The North Water (2016) by Ian McGuire

 Audiobook Review

The North Water (2016)

by Ian McGuire

   English author Ian McGuire- I just like the work- I read The Abstainer (2020) in 2021, and when I saw he had a new book coming out (White River Crossing), I went back and checked out his 2016 novel, The North Water in Audiobook format on the theory that a novel about an ill-fated whaling journey into the great white north in the 19th century would be more entertaining to listen to than to read.  It certainly was the case for The Abstainer, which featured a panoply of Northern English accents.    McGurie's talent is that he writes historical fiction which feels modern when you read it, with characters who manage to voice philosophical musings while they are starving to death on the arctic icesheet. Compare McGuire to writers like Melville or Joseph Conrad- who express modernist themes but have characters who are moored to their time and place.  McGuire occupies that liminal space between genre and literary fiction that I really favor, and if I can get the Audiobook without waiting, so much the better.

Beasts of the Sea (2023) by Lida Turpeinen

Audiobook Review

Beasts of the Sea (2023)

by Lida Turpeinen

Translated from the Finnish

by David Hackston

  Beast of the Sea caught my eye simply because it is translated from the Finnish, and this is only the seventh book translated from Finnish to make to this blog (Unknown Soldiers (1954) by Vaino Linna, Crossing (2019)by Pajtim Statovci, Meek Heritage (1938) by Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Year of the Hare (1975)  by Arto Paasilinna, The Summer Book (1972) by Tove Jansson and the The Manila Rope (1957) by Veijo Meri.  Sillanpää is an obscure Nobel Prize winner, and the rest are one-translation wonders.   

  The hook for Beast of the Sea is that it is only loosely a "novel", really more a set of connected novella's/short stories centered around the geographic area where the Steller's Sea Cow was discovered and hunted to extinction within a generation of being "discovered" by the west.  So one bit is about the naturalist on the expedition where the Steller's Sea Cow was discovered. Another bit is about a Finnish naturalist who came to possess one of the only skeletons of said Steller's Sea Cow after extinction. Then you've got a part with the English wife of a Russian Governor of Alaska (rough gig). Each chapter contains conventional novel stuff with more scientific stuff.   The link that runs through each chapter is just as much the place where the Sea Cow came from as the Cow itself. 

Things We Lost to the Water(2021) by Eric Nguyen

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Things We Lost to the Water (2021)

by Eric Nguyen

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 15/28

   This is the first Vietnamese American author to make it into 1,001 Novels: A Library of American since Ocean Vuong represented Hartford, Connecticut in the New England chapter.  It's hard for me to read ANY book written by a Vietnamese American author without thinking about the work- fictional and non-fictional by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen.  Ocean Vuong though, is the more obvious comparison- so obvious that I wonder if comparing the two writers constitutes a microaggression.   As writers they have very different styles- Vuong being a poet-at-heart who deigns to write fiction and Nguyen being a more conventional type of author.

  Things We Lost to the Water is a very conventional coming-of-age story, sub-category immigrant experience, sub-category New Orleans, sub-category LGBT.  In that sense, I enjoyed the author-protagonist stand-in since he was a rare character from this part of the country that actually cares about books, literature, the life of the mind- something sorely, sorely lacking in the literature of the deep south thus far.   Unlike Nguyen, who has concentrated his gaze at the heart of the South Vietnamese government and military milleu of Southern California, both Nguyen and Vuong write from the edges- Vuong in New England and now Nguyen in the South. Unlike Vuong, who has a rock-solid working-class/underclass background, Nguyen's fictional situation is more complicated- his Dad, who stays in Vietnam is a college professor who falls afoul of the new regime and his Mom is a teacher.  In America, Mom becomes a nail tech, and her children struggle with fitting in.

  Like other Vietnamese American authors, Nguyen captures the feelings of loss, abandonment and anger that track American feelings about the Vietnamese war itself- it is an ambiguous situation, to say the least. 

Summer of Fire and Blood (2025) by Lyndal Roper

 Audiobook Review

Summer of Fire and Blood (2025)

by Lyndal Roper

    Billed as "the first history of the German Peasant's War in a generation," Summe of Fire and Blood delivers on the promise, bringing the English language historiography of this poorly understood episode in early modern German history into the present.  It was also a great Audiobook snag- the kind of book I'm really looking for in the Libby app.  The problem with being interested in a subject like "Early Modern German history" is primarily that most of it is written in German.  What is written in English is always going to be heavily weighted towards the academic//specialist market.   I thought going in that this was a German language translation, but no, it is apparently true that the first history of the German Peasant's War in a generation was written English.

