Word of this book’s popularity spread and I received the book with assurances I may find it interesting. Indeed, I did. Enraptured with octopus anywayWord of this book’s popularity spread and I received the book with assurances I may find it interesting. Indeed, I did. Enraptured with octopus anyway, I was surprised debut author Van Pelt managed to pull this off as a fiction, but it worked very well after a sluggish first half.
While I am not usually interested in reading about a grumpy older woman, in this case Tove reminded me so much of people of Nordic descent that I have known that I found her approachable. And Marcellus, the octopus, well…he was a wonder and lovable in his invertebrate way. Probably the most disturbing portrait in the story was that of a teenaged boy who imagined himself unloved and who appeared destined to flame out in a drugged and drunken stupor before he even knew the good bits. It felt too real to be comfortable.
Tove is certifiably old, at 70 years, but to keep busy and because she finds it interesting, she works at a cleaner at a local aquarium on the northwest coast of the U.S. She notices that Marcellus appears to watch her from his hiding place and she makes efforts to befriend him. It works! Marcellus loses a bit of his fear and Tove allows him to escape his tank to eat some of the ‘seafood’ in the other tanks at night without telling the management.
Its a reasonable arrangement until Tove hurts herself falling off a ladder. Then things start to unravel and the book takes flight. The second half of the story is propulsive and hard to put down, so involved are we with the lives of these characters. Van Pelt does a great job of writing with enough depth that we understand and recognize the motivations of all players and are grateful for the opportunity to think long and hard about the octopus Marcellus.
I read recently that fishermen are planning to make octopus the center of the seafood menus in restaurants now (now that they have managed to overfish all other types of seafood). I would urge everyone to think more than twice about choosing octopus to eat. We really do not want this species to collapse. Also, if you have access to Netflix, please try to see the film, My Octopus Teacher, written and directed by a South African diver who spent a year befriending an octopus off the west coast of Cape Town....more
Crisis Deluxe is the debut novel of a former investment banker. Honestly, the work sounds as though it would kill with anxiety anyone who suffers fromCrisis Deluxe is the debut novel of a former investment banker. Honestly, the work sounds as though it would kill with anxiety anyone who suffers from imposter syndrome. A rougher bunch of the over-compensated would be hard to find.
Super-charged self-satisfaction is not hard to find these days in lots of professions; it may even be a prerequisite for some positions. I am quite sure it has something to do with compensation: “I mean, if I’m paid this much, I must be good! Right?”
What works in this novel is the complicated story of the buy-out of an investment bank headquartered in Hong Kong by a bigger investment bank based in New York. Money, as ordinary folks know it, is a different beast in this world; our interest lies in learning its new definition, realizing the dimensions of its reach and the emptiness of its pleasures.
Things we would ordinarily treasure—out-of-reach gustatory delights, trips around the world, rides in Rolls Royce and expensive clothing—are paired with the scent of sweat, exhaustion and even blood.
Mostly we recognize money is not worth what we give up to get it, something minimum wage and gig workers have discovered post-pandemic in America. But I cannot be completely sure if that lesson is one I learned in this book or if it was merely confirmed to me there.
The investment banker at the heart of this fiction introduces himself like James Bond: “Street. Alexander Street.” Great name. Street is sent to Hong Kong from South America where is he finishing one deal so he can save another going very bad as Asian financial markets teeter and crater. Why the market is unstable is never discussed which prompts my usual skepticism over Wall Street and SEHK shenanigans.
Financial markets are built on trust, and bankers showed us their empty shirts in the last 20 years. IMHO, they simply know there are ways to make money in shaky markets but don’t have the brains, heart or knowledge to tell us why.
Street works out of NYC but his parentage is European. With that he has the best of both worlds: credibility and deniability. He can deny being a hated Yank while having the backing of a big, fat American investment bank. The story involves us in the details of the Hong Kong company’s balance sheet and its status as the continent’s first successful purveyor of corporate bonds. As the market falters, holders of commercial debt begin to limit their exposure by calling in loan payments just when companies are least likely to be able to pay.
Powerful interests around Hong Kong’s city-state begin to move as the investment bank buyout is reimagined. When a wealthy but uninvolved friend of Street’s is murdered before his eyes at dinner one night, we never really get full satisfaction. Murder, and its cousin poisoning, usually require more explanation both to and by the police than we received in this novel. Like in any country, when a rich person dies, there are ripples.
There is a romantic interest in this novel but it is odd. In the manner of all things masculine, Alexander Street does not excessively, or even adequately, question when his gorgeous high-school sweetheart of thirty years before suddenly shows up, willing and able to involve herself in a romantic liaison with him, despite the fact both are long-and-happily married. That she is the older sister of a difficult young bond salesman involved in the bank buyout raises warning flags for women readers but barely touch the consciousness of Street. Alexander Street.
The ending kept me guessing and was climactic. See for yourself.
P.S. I met Chris Coffman on Goodreads. He wrote some of the most insightful and interesting reviews I came across...oh, some long time ago now. Then he dropped off as a result of being consumed with writing his own mystery. I hope you pick this up to encourage such efforts....more
This first novel by Cusk won the Whitbread Award for First Novel in 1993 and it seems worthy of that distinction. It is less tentative than we would hThis first novel by Cusk won the Whitbread Award for First Novel in 1993 and it seems worthy of that distinction. It is less tentative than we would have reason to expect though it depicts a just-new woman carrying a load of insecurities while trying to navigate a large city.
Ultimately Agnes manages to find her way outside the maze inside her own head, recognize the privilege of her upbringing, and to feel something for the difficulties of others, but it is a tough couple hundred pages until she gets there. It is not so much funny as pathetic, and that is because we recognize something of ourselves (and perhaps our children) in her.
I wish I’d had more time to concentrate on this novel, though the reason l didn’t is that I always found time to do something besides read it. Reading about Agnes was uncomfortable. Agnes (what a name!) was so unsure of herself it was painful. I do remember those years but do not miss them. It is a miracle we make it through, though Cusk puts in a couple reminders that some folks nearly don’t, and many don’t come through without damage.
We see the promise of Cusk in this novel in that her seemingly lightweight protagonist manages to discern the outlines of consequential existential questions— about the purpose of life— and this doesn’t change in her later work. Cusk is a heat-seeking missile for “the heart of the matter” and that is why readers eagerly seek out the next installment in how she describes what she has discovered.
Ultimately I was reading this novel at this time is for completionist reasons, but it also strangely dovetailed a major life moment. My oldest brother who’d had a major influence on my life trajectory died suddenly. Preparing his memorial service involved creating a short slideshow—he was a photographer and oceanographer, among other descriptors. He’d taken pictures of me beginning my travels overseas alone at the age of Cusk’s Agnes. Reading of Agnes’ mental circularities, uncertainties, and anxieties reminded me what I’d ditched as soon as I could.
I am having a look at all Cusk’s books to see how she got from here to her adaptation of Medea and the Outline trilogy. I have one novel left, The Temporary, before I will need to circle back to read her later work again. I admire her writing and think her work resonates, particularly for white women of a certain level of wealth, education, and age. That is not to say her later work doesn’t speak to universal experience—I think it does—but I wonder if the humor translates as well. She is easily in the ranks of America’s now dead male writers, Updike and Roth, whose work was claimed by a generation of white men of a certain level of wealth and education.
