Irish novelist/poet/playwright Sebastian Barry has written a whole series of books following an Irish family as they emigrate to the United States, and the lives of those folks after they get there. There are three books in the "McNulty Family" series:
The story revolves around this peril, and Barry's plot makes it difficult to talk about details without risk of spoilers, but A Thousand Moons is another winner and Barry is a terrific writer. It's a shame that his LGBT friendly rewrite of American historical fiction hasn't found greater purchase inside America itself.
![Amazon.com: The Down Days: A Novel eBook: Hugo, Ilze: Kindle Store](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51I1+bp+nZL.jpg) |
Cover of The Down Days by South African writer Ilze Hugo |
Published 6/24/20
The Down Days (2020)
by Ilze Hugo
The Down Days is like a cross between a sober work of literary fiction about a near future, virus stricken South Africa and a Die Antwoord album. In the aftermath of an annihilating outbreak of a virulent type of "laughing sickness" a la the
1962 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic, the residents of a not-Cape Town remained "Sick City" are struggling to survive. Travel in and out of the city is forbidden, residence within the city is linked to a daily testing system designed to prevent spread of the laughter illness- which ends with the liquidation of the victim's internal organs- so, not so funny.
Laughter, it goes without saying, is forbidden. The remnants of South Africa's rainbow nation have moved beyond race and any kind of recognizable 21st century cultural identity. I felt reasonably sure about identifying some Dutch/Boer patronyms and a couple of characters who were identified as white, but the disease born threat of destruction seems to have eliminated our current race/class based divisions. In the case of class, it is clear that everyone who had the means left, characters squat in abandoned sea side mansions, etc.
Unfortunately The Down Days was written before our current global pandemic and published during said pandemic, making it hard to really appreciate either as science fiction genre or literary fiction. The Down Days is not particularly science fictiony, and the actual story- which has something to do about ghosts and a young girl trying to find her lost brother. The Down Days is an enjoyable ride, but there isn't a big pay-off at the end. I'm actually somewhat surprised it got a United States release.
![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uPmJMBdnZAPx3XXySuvza-FiEvRABZDYux4PtHqsMJ8ipYeX2s6S6cUsCLaSo6HUmRpPuysJrOAj3vtnNkEgzWhegc5T8-cHMsajLwEkla6tvexIvQ8no=s0-d) |
American author Marie-Helene Bertino |
Published 6/29/20
Parakeet (2020)
by Marie-Helene Bertino
The elevator pitch for Parakeet, the new novel by American author Marie-Helen Bertino is, "Bride to be surprised when Grandmother returns from the grave as a Parakeet and tells her to call off the wedding." And indeed, that does describe the first chapter, but Parakeet is actually much stranger than the idea of a bride's dead grandma coming back from the grave to tell her to call off her wedding. Other elements include an estranged playwright brother who won the Pultizer Prize for a play based on her life, which he wrote without consulting her; her job as a biographer for a personal injury lawyer who helps sufferers of brain trauma, her own trauma and various hallucinations of the more and less lucid variety. There's also a decent amount of drug abuse and some ok sex scenes, all in a sprightly 240 pages.
Parakeet is a easy recommendation for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Olga Tokarczuk (she won the Nobel Prize last year.)
![Ornamental – Coffee House Press](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1475/9808/products/9781566895804_FC_700x.jpg?v=1571423612) |
Cover of Ornamental by Juan Cardenas
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Published 7/1/20
Ornamental (2020)
by Juan Cardenas
Translated by Lizzie Davis
Published by Coffee House Press
It was great to read something by a small press- to see it available at the library level as an Ebook and to read about it in the
New York Times- I think. It would be great to just get a list of translated literary fiction in Ebook format with a one line summary- when it comes to smaller presses it is tough to keep track of the new releases, especially widely available ebooks. I've noticed that most of the contemporary literary fiction I find available through the library in electronic format comes either from the major publishers, new directions and new york review of books and that is it. No academic publishers, few regional presses, etc.
Ornamental is a slick 124 pages, about a Medical researcher in an unnamed Columbian city working on a new pharmaceutical that only works on women. The specific effect it has on women is like a milder, but still intense form of mdma, with no hang over. At first, I assumed the medical researcher/narrator was working for a pharmaceutical corporation, later in the book, they sound more like a drug cartel, or the "legit" wing of a drug cartel. That's a point not mentioned in the Times review. Cardenas eschews proper names, "The Doctor," "The wife" and then four test patients, "Patient One, Two" etc. Patient Four emerges as the key figure, with her own set of stream of consciousness monologues inserted between chapters written from the perspective of the Doctor.
Cardenas has an international voice, emphasized by a writing style that eschews the minute, specific detail in matters of place and time- no music is played, nothing takes place that specifically tags the action to a particular time.
![Souvankham Thammavongsa Shows Us the Beauty of a Furious Poem ...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/walrus-assets/img/WEB_Lahey_poetry_art.jpg) |
Canadian-Laotian poet and author Souvankham Thommavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife |
Published 7/2/20
How to Pronounce Knife (2020)
by Souvankham Thommavongsa
The Laotian Canadian community is one tenth the size of the Laotian American community- twenty thousand compared to two hundred thousand. This larger community has its own ethnic divisions- I know from living in California that the Hmong are a group that emigrated to the United States from Laos but are not themselves Laotian. Almost all of the Laotians passed into the United States via refugee camps in Thailand, and there is some overlap between the Laotian diaspora and Thailand. Like many of the second generation immigrants, Thommavongsa wasn't born in Canada but emigrated when she was only a year old- this is a common experience for children of the South East Asian immigrants from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia who emigrated after the Vietnam War.
It is a distinctive voice- different from other Asian communities in that Laotians- especially the Hmong, come from a rural, farming background, they didn't come over with a lot of education or sophisticated work skills and the immigrants tended to work dead end jobs and have problems learning English. There was alot of war related trauma in the immigrant population, and some of that has been passed down, with the second generation suffering from some of the community based ills- gangs are a problem- seen in other disadvantaged America populations.
Thommavongsa is the first Laotian writer I've come across, and her collection of short stories ring true, with a variety of different familial and employment scenarios coming in to play, but all of them linked by a certain level of poverty and material insecurity. In many ways, the Laotian families carefully depicted in Thommavongsa's short stories more closely resemble 19th than 20th century immigrants. Sure to eye opening for any reader- since the Laotians are so infrequently depicted in literature, television, film, etc, I would guess that Thommavongsa has a bright future in literature.
![Megha Majumdar | Penguin Random House](https://images2.penguinrandomhouse.com/author/2204934) |
Author Megha Majumdar |
Published 7/13/20
A Burning (2020)
by Megha Majumdar
Audiobook read by Vikas Adam, Priya Ayyar, Deepti Gupta, Ulka Mohanty, Sonella Nankani & Neil Shah
It is easy to understand why A Burning by Indian/living in America author Megha Majumdar is such a hot ticket, a New York Times best-seller, impressive for a debut novel that takes place in India, Majumdar has a five star resume for a debut author of literary fiction- raised in Calcutta, studied at Harvard, working as an editor at an indie press, published by Alfred A. Knopf- she really ticks all the boxes.
I was excited to get the Audiobook from the Los Angeles Library- another example of one of those books where the right accent really makes the story jump- it's almost like listening to a radio play of the book, even though it's just people reading the printed page. Majumdar is already a pro: Her tale, about a young woman in Calcutta who becomes embroiled in the aftermath of a terrorist incident in Calcutta after she makes an ill-advised status update on Facebook criticizing the government. The number of narrators contributing to the Audiobook gives you an idea of the number of narrators- you've got a gym teacher who gets involved in local politics, an
Hijra character who is thoughtfully drawn and a half dozen non narrators who get into the mix of voices.
