So I actually finished this ages ago and have been putting off writing the review because I kept feeling like a whole essay was in me and I was waitinSo I actually finished this ages ago and have been putting off writing the review because I kept feeling like a whole essay was in me and I was waiting for it to write itself. But it didn't, so here I am. The Once and Future King does some really astonishing stuff with the idea of nostalgia--it is constantly producing its version of Arthur's England as so much better than White's own and as quaint, unfinished, untenable (and as not something you would want to be tenable anyway). In the first section, The Sword in the Stone, (originally published separately as were all parts other than the final one The Candle in the Wind) this is done mostly through a long series of humorous anachronisms--references to White's present for comparison or explanation--and a tone of indulgence. White's narration is fond of the subject matter, but also finds it charmingly childish/primitive (one of the more troubling moves of the novel, as the figure of the primitive as child or Noble Savage crops up a shocking amount, both applied to non-white peoples as a point of comparison and to the past of the British Isles themselves). While this does persist, (so that the middle two sections--especially the second, The Queen of Air and Darkness give the impression of being written with two contradictory tones at once, which is also a nostalgic move in its way. The fondness, more than anything, persists in the moments of levity.) the novel gets increasingly dark, increasingly tragic, as it hurtles towards Arthur's death and the end of the Round Table. White's take on the fall of the round table is interesting, though not my favorite moral reading. He locates the fall first in Arthur's seduction of Morgause (and the incestuous birth of Mordred) and then in the affair between Lancelot and Guenever. Notably, this is not presented as a matter of "moral decay" exactly--the censure is not one that boiled down neatly to "loose women produce ruin" or "preserve the sanctity of the family" or anything like that. Instead it casts the whole thing in a Greek-tragic sense as inevitable, punishment almost without fault, or something that looks like what is being punished as an effect--almost "the inevitable failure of ideals necessarily produces Doomed Romance." Which is not exactly a lesson I want to take from my reading, but the extent to which White's novel wants you to take an extractable lesson is also unclear. For all that explanations are offered, they are presented as almsot as fragile as Arthur's vision of England itself--this mysterious conservative push towards endurance while also endlessly aware that the old way was not always right, that it got itself wrong in ways that a return to it would only exacerbate. White does not want to go back. Nor does this novel want to replicate the past. Instead, it produces nostalgia at every turn in something that feels almost like a desperate bid to salvage whatever is worth salvaging. The past is gone and maybe never was (cheekily hinted at by the repeated citation of Malory as if he were a historical source and not a literary one) but The Once and Future King asks if there is something worth taking from that past. Its racism and sexism make it a difficult read, and one I wouldn't recommend lightly. But they also force us to turn to its question. This book is not innocent. It is not infallible. It is often wrong, both incorrect and potentially harmful. What does it mean to have nostalgia be produced by such a text? What does it mean for elements of its reimagining of the legend of Arthur--a story that circulates as legend and which White trades on and subordinates his novelistic work to--have become part of common representations of the story? Is there a way to salvage White's text from itself, to use it to ask questions about the production of the past and our relation to it? I think there must be. And I think that there are plenty of reasons one might be unwilling to take up that task....more
I'm a bit late to the party on Refuse (by which I mean I should have bought a copy when he came to read at my college a couple years ago) but boy am II'm a bit late to the party on Refuse (by which I mean I should have bought a copy when he came to read at my college a couple years ago) but boy am I glad I finally got around to reading it. Randall's work straddles the line between experiment and revelation gorgeously, playing effectively and freely with form while alway being grounded in a poetic transformation of experience, feeling, sound, and movement. (I will say that there's a part of me that wants to know what joyful, ecstatic, poems look like as they are few and far between in this collection, but it draws you in well with its difficult material anyway.) The poems are smart but never precious, raw but never unfinished, just brimming with lyrical force. Knowing he studied with Amiee Nezhukumatathil and Nathalie Anderson, I think I can see their hands, but his voice is uniquely his own, singing and strong.