This early novel feels dated now: it was written twenty-five years ago. Reading about Agnes’s travails reminded me that young women today likely have different experiences with first sex, with boyfriends, girlfriends, even parents. Our relationships have been changed by cell phones and connectedness, and at the risk of seeming out of touch, I venture that the rate of change truly has speeded up. Perhaps everything we really need to learn can, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, be found in our own backyards after all. There is something to be said for getting a firm foundation in a more limited environment before being hit with the world, but perhaps those faced with choice early are better at navigating it. Whatever the case, we’re not in Kansas anymore. ...more
This story of Peru’s civil war (1980-2000) is startling in what it reveals about humans—how thin the skin of our civilization and how remarkably base This story of Peru’s civil war (1980-2000) is startling in what it reveals about humans—how thin the skin of our civilization and how remarkably base our instincts. I would have plunked the whole story under the rubric ‘science-fiction’ except for the acknowledgements in which Alarcón cites debts from his long period of research.
After twenty years of war, teenagers are like newborns, having no institutional memory. Towns were designated by number, not name. Both sides so distrusted and despised the other they no longer ruminated on guilt. Each was sloppy in their reasoning and callous in their behaviors; they treated one another like a separate species needing extermination. Terrifyingly, it shows us what can come of broken political systems. It happened. Not long ago.
It shows us what comes when intellectuals are jailed and disappeared, when the people are kept in ignorance. They know only that their family members and townspeople are disappearing, they know not where they go. This particular novel focuses on a radio show that the entire country listened to: a golden-voiced newsreader sharing names sent to her by people trying to find individuals they knew and loved. If everyone listens, there is hope that some may eventually be reunited with their families.
What is so astounding about this novel is not only that it previews for anyone interested an outcome when a country follows a path of political warfare and division. Sometimes I think we can still fix our own broken system; after reading this I am sure we must, and sooner please. This novel is a debut by an author who was thirty years old at the time (2007). It doesn’t seem possible he would be capable of such depth and such understanding. But great stresses can force unusual talent.
"Manau carried with him the shame of an exposed man who had imagined his mediocrity to be a secret."
and
"….it didn’t seem at this [early] hour to be a city but a museum of a city, a place she was viewing as if from some distant future, an artist’s model built to demonstrate how human beings once lived…"
Lately I reviewed the author’s latest collection of stories The King is Always Above the People, which led me to this novel and another of his, At Night We Walk in Circles, published in 2013. Alarcón hosts a podcast for Latin American voices, among other things. He is a critically important voice for North Americans at this time of our own political upheaval, and because he is extraordinary. We need to hear him. Get something of his right now....more
This wasn’t the book I thought it would be when I sought it out after watching Trevor Noah interview Terry Crews about the cancellation and subsequenThis wasn’t the book I thought it would be when I sought it out after watching Trevor Noah interview Terry Crews about the cancellation and subsequent surprise pick-up of further episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I hadn’t seen that TV series but I was so impressed with what Crews said in the interview about masculinity and how it really never was all that good for men, either. And then there was the funniest man on late night (Noah) saying over and over how funny Crews was…well, I knew I had to find out what I’d missed.
Crews grew up in Flint, Michigan in an abusive household. His father was a foreman in a GM plant. Terry and his brother as youngsters were fearful for their physical safety. Terry dreamed of getting out of Flint, and like many boys of a certain age, he hoped an athletic scholarship would provide that opportunity. He got his chance, and this look at college athletics is exactly what we’ve been learning over the past couple of years from journalistic sources. Extremely exploitative and oftentimes racist, these school programs exist not to further the career opportunities of teens, but to pull in money for the school with very little accountability either to the administration or to the students.
Crews’ scholarship was constantly being withheld or given back, not allowing him to plan his education path, while the amount of time required to play on the team meant there was no time or energy for anything else while he was in college, giving him less education than he needed and few opportunities to grow into the well-rounded, responsible person we expect of college graduates. From there he jumped from the frying pan into the fire, accepting a bid from an NFL team.
Here the exploitation of the players was greater by several degrees of magnitude. Unless one is a first-string player, there is precious little money considering the physical risks, much of the expense of which the player himself has to front in advance while ‘practice’ is taking place. We learn also that players are not intended to sign contracts offered them should they prove capable enough to win games, but are expected to work for half the contract value or less so that wage prices are kept low. One begins to understand why an NFL franchise is such a lucrative business opportunity, and why someone like Donald Trump would have loved to get his hands on such a opportunity to scam the tax authorities, players, fans, etc. It’s a virtual mint, if one doesn’t mind the slave-owner aspect.
Crews shares examples of bad experiences he’d had with coaches, teachers, or pastors which reminded him of how constrained his opportunities were. Somewhere he’d developed a sense of his own worth, and grew weary of “being threatened by people he did not respect.” He found a woman he did respect while still in college, and tied her fortunes to his early on. He seemed to have the right instincts because she has been his rock during extremely trying financial times in the NFL and after, when he was trying to break into show business—not as an actor, but as a producer, writer, animator.
Crews, right from the opening paragraphs of his memoir shows his extraordinariness, and makes the ordinariness of the people around him all the more apparent. A black man in those days was just another expendable person, and the fact his college coaches did not put him in a position which would show his skill Crews suggests was due to racism. Once in the NFL, it seems was more a lack of mentorship and a culture of exploitation that did not allow him to shine, making us feel even more sorry for the men who actually made the team and stayed on it. Money doesn’t make up for everything, no matter what they say.
And we get a glimpse of the NFL culture and what it is like to socialize with other NFL players on the constantly on-the-move circuit of games away from home. It sounds perfectly dreadful, the forced camaraderie among the displaced. Crews recounts once getting on a plane after he'd been cut from one team and was being called to another across the country. He did not have enough money to fly to the new team. Because he’d paid with hastily-borrowed cash, airport security assumed he was a drug dealer and pulled him off the plane. Cripes. Can you imagine any one of any other race willing to put up with that kind of bull? He was plenty pissed off, but needed to get where he was going so didn’t scream the house down.
Well, it is kind of a miracle this man survived as long as he did, and accomplished as much as he has. While he is apologizing for his anger management issues and resentments, I’m thinking…wait. You mean we don’t have the right to be royally pissed off when we are jerked around? He’d say that it does us no good, and we need to frame the issue differently so that it doesn’t trip us up on our way to a goal. Now that I’ve seen him talk online about his experience with sexual abuse by a talent agent, I’m thinking he is the hottest property around.
Crews does talk at the end of this memoir that manhood used to mean being right and in control. Now it is more about getting along with others and allowing everyone to live their best lives. He relies on the talents and goodwill of his long-time wife Rebecca and isn’t afraid to acknowledge the part she plays in holding up his world. He is inclined to talk about compassion for our own, and other's, failings is a good way to heal a rift. He suggests starting with oneself, rather than expecting someone else to take on that challenge. He really is a role model, and doesn’t just talk the talk....more
This novel references Gertrude Stein’s comment about her memories of Oakland, CA, “there is no there there,” upon discovering her family home was takeThis novel references Gertrude Stein’s comment about her memories of Oakland, CA, “there is no there there,” upon discovering her family home was taken down to accommodate an office park. I think the characters in this book would say it differently, that there is indeed something in Oakland, home of the fictional Big Oakland Powwow with which it concludes.