Majumdar smoothly transitions from an elevator pitch that borders on the YA to a conclusion that puts her into major literary contender status- quite a segue for a first novel. There can be no doubt that there will be- probably a television- version and it allows Majumdar to publish a bildundsroman inspired by her own life as a SECOND, rather than a first book- a trait I think bodes especially well for a new novelist, where the danger is that the only good idea a young author has derives from his or her direct experience- that isn't really what a great novelist does, but it's the easiest way to score a hit with your first book.
I think because I listened to the Audiobook instead of reading the hard copy, it didn't really dawn on me just how good A Burning was as a book- I was just listening to the story. After I had time to reflect, the craft of it really stuck me, and it seems to me that Majumdar has a very bright future in front of her- I can see her writing an excellent bildungsroman, a historical epic, dabbling in genre or trying to land a major best-seller- probably a marriage plot- which I wouldn't begrudge her.
Published 7/14/20
Maximum Bob (1991)
by Elmore Leonard
Despite it being a late career success- winning the first Hammett Prize when it was released and inspiring a seven episode television miniseries on ABC, best-seller, etc. I think Maximum Bob is one of Leonard's worst, and a clear indication that after the success of Get Shorty, he began to "go Hollywood" as they say. Here, the strong evidence is Leonard's repeated characterization of Judge Bob Gibss- dubbed Maximum Bob by Newsweek (!) for his strict sentencing policy, as "looking like Harry Dean Stanton." That is a pretty specific reference point, and a weird one, considering Stanton's status as a muse for David Lynch during his most productive period.
Beyond that, the plot is classic Florida-period Leonard, with some particularly cringey details beyond the repeated references to the main character looking like Harry Dean Stanton. Specifically, the wife of the Judge is a spiritual channeler who is frequently possessed by the spirit of a 10 year old African American girl who lived before the civil war. She is the only African-American in the book. It's...awkward.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/InTheLandOfTime.jpg) |
Cover of the 2004 Penguin Classics Lord Dunsany compilation- the first- over a hundred years after he started publishing stories.
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Published 7/17/20
In the Land of Time (2004)
by Lord Dunsany
Lord Dunsany is the greatest fantasy writer you've never heard up. Even if you haven't heard of him:
Dunsany can nevertheless be seen as the source and inspiration of much of the writing that followed in his wake; such figures as H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Moore herself are deeply in Dunsany’s debt for the example he set as a prose stylist and as a creator of an entire universe of shimmering fantasy.
The strongest look is between Dunsany and Lovecraft. Dunsany's breakthrough came with The Gods of Pegaana, 1904- self published. The achievment is described S. T. Joshi, who provides the introduction:
What Dunsany had done was to create an entire cosmogony, complete with a pantheon of ethereal but balefully powerful gods—a cosmogony, however, whose aim was not the fashioning of an ersatz religion that made any claim to metaphysical truth, but rather the embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s imperishable dictum, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”
His secret, it turns out was a combination of a style derived from the English translation of the Old Testament with the classic-revivalism of Nietzsche:
Dunsany read Nietzsche in 1904, just around the time he wrote The Gods of Pegaāna, and we can detect the presence of the German iconoclast in numerous conceptions and perhaps even in its ponderous phraseology, so similar to the prose-poetic rhythms of Thus Spake Zarathustra. In effect, Dunsany was seeking to fuse the naïveté and spirit of wonder that had led primitive humanity to invent its gods with a very modern sensibility that recognized the insignificance of mankind amidst those incalculable vortices of space and time that modern science had uncovered.
Joshi also addresses one of my favorite questions, "What happened?" Dunsany was huge in his day- though Joshi points out that his best work was published early, and the stories from the end of his career including the sadly Wellsian Jorkens stories, published towards the end of his career. Joshi has this to say on the subject of "what happened" to Dunsany's literary reputation:
How did a writer so well known in his time, and so showered with critical acclaim, lapse so far into obscurity? A number of factors having nothing to do with the merit, or lack of it, of Dunsany’s work conspired against him. First, fantasy has always been relatively restricted in its appeal, and in the course of the twentieth century it gradually dropped out of mainstream fiction and became a narrow “genre” somewhere between science fiction and horror fiction, and incurring the critical disdain that those literary modes suffered. Second, Dunsany’s ambiguous involvement with his Irish literary compatriots—to say nothing of his Unionist sympathies at a time when most leading Irish writers were Nationalists—caused his work to be either scorned or deliberately ignored by those who should have been acknowledging it as a distinctive contribution to the national literature. And third, Dunsany, like so many writers, wrote too much.
There is a strong argument that only the first two sections, Pegaana and Environs and Tales of Wonder. The rest of it- including his "prose poems" is more for the completest than the casual reader of the antecedents of weird fiction.
![Inverted World](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0726/9203/products/inverted-world_1024x1024.jpg?v=1528394385) |
Cover of the 2008 reprint of Inverted World by Christopher Priest |
Published 7/21/20
Inverted World (1974)
by Christopher Priest
A city called Earth on tracks is pulled ever north, pursuing a never obtainable "optimum" for reasons opaque to Howard Mann, an apprentice in the city's medieval-like guild system. Is this an alien world? Who built the city? It's all very unclear. The afterward by John Clute argues that Inverted World is the first English example of the subgenre of "Hard Sci Fi" featuring mostly masculine heroes seeking the answers to complicated questions involving future science, interstellar travel, looming disaster, etc. Like many examples of excellent genre fiction, the pleasure of the book is bound up in the ending, and any discussion of the narrative structure or the plot risks that payoff.
Published 7/22/20
Missing Persons (1978)
by Patrick Modiano
Originally published in 1978, Missing Persons won the Prix Goncourt(the French Pulitzer) and established himself as a major literary talent inside France (he was five novels in to his career). It is also- surprise surprise- the most accessible of the four books of his I've read. Missing Persons actually takes the detective story by way of European existentialist format common to all of Modiano's novels and takes it somewhere- giving the reader a narrator who is investigating his own identity- having been found without memory as a young man in the aftermath of World War II. Missing Persons is the Modiano to read first!
![The Word for World Is Forest - Wikipedia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bc/WordWorldForest.jpg/220px-WordWorldForest.jpg) |
Original cover for The Word for World is Forest (1976) by Ursula Le Guin |
Published 8/24/20
The Word for World is Forest (1976)
by Ursula Le Guin
This is the penultimate book in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, a loosely affiliated series of novels about a universe where the Hainish seeded the human race throughout the galaxy before disappearing for a million years, then reestablishing contact with the colony worlds- including our Earth- called Terra in the Hainish cycle. The Word for World is Forest is the most overtly allegorical book of the Hainish Cycle. The stroy is about a Terran colony which has set up shop on a forest planet inhabited by "humans" who have widely diverged from the universal norm- they are about a meter tall and covered in green fur. They lack a word for "war" and spend have their time dreaming while awake.
The Terrans are there for the wood and they don't shy away from enslaving the natives- who they refuse to recognize as human. The attitude is at shocking variance with the philosophy expressed in the rest of the books by the pan-human alliance- a kind of Star Trek prime directive of gradual interaction and no coercion- which is brought into focus when a post-alliance space ship shows up with a brand new ansible- a device used to instantaneously between worlds. With instantaneous communication comes new orders from Terra/Earth- lay off the natives. Unfortunately, in a scenario that will be very familiar to fans of 20th century history, the natives are pissed off, and have learned about violence from their Terran captors.
Clocking in at 189 pages, The World for World is Forest is called a novella, but it's a novel- just a short novel- and the anti-colonialism message is nowhere near as controversial than it would have been fifty years ago.
![Ukraine Map and Satellite Image](https://geology.com/world/ukraine-map.gif) |
Map of the Ukraine, location of the apartment building at the center of Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva
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Published 7/15/20
Good Citizens Need Not Fear (2020)
by Maria Reva
Good Citizens Need Not Fear is a fun collection of inter-linked short stories about the lives of a group of apartment dwellers living in a decrepit building in Ukraine in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR. I listened to the Audiobook which was great- the variety of characters calls out of multiple voices- accents I couldn't approximate with an specificity. Author Maria Reva was born in the Ukraine but raised in Canada, before studying (and living in the US) and Good Citizens Need Not Fear was written in English , not translated from Ukrainian- which is an increasing trend in international literary fiction, but usually taking the form of immigrant authors writing in English, less often in French, German or Spanish.
