Clifford Garstang's Blog, page 32
July 31, 2020
2020 Reading — July
The Magpie’s Return by Curtis Smith is coming out in August, but I got an advance copy and I did a review that I hope will appear before the book’s publication. The book is told from the point of view of Kayla, a young genius. She and her intellectual parents move into a new house next to a man who is an ardent supporter of a rising nationalist demagogue, who then is elected president. On New Years’ Day, nuclear war breaks out in Asia that results in a “Shut-in” in America (not dissimilar to our COVID-19 Lock-down), which is followed by a further breakdown in society, a purge against intellectuals and members of the Movement who oppose the nationalists. Kayla’s father is part of the Movement, perhaps a leader, and it’s not giving away too much of the story to reveal that at the end of Part I, a quarter of the way into the book, a mob storms the family home and the father is hanged from a light pole in a horrific scene. The rest of the book is about what happens to Kayla when she flees for her own safety. The book brings to mind some other recent reads, including Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, which isn’t as speculative as Smith’s book, but does focus on the unfair suffering of a teenager. Ultimately, what’s frightening about the book—speculative or otherwise—is that the breakdown in society doesn’t seem so farfetched given our current political environment.
[image error]Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda
Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda is a
collection of short stories linked by location, but covering many, many years.
In fact, the first story begins in pre-history with the Clovis people, some of
the first occupants of the central plains in North America, more than 10,000
years ago, and the last is set in the future, after the territory has been
turned into a wasteland, literally, and all the plants, birds, and insects have
disappeared. In between are stories about a family of ranchers who exploit the
land while fighting others who would ruin it by burying hazardous waste. One
fascinating story is about a young man who is exempt from the WWII draft
because he cares for his sickly mother but works in a bomb factory where his
specific job is burying the supposed duds. Riveting. The whole of the
collection is beautifully written and deserves more attention. (We read each
other’s books and held a “conversation” that will appear in a literary magazine
soon.)
[image error]On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee is a dystopian
novel that begins in B-mor, which is what Baltimore has become. It isn’t clear
what has happened to bring so many people from New China to settle here, or why
the world seems to be divided into Charter Villages, where the upper class
live, the Facilities (such as B-mor) where the working class lives and produces
food and manufactured goods, and the Counties, where the outcasts and outlaws
seem to live. The narrative is in the third person plural from the point of
view of B-mor residents and follows the story of Fan, a young woman who leaves
B-mor in search of Reg, her boyfriend and father of her unborn child, who has
been removed from B-mor. We learn gradually why he has been removed, but the
process of Fan’s search is thrilling, taking her into the Counties where she
encounters various dangers and then into a Charter Village, which has its own
risks. The diction of the narrative voice is fantastic—elevated and wise—and
Fan’s quest is suspenseful and compelling. Don’t stop reading before the end!
[image error]On Writing by Stephen King
On Writing by Stephen King is a terrific kind of memoir. The first part is the memoir section, telling us how he came to be a writer. The second part is his craft advice. The memoir section is most interesting, detailing how he began writing very early. Raised by a single mother, he worked at various jobs while in college, but started sending out stories even then. He taught school for a while right out of college, and as a young married man with children, life was tough. But then he sold his first novel and really hit it big when the paperback rights were sold. The second part is less interesting to me. His craft advice is mostly familiar, but he’s too critical of workshops and residencies, and I think maybe he doesn’t recognize how the world has changed since he started out. (And, of course, the world has changed more since this book was published in 2000.) There are some postscripts also, the most important of which is the one dealing with the accident that nearly killed him and his long road back. The book is worth reading, but there are other books on the writing craft that I think are better.
[image error]We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin is
about a black lawyer in the near future who is married to a white woman. Their
son, Nigel, has a number of birthmarks, including on his face, that reveal his
black coloring. The father, though, applies skin-lightening cream to the marks
and hopes to purchase a procedure to make Nigel appear white, saving him from
all the attendant racism and racial-profiling that still exists in society.
