VANISHED EMPIRES

Dedicated to classics and hits.

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Wandering Stars(2024) by Tommy Orange

Author Tommy Orange


 Book Review
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.

    

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

A Woman of Pleasure (2024) by Kiyoko Murata

 Book Review
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.

  

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

House Made of Dawn (1968) by N. Scott Momaday

 Book 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. 

I is Another: Septology III- V (2021) by Jon Fosse

 Book 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. 

Monday, March 25, 2024

The Last Samurai (2000) by Helen DeWitt

 Book Review
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.

If Beale Streer Could Talk (1974) by James Baldwin

1,001 Novels: A Library of America
If Beale Street Could Talk (1974)
by James Baldwin
New York: 40/105
Harlem: 6/14

     I checked this out as an Audiobook and almost immediately regretted it because this book is what you call a "Busman's Holiday" for me about a young African-American man falsely charged with raping a Puerto Rican woman, told from the perspective of his fiancé, who is, of course, pregnant with their first child.  It's also a portrait of the social fabric as it existed in Harlem in the early 1970's, Baldwin spends plenty of time with the families of both the imprisoned father to be and his betrothed.  Tish and Fonny are young, black and in love, and of course that presents a problem for the NYPD- the villain of the piece being a "red haired blue eyed" Manhattan police officer who apparently frames Fonny for a violent rape sheerly out of spit after a white shopkeeper intervenes on the couples behalf after Tish is accosted by a white junkie.

   Of course, this is all extremely old hat to me- I could tell you  about the lives of young men from African American communities ruined by a racist criminal justice system- that kind of thing was still happening in places like San Diego and Orange County when I was practicing 20 years ago, though thankfully it seems to be a thing of the past these days.   This is the third book I've read by James Baldwin- I read Notes From A Native Son just for fun and Go Tell it on the Mountain for the 1,001 Novels To Read Before You Die list.  I'm surprised I haven't read Giovanni's Room yet.    Beale Street is a good pick for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America since it shows Baldwin depicting a slice of Harlem community but I certainly prefer Go Tell it on the Mountain if anyone is asking about my favorite James Baldwin title. 

 

Sunday, March 24, 2024

2024 International Booker Prize Longlist

 2024 International Booker Prize Longlist

Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott
Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, translated by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann
The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson
White Nights by Urszula Honek, translated by Kate Webster
Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae
A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson
The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk
What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey
Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo, translated by Leah Janeczko
The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky
Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz
Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Julia Sanches

(Stole this formatting from Lithub)

   The 2024 International Booker Prize (translated fiction) longlist dropped two weeks ago and I didn't do a post.  I like the International Booker Prize longlist because it's a good source for new literary fiction in translation AND it's the first announcement of the literary prize year.   Finding the books in the United States, even in E format, is often a problem, though this year I've already got a line on half the titles.   The only author I recognize on the list is Ismail Kadare- who has three titles on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list. He also won the first prize of the predecessor award- the Man Booker International Prize- back in 2005.  Dude is 88.

   Beyond that- I really have no idea- looking forward to getting into some of these titles ASAP.

Friday, March 22, 2024

Don't Erase Me(1997) by Carolyn Ferrell

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Don't Erase Me (1997) 
by Carolyn Ferrell
South Bronx, New York
New York: 39/105
The Bronx: 7/7

   Don't Erase Me, a harrowing collection of short-stories about materially disadvantaged young women growing up in the South Bronx in the early 1990's, closes out the Bronx sub-chapter of editor Susan Straight's 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list. Ferrell published this collection back in 1997- one of the stories ended up making it into more than one anthology and Ferrell landed a job teaching at Sarah Larwrence.  She didn't publish another book until July of 2021 when Dear Ms. Metropolitan came out- a grim tale about three young women who are kidnapped, tortured and raped for a decade by a neighbor.   Don't Erase Me isn't quite that grim- although several of the included short stories- all about young minority women living in the South Bronx (except for one that takes place in Orange County for some reason), recall multiple tropes that I remember from 90's newspapers.  In one story, eighth graders compete to be "school wives"- i.e. get pregnant and married in the eighth grade.  In another, a single mother of three struggles with her HIV diagnosis, which she apparently contracted from her step-father.  In a third, a gay African American student is murdered by classmates. 

  Also worth mentioning that Don't Erase Me is not a novel, it's a collection of short stories.  I think this is the first short story collection on the list and it's hard to see why this would be the one book to pick in a project putatively dedicated to the novel.

  It is all pretty dark stuff, and frankly, every novel in this sub-chapter was pretty dark.  Not to tip my forthcoming summary post, but How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent by Julia Alvarez, which was recently named to Atlantic Magazine's Top 150 American Novels list, looks like the class of the bunch.  Charming Billy is also up there because it's a prize winner, but the rest, yikes.  Not fun. None of these books were fun and a couple were positively excruciating. 

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Hoops (1981) by Walter Dean Myers

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Hoops (1981)
by Walter Dean Myers
New York: 38/105
Harlem: 5/14

   I've started reading the YA titles from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list on my Kindle app on my cell phone (Samsung Galaxy)- the YA titles don't take a huge amount of effort to understand, and I can read them during times when I otherwise wouldn't be reading at all- watching television or what have you.  This lessens the annoyance I feel at having to read yet another YA title.  It is pretty clear to me at this point that editor Susan Straight is interested in including a wide swath of YA titles at the expense of more adult books that cover the same territory.  Hoops is about New York City basketball life circa the late 1960's, early 1970's, I think- it was hard to pin down the exact time.  It's hard for me to believe that Straight picked this book instead of The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll, which basically covers the same time and place trading Harlem for Hell's Kitchen.  To be fair, The Basketball Diaries has a fair amount of heroin usage, and maybe that is not what Straight is all about, though she hasn't shied away from books ABOUT the drug trade in NYC (See Spidertown.)

     It was good by the standards of YA lit, but I found it wanting compared to The Basketball Diaries

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Home to Harlem (1928) by Claude McKay

Jamaican-American author Claude McKay



 1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Home to Harlem (1928)
by Claude McKay
Harlem, New York City
New York: 37/105
Harlem: 4/14

 I was actually interested in reading this novel from the Harlem Renaissance- it faced a fraught path to publication and a rocky reception once published- right before the Great Depression- fell out of print and was later revived after his death.  Today he's recognized as an apostle of the Harlem Renaissance and a precursor to Black/Queer literature- McKay was either gay or bisexual and simply lived at a place and time when it wasn't acceptable to be public.    McKay's focus in Home to Harlem is on a pair of young black men, one born in the United States, the other a Haitian immigrant (McKay emigrated from the interior of Jamaica to the United States before relocating to Europe for several years).    The over-all vibe is similar to the beat genre of literature that would come decades later- McKay's plot reminded me of Kerouac or Bukowski, i.e. the lives of men who live on the fringes by some kind of conscious choice in a quest to escape 20th century conformity.

  Today it would be tough to ask someone to read Home to Harlem because of the frequent and prolific use of the n-word by the characters- all black characters- to describe themselves, others or even as a adjective- the use of the phrase "n word brown" is constant to describe the color suits and shoes.  Obviously, McKay knows what he is doing and the usage here is much like the usage in hip hop decades later, an attempt by the victimized to reclaim the word, but it is also hard not to think that these characters are consciously accepting their denigration by white society by embracing the n word in their everyday speech. It's certainly a challenge for the modern ear.  Hard to imagine an audiobook version.

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