Distinct Indian voices tell a story about their lives, whatever they want to tell and not necessarily to an immediate point. Somehow it all comes together at the end, at the powwow. Family members find one another, and there is some recognition of their losses. It is a fantastic imagining of the experiences of many.
The chapters are long and rangy at the beginning, shortening as the pace quickens and the powwow approaches. The interconnection between characters comes clear. It is beautifully woven together, each party distinct and yet having a similiarly destructive upbringing.
What struck me most was, finally, the recognition of what happened to Native Americans and how diminished their legacy within their own tribes. There are many reasons for this, much of which we now realize was a shared responsibility we did not manage well. Orange doesn’t shy from painful truths; there is a psychic cost to the lives our ancestors took, or oppressed, a cost that has been playing out for hundreds of years. Although there may have been writers before who captured that karma, Tommy Orange is particularly skilled at showing us the ravages in a range of folks who struggle under the burden of what they have lost.
I alternately read and listened to the audio of this, produced by Random House Audio and featuring a full cast of readers: Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Ceurvo, Kyla Garcia. It’s a wonderful listen, and an equally a fine read. However you approach this, you will appreciate the insights.
One of those insights helped me with a phenomenon I have never understood. The alcoholic uncle of one character came to visit his sister and her son. When he wasn’t drinking, the uncle was full of interesting stories and was a pleasure to be around. One day the uncle told the boy he was dying and was visiting people he knew and liked before his time was done. The young boy asked him why he was still drinking if it was killing him. The uncle answered
“I’m sorry you gotta see it, Nephew, it’s the only thing that’s gonna make me feel better. I been drinking a long time. It helps. Some people take pills to feel okay. Pills will kill you too over time. Some medicine is poison.”
Published in 2016, this is Ocean Vuong’s first full collection of poetry. We will never know how a boy emerges, so young, with a talent so great. A poPublished in 2016, this is Ocean Vuong’s first full collection of poetry. We will never know how a boy emerges, so young, with a talent so great. A poem chosen at random lights deep, protected nodes in our brain and attaches to our viscera. We recognize his work as surely as we appreciate a painting, or a piece of music. He appears a conduit, not a creator.
One of the poems in this collection has a title referencing a Mark Rothko painting. Glancing at it, we know immediately why he pairs it with these words.
Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown, 1952)
The TV said the planes have hit the buildings. & I said Yes because you asked me to stay. Maybe we pray on our knees because god only listens when we're this close to the devil. There is so much I want to tell you. How my greatest accolade was to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge & not think of flight. How we live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we've been through. They say the sky is blue but I know it's black seen through too much distance. You will always remember what you were doing when it hurts the most. There is so much I need to tell you--but I only earned one life & I took nothing. Nothing. Like a pair of teeth at the end. The TV kept saying The planes... The planes... & I stood waiting in the room made of broken mockingbirds. Their wings throbbing into four blurred walls. & you were there. You were the window.
It was the phrase How we live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we've been through. That phrase stopped me.
In an interview with The Guardian, Vuong says “life is always more complicated than the headlines allow; poetry comes in when the news is not enough.” Vuong won awards for this collection, and gained recognition. He now is an associate professor in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and writing a novel.
“I’m writing a novel composed of woven inter-genre fragments. To me, a book made entirely out of unbridged fractures feels most faithful to the physical and psychological displacement I experience as a human being. I’m interested in a novel that consciously rejects the notion that something has to be whole in order to tell a complete story. I also want to interrogate the arbitrary measurements of a “successful” literary work, particularly as it relates to canonical Western values. For example, we traditionally privilege congruency and balance in fiction, we want our themes linked, our conflicts “resolved,” and our plots “ironed out.” But when one arrives at the page through colonized, plundered, and erased histories and diasporas, to write a smooth and cohesive novel is to ultimately write a lie.”
Vuong brings with him the possibility of a vision that is articulate enough to share, brave enough to bolster. It's a kind of blessing, a grace note we don't really deserve, his voice.
Vuong’s poetry is available as an ebook from many libraries. He’s what we call a ‘literary light.’...more
In hindsight, the resonance of this dark and fierce debut on the stage of world literature should have been the warning bell that the #MeToo movement In hindsight, the resonance of this dark and fierce debut on the stage of world literature should have been the warning bell that the #MeToo movement was about to extract its penalty. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017, this novel’s strengths are in describing a natural world that seems almost untouched in its primitiveness, a world that one would swear were long gone.
A family of father, daughter, and son builds their own dwelling on land passed on by a long-dead wife and mother. A wealthy landowner nearby likewise claims the land but recognizes the family from when the mother lived there. A convoluted agreement is worked out whereby the wealthy man deeds the land to the family in return for fealty.
The story is old as Moses but were for modern day appliances and tools, we’d not know the exploitation continues so blatantly today. Mozley brilliantly describes the bump and thrum of life on a working woodlot which yields most of the family’s needs for game and heat. The father, a very large man, earned a living early on by bare-knuckle fighting for cash. He was cool-minded and strong; he always won.
The daughter and son were seen as strange among the townspeople who knew of them. They were self-sufficient and proud, and did not attend any local school, though they were of an age to do so. The boy was slight in frame and lovely in countenance; the girl became a tall and strapping and arresting-looking woman. It is said the son took after the mother. We learn that the daughter takes after the father.
This was a very good choice for the international fiction prize, evoking as it does the history of the Celtic Britons, the earliest known settlers of the region in 4th Century B.C. The epigraph itself, a quote by Ted Hughes, speaks of Elmet as "the last independent Celtic kingdom in England...a sanctuary for refugees from the law." The story itself is rich and complete, the bullying nature of wealthy landowners charted throughout the ages. Insular and suspicious townsfolk make their appearance, as does a singular woman who lives alone in the hills.
A fight scene near the end of the book registers viscerally. The momentum and brutality derived from that moment electrifies our experience through the end of the novel, the final scenes almost changing the nature of the novel despite the foreshadowing given earlier. This may be why Mozley added the italicized chapters earlier on--to warn us of great changes to come. Perhaps ideally these wouldn't be necessary, but then the sense of time and distance and distress of the narration wouldn't be as clear.
There are so many intriguing aspects of this novel one is tempted to cut Mozley some slack if some fulsome descriptions might be considered extraneous to the thrust of the action. The character of Vivien, for instance, may have been developed somewhat beyond her remit. Considering the vast talent arrayed for the award last year, it is difficult to expect a debut would have prevailed against such talented entries as Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which did end up taking home the prize. But this was, without a doubt, a very strong debut indeed....more
In the future, people will probably mistake the the origin of the phrase ‘the warmth of other suns’ to be this big book on America’s Great Migration, In the future, people will probably mistake the the origin of the phrase ‘the warmth of other suns’ to be this big book on America’s Great Migration, when it fact Wilkerson credits the phrase to a poem of Richard Wright’s that she uses as an epigraph:
"I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown. I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom."
The beautiful, elegiac poem expresses regret one had to leave some of one’s roots behind in order to ‘transplant’ elsewhere. Wilkerson interviewed about 1,200 people and did subsidiary research to collect & corroborate enough impressions and remembrances that she felt comfortable in this period and could supply details others forgot.
I'd be willing to bet she used techniques similar to those used by the author of one of my favorite histories, the award-winning Russian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, who wrote Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet Union. Alexievich’s journalistic technique uses the general experience to elucidate the personal, though Wilkerson also did extensive interviews with the three main subjects of her narrative.