That is also why he is estranged from his own father, Sir, who was jailed for
life on attempted murder charges after trying to stop police brutality. When
tragedy strikes the family, the main character struggles to recover his
balance, shake a drug addiction, and protect his son. It’s a timely discussion
of our American race problem.
[image error]The World is Round by Nickky Finney
The World is Round by Nikky Finney is a wonderful
collection of poems that Northwestern University Press republished when her
collection Head Off and Split won the National Book Award. It’s a stunning
collection with some heavy issue poems as well as some more personal lyrics. I
used “Shark Bite” in a class I was teaching as an example of a poem that was
fierce and agenda driven. It’s a hard poem to read because of the horrific
story it tells. Then there’s “Hurricane Beulah,” a lovely poem about the poet’s
grandmother and, among other things, taking her shopping at the Salvation Army
store. I like to begin my writing day with poetry, and this one made for a good
July.
[image error]The Sweet Indifference of the World by Peter Stamm
The Sweet Indifference of the
World by Peter
Stamm is an odd little book that I need to give further thought. The cover
should have been a clue that it was going to be different, as the title is a
mirror image. A novelist—one old novel to his name—remembers his love,
Magdalena. He then spots a younger woman who looks like her, whose name, it
turns out, is Lena, short for Magdalena. He begins to tell her about Magdalena
and it develops that Lena and her boyfriend, whose name is a short form of the
novelists, are living a life that is almost but not quite the same as the
novelist and his love. The notion of the multiverse is in vogue these days, so
that’s what I thought of at first, with these different people being slight
variations of each other. When I finished the book, I went back to the
beginning and saw that I had missed in the first chapter a clue to what was
going to happen in the book, but I’m still not sure what it was all about. At
one point, the main character, the novelist, rewrites the book he originally
wrote, which, of course, is about his relationship with Magdalena. And perhaps
that is the point: we keep rewriting the stories of our lives.
July 9, 2020
You’re Invited!
Please join me on Wednesday, July 22, at Noon Eastern Time for a one-hour Zoom session with three other writers, Julie Zuckerman, Jodi Paloni, and Shivani Mehta, in a program hosted by Press 53 and Virginia Pye. Space is limited and registration in advance is required. (You can see the Facebook invitation to this event here.)
The four of us will read a little from our recent Press 53 books, talk a little about the process of storytelling, and answer questions. It should be a fun, brisk program moderated by Virginia.
You can learn more about the authors and their books at Press 53:
Also, check out the special bundle pricing–5 books for $53–so you can buy books by all five of us!
July 1, 2020
2nd Annual 1455 Summer Literary Festival
2019 was the first year for the 1455 Summer Literary Festival. I learned about it a little late, so I was only able to attend part of the festival and didn’t participate as a speaker. It was well done, though, and I was looking forward to attending the entire event this year and to meeting other writers and readers as one of the speakers.
Alas, COVID-19 has driven the Festival online for 2020, which is unfortunate, but it also means we can all attend from the comfort of our own homes and not make the trek to Winchester VA (as charming a town as that is).
I’m pleased to say that I’ll be joining the writer Jessi Lewis on a panel called Writing the Valley, moderated by Debra Lattanzi Shutika. Our panel takes place at 10:30 am on Saturday, July 18.
Check out the whole lineup–there are some great speakers and panels. And it’s all available for free!
June 30, 2020
2020 Reading–June
Although it was a busy month–despite social distancing and lockdown–I managed to get a fair amount of reading done in June, a mix of fiction and non-fiction. No poetry this month, however. I need to fix that for next month!
[image error]FLOAT by Anne Carley
FLOAT: Becoming Unstuck for
Writers by A.M.
