Abundance (2021) by Jacob Guanzon

Book Review

Abundance (2021)

by Jacob Guanzon

    Abundance was a 2021 National Book Award longlist in fiction. I found it hard to take and impossible to enjoy, like a novel length exploration of the chaotic life of one of my clients from state court.  As a criminal defense attorneys, protagonists like the one in Abundance- Henry, the son of a single-dad immigrant at the lower levels of the American socio-economic ladder, describes a life that can only be described as a disaster:  Not great at school, drifts into juvenile delinquency via recreational drug use, impregnates the first girl he sleeps with, keeps the child, marries the girl, goes to prison, chases the girl out of his life after getting out of prison.  I've been a criminal defense attorney for 20 years and I've probably represented close to 2000, 2500 different human beings, and Henry's life experience tracks that of about half of those clients.  Another 30 percent are just older versions of this guy.

   And while I'm generally sympathetic to people and their problems, there is no question that I divide the world into two types of people.  The first category is people who only need to spend a single night in jail to figure out what they need to do to avoid that ever happening again, and the second category is people who don't get that message.  Henry is in that second category and I find him and his compatriots to be pretty exasperating.  

Icebound (2021) by Andrea Pitzer

Book Review

Icebound: Shipwrecked at the End of the World (2021)

by Andrea Pitzer

   Here is another example of a book I read simply because I'm trying to balance gender representation.  This is a work of non-fiction, written by a woman, about a subject, artic exploration, that I happen to find fascinating.  I'm generally interested in information about the icy north- certainly I watch many of the survival themed reality shows that populate the Discovery channel constellation of properties.  I think it's also a function of living in Southern California and having limited exposure to cold of any kind.  Pitzer's book is straight forward in recounting different episodes of would-be arctic explorers being stranded.  It's not particularly obvious from the title, but this is a book about being shipwrecked at the northern end of the world, not the southern.

   As you might expect, arctic capital E exploration was undertaken by men (I don't think there is a single woman mentioned in this entire book, which is written by a woman) who liked to keep journals, so there are a wealth of written materials for almost every incident that didn't end with the death of or disappearance of everyone on board.   The main thing a contemporary reader will pick up is the astonishing lack of preparation taken by men trying to sail to the northern edge of the world.  Like, they didn't have special jackets to wear for the cold until well into the 20th century.  Dudes would just head out in their boats, and get frozen in ice for months, unable to do anything about it.

  They also had to deal with tons of polar bears, who come off as not very sympathetic at all.

Planet of Clay (2020) by Samar Yazbek

Book Review

Planet of Clay (2020)

by Samar Yazbek

   Is the last National Book Award finalist for translated fiction left?  I'm still short one finalist- Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Dupabin (also the winner).  It was heartening to see a book on the list translated from Arabic, and even better that the author is a Syrian woman- major diversity points, and triple empathy points for a novel about a mentally disabled girl/teenager/young adult during the horrors of the Syrian Civil War.   It's rough sledding- a fractured narrative. Just rough.