Reva draws story points from what feels like articles you might have read in magazines like the New York, Harpers, or Atlantic- you've got the Bone Records- which was widely written up as a phenomenon in the western press, the late Soviet era adoption of the western style beauty pageant, the plight of Ukrainian orphans and the general decrepitude of post-Soviet life, which seems like an increasingly deep well for literary fiction, and arguably includes the main work of two of the last five Nobel Prize in Literature Winners- Olga Tokarczuk (2018) and Svetlana Alexievich(2015). It's pretty easy to see where Penguin-Random House was coming from when the decided to give Good Citizens Need Not Fear a fancy Audiobook and press push.
Many reviewers and the publisher have called it "Kafkaesque" but really that just reflects the content of any book written near the end or after the end of the Communist Era- it was all Kafkaesque- still is.
![Death in Her Hands (Ottessa Moshfegh).png](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/aa/Death_in_Her_Hands_%28Ottessa_Moshfegh%29.png/220px-Death_in_Her_Hands_%28Ottessa_Moshfegh%29.png) |
The cover of Death in Her Hands: A Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh
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Published 7/16/20
Death in Her Hands: A Novel (2020)
by Ottessa Moshfegh
I'm a big Ottessa Moshfegh fan- I think My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a classic- it anticipated our year long virus quarantine by two years, and I thought it was a classic even before it gained new, post-quarantine relevance. After I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation (for book club, no less) I went back and tackled her back catalog- McGlue, her LGBT meets Melville historical novella about a murderous sailor and Eileen, her first novel. Death in Her Hands is her latest book, a Novel, as the title proclaims, though I believe she had it written before she wrote My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Other reviewers have noted the eerie similarities between the set up for this book and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Olga Tokarczuk. As it turns out, there isn't much more beyond the general set up: The narrator, and elderly woman living alone in the woods, stumbles upon a murder mystery which she endeavors to solve... or does she. They both revolve around a classically unreliable narrator, but considering the thematic similarity between this book and Moshfegh's other books, it seems far more likely a case of parallel inspiration by writers with similar outlooks than any kind of nefarious theft.
It's easy to describe Death in Her Hands: A Novel a literary take on the detective novel, but in that regard her inspiration seems more European- more Patrick Modiano than Paul Auster, to give two examples from the literary-fiction-detective-novel subgenre. Of course, writers of literary fiction are forgiven endings that drift between inconclusive and maddening- not something that writers of genre detective fiction get to do- and Moshfegh takes full advantage of her freedom, with an ending that left me cold.
I deeply regretted listening to the Audiobook- the narrator is an old woman from New Jersey living in what I think is supposed to be New England, so there isn't anything to be gained from accent, and it felt like listening to this book took forever. Nothing about Death in Her Hands changes what I think about Moshfegh as an author, I think her publisher was like, "Let's publish whatever you've got while you figure out your next book." That's fine.
![Teju Cole: "We are Made of All the Things We Have Consumed ...](https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Teju-Cole.jpg) |
Nigerian-American author and Harvard Professor Teju Cole |
Published 7/22/20
Open City (2011)
by Teju Cole
I recommended W.G. Sebald to a friend and she responded by mentioning Teju Cole, the Nigerian-American writer (and Professor of Creative Writing at Harvard University) and his debut (and only) novel, Open City, which was widely compared to W.G. Sebald when it was published in 2011. The comparison is apt, though there is more structure and character development in Open City than in any of Sebald's work. The combination of observational geography and cultural essay is coupled with a genuinely engaging story about the Nigerian-American psychiatrist, Julius who narrates Open City.
I listened to the Audiobook which was great- I guess the print edition eschews punctuation and paragraphs, something I didn't notice listening to the Audiobook, which flows like you are listening to someone speak to you- not a common quality for contemporary literary fiction.
The 2020 Booker Prize longlist was announced yesterday. Hilary Mantel has to be the heavy favorite last year. She has won for her last two books in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, and The Mirror & The Light, the concluding chapter, has been well reviewed. The other major headline is the return of American based writers- largely absent last year.
Diane Cook (USA) The New Wilderness (Oneworld Publications)
Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe) This Mournable Body (Faber & Faber)
Avni Doshi (USA) Burnt Sugar (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)
Gabriel Krauze (UK) Who They Was (4th Estate, HarperCollins)
Colum McCann (Ireland/USA) Apeirogon (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Maaza Mengiste (Ethiopia/USA) The Shadow King (Canongate Books)
Kiley Reid (USA) Such a Fun Age (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
Brandon Taylor (USA) Real Life (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)
Anne Tyler (USA) Redhead by The Side of The Road (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)
Douglas Stuart (Scotland/USA) Shuggie Bain (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
Sophie Ward (UK) Love and Other Thought Experiments (Corsair, Little, Brown)
C Pam Zhang (USA) How Much of These Hills is Gold (Virago, Little, Brown)
So far this year I've read three of the longlisted titles- This Mournable Body, The Shadow King and How Much of These Hills is Gold. Only This Mournable Body struck me as a potential shortlist/winner type title. Dangarembga is the first Zimbabwean woman to have a novel published in English, and This Mournable Body is the end of a trilogy of novels about her protagonist. The Shadow King, about female soldiers fighting the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and How Much of These Hills is Gold, about a pair of Chinese-American orphans struggling to survive in the American old-west, were both interesting, but neither struck me as shortlisters/winners.
![Apeirogon: A Novel by Colum McCann](https://images2.penguinrandomhouse.com/cover/9781400069606) |
Apeirogon: A Novel by Colum McCann |
Published 8/12/20
Apeirogon: A Novel (2020)
by Colum McCann
Apeirogon: A Novel is a member of the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist. It's about two men- an Israeli and a Palestinian who have both lost their innocent daughters in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The novel is based on the real life friendship of the two main characters, Bassam Aramin, the Palestinian is a veteran of the infitadah who spent several years in prison, after his release he becomes dedicated to peace. Rami Elhanan is his Israeli counter part, a former tank mechanic and son-in-law of a famous Israeli General who became equally famous for his peace efforts. Both men are controversial in their own communities and McCann does an excellent job of not simply retelling the deaths of the two daughters, but also building context through the use of short chapters of non-fiction about the area- history and geography.
The literary technique deployed by McCann is exemplary- I can see where the combination of subject matter and storytelling skill drew the attention of the Booker Prize committee, but it still seems like a prize WINNING book with this kind of story would be written by a Palestinian (we all know the Booker Prize wouldn't give the award to an Israeli, ha-ha.)
Published 8/17/20
The Red Head by the Side of the Road (2020)by Anne Tyler
This is the first Anne Tyler book I've read- despite the fact that she is one of those rare authors who combines prize-winning literary excellence AND big sales. My ignorance of her bibliography is tied to her genre- literary realism- not my favorite, and her subject matter, white Americans and their problems. The Red Head by the Side of the Road seems like a pretty typical Tyler novel by those standards, about a free-lance tech repair guy living in the Baltimore suburbs, and his difficulty with relationships. The stakes are low- there are no deaths, no family dysfunction, no blow out fights- just a guy, his free-lance tech business and his trouble maintaining a long term relationship. Given Tyler's reputation I wasn't exactly waiting for someone to get by a car or die from a heroin overdose, and she didn't disappoint.
I read The Red Head by the Side of the Road because of the Booker long-list nomination, and it didn't seem like a shortlist pick, and indeed it was not.
