Lori Eshleman's Blog, page 3

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


An intergenerational novel about descendants of two half-sisters born in 18th century Ghana, one who remains in Africa and one who is taken as a slave to America. Effia the Beauty marries the English governor of the Cape Coast Castle, the center of a British slaving operation. Their descendants are mixed race, and bear the burden of not fitting completely in either culture, as well as carrying the sins of their grandfather. Effia’s half-sister Esi is locked up in the dungeons of the same Castle, before being enslaved in the American South. Each chapter alternates between descendants of the two family lines, both men and women. In the process the reader learns of slave-hunting in Africa, the wars between the Fante and the Asante, and ultimately the British. In tandem, we learn of the horrors of slavery in America, of attempts to escape, the flight to northern cities like New York and Boston, and the varied ways that former slaves and their descendants have been locked out of the larger society, through segregation, racial bias, drug addiction and poverty, and the continued enslavement of black men after the Civil War through forced prison labor. One of the most poignant sections is the story of H, a powerful black man who is arrested on trumped up charges, then forced to labor in a coal mine in Alabama for a decade. Stronger than most, he survives, to settle in a coal mining town and continue the only vocation he knows, despite the specter of black lung. The characters in this novel are driven by broken memory, dissatisfaction and longing to seek their true selves. They alternately escape from suffocating circumstances --like James, who was born into an African royal family; or are torn apart by their family heritage -- like Akua, who cannot sleep for fear of the firewoman who appears in her dreams, leading to devastating consequences. Themes of fire and water run throughout the book, attending those who stay in Africa and those who cross the water to America, until both come together at the end. This symbolism at times seems somewhat forced, but ultimately unifies the novel and gives it a visionary quality. Published to acclaim in 2016, this novel resonates strongly with our current concerns about racial inequity and injustice. The past truly is still with us!



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Death in Her Hands, by Ottessa Moshfegh

Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Part mystery, part horror story, part portrait of widowhood, the setting is a rustic cabin by a woodland lake in Maine. The narrator, a 70-something widow named Vesta Gul, has sold her home after her husband Walter’s death and moved to this rustic retreat with her dog, Charlie. Upon finding a note in the woods declaring that a girl named Magda has been killed and no-one will know the killer, Vesta sets out to unravel the mystery of Magda, her killer, and the location of her body. Uncannily, Vesta seems able to imagine the details of Magda’s life in great clarity, with the help of a questionnaire of tips for mystery writers from the computer at the local library. Even more uncannily, the imagined “clues” find parallels in the town and its cast of characters, from the scarred convenience store owner to the threatening local policeman, to the oddly-dressed lakeside neighbors. The increasingly surreal plot is anchored by mundane descriptions of Vesta’s trips to the grocery store, her frugal diet of bagels and tea, and the chicken she roasts for her dog. Vesta believes she shares a mind-space with Charlie, as she did with Walter. Fragmented memories of Walter rise to the surface, gradually shifting the reader’s perceptions of their marriage. A handsome, successful German academic, Walter seems like the ideal, caring husband – or was he? Vesta, too, initially comes across as a woman who doted on her husband. Just like she dotes on her dog…Moshfegh’s prose crafts a meticulous and at times raw portrait of the self in relation to mind, body, and others. Increasingly infused with dread and suspicion, the novel unleashes a hallucinatory spill of dark thoughts and urges. In the end, if this is a horror story, it is a horror of the self’s own making. As Vesta states, “So many dreams had been dashed. But I dashed them myself” (125).



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Review of Inheritors, by Asako Serizawa