Carley is a helpful book of exercises/tools by a writing coach I know. FLOAT
stands for Focus, Listen, Open, Analyze, Tool, and the book includes dozens of
short sections that address various problems a writer might be facing. Although
I don’t really believe in “writer’s block,” these tools nonetheless seem like
good exercises for keeping limber the various muscles required for writing,
including motivation, discipline, accountability, etc. I also like the section at the end that
includes a lot of quotations from various writers, including this one from
Stephen King: “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates,
getting laid or making friends. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as
any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”
[image error]There There by Tommy Orange
There, There by Tommy Orange is a book that
won raves in 2018 when it came out and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
So why didn’t I like it? I’m not sure. Although it is set in a milieu that is
completely unfamiliar to me—the urban Indian community of Oakland,
California—the characters seemed to share a stereotypical Indian problem with
booze that is too familiar. While that may reflect reality, it seemed a little
too easy. Again, the violence against women—or everyone really—may be real, but
there was a lot of it. (Not as much as A
Brief History of Seven Killings from a couple of months ago, but still, a
lot.) Without giving too much away, the climax of the story also seemed too easy
and there’s nothing complicated about what happens. In addition, the many
voices narrating the story made it difficult for me to get into the book, at
least until it was clearer how the characters were connected. And then there
was the grammatical error on page 100 that annoyed me. (I realize few even
would notice it and fewer would care.) On the plus side, the arc of the story
has a nice build-up of tension, with everything aiming toward the Big Oakland
Powwow, a kind of community fair that is a big deal, and so is a natural focal
point for the plot. That aspect I liked.
[image error]The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte
The Rise and Fall of the
Dinosaurs by
Steve Brusatte was my bookclub’s selection for this month, nominated by me
after I’d seen something about it in Skeptical Inquirer. Except that it’s
filled with a lot of names for animals you’ve never heard of, so that it’s a
little hard to keep track, it’s fascinating. I was interested in what was going
on before the dinosaurs showed up and the fact that there is a fossil record of
a lot of animals that were around then and some that were almost, but not
quite, actual dinosaurs (there’s a way for paleontologists to make that
determination). Also, while I’ve been aware of the Pangea supercontinent for a
very long time, I somehow didn’t realize that the dinosaurs existed then and
continued to exist after the supercontinent split. Another startling thing is
the sheer number of years we’re talking about. The dinosaurs arose 250 million
years ago and survived until 66 million years ago, and the author throws around
changes that occurred over 10 million or 50 million years as if it were an
afternoon. This length of time and the fact that there is a fossil record of it
all is almost unfathomable. Near the end of the book, Brusatte talks about the
evolution of birds. Now, I’d heard some time ago that birds were descended from
dinosaurs, but he makes the point that this makes them living dinosaurs, and
I’d never quite thought of it that way. Finally—spoiler alert—the great
dinosaur extinction (except for birds) happens 66 million years ago when a huge
asteroid crashes into the planet, and this too is something we already knew,
but Brusatte provides additional details that I hadn’t previously read.
Throughout, the author talks about many other leading paleontologists who have
made major discoveries, so it’s not just about him, which is admirable, and the
voice/tone is quite conversational. Terrific book.
[image error]Deep Creek by Pam Houston
Deep Creek by Pam Houston is a memoir of
Houston’s life on her 120-acre ranch in Colorado. It’s very enjoyable, but I
have to say one of the things I enjoyed most is when she’s talking about people
I know. There is one long section about her talk with Cheryl Strayed about the
death of Houston’s mother (Strayed’s blockbuster book Wild was about her grief over the death of her own mother), and
later there is a chapter where Josh Weil comes to ranch-sit and together they
rescue (and then unrescue) an orphaned elk calf. Houston writes about her
landscape beautifully. There is an especially chilling section when she’s
writing about a huge wildfire that is threatening her property. Very
suspenseful and moving. Throughout the book she writes about her difficult
relationship with her mother but also the abuse she experienced from her
father, because, I assume, the trauma of her childhood contributes to who she
is now and why her ranch is so important to her. I listened to the audio
version of this book, narrated by the author, which adds a dimension that I
would have missed if I had only read the printed version.