Published 8/18/20
Who Killed My Father (2018)
by Edouard Louis
Translated by Loren Stein
Part biography, part polemic, Who Killed My Father was published in 2018 in France, written by Edouard Louis. The New Directions English translation, published in 2019, suggests that fans of My Struggle will be enthralled. Well, I'm a huge fan of My Struggle, and reading that Edouard Louis burst upon the scene with a book about Pierre Bourdieu doesn't turn me off. Also, a friend of mine recommended it during a discussion of the "Me Too" movement, and he is no Parisian intellectual. Really, the recommendation was enough.
The diagnosis of French working class ennui is over a century old- Emile Durkheim was writing about it in 1897 (Suicide: A Study in Sociology), and its also been succesful recently- Nicolas Matiheu covers similar territory in Their Children After Them- which won the Prix Goncourt the same year Who Killed My Father was released. Louis' thesis is that his father, a classically working class, husband, father and violent abuser, is a victim. First, his wife leaves him, then he suffers a terrible accident at work which permanently disables him.
It's a very post-modern attempt to rehabilitate this character- someone who is typically the bad guy in contemporary literature, if not in sociology. The major difference between this and a hundred over non-fiction books on the subject is that Louis forthrightly points his finger at the French state and their inhumane policies towards injured workers like his father. Or something to that effect, but the answer to the question asked in the title is, "The French state, specifically it's inhumane attitude towards long time disability."
Published 8/20/20
Man Tiger (2015)
by Eka Kurniawan
Translated by Labodalih Sembiring
Man Tiger is another interesting novel from Indonesia's most popular author in English translation, Eka Kurniawan. The Verso Publishing product page calls Man Tiger "wry and affecting" but doesn't really delve into the darkness of the plot, about a young man growing up in poverty along the Indonesian coast. When he commits a horrific act of violence (it happens on the first page, so no spoiler) the book becomes an inquiry into the how and the why- similar to a century of underclass lit, from the kitchen sink realists of the British Isles to African American fiction starting in the mid 20th century.
What stuck me is simply the factual description of the way people live in Indonesia- which is always the most interesting part of reading fiction in translation. The very fact that a reader is able to read a work translated into English means that the Author has managed to arouse uncommon interest from a culture that has little interest in other cultures by mimicking a tradition which already resonates with English language readers. Anything too strange or different wouldn't make it into English in the first place.
![Machines in the Head](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0726/9203/products/Machines_in_the_Head_1024x1024.jpg?v=1578516779)
Published 8/27/20
Machines in the Head(2020)
by Anna Kavan
Anna Kavan is a good example of a writer who is due a revival- which will no doubt be helped by this New York Review of Books Classics edition of her stories- published this February- which is a big step up in visibility for all of her work except Ice, which has a Penguin's Classics edition. Her stories are all over the map thematically, from tales of hospitalization and addiction, to fragments of futuristic dystopia and experiences of World War II. Kavan wasn't big on plot!
![Bernardine Evaristo - Bernardine Evaristo](https://bevaristo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/portrait-400x400.jpg) |
Author Bernardine Evaristo, her 2019 novel Girl, Woman, Other split the Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood's Handmaids Tale sequel.
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Published 9/1/20
Girl, Woman, Other (2019)
by Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Evaristo's eighth novel, Girl, Woman, Other split the 2019 Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood. I guess, splitting it is better than giving it just to Atwood for a bloody sequel, but I would have preferred they give it to Evaristo alone. There is simply no way the SEQUEL to Handmaid's Tale deserved the Booker Prize. Girl, Woman, Other is, on the other hand, a perfect Booker Prize winner- Evaristo- the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize (!) and the book itself is excellent.
Evaristo weaves the stories of twelve different women, eleven black and one white, moving backwards and forwards in time to show the different experiences of black women of different sexualities and socio-economic status as they attempt to navigate England between the end of World War II and the present day. Evaristo is clearly a writer at the top of her game- you can see her balancing the stories of her characters with the dictates of the international marketplace for literary fiction. I know that balance isn't important in the romantic artistic sense, but as a reader of international literary fiction, I appreciate it on a personal level. It's a major theme of this blog- the balance between art and commerce as expressed by literary fiction.
I listened to the Audiobook- which was outstanding- with all the different voices and accents. After that I bought the American edition (paperback, regrettably- I don't think it got a hard cover release in the US out of the sheer desire to reward the author for her good work.
Published 9/1/20
Real Life(2020)
by Brandon Taylor
This hot literary debut by American author Brandon Taylor nabbed a Booker long list nomination this year. That's impressive for any author, but especially so for an American- American writers have only been eligible for the Booker Prize for a few years now, and after a year or two where the was American dominated, fewer Americans are making it to the long list. The one sentence elevator pitch: A gay African American from Alabama experiences joys and sorrows during his time doing post-graduate work in chemistry at an Iowa university- doesn't do Real Life justice.
Real Life is one of those books where excessive description will inevitably diminsh the pleasures (and challenges) that face the reader- but I thought Taylor's take on his subject was very nuanced, and it shows sides of both the LGBTQ and African American experience that you don't often see in literary fiction. Trust me though, that Real Life is not boring, even if the description doesn't sound adventurous, plenty of adventure lies within. I understand why it would be a long list book and not short list but Brandon Taylor is a writer to watch going forward.
Published 9/1/20
The Book of Eels(2020)
by Patrik Svensson
It's hard to believe that a memoir/non-fiction title about the European Eel, written in Swedish, would arrive in 2020 on American virtual book shelves bearing "#1 International Best-Seller" on its cover. What, exactly is a #1 International Best-Seller I asked myself, but I guess it's besides the point. The fact is, I would LOVE to read a book about Eels.
Eels, as it turns out, are wild creatures- still poorly understood today. For example, no one has ever seen an eel give birth. They won't give birth in captivity, and all reproduction takes place in the Sargasso sea, and no one has ever managed to see them give birth, or find a pregnant eel. The eel has an exquisite pedigree within the deep streams of western culture- Greeks and Romans both were fascinated, and they performed a substantial portion of Roman cuisine. My personal experience with eels prior to reading Book of Eels was of their appearance in history books, as a running gag during trips to England (where people still eat eel) and in sushi restaurants, where eel sushi is common- it's meaty.
The Book of Eels isn't just historical background and contemporary anecdotes about modern eel culture (they are big in Basque country, in Northern Europe, where Scandinavian's have harvested them since time immemorial) but I suppose the real draw is the memoir bit about the relationship between Svensson and his father, a devoted fan of the eel. There is nothing dark or shocking about either part of the book. He doesn't really get into eel slime- which is- just google hagfish slime (hagfish are akin to eels), but I think the idea is to make eels less, not more disgusting in the mind of the reader.
![Abi Daré | Penguin Random House](https://images4.penguinrandomhouse.com/author/2202870) |
Author Abi Dare |
Published 9/2/20
The Girl with the Louding Voice (2020)
by Abi Dare
This debut novel by Nigerian author Abi Dare tells the harrowing tale of Adunni, a 14 year old girl living in rural Nigeria who flees an arranged marriage with a much older man, only to find herself a virtual slave to Big Mama, the wealthy owner of a Lagos area cloth factory. The most remarkable aspect of the prose of the book is that it is written in broken English, complete with non-standard grammar and vocabulary. It made for an excellent Audiobook- hearing the actual VOICE of Adunni made a huge difference for me, really drawing me into the story.
Dare does a decent job of developing her plot, but once Adunni escapes her arranged marriage (really more of a sale) the trajectory of the story of a maid of the underclass escaping her fate becomes predictable. It's obvious that Dare is not herself an escaped Adunni, her biography more resembles a wealthy woman who becomes Adunni's patron to escape the clutches of Big Mama. But you know that Adunni is going to win in the end- it's clear. Honestly, it's the only thing that made the excessive cruelty suffered by Adunni at the hands of Big Mama bearable over the length of a novel.
