Lori Eshleman's Blog, page 4

Review of The Sweetest Fruits, by Monique Truong

The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The name Lafcadio Hearn may be familiar to most of us through his books of Japanese tales. Author Monique Truong gives us a sideways view of Hearn’s life, told through the eyes of the women who loved him. From his unworldly and unstable Greek mother, Rosa, who is swept off her feet by a dashing Irish officer on the island of Lefkáda. To his first wife, Alethea, a cook and former slave who encounters him in a boarding house in Cincinnati, Ohio. And his second wife, Koizumi Setsu, who meets him when he arrives in Japan as an English teacher. Each woman sees only a portion of his life, each in a vastly different setting. Each tries to make sense of what they know of him. Alethea, pleased to become the mistress of her own house, cooks and cares for him -- and is privy to his preference for fine white underwear, and his niggling criticisms of her cooking – his liking for bread over biscuits, for beef over pork. She listens and comments as he reads his stories published in the newspaper, stating “I was his witness” (125) and noting how his stories changed when they were published. As his mother abandoned him, Hearn ultimately abandons Alethea, in dawning awareness of having crossed a forbidden boundary.

Setsu, too, cares for him, raises his children, and collaborates with him, by telling him Japanese tales and serving as his guide to remote villages that regard this foreign man with suspicion. Like Alethea, Setsu’s narrative is filtered through her sense of living in a compromised position in Japanese society, as the daughter of an impoverished former samurai family who has few choices. Like a plant that bends toward the sunlight, her every aim is to create a pleasing life for Hearn; yet she is subtly attentive to the cultural strangeness of his tastes and speech. The Japanese words Hearn learned, in part through her, “never found their rightful order” (212) and made him sound like “A drunk lady poet” (212)! Through her narrative, we see her gradual realization that Hearn has not only borrowed his Japanese tales, but has altered them in ways that suit his flair for a good story, which to her holds the scent of betrayal. Even more, he has written her out of his stories, and erased her role as guide and interpreter and sometime rescuer. Through her “second telling” of their life, Setsu lays certain truths bare: “What was once fact---because you alone claimed it to be—can lose its lacquer, chip and blister over time…What was love can be read as mere proximity” (281). Lafcadio Hearn moves chameleon-like through the lives of these women and the countries they inhabit, absorbing and reshaping their stories and becoming famous in the process. In the end it is not so much Hearn who comes to life in the pages of this novel, but the women who tell the story.




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Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Polish writer and Nobel Prize-winner, Olga Tokarczuk experiments with the form of the novel in this fragmented meditation on time, space, and the body. Broken into sections of varying length, Flights follows the body in motion through time and space—on airplanes, trains, and even carriages—never really arriving, but always going “in the direction of.” As one character states “a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest…that which is static will degenerate and decay…while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity” (4). The reader encounters various travelers throughout the book: an infirm retired classics professor on a cruise who conjures the ancient past in his guided tours; a sailor who reads Moby Dick while imprisoned and mentally escapes to the open sea; a biologist summoned to the bedside of a dying ex-lover for a very particular request; a woman who escapes a stressful family situation for a week of suspended animation in the subways of Moscow; even short lectures on “travel psychology” to distracted airport travelers. Travel for many of them becomes a kind of freedom and escape. Yet, for the reader, this suspended animation can seem like a kind of purgatory.

In counterpoint to stories of travel, Tokarczuk intersperses segments on the static body preserved in reified forms--such as pilgrim relics, body parts suspended in chemical-filled jars in cabinets of curiosities, and plasticinated museum displays of the muscles and organs of the inner body. While these macabre body-objects attempt to preserve humans from the decay of time—a kind of plasticine immortality--they also evoke a wish for ultimate control. Like the body of the African courtier stuffed and displayed in the Imperial Natural History Collection of Austrian Emperor Joseph II. Or the photos of women’s internal parts savored as a kind of body-porn by an unnamed businessman. Or the 17th century anatomist tormented by sensations of a phantom limb, who spends years dissecting his own amputated leg in a vain attempt to repair his broken self.

Can these two modes of being—static and in motion—come together? And what happens if they do? Perhaps that would be the point described near the end of the novel, “where the straight line that runs from nowhere to nowhere makes—for one moment—contact with the circle” (387). A transcendent merging of place, time, and desire: “a kind of promise that perhaps we will be born anew now, this time in the right time and the right place” (403). Profoundly philosophical, fragmented, and at times disturbing, this novel is a difficult read, but stays with the reader.




