VANISHED EMPIRES

Dedicated to classics and hits.

Monday, November 11, 2024

The Kitchen House (2010) by Katherine Grissom

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Kitchen House (2010)
by Katherine Grissom
Tidewater, Virginia
Virginia: 8/17

   The Kitchen House by Katherine Grissom resides squarely in the "white lady book club" category.  It has a cover quote from Alice Walker(!) comparing it to The Help and my paperback copy had one of those complicated, multi-flap covers that only come with "Recommended by Jenna" stickers added or the like. Grissom blends the stories of a white child who is brought to a Virginia plantation with the story of her African-American counter-part, Belle, slightly older and way wiser in the troubling ways of pre-emancipation Virginia.  To whit, the ability of any white man to force himself on any black woman with legal impunity, and indeed, the ability to sell his own child should the mood or need arise.

  This dynamic is at the heart of Grissom's tale, and perhaps it is why an author like Alice Walker would agree to blurb the book jacket of a white author telling a story involving narrators of both races.  Here, the dramatic tension is maintained by the white Irish servant girl's very naivete about such matters.   Compared to other characters in the same circumstances, her ignorance often seemed comical but I suppose that is book-club land for you. 

Friday, November 08, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, November 07, 2024

The Known World (2003) by Edward P. Jones

 Book Review
The Known World (2003)
by Edward P. Jones

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

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

Wednesday, November 06, 2024

Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) by Jacqueline Woodson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Brown Girl Dreaming (2014)
by Jacqueline Woodson
Greenville, South Carolina
South Carolina: 3/13

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

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

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

Tuesday, November 05, 2024

Jim the Boy (2000) by Tony Earley

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Jim the Boy (2000)
by Tony Earley
Rutherfordton, North Carolina
North Carolina: 8/20

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

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

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

Monday, November 04, 2024

Indigo Girl(2017) by Natasha Boyd

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Indigo Girl (2017)
by Natasha Boyd
West Ashley, Charleston, South Carolina
South Carolina: 2/13

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

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

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

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

Friday, November 01, 2024

The Book of Numbers (1969) by Robert Deane Pharr

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America
The Book of Numbers (1969)
by Robert Deane Pharr
Richmond, Virginia
Virginia: 7/17

   I've got 10 titles to go for Virginia and I'm out of Audiobooks.  I actually had to buy a copy of The Book of Numbers, a lost classic by African-American author Robert Deane Pharr.  Like many of the lesser-known classics of post World War II African American literature, The Book of Numbers has some shocking language and behavior as judged by the standards of bourgeois white America.  Pharr writes about a fictional city based on Richmond Virginia and about the denizens of "the block," the only African American urban area in Virginia.  Once again, it's worth observing that in 1806 Virginia passed a law that required freed slaves to leave Virginia within 48 hours, and that undoubtably had an impact in reducing the native population of free African Americans until after the Civil War.  

  The main focus of The Book of Numbers is an African American racketeer named Dave and his mentor-sidekick Blueboy.  They blow into town with a bankroll funded by the insurance money Dave received from the deaths of his parents and proceed to start Richmond's first numbers racket.   I didn't know much about numbers before I started 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, but The Book of Numbers isn't the first or second book to use the numbers racket in its plot.  Pharr is very detailed about the ins and outs of the racket- one memorable chapter involves Blueboy and Dave trying to locate a printer who will print the triplicate pads required to run a numbers game.  This was also the first mention of how the numbers were generated- Dave would use the first three winners of horse races at various tracks around the country. 

  The language is very earth- tons of N-words and frank discussions of sexuality that still seem pretty racy.   There's also a cool blaxploitation era movie that you can watch on youtube.  The Book of Numbers was a real stand-out for me in this chapter  of the 1,001 Novels project.
   