The Great Migration covered the period 1915-1970; Wilkerson’s own attention span covers a period of almost one hundred years, from 1915-2010. The three different sets of migrants whose lives she uses as examples did not know one another, and all three were alive when she began her research; all three had died before she’d finished. George Starling moving up the eastern seaboard from Florida to Harlem in New York City; Ida May Gladney moved from Mississippi to Chicago, part of the midwest migration; and Robert Foster moved from Louisiana to California, an experience about which I knew the least.
The book is huge with detail. It can’t be rushed, and those who read or listen to it regularly, recognizing it may take weeks to get to it all, may enjoy it best. There is a rhythm to the telling; it is long-form story-telling, and it adheres to an oral tradition. One can certainly make the case that, since Wilkerson conducted interviews for the bulk of her narrative, this is in a long line of family histories passed down orally from generation to generation. The experiences she recounts fills in holes some discover in our own family histories. We can now imagine what the migrants must have encountered.
In charts showing the movement of African Americans from the South to different parts of the country in the last century, Los Angeles and cities in California got only a third or smaller proportion of what Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Philadelphia settled. Boston and New York were in between those two.
One incident Wilkerson recounted that shook me badly was the story of the attempted integration in the summer of 1951 in Cicero, an all-white town on the southwest border of Chicago. The mob mentality that took over the reason of the so-called white people—and it should be noted this was a broad swath of first- and second-generation European immigrants—when they learned a black couple had rented an apartment is horrifying, terrifying to recount. The couple’s belongings and the apartment were destroyed…on day one. The next three days brought a full-scale riot that needed the National Guard to subdue.
Boston is not specifically mentioned in this history, but the New York experience plays a large part. Wilkerson makes reference to the Northern Paradox, a term coined by the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal:
“In the North, Myrdal wrote, ‘almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs’—that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods, indeed, avoiding social interaction overall.”
Considering African Americans apparently occupied approximately 25% of the population in these two cities, I’d have to agree that the discrimination, in Boston at least, is subtle, hidden, denied since most neighborhoods until recently were clearly segregated.
Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi for Chicago October 14, 1929, and eventually ended up voting for Barak Obama as senator of Illinois. In describing cooking and eating corn bread the way it was made when she was coming up, she says
“Now you put you some butter and some buttermilk on it,” she says, “and it make you want to hurt yourself.”
I’ve never heard that phrase before, but it sure covers a number of addictive activities.
In describing Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster’s life in California, we get an indelible picture of the man by the way he remembered the clothing he and his wife wore at eventful moments in their lives.
“He remembered one night in particular. He was wearing a black mohair suit he ordered specifically for the occasion from the tailor who dressed Sammy Davis, Jr., and Frank Sinatra. He wore a black tie with a burgundy stripe, a white tab-collar shirt, gold cuff links, black shoes, black silk socks, and a white handkerchief with his initials, RPF, embroidered in silver.”
Elsewhere he mentions this black mohair suit jacket has a silk lining in scarlet. How can one begrudge a man who is so enthusiastic in his compositions? There is such joy there.
The last individual detailed in this book, George Swanson Starling, was memorable for what he did not accomplish. His family held him back from finishing college, so George married an unsuitable woman and left home for the North.
"It was spite," George would say of the decisions he made at that moment in his life…"That’s why I preach today, Do not do spite," he said. "Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim [at] and goes back and zaps you. And you’re the one who pays for it."
A truer lesson was never told.
I used Whispersync to listen/read. Robin Miles narrates and her reading is perfect in pace and clarity. Ken Burns gave an intro to the audio edition which was not reproduced in the kindle version. He says, basically, "This is must-read nonfiction, essential to our understanding of race. I loved this book" and more. We haven’t had this kind of history told in this way before. Allowing this history to inform the construct that is your life will change that life a little bit....more
The subtitle of this collection is 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women, and it is beautifully done. The short passages cover every continent and every raThe subtitle of this collection is 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women, and it is beautifully done. The short passages cover every continent and every race, religion, and sexuality…that is, the stories are about girls and women with lesbians and transgender individuals identifying as female included. It is ravishingly interesting.
Each short passage is a tightly written biography suitable for 9-14 year-olds, informative, and inspiring. Many unusual job descriptions and lifelong purpose are described, expanding our horizons about the scope of what is possible. As an adult, I didn’t expect to learn as much as I did nor enjoy it as much.
This book is about rebels. It challenges us to think again about what we admire and what we don't...and why. It is a fantastic teaching tool. I can imagine a mother reading an entry alongside her preteen (of either sex, by the way) and discussing it for a short while so that the implications of each success sink in: "Why would that person be considered a rebel?" "What do you think about what that person did?" "Do you know anyone who has done things like this?" The mother is going to recognize some of the names and so can add whatever backstory is not in the book.
A few examples from the stories are
✦ Inventor Ann Makosinski, a fifteen year-old Canadian who won first prize in Google Science Fair for inventing a flashlight that doesn’t need batteries, wind, or sun--just body heat. ✦ Amna Al Haddad, weight lifter from the United Arab Emirates. She was a journalist and discovered she really enjoyed exercising! She began to work out in a gym with weights for the first time in her life as an adult. She was good at it and began training for the Olympics. ✦ Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who was murdered for reporting on the truth of what she saw in the brutal civil war in Chechnya. ✦ Jane Goodall is among the women to emulate for having her own mind and studying a subject so deeply that she became the expert. ✦ Hayshepsut was an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled Egypt long before Cleopatra became Queen. Records of her were destroyed after her death, but archeologists were able to piece together a record of her successful rule, the first (and only?) female pharaoh.
Included with each biography is a full page color representation of the subject, and a quote of something they said or wrote. Next to the short bio of Misty Copeland, for instance, is a drawing of her in flight during a ballet performance with a quote that reads, “Dance found me.”
The authors, Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, studied in Italy and the United States where they founded Timbuktu Labs, a children’s media innovation lab. What’s that? you may well ask. The authors define the mission of Timbuktu as committed to “redefining the boundaries of children’s media through a combination of thought-provoking content, stellar design, and cutting-edge technology.” They designed the first iPad magazine for children. The start-up has created mobile apps and creative content for users in more than 70 countries.
It’s more than just new. It’s exciting. The first edition of this book was published in 2016. Since then it has gone through multiple reprintings, and in 2017 Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2 was published. There are apparently also coloring books, temporary tattoos, and posters that go along with the books and can be purchased separately. It’s become an industry, with good reason. If you have a girl in the family in the target age range, check it out. Just when you thought your girls were too old for bedtime stories, this may bring it all back....more
This book seems too small for all it accomplishes. The quiet watchfulness and introspection of the Prologue tamps down opinion before it develops. We This book seems too small for all it accomplishes. The quiet watchfulness and introspection of the Prologue tamps down opinion before it develops. We are here to listen, to understand. It is such a quiet read, immediately alert to the tension inherent in a grandson of immigrants policing the border.
This is a beautiful book, a beautiful physical object. Riverhead Books formatted the inside to be a kind of art, using gray pages to separate the sections and lines to guide our eye, delineate our thoughts. We recognize we are privileged to see what an American thinks of the border, an American with reason to care about the migrants, who shares our history and theirs.