Inheritors by Asako Serizawa

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


These interconnected stories of an extended Japanese family span the time before and after World War II, in Japan and the U.S., from the early 20th century to the near future. Gripping, multivalent, and labyrinthine, the stories don’t flinch from engaging difficult topics, including “comfort women,” a Japanese bioweapons facility in China that used human subjects, incendiary bombs falling on Tokyo, Japanese suicide torpedoes, and encounters with American GIs after the war. In the process, family members are damaged, lost and dislocated. The stories cover a spectrum of motivations and perspectives: from pacifists and Communists, doctors and intellectuals; to migrants to the U.S. and ardent Japanese nationalists. Specific themes resurface throughout: the maze or labyrinth, including the puzzle-like intersections among stories; the garden, offering promise and hope for the future – until it bangs up against the climate crisis; and the encapsulated self, unable to connect with those they love or indeed with the world at large – “They waited too long. They had already passed each other in the night” (193). Serizawa’s imagery is rich with embodiment and sensations -- from light and dark, to gut and heart, to staring eyes and listening ears. “The walls shimmered; the air pulsated, a luminous agitation Masaaki would experience again only in the final moments of his own life” (209). The characters’ history and heritage unfurl through artifacts such as memories, news-clippings, or photos; and fluid, gut-punching moments of self-revelation. My reading of the book was complicated by memories of my uncle in the Navy, who married a survivor of Nagasaki some time after the war and brought her home to America. As a child I was drawn to the kimono and geta, the puzzle-box and Japanese dolls they gifted me. This book helped me realize that their story must have been more complicated than I could have known.



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Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A contemporary take on race relations and media-culture. A well-to-do white woman named Alix Chamberlain – who has made a name for herself giving workshops on cover-letter writing, interviewing and confidence-building for young women – hires a sitter for her two-year old daughter, Briar. Emira Tucker is young, black, and college-educated, but has no idea what to do with her life – she currently works as a transcriber and part-time sitter for Briar. Emira genuinely loves Briar, who is loud and socially awkward, and hardly meets Alix’s expectations for the ideal child. One evening when Alix asks Emira to take Briar to a grocery store late at night to get the child out of the house, a suspicious shopper summons the security guard, who accuses Emira of taking the child. A stand-off takes place, of a type all too common today: Emira holding the child and trying to explain herself, while the guard detains her “because the safety of a child is at risk” (14). Another man catches the encounter on his cell phone.

The remainder of the novel unfolds from this event. Alix becomes suddenly obsessed with trying to be Emira’s friend and making her part of the family – raising old stereotypes of the black “help.” Emira accidentally runs into the man who took the cell video, a good-looking white guy and successful businessman named Kelley, who happens to have a history with black friends and black women. Alix, Emira, Briar, and Kelley’s relationships become inextricably entangled – and the question of whether to release the video on social media keeps popping up.

I found this novel to be entertaining, sometimes amusing, and often unsettling. The dialogue, especially between Emira and her friends, is lively and engaging. But it was difficult to like the main characters, besides Emira and Briar; Emira, perhaps purposely, comes across as rather passive – pushed into action at the end by her best-friend Zara. Unlike Alix, though, she has the ability to let things go, and move on.




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No Book but the World, by Leah Hager Cohen

No Book but the World by Leah Hager Cohen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This novel about the two children of an experimental school founder in rural upstate New York takes its title from the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and refers to the belief that children should learn in a natural manner by experiencing the world rather than being taught. As adults, Ava and Fred bear the marks of their parents’ freeform upbringing, as well as the impact of their differing personalities. Fred suffers from some never-identified disability that makes him bang, bounce, drool, shy away from contact, and stumble in speech. As the story begins, Ava tries to help him after he is arrested for a possibly horrific crime in the wake of a young boy’s death in the wilderness. As Ava and three other characters narrate the story, the reader sees flashbacks to their childhood at the old school site of Batter Hollow, the push and pull between their parents Neel and June, and the childhood games Ava and her friend Kitty played with Fred – some not so harmless.

Cohen’s writing is descriptive and synesthetic, as shapes become colors and sounds become smells. The amorphous imagery is well-adapted to the children’s free upbringing and idiosyncratic personalities. Fred himself emerges as the quintessential Rousseauian wild child, unknowable, but fully immersed in bodily sensations and solitary surroundings. But is he an innocent or capable of criminal acts? Is he free or imprisoned? Ava herself isn’t sure. And Ava fears, too, that she is more like Fred than she wants to be -- always the outsider. Buoyed up by the love of her husband, Dennis (Kitty’s older brother), and the help of a geriatric public attorney in the town where Fred has been arrested, she makes headway in coming to terms with her relationship to her brother and deepening her understanding of him. “Isn’t this really what he desired, to change the state of things?” she reflects, “As a way of validating his presence, his mattering” (283). But the sudden turn at the end of the novel snatches satisfaction from the reader, especially due to the author’s sudden unmasking of her characters’ disparate voices.