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The Cost of Living, by Deborah Levy

The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography by Deborah Levy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In this brief memoir, British writer Deborah Levy reflects on the time after her divorce, as she struggles to find her footing and continue her writing career. Post-marriage brings both freedom and struggle. The freedom to rent a small shed and turn it into her writer’s retreat; to purchase a heavy electric bicycle on which she scoots around London, burdened with books, grocery bags, and occasional mishaps. The struggle of living in a small flat with undependable water and heating and a common hallway perpetually under restoration. Birds become the leitmotif of the book: a bird clock that signals the hour with different bird calls; a trio of feral parrots that land on the balcony; remembrance of how her deceased mother loved owls. And keys: Levy lists the many keys she must carry and what they open – far more keys than in her previous life. Between the birds and the keys and the bike and her newfound friends, met in serendipitous ways, she begins to find freedom, grieve the past and unlock the future. “I am obsessed with birds, but it might have something to do with death and renewal” (129). Levy has a chatty and vibrant style of writing, as if she is in conversation with a friend. She likes to bring together contrasting imagery that can burst open like a bird in flight: “Do you know that jasmine, like orange blossom, has a scent that is otherworldly but it can sometimes smell like drains?” (129) Her words and thoughts keep the reader off-balance, sometimes amused and sometimes enlightened, or both at once.



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The Man Who Saw Everything

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This novel by British writer Deborah Levy opens with an accident. A car hits a young man named Saul as he crosses Abbey Road in 1988 in the exact spot where the Beatles famously crossed. After the accident, Saul, too, has his picture taken by his girlfriend Jennifer, a photographer. The novel pivots around this accident--and Saul’s subsequent visit to East Germany to complete historical research, where he meets people of great importance in his life. At the time, Germany was still split between East and West, as this novel is split between 1988 and 2016; and as Saul’s life is fractured between his own experience and how others experience him, including the photos Jennifer takes of him. After the accident, Saul is not himself: he seems to know things that have happened in the past and will happen in the future. In time, the reader recognizes that nothing is what it seems, and Saul is not a reliable narrator. An apparent survivor of domestic abuse, his sense of self seems broken, along with his ability to empathize. After losing his mother to a car crash when he was young, he wears her pearls around his neck like a talisman. Those around him, in contrast, seem to know what they want and always to know more than he, the narrator, does. Saul attracts them with his great beauty, and perhaps, his coldness. Levy’s writing kept my attention, especially the first half of the narrative. I found myself wanting to put the fractured pieces together, wanting to solve the mystery. At times, though, the indecipherability and lack of groundedness of the main character unmoors the novel itself.



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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


After reading of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk in the New Yorker, I devoured her most recent novel. It’s narrated in the first person by an elderly woman named Janina—a name she despises--who lives in a rural Polish settlement accessible by dirt roads. Surrounded by forests and wildlife, it’s a fitting setting for an animal lover like her, who attends to the movements of deer, foxes, and humans as she makes her rounds and plays the role of caretaker to the summer residents. She has an odd assortment of neighbors, to whom she gives darkly humorous nicknames such as Big Foot, Oddball, and the Writer. She herself, it turns out, is given to vehement verbal assaults on the local hunters, the owner of a fox farm, and even the village priest who blesses the hunt—on anyone who kills/murders animals. As the neighbors begin to die in mysterious and unpleasant ways, she tries to convince the authorities that it is the animals taking revenge.

Far from being a typical mystery, this novel is a reflection on the uneasy relations between humans and animals, the motions of the planets and their astrological influences, and the idiosyncratic philosophy of the early 19th century visionary William Blake. Janina and her younger friend Dizzy meet on weekends to translate Blake into Polish, and quotes from his writings are scattered throughout the book; other unusual characters include the entomologist Boros, whom Janina encounters collecting beetles in the woods; her silent elderly neighbor Oddball; and the proprietress of a secondhand clothing shop in the nearby village. This assortment of people forms a bond over books, food (such as the intriguing “mustard soup” that appears near the end of the novel), and their common circumstance of living on the margins of society. Unlike most mysteries, there is no relatable detective at the center of the story--but Dizzy works for the police as an IT specialist, and the group of friends share information and speculation about the unfolding deaths. By turns poetic, disturbing, and thought-provoking, this novel is satisfying fare for the book-lover’s table.