Published 9/4/20
Tender is the Flesh (2020)
by Agustina Bazterrica
Tender is the Flesh arrives in English translation as an Argentinian sensation, winner of the Clarin Award for Best Novel. Imagining a near-future where the only meat is human flesh, the narrator has adapted to the most dystopian of dystopias, trading his skill in butchering cows to butchering humans for consumption. In fine genre tradition, much of Tender is the Flesh takes places in lengthy procedural's, a walk down the factory floor, an interview with prospective employees, trips to the (human) leather factory and the animal experimentation lab. Marcos is still a man with modern problems, his dad is in the end stages of dementia at an expensive nursing home- Marcos wants to make sure he isn't eaten when he dies.
After the death of his infant son, his wife has lapsed into severe depression, so severe that she is forced to retreat to her parent's home in the country. Marcos is at alone, at loose ends, when he receives a "gift" of a "genetically pure" human female- tongueless- meat humans have them removed close to birth so they can't talk, but still with her limbs- one factory specific detail from Tender is the Flesh is that pregnant meat humans have all their limbs amputated to prevent from killing the fetus inside them.
Horror is piled upon horror, and Tender is the Flesh works equally well as commentary of factory farming, which is immoral by any neutral standard, as well as commentary on international capitalism. Bazterrila develops her plot carefully, and she never abandons the explaining impulse, with new and even more horrific details about the post-eating human society emerging all the way until the last chapter.
![Hard Rain Falling](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0726/9203/products/hard-rain_1024x1024.jpg?v=1528394389) |
Cover art for the New York Review of Books Classics edition of Hard Rain Falling.
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Published 9/10/20
Hard Rain Falling(1957)
by Don Carpenter Hard Rain Falling is a "lost classic" of American crime fiction, rescued from out-of-print status by the New York Review of Books Classics edition published in 2009. If you wanted to trace the roots of American crime fiction, you would want to go back at least until to the 1730's, when English painter William Hogarth did his series of a Rake's Progress, dramatizing the decent of an 18th century dandy into degeneracy and sin. The major evolution between then and now is the decoupling of crime fiction from some kind of ending which provides moral uplift- this being the major difference between Hard Rain Falling, written in the mid 1960's, and You Can't Win by Jack Black- published in the 1920's, where the uplifting ending or reform is required.
Jack Levitt is the main protagonist- he shares time with Billy Lancing, a light skinned African American who Levitt befriends, later loves (when they are together in San Quentin) and loses (Lancing is killed in prison.) Levitt is an orphan- the introduction is a brief description of the circumstances of Levitt's birth, and this experience colors his subsequent experience- since he is basically turned loose on the streets of Portland at 14. He commits crimes big and small, and is eventually done in by a kidnapping and statutory rape case out of a county resembling Sonoma County, after he's found in a San Francisco hotel room with the under-age daughter of a local dignitary. It's a classic tale, old as time. His prison story isn't as harrowing as the more naturalistic accounts that would later occur, but it is a realistic depiction of prison life- interesting in the 1960's, when people were just becoming interested.
Published 9/11/20
Blonde Roots (2008)
by Bernardine Evaristo After I finished Bernardine Evaristo's Booker Prize winning Girl, Woman, Other earlier this year, I went and looked at her previous novels. Blonde Roots, an exercise in alternate history where Africans call Europe the "grey continent" and export white slaves to "New Japan" obviously appealed to me, since it combines elements of genre with literary aspiration. One of the critiques I read of Blonde Roots is that it was too enraptured with the details of world building that the story never really takes off, and I guess that would be a judgment of the marketplace as well, since Blonde Roots wasn't a hit. Still, I found it very interesting, and it was a very interesting audiobook, since the characters speak with accents that are essentially, made up.
Doris, the white slave from the "Cabbage coast" is the major narrator, though she splits duties with the orotund prose stylings of her master, Bwana, who addresses the reader in a mirror universe of the white planters of 18th, 19th and 20th century prose fiction. Obviously, the book is written in English and Bwana comes from the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa and it's great capital city of Londolo. It's not clear when Blonde Roots takes place- slavery is very much in place, but crowd scenes often have the tinge of the 20th century- mohawks and political slogans. So yeah, maybe Blonde Roots isn't a stone-cold prize winning classics, but it is a wild Audiobook and worth tracking down simply for the listening experience.
Published 9/16/20
The Discomfort of Evening(1967)
by Mareke Lucas Rijneveld
Everybody loves an auspicious debut, and they don't come more auspicious than The Discomfort of Evening, by first-time Dutch novelist Mareke Lucas Rijneveld. The Discomfort of Evening just won the Booker International Prize, just in time for the American edition to be published. I feel like maybe someone must have tipped them off?
The Discomfort of Evening is a harrowing coming-of-age story about a young woman (just turned 13) living in a contemporary community of Reformed Church members- which seems like a very strict, almost Amish-esque kind of Calvinism. Her father is a dairy farmer (Rijneveld allegedly still works on a dairy farm) and her brother has recently died in a swimming accident, leaving her alone with said parents and her younger sister.
There is nothing totally horrific in The Discomfort of Evening- some of the reviews hinted at really disturbing material, but you know, it's a farming family, so animals die and fathers try to cure their daughters chronic constipation by putting pieces of soap up her butt. Normal farm family stuff, I surmise. I had a feeling, based on the buzz around the British edition, that this a serious contender for the Booker International Prize and now having read it I can see why. The only shortlist title I didn't get to this year was The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Camara.
Published 9/17/20
Herbert (2019)
by Nabarun Bhattacharya
Bengali author Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948-2014) came from a left leaning family that already counted several authors among its members. Nabarun seems like the rebel in the family- an avowed Marxist who has been mostly (entirely?) ignored by English language audiences because none of his books were in translation. That has changed with Herbert, his 1994 classic, which I believe is the first of his novels to get an English translation.
It's an interesting story- about a low-rent psychic who is tapped by an impresario for "bigger things." Increased attention leads to increased woes, as he is quickly targeted by an anti-psychic group for exposure. It is a bracing story, crackling with more life and energy than many other books coming out of India. Highly recommended- more of his books ought to be translated into English.
National Book Award 2020 Longlist for Fiction
Rumaan Alam,
Leave the World BehindChristopher Beha,
The Index of Self-Destructive ActsBrit Bennett,
The Vanishing HalfRandall Kenan,
If I Had Two WingsMegha Majumdar,
A Burning (
Review July 2020)
Lydia Millet,
A Children’s Bible (
Review May 2020)
Deesha Philyaw, T
he Secret Lives of Church LadiesDouglas Stuart,
Shuggie BainVanessa Veselka,
The Great Offshore GroundsCharles Yu,
Interior Chinatown
Booker Prize 2020 Shortlist
Diane Cook -
The New WildernessTsitsi Dangarembga -
This Mournable Body (
Review May 2020)
Avni Doshi -
Burnt SugarMaaza Mengiste -
The Shadow King (
Review Mar 2020)
Douglas Stuart -
Shuggie BainBrandon Taylor -
Real Life (
Review Sept 2020)
The 2020 National Book Award fiction longlist and Booker Prize shortlist were announced the this week. The biggest headline is the omission of Hilary Mantel, who will be denied the chance at a win for all three books in her Cromwell trilogy. Maybe it's a bit of a hangover for the "split Booker" handed out to Margaret Atwood last year for the sequel to
A Handmaid's Tale.
Scottish writer Douglas Stuart is the only author on both lists- I'm reading Shuggie Bain, about a Glaswegian working class family, right now- and it could be a Booker Prize winner for sure. I'm not as sure at it's National Book Award prospects. I didn't particularly like either A Burning by Megha Majumdar, about an Indian teen who gets wrapped up in a social media induced nightmare or A Children's Bible, Lydia Millet's apocalypse-light take on the end times from the perspective of some upper middle class teens. I thought The Shadow King was good but not great. Both Brandon Taylor and Tsitsi Dangarembga have written books that could win- a Booker win would be timely for Dangarembga, who has faced arrest and persecution over her political activity in Zimbabwe.