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Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg

Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Originally published in 1963 by its celebrated Italian author, this memoir-novel relates the doings, sayings, and personalities of Ginzburg’s relatives and friends in Turin in the period before, during, and after World War II. Her larger-than-life father Giuseppe Levi, nicknamed “Beppino,” is a Jewish scientist who is very set in his ways and loudly complains when his wife, children, and friends behave in ways he considers supremely foolish. His greatest pleasure is to go hiking in the mountains, dragging his unwilling family along in stiff leather boots and hot woolen clothes. Her Catholic mother, Lidia, in contrast, is pleasure-loving and rather frivolous, liking nothing better than to have her seamstress make her new dresses or gossip with friends or sing opera at the top of her voice. The book is peppered with sayings and stories that belong in the family lexicon, which no-one else would understand, such as “Whatever you do, don’t say it’s the teeth!” (20) or “We haven’t come to Bergamo on a military campaign”(23). Much of this is narrated with a blend of good humor and acceptance, as if that was just the way things were. Even as the serious situation of this part-Jewish family of antifascists in Mussolini’s Italy becomes clear, the elements of farce and happenstance remain. Beppino is imprisoned for a time, but released; one brother has to swim a river to the Swiss border, where he becomes a Francophile; and friends are killed by the Nazis, including Natalia’s husband Leone, whose death is mentioned in a single line. After the war, the characters retain their idiosyncratic qualities, but there is a sense that things have changed – a world is gone -- no matter how much people try to carry on. This novel caused me to reflect on my own family lexicon – the stories, sayings and personalities (such as my Swedish grandmother’s proverb, “Everything has an end, and a sausage has two!”) And it resonated with the times we live in -- of momentous events, trials, and change.



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The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo

The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Two college students meet in the 1970’s, marry, and have four daughters. Marilyn and David seem very much in love, especially to their daughters, who feel they can never quite live up to the success of their parents’ relationship. Lombardo narrates the more complicated story of this couple – and of their daughters, all of whom have secrets. She does so through a series of flashbacks, flipping between the decades of the late 20th to 21st century, from the early years of Marilyn and David’s marriage, when having several babies close together is quite overwhelming; to the teenage troubles of rebellious Wendy, and the apparently more conventional Violet; to Liza, the successful young college professor whose life is not as in control as it looks; and the failure-to-launch tale of the youngest daughter, Grace. This is a sticky, emotion-laden story. All characters seem caught in the web of family relations, whether with their parents or their husbands, boyfriends, and children. It did keep me reading – but there were sections I skimmed, when the characters seemed twisted pretzel-like around their own sense of shame, resentment, and confusion. The fifteen-year old Jonah, given up for adoption by one of the daughters, is a pivotal center of the novel, as is the gingko tree at David and Marilyn’s house – a place of coming together, refuge, and catastrophe. By the end of the novel the story has reached a place of greater calm, but the path to it is turbulent.



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Akin, by Emma Donoghue

Akin by Emma Donoghue

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The first novel I’ve completed since the pandemic began, Akin relates how a widowed and retired chemistry professor’s life is upended by taking temporary custody of an eleven-year-old great-nephew named Michael, whose mother is in prison and who grew up in Brooklyn. Oddly, this arrangement occurs a few days before Noah is supposed to travel to Nice, France, where he was born, and which he left at age four. Having been largely home-bound for the past 2 and a half months, I shared their excitement as this mismatched pair arrived in Nice, the sense of a familiar and yet unfamiliar cityscape, and the temporal gap between the 1940’s and the present-day. There is a similar gap between the 80-year-old professor and his great-nephew, who swears, plays endless games on a cracked smart-phone, buys obnoxious toys like a noise machine that generates farts and gun-shots, and plays with silly-string that ruins the professor’s prized fedora -- a relic of his grandfather, who was a famous French photographer. The boy also shows a knack for taking photos – like his great-great-grandfather -- and shows some tolerance for the professor’s pedantic life lessons relating to the table of elements and other scientific arcana.