The real terror that migrants bring or flee is not hidden; it is one of the first things the border guards encounter. A drug capture is a feather in one’s cap. The people ferrying the drugs are not as important; they are allowed to struggle back to where they came from, or continue onward if they dare. Not much thought is expended in their direction.
Before long, Cantú becomes aware of his own muted, muffled response to the hideousness of the choices facing his human captures. The job itself appears to be a reason why he cannot envision himself in their place. Then we discover Cantú’s stress is coming out by a grinding of his teeth when at rest. He dreams of captures—his response and theirs—and how it could be different.
He moves to a different job, a different state. He watches, in a computer lab, movements in the border area. He researches reasons for population movement, drug dealing, gang murders, a capture’s history. This knowledge does not abate his nighttime fears. He starts to try to imagine the humanity behind the statistics, quoting the historian Timothy Snyder, “Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life….it is for humanists to turn these [deaths] back into people.”
He goes back to El Paso and the Rio Grande and finds himself more confused than ever. “…studying…and reading…international affairs…I had the idea that…the patrol…would somehow unlock the border for me…but…I have more questions than ever before.” Exposure to the violence of the border region gave him a kind of moral injury: “Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong.”
In contemplating the migration of individuals from Mexico and Central America to North America, Cantú must examine the horror facing those migrants in their own countries. He gives us a taste of it, leading us to question our own understanding of government, laws, fairness, money, profit, coercion, protection. We realize we do not know the answers to the questions these migrants raise: How are we to live? What do we have to lose?
Cantú leaves the border patrol to think, write, read, study. In trying to make sense of his own history, his recent past, and his future, he takes a job in which he meets a man who becomes his friend. That man, it turns out, is what Americans call an illegal, though he has lived and worked more than thirty years in the United States. All the understanding Cantú learned at the border is put into practice now as he couples his sensitivity and sensibility with experience.
This gorgeous, thoughtful read is replete with references to poets and novelists, as well as to those who write history, philosophy, international affairs. Cantú took time and had the resources to assimilate his feelings about illegal border crossing—the indignity, the futility of it—and he is eloquent in his expression of it.
What I came away with, putting financially-motivated drug traffic aside, was that the movement of individuals is migration, something that is not going to stop because we disapprove. When things get bad enough, people move. Cantú’s title alludes to the water-like quality of the stream, and the possibilities for growth.
Flood. We, and the people of other great nations, should think about restructuring our attitudes to accept the reality of a world in crisis and how that affects us whether we want it to or not. We must look at ourselves and the world, ourselves in the world, to see what we need to do to keep ourselves from moral injury.
Michelle Kuo’s debut stopped me in my tracks. All other work I had on my plate was shoved to the side while I read this nonfiction detailing Kuo’s aftMichelle Kuo’s debut stopped me in my tracks. All other work I had on my plate was shoved to the side while I read this nonfiction detailing Kuo’s after-college years teaching English to at-risk kids in Helena, Arkansas in the Mississippi Delta. As a piece of literature, this memoir succeeds beautifully; her organization is laced with poetry, and the work exudes a kind of transcendental grace. More than once I found myself barking out sobs at the waste of lives we tolerate every day and for her recognition of the means by which we acknowledge and express thanks.
Back in 2009 Kuo had published a piece in the NYT Magazine about her two years teaching in Arkansas, and a special student she had there. In one year that student’s reading had progressed two grade levels and his attendance had improved dramatically. His classmates has also named Ms. Kuo a great influence on their lives. The at-risk school closed for lack of funding just as her kids were entering high school. Then Ms. Kuo left to attend law school in Boston.
One of the things I liked best about this story is the self-interrogation Kuo subjects herself to on her reasons for choosing to teach in the Delta. She explains how racism impacted her and how, learning of writers of the civil rights movement, she felt exhilarated and enabled. But she did not think she would do well trying to change the minds of self-interested people in power. She thought she could bring notions of empowerment to those who had no advocates.
Kuo’s parents are my favorite characters in this story. Immigrants from Taiwan, they’d sacrificed everything to give their children more opportunities. When their clever and talented daughter graduated from Harvard and chose to teach in the Mississippi Delta region, they are confused, embarrassed, hurt. She could go anywhere and do anything, and she chooses social and racial justice work in the deep South. She doesn’t claim religious beliefs, and the work wasn’t easy. By the end of her story we can all see that her generosity of spirit comes directly from her parents, though they didn’t recognize it at first.
Kuo names the chapters in her story after works of literature: poems, short stories, novels, or in one case, after the words of an affidavit her prize student, Patrick, signs to acknowledge his role in the death of a man. Patrick had dropped out of school when Ms. Kuo left for law school, had allowed his reading and writing skills to languish, and was a vulnerable teen with no oversight in a town that didn’t care very much. Kuo returns to the Delta to teach Patrick in prison, organizing her life so that she can try, in a few short months, to bring back some of the promising boy she’d seen years ago.
There were other teachers from northern schools who’d come to the Delta to teach in underserved communities and some had stayed. When Kuo returned to Helena, she was treated to their successes: the segregated black school did better on their state math scores than did the white schools. For the first time white families were complaining their kids didn’t have the same opportunity at their better-resourced schools.
What Kuo hadn’t been prepared for was that the man she saw in jail bore almost no resemblance to the promising boy she’d left years before. Now nineteen, Patrick could no longer read or write well. He expected nothing from anyone, least of all from himself. But he did remember what it felt like to have Ms. Kuo as a teacher. “It made going to school—you know, made it really mean something, somebody that care for you.”
Kuo infuses her work with the language of poets, and insists that we, like Patrick, listen to the sounds and decipher the deeper meanings. She shows us what teaching can be, and what a gift it is when done right. Discipline and good behavior often comes from not wanting to disappoint a mentor, and that impetus is what Kuo provided for Patrick. She draws for us the everyday reality of Patrick’s world so we do not blame him for his own inadequacies.
In this way, the memoir is a political book. We are persuaded that certain educational and social polices are not as helpful as others. We can see that there can be benefits to assistance and huge, disgraceful, unacceptable human losses without them. It is unforgivable of us to allow such disparities in opportunity, but we need those whose opportunity is stolen to acknowledge and address that lack. Ms. Kuo teaches us about that nexus, and we are grateful....more
A couple of weeks ago I finished Barking to the Choir by Greg Boyle, S.J. Boyle’s writing about his ministry in Los Angeles was both deeply aware of tA couple of weeks ago I finished Barking to the Choir by Greg Boyle, S.J. Boyle’s writing about his ministry in Los Angeles was both deeply aware of the human condition and deeply funny. His humor was the kind that could make us examine our own experience for other instances of that kind of vulnerability and human error that make life poignant rather than tragic. Father Boyle mentioned in passing that he decided to become a Jesuit because he found the order socially relevant and really funny. My father was educated by Jesuits, and his admirers always said his humor was Jesuitical: thoughtful, and complex. So I went looking for Jesuits and humor and found Jake Martin.
This book was published in 2012, and tells of Jake’s Irish Catholic upbringing, the death of his father when he was young, his fabulously funny females on his mother’s side. Jake watched a lot of television growing up, and, coming from a family of wise-cracking females, he learned early the value of making people laugh. He is able to discuss particular episodes in long-running comedy TV series, which is pretty much lost on me since I never watched more than one or two episodes of any series. More importantly then, Jake seems to have internalized what makes good comedy socially relevant and long-lasting, besides being merely funny. He just touches on this vastly interesting subject area and therefore makes one want to learn more about what comedy is.
