The North Water (2016) by Ian McGuire

 Audiobook Review

The North Water (2016)

by Ian McGuire

   English author Ian McGuire- I just like the work- I read The Abstainer (2020) in 2021, and when I saw he had a new book coming out (White River Crossing), I went back and checked out his 2016 novel, The North Water in Audiobook format on the theory that a novel about an ill-fated whaling journey into the great white north in the 19th century would be more entertaining to listen to than to read.  It certainly was the case for The Abstainer, which featured a panoply of Northern English accents.    McGurie's talent is that he writes historical fiction which feels modern when you read it, with characters who manage to voice philosophical musings while they are starving to death on the arctic icesheet. Compare McGuire to writers like Melville or Joseph Conrad- who express modernist themes but have characters who are moored to their time and place.  McGuire occupies that liminal space between genre and literary fiction that I really favor, and if I can get the Audiobook without waiting, so much the better.

Beasts of the Sea (2023) by Lida Turpeinen

Audiobook Review

Beasts of the Sea (2023)

by Lida Turpeinen

Translated from the Finnish

by David Hackston

  Beast of the Sea caught my eye simply because it is translated from the Finnish, and this is only the seventh book translated from Finnish to make to this blog (Unknown Soldiers (1954) by Vaino Linna, Crossing (2019)by Pajtim Statovci, Meek Heritage (1938) by Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Year of the Hare (1975)  by Arto Paasilinna, The Summer Book (1972) by Tove Jansson and the The Manila Rope (1957) by Veijo Meri.  Sillanpää is an obscure Nobel Prize winner, and the rest are one-translation wonders.   

  The hook for Beast of the Sea is that it is only loosely a "novel", really more a set of connected novella's/short stories centered around the geographic area where the Steller's Sea Cow was discovered and hunted to extinction within a generation of being "discovered" by the west.  So one bit is about the naturalist on the expedition where the Steller's Sea Cow was discovered. Another bit is about a Finnish naturalist who came to possess one of the only skeletons of said Steller's Sea Cow after extinction. Then you've got a part with the English wife of a Russian Governor of Alaska (rough gig). Each chapter contains conventional novel stuff with more scientific stuff.   The link that runs through each chapter is just as much the place where the Sea Cow came from as the Cow itself. 

Things We Lost to the Water(2021) by Eric Nguyen

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Things We Lost to the Water (2021)

by Eric Nguyen

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 15/28

   This is the first Vietnamese American author to make it into 1,001 Novels: A Library of American since Ocean Vuong represented Hartford, Connecticut in the New England chapter.  It's hard for me to read ANY book written by a Vietnamese American author without thinking about the work- fictional and non-fictional by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen.  Ocean Vuong though, is the more obvious comparison- so obvious that I wonder if comparing the two writers constitutes a microaggression.   As writers they have very different styles- Vuong being a poet-at-heart who deigns to write fiction and Nguyen being a more conventional type of author.

  Things We Lost to the Water is a very conventional coming-of-age story, sub-category immigrant experience, sub-category New Orleans, sub-category LGBT.  In that sense, I enjoyed the author-protagonist stand-in since he was a rare character from this part of the country that actually cares about books, literature, the life of the mind- something sorely, sorely lacking in the literature of the deep south thus far.   Unlike Nguyen, who has concentrated his gaze at the heart of the South Vietnamese government and military milleu of Southern California, both Nguyen and Vuong write from the edges- Vuong in New England and now Nguyen in the South. Unlike Vuong, who has a rock-solid working-class/underclass background, Nguyen's fictional situation is more complicated- his Dad, who stays in Vietnam is a college professor who falls afoul of the new regime and his Mom is a teacher.  In America, Mom becomes a nail tech, and her children struggle with fitting in.

  Like other Vietnamese American authors, Nguyen captures the feelings of loss, abandonment and anger that track American feelings about the Vietnamese war itself- it is an ambiguous situation, to say the least. 

Summer of Fire and Blood (2025) by Lyndal Roper

 Audiobook Review

Summer of Fire and Blood (2025)

by Lyndal Roper

    Billed as "the first history of the German Peasant's War in a generation," Summe of Fire and Blood delivers on the promise, bringing the English language historiography of this poorly understood episode in early modern German history into the present.  It was also a great Audiobook snag- the kind of book I'm really looking for in the Libby app.  The problem with being interested in a subject like "Early Modern German history" is primarily that most of it is written in German.  What is written in English is always going to be heavily weighted towards the academic//specialist market.   I thought going in that this was a German language translation, but no, it is apparently true that the first history of the German Peasant's War in a generation was written English.

   The use of the 'German Peasants War' (instead of German Peasants Revolt, which is what I grew up with) should tell you about the perspective of the author- it's very James Scott/David Graeber, looking at things from the bottom up and trying to tell the story of people who weren't well educated and didn't write everything down.   Roper goes hard on the origins, motives and the heady days when various bands of roving peasants were able to sack unguarded Monasteries and bully townsfolk into submission.  They were benefited from the generally chaotic political situation in German speaking areas- polities were split between conventional nobility, church-run states and independent towns. 

  The ruling authorities didn't seem to be particularly aware that such a thing as a peasant revolt on a large-scale was even possible.   Of course, gradually the nobility got their act together and when it finally came to peasant armies vs. the military of the early modern era, the peasants got crushed.  The payback was brutal- which Roper covers but doesn't really dwell upon.   Surely there is a Foucauldian take that would emphasis the payback portion over the war itself.

Strip Tease (1993) by Carl Hiaasen

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Striptease (1993)

by Carl Hiaasen

Florida: 2/23

   It's hard not to compare Carl Hiaasen with Elmore Leonard- both blend crime fiction with humor and they both enjoy a Florida setting for their books. Strip Tease got a movie version with peak Demi Moore and not-peak Burt Reynolds.  It's mostly been forgotten but thanks to Rotten Tomatoes I can tell you that it has an 11/24 critics/audience split, which is just about as low as you can go for a mass-market R-rated film.   After taking a couple states off from Audiobooks, I'm back into them for Florida because of the number of crime-fiction//detective fiction titles, favorite genres for Audiobook editions.   At 15 hours (464 pages in book format), Striptease is almost unbelievably long for a work of crime-fiction.  It almost amazingly manages to stay in PG13 territory despite large parts of the book taking place inside a strip club and a plot involving several murders.

  Erin Grant is a classic "stripper with a heart of gold," working the exotic dancing gig so she can pay off her lawyer while she is battles her criminal ex for custody of their young daughter.   Besides the length, Striptease was a relief to listen to after months of downtrodden poor people living in the rural deep south.