The trip to Nice also involves unraveling the mystery of a handful of odd photos taken by Noah’s mother, Margot, during the war years in Nice, after Noah himself had been safely sent to his father in America. In between excursions to the beach, a circus, a Roman stadium, and Carnival festivities, the old man and the boy visit a museum of the French Resistance and a church Margot attended; stay in the very hotel she photographed, which turns out to be the site of Nazi internment and interrogation of Jews; and meet up with a childhood acquaintance of Noah’s and an old man in a nursing home, who may hold the key to the photos, but suffers from dementia. The reader is privy to Noah’s inner ruminations about his mother’s role in the war – first his awful suspicions, then his dawning understanding of his mother and their shared past. In the process, he and Michael form an unlikely bond that also leads the professor to revise his view of the future. While at times I was perplexed by Noah’s summation of his mother – his tendency to so readily see her as either very bad or very good – and wished for a third person to loosen the back-and-forth between the two main characters, overall I enjoyed this novel and its journey to another place and time.




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Strangers and Cousins, by Leah Hager Cohen

Strangers and Cousins by Leah Hager Cohen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


On its surface this is a novel about a wedding set in a rambling old house in the small town of Rundle Junction in New York State. Several generations have lived in this house, and the oldest surviving member of the family, great-aunt Glad, has come to attend the wedding. As the bride-to-be, Clem, the oldest daughter of Bennie and Walter, prepares a tradition-busting wedding pageant with her college friends, for her tradition-busting marriage to a black woman, great-aunt Glad’s memories drift back to another pageant that took place in Rundle Junction in the 1920’s when she was a child – a pageant that ended in a terrible disaster, leaving a permanent mark on the town. Eighteen children died in a fire, and because they needed someone to blame, suspicion fell on a reclusive Jewish man from Europe. Fast forward to the present, when Bennie and Walter are secretly planning to sell the family home due to the arrival of a group of Orthodox Jews–the Haredim. Walter, who is Jewish himself, fears the change they will bring to the town. And the old house itself is deteriorating, too costly for them to maintain.

In the course of the novel, the mysteries of the past are untangled, which aids in untangling the conflicts of the present. Cohen writes with an ear for rhyme, song, and play: children played in the pageant many decades ago, while Clem and her friends set up tents and tumble together in the present, planning their wedding pageant; and Clem’s young brother Pim mixes things up with his playful thieving of shiny objects from the wedding party. The wedding itself descends into mayhem that evokes several more disasters, and great-aunt Glad finds solace for her grief, at the end of her long life. Through it all, Cohen captures the messiness, tears, anger, and love that energizes this big family. And manages to rather skillfully point out that building walls against strangers, whether real or imaginary, does nothing to make us safer.




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Hot Milk, by Deborah Levy

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This symbol-rich novel pivots around the relationship between an adult daughter and her mother, who suffers from a mysterious illness that prevents her from walking. In desperation, the pair have come to a clinic in Spain, run by Dr. Gómez, where the treatment is far from standard. Narrated in the first-person by Sofia, Rose’s daughter, it is a coming-of-age story for a twenty-something who has lived her life in the shadow of her mother’s illness. Images of milk and water run through the narrative: mother’s milk, cat’s milk, drinking water that never suits Rose’s taste, sea water. Milk that binds and nourishes, water that drowns and frees. Swimming in the ocean off the coast of southern Spain, Sofia is stung by the Medusa jellyfish. The wounds from the Medusa resurface throughout the novel, bringing to mind that other monstrous and decapitated female who petrifies with her gaze. On the beach, Sofia also encounters the beautiful Ingrid, who is as blonde as the half-Greek Sofia is dark. The sexual tension between the two runs through the novel, as Sofia explores her identity and desires. Meanwhile, under Dr. Gómez’ treatment, Rose is at times able to walk, but continues to play the invalid, even planning to have her feet amputated. In disgust and despair, Sofia realizes she must leave her mother in order to find herself. These are familiar themes in Levy’s work: symbiosis versus independence, entrapment in the familiar versus freedom in the alien. The author’s use of symbols had an almost Jungian effect, as insights about my own life and mother surfaced like the Medusas in the sea. Yet it was disappointing that Levy at times felt the need to explain the symbolism, rather than letting the reader apprehend it herself. Despite this flaw, reading Hot Milk was an evocative and rich experience.



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