B. Morrison's Blog, page 21

The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

This 2015 debut novel finally gives us the Vietnamese war and its aftermath, not from an American perspective but from a Vietnamese point of view. The narrator is half-French and half-Vietnamese, rejected by both cultures, but told by his mother that he will do something extraordinary.

Like his parentage, he embodies the title: he sees both sides of every issue and can understand where the various parties he has to deal with are coming from. Even his loyalties are divided. He is committed to th...

Pumpkin Moonshine, by Tasha Tudor

With little ones in the house several days a week, I’ve been reading lots of picture books. This one is a favorite just now, as we enjoy all the pumpkins on porches while we walk around the neighborhood.

Sylvie—who appears to be around four years old—is visiting her grandparents in Connecticut and wants to make a Pumpkin Moonshine. She and the dog Wiggy climb up the hill to the cornfield where she chooses the largest pumpkin, one that is half as tall as she is. She can’t lift it, so she rolls i...

The Odd Woman and the City, by Vivian Gornick

In this 2015 memoir, Gornick gives us a flâneur’s tour of New York City and of her own quirky take on life. She calls it a memoir, but to my mind it falls somewhere in the grey area between memoir and personal essay.

Author of memoirs such as Fierce Attachments and one of the best texts on writing memoir, The Situation and the Story, Gornick warns us up front that she has not only changed names but reordered certain events and used some composite characters and scenes. I have no problem with ps...

Autumnal Tints, by Henry David Thoreau

I had to laugh when I started this long essay. Thoreau begins by saying how surprised Europeans and even many Americans are when they first see the spectacular foliage of a New England autumn. Today, we in New England are besieged by RVs and SUVs with out-of-state plates clogging our roads and highways as leaf-peepers from all over chase peak foliage.

My hilarity soon turned to admiration as Thoreau takes us through the season’s offerings, from the purple grasses of late August to the scarlet ...

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

I have read Walden a few times since I first encountered it in high school. Back then I was charmed as so many are by the idea of going to the woods to live, and thrilled by his bits of philosophy. Despite a heavy load of schoolwork, I still spent as much time as I could outside, among the trees, so it’s no surprise that I adopted as my lifelong personal motto “To be awake is to be alive.”

Later readings brought more informed insight. I learned how close his retreat was to town, for exampl...

“To Die One’s Own Death,” by Jacqueline Rose

London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 22 · 19 November 2020

Written during the first wave of the pandemic with its soaring death rates made worse by the fumbling response of corrupt governments, and amid accelerating climate catastrophes, Rose’s essay, subtitled “Jacqueline Rose on Freud and his daughter”, looks at how we cope with these repeated blows. If we shut down emotionally and intellectually, “does that leave room to grieve, not just for those who have been lost, but for the broken pieces ...

Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis

When I ran across Matt Mikalatos‘s blog posts on rereading C.S. Lewis’s work, I was inspired to look again at the Narnia books. In Prince Caspian, a sequel to the first book, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are about to board a train back to school when they are suddenly whisked off to the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though they do not recognise it at first because over a thousand years have passed.

Narnia is now ruled by Miraz who became Lord Protector of his nephew Caspian ...

The Shape of a City, by Julien Gracq

In the 1920s Gracq lived for a time in Nantes. However, being a child at boarding school, only let outside the grounds on vacations and Sundays, his perceptions of the city are fragmented and idiosyncratic.

I lived in the heart of a city that loomed large in my imagination, but which I did not know very well. I was aware of certain landmarks, and familiar with some itineraries, but its substance, and even its smells, never lost their exotic flavor; a city where all the views led only to ill-de...

If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin

This is a story of young love up against a society determined to keep them apart, yet it’s a story like none you’ve heard before. Tish, 19 years old, and Fonny, 21, have known each other most of their lives, friends first, then lovers, and now pledged to marry. However, in 1970s New York, like today, it can be a crime to be black. Fonny has been jailed for raping a Puerto Rican woman, framed by a white policeman who was still smarting from an earlier encounter with Fonny.

It’s also a story of f...

Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry

Two aging Irish gangsters sit in the Algeciras ferry terminal. It’s October 2018 and, though they’ve been drug dealers since their teens together back in Cork, earning fabulous sums and losing them in failed business deals and their own drug habits, that’s not why they are there waiting for the next boat from Morocco to arrive. They pester the young man behind the hatch in the INFORMACIÓN booth since they don’t understand the Spanish announcements over the PA. He ignores them.

Maurice Hearne a...