![Raven Leilani on Twitter: "… "](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ee7mkRBWAAAz9VJ.jpg) |
Author Raven Leilani |
Published 9/22/20
Luster (2020)
by Raven Leilani
Luster is a smart debut novel by American writer Raven Leilani, about a young African-American woman working on the edges of the publishing industry. Edie, her protagonist and the narrator, represents a non-traditional character beyond her race and gender. She is the daughter of Jehovah's Witnesses from upstate New York, so not an urbanite by birth, though Luster takes place in New York City and its environs. Edie didn't graduate college, but she isn't part of the disenfranchised underclass either- the beginning of Luster finds her drifting, barely hanging on to her shitty job and beginning an app inspired relationship with Eric, a forty something white guy with an "open" marriage, and as, it turns out, an adopted African American daughter who is only a decade younger than the young twenties Edie.
Fate throws Edie a series of curve balls: First she loses her job, then she loses her apartment. She ends up moving into the house of her erst-while fling, Eric, when he encounters his wife, a pathologist who works for the VA. There is no doubting Edie's status as an outsider's outsider, but it is equally true that Leilani's literary voice appeals to a broad swath of the audience for literary fiction: She is vulnerable and knowing, witty and emotionally damaged. The story really kicks into gear once Edie is ensconced in Eric's suburban manse. The fact that she ends up mentoring the couple's adopted teenage daughter while fucking her dad ends up being not as big a deal as one might think.
Published 9/28/20
The Disaster Tourist(2020)
by Yun Ko-Eun
I'm always on the look-out for contemporary Korean literature- I think you could probably find popular genre fiction- romance and the such, but I'm interested on the serious side, which is great because Korea is producing a ton of those books, including The Disaster Tourist, about an unhappy employee of a travel agency who finds herself stuck on a quasi-tropical island reliant on "disaster tourism," packaged tours marketed to Koreans seeking proximity to great, and recent, natural disasters. Sometimes it can be hard to mark the line between what we might call literary and genre fiction- even a play by numbers work of romantic fiction might strike an average reader as English language literary fiction as literary simply by virtue of the unusualness of reading about Korean social mores in such detail.
There can be no such mistake with The Disaster Tourist, which has enough fillips of surrealism and absurdity to place it squarely in the category of literary fiction. Ultimately though, the work The Disaster Tourist brought immediately to mind was Platform with Michel Houellebecq: Both books use the tourist industry as a vehicle to make a deeper critique about the negative impact tourism can have on the tourist AND the place they travel to on vacation.
Published 9/28/20
Sisters (2020)
by Daisy Johnson
English author Daisy Johnson made international headlines when her 2018 debut novel Everything Under made it onto the Booker Prize shortlist. Sisters didn't make either list for the 2020 prize, but it did receive an international release, so I was able to pick it up from the library. As one might guess from the title, Sisters is about a pair of sisters, July and September, living with their mother, an author of children's books, in an isolated farm house (inherited by the mother from her dead father.) Johnson has cited Stephen King as one of her favorite authors, and it seems entirely possible that she will make a move for giant commercial success at some point, which would seemingly put her on a similar trajectory as Ian McEwan, who was called Ian Macabre in his earlier, scarier period.
Published 10/6/20
Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time (2020)
by Ben Ehrenreich
I'd imagine that a potential reader knows whether they would be interesting in reading Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time by how they react to the title. If, like me, the desert and the end of time are subjects which frequently occur their thoughts, that potential reader would leap at the opportunity. On the other hand, a potential reader NOT interested in 1) the desert and 2) the end of time wouldn't even get beyond the title.
Ehrenreich is what you might call a freelance alternative-weekly style journalist (even though alternative weeklies are few and far between these days). Desert Notebooks takes the familiar form of New Yorker/Harpers style creative non fiction, combining non fiction research with personal reportage, most of it from the Joshua Tree/Las Vegas axis. I had almost 100% personal congruence with his non-fiction subjects: Mayan mythology, Walter Benjamin, the experience of Native Peoples in North America, the industrial revolution, etc. So I wasn't surprised by much of what I read, but I was impressed by the blend of that material with Enrehreich's own perspective- one similar to my own.
Desert Notebooks was also an above-average audiobook. The creative non-fiction/hybrid format adapts well to the Audiobook format because there is typically a wide variation in material and a single authorial voice.
Published 10/8/20
Shuggie Bain (2020)
by Douglas Stuart
Hotly tipped Shuggie Bain by Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart has made a splash on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK it is a current shortlist pick for the Booker Prize, and yesterday it received the same honor in the USA, where it made the National Book Award: Fiction shortlist. I don't think it a stretch to say that it could be the first dual win for a writer. I believe Stuart, though Scottish, is eligible for the National Book Award because he lives in New York City and had an American publisher.
The setting for this dark bildungsroman is Glasgow in the early 1980's. Not a great time! The coal mines have closed, and almost the entire population is out of work, certainly the mood among the working classes depicted in Shuggie Bain can be described as "extreme existential despair." Although the book is about Shuggie- shown in the first chapter as a newly independent "adult" aged 14 or 15 and then spun back in time, it is his mother, Agnes Bain, who is the star.
Agnes has the misfortune to appear slightly nicer than her surroundings- she speaks the Queen's English, not the Glaswegian dialect, and although her own parents are members of the same working class as the neighbors, Agnes has higher aspirations of some sort. You could say she fancies herself better than her neighbors. In the early chapters, Agnes quickly ditches her predictable, well meaning husband with whom she has two kids for Hugh "Shug" Bain, a flashy, and older, taxi driver with the gloss of sophistication she's been looking for. They have a son in addition to the kids from Agnes' prior marriage (Shug has prior children of his own but they are kept off-stage), the son is called Shuggie.
After a rough couple of years living with her parents, Agnes and Shug get their own place, a decrepit stand-alone shack in a housing project opposite an abandoned heap of coal slag. It's not the 20 story plus apartment nightmare of popular imagination, but it is, as it turns out, equally able to induce despair in the residents, Agnes included. Abandoned by Shug and eventually her two oldest children, Agnes and Shuggie struggle to survive as Agnes succumbs to alcoholism.
Not the kind of plot that screams fun, but it is a compelling ride, and Stuart writes in an international style of English that eschews the slang heavy patois of Irving Welsh (and other Scottish writers of internationally consumed literary fiction) in favor of non-geographically specific vocabulary, word choice and spelling. But make no mistake Shuggie Bain is SCOTTISH AS FUCK and the Booker Prize doesn't seem out of the question here.
Published 10/8/20
Machine Learning: The New AI (2016)
by Ethem Alpaydin
I earn a decent amount of money some years by using Google Ads to attract business as a criminal defense lawyer. I've been doing it for a decade, but only as a supplement. It's never been a focus for me because the type of business you attract from the internet or just advertising generally, involves a lot of sales work and lead sifting. It's as much about telesales as anything else, a major turn-off for me. But I've kept with it intermittently over the years because I think it is pretty obvious that one only needs to advertise on Google to capture a significant portion of the audience of people who want to hire a criminal defense lawyer.
So I'm a dabbler, but it still adds up to tens of thousands over the past decade, so I try to develop my understanding of the principles behind Google Ads, which is hard for me because I'm not a computer guy or a science guy, and I basically dropped economics when it reached statistics in college. The major theoretical concepts behind Google Ads are auction theory and, as of, like, last year, machine learning. Every Google Ads account has a "strategy" to achieve a certain end within the ad program. Historically, much of what Google Ads professionals DID was make the decisions to pursue a specific strategy within Ads. As of like, six months ago, Google is telling people, "Just click this button here and let Machine Learning do it."
Left unexplained is what is machine learning. I turned to this book, part of the
MIT Press Essential Learning Series to find out. Here is what I found out. Machine Learning essentially abandons the traditional "goal" of AI: Simulating Human Thought, for a more achievable goal based on using rules extracted by algorithms from vast amounts of data. Alpaydin, who is the author of a widely used textbook that is used by students in the field, takes a lay reader through each of the components of this statement to give a better understandings of the idea of Machine Learning.