[image error]The House on Fripp Island by Rebecca Kaufmann
The House on Fripp Island by Rebecca Kaufmann begins with a prologue in which a ghost tells us he or she was murdered, that the death on Fripp Island was not the accident it had been ruled, and that the ghost enjoys wandering around popping into the heads of the living from time to time. We then get to the book proper in which old friends Lisa and Poppy arrive on Fripp Island with their husbands and children for a short vacation in a shared house. At this point we don’t know who the victim is, so there’s a certain amount of suspense trying to guess who it is and who the killer is. The two families are fairly standard—rich family with marital tension and alcoholism, poor family with solid marriage and health problems. Everybody has secrets, which creates some nice tension, but otherwise the plot is pretty standard: one wife worries that her husband is having an affair, the other worries that her husband might be too dependent on pain pills. One girl is obsessed with boys. Another girl appears to be starting a transition to being male. The older boy is . . . well, I don’t want to give everything away. The murder eventually happens, there’s a fast denouement where we jump forward to see what all the survivors are doing twenty years later, and that’s it. My review of the book will be published at Southern Review of Books.
[image error]The Heaven of Animals by David James Poissant
The Heaven of Animals by David James Poissant is a
collection of stories that came out in 2014 and has been on my bookshelf since
then. Because I was asked to interview the author about his new novel, I
decided I should read the story collection first. The first story, “Lizard
Man,” sets the tone. Two men—one who is estranged from his gay son and one who
has long been estranged from his father—set the older man’s captive alligator
free. The title story, concluding the collection, revisits two of the
characters from this story much later, and is a powerful if somewhat maudlin
tale of a father hoping to salvage his relationship with his son. In between
there are a lot of other find stories that were published first in some
high-powered magazines, which is where Poissant built his reputation: Glimmer
Train, One Story, Southern Review, The Atlantic, Playboy, etc. That is how you
get a book deal from Simon & Schuster for a story collection. I’m glad I
read the collection because one of the stories is the seed for the novel, which
I read next.
[image error]Lake Life by David James Poissant
Lake Life by David James Poissant is a
novel set on a lake in North Carolina. The family has owned a cottage—a
double-wide trailer that has been converted—on a lake for thirty years, but now
the owners, academics from Cornell, are selling the house and retiring to
Florida. Maybe. It’s not clear who really wants that. Michael, their son, isn’t
happy about it, but he’s dealing with his own problems—a wife expecting a baby
he isn’t sure he wants given their loveless marriage and a dull job. Their
other son, Thad, also has a relationship
problem in the form of his boyfriend, Jake, a shallow painter who is having
trouble painting of late. When a neighbor boy drowns despite Michael’s attempt
to save him, the family seems to start spinning apart. Everyone has a secret,
which provides automatic tension that keeps us reading. My interview with the
author will be published at Southern Review of Books.
[image error]Borderline Citizen by Robin Hemley
Borderline Citizen by Robin Hemley is a collection
of essays about travel or, more specifically, crossing borders. I learned a lot
from this book! I knew a little already about the Walled City of Kowloon, but I
didn’t know about the enclaves and exclaves on the border of India and
Bangladesh. Fascinating. And I’d heard about a similar arrangement in Belgium
and The Netherlands, but Hemley’s essay spells it out. Then there are pieces
about Cuba, the Falkland Islands, a mega-rich Chinese businessman, Point
Roberts Washington (a chunk of Washington state that you have to drive through
Canada to get to unless you take a boat), the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad,
and more. The essays are part journalism and part travel writing, but the
thematic link that holds them together is fascinating. (Having studied with
Hemley in my MFA program and also spent a little time with him when he was living
in Singapore, I enjoyed reading his work.)