My favorite poems included all the poems entitled "Palinopsia," "Pregame Prayer with Complete Citations," "Icarus," "A Thousand Cardinals," "This Land is Where We Buried Everything that Came Before You: African American Hitory and Concepts of Ownership in Early Elementary Education," "The Spool Who Sat by the Once Bombed City: Psychological Explorations of Ancestral Memory," and "Portrait of My Father as Sysiphus." As might be clear just from the titles, these are intimate without seeming to place his pain on display--we are not permitted to be voyeurs, instead we are let in or not entirely on his terms. A brilliant book. Highly recommended....more
Reading this as background for my thesis, I sort of flew through it without giving it all the attention it deserved. I did however really enjoy it andReading this as background for my thesis, I sort of flew through it without giving it all the attention it deserved. I did however really enjoy it and this read solidified that I need to someday spend more time with this fascinating exploration of history, family, self, and the processes by which meaning and understanding are made. It's fragmentary but always structured, difficult but also readable and engaging. It's a resolutely multilingual text (sometimes with English equivalents nearby sometimes without) as well as a polyvocal one, that thinks a lot about the role of language in racialized and immigrant and colonial experiences all while making a firm claim on the English language as a tool for thought that is, perhaps, antithetical to everything that goes along with the global dominance of English. I definitely recommend it and only wish I had been able to read it more slowly....more
I'm surprised I haven't reviewed this before, since I have have read this before more than once and it's terribly funny. Disch's tale of a plucky set I'm surprised I haven't reviewed this before, since I have have read this before more than once and it's terribly funny. Disch's tale of a plucky set of appliances who have been left in their owner's somewhat recently abandoned mountain cabin and their quest to become useful again is a riotous read, tongue in cheek (as it addresses the readers as appliances and makes amusing comments about how, as everyone knows, flowers will say anything if it makes their poems' forms work out).
It's a sweet book; the appliances are lovable and just want to be appreciated as the sturdy and reliable tools they are. It's readable and fast-paced and (unsurprisingly) pretty short. I don't have a lot of detailed thoughts; it's a regular re-read for me because each new time gives me a chance to revel in some new little bit of humor--this time it was the sheer beautiful awkwardness of the summer-cottage toaster meeting the newer, shinier, apartment toaster and the scene where the apartment appliances have to tell their compatriots about the marriage and the new habit of vacationing by the sea, where his wife has no allergies, and the avoidance of it by watching television (as if the TV were less involved in the awkward feelings among the appliances than everything else). Great fun, especially for the young-at-heart....more
A truly excellent read, American Primitive is smart, tender, and accessible--while it doesn't engage in the same degree of allusive and verbal pyrotecA truly excellent read, American Primitive is smart, tender, and accessible--while it doesn't engage in the same degree of allusive and verbal pyrotechnics as I often look for, Mary Oliver commits to the truism that if you are going to do something simple, you have to do it perfectly. These poems are basically observational, straightforward in the basics of their content, unpretentious in their diction, almost "rustic" in their tone, and they hit every note with absolute perfection.
The book holds together beautifully; it's difficult to separate the poems, though I'm sure they would stand on their own as individual poems. Oliver really strikes the balance between all the poems feeling the same and the book holding together as a unit--here by having the whole book read almost like it's one long poem that chronicles a place rather than trying too hard to separate them and have them feel like repetitions of each other. I did particularly like "In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl", "Cold Poem", "Little Sister Pond," and "The Honey Tree", but I think all of the poems benefited from being embedded within the larger picture that Oliver is crafting in her book. For example, I think "In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl" is my very favorite piece as it is the closest to what I usually am looking for, opening,
Great bumble. Sleek slicer. How the crows dream of you, caught at last in their black beaks. Dream of you leaking your life away. Your wings crumbling like old bark. Feathers falling from your breast like leaves, and your eyes two bolts of lightning gone to sleep
But even this is so effective, in part, because it elaborates the world of this natural and naturalized America and it brings back a bit of speculation (even though Oliver's poems read like they are of the fundamentally nonfictional school of verse writing) into nature--a sort of natural magic, a layer which would be less noticeable if the poem were standing off by itself in a journal or anthology (or perhaps even a selected poems).
