my understanding is that this particular culture- that of freed slaves who remained on rural plantations, isn't covered- in most Brazilian lit the African descended Brazilians are city dwellers and not part of a socio-economic mono-culture like the people in this book.

   I really enjoyed Crooked Plow if only as a relief from the parade of nervous, young auto-fictionists that have so far dominated my reading of the 2024 International Booker longlist.  Shortlist comes tomorrow!!!

   

Published 4/10/24

Audiobook Review

The Silver Bone (2024)

by Andrey Kurkov

   The Silver Bone, by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov, didn't make the 2024 Booker International shortlist, but it did make the longlist. I checked the Audiobook out of the library because it looked fun- a detective novel set in Bolshevik era Kiev?  Certainly it was more fun than the rest of the books on the Booker International 2024 longlist put together, which are mostly a sad, troubled bunch of narratives.   You could call The Silver Bone "The Accidental Detective" because Samson Kolecheko, the detective-protagonist of this book (and many to come) only finds himself a detective after he files a police report and is complimented on his ability to write.   Trained as an electrical engineer, Samson finds himself orphaned in Chapter one after a rampaging Cossack murders his father in the street.

  Samson retreats to his family apartment- spacious or "bourgeois" in the lingo of the time and is immediately invaded by two Russian soldiers who are billeted in his Dad's study.  This gets the ball rolling, and what follows is a good time with Samson running all over revolutionary Kiev trying to solve a murder and the mystery of a silver femur bone.   The Audiobook was narrated by someone using a Ukrainian accented English which is an Audiobook pet peeve of mine.  Audiobook accents are for different variations of written ENGLISH.  If a work written in another language is translated into English the narrator should either have No accent, or like everything else in a work of translated fiction, translated into the appropriate English language variation.

  Here, for example, everyone is speaking Ukrainian but Samson is a university graduate, while other characters are uneducated/working class Bolsheviks. It would make sense to give Samson a BBC accent and the working class characters cockney accents.  Or, keeping with the time period of the novel, Samson could have had some kind of trans-atlantic accent and the working class characters the accent of an early 20th century Brooklyn factory worker.   Giving all the characters Ukrainian accented English is dumb.  

Published 4/12/24

Audiobook Review

A New Name: Septology VI- VII (2021)

by Jon Fosse

   Great, great idea for an Audiobook since the whole series- I think- is a single sentence.  The hypnotic/mesmeric quality really comes through and I positively raced through this last, seven hour installment.   Having listened to all seven volumes I would support readers who say that it is really just a single, long book.  Although Fosse uses flashbacks, all seven books essentially detail a week or so in the life (maybe as short as three days?) of Norwegian painter Asle.  Asle is old, living alone on the southwest coast of Norway.  He is lost in his memories, even as he deals with the alcohol related hospitalization of his neighbor and only friend, Asleik.  In the flashback segments, much of his musings revolve around another Asle, also a painter, and also an alcoholic.  Narrator Asle is a non-drinker and Catholic convert and he talks about both those subjects:  Alcohol and religions, over and over again. 

    Besides telling this parallel story of the other Asle- or is he another Asle? a reader may well be asking themselves by the end of the Septology,  narrator Asle narrates his bildungsroman- which basically involves being recognized as a talented painter while still in primary school and then the work it takes to get narrator Asle to his current, long-term position as a nationally recognized painter.   So all seven books of the Septology construct this single, coherent narrative about narrator Asle and other Asle, with enough indeterminacy to raise the question in the mind of the reader whether they aren't one and the same, with narrator Asle using other Asle to segment out the more traumatic circumstances of his adult life- including the abandonment of his infant son and wife while still a student.

  I actually Googled that question- whether the "other Asle" is real or not, and I'll stand by my interpretation- I think narrator Asle has carved off this other Asle to handle his more personally painful memories/regrets and then constructed this master persona- narrator Asle. 

  That is it for me and 2023 Nobel Prize Winner Jon Fosse- no way I am going to be looking to read more books by him.  I don't have any other Nobel winners in mind at the moment, I just scrolled through the past two decades of winners and didn't see anyone who jumped out.  Maybe just wait for this years winner?