   The use of the 'German Peasants War' (instead of German Peasants Revolt, which is what I grew up with) should tell you about the perspective of the author- it's very James Scott/David Graeber, looking at things from the bottom up and trying to tell the story of people who weren't well educated and didn't write everything down.   Roper goes hard on the origins, motives and the heady days when various bands of roving peasants were able to sack unguarded Monasteries and bully townsfolk into submission.  They were benefited from the generally chaotic political situation in German speaking areas- polities were split between conventional nobility, church-run states and independent towns. 

  The ruling authorities didn't seem to be particularly aware that such a thing as a peasant revolt on a large-scale was even possible.   Of course, gradually the nobility got their act together and when it finally came to peasant armies vs. the military of the early modern era, the peasants got crushed.  The payback was brutal- which Roper covers but doesn't really dwell upon.   Surely there is a Foucauldian take that would emphasis the payback portion over the war itself.

Strip Tease (1993) by Carl Hiaasen

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Striptease (1993)

by Carl Hiaasen

Florida: 2/23

   It's hard not to compare Carl Hiaasen with Elmore Leonard- both blend crime fiction with humor and they both enjoy a Florida setting for their books. Strip Tease got a movie version with peak Demi Moore and not-peak Burt Reynolds.  It's mostly been forgotten but thanks to Rotten Tomatoes I can tell you that it has an 11/24 critics/audience split, which is just about as low as you can go for a mass-market R-rated film.   After taking a couple states off from Audiobooks, I'm back into them for Florida because of the number of crime-fiction//detective fiction titles, favorite genres for Audiobook editions.   At 15 hours (464 pages in book format), Striptease is almost unbelievably long for a work of crime-fiction.  It almost amazingly manages to stay in PG13 territory despite large parts of the book taking place inside a strip club and a plot involving several murders.

  Erin Grant is a classic "stripper with a heart of gold," working the exotic dancing gig so she can pay off her lawyer while she is battles her criminal ex for custody of their young daughter.   Besides the length, Striptease was a relief to listen to after months of downtrodden poor people living in the rural deep south. 

Glass House (1994) by Christine Wiltz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Glass House (1994)

by Christine Wiltz

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 14/28

  HALF WAY THROUGH LOUISIANA. Chug-chug that train be moving. I am deep into New Orleans.  New Orleans and environs makes up more than half of the Louisiana chapter, which sounds right to me.  Interesting literary subjects of Louisiana being 1) New Orleans: It's places and peoples and 2) Cajun/Bayou country.  The rest is just plantation country with more mixed-race people in positions of power.   Wiltz is another one of these roughly contemporary women writers that editor Susan Straight favors in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Wiltz has one best-seller, about the "last madam" of New Orleans.  She's also got a handful of genre titles (The Neal Rafferty New Orleans Mystery Series, 1-III).  Finally, there is Glass House, a conventional 1990's era "city novel" centered around the experience of urban living during the fraught decades between the 1970's and 2000's. Inevitably, these books are written from a white perspective, with African American's showing up in sympathetic supporting roles that are often fraught with ambiguity. 

  Here, the protagonist is a newly single woman moving back to New Orleans to inherit her spinster Aunt's rickety old mansion.  She is still coping with the experience of having her parents murdered by an African American teen inside their Mom n Pop grocery store- classic 80's/90's issue book murder right there.  She reconnects with an old flame struggling with his own set of issues, and the darkly charismatic contractor/local drug kingpin who is also the son of her deceased Aunt's housekeeper-for-life. Wiltz casts a sympathetic eye on her literary version of an inner-city drug kingpin, mostly we hear about his attempts to clean up the projects he calls home and he and his henchman do not engage in any criminal activity in the pages of this book.

   

Set in Motion by Valerie Martin

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Set in Motion (1978)

by Valerie Martin

New Orleans, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 13/28

  Set in Motion is a debut novel by Valerie Martin, an author who has published steadily if intermittently over the decades (two novels in the 70s, one in the 80s, three in the 90s, three in the oughts, one in the '10s and two this decade.  Her career highlights in terms of sales are Mary Reilly, her rework of Frankenstein, which landed a movie version and Property- which won the Orange Prize (Women's Prize for Fiction) in 2004.  I think I actually saw the Mary Reilly movie when it was released.   

 Set in Motion felt like a predecessor of sad girl lit, or rather an originator of the genre.  Sad Girl lit (of which I am a fan) features protagonists who are young-ish, though always grappling with issues surrounding mortality, they are not married, they do not have children, they may or may not have a job, they are prone to fits of emotion triggered by unusual and/or disturbing events.  The protagonist of Set in Motion fits all these descriptors.   She works for the County Welfare office vetting applicants for food-stampes.  She has a bartender boyfriend who casually shoots drugs into his veins (Pre Aids!!!!).  She has sex with the fiancé of her friend in a manner that borders on a contemporary description of sexual assault.