The main thing for a layperson to understand based on the whole book is that machine learning requires ALOT of data, the more data the better. Google Ads represents the best possible world for that idea, since it is basically a monopoly for internet search traffic all over the world, and certainly here in Southern California. The second thing to understand is that there is no "intelligence" or guiding that takes place- the machine learning does what it does, and then you measure whether it is effective or not.
Finally, there are the more sophisticated implications of these basic ideas- which largely eluded me, especially because I was listening to the Audiobook.
Published 10/12/20
If I Had Your Face (2020)
by Frances Cha
If I Had Your Face by Korean born, Brooklyn based author Frances Cha is about the intertwined lives of five Korean women living in a converted "office-tel." There are two pairs of roomates: Kyuri and Miho- a cocktail hostess and up and coming artist as well as Ara, a mute hairdresser and Sujin, who is working her way up the same cocktail hostess ladder as Kyuri. Rounding out the cast is Wonna, the lonely wife of a typical salaryman. The characters do not equal space, with Kyuri and Miho- who appears to be the stand-in for the author, occupying most of the narrative, including a riveting flashback from when Miho was studying in New York.
It's hard to make a case for If I Had Your Face as anything but a work of Korean literature, except for the fact that Cha wrote it in English- I'm not even sure if there is a Korean language edition. I enjoyed the Audiobook, Cha, writing in English, integrates a lot of Korean-specific vocabulary in a way that her English language audience can understand. I went back and forth on whether the experience was more like literary fiction or "chick lit" and until the ending I was going to say literary fiction, but the ending put me on the other side of the fence.
Published 10/14/20
The New Wilderness (2020)
by Diane Cook
I think the shocker of the Booker Prize shortlist this year is The New Wilderness, the debut novel by American author Diane Cook. I'm not expecting Cook to win the award, but a Booker Prize shortlist for a debut novel by an American author is a win in and of itself. The set up for The New Wilderness sounds promising, a vaguely described dystopia where a group of twenty Americans have been selected to participate in an experiment in "the Wilderness State," which sounds like it exists in the eastern portion of the Pacific Northwest and Idaho. The Wilderness State is a place where no one, save the group are allowed. They are policed by the Rangers, a surly bunch of government employees tasked with enforcing the draconian rules under which the group are allowed to exist: Leave no trace, don't stay in one place for two long, no outside goods, etc.
At the center of The New Wilderness is Bea, the wife of the organizer of the experiment and her daughter, Agnes. Bea, a succesful interior designer in "the city" is driven to join because Agnes is dying, a victim of the foul city air. The New Wilderness picks up in situ, with Bea burying her prematurely born child at the edge of the campground. From there, Agnes and Bea swap narrating duties back and forth- it's their relationship at the center of the book.
Cook takes her time to get where she is going- there are distinct first, second and third acts with surprising twists and turns. It's clear that Cook has done her research, much of it derived from the reconstruction of pre-contact Native American hunter-gatherer culture.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Perumal_Murugan_at_KLF_2018.jpg/1280px-Perumal_Murugan_at_KLF_2018.jpg) |
Indian, Tamil language author and intellectual Perumal Murugan
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Published 10/15/20
The Story of a Goat (2019)
by Perumal Murugan
I was surprised by the picks for the National Book Award in Translated Fiction finalists. Pilar Quintana over Fernanda Melchor, Anja Kampmann over Linda Knausgard. Not a commercial hit among them. The Story of a Goat, the first book by controversial Tamil author Perunal Murugan since he was hounded out of Indian literature, did not make the list of finalists, but it was a longlist pick. The Story of a Goat is exactly the type of India literature I'm looking for, not written by an expatriate who graduated from Oxford or a member of the Indian elite. Murugan, 53, is now 'back' and the backstory is as interesting as that of any author on a translated literature shortlist, more akin to something you'd expect from a Nobel Prize winner.
Murugan gives a deft, and welcome tale about a childless, elderly farming couple living in rural Tamil Nadu. One night a ridiculously tall stranger gifts them a goat, and promises an extraordinary provided they care for the goat. Murugan also writes from the perspective of the goat itself, which seems pretty radical, if not unprecedented within the precincts of Indian literary fiction. Most of the domestic Indian literary fiction I've read eschews the techniques of magical realism, which seems like such a natural fit going by the success of Salman Rushdie internationally, but Murugan gets pretty close in The Story of a Goat.
Published 10/30/20
The Telling (2000)
by Ursula Le Guin
The Telling is the last full length novel of the Hainish Cycle. The Cycle also includes two collections of short stories, one published before and the other published after The Telling- both of those compilations are included as volumes in the over-all cycle. The Telling reprises the most familiar narrative structure of the Cycle: An observer, here from Earth just after it joined the Ekumen, travels to a prospect planet and gets involved in the local scene, giving Le Guin to work out some of her anthropological/sociological ideas.
The further the Cycle progressed, the more obvious the comparison to current events. For example, The Word for World is Forest appears to reflect the American experience in Vietnam. The Dispossessed mirrored the struggle between Capitalism and Communism in the 20th century. Here, the reference point is the Cultural Revolution in China, with the protagonist attempting to discover the "real" culture of the visited planet.
Published 10/27/20
Auctions (The MIT Essential Knowledge) (2016)
by Timothy P. Hubbard
I never got into math, science, computers, technology, despite growing up in the Bay Area and going to law school in San Francisco during the first tech boom. I attended law school without a laptop, for example. I've always been prone to motion sickness, and using a computer or video game system for too long made me sick the same way.
BUT it occurs to me that the way technology is going, even if you aren't a tech/computer person, you want to find some way to use technology to ensure your continued existence. I like to say that, when the robots take over, I'd like them to keep me around, for whatever reason. My main interaction with that universe has been my use of Google Ads (formally Adwords) over the past decade. I like, but don't love Adwords. Obviously, it costs money to use it- traditionally criminal defense lawyers do advertise, but more traditionally they derive business from word of mouth, so I've never focused on building up my Google Ads usage, but relied on it as a supplement.
What is interesting about Google Ads is that no one really understands how it works. I mean they do, but the program is constantly evolving, and the features keep changing. One change I've mentioned on this blog is that traditionally, using Google Ads meant setting budgets, bidding on keywords, like, doing actual stuff. Within the past year, Google Ads has added machine learning to make those decisions. Very helpful for someone like me, a professional who doesn't have a "department" but think about all those people who make their livings making those decisions!
What I'm trying to do is learn more about the concepts that underlie Google Ads. The principles, if you will. The first topic was Machine Learning, which I tacked in the corresponding volume from The MIT Essential Knowledge series- which I highly recommend for non tech people who want to understand these subjects. The second subject is the idea of Auctions, which is what Google uses to sell keywords within Google Ads. Traditionally, one set a bid price and adopted a bid strategy for each keyword within Google Ads. Now, the machine learning/AI sets that amount, but it is still the same system.
Auctions are viewed through the analysis of economics- I have an undergraduate minor in the subject, so I understood the basics. Auction theory is closely related to "Game Theory," though as this book anticipates, it has increasingly been viewed as it's own subject. See, for example
the winners of the Economic Nobel Prize this year. I imagine what economists love about auction theory is that it involves the efficient distribution of goods, which is a subject near and dear to their hearts. Every auction is a chance to study the efficient distribution of goods.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Charles_yu_2011.jpg) |
American author Charles Yu
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Published 11/3/20
Interior Chinatown (2020)
by Charles Yu
Interior Chinatown is a National Book Award finalist this year. Author Charles Yu has the kind of resume that sounds like a stereotype for the high-achieving second generation Asian America, undergraduate at Berkeley, where he studied molecular biology, law degree from Columbia University and then stints at Sullivan & Cromwell and Bryan Cave (two of the largest law firms in the world) and then jobs as in-house counsel before he started devoting himself full time to fiction. Interior Chinatown is Yu's second novel and it is easy to see why it might be a National Book Award finalist, combining shimmering modernist technique with a narrative that investigates the inner life of second generation Americans growing up at the margins of society.