May 31, 2020
2020 Reading–May
My list of completed books this month is a little light because I was participating in an online class–both teaching and learning, which was interesting and the subject of another post–that met three nights a week, cutting into prime reading time for me. But here are the books I did finish:
[image error]
The Dictionary of Unspellable
Noises by Clint
McCown is a collection of new and selected poems, although the organization of
the book is different from other “new and selected” volumes I’ve seen. Instead
of grouping poems together by the books in which they first appeared, McCown
has given us sections that draw from several different books and add new ones
to the mix. It’s been a pleasure to read a couple of these every morning before
I start work, enjoying the personal nature of the poems about McCown’s work on
the land and his relationships with family and friends. But two poems really
stood out for me. In “Uncertainty” the speaker engages in conversation with a
pine forest. And in a similar vein, in “Lamentation in Tennessee,” he speaks to
the wind. Both poems address serious questions in a humorous way, as does a
similar poem in which he listens to Death tell jokes.
[image error]
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett was engaging
enough, but isn’t my favorite Patchett novel. It tells the story of a house,
sort of, but it’s really about the Conroy family, told from the point of view
of Danny, with a focus on his relationship with his older sister, Maeve, and
their parents, Cyril and Elna. Cyril has moved the family into a fancy house in
a suburb of Philadelphia. Elna hates it, largely because she is more cut out
for a life of serving the poor (she left a convent to marry Cyril). She leaves
(running of to India to work in an orphanage) and Cyril marries Andrea, who is
sort of a wicked stepmother trope. Upon Cyril’s sudden death by heart attack,
she throws Danny out of the house, and he goes to live with Maeve in her tiny
apartment, until they figure out that there is a trust that will pay for his
education, first in prep school and then Columbia, and then medical school,
which Maeve wants him to make maximum use of to spite Andrea. Life goes on and
the house never really leaves their lives, through all the twists and turns
that make the second half of the book somewhat engaging. This was a finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize this year (last month’s read, The Nickel Boys, was the winner), and I’m not really sure why.
[image error]
The Evolution of the Southern Back Country: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia 1746-1832 by Richard R. Beeman. A few years ago, I discovered that ancestors of mine from Scotland settled in Lunenburg County Virginia in the mid-18th Century after a brief stay in Pennsylvania. Because I was born in the Midwest but currently live in Virginia, I found that information particularly interesting and made the trip to Lunenburg (about two and a half hours away) to see what I could learn. I stayed at a very nice B&B and discovered that the host was very much into genealogy and local history. He took me to the courthouse and showed me where I could find the records I was looking for. I spent a great day looking at old deeds and such. He also recommended this book, which I was able to order and have finally gotten around to finishing. It is dry and extremely detailed and took me a long time to get through, but it’s an impressive (if incomplete) account of the area during the period that my ancestors were here. (They moved on to Tennessee around the turn of the 19th Century and then, eventually, to Iowa.)
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The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan was my book club’s selection for this month, and I certainly learned from it. One thing I learned is that many policy choices we make now have long-term consequences. Although I fished on small inland lakes with my family often during my youth in the Midwest—almost always in northern Minnesota—we never fished on the Great Lakes. We did cross the Mackinac Bridge once or twice, taking the long way just for kicks (and to visit relatives in the UP), but that was it. So my experience with the Lakes is pretty much limited to living on the shore of Lake Michigan when I was in college and then as a young lawyer in Chicago. Even then, except for a little sailing, the lake was something more to look at than use. In any event, it was fascinating to learn about the various invasive species that have created problems in the lakes, for which the author primarily blames the St. Lawrence Seaway traffic (the lamprey, alewives, mussels) and then the Chicago Canal (carp).
[image error]
Claire, Wading into the Danube by
Night by Jeffrey
Condran is a fine collection of short stories with a variety of
settings—England, Ireland, Bratislava, Pittsburgh. One of my favorite stories
in the book is “Cupcakes” about a guy who drives a Hostess Cupcake delivery
truck and brings home sugary snacks that are past their sell-by dates to eat
with his girlfriend, who is a little nuts, or more than a little (and I doubt
that the sugar diet helps). She’s not the only unbalanced woman in the
collection either. In the title story, which concludes the book, Claire disappears
and the narrator tries to track her down by going to Bratislava, where she was
last heard from. In “Gepetto’s Workshop,” a story about a bookstore, the main
character has returned to Pittsburgh after a long absence spurred by a woman
whose alcoholism pushed him away. And so on. Very good stuff.
