Under the Eye of the Big Bird (2024) by Hiromi Kawakami

Book Review

Under the Eye of the Big Bird (2024)

by Hiromi Kawakami

Translated by Asa Yoneda

   I checked the latest book by Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami after reading the New York Times review a couple weeks ago.  The review ticked most of my boxes:  It's translated from a foreign language and combines literary fiction techniques with a science fiction story.  Under the Eye takes the form of a connected series of short-stories about a horrifying far-future scenario where the human population of the Earth has collapsed, leaving the remnants grasping for a means of survival.  For the first fifty pages or so, the reader has no perspective on the situation, and it makes for a strange reading experience.  For example, the first story is about a girl who lives near a clone factory where humans are made from the remnants of animals, leaving each human with a small bone embedded inside of them which resembles the animal from which they are constructed.

   About a third of the way through the book Kawakami fills us in: Earth is populated by clones, sentient AI and different groups of humans, watched over by two formerly human, now cloned scientists who have designed this plan to ensure human survival by promoting isolation in an attempt to press fast-forward on evolution and come up with a kind of human that can survive and repopulate the Earth.   It is weird, wild stuff, with a time-scale of thousands, even tens of thousands of years.  I really enjoyed Under the Eye and recommend it heartily to the literary fiction/science fiction cross-over crowd.

Orbital (2024) by Samantha Harvey

Audiobook Review

Orbital (2024)

by Samantha Harvey

   The New York Times review of Orbital by Samantha Harvey was maybe the first book review I read this year.  The way it was described made me wince- it's set on the international space station and switches between the perspectives of the multi national astronauts onboard as the travel around the planet several times (each orbit is another chapter).  They think about stuff, and stuff happens on Earth- a strong tsunami in the Pacific is the major earth-bound event- and that's the book.

  In January I told myself I'd read it if it got nominated for the Booker Prize.  It did. And then I put it off again because, again, my feeling was this is an example of the uninteresting side of the coin that is combining literary fiction with elements of speculative fiction.  There is, to be sure, a "realist" non sci fi literature of near-earth travel, but I'm just saying setting a book in space is a typical element of science fiction.  In Orbital we've got that and then the thoughts of these astronauts.  I told myself, "I'll read it if it makes the Booker shortlist, and there you go.  I was able to check the five-hour audiobook out of the library the day the shortlist was announced and listened to it at the gym and running for a couple of days.

  I can see the perspective of the Booker committee.  First, it's short, 144 pages, which is an UNDENIABLE advantage in competing for the Booker Prize.  Second it's got an international perspective- the most international perspective, you could argue, which suits the favor that the Booker Prize shows to outward looking fiction.  Third, she's an English lit insider who draws comparison Virginia Woolf for her writing style and themes and her 2009 novel Wilderness was longlisted.

  Personally, I thought it was a good Audiobook because of the length and the different voices of the astronauts- Russian, American, Japanese.  There are also several "set-piece" style descriptions of the Earth itself which are distinctive and memorable. But Orbital is def an example of modernist-inspired fictions where "nothing happens."  I'm sure that statement would drive Harvey nuts, but that is my opinion.   Whatever my personal feelings there is no denying that Harvey has the literary pedigree and that Orbital has the kind of moxy the Booker Judges seem to reward every year so...who knows. Maybe the winner.

Hum (2024) by Helen Phillips

 Book Review

Hum (2024)

by Helen Phillips

  I like American author Helen Phillips- I read her 2019 book, The Need and enjoyed it. I thought it was a good example of a way domestic fiction: A book out the difficulties of raising children, can be made interesting by the use of techniques drawn from speculative fiction: Throw some robots on top of that tired domestic routine!   This is the same kind of deal- Mom has just been laid off from her job in a decrepit future metropolis where the AQI makes outside a no-go.  The kids are shuttled from in door location to in door location and Mom and her task-rabbit husband live in a windowless box apartment.  Life is grim.  Mom agrees to undergo anti-surveillance facial modification surgery in exchange for a healthy payment and she uses part of it to buy her family a three day trip to the walled botanical garden in the heart of the city.

   The "Hum" of the title are future ai powered androids that serve as replacement humans in various capacities- mostly as representatives of the future government or minders of the public peace.   Although the over-riding theme is still the difficulties of being mom in the present/future world, the speculative elements make it less tedious than a book sent in the present or recent past that deals with the exact same subjects. 