Near the top of this year's discoveries, almost up there with my favorite books of poems ever. A really fantastic book and highly recommended, especially if you love nature poetry, are looking for a way into the world of contemporary American poetry and finding anthologies too cumbersome or if you want to make a first foray into the single-author collection, or if you just want a read that is restorative and refreshing....more
I wanted to love The Martian and instead I only liked The Martian. Reading it, the fact that hard science fiction (or survival/adventure novels) is noI wanted to love The Martian and instead I only liked The Martian. Reading it, the fact that hard science fiction (or survival/adventure novels) is not really the genre where I usually choose to spend my time was driven home with astonishing clarity. Mark Watney is a funny, plucky go-getter of a protagonist and his tactics for survival in the harsh Martian environment are smart and well-developed. I even really liked it when he was figuring out how to be a Martian farmer, the right kind of tension and pacing--few individual tasks that are desperately dangerous but the stakes for the whole enterprise were very high. Unfortunately, as the plot went further along and we needed to spend more time on the details of flight paths and equipment building (not that any of it was inaccessible to the layman--you don't need to be an engineer or an astrophysicist to understand the novel) I was less and less invested. By the end of the book I was reading because I wanted to finish it, not because I was on the edge of my seat with tension ((view spoiler)[I never really believed that Watney wouldn't make it (hide spoiler)] The pacing was good; I never felt like the plot was rushed or uneven. The prose was readable and skilled. The other characters were not as fully developed as they could have been, but they were perfectly fine characters. On the whole, very well executed, but it didn't do for me what it has done for so many other readers. I probably won't be seeking out Artemis or his other work unless he publishes something that feels notably different....more
Lush and beautiful, tender and erotic, heartfelt and earnest.
What Belongs to You is a short novel about a man, a teacher at an international school inLush and beautiful, tender and erotic, heartfelt and earnest.
What Belongs to You is a short novel about a man, a teacher at an international school in Bulgaria, and his entanglement with a young hustler named Mitko. He wants him badly, even cares about him, but the power dynamics of age and class are constantly shaping the action so that there is never parity between the unnamed protagonist and Mitko--they always seem to both be trying to take advantage of the other even as they seem to want to be able to build their relationship on desire and care rather than money, inequality, and lust. (view spoiler)[For example, they are often cruel to each other, but not always. Mitko takes the time to tell the protagonist he has syphillis and thus the protagonist is able to get tested and treated. But this is also an occasion for Mitko to extract money. The final scene involves Mitko threatening to reveal that the protagonist is gay because no more money is forthcoming and contact is to be cut off and it utterly deflated when it is revealed that that is no secret for the protagonist. Conversely, elsewhere the protagonist is willing to force Mitko into situations because he has paid him, is possessive, is willing to take advantage of the power his stable income gives over the younger man (hide spoiler)]. My favorite section was probably the middle third of the book, a memory-filled section that reflects of the protagonist's experience growing up gay in the American South, but the whole book was beautiful. Here is the beginning of the book:
That my first encounter with Mitko B. ended in a betrayal, even a minor one, should have given me greater warning at the time, which should, in turn have made my desire for him less, in not done away with it completely. But warning, in places like the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, where we met, is like some element coterminous with the air, ubiquitous and inescapable, so that it becomes part of those who inhabit it, and thus part and parcel of the desire that draws us there.
As the book continues, you don't notice the prose as much, but it's always there, always beautiful--always just this side of purple, teasing you with the expectation of sentimental overblownness and then refusing to fall to that. This is an unapologetically gay story, focusing on a gay man but also on a vision of queer community in a place (here early 21st c. Bulgaria) where those communities can be difficult to find, under the radar, or even potentially dangerous while still being vibrant, exciting, and necessary. This is a story unapologetically for gay readers who may be able to see themselves (as I did) even when they have participated in none of the activities in the book (my family has been much better than the protagonist's, I have not needed to find my queer community in public restrooms) just by virtue of the way that it looks at the way the world treats queer people from the inside. This is a story unapologetically for adults--the sex scenes are several and explict, and while they are full of emotion and narrative and thematic import, they are also erotic and graphic and he doesn't shy away from that, no veil is drawn over the sex while it still furthers the story (a difficult task). I would recommend What Belongs to You to almost any grown reader, so long as they are aware of the role that sex will play within the story....more
I really liked Faithful and Virtuous Night. Glück's work is readable and elegant and dancing on the edge of impossible amounts of beauty and wonder anI really liked Faithful and Virtuous Night. Glück's work is readable and elegant and dancing on the edge of impossible amounts of beauty and wonder and redemption. In the cover copy we are shown a New York Times Book Review that describes her as "a great poet of renewal" and this is absolutely accurate. These poems are poems that adamantly insist that there is always something worth the living. Glück is not, at least in these poems, joyful or even necessarily optimistic, perhaps not even hopeful, but she is also not, under any circumstances despairing. She is, instead, adamant. The poems, though often dark and usually dealing with loss and suffering, are living proof that art and misery need not go together--instead we get poems like "Forbidden Music" which begins
After the orchestra had been playing for some time, and had passed the adante, the scherzo, the poco adagio, and the first flautist had put his head on the stand because he would not be needed until tomorrow, there came a passage that was called the forbidden music because it could not, the composer specified, be played.