May 27, 2020
Talk, Talk
I’ve recently done a few interviews about my new book, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, and inevitably those interviews wander off into other subjects as well.
First was an interview with Kristina Marie Darling that appeared in Lit Hub: Be Prepared to Travel, which has something of a focus on the international flavor of my work.
Then there was the interview with Leslie Pietrzyk on her blog, Work-in-Progress: House of the Ancients and Other Stories. As a fiction writer herself, Leslie’s focus is on process.
And then this week, Curtis Smith (who interviewed me last year, too, on the occasion of the publication of my previous book), did an interview with me in Small Press Reviews: Always Reading as a Writer. This one is wide-ranging, talking about everything from literary citizenship to the pandemic.
I’ve done other interviews in the past, most of which are still online, with links on my Press page.
May 14, 2020
Happy Bookiversary!
A couple of days ago, I celebrated the Publication Day of my latest book, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, released this week by Press 53. But today, May 14, is the first anniversary of the publication of my novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, released last year by Braddock Avenue Books.
It was a thrill a year ago to see the book in print and start hearing reactions to it from readers. The novel was very long in the making, as I’d actually finished it almost eight years before it was published, and its road to publication was long and winding. But I’m very proud of that book and hope that it continues to find a readership.
You can order the book from the publisher: Braddock Avenue Books.
You can also order from your favorite Independent Bookstore. (Or stop into the store and ask them to get it for you.) The book isn’t currently available from Bookshop, unfortunately.
You can buy in-store or on-line from Barnes & Noble.
Check out the great books, including The Shaman of Turtle Valley, you can order from Small Press Distribution.
And, of course, the book is also available from Amazon.com.
If you’re a library user, ask your local branch to get the book for their collection!
May 12, 2020
Book Launched!
Today, May 12, 2020, is the official publication day for my new book, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, a collection of 23 short fictions (some of them very short). My publisher, Press 53, has been great to work with on this book as well as my earlier collections. Sincere thanks to Kevin Morgan Watson for bringing the book to life.
In these socially distant times, it’s not likely that I’ll be doing any in-person events anytime soon, but you may have an opportunity to see me on Zoom. In the meantime, if you read the book, I hope you enjoy it!
To read what some kind folks and writers I greatly admire have had to say about the book, click here.
If you haven’t ordered your copy yet, you have lots of options:
Order from the publisher, Press 53. Press 53 is currently running some bundled specials, so you can get a really good deal on 5 books for $53, for example, including the new book and some of my earlier titles.
Order from Bookshop. Bookshop is a new online bookstore that seeks to do the same thing Amazon does, but for the benefit of independent bookstores. Of course, you can also order directly from your favorite local bookstore.
Order from Barnes & Noble. Your local Barnes & Noble probably doesn’t stock the book, but they should be able to get it for you, or you can order online and have it shipped.
Order from Amazon.com. Yep, you can get it from Amazon, too.
May 5, 2020
Recent Book Reviews in NYJB
In the past week, two of my book reviews have appeared in the New York Journal of Books, both, coincidentally, translated from Korean.
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First to appear was my review of Friend by North Korean writer Paek Nam-nyong, translated into English for the first time although it appeared in North Korea more than thirty years ago and in South Korea not long after that. In that review, I also discuss a South Korean novel that appeared at the same time, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo. Both books were published in April 2020 in the US.
See Review of Friend in the New York Journal of Books.
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This week, my latest review appeared. This one is Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah, which is a surreal novel set in Seoul that blends waking and dreaming, real and unreal. While the North Korean novel was a curiosity, this one feels more significant as literature. Its official release date in the US is today.
See Review of Untold Night and Day in the New York Journal of Books.
Given my interest in both Korea and China, I would welcome the opportunity to review new and forthcoming translations of fiction from either country.