Becoming a Jesuit may not seem like much a career path for a boy whose greatest goal was to appear on Saturday Night Live, but actually it would make a brilliant synergy if he could make it work. I saw a short YouTube video of Jake talking about his decision to go into the Jesuits and I was surprised. He seemed much more uncomfortable speaking in front of an audience than I was expecting. All the hand-waving and the aw-shucks unpracticed responses were at odds with the stuff he’d written in this book which seemed to indicate a man who’d reconciled with his earlier bad habits as an ordinary citizen and was looking deeper into the mysteries of both successful comedy and his faith. He seems on solid ground with the theory; why is he uncomfortable in practice and on stage?
He wasn’t funny in the book, but he stoked our interest in finding something funny about faith, about God’s will on earth, and in human vulnerability and striving. I made it hard for him because I opened the book randomly and expected him to land immediately. It actually worked…I continued reading, perplexed at his seeming gentleness and naiveté. Somehow the link between comedy and gentleness has been broken for me. It would surprise me if he could hold his own among the troupe at Second City, a famous improv comedy spot in Chicago where he began his comedic education on stage. Second City was the start for many stars we watch on national television today, so Martin is well-connected in that way.
I hope he can pull it off eventually, if he is just getting started now (actually, five years ago this book was published & we haven't heard of him yet). At least he appears to understand what a big canvas he has and what a huge number of examples he has of everyday ridiculousness....more
Reni Eddo-Lodge no longer wants to talk to white people about race because white people always manage to make the conversation about themselves. Isn’tReni Eddo-Lodge no longer wants to talk to white people about race because white people always manage to make the conversation about themselves. Isn’t this the original definition of a bore? This would actually be funny if it didn’t have such deadly consequences for people of color everywhere.
“Discussing racism is not the same thing as discussing ‘black identity.’ Discussing racism is about discussing white identity. It’s about white anxiety.”
Eddo-Lodge is British and this book evolved from an explosive blogpost of the same title that she wrote in 2014 and which is reproduced in full in the Preface to this volume. Contrary to her explicit desire to stop talking to white people about race, she has become a national and international spokesperson and spends most of her time talking to white people about race. Is there a lesson here?
Eddo-Lodge divides her commentary on the subject of race into seven chapters, the first of which, “Histories,” details her awakening to the realization that she knew very little about black British history until her second year at university. That moment of awakening, the moment Ta-Nehisi Coates also details in his own book, Between the World and Me, is a thrilling one in the life of an writer/activist. After that moment comes the hard work of study and making connections.
“We tell ourselves that good people can’t be racist…We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead it is about the survival strategy of systemic power.”
Chapter 2, “The System,” tries to describe the way racism looks today from the point of view of those discriminated against in Britain, and the excuses made to paper over any actual discussion of the problems. This is where the insistence upon merit and the way the conversation always turns to white anxiety is most apparent. Chapter 3, “What is White Privilege?” surprises us with the assertion that
“White privilege is never more pronounced than in our intimate relationships, our close friendships and our families… Race consciousness is not contagious, nor is it inherited. If anything, an increase in mixed-race families and mixed-race children brings those difficult conversations about race and whiteness and privilege close to home (literally) than ever before.”
I’d always assumed that mixed race families had the advantages of understanding around issues of race, but Eddo-Lodge tells us that many families are not having the conversations they need to have, difficult and raw though they may be. Of course.
“It makes sense that interracial couples might not want to burden themselves with the depressing weight of racial history when planning their lives together, but a color-blind approach makes life difficult for children who do not deserve this carelessness.”
There is so much in this short book that I have to urge everyone to get their own copy. The insights come fast and furious from this point on. For some white people, Eddo-Lodge asserts, “being accused of racism is far worse than actual racism.” That resonates in today’s America, and could as easily be said about sexism. We need to humble ourselves enough to learn new lessons. When addressing feminism and racism in Chapter 5, "The Feminism Question," Eddo-Lodge may present her most eloquent arguments, including a discussion about the need for black feminists to meet separately:
that [white gaze] “does so much to silence you...And there's an element of just speaking the truth of what it means to be a black woman in the UK that it would be ridiculous, as a white person, to not read that as implicating you."
In direct relationship to the cogency of her arguments, her shortest chapters are the most fluent, insightful, and well-argued. At the end, Eddo-Lodge uses a Terry Pratchett statement as her final chapter heading: "There is No Justice, There is Just Us.” In this chapter she reflects our questions right back out at her audience.
“White people, you need to talk to other white people about race….white people who recognize racism have an incredibly important part to play. That part can’t be played while wallowing in guilt.”
Apropos of this exhortation, a racial justice educator based in Boston, Debby Irving, wrote a book on race primarily for white people, called Waking Up White, detailing her experiences waking up to an unconscious racism. I agree with her that we need to learn to speak this new vocabulary of race if we want to enjoy the benefits of diversity. Eddo-Lodge, despite her exhaustion talking about race with white people, is doing her part....more
I venture to guess that anyone reading Ellen Pao's personal experience about the discrimination she alleges at the hands of partners in the Silicon VaI venture to guess that anyone reading Ellen Pao's personal experience about the discrimination she alleges at the hands of partners in the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins will find something in it with which to identify. I don’t expect anyone disbelieves her account. The cliquish melodrama of board meetings or the exclusionary after-hours drinking and strip clubs will be familiar to many, not all of them women. The truth is, the watch-your-back lifestyle of partners out for themselves in a corporate environment can get pretty ugly, particularly when large amounts of money are thrown about.
Pao is just one of the first women to document how such exclusionary behaviors affects so-called attempts to diversify management away from white men who probably [should] feel a little uncertain about sitting atop a corporation that is supposed to have its hand wrapped around the zeitgeist. But any uncertainty these white men feel about their position is no excuse for discrimination based on sex, color, sexual orientation.
Let’s face it: Ellen Pao is one very special individual, but she’s not going to change American corporate culture all on her own. She merely points out how childish corporate culture can become when adults with family responsibilities and an obligation to think outside the box and be challenged in their thinking try to find ways around those obligations.
Ellen goes through whole sordid, tiresome saga of being given seats in the back of the room, not being invited to business dinners (or even some business meetings!), of being asked to get the coffee or pass the cookies, chapter and verse, yada yada, but here it is, bluntly:
”As my time in venture wore on, more and more I began to notice my colleagues’ desperate unwillingness to depart from what they knew. The fear seemed, to me, to come from social anxiety. Almost all these men—and they were nearly all men—were awkward with each other and filled the awkwardness with clunky, inappropriate conversations. They might spend a full hour discussing porn stars and debating their favorite type of sex worker…Some would check out and flirt with the much younger administrative assistants—half to a third their age—and some would make racist jokes that weren’t funny…Or sexist jokes…week after week after week, and sometimes more than once in the same day.”
I will take a stab at suggesting that we’ve all been there…in high school. Ellen Pao grew up Asian American in a white world. She knows all about different. She knows about Asia and she knows about America. Not exclusionary. Not arrogant. Not, in fact, entirely sure of herself, despite three IV-league degrees in engineering, law and business. But she’s had enough of the chortling adolescents with sexual hand gestures—in school and at work.