Creation Lake (2024) by Rachel Kushner

 Audiobook Review

Creation Lake (2024)

by Rachel Kushner

  I've been looking forward to Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner's new novel since I finished her last novel, The Mars Room, back in 2017.  Kushner is exactly the type of author I'm looking for:  A woman who doesn't write about women who are wives and moms.  Rather, her protagonists are women on the fringes of society, i.e. interesting subjects, and her books sparkle with life.   In Flamethrowers, the subject was biker gangs.  In The Mars Room, it was a woman doing life for murder.  Here the narrator and protagonist is "Sadie Smith"(a nom de spy), an American woman with a graduate degree in literature (or something like that) who has eschewed a life of academic stiving for work as, first, an undercover informant for the FBI (we call them "CI's" or confidential informant, in the biz) and then as a spy-for-hire.

  Creation Lake takes place during one of her gigs- an assignment to infiltrate a commune of rural eco-radicals who are "led" by Bruno Lacombe, a mysterious intellectual who lives in a cave.  Sadie is an interesting lady:  She's smart and funny and ruthlessly immoral. In quiet moments during the activities of this book, she reflects wryly on the case that got her booted out of the FBI CI program (she set up a young man and his older mentor in an eco-terrorism bust, only to see them both acquitted at trial on the grounds of entrapment).  She also enjoys reading the lengthy email missives from Bruno to his followers which have a distinctly Knaussgardian flair.  

  Equally at the center of Creation Lake is the French region of Guyenne- which is in the south-west of the country, with a rich tradition of Neanderthal cave artwork and rural despair.  Through the medium of Bruno's emails, Smith learns about the Cagot, a poorly understood caste of outcasts from the region.  Her contemplation of Bruno's emails and her own trips around the area in pursuit of her goal elevate Guyenne to supporting character status. 

  If this wasn't a Rachel Kushner novel, I would have been waiting for Sadie to develop a conscience but that doesn't happen.  Rather, Smith becomes determined to see the plan out and we are invited to watch the proceedings unfold.  Creation Lake isn't a spy novel exactly, but it does provide those pleasures in addition to introducing a character who could possibly establish some kind of IP franchise. I checked out the Audiobook because it was read by the author, and I thought she did a great job. Creation Lake deserves the Booker shortlist and it could possibly win that award. 

Brotherless Night (2023) by V. V. Ganeshananthan

 Audiobook

Brotherless Night (2023)

by  V. V. Ganeshananthan

Read by  Nirmala Rajasingam

   Brotherless Night is another great book coming out of the post-Tamil War Tamil diaspora. There's been a small flood of Sri Lankan authored books hitting the international market, typically by making it onto the Booker Longlist.  I heard about Brotherless Night after it won the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction-  I couldn't resist a prize winner about the Tamil War in Sri Lanka, which I think will prove to be one of the key current events from that period in world history- it lasted 26 years from 1983 to 2009, and Ganeshananthan's narrator and protagonist, Sashikala Kulenthiren is there to take us through it from the perspective of a young woman from a well-off Tamil family (one daughter, four brothers) who is destined to become a doctor.  

  There is nothing magical realist, post-modern or metafictional about Ganeshananthan's approach- which is so straight forward it often reads like a biography memoir vs. a novel.  Sashi is a bright, engaged young woman living in a momentous time, but hers is the only perspective we get from the book.  There's no secondary plot or skipping around in time- the reader gets Sashi's experience, having her normal life disrupted, losing all but her youngest brother to the liberation movement and then witnessing the horrors o the tamil's themselves, who were as ruthless to their own internal rivals and dissidents as the Sri Lankan government, the Indian Peacekeepers, who end up sowing more misery with their ill-considered troop deployment and of course the Sri Lankan government, which really seems befuddled more than anything else by a rebellion in a part of the country that was so thoroughly comprised of this one, rebellious ethnic group that middle ground became impossible to find.

  Ganeshananthan moonlights as a field medic at a Tamil jungle hospital and witnesses all manner of catastrophe before getting involved in an effort to document the atrocities committed on all sides.  This puts her in a rough spot with the Tamils, but her service as a field medic and sister of 3 Tiger brothers earns her a ticket to the United States, from where she witnesses the end of the war.   It is QUITE a journey- 100x more vital than ANY American author.  She's not particularly accomplished as a prose stylist but the story is so powerful it doesn't matter.

 It was also a fantastic audiobook because of the accents involved- all of which would be impossible for me to do in my head.  Fully recommend the Audiobook edition- 20 hours long.