Thursday, October 31, 2024

A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024) by Mariana Enriquez

 Audiobook Review
A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024)
by Mariana  Enriquez
Translated by Megan McDowell

  I straight up loved Our Share of Night, the multi-generational novel about a group of Satanists operating in the UK and Argentina.  I'm by no means a fan of the horror genre, but Enriquez really nailed the cruelty of a fictional satanic cult and I still think about some of the scenes on a regular basis as an example of what good writing means to me- and just to think that this is a writer who has her words translated into English from Spanish.  I've more or less decided that for books within the close Indo-European sphere: English, Spanish, French, German the idea of losing meaning/beauty in the translation from one closely related language to another is overblown except on a poetic level. 

  Going in I knew that this volume of short stories wouldn't match her novel, but I still enjoyed this collection.  The title story, in particular, combines the elements of her style:  A spooky, LA-based story about an Argentinian journalist who convinces her editor to let her travel to  Los Angeles to do a story on the cultish group that has sprung up around the memory of Elisa Lam, a 21 year old Canadian student who died under extremely mysterious circumstances inside the Water Tower of the Cecil Hotel.  While in Los Angeles, she is forced to confront the memory of her dead lover who lost himself to schizophrenia and heroin and reconnecting with a lesbian couple who live in the Hollywood hill.   Most of the other stories are set either in Argentina or in an Argentina-like place and have similar but different combinations of spooks and personal issues.   Mostly, though, this collection was just a reminder for me about how much I loved Our Share of Night. 

   


Wednesday, October 30, 2024

William (2024) by Mason Coile

 Audiobook Review
William (2024)
by Mason Coile


    William is an AI centered horror novel and I checked out the Audiobook after the New York Times gave it a great review last month.  The mere fact that the Times gave that many column inches to a work of genre fiction that was published under a pseudonym, no less (Mason Coile is the "open pseudonym" of award-winning Canadian author Andrew Pyper.)  The set up is that a pregnant tech billionaire and her agoraphobic husband are living in their state of the art "smart home" in the Seattle area.  Henry, the protagonist, is an engineer who spends his days working on "William" a spooky ai powered android that has no legs and a fearsome hatred of Henry and all of humanity.  The reader knows things are not going to go well and indeed they do not, with events starting to pile up after Lily, his wife, invites to work friends over for a rare dinner. 

  Although William clocked in at under four hours, Coile manages to intersperse the gory horror scenes with philosophical musings and a very big twist at the end.  It's worth a listen for the Halloween season!

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Father of Lies (1998) by Brian Evenson

 Book Review
Father of Lies (1998)
by Brian Evenson

   The first Brian Evenson book I read was Immobility, his 2013 novel about a human-less post-apocalyptic scenario.   That was back in 2021.  Since then I've kept track of him- he's one of the few horror/sci-fi genre writers who commonly attracts attention from the literary fiction mainstream, which is enough for me.  Recently(2016 anyway), many books from his backlist were put back into print by Coffee House press, and Father of Lies (along with everything else he ever published) popped up on the Libby library app.  

  Father of Lies is an early work, a relatively straight-forward work of religio-horror about a psychopathic leader of a Mormon-like church (Evenson is from Utah and was raised Mormon).  In 2024, it sounds like a particularly sadistic retelling of the Catholic Priests vs. Young Boys saga of the past decades.  Unlike the Catholic Church, Mormons are still in full on refuse to acknowledge/cover-up mode, which perhaps accounts for the fact that the church which is depicted is only Mormon-like. 

  The horror is nothing you wouldn't read about in a newspaper story about Catholic priests abusing young boys- although he does murder one young parishioner after she confesses to being pregnant by her older brother.   This murder triggers a cascade of events which include a physical manifestation of Satan and lots of back and forth between him and his ever-supportive Church elders.  Events spiral when the mothers of three young church-members all come forward claiming that their young male children are victims of the protagonists vile abuse, and much of the horror comes from the support he continues to claim from the Church hierarchy who really stand by him all the way through the book.

Blog Archive