Pao’s loss against Kleiner Perkins may define her, but not in the way the partners thought. Ellen Pao is not only a star, but a thought leader. At the end of this book detailing her discrimination case against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, she writes of work done as CEO of reddit. They were one of the first internet firms to take down user content that was anti-social, hate speech, pornographic, or harassing. Those are difficult decisions to make. No other company was able to make that decision until she had. After reddit she set up a venture, Project Include, to help early- to mid-stage tech firms diversify their leadership and management teams. She acknowledges change is hard, that it won’t happen on its own, and that lessons her team has learned can be useful for firms wanting to start but who are overwhelmed with choices.
This book is not merely Pao’s side of the Kleiner Perkins lawsuit. It is Pao’s take-aways from that soul-crushing experience. This book is how you know this woman is going to power up and over any obstacle in her way. The thing she seems to understand is that diversity is, well, diverse. Not everyone thinks alike. That can divide a group, but Pao is betting that making people feel comfortable speaking out, contributing, and showcasing their special talents will bring a cohesiveness that will make the group succeed. Let’s hope so. Be prepared for something radical. And watch this woman. My money’s on her.
Some extremely nasty commentary took place in the media before, during and after the Kleiner Perkins lawsuit, including this somewhat absurd piece in Fortune by Fox News contributor and now Fortune executive editor Adam Lashinsky and Katie Benner. The authors point out a real logical inconsistency: that Ellen Pao’s “jaw-dropping” and “bold” lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins “flew in the face of past criticisms levied against her by Kleiner partners — that she was passive, that she waited for orders, and that she was risk-averse.” Pao answers all the questions raised in this article fully and adequately, even eloquently, in this book. As I contend, I’ve seen these behaviors before. Theirs don’t make sense. Hers do. I’m with her....more
Nancy Pearl may just be a natural-born writer, though she is best known for her role as bookseller, librarian, interviewer, reviewer, and motivationalNancy Pearl may just be a natural-born writer, though she is best known for her role as bookseller, librarian, interviewer, reviewer, and motivational speaker on the pleasure and importance of reading. In a DIY MFA podcast interview with Gabriela Pereira in September 2017, she tells us that she was merely an instrument for the characters she channels in her debut novel. Her characters feel real to us as well.
Pearl reminds us that reading outside our comfort zone can be a fruitful experience, and her debut novel challenged me—hard—in its first pages. She introduces a self-destructive character so hard to love that we draw back, judging that character without understanding. I had to put the book aside, perplexed, wondering why Pearl would risk her hard-won reputation with such an unsavory character. Months later, I was still curious when I picked up the book again. I read it through nonstop and loved what she was able to do.
In the interview linked to above, Pearl discusses the importance of mood when reading. My second look at this novel is testament to her notion that mood matters with our acceptance of certain ideas. After I had already internalized the behaviors of her difficult character, I allowed Pearl’s writing to guide me. Her writing is so skilled it is almost invisible, though there were several times during this reading when I pulled out of the novel and shook my head in awe at her fluency and execution.
This novel is character-driven. Lizzie does something truly objectionable her last year in high school, designed to hurt herself, her parents, her friends, her ‘victims,’ indeed, everyone who learns of her behavior. Her need for love is so desperate that she denies it, derides it, disguises it. Her parents were difficult academics, and were probably completely to blame for their daughter’s alienation, but blame is not a worthwhile game to play. One still has to grow up, whatever hand one is dealt, and Lizzie had a hard time of it.
Later, her husband George would tell her in exasperation that she “had the emotional maturity of a three-year-old.” This story, then, is Lizzie's emotional journey, through school, boyfriends, and marriage, all the while holding onto her rage and disappointment from childhood. Many of us do this; we never really mature. Lizzie was blessed that the man she married was an even-tempered adult who loved her, and she had close friends who loved her as well. When one is loved, one generally tries not to disappoint those people, lest they turn their love away. We watch as Lizzie learns what that means—what it means to grow up.
I ended up putting everything else aside while I read this in a huge gulp, over two days, riveted to the unfolding story. I really appreciate what Pearl did with the character of George, who would be a grace note in anyone’s life, including readers’, because he seems to understand the really big lesson all of us must learn to get any measure of happiness and satisfaction from life. One can’t have all one wants in terms of love, jobs, recognition, or pay, so how can one be happy? The way one deals with failure will determine one’s future. It’s not the failure that’s important. It’s what comes after that. His lessons feel like gifts.
Poetry plays a key role in this novel, to describe a person’s conclusion, or to underline an observation. The poem at the beginning of this novel by Terence Winch, “The Bells are Ringing for Me and Chagall,” in retrospect gives the reader a very good idea of the direction of this novel, though one cannot see that at the start. The poem at the end is a paean to a long-lasting well-maintained relationship which may sustain one in times of terrible crushing sorrow. We may think we want fast and flashy cars, but reliability may save us.
There is a lot of lived experience in this novel. Pearl is in her seventies now, having done it all when it comes to literature, and now she has written a novel herself. What a brave act. Writing a novel is difficult when one is unknown. It must be terrifying to put something out there when one is well known. All that reading stood her in good stead, however. Her writing is gorgeous, clear and propulsive, and the tricks she uses to ensnare our interest—lots of conversation, poetry, lists, word games, memories—work beautifully.
I especially liked the unique structure of this novel. There are no chapters per se, but short sections that suit a remembered story. The sections have titles, in which she tells us what comes next. And what comes next, I hope, is another novel in which lifetime lessons are revealed. Thank you Nancy Pearl....more
This debut novel won the 2015 Victoria Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Can you imagine the fantastic possibility of that? HarpThis debut novel won the 2015 Victoria Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Can you imagine the fantastic possibility of that? Harper explains in an interview with Bookpage that she began writing the novel as part of a 12-week online novel writing class. It must be like getting blast out of a rocketship.
Americans have no doubt heard of the bushland fires Victoria state has experienced in the recent past. Weather patterns that leave huge portions of the Australian countryside water-starved can kill communities even before fire removes all signs of human habitation. People therefore rely on one another and suffer together when some members of the community experience hardship.
This fiction takes place in a country town experiencing drought conditions. Families as well as government-provided services and facilities are experiencing enormous stress. Author Harper brings Aaron Falk, a former resident, now a federal agent responsible for financial crimes in Melbourne, back to the bush to attend the funeral of a once-friend. He reminds townspeople of the reason he left so abruptly twenty years previously.
Two stories, one a long-unsolved cold case, are worked in this novel. The more recent crime is a spectacular triple murder-suicide of a family, sparing only an infant. The presumed killer is thought to be the father of the family unit, who died of a gunshot wound. Experienced crime readers will find small inconsistencies in what the characters reveal which can give clues to outcome.
I listened to the Macmillan Audio production of this mystery, very successfully read by Stephen Shanahan. Shanahan’s accent was very Australian but perfectly understandable, reminding readers that the setting is significantly different from an American experience. He managed to convey a wide range of emotions by both sexes without straying from a straightforward script. Good job all round....more
The 2008 animated documentary of the same name by Ari Folman and David Polonsky took four years to complete. The frames of this graphic novel may haveThe 2008 animated documentary of the same name by Ari Folman and David Polonsky took four years to complete. The frames of this graphic novel may have come from the film itself, and the sense of the film is uncannily captured without the sound or movement. Both book and film are so powerful I could not make it through in one sitting. A tremendous sense of anxiety and foreboding is generated by white/brown/black monochrome washed with an acid, chemical yellow, the slavering wild dogs, and the dissociative reality of war on a beach.
