The Watermark (2025) by Sam Mills

 Book Review

The Watermark (2025)

by Sam Mills

    I read about this book in the Guardian and it looked interesting so I checked out the E-edition from the library.  Sad to find out at the end that the print version has a "graphic novel" section that is simply translated into prose in the E-book.   Ultimately though I found the mechanics of the plot more interesting than the book itself, about two modern-day star-crossed lovers (a low achieving, well educated hipster and his morose artist girlfriend/soulmate) who are entrapped by a writer of literary fiction by use of a tea to become characters in his, and others, books.   While I won't be thinking about the characters or what happened in the book, the idea of these people being trapped as characters in a series of different novels, written by different authors, was really interesting and I can't remember reading anything along these lines that took it through so many levels- for a literary Inception type impact on the reader.   I wish the characters themselves were more interesting but five stars for the idea.

The Lost Steps (1953) by Alejo Carpentier

 Audiobook Review

The Lost Steps (1953)

by Alejo Carpentier

   I read about The Lost Steps in Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank- a book about the life of the 20th century novel.  The Lost Steps struck me as interesting- a pre/proto-magical realism work of Latin American fiction, about a guy living in an American city (New York?) who is dispatched by a museum to the wilds of Brazil to locate the "oldest instruments" in the western hemisphere.  Fortunately, Penguin just published a new translation (2023) done by Adrian Nathan West, who also translated the excellent book by Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World.  AND Penguin also did an Audiobook version, which is what I checked out from the library.

   I thought there were many memorable passages in The Lost Steps, and I enjoyed this book start to finish.  The protagonist is a frustrated composer working in advertising and he has a very existentialist vibe.  His adventures in Brazil are fun and the author and the protagonist stay away from racist proclamations about the indigenous Brazilians they encounter, which is welcome for a book from 1953.  Particularly memorable were his rhapsodic, Proustian passages about his relationship with music- again, unusual for fiction published in the early 1950's.  The Lost Steps maintained a modern feeling from start to finish and fans of Latin American lit from the first Golden Age should give this book a chance.

Plum Bun (1925) by Jesi Redmon Fauset

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral (1925)

by Jesi Redmon Fauset

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania: 6/27

   I've dramatically slowed down on the pace of 1,001 Novels: A Library of American because of less job-related driving (Audiobooks) and more job-related work (reading and writing and generally running around more).   Still, I was excited to listen to Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral which is a forgotten classic from a key (but largely forgotten) member of the Harlem Renaissance, Jesi Redmon Fauset.  Plum Bun is a novel about the experience of "passing" where (in this context) an African-American, usually a woman, abandons her racial identity in favor of living among white people.   It's a phenomenon that is best demonstrated in Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing and the introduction makes a point of asking why the canon only includes one such tale.  From my perspective, it's understandable.  Larsen's book is centered around a woman who marries a white man who believes her to be white, and the resulting action is memorable and tragic.  

  In Plum Bun, on the on the hand, protagonist Angela Murray carefully avoids such a situation and generally speaking lives more like an existentialist hero- avoiding close attachments while yearning for them at the same time- than a heroine in a novel published in the 1920's in the US.  Plum Bun is also a book that seems somewhat randomly assigned to Philadelphia because Angela Murray grew up there.  Almost the entire book is set in New York City, and New York City is really the only place that the Author puts across to the reader- I didn't get much of a sense of Philadelphia at all beyond her childhood memories of "passing" with her mother, who was also light-skinned.