Toward Eternity (2024) by Anton Hur

 Book Review

Toward Eternity (2024)

by Anton Hur

  Before Toward Eternity was published last month I only knew Korean author Anton Hur as a translator of Korean Fiction into English.  Specifically his translation of Cursed Bunny, Bora Chung's 2021 collection of short stories, put him on my radar.  Thus, when I read that his debut novel was a mind bending work of science fiction, I had to have it and indeed I bought it during a recent visit to Powell's City of Books in Portland. 

   The plot starts out as a borderline philosophical inquiry into the nature of being: If you replace a sentient being molecule for molecule with something else (here the "something else" is called a "nanite"), is that new thing the same as the old sentient being, something different entirely, what?   Hur then abruptly shifts to a far future world where the sentient androids created by nanites have eradicated natural humanity- or close to it- the only thing standing between natural humanity and extinction being a dissident bloc of nanites who seek to preserve diversity in the universe.

   It is a...wild ride and a clear example of the result when speculative fiction and literary fiction collide.  I really enjoyed Toward Eternity and highly recommend it for the cosmic science fiction reader. 

Nova Swing (2006) by M. John Harrison

 Audiobook

Nova Swing (2006)

by M. John Harrison

Read by Jim Frangione

   Nova Swing is a 2006 science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke and Phillip K. Dick awards.  It's the second volume in a three volume series that traverses the future-noir/new weird territory that readers associate with China Mieville, Jeff VanDerMeer, J.G. Ballard and the Stugatsky brothers from Russia.  Also the films of Tarkovsky.  Which is to say that it isn't as good as any of those reference points, but is in the same ballpark.  I found it because I plugged the name of Mieville and VanDerMeer into Facebook AI and this popped out as an option- I'd never heard of M. John Harrison, who is an incredibly prolific writer of both genre fiction and non-fiction

   Unfortunately, Nova Swing was not a great audiobook for a couple of reasons. First, it's the second book of a three volume set, so if you haven't heard volume 1, you don't know anything about the underlying scenario which is some kind of future universe where some kind of interdimensional incident has generated a set-off landscape where "tourists" bring back "artifacts" helped by tour guides, including the main character in the case and policed by local detectives who act like they are in the 1940's, even though it is set in the far future.

   The other issue with the Nova Swing audiobook is that all the name and proper nouns are made up gobbledgook words- the interdimensional locale is called the Saudade Event Site, the larger area is the Kefahuchi tract and the characters have names like Vic Serotonin and Liv Hula.  And even though I don't see the comparison anywhere, much of the vibe of Nova Swing reads like a straightened-out, genrefied version of William S. Burroughs non-sensical cut up sci fi landscapes like those in the similarly named Nova Express.   

  

  

The Power Broker: Volume 1 (1974) by Robert Caro

 Audiobook Review

The Power Broker: Volume 1 (1974)

Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

by Robert Caro

Read by Robertson Dean

(2011)

   Lists like the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America and 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die commonly keep fiction and non-fiction books separate.  For example, in the two lists I just cited, there are zero works of non fiction.  At least with the 1,001 Novels project the bias is in the title, but the 1,001 Books list has no excuse.   One recent list to buck this separation is the recently published New York Times Top Books of the 21st Century, which combines fiction and non-fiction.   Such an approach might have benefited the 1,001 Novels project.   You can see why if you listen to the Audiobook of The Power Broker: Volume 1, which is just about as New York a book as one could possibly imagine.  Indeed, there is an argument that its inclusion is required if a reader wants to really know New York, city and state.  No single person has had a greater impact on how the entire state LOOKS than Moses.   

  Volume 1, which lasts 22 hours in Audiobook format, handles his rise, and takes us to the cusp of his monumental bridge, tunnel and freeway building projects that remade Manhattan in his image.  We learn that Moses came from a patrician upbringing- a key element of his success is that he never needed to make money from his work and that his vision was inspired by the idea of a non-partial bureaucratic technocrat, who overcame all obstacles to benefit "the people."  Caro presents it as an idea he came up with while he was doing post-graduate studies in Oxford University, and his school-child dreams of a core of highly disciplined, uncorruptible state employees was about as far from the facts on the ground in New York City as could be possible.