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Review of Autumn Light, by Pico Iyer

Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells by Pico Iyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Writer Pico Iyer reflects on the changing of seasons in Nara, Japan, where he has a home. Having fallen in love with Japan and his wife Hiroko almost three decades before, he returns to Japan each year. As a fan of Japanese literature, I enjoyed his reflections on Japanese culture, people, and seasonal rituals. For him, Autumn is a season of reflection and remembrance, as he looks back on his early encounters with Hiroko, how they created a life together with her two children, their encounters with the Dalai Lama, and their visits to temples in the vicinity of Nara and Kyoto. Of the famous Nara deer, he says: “If they are true messengers of the gods, the deer speak for gods as ungovernable as Zeus and Hera” (151). Nara itself is a mix of neighborhoods with names like Deer’s Slope and Slope of Light, convenience stores, Starbucks and other borrowings such as “Silent Night”, Mickey and Minnie, juxtaposed to pockets of wilderness, and ancient wooden temples.

At the same time, Iyer is aware of the slowing of his own life and the lives of the elderly Japanese around him, symbolized in the flaming leaves and cooling temperatures of autumn. “Autumn is the season when everything falls away” (10). This particular autumn marks the death of Hiroko’s father, and the decline of her mother, who now lives in a nursing home. As the author observes, “change itself is an unchanging truth” (159). The sense of loss is heightened by the estrangement of Hiroko’s brother, whom she and her family haven’t seen in almost 30 years; and by the silent loneliness of her daughter, who waits patiently for an absent boyfriend. Mundane trips to the post office and visits to Hiroko’s mother alternate with lively ping-pong matches between Iyer and a group of elderly ping-pong devotees at a local club. These scenes reminded me of playing ping-pong with international students in the dorm as a graduate student in Minneapolis. It is especially through these ping-pong matches that Iyer comes to know the Japanese: the retired businessmen and their chic wives, the teasing sense of humor, the daring paddle action that belies their age. As someone who has never learned Japanese well, and who spends part of the year abroad, Iyer retains the sense of being both an observer and a familiar in this place that he calls home—a perspective he shares with his reader.




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Review of The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, by Andrea Wulf

The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt by Andrea Wulf

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved this fascinating work of graphic nonfiction, which presents the scientific expeditions of Alexander von Humboldt and the botanist Bonpland in South America and Mexico in 1799-1804. Wonderful illustrations by Lillian Melcher, along with a collage of plant specimens, maps, drawings, and notes from the expedition, bring the voyage alive. We share in the hardships of cold temperatures and thin air as the small group climbs the great volcanoes of South America, including Cotopaxi and Chimborazo in Ecuador; and the insect bites, sweltering heat and rain in the Amazon basin. Brilliant colors of tropical blooms alternate with sepia tones, and dark washes flecked with rain, waves, and stars. Speech bubbles create lively exchanges among the explorers, while hand-printed text evokes Humboldt’s written notes and observations. Wulf mixes in humor and gentle playfulness about Humboldt’s intellectual vanity, his indifference to danger, and his obsessive determination to climb all available volcanoes, using instruments to measure data such as temperature, altitude, and magnetism, and sketching the interesting things they encounter. We also share in the friendship and loyalty among this small group of travelers, including handsome young Carlos Montúfar, who joins them in Quito, and a servant named José, who carries the precious barometer. Wulf’s layered narrative captures the immediacy of the expeditions, the reflections of an elderly Humboldt on his life’s work, and the network of connections between Humboldt’s conceptions of nature and those of contemporary and later thinkers like John Muir, Charles Darwin, and James Madison. She illuminates the revolutionary aspect of his observations on nature as a unified whole, rather than a series of classifications; as well as his early concerns about deforestation and human impact on the environment. “I see nature as a global force – an interconnected whole.” Thanks to his exacting records collected on Mt Chimborazo, climate scientists some 200 years later were able to determine that “the plants have moved 1,500 feet upward since Humboldt’s time.” Humboldt was also fascinated by the remnants of ancient cultures like the Incas and Aztecs, whose sculptures and hieroglyphs grace the pages of this book. Feted and world-famous in his time, Wulf’s graphic book—and her 2015 study on Humboldt, The Invention of Nature—highlight Humboldt’s prominence as an environmental theorist and natural scientist.



