Praiseworthy (2024) by Alexis Wright

Australian-Indigenous author Alexis Wright

Book Review

Praiseworthy (2024)

by Alexis Wright

  I was excited to read a rave review for this new novel by Australian/Indigenous author Alexis Wright. It goes without saying that 90% of Australian literature that gets out of Australia is written from a white, Anglo-British perspective with the remaining 10 percent being immigrant type lit from European and non-European immigrants. Before reading Praiseworthy I don't think I'd ever read a book, seen a movie, listened to a song, where the artist was an indigenous Australian. 

  Praiseworthy is not what I would call a crowd pleaser.  It's over 600 pages long and written entirely in stream of consciousness format, with the narrators being muses, one per hundred page chapter, telling the story of a more-or-less nuclear indigenous family- patriarch Cause Man Steel, who is obssessed with harnessing the power of donkeys to replace fossil fuel based transport, his older son Aboriginal Sovereignty and younger son Tommyhawk.   The time is 2007, after the Australian Government passed the Intervention act, which banned indigenous Australians from possessing alcohol and pornography(!).   The language is flowing and entrancing- I've often found the saving grace of 500 page plus stream-of-consciousness style novels is that not much actually happens since every character takes 50 pages to take a dump or walk down to the mailbox.  Also almost all stream-of-consciousness writing follows the template of stating a thought or observation and then having the character go on elaborating and expanding on that exact thought until they come to their next thought.  

  These rules hold true in Praiseworthy, but I wouldn't call it a fun read.  Vital, yes.  Important, yes.  Prize winning, possibly, but not fun. 

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.

    

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.

  

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. 

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 Street 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: 7/14

     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. 

 

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.