April 30, 2020
2020 Reading–April
Another big reading month, because what else is there to do, including a couple of big books.
[image error]A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James is a long book! Nothing brief about it. And, because of the Jamaican patois, it’s a challenge. I’m listening to the audiobook but also referring to my print copy, and I’m glad I have both. It’s possibly the most violent book I’ve ever read, but the title should have been the first clue to that. (The title, BTW, is a reference not to the number of killings shown in the book but to a series in the New Yorker written by one of the characters about the Jamaican gangs.) Anyway, at first, the book seems to be about the struggles of the Jamaican people, mostly poor, and the political instability that might be the result of CIA attempts to prevent a Communist government like nearby Cuba’s. A portion of the story is devoted to the attempted killing of Bob Marley, for reasons that I never fully grasp, although it also seems to be political. But then it becomes mostly about the drug trade, especially when the action of the book shifts from Kingston to Miami and New York. From a craft point of view, the book is interesting because of the voices of many characters, including some of the really bad guys. In this, the audio helped a lot to keep them more or less straight. The most enjoyable character to read was the one woman in the book who has witnessed the shooting of Marley, fears reprisals, and so reinvents herself several times. I’m glad to have read it.
[image error]Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah
Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah is a translation from Korean. The novel centers on a former actress, Ayami (which is a Japanese name) who works at an “audio theater” that plays the audio of recordings of plays for an audience of high school students and blind people. The theater is operated by a mysterious foundation. Ayami doesn’t know who her parents were and her adoptive parents are dead. She is being stalked by Buha, who may or may not be her former husband. A poet comes to town from somewhere, Europe maybe, and Ayami is sent by Yeoni, her German teacher, to meet him at the airport. Yeoni and Ayami have been reading The Blind Owl together in a German translation of a famous Persian book. I’m hopeful that reading that book will give me some understanding of what Bae is doing in this book. For example, there are several descriptive passages that are repeated throughout the book, and apparently this is a technique borrowed from the Persian novel. We’ll see.
[image error]The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat
The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat is the Persian
book that the characters in Untold Night
and Day are reading, so I read it too. It tells the story of a man, an
opium user, who is enchanted by a mysterious woman with searing eyes. He sees
her and then can’t find her again, but one day she comes to him, enters his
house, and dies. He doesn’t know what to do, so he cuts up her body and stuffs
it into a suitcase. Then a hearse driver appears and takes him to a cemetery
where he puts the suitcase in a grave. The hearse driver gives him an ancient
jar with a picture on it. When the man gets home, he realizes the picture is
that of the woman and is exactly the same as a picture of her he himself has
painted. He then is moved to write, and what he writes takes up the second half
of the book, a story about a man, an opium user, married to a horrible woman
whom he eventually kills. It’s highly abstract, but the book benefits from an
introduction by Porochista Khakpour, an Iranian American writer I happen to
know.
[image error]Waltzing with Horses by Felicia Mitchell
Waltzing with Horses by Felicia Mitchell is a poetry
collection published by Press 53 that I picked up a few years ago and have only
just now gotten around to reading. It’s a terrific collection that I enjoyed
making my slow way through, a poem or two a day usually. Many of the poems are
personal and confessional, and a good number of them are about the poet’s
mother, moving ever closer to death through the pages until, in the
collection’s last poem, “After the memorial service/ we buried a salamander
instead.” In another poem, a keen observation: “In the museum she has made of
her living room/ photographs of my mother’s life are stacked and pinned/ as if
looking at them will take the place of memory.”