Interior Chinatown takes the form of the screenplay- which- I listened to the Audiobook, and while I sensed the interesting format, I couldn't really see it- it does make for a more interesting than average listen. Yu, I think has a shot at the National Book Award. He clearly has more to say than Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) and Lydia Millet (A Children's Bible)- both of which seem a little too on the nose since they revolve around the end of the world. I thought Shuggie Bain was a better book, but it is set in Scotland, and it seems unlikely that an American Book Award would award it to a book that takes place outside of the United States. I haven't been able to locate the last National Book Award Finalist, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw (and published by West Virginia University Press!)
![Interview with K-Ming Chang](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/5ed16b_f1a84923c8ef4cbf9b18384990ebc261~mv2.jpg/v1/fit/w_908%2Ch_858%2Cal_c%2Cq_80/file.jpg) |
Taiwanese-American author K-Ming Ching
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Published 11/4/20
Bestiary (2020)
by K-Ming Ching
This is a capital L capital F debut work of Literary Fiction by Taiwanese-American author K-Ming Ching, about three generations of Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American women, Daughter, Mother and Grandmother. The fiction of Taiwan isn't totally unknown to me- I've read two books by Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi, but I K-Ming Ching is the first Taiwanese-American author I've read.
Despite plentiful usage of plot devices that are firmly in the literary magical realism (Daughter has a tail, for example, Grandmother tells frequent fairy-tales that have dark twists and turns) Ching is closer to the gritty experience of the Hmong immigrants of Souvankham Thommavongsa (How to Pronounce Knife) and light years distant from the more bourgeois experience of second generations immigrant writers from China, Korea and Japan.
One of the distinct aspects of Taiwanese/Taiwanese-American is the dynamic between several discrete ethnicities- an exception in largely homogenous East Asia. First, there are
indigenous Taiwanese. Next, there are groups of Chinese who began settling from the mainland during the European Middle Ages. Between the end of the 17th century and the end of the 19th century, Taiwan was part of China proper, so there is a difference between the Chinese settlers who came before and after that divide. In 1895 the Japanese took over, hanging on until the end of World War II. In a final twist, Taiwan became the last and enduring refuge of the mainland Chinese Nationalist Part after they lost the mainland to the Communists. It's this last bit which spurs the emigration of Grandmother to the United States (her family is murdered by arriving Nationalist soldiers after World War II.)
I recommend the Audiobook- which is partially narrated by famous Hollywood actress Sandra Oh (who is Korean-Canadian)- this is the kind of book where you want to hear the accents without having to do them in your head.
Published 11/5/20
The Emissary (2018)
by Yoko Tawada
I randomly checked The Emissary by Yoko Tawada out of the library because I was looking through recently available titles by New Directions. A tip for navigating the e-world of the American library system is that books that are translated into English are less popular than those books written originally in English, so if you are willing to read literature translated into English, you will never be forced to wait long to check out a title. Compare that to the average wait time for popular works of American literary fiction- three months is not an uncommon waiting period for a prize-nominated title or major book club pick.
I'd never heard of Tawada- a Japanese author who decamped to Germany after graduating from university in Japan (with a degree in Russian literature.) She is unusual in that she writes in both Japanes and German, sometimes switching between chapters in the same book. This is a challenge for those seeking to approach her work. New Directions has taken up the challenge, and they were rewarded when Tawada won the inaugural National Book Award for translated fiction a couple years ago. After reading The Emissary, it feels like more of a lifetime achievement award. The Emissary is only 130 pages, and in unquestionably closer to a novella. I gather that Tawada is more a prose stylist than storyteller.
While the set-up to The Emissary is appealing: A future Japan where the environment has rendered all children feeble, leaving the maintenance of society to people over the age of one hundred, there is no story of which to speak. Which is fine- this is capital L literature, after all, but The Emissary wasn't as nearly as fun as I had hoped.
Published 11/11/20
Snow (2020)
by John Banville
Irish author John Banville is a favorite of the 1001 Books editors- they included five of his books in the first edition. None of them were cut for the revised edition in 2008- which I think leaves him close to the top for number of books for a single author in the 1001 Books series. Banville wrote detective fiction for years under a pseudonym- Benjamin Black. Snow is the first work of detective fiction written under his own name.
I was interested in the fact that Banville deigned to publish this work of genre fiction under his own name AND in the fact that the Audiobook I listened to was narrated by my favorite Audiobook narrator, John Lee. Snow gives Lee a chance to bust out his Irish accent, which I'd not heard him use in the past.
The story in Snow is paint-by-the-numbers type stuff, set in rural Ireland in 1957. St. John Strafford is sent from Dublin the investigate the murder (and castration) of a Catholic priest at the country-house of a member of the erst-while Anglo-Irish aristocracy. The suspects line up in predictable order: The redheaded house boy, the risque teenaged daughter, the sullen firstborn son, the wacked out second wife. There was nothing remotely surprising about anything that happened. The writing is, of course, excellent but I thought there was a real lack of interesting ideas.
![yu miri | all wrongs reversed](https://allwrongsreversed.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/yumiri.jpg?w=584) |
Japanese- Korean author/playwright Yu Miri, author of Tokyo Ueno Station
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Published 11/13/20
Tokyo Ueno Station (2020)
by Yu Miri
Tokyo Ueno Station by Japanese author Yu Miri is another finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature- it's actually the only finalist I can actually find- I checked out the Audiobook(!) edition from the Los Angeles Public Library. Unusual for Japanese literature, Tokyo Ueno Station is written from the perspective of a homeless older man, living in the park opposite the titular station- a kind of Gare du Nord for the Tokyo area, if I understood the book. In expert fashion, Miri toggles between the prosaic reality of homeless life in Tokyo (The local restaurants and neighborhood do-gooders make sure they stay fed, but they periodically get swept out of the park because a member of the royal family wants to come and take a gander) and a retrospective of the life of the narrator, his humble beginnings and even more humble life as a kind of migrant laborer.
His life, of course, is marked by tragedy, namely the untimely death of his college-age son- who he never got to see because he worked so far away from home. In my experience, Japanese literature is a thoroughly bourgeois affair- more so than in the West, where the ties between native aristocrats and western modes of literature is stronger. In Japan, the elites were more concerned with traditional Japanese modes of artistic expression, and it was left to the rising bourgeois to champion western styles of art, particularly the novel and film.
To be fair, there aren't many books written about the homeless in any language, or films. I recommend the Audiobook- under four hours and makes for an interesting listen that doesn't make you feel like you are missing out on reading the text of the actual book.
Published 11/24/20
The Pale King (2011) by
David Foster Wallace
There are two pop-culture/artistic suicides that have impacted me memorably- the first is the death of Kurt Cobain- I was a senior in high school, driving through the rain en route to a weekend in Mendocino with my girlfriend- somewhere in Marin or Sonoma- when I heard the news on the radio. The second was David Foster Wallace. He killed himself in September of 2008. I was living in San Diego. Hearing the news took my breath away- I had figured Wallace as THE epochal author. He was one of the first writers of contemporary writers of American literary fiction I discovered on my own, and I'm still struck by how closely his parenetical writing style mirrors my own. The fact that he struggled with depression, and ultimately lost the struggle, is as haunting an example of the hollowness of artistic success as I can imagine.
The Pale King- published posthumously and assembled by this editor with the help of Foster's widow, is by all accounts a bit of a mess, but it is a highly thought out mess, and frankly, it is all we have left. The Pale King mostly takes places in and around and IRS tax processing facility in downstate Illinois- outside Peoria. Most of the book describes the lives of several employees in excruciating, Foster Wallace-esque detail, interspersed before and after a lengthy portion which purports to be by Foster Wallace himself- based on his year working at said tax facility.
Honestly, there wasn't enough tax stuff- I thought there would be A LOT more tax stuff. Instead, The Pale King is heavy on childhood recollections, including a lengthy monologue by a female tax employee at the end of the book that is almost cringey, post- me-too era.