Published 4/12/24

Audiobook Review

Glorious Exploits (2024)

by Ferdia Lennon

  Glorious Exploits was an Audiobook I checked out from the library (narrated by the author!) after I saw a couple of positive reviews and read the logline, "Athenian prisoners of war perform greek drama in Syracuse quarry pit."  Like Sparrow by James Hyne, Glorious Exploits is an attempt to tell a story shaped by contemporary literary fiction in a historic time period, here ancient Greece, (Well, Sicily anyway.) in Sparrow, it was ancient Rome.  It's a slight variation on the other recent trend in this area- retelling ancient myths from a new perspective, usually that of a female character.  Here, the narrator is a Syracusan citizen- proud but poor, who is just hanging out after the defeat of the invading Athenian army at the hands of the locals.  Instead of killing, ransoming or selling the Athenians into slavery, the Syracusans decide to dump the Athenians in a pit and slowly starve them to death.

   Lampo, the narrator, and Gelon are determined to carry this off for reasons that remain opaque but are somehow related to the death of Gelon's son at some point. Their fellow Syracusans reactions range from supportive to violent, and that generates much of the plot outside of the "We're putting on a show" bits.  I found Lampo engaging and quite enjoyed the voice of author Ferdia Lennon- it was like listening to a cheeky brit tell a compelling story about ancient Greece.  Glorious Exploits certainly was not "historical fiction" in the genre sense- there is talk or war, but only in the recent past, and there is some adventuring but it is limited to a late, third-act trip to the northern tip of Sicily.  It really was a refreshing change from the vast majority of literary fiction and I actually enjoyed the listening experience, often not true for literary fiction.

Published 4/15/24

The Swan Book (2018)

by Alexis Wright

  I was pretty impressed by Praiseworthy, by indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright, and published this year.  I didn't love reading Praiseworthy, but I was still impressed because how often does a 672 page stream-of-consciouses'(multiple viewpoints) by an indigenous-Australian writer get picked up for American publication.  Just about never I'm thinking.  The ambition of an author writing in the 2020's who has the fucking balls to write a 670 page novel and hand it in.   It's just impressive and worthy of note.

  I've adopted a specific reading technique for technically challenging/lengthy works of literary fiction:  I don't really start paying close attention until I'm at least 10% through the Ebook/audiobook or 100 pages into a physical copy.  Maybe I don't entirely get what's going on, but with longer books that is often because there is some kind of preamble that doesn't tie to the main text and with technically challenging titles it's the lack of guideposts that create the confusion, so paying more attention isn't necessarily the answer. 

   That was an approach that really paid off in Praiseworthy and I also put it to use for The Swan Book, which is similarly challenging but not as long and is also about climate dystopia and child marriage.  I didn't get too upset about the fact that I had little idea what was going on for most of the book. There is a guy- and he is indigenous, but he is also like, the head of the Australian government, and there is like, a reservation-prison-nation for the indigenous people in Australia and there is a girl who lives in a polluted lake, and he goes there- the politician- and basically kidnaps her and forces her to marry him and then they go on a road trip into the Australian outback, and he destroys the indigenous reservation-prison-nation for some reason and then he gets murdered and his child-bride has to figure out what to do with herself. 

  At some point you get enough context so that the beginning of the book makes sense. Ive a great admiration for novels that use the complicating techniques of literary modernism in contemporary literary fiction but in the context of a blog its hard to recommend to a member of the general reading public, "Yeah, go out and read this book that hardly makes sense." Of course, it DOES make sense, but you have to read the whole book to figure it all out.

Published 4/18/24

What I'd Rather Not Think About (2024)

by Jente Posthuma

Translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey

   The Dutch have been doing all right in the Booker International Prize this past decade. Lucas Rijneveld won back in 2020 for The Discomfort of Evening which was... dark.   Now we've got another Dutch author on this years longlist- I realize by the time this post publishes we will know about the short list, but I'm writing this before that list is announced.  What I'd Rather Not Think About is a work about a pair of fraternal twins- "One" is the older twin, a gay man.  "Two" is the younger, and the narrator, a cis, straight woman. 

   Basically, One commits suicide by riding his bike directly into a canal and drowning (he leaves a note so we know it's suicide).  Such a Dutch way to kill yourself!  Two spends the rest of the book recounting her memories and trying to make sense of what, even by the standards of literary suicide, seems like a random act of self-violence.  Despite the recounting of the off-hand type of comments everyone makes at one point or another ("I wish I was dead." level stuff), there is nothing in the rest of What I'd Rather Not Think About that explains this central act- viewed, rightfully, as an act of abandonment and betrayal, by the narrator.