For anyone who hasn’t seen this film or read the graphic novel, I urge you to put aside anything else you have on your plates the minute you obtain a copy of either. It probably won’t take more than an evening to read/watch this remarkable act of witnessing, and you will remember it for the rest of your lives. Folman was a nineteen-year old recruit in the Israeli army when he was sent to Lebanon in 1982 to stop PLO rocket attacks and to retaliate for an assassination attempt on the life of Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom.
At the time, many displaced Palestinians were living in refugee camps in southern Lebanon in permanent structures like houses. Their lives did not look temporary, but there was always agitation because their refugee status did not change. In Lebanon, the sectarian Christian leader Bashir Gemayel aggressively challenged (some might say crushed) the rights of Palestinians and Muslims, and shortly after he became president-elect in the 1982 presidential election in Lebanon, he was assassinated.
Gemayel’s party, the Christian Phalangists, took their revenge on two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila. Israeli forces were slow to recognize and respond to an unfolding massacre. It appears they simply did not recognize the evil for what it was--it was too monstrous. The scars of those days left many men unable to understand what had actually happened in September 1982 and their role in it. Forman and Polonsky managed to show us that paralysis that comes over someone, even a group, when something bad is happening. The men protested up to their leaders, but not loudly, confidently, definitively enough. This phenomenon is not unknown. It may even have happened to us.
Much of the story is about the elusive nature of memory, and what scars the trauma of war leaves. The authors decided not to try and give voice to the other participants in this extraordinary event, but to just focus on the point of view of someone who was there but not directly implicated in the killing and who retained no memory of the time. We can forget these times of trauma, which is why the Holocaust is constantly referred to and memorialized. One must remember in order to forestall similar atrocities in the future.
The art in the film and the book is exceptional for its originality. The drawings are a certain kind of primitive and for that reason are all that we can project onto them. It may be the horror is something we bring because objectively speaking, until real photographs appear at the very end, events are only hinted at: we have the blank stares of the affected soldiers and the bizarrely horrible sudden deaths of soldiers playing on a beach—and this all from the point of view of what might be called the Israeli bystanders.
They were part of the army, and they had ordnance, but they had little passion for battle, the Israeli participants. The Palestinians and the Phalangists were locked in what became a battle to the death, giving and receiving no quarter. The whole record of the movie and the book should go down with oral histories of ancient battles not at all heroic but horrible and instructive and something forever to be avoided.
After making this film, Ari Folman said he no longer has interest in simply shooting actors in traditional filmmaking. There was something even more exciting to him about the art of David Polonsky, who tried using his non-dominant hand to draw so that the smoothness of caricatures did not distract from the roughness of the subject matter. Animation was a relatively new industry in Israel when they began, and since they had no infrastructure, they made decisions that more practiced and wealthier studios may not have made.
Both the film and the graphic novel are for grown-ups, or for people who want to be grown-ups....more
Years ago I remember wishing I could experience a bit of what immigrants experience, or that some could communicate their experiences in ways I could Years ago I remember wishing I could experience a bit of what immigrants experience, or that some could communicate their experiences in ways I could understand. They’d started out somewhere I’d never been, and they’d arrived somewhere they’d never imagined. Like Finland. Cold, white, communal, with few racial or religious tensions. I was eager to hear it all, but such stories, if they existed, were rarely published in the U.S. All that has changed now and I couldn't be happier.
This remarkable debut by the 27-year-old Statovci gives us that strangeness, familiarity, differentness, and similarity in a wild ride from Kosovo to Finland, from traditional society to an open society, from cultural acceptance to social ostracism. See how the arrows in that sentence seem to point in opposite directions? Therein lies the tension.
Two seemingly unrelated stories, one featuring a talking cat, twine and twist through the first part of the novel, both stories engrossing: a woman describes the lead-up to her traditional marriage…the clothes, the gold, the mother-to-daughter secrets, the preparations. The other thread features the cat and a snake, neither of which we want to take out eyes off for very long. They are both dangerous.
As readers we don’t object to the fact of the cat, though by rights we should. He is thoroughly obnoxious, insulting his host and then being falsely obsequious. He comes for a tryst and stays for meal, which he then refuses on the grounds such food would never cross his lips. He insists on eating meat in a vegetarian’s house, and he takes long, splashy showers…he is your worst nightmare, the height of self-regard.
The snake—I’d like to hear your take on the snake. A boa constrictor. He’s a wily one, seems to have formed a kind of attachment to his owner, in that he doesn’t threaten him, but he does threaten a guest…Throw a dangerous animal into a story and see if your attention flags. It’s a old trick that works every time. We don’t take our eyes from him whenever he appears from behind the couch.
But it is the story of the wedding that grabs us by the balls, as the expression goes. We are shocked, distressed, angry. We try to imagine how we would handle what comes up, both as a young person, and as an adult. We think over decisions we make so quickly, painlessly in adulthood that are so tortuous and fraught in youth.
All this is overlaid with the portrait of a family of seven living in one room provided by the Finnish government to refugees. The bunk-beds squeak so cannot be used. Mattresses cover the floor. Four or more families share a kitchen, a bathroom. It is nearly intolerable until they remember what they left, native Albanians in a Kosovo run amok. The Bosnian War was brutal beyond all imagining. There is that.
The stories twist and twine through one another like the loops of a snake, another of which, a poisonous viper, makes an appearance later in the book. The viper is only a meter long, and is captured in a plastic bag. It doesn’t provoke as much anxiety as it should. When a plastic bag reappears later in the story, holding not a snake but a book, The White King by György Dragomán, we wonder…can the snake represent his father, the bully whose influence stays around, silently inhabiting the places we live? Deadly, but sometimes ineffective, who might be deflected or exorcised with understanding and effort.
And the cat? There is more than one cat. The first cat talks. The second cat was abandoned, uncared for, unloved in the native country until rescued and restored to health. And finally, there is the black cat in a litter, “just normal, mongrel kittens,” in the author’s words, to distinguish them from the black and white cat who speaks, and the orange cat who doesn’t. The talking cat so full of himself could be the author himself, and the follow-on cats could be those who’d suffered during the war, coming finally to the children, those ‘normal’ integrated ‘mongrels’ who’d adjusted to their new environment in their adopted country and married with locals.
The disturbing shifting sexuality throughout this novel, in a person from a traditional culture with unresolved parent issues, has a touch of intimidation and coercion about it, in the beginning at least. By the end I am much more comfortable that our narrator’s sexual choices are healthy ones, and begin to wonder…is this one of the things that caused the rift between his father and himself?
Statovci succeeds in capturing our attention with this debut, recounting an agonizing childhood and an adulthood filled with sudden emotional traps. His use of a female point of view is extraordinarily effective in making us inhabit her choices. He shows us the distance an émigré may feel from his host country, no matter how conflicted these feelings are with gratefulness and surprise and ordinary, daily joy at being alive. He shows us the pointed, hateful bullying in town—a step up from ordinary school bullying—that may provoke withdrawal rather than a healthy resistance and reliance on home-grown values.
This is a thrilling debut. Bravo!
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Just came upon this terrific piece in Lit Hub by Statovic which explains much of the novel's imagery in straightforward terms. Gosh, I like this guy. What a miraculous job, to have written this novel....more
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