We get poems that are often isolated and chilly but that also are reflective, smart, and kind. We get poems that are deeply individual and felt while also being impersonal and "safe" (or as safe as poetry ever gets). Unlike with confessional poets (think W.D. Snodgrass in particular, but even people like Plath and Berryman) I don't ever feel like Glück is opening up the material of privacy to us. The space between Louise Glück the poet and Louise Glück the writer and "Louise" the speaker is assiduously maintained. Look, for example, to the title poem:
The habits of long ago: my brother on his side of the bed, subdued but voluntarily so, his bright head bent over his hands, his face obscured--
At the time of which I'm speaking, my brother was reading a book he called the faithful and virtuous night. Was this the night in which he read, in which I lay awake? No--it was a night long ago, a lake of darkness in which a stone appeared, and on the stone a sword growing.
Impressions came and went in my head, a faint buzz like the insects.
This passage, from the middle of the poem, tempts you to consider Glück herself as the speaker--since this piece, like many others in the book, posits a brother and dead or absent parents--but also maintains a careful impersonal distance whereby we find ourselves uncertain how much of anything in the poem is "true."
Stylistically, as these poems indicate, the poems are simultaneously lush and austere, filled with rich detail but with a calm, cool tone that is colored like dimly lit streets and bare rooms and uncertainty. They are readable and they are not too dense to be understood, but they are not inviting. They are chilly and complex, but they are not hostile. My favorites were"Faithful and Virtuous Night", "An Adventure", "Theory of Memory", "A Sharply Worded Silence", "Aboriginal Landscape", "Utopia", "The Sword in the Stone", "Forbidden Music", "A Foreshortened Journey", "The White Series", "A Work of Fiction", and "A Summer Garden" but the assembly of that list was very difficult, since there wasn't a single poem in the book that I didn't love. Please read this fantastic collection of poems...more
So I finished this book weeks ago (like within a week of starting it back in September) and am actually not far from finishing my next book, but I'm fSo I finished this book weeks ago (like within a week of starting it back in September) and am actually not far from finishing my next book, but I'm finally getting around to reviewing Her Body and Other Parties.
On the whole, it was excellent. Well thought out, well constructed, the flow from story to story was actually really nice and made the book as a whole feel coherent as we snaked through these stories. They were troubling, disturbing, beautiful, all of the above all at once--at their best. At their weakest, Machado's beautiful prose couldn't quite hold it together (like, for me, "Mothers" which seemed to sort of go off the rails partway through without making it clear what its new destination was--even though I liked the characterization of the narrator and of Bad). The individuals stories were a little more hit and miss that I'm accustomed to in a single-author collection, though I felt like each one hd work to do in the overall formation of the book and I probably wouldn't have removed any of them, even with my issues with a few. I think "The Husband Stitch", "Especially Heinous" and "Real Women Have Bodies" were all basically flawless, exactly what they set out to be, and they support several of the main movements of the book--the concern with the body and its policing in gender, sex and sexuality (typically between two women, but not always--the protagonist of "The Husband Stitch" appears to be heterosexual), the power of story to organize our experience and so transform it. These are dark fantasies, perhaps even horror stories, but they aren't the horror of eldritch beings come to devour the world, or angry ghostsm or demons, or possession; it's a more everyday horror, made all the more powerful as it plays out among spirits, and in worlds of disappearing women, and after the zombie apocalypse. The stories are innovative--both "The Husband Stitch" and "Especially Heinous" employ compelx and effective formal devices as part of what drives them forward--and intimate--many of them are in first person and in "The Resident" she only gives the protagonist intials, her intitals, as if to say "Don't you want to think this is me, the author, in this tale?" On the whole, I recommend it for Machado's beautiful prose and deft displays of craft that even at their most obvious are not ostentatious, as well as for her high-quality characterization and intelligent, insightful, engagement with the stories' themes, topics, and concerns. I can't give it five stars because I think the excellent stories promise more than it could give and the weaker stories managed to leave me cold in such a way that rather than just moving on, I felt they forced me to move my appreciation for what I was reading into a less fulyl felt mode even as I moved to the next piece, even when I ended up really loving that next one....more
Well, that's not quite right. I did give The Glass Menagerie four stars after all, and if it hadn't been . . .something, I woThis was . . . something.