  Despite the dark subject matter, What I'd Rather Not Think About is a breezy read, easily tackled in an afternoon.  Doesn't seem like a Booker International Shortlist title to me.

Published 4/18/24

Solar Bones (2016)

by Mike McCormack

   Solar Bones written by Irish author Mike McCormack only contains a single sentence.  It does contain many paragraph breaks, but no periods.  It takes the form of a reminisce by Marcus Conway, who is (I learned from Wikipedia after finishing the book), a spirit who has returned to his kitchen table on All Souls Day.   Something that Wikipedia does not mention is that Conway likely died as a result of a global pandemic that claims his wife during the recollections of the book.   There are just hints of the impending apocalypse- his wife sweating and vomiting her way to death in the bedroom as Conway talks to his alarmist children in different parts of the world.

   McCormack won the 2016 Goldsmith's award for this book and he made the 2017 International Booker longlist, but again, the fact that is a formally challenging, modernist-technique influenced book really dampens the recommendation appeal.  Based on what I know, books like Solar Bones have a zero percent casual readership a month after the New York Times writes its rave review.  People just don't want to be really challenged in their reading comprehension by their literary fiction.  They don't seek it out.

Published 4/18/24

The American Slave Coast: 

A History of the Slave Breeding Industry (2017)

 by Ned and Constance Sublette

  I listened to the 30 hour Audiobook of this title over the last several months- took me a few check outs from the library and then waiting in between check-outs to finish it.  I checked it out because I've been reading about early American capitalism- cued by a recent trip to the Fairmont Copley Plaza (Boston) where I mused over the genesis of American fortune over Espresso martinis in their absurdly rococo hotel lobby bar/restaurant.    "Where does the money come from?" I mused to myself.   

   It comes from the exploitation of natural resources- lumber, stone, later oil and coal.  It came from shipping, where America quickly established itself in the farthest ports as a neutral trading partner.  And, as this book amply demonstrates, it came from the production and sale of human beings, slaves.  Not just in the south, slave BREEDING was close to being a raison d'etre for the original rebellion and a key facet of what kept the union together after the Civil War. 

   I won't recount the argument in full, which is NOT that there was some kind of breeding farm system in place- the authors investigate that allegation and find nothing but a few mentions and letters.  Indeed, slave breeding was both casual and highly complex and integrated with American (and global capitalism) but the key to understanding the narrative here is that the US acted early to band the FOREIGN IMPORTATION of slaves at the behest of the Virginia political class (slave owners) who made money selling their excess bodies to the cotton growing regions in Mississippi and Louisiana.

  They were facilitated by a class of middle men who operated in the north- cotton factories, factors for cotton production and shippers as well as those who operated in the middle- Maryland and Washington DC were the site of "slave jails" where run away slaves (and occasionally kidnapped free men) were sent back to the south.

  The main thesis here is that slavery was not some outlier in America, but rather an economic activity that helped provide the economic basis for the rapid expansion of the American economy- all of it.

   

Published 4/23/24

Black Vinyl, White Powder (2001)

by Simon Napier-Bell

  Simon Napier-Bell has one of those "only in England" biographies that starts with him leaving Public School in the 60's to be a tour manager for pre-Beatles English skiffle bands, living in London as the Beatles emerged, managing the Yardbirds and Marc Bolan and then going on to manage the band Japan before managing Wham! Along the way he saw A LOT, which inspired him to write this book, which is a history of the UK music scene with an emphasis on, yes, THE DRUGS.

  What drugs?  Mostly speed and cocaine with some coverage of heroin, hash, LSD and E.  Readers familiar with the events depicted- basically the music industry from the early 1960's through the 1980's from the perspective of a music industry professional who lived in London (Except for that full year he spent abroad for "tax purposes" lol);  but the anecdotal style, interspersed with well sourced quotes from various music magazines and general press interviews, is breezily readable.   I'm not sure I learned anything reading Black Vinyl, White Powder but for those generally interested in the history of pop music in the 20th century it makes for a good addition to the book shelf.   The index is hilarious. 

German author Jenny Erpenbeck

Published 4/29/24

Kairos (2023)

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  German author Jenny Erpenbeck is one of those non-English language authors who seemingly emerges into the Anglo literary sphere overnight, only for readers to learn that she's been doing it for years and is, in fact, a contender for the Nobel Prize.  It all came as news to me!  First, Kairos showed up on my radar when it was nominated for the Booker International Prize.  I checked out the Ebook from the library, looked at the summary, "Much younger woman and much older man have affair during the collapse of East Germany", and let the check out lapse.  Then, Kairos got nominated for the Booker International shortlist and I sighed and checked the still-available Ebook out from the library and read the book.

   I think I've said before- and recently, that the "Much younger woman, much older man" literary plot is one of my least favorite- just behind "Wealthy and well educated urban American couple gets divorced", and "well educated American man or woman has a crisis involving their values."  Who are these older men obsessed with banging women just out of their teens- or in this case- a 19 year old?  I'm convinced that is men who didn't actually have sex with 19 year olds WHEN THEY WERE THAT AGE, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to make up for it.  It's sad, really, male desire.   At least, these days, the book is more likely to be written by a woman than a man.

    Kairos does gets points for depicting the East Germany landscape of the pre-collapse era- I love me some 80's Communist country milieu, but I didn't share the love that reviewers have felt for the story.  I'm going to feel dumb about this review in ten years when Erpenbeck wins the Nobel.

Published 5/1/24

The Adversary (2024)

by Michael Crumney

   Every year for the past decade I've spent about a week in coastal Maine.  It is an absolutely great place to vacation, because even at the very height of tourist season it feels less crowded than any Southern California city on a Monday afternoon at 3 PM.   The yearly visits have helped me realized just how much of Maine there is, and beyond that, Newfoundland and the "Atlantic Provinces," which are even more thinly populated than Maine and go on forever.  I leapt at the chance to check out this The Adversary by Michael Crumney as a library Audiobook, if only to hear the wacky Newfoundland accents- in fact, the New York Times actually published a stand-alone review for the Audiobook of this title- something they only started doing this year. 

   Set in Mockbeggar, a fictional coastal town in Newfoundland, during the early 19th century, The Adversary is mostly about the conflict between siblings, he, a profound ruffian who lords over the population by virtue of his inheritance and position as justice of the peace in the small, isolated community; and she, his older sister, who manages to marry and bury the second wealthiest trader in the community, allowing her to live her live as "the widow," dressing as a man and running her business.  It is a dark and gory business- almost shockingly so at times.  Some of the incidents left me breathless.  Crumney buffs out the cast of characters to include the brother's main supporter, the town Beedle, the brother's crew of prostitutes that he imports to the town and sundry others.  The sister has the support of the men and families of those who work for her, and the general sympathy of the townfolk, who think her brother is a royal asshole. 

   One thing that The Adversary lacks is any scenery besides the rocky Newfoundland close.  Whether by design or accident, by the end of The Adversary I was ready to leave these shores and make my way to greener pastures.

Published 5/15/24

Mason-Dixon: Crucible of a Nation (2023)

by Edward G. Gray

Harvard University Press

   I always get excited when I see an Audiobook edition of a new work of serious history in the Libby library app.  That was the case for Mason-Dixon: Crucible of a Nation, which is billed as "the first comprehensive narrative of America's defining border."  Sold!  I love a good history of a defining border.  All histories about borders, more or less.  If someone wants to write a whole history book on a specific border, or the idea of borders generally, I'm interested.   Reading the description, I couldn't but help think of the Thomas Pynchon novel, Mason & Dixon, which is, in fact, a comprehensive (773 page) narrative of this very border.  Edward Gray never mentions Pynchon- you would think he could have pulled an epigraph out of a 773 page book about this very subject.

 Alas, humor is not in long supply in Mason-Dixon: Crucible of  a Nation.  Although there are other subjects, the Mason-Dixon line is mostly about slavery- legal on one side, illegal on the over, but importantly, the return of slaves who had escaped from unfree to free is THE theme of this book, and the line itself.   It is clear from the pages of this book- even if the author fails to acknowledge it- that the anti-slavery north aided and abetted the southern slave trade up to the start of the Civil War itself.  Another theme that emerges here is the curious manner in which the states north of the Mason-Dixon line worked to abolish slavery while remaining perfectly comfortable with restricting liberty through fixed terms of servitude, laws barring the free movement of black people and a general expression of distaste for black people, free or unfree. 

  Gray's book covers only the actual line itself- the use of the extended line in American rhetoric is left untouched, while the reader gets chapters and chapters about ongoing litigation between Pennsylvania and Maryland's landowners and squatters.  The Native Americans, of course, do not come out well, but Gray does a good job highlighting the morally ambiguous role of the Iroquois, who were power-brokers in the years before the revolution and were fond of selling the land of other tribes out from under those tribes, rendering them homeless. 

Published 5/16/24

Audiobook Review

2054 (2024)

by Eliot Ackerman & Admiral James Stravidis

  It was inevitable that 2034, Eliot Ackerman's 2022 hit, co-written with an Admiral, would spawn a sequel, but I am surprised at just so how fast Ackerman and Admiral James Stravidis cranked out 2054.  2034 was a book about a pretty conventional "war of the future" between the US and China, which culminates in the nuking of four cities- two in the US (San Diego and Galveston) and two in China (Beijing and I forget), before the Indians put a stop to everything.  The ending of 2034 foreshadowed a world where India is the emergent power, but 2054 picks up in a world where India has vanished from the world stage.  Whereas 2034 was genuine attempt to demonstrate World War III from several global perspectives, 2054 restricts itself to a plot centered in Washington DC, with brief excursions to places like Manaus, Okinawa and Lagos.  Futurist Ray Kurzweill and his idea of the singularity- the point where technological and biological intelligences fuze- is the central concept of 2054, which is on much weaker theoretical ground than the fairly conventional warfare of 2034.

    The New York Times reviewer point out, and I agree, that while an Admiral might be well equipped to add detail to a story involving nuclear missiles and an American naval assault of mainland China, there's no reason to think that he has interesting takes on the singularity or remote gene editing, both of which are only fuzzily explained in the course of 2054.   The description of a a quasi-illegitimate third term US President, whose untimely death (at the hands of a remote gene editor?) leads the cast of characters through a near civil war.   The rest of the world is an onlooker- China represented via a shadowy Nigerian businessman, India, Russia and Europe nowhere to be seen. 

  There is also a curious lack of climate related observations for a book that is set during the summer in Washington DC- which- people are always talking about the weather in Washington DC, so the idea that the country is being brought to the brink of Civil War and no one is complaining about how damn hot it is in DC in the summer just struck me as a shocking omission and suggestive of the lack of care that went into the writing of this book.  

Published 5/20/24

Continental Reckoning: 

The American West in the Age of Expansion (2023)

by Elliott West

  Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion by Elliott West won a Bancroft Prize (for US history) this year and reading the description it very much sounded like a history book I would actually want to read.  I like reading history books, but not "popular history," i.e. Presidential biographies, Civil War battles or other "Dad History" topics.  I also don't like the niche stuff, or rather, I imagine to be myself someone who likes academic niche history but I don't actually enjoy reading the books, and they don't usually get published as Audiobooks.  That leaves a narrow category, which is "broad histories written by serious authors that summarize years of scholarship in the niche areas comprising the subject."  You might get one of these books per topic, per decade, if you are lucky.   Continental Reckoning is a great example of a work that synthesizes hundreds of sources to create a newish thesis on this broad subject, the history of the American west.

   If you could describe the course of scholarship on the American West in the past 50 years you would start with the "Manifest Destiny" thesis.  The description starts with scholars in the mid 20th century providing mild critiques and elaborations of this idea that white Europeans vanquished natives and other groups in a glorious effort to populate the western United States with white Europeans, "progress is great" etc.  The scholars existed in a very siloed environment, where "the history of the west" was a small subcategory of American History, which was dominated by scholarship on the founders/early America through to the time of the Civil War.

  In the 60's and 70's there was a reaction that produced a body of scholarship that directly attacked and eventually dismantled (for those paying attention) the myth of manifest destiny and exposed the settlement of the American west as a genocidal conquest that emphasized the experience of the people who stood in the way (the Native Americans), eventually this expanded to take into account the experience of other groups like Asian-Americans, latinos and women, to create a counter narrative, emphasizing the negative.  Another strand of this critique came in the emerging areas of technological and environmental history, where the settling of the west was exhibit "A" in many of those works.

   More recently, the history of the west has been caught up in the broader trend of historical scholarship which seeks to create linkages across time and history.  A pioneer in this area was Bernard Bailyn, who wrote histories of "the Atlantic" linking America and Europe.  Another pioneer was David Hackett Fischer, who wrote Albion's Seed in 1989- which, in my mind, is the most significant history book of the past half century.   Decades later, this last trend has reached the West and Elliott West has made his academic bones advocating for a "Greater Reconstruction" thesis that seeks to link the violence of the pre/Civil War and post Civil War era with the war against Native America that took place at roughly the same time and featured many of the same players. 

  In Continental Reckoning West persuasively argues that the mid 19th century was a violent time because white Euro-Americans were violently reordering the space of America along lines that favored the thesis of white supremacy.   Any thought that such a thesis might still be considered controversial in the 21st century is simply eradicated by the weight of the evidence, drawn from the very top (Congressional Records, Presidential papers) all the way down to the bottom (letters written by soldiers involved in Native American atrocities).  At every point, West is synthesizing materials discovered by others, but he is a lively writer and has a great eye for telling detail worth including in his grand narrative.

 Reading this book got me thinking the ways the different sides in our contemporary political scene use and abuse history.  What I came away with is that the persistence sense of grievance on BOTH ends of the political spectrum is nurtured both by the facts of American history itself AND the way that different people resist or don't acknowledge those facts.   This grievance based culture- which, I want to emphasize, is present on both sides of the political spectrum, is a culture of weakness.   Might both sides benefit from acknowledging the truth of American history before attempting to move past that history?

Published 5/21/24

Jim (2024)

by Percival Everett

   It has been quite a couple of years for author and USC Professor Percival Everett.  Everett is the authorial equivalent of an English soccer player who works his way up from the 2nd division to the Premier League over the course of his career.  He's been publishing novels extremely frequently going back to 1983.  His first New York Times review came in 1994 for God's Country.  The reviewer noted it was his sixth novel and mentioned his first novel within the review.  He then got a capsule review for his next book...and that was it. more or less.   Everett hasn't exactly been obscure- he became a tenured Professor of English at USC in 2007, but the rise to Everett as an author with a general/popular audience began in 2022, where he was another example of an American author who saw an uptick after the Booker Prize opened the nominations to American authors who publish their books in the UK.  Everett didn't win, but he made the shortlist.  That was enough for me to check it out, and I came away impressed.

  Last year, Everett made another exponential leap into the public consciousness with the success of the movie version of his 2001 novel, Erasure.  That movie is currently sitting at Rotten Tomatoes at a 93/96 critics/audience split and as modest financial hit, with grosses over 20 million on a budget of 10 million.  It has certainly expanded the audience for Everett's back catalog.  He released Dr. No in 2022 and last month he published Jim, his ambitious retelling of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Considering they just gave the Pulitzer for her retelling of David Copperfield in the West Virginia coal fields (IDK I never read it), you'd have to think he has a shot at the Pulitzer Prize this year.  

 I was leery going in because of the whole rewriting of a classic text situation- not something I'm necessarily opposed to, but it needs to be pretty good to hold the attention, since the reader already knows the plot of the underlying text.   It's one thing to do that in the world of ancient epic- Homer, Beowulf, but as you get closer to the present it seems like less fertile territory.   But, as it turned out, Jim did live up the hype.  The plot is pretty spoiler intensive considering the source is a book everyone in the world at least knows about, so it's tough to talk in detail about what happens beyond the "Retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim" tagline, but Everett has a lot going on here- layers and layers of meaning, all of which was interesting and not overly clever or pedantic etc.  Jim is a real hit, and maybe a prize winner this year.

Published 5/23/24

Revisiting:  Submission by Michel Houellebecq

Original post February 4th, 2020

     I've really adhered to the "review" template over the years, while in personal conversation I describe this blog as more of a reading journal than any serious attempt to review the books I read/hear.  In the past year, I've become increasingly interested in self-editing this blog, first, reducing the total number of posts to something that could be quickly exported and/or printed if required and second, actually looking at the things I've written and trying to decide what value an individual post might contain.  One thing I've noticed, besides a general level of terseness (necessary for a blog one would think?) is that everything just gets buried online and to combat that phenomenon, you need to resurface old posts. 

   Houellebecq is, I would say, a hugely UNpopular author, particularly after his Pandemic era fracas over a sex tape (?!?)  he willingly made.  He's also frequently cited as an inspiration for the alt-right or the "incel" movement, which seems ridiculous to me because those guys don't read literary fiction unless you'd call Ayn Rand literary fiction.   I mean, I'm aware of plenty of critiques from folks who actually read literary fiction where they say, essentially, "Oh, Houellebecq is for trolls."  I have not met any trolls- or read anything written by trolls, where they say, "Houellebecq is our guy!"  It's different than say, Jordan Peterson, who actually does seem to have trolls for actual fans.

Original Post

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. 

Published 5/28/24

Diaspora (1997)

by Greg Egan

   I forget how I came to read Diaspora by Australian writer Greg Egan but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the Netflix version of the first book of The Three Body Problem by Chinese author Liu Cixin.  I am a big fan of that book and the trilogy itself.  I'm also interested in what you might call cosmic scale science fiction.  Cosmic in the sense that the story takes place beyond the Earth and that it typically deals with an issue that confronts the entire solar system/universe/galaxy/etc.  Cosmic Science Fiction has cousins (Cosmic Horror) and antecedents (War of the Worlds style alien invasion and the space opera) but Cosmic Science Fiction really begins with the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov.  Those books remain widely read- there is an ongoing Apple TV version available, the books are still in print and the first book is a canon-level title even outside of lists of science fiction books.  There is  a strong overlap between Cosmic Sci Fi and "Hard" Science Fiction since most Cosmic Science Fiction requires characters and plots that revolve around the frontiers of physics, and that is very clear in The Three Body Problem trilogy, where the later books involve heavy levels of multi-dimensionality.

  Now, having read Diaspora, I can say that compared to Diaspora, the world of The Three Body Problem is almost comically unsophisticated.   In Diaspora Egan manages to surpass the wildest passages of The Three Body Problem trilogy in the first five pages, and the pace does not, at any point, slacken.  

   I'm sure there is no point in describing the plot- either you are in or out, and if you are out you will know after the first 5 pages.  Diaspora isn't exactly a joy to read- unless you enjoy multiple pages of made up physics experiments and a narrative that progresses entirely through non-human narrators and largely takes place in ai generated virtual reality spaces- but if this review intrigues you then trust me, Diaspora is an absolute must.    And again, how did I make it this far without every hearing tell of this author, it seems like I should have crossed his path twenty years ago.

Published 5/29/24

Of Cattle and Men (2024)

by Ana Paula Maia

Translated from the Portuguese by Zoe Perry

   Of Cattle and Men by Brazilian author Ana Paula Maia can accurately be described as "Cormac McCarthy x The Jungle by Upton Sinclair in Brazil.   It's another example of a book that got a big push in the UK but was released without a PR campaign campaign in the US, which is how I came to check out the eBook from the LAPL.  Of Cattle and Men is only 99 pages long and it is a brisk 99 pages, with a narrator who barely scratches the surface of what we might call conscious thought.  He is in his own way, a hero, though, as the McCarthy references should augur, a flawed one.   You just have time to get settled into this bleak universe when the book ends.

   This book was published in Brazil in 2013- another example of the lag between an author publishing in her native language and getting any kind of attention in translation.  Maia is also another example of the South American brutalist trend, which crosses genres and nations but universally addresses the various traumas of modernity as experienced by modern South Americans.  It's one of my favorite things going these days.  I'd identify Tender is the Flesh (2017) by Augustina Bazterrica as the leading example.  

  The whole book is set in a slaughterhouse so, trigger warning if you cringe at detailed written description of meat processing. 

Published 5/30/24

The Ministry of Time (2024)

by Kailane Bradley

  The Ministry of Time is a book that was released in the UK and the US at the same time but not really promoted in the US, meaning I was able to check the Audiobook out of the library right away.  The idea of combining time travel, spy fiction and romance intrigued me, as did the rave review from the Guardian.  I enjoyed listening to the Audiobook, since the plot involves bringing a bunch of folks from the past into the present- you get to hear all the different accents- including some that go back to the 17th century.   The romance strand of the plot- between the main narrator, a British-Cambodian woman who is working as a linguistic who is promoted to be a "bridge" i.e. a facilitator between the newly coined Ministry of Time and the time-travelee's.  She is assigned to Richard Burton-esque polar explorer who is plucked from a disastrous and fatal artic expedition.  That's the romance angle- and I thought that part of it was very well executed as was the character of the narrator- I might mention that the author is also a British-Cambodian woman, so that makes sense.

  The time-travel plot and the larger story is less well drawn- not that time travel stories are ever particularly great since it's one of those examples where fantasy is masquerading as science fiction but the author feels compelled to adhere to the genre constraints of science fiction and eschew the more expansive pallet of fantasy.  Basically, you get a spy tinged rom dram com for the first two acts, and then the third act turns into a preposterous action movie.  It's fun, yes.  Quite possibly a hit, but not great literature.