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Walking on the Ceiling, by Aysegul Savas

Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegül Savas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This short novel reflects on cities, relationships, and writing, through a series of walks. The walks take place in two cities: Paris, where a young Turkish woman named Nunu walks and talks with an older man, M., a British writer whose books are set in Turkey; and Istanbul, where Nunu grew up taking walks with her mother, especially on Sundays, when they habitually went to lunch. Like her mother, it seems, Nunu “gets antsy if she stays in one place” (84). Other walks take place in more private spaces: the narrator’s father walks the length of their train-like apartment in Istanbul, to the balcony on the other side of the marital bedroom, reciting the letters of his daughter’s full name, NURUNISA; and she herself walks telepathically in the “white city” on the ceiling of her childhood bedroom--a place she escapes to “when Istanbul was heavy and dark, pressing in against the walls of our apartment” (203). The narrator makes clear that the stories she narrates may be unreliable and incomplete: “But stories are reckless things, blind to everything but their own shape. When you tell a story, you set out to leave so much behind” (2).

Besides recounting walks, the novel records lists and inventories: of fish and flowers, Turkish dishes, restaurants in Paris and Istanbul, and favorite items. The descriptions of walks, the lists, the fragmented memories of relatives and friends may appear as “a sign of sorrow, a wish to care for and preserve things on the brink of disappearance” (125). --Or perhaps they mark no more than a “residue of absence”(151). Much of what takes place in this novel is mundane, yet oddly profound. It recounts the dislocations that occur as people’s worlds slide past each other like tectonic plates. Istanbul, too, seems fractured from its ancient past. But shared stories, like those between Nunu and the writer, momentarily ease such dislocations. “We passed our stories back and forth until they merged…At that time, brief though it was, we shared a single imagination” (207). In reading and reflecting on this book, I found myself privileged to share in this single imagination.




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Review of Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Set in Russia, on the Kamchatka Peninsula, this powerful novel circles around the disappearance of two young girls from the peninsula’s only city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. As the novel opens, we see the girls playing by the sea, as the older girl Alyona tells her sister a legend about a town that disappears into the sea following a quake. The legend sets the tone for the rest of the novel, as the sisters also vanish. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a different person—all women—we learn of lives lived in hope and loss; of women who dream of escape, but are sucked back into what they already have. In the telling, Phillips drops breadcrumbs that lead us ultimately to the fate of the two sisters. One of the last chapters allows us into the head of the lost girls’ mother, a viewpoint that is gut-wrenchingly difficult to read. There are other losses in the book: one woman has lost her beloved dog, another a teenage daughter who supposedly ran away from home, others a best friend or a husband. The reader feels the intensity of their pain. The interlocking stories gradually build up a picture of this remote part of Russia, the people who live there, and the tensions between them: the Russians and the indigenous people like the Even, many from the remote villages to the north, accessed by bad roads. Some of the most striking scenes are descriptions of traditional reindeer herding in the tundra: “The blue-lit black of nights. The limitless dry yellow of days…the daily moving of camp, on horseback, again, making their way along the thousand-kilometer loop of trails that took the herd a year to cover” (82). Phillips also evokes the overpowering closeness of parents and children, their mutual vulnerability: “Mila wrapped her arms around Nadia’s neck and leaned into her lap. The girl smelled soupy: dill, black pepper, lemon juice. Nadia hugged her tighter” (154). With evocative prose, an exotic location, and a strong dose of human emotions, this novel pulled me in from the first page.



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Machines Like Me, by Ian McEwan

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ian McEwan’s new novel is both futuristic and set in the past: the past is 1980’s Britain at the time of the Falklands War, a past replete with details that seem to make sense, such as references to politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn, Beatles music, and novels by Hemingway. Yet, the reader quickly realizes that this is an alternative past, a “what if” past: what if the British lost the Falklands War, what if the democratic socialist Tony Benn became Prime Minister, what if the computer genius Alan Turing lived into old age instead of dying in 1954? As McEwan states, “The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise” (70). This last alternative fact--the long life of Alan Turing—results in a premature development of artificial intelligence, the internet, and self-driving cars. The narrator, Charlie Friend, profits from these speeded-up innovations by purchasing one of the first humanoid robots, who takes the form of a handsome man appropriately named Adam. When Adam comes to live with Charlie and his girlfriend Miranda, their lives are disrupted in a way that resonates with McEwan’s previous novels. The novel explores the mystery of machine self-consciousness and ability to feel, as Adam claims to have “fallen in love” with Miranda—and in mirror view, the mystery of human consciousness and feelings. Above all, McEwan explores the limits of human morality, skewed by self-interest and the tendency to create convenient explanations. In the process, Adam comes across as more sympathetic than either of the humans. Charlie Friend has rather an empty self, such that on one occasion he is confused as the robot, rather than Adam. All three keep secrets and act without informing the others; and all three pay a price for that. As in his other novels, McEwan lures the reader in with the questions he asks, the dilemmas he poses, and in this case, the disruption of history itself.




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