Well, that's not quite right. I did give The Glass Menagerie four stars after all, and if it hadn't been . . .something, I would have given it five. It really was beautiful. Williams' language is careful and fluid and effective while still sounding close enough to real that I could hear it on the stage:
Tom: Adventure and change were imminent in this year. They were waiting around the corner for all these kids. Suspended in the mist over Berchtesgaden, caught in the folds of Chamberlain's umbrella-- In Spain there was Guernica! But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows. . . . All the world was waiting for bombardments!
And that was narration, but the dialogue is just as efficient and smooth throughout the entire play. The stage directions are clear and interesting and some effects named I can envision with great clarity and power--like a pool of light on Laura, in contrast to her dimly lit mother and brother, while she herself is silent and off to the side of the scene, the focus, although not the primary participant of what is going on. In terms of thematic concerns, The Glass Menagerie is an interesting meditation on restlessness, loneliness, ambition (and the lack thereof), and family dynamics. Tom's restless energy and his constant movie-going--which his mother refuses to believe is his real behavior--brings to mind Williams's own position as a gay man, but that particular resonance could just be me reading into the play unnecessarily. The other motions--the hopelessness of uneven ambition, the loneliness and isolation of Amanda and Laura, the way their fears and hopes interact, coming even sometimes to the same thing, Tom's restless ambition and the struggle the draw of the outside and the claims of family--are clear and ringing through the play, which is wracked by pain and frustration really from beginning to end--a function of the memory play conceit, whereby all of this is long over and the small tragedy that closes it has already occurred. The reason it was . . . something and not just a beautiful play lies in some "objectionable" sections. Not so much the racial slurs, which, while cruel, are a product of their time and could be removed (or not--although I suspect I would remove them) in production without harming the play or its decidedly Southern tones. What I noticed was a never spoken sense of misogyny, stronger than the explicit racism in the text, which is pronounced casually and without vehemence. Tom's fight with his mother, in particular, reeks not just of an argument between them, but of an articulated disgust towards women, even though the closest it came to direct speech is Tom's calling his mother a "witch". This made the whole thing inspire even more ambivalence than its quietly tragic plot would create anyway, which made for a very odd reading experience....more
Fair warning, I was unsure whether to give Lolita five stars or a single star, but I am glad enough to have read the book to overlook the rather awfulFair warning, I was unsure whether to give Lolita five stars or a single star, but I am glad enough to have read the book to overlook the rather awful experience that was reading it. Let's start with the good: 1. Nabokov's writing is impossible beautiful and elegant and 2. I think that Lolita is a book that "says" in spite of Nabokov's insistence that he dislikes allegory and symbolism. I wanted to reel off Nabokov's prose like some sort of unending recording. Here is a section of (relatively) benign introduction:
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty, he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parson, experts in obscure subjects--paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lighting) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of my memory.
The construction just bowled me over--something that gave me great joy and made Lolita even harder to read than I had expected. In terms of its themes, the book is a story about self-deception and about destruction and about change. it is also about America, but not in a clear, conventional sense, rather that the United States suffuses the narrative like some great bank of memory and sensory input. Humbert's despicable actions has given me something to think about in the way people can hurt one another without meaning to and the ways we can fool ourselves into ignoring the same. Not pleasant, I'll admit, but decidedly interesting and the novel is likely to crop up in my future meditations on the subject (one that does come up from time to time naturally anyway). Lolita is an exercise in unreliability--how much do we trust Humbert on anything when we can see the places that he is trying to deceive us? How do we interact with unreliabilty? What does it mean to interact with deception and self-deception and denial? We have no choice but to rely on Humbert, who we fundamentally do not trust--what does that do for the story and our interpretations? These are all questions raised by Nabokov's work.
Now for the bad: because Nabokov's prose is so beautiful, Humbert is close enough that I felt physically ill, routinely, while reading the book. We are in his head, listening to his defense, and I had to read in ten-twenty page bursts with breaks between them in order to make it through the novel. Every time I picked it up I had to convince myself: I will finish this book. I will finish this book. I will finish this book when what I really wanted to do was push aside the sickening self-justifications of his abuse of Lo and the roiling cauldron of misogyny that underlay his entire defense and his every assessment of a woman or young girl, and abandon reading. Now, I have read other books with horrifying, painful, sickening content--both Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's Beloved contain scenes of cruelty and violence that took physical effort to continue reading, but nothing required as persistently and continually exerted force as this. (view spoiler)[ I also had some problems with the "form" of Humbert's defense that made it worse even than the fact of the acts and the defense themselves, but that would require some outside information about style and though processes and the reflections of tone--not of content--that I am not going to get into here (hide spoiler)] As a result, few if any books have been as profoundly miserable a reading experience for me--including some of the most emotionally taxing other work I have read--in spite of my awe at Nabokov's craft and the realization that I am glad to have read the novel....more
(view spoiler)[One thing both good and bad: Alvarez really does not shy away from her illustrations of violence--physical, sexual, emotional. The crue(view spoiler)[One thing both good and bad: Alvarez really does not shy away from her illustrations of violence--physical, sexual, emotional. The cruelties are not endorsed, but are revealed in a matter-of-fact tone. I found this particularly true of the use of f** on page 212 (hide spoiler)] As always, I am astounded by the beauty of Alvarez's work in this novel. This is Julia Alvarez's first novel, and it draws heavily on her experiences as a Dominican-American growing up between the Island and the United States. The echoes of Alvarez's experience are seen in the similarities between this novel and her poetry--the maid named Gladys, the four girls, the revolutionary father, the awe and near-terror over the first sight of snow, but this book is not simply Alvarez pressing the stories she finds in her poems into prose fiction. This is a novel of simple elegance and wry humor, exploring one version of the immigrant experience with intimacy and carefully drawn characters. The novel takes an unusual structural approach that works very nicely. It is divided into three sections, each of which occupies a range of years, moving backwards in the lives of the characters as the story continues. This makes for a fascinating structure for character development--we already know the adult women before we meet their child-selves, receiving not so much a narrative of birth onwards, but rather a series of anecdotes that explain how the women before us got to be that way. This makes the characters extremely believable and allows each one to develop naturally, deepening in complexity as we get to know them better. Particularly in the middle section of the book, Alvarez dramatizes the push and pull between the culture of the parents and the Americanized children, a common theme in literature dealing with immigrant experiences. At the same time, the book opens with an adult Yolanda visiting the Dominican Republic, contemplating returning there, even with her new, American, life and ideas. Alvarez rejects neither the past nor the present, the Island nor los Estados Unidos in her story, but rather shows young women working to find the balance between the different cultures that have influenced them and that they hold dear. Alvarez is unafraid to portray the negative aspects of life in either location as well. Carla's run-in with a pedophile on the street--unprotected in the United States as she never had been in the Dominican Republic--is implicitly contrasted with the terror and violence of hiding from the secret police, the fear that suffused their comfortable guarded life on the Island under Trujillo. This makes for an honest examination of change and upheaval by refusing to romanticize either the new home or the old one. In terms of style, Alvarez's writing is elegant and smooth, and this work is cut through with a dry humor at the whole situation as well as a clear understanding of and sympathy for the difