The Book of Elsewhere (2024) by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville

 Book Review

The Book of Elsewhere (2024)

by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville

  Back in 2021 Reeves launched his personal IP project of BRZRKR or "beserker"- a comic book series about a deathless eternal warrior who is 77 thousand years old. I like Reeves well enough, but I haven't been a regular reader of comic books since high school and the logline didn't sound particularly inventive. Then, last month, The Book of Elsewhere was released as a "Keanu Reeves novel actually written by China Mieville."  That description caught my eye, as did several reviews which came to the conclusion that The Book of Elsewhere was way more interesting than one would expect.

  English author Chine Mieville has been on my radar for years but I haven't really honed in on him, maybe because this is his first novel in twelve years, or maybe it's because he has been categorized as a writer of fantasy instead of being properly categorized as a writer who bridges fantasy/science fiction/social science literature.  If I'd know what he was actually about I would have read through his bibliography years ago.  Based on The Book of Elsewhere, I immediately went to start with his back catalog.  \

   Somewhat confusingly, The Book of Elsewhere is described as taking place in an "alternate universe" of the BRZRKR comic, which suggests it's non-canon, but since canon is a twelve issue comic book about an immortal warrior who is also sad, my sense is that the alternate universe conceit isn't important.  The set up is that  B or UNrat- who you have to imagine as Keanu Reeves, exists in the present day as a "super soldier" for the US government.  He goes out on Black-ops, where due to the vagaries of his bezerker state, he sometimes kills both friend and foe indiscriminately.  When he comes out of his fugue state he is often sad about what he has done.  He is also sad about being unable to die.   Part of the back story here is that human civilization is actually tens of thousands of years old, and we just haven't found out about the part that came before ancient Mesopotamia.

    The book shifts between the present and the past.  Besides the main dude, there is the cast of contemporary characters, soldiers he fights with and scientists the government has recruited to study him.  There is a similarly eternal pig who has been trying to kill him over and over again for centuries. There is a "life-based" cult who worship the pig and seek to kill B/UNrat- again for millennia.  

   The main Audiobook narrator is Edoardo Bellerini who is also the Audiobook narrator for the My Struggle series by Knausgaard, which is pretty insane- just writing as someone who listened to the Audiobook for My Struggle.  This was actually a killer Audiobook because of the shifting voices back and forth through time.  As other reviewers have noted, it is, indeed, way better than it has any right to be.  I hope they make a movie/tv show out of this book rather than the comic.

Dominicana (2019) by Angie Cruz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Dominicana  (2019)

by Angie Cruz

Audubon Ballroom,  3940 Broadway, New York

Manhattan 34/33

New York: 92/105

   Looks like I miscounted both Manhattan, which is now at 34/33 and the Brooklyn etc area, which is down to 26 from 28.  I was under the impression Dominicana, about a child-bride (15) who is brough from the Dominican Republic as the wife of a Dominican immigrant, was set in Brooklyn or Queens.  If I knew more about New York I would have caught my mistake, since she ends up living across the street from the famous Audubon Ballroom, sight of the Malcolm X assassination.   I was more inclined to read this book as a horror story than any other genre, though it's clear the author has no such intent in mind.  Dominicana is another example of the "dim bulb" narrator problem in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  In seeking to present a complete geographic socio/economic portrait of America, one is forced to read about the legions of citizens with little formal education and limited economic/social success.  Nothing against Ana, who seems almost overly bright considering her situation: brought to the US at 15 with little formal education and literally locked inside her apartment, where she is subject to emotional, mental, physical and sexual abuse on what is essentially a daily basis.

  Clearly, the point is to show Ana as a hero, and she is that, but she is also a young woman who doesn't speak English and is literally locked in her apartment for more or less the entire book.  I'll tell you something else, which is that Dominican men come off extremely poorly in the pages of A Library of America.  Oscar Wao is a sympathetic Dominican but the rest of them are portrayed almost universally as wife-abusing brutes, obsessed with their code of machismo.  I can't believe how matter-of-factly domestic abuse is accepted by the women in these books, and that's speaking as someone who has worked dozens of domestic violence cases in criminal court.  I mean these are novels, not real life, can't there be some hope for these poor women?  

   I listened to Dominicana as an extremely tedious thirteen hour audiobook.  Locked inside the voice of 15 year old Ana, the listener suffers along side her in a most unpleasant fashion- and I'm saying that as someone who is 50 plus novels deep into this type of trauma-lit as a result of this particular project.  If I could do it over I would have read the book.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Diaz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) 

by Junot Diaz 

Paterson, New Jersey

New Jersey: 9/14

  Another Pulitzer Prize winner out of New Jersey.  The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is also another 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die/1,001 Novels: A Library of American cross-over book.  I read it in 2015- I think I read my girlfriend's copy that she kept on the shelf of her apartment when we first met.  It's a good pick for 1,001 Novels list- about Dominican immigrants, and a prize winner and all that.  I was pretty critical in 2015.

Published 4/28/15
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
 by Junot Diaz

  Junot Diaz is one of those contemporary authors who I managed to miss over the past decade.  I knew that Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2008.  I noticed the Audiobook edition was read by none other than Hamilton the musical writer Lin-Manuel Miranda- another cultural phenomenon I've missed.  Which is all in the way of saying I had long suspected that I wouldn't like this book, but I wanted to give it a fair shot, especially since so many other people love it.

  I'm sure there isn't a lot of advantage to be had in trashing a decade old Pulitzer Prize winner.  Diaz isn't the first person to tackle the Trujillo Dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, and this book often references The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa.  The travails of  life under the Trujillo regime are similar to the travails suffered by others under Third World dictators- or the mid twentieth century totalitarian dictators of the World War II era. 

   The other part of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao involves the life of young immigrants in America, Oscar and his older sister.    I can't remember a book I've enjoyed less.  I think it was probably the combination of Diaz' "street smart" jargon- which I believe is a major reason people love it- and the voice of Lin-Manuel Miranda who I clearly do not appreciate in any way shape or form.  I'm not saying this book or Miranda is not good, the popularity of both and the general universal critical acclaim would indicate that they are both excellent at they do. but no, not for me. I'm also going to take a pass on Diaz' other books because I just don't think I could take it.

Exhalation (2019)by Ted Chiang

 Book Review

Exhalation (2019)

by Ted Chiang

  What is crazy about author/intellectual Ted Chiang is that he has 125 reference in the New York Times data set and none of them are a full-length book review of Exhalation, his 2019 short-story collection.  Only five years later he's been hailed as a genius-level thinker about the potential impacts of AI on our society.   I believe Chiang's real break-through outside the science-fiction community was the success of Arrival, based on a short story from his first collection.  Arrival hit theaters in 2016, so that makes it doubly surprising that Exhalation didn't rate a full New York Times book review.

  You'd have to chalk it up to the double prejudice against genre fiction and short stories.  It's interesting to me that Chiang is known as an AI expert, because I think his most interesting stories are the ones that deal with religion.  In this collection Omphalos- which won a Locus Award in 2020- is a good example.  Omphalos takes place in a world where "young earth creationism" was proved true and accepted as scientific fact in a world that is otherwise similar to ours.  Basing science fiction stories on religious concepts or themes is a particularly interesting approach to science fiction- and you could almost call it a different genre, one I think that Chiang may have invented?  I certainly can't think of another example- maybe Chabon's alt-history The Secret Yiddish Police-Man's Union.  But the AI stuff is good too- in this collection The Lifecycle of Software Objects was a particularly interesting take on the after life of digitally created "pets."  That story caused me to think more about AI then I have in months.

  

American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

American Pastoral (1997)

by Philip Roth

Newark, New Jersey

New Jersey: 8/14

  I read American Pastoral in December, 2017 for the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die project.  'Twas a simpler time, ha ha.   I wouldn't say I "discovered" Roth through the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die project, but I certainly conquered his bibliography thanks to the start 1,001 Books gave me.  Roth amazingly placed eight books on the 1,001 Books project- a truly astonishing amount and even including  a lesser work like The Breast, among its selections. If you want to pick one major difference between the construction of the two lists (besides the obvious difference in area covered), it's the decision by 1,001 Books editors to include multiple picks for MANY authors, while so far editor Susan Straight hasn't done it once.  

  As I said back in 2017, American Pastoral was from his series of Nathan Zuckerman novels- his suburban everyman character, though in this book he is merely the narrator and the book is about a his neighbor and his 60's radical-bomber daughter.  Roth is a great pick for New Jersey but personally I would have preferred The Plot Against America which, like many of Roth's books, is also set in Newark, New Jersey.

Published 12/19/17
American Pastoral (1997)
by Philip Roth

  Man, the hits keep coming for late career Philip Roth. American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and even though he inevitably seems to write about weird old guys from New Jersey, he never writes the same book twice, dabbling in meta fiction, speculative fiction and the roman a clef despite having established his initial literary reputation on the back of realistic portraits of urban life in the northeast.   American Pastoral is also one of Roth's Zuckerman novels, about Nathan Zuckerman, successful novelist generally assumed to be the alter ego of Roth.

  Despite American Pastoral being narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, the book is about Seymour "Swede" Levov, a Jewish-American student athlete of vast renown, grown old and successful, but tormented by the 1960's radical inspired bombing of the local postal office by his 16 year old daughter.  Although Zuckerman narrates from the present, most of American Pastoral takes the form of Zuckerman imagining Levov's life, culminating in the bombing, but moving back and forth within different periods in the past.

  I thought it was a little strange that this was the book that won Roth a Pulitzer.  By 1997 he had been a prospective Nobel Prize for Literature winner for a decade, and he still had not won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  Ultimately, American Pastoral derives its strength from the well observed horror of a parent at the choices made by a child.  That is under developed literary territory.

1,001 Novels A Library of America: Capes and Tidewaters, Shifting Coasts and Capitals

 1,001 Novels A Library of America:

 Capes and Tidewaters, Shifting Coasts and Capitals

District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina

   True, I haven't finished up New York/New Jersey quite yet, but the press of needing new books to read waits for no person.   The third chapter in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America are the states which run north to south against the Atlantic Ocean, from Delaware in the north to South Carolina in the south.  This is the most diverse chapter yet, ranging from the majority black capital to the oldest of the old Confederacy states in the south, South Carolina.  In terms of personal experiences, I went to college in Washington DC so I'm familiar with that area and the parts of the surrounding states that interface with it.  I went to Baltimore a couple times in college.   I've drive through Virginia and North Carolina and I've never set foot inside South Carolina, but know plenty about its history.

  Delaware only merits three books, making it the least represented state in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project by a good margin.  Looks like  77 books for the whole chapter, so I should be able to knock it out in less time than either New England or New York/New Jersey.  I am very much looking forward from moving on from New York City and the travails of its citizens.

Eddie and the Cruisers (1980) by P.F. Kluge

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Eddie and The Cruisers (1980)

P.F. Kluge

Berkeley Heights, New Jersey

New Jersey: 7/14

    Editor Susan Straight called Eddie and The Cruisers an "iconic novel of 1950s rock-and-roll," and I was surprised to find out the book itself is hugely out of print (a copy costs 100 at Amazon) AND unavailable to check-out from the Los Angeles Public Library.  It is also unavailable from the library as a Kindle book, forcing me to read Eddie and The Cruisers on the native Libby app on my cell phone.  Reading a 300 page book on my phone is possible but unpleasant because the screen is so small: So much flipping of virtual pages that it becomes a distraction and at times simply unbearable.  There is also the distraction of other things to look at on ones phone, making it hard to focus on reading a book.

  Even so I feel like I'm not being overly negative when I observe that Eddie and The Cruisers, iconic though it might be, is not actually a good book, in the sense of how it is written, the plot or any other themes the author may be trying to express.   I did look up the movie and specifically the sound-track, this being a solid piece of IP even if it isn't a great book.  The band they found to perform the music of Eddie and The Cruisers was an east-coast bar band that essentially functioned as a Bruce Springsteen cover band in fact if not in name.

  That got me thinking about the New Jersey bar-rock scene, which this book somewhat describes.  While at some level I know that artists as disparate as Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi came "from" New Jersey, I didn't know what that meant, and Eddie and The Cruisers gave me some idea of the milieu.  In that regard it's a great pick for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, New Jersey chapter, but otherwise not worth the effort to dig up.  I do want to see the movie after reading the book. 

Pink Slime (2024) by Fernanda Trias

 Book Review

Pink Slime (2024)

by Fernanda Trias

   I confused Uruguayan author Fernanda Trias with Fernanda Melchor (Mexican), but I read Pink Slime because it is another excellent example of the wave of speculative/realist fiction emerging out of Latin America.  I could name a half dozen books just from my blog- Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez (Argentina), is one of my favorite books of this decade.  Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (2023) by Agustina Bazterrica, who also wrote Tender is the Flesh, one of my favorite books from 2019.  There is You Glow in the Dark (2024)by Liliana Colanzi, and I'm sure, others that I've missed.  These books exist alongside their non-speculative counterparts- authors like the aforementioned Melchor, and Brazilian Ana Paula Maia.

  I was so anxious to read Pink Slime that I read it on my phone, on the native reader for the Libby library app, which was a major sacrifice.  Pink Slime takes place in an unnamed Latin American or possibly Southern European nation- there is a coast line, towns further inland and geographic features of the city that evoke specific cities- la rambla (Barcelona) and barrio alta (Lisbon) but appear to be used generically here.  The narrator and protagonist is unnamed, working as a caretaker for Mauro who has the syndrome where he never feels full from eating and is essentially constantly hungry.  Mauro's wealthy parents are absent for a reason unexplained, and the narrator is housebound as the coastal city is beset by a killing red wind that flays humans alive after infection.  Respite comes in the form of a thick, bad smelling fog that allows transit around the increasingly deserted city.  Food, the pink slime of the title, comes from a chicken processing plant, newly constructed amid dwindling food supplies.

   Pink Slime is a novel of pre-apocalyptic survival and I found it compelling, worth picking up from the library for sure.

Jernigan (1991) by David Gates

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Jernigan (1991)

by David Gates

Trenton, New Jersey

New Jersey: 6/14

  Jernigan was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1992.  It was the first novel by author David Gates, who went on to publish one additional novel and two collections of short stories, most recently in 2015.  It's pretty crazy to read a novel by an author who made it to the last three of the Pulitzer Prize with his first book and then basically quit. Like the protagonist of The Sports Writer, he did parlay it into a journalism career, where he was a writer and editor at Newsweek until 2008.   Jernigan is an example of a sad dad, suburban New Jersey type, vice: alcoholic, issue: PTSD from wife's dramatic death(running drunk out of their suburban pool party, getting behind the wheel of her car and backing out of the driveway into the path of an oncoming truck, which hits her car and kills her). 

  Like all substance abuse narratives, I found the character rather self-dramatizing. Substance abusers are all similar in that they act like they are the only people to grapple with a particular problem and uncaring of the fact that their particular failure also impacts other members of their community who often are suffering from the exact same issue.  Picking up in the aftermath of his wives death, Jernigan suffers another trauma when his famous-painter dies in a house fire, which also destroys all his unsold paintings. This double trauma sends him into a real spiral, where he falls in bed with the singlish mom of his son's girlfriend, and finds himself living in her "suburban survivalist" home, where she brews moonshine and raises rabbits in the basement to eat. 

  Single mom and her daughter have their own issues, and the whole situation can only be described as a god awful suburban mess. At least, though, Jernigan is an interesting, articulate guy, and there was enough incident in the plot to keep me from crying tears of boredom. 

Dear Edward (2020) by Ann Napolitano

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Dear Edward (2020)

by Ann Napolitano

West Milford, New Jersey

New Jersey: 5/14

   Here is an observation about the psycho-geography of New Jersey:  It is the area "west" of the New York City monolith where people go to break semi-free of the high pressure environment and replace their fifth story walk-up apartments with spacious ranch-style homes on cul-de-sacs.  This psychic landscape was made possible by the automobile, and it is worth noting that any Jersey-ite and light out from any point in New Jersey and simply drive west and end up in California.  There is also a southern section for the Philadelphia/Trenton era that serves as a mirror to the northern New York focused area, and then there is the rest, which includes some tourist areas and farm country.

  Dear Edward is the northern most of the northern New Jersey cohort, taking place on the border between New Jersey and the beginning of the southern reaches of upstate New York. It is clearly suburban environment, and the ties to New York are dim.  Dear Edward is a cross between domestic lit and a thriller.  Edward is a young boy who is the sole survivor of a domestic flight that goes down over the United States flying between New York and Los Angeles.  He has to go live with his (childless) Aunt (mother's sister) and her husband in the suburbs of New Jersey.  None of these characters are interesting, from the baby-hungry Aunt who has suffered a miscarriage, to her husband, a nerdy stock character out of touch with his feelings, to Edward himself.  A real significant moment comes when Edward sneaks into his Uncle's private study and finds racks full of...western novels by Louis L'amour. Sheesh!

  I listened to the 13 hour audiobook- huge mistake since the whole book is portions told from a variety of perspectives of the passengers on the airplane before they die alternated with chapters about Edward's life after the crash.  As interesting as life as a sole-survivor of an airplane crash might sound, Edward manages to bring no interest to his part in the book. One minute into the Audiobook, you know we are going to be listening to sad Edward mope around for the rest of the book.

  There is some relief in the portions narrated by the passengers on the doomed flight, but I thought it was pretty risible that all of the profiled characters who were people FROM the New York area who were ALL travelling to Los Angeles for various reasons having to do with work or family.  Anyone who has ever been on New York to LA flight knows that many, if not a majority of the people on that flight are people from LA going back there, and that another huge group is foreign tourists, none of whom, apparently, were on this flight.

  Like many of the low-stakes works of domestic fiction on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list, Dear Edward has an almost claustrophobic level of myopia about the world it portrays.   I would also add "children suffering from extreme PTSD" as another category on the list of the dim-bulb narrators of American fiction: Nothing wrong with being poor or even illiterate but it does make an interesting book harder to write.