   After some early career missteps, he was rescued from obscurity by a friendship with Belle Moskowitz, a reformer and early supporter of future Governor of New York Al Smith.  Moskowitz recommended Robert Moses to Smith as a man who could get things done, as someone who could help Smith implement the progressive ideas he wanted to advance to distance himself from the Tammany Hall political machine from which he sprang and get him in the running for a run at President.  Smith and Moses were an odd couple to be sure, and the depiction of their friendship is the unquestionable highlight of the book.   

   In Volume 1, most of the action is stage setting, as Moses begins to develop his vision of parks and freeways to drive to those parks.  Most of the action takes place on the tip of Long Island, where Moses spent the 20's and 30's in endless litigation with the land barons who owned all the property out there.  Parks were really popular with the general public and the press, particularly when those standing in the way are wealthy captain of industry.  It's clear both from the action of the book and Caro's relentless foreshadowing that the combination of power and lack of public accountability would turn Moses into a monster, but by the end of Volume 1 that moment is still on the far-ish horizon.

Clockers (1992) by Richard Price

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Clocker (1992)

by Richard Price

Jersey City, New Jersey

New Jersey: 13/13

  HUZZAH it is the end of Chapter 3 of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, edited by Susan Straight.  Chapter 3 is called "Empire State and Atlantic Shores," or you might just say NY/NJ. Like the last chapter (New England), Chapter 3 is a culturally and geographically cohesive area. You could make an argument that far upstate New York is more contiguous with New England geographically speaking, but there is no denying that upstate New York is still New York state.   New Jersey, meanwhile, is essentially a suburb of New York City- though Southern New Jersey, with it's urban proximity to Philadelphia, is like the converse of upstate New York: It's part of the state of New Jersey, but there are argument for lumping it with Pennsylvania.  

   The last book in this chapter is Clockers, the 1992 crime verite novel about a crew of cocaine dealers working out of Jersey City, and the cops who stalk them.  Clockers was a hit in its own right, spawned a generally well received 1995 movie version courtesy of Spike Lee AND was the direct inspiration for HBO's The Wire, which Price also wrote for, in 2002.   I'm sure I read Clockers around the time it was first published- I would have been in high school when it was published and I'm sure I read it either then or while I was in college- probably the paperback edition.   Landing at close to 600 pages, Clockers is really two novels interwoven, the novel about the cocaine seller, Ronald 'Strike' Dunham, who favors yoo-hoo to self-medicate his ulcer and the novel about Rocco Klein, a police investigator working for the District Attorney homicide squad.   Their paths intertwine when Strike is tasked by his boss to kill Darryl, his second-in-command, and assume his position.  The murder happens outside the fast food restaurant where Darryl works, and Klein gets involved when Strike's younger, hard-working brother, confesses to the crime and claims self-defense. 

  The confession doesn't sit right with Klein, who spends the rest of the book trying to get the bottom of the murder and what he believes to be a false confession.  Strike embodies the "tortured drug dealer" archetype, though reading Clockers reminded me of the insanity of the economics of inner-city cocaine street level dealing.  As an experienced criminal defense lawyer I can say that the only thing dumber than selling drugs on the actual street is bank robbery.   It's funny because Clockers is chock filled with Strike reflecting on the impossibility of working a "straight" job, and I often think how, personally, working a shitty fast-food job would be WAY better than working as a street-level criminal.

  I'm so glad to be done with NY/NJ.

Mara and Dann (1999) by Doris Lessing

 Book Review

Mara and Dann (1999)

by Doris Lessing

   Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2007, which led to an early "viral" moment of her nonchalantly reacting to the news.   When she won, the Committee noted that her bibliography included 50 titles and several genres.  Lessing had four novels on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list, which was published just before she won the Nobel.  One of them, her 1979 book Shikasta, is from the science fiction portion of her bibliography, like Mara and Dann. 

   Mara and Dann flopped back in 1999- the New York Times called it flatfooted and tedious.  It's a picaresque about a brother sister duo who have to flee southern Africa in the far-future, after a new ice age has rendered the northern hemisphere uninhabitable. Unlike the New York Times, I enjoyed Mara and Dann, specifically the Audiobook.  Picaresque's are similarly well suited for the Audiobook format, since you are taken on a journey with the characters.    Lessing's future Africa, called Ifrik in the book, keeps the reader in the dark for the first portion of the book, these austere portions are the ones that work best.  As Mara and Dann work their way north the world becomes more familiar, and for me, less interesting.

 Still, I'd rather listen to Mara and Dann again before I'd listen to an Audiobook narrated by a precocious but confused adolescent living in difficult circumstances.