[image error]Apeirogon by Colum McCann
Apeirogon by Colum McCann is a complex
novel told in 1001 segments (because One
Thousand and One Nights is a recurring theme) telling the story of Rami and
Bassam, an Israeli and a Palestinian, who both have lost daughters to the
ongoing conflict. Rami’s daughter, at 14, was at a café when a suicide bomber
detonated. Bassam’s daughter, at ten, was struck in the back of her head by an
Israeli soldier’s rubber bullet. Rami’s and Bassam’s experiences are
non-fiction and form the core of the novel, which also includes numerous other
characters as well as the controlling metaphor of flight and the migration of
birds. Essentially, though, it’s about the inhumanity of the occupation,
something that might resonate with an Irish writer like McCann. Interestingly,
some images from previous books by McCann appear here, such as the tunnel
diggers (This Side of Brightness),
the tightrope feats of Philippe Petit (Let
the Great World Spin), George Mitchell’s negotiations of the Peace Accord (Transatlantic). There’s no real plot to
speak of, and it’s impossible for most readers to know where the non-fiction
ends and the fiction begins, as the narrative is tied closely to real people
and events. The structure, I suppose, also attempts to create a kind of
literary apeirogon, a shape with countably infinite sides, almost approximating
a circle. This is not my favorite of McCann’s books, but it certainly is
powerful.
[image error]The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is annoying.
Haidt claims to be, or have been, a liberal, but this book gives conservatives
far too much credit for having a belief system based on all six of his pillars
of morality, whereas liberals primarily rely on just two. It isn’t clear that
the pillars are accurate or that they’re even equal, and some of his
attributions seem arbitrary. It seems to me that liberals and conservatives
both exhibit loyalty, but in different ways and to different groups. And there
is a long discussion about how wonderful religion is at binding groups together
for mutual benefit, but not a word about how the gods of these religions are
pure inventions. How moral can a system based on a lie truly be? He lost me
early on in the book when he dismisses rationalists, because that would
describe my own system of morals.
[image error]Conversations With US by Chris Register
Conversations With US: American
Southwest by
Chris Register is sort of a Studs Terkel-esque (in Working, for example) book of interviews with “real” people
encountered by the author during a bicycle tour of the Southwest. It follows
the first volume in his series, in which he biked through the Great Lakes
region. Register’s premise, which is hard to argue with, is that the country is
divided because we don’t talk to each other and we don’t listen. What’s fun
about the book is that in addition to the interviews he conducts, he also
shares the trials and tribulations of the actual biking—repairing his bicycle,
encountering wildlife, camping, bad roads, etc. I had the pleasure of doing an
interview with Register about his project, which you can read about here. While I appreciate the goal of
fostering communication, it feels like it’s a one-way conversation, at least
here. In any case, I really enjoyed reading about the journey, his encounters
along the way, and his many flat tires (!).
[image error]The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead isn’t as
fanciful or as complex as his previous book, The Underground Railroad, but it’s a good story, beautifully told.
Elwood is a smart black teenager who gets an opportunity to take college
classes but has to hitchhike to school. He is picked up by a guy who has stolen
the car he’s driving, which gets Elwood sent to Nickel, a reform school, when
the guy gets pulled over. Nickel is abusive to the boys, especially the black
boys, and the horrors are revealed ultimately when a team of archaeologists
excavate the grounds and discover lots of bodies. Elwood, in the present, is a
success story in New York City, but he can never escape his past. Now, he
prepares to return to Nickel to reveal the truth about his time there.
Whitehead is a terrific writer.
[image error]Weather by Jenny Offill
Weather by Jenny Offill is a short novel in fragments, in the style of her last book, Dept. of Speculation. Although I love the voice here, as I did in the previous book, I also have a similar complaint that not much happens. In this book, the main character is Lizzie, a woman who works in a library, but without a library degree. She also works as an assistant to a psychologist/scientist who answers questions people submit for her podcast about Climate Change. The book, then, deals with questions of the doom we’re all facing (cheery!). At the same time, Lizzie is coping with her brother, Henry, who is a recovering addict with relationship problems, and her mother. But she has a stable marriage to Ben and a charming (if possible autistic) son, Eli, so Lizzie’s life doesn’t seem so bad to me, and possibly not worthy material for a novel? At the end of the book is a url to a site Offill has created that I recommend you check out: obligatorynoteofhope.com