What is not to love?  I also enjoyed the descriptions of New Orleans in the mid 1970's, which were a nadir for urban areas all over the United States.  The sense of urban despair was palpable in this era. Love it.

Yellow Jack (1999) by Josh Russell

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Yellow Jack (1999)

by Josh Russell

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 12/28

    Josh Russell is the first 1,001 Novels: A Library of American writer I can remember who does not have  a Wikipedia page.  He is gainfully employed, as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Georgia State University.   I did take a creative writing class in college- it struck me as a borderline insane way to spend one's time and energy.  I don't have a ton of respect for the teachers or students of creative writing, beyond recognizing that teaching creative writing is by the far the best way for authors of literary fiction to support themselves and their families- you gotta do what you gotta do.

   Yellow Jack is set in dirty old New Orleans, about a protagonist who learns the tricks and methods of the earliest kind of photography in the studio of originator Louis Daugerre, and then flees to New Orleans, where he sets up the very first photography studio.  Russell does an excellent job of conjuring early to middle 19th century New Orleans- a place where summer inevitably bought death in the form of Yellow Fever.   Claude Marchand lives a life of passion and intrigue, juggling a mixed-race girlfriend and the sexually precocious (and way underage) daughter of a local bigwig.  Meanwhile, the mercury that was key to developing early photographs is causing his teeth to fall out and driving him not-so-slowly insane.  I wouldn't say Yellow Jack was a fun read, but it was interesting. 

The Book of I (2025) by David Greig

 Audiobook Review

The Book of I (2025)

by David Greig

   The Book of I is a fun, short novel out of Scotland set in the Middle Ages in the aftermath of a Viking raid of a British Church.  The Vikings murder everyone except a young apprentice who hides in the latrine and the wife of the blacksmith, who escapes by rendering her attacker unconscious with a glass of extremely strong mead.  So strong that his compatriots give him a half-ass burial and depart, leaving him for dead.  The remnant Viking wakes up the following day and has to figure out his next move.  It is low stakes fiction with a couple episodes of extremely brutal violence.  Very short.  I love books set in the Middle Ages that aren't historical fiction or fantasy, just literary fiction set in the past.  This is one of those books.

The Hard Blue Sky (1958) by Shirley Grau

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Hard Blue Sky (1958)

by Shirley Grau

Isle Aux Chiens, Louisiana

Louisiana: 11/28

  I think the highest compliment I can pay a book on this particular list is when I look up the location on the map of the project and then open the corresponding Google Maps location- that shows that I am interested.  That's what I did while reading The Hard Blue Sky, an early novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Shirley Grau.  I think looking at an Ngram for William Faulkner is a good proxy for interest in southern literature- Faulkner himself was the subject of a revival that saw him peak in interest in 1960 and plummet after 1990.  Grau- a New Yorker short story writer who won the Pulitzer in 1965- seems like a beneficiary of that interest.  I surmise that the drop off in William Faulkner interest in the 90's relates to what I imagine to be a wholesale replacement of Faulkner in American Literature survey courses with writer like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.  If you draw another Ngram with Faulkner and Toni Morrison you see the lines cross in 1994, the year after Morrison won the Nobel.  Faulkner, who won the Nobel in 1949, required further help from American critics specifically Under the Volcano author Malcolm Lowry, who is frequently credited with helping Faulkner get the Nobel in '49, and made further efforts to ensure his books didn't fall out of print before that. 

 I mention that because I would say Grau is largely forgotten- her Pulitzer winner has over 6000 reviews on Amazon, which indicates some continuing interest, but her other books top out at 100 reviews, with some in double digits.  She got a New York Times feature obituary when she died in 2020 but he last NYT mention was in 2003.   The Hard Blue Sky is a good example of the promise of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project: Rediscovering a once prominent author who I would otherwise never encounter. 

  It's also hard not to wonder if this physical landscape might itself be on the way out as a result of climate change and rising sea levels- this is a place where houses have been built on stilts for decades and maybe for centuries.  Besides the locale, the book itself, centered on the life of a young woman coming-of-age after the untimely death of her mother, rarely rises beyond the tropes of the coming of age novel circa the late 1950's.   The lessons learned by Grau's protagonist are far more genteel than the lessons learned by her African American counterparts in this part of the country:  No one gets rapes.  No one is murdered by law enforcement for no reason.  No one has their house burned to the ground by marauding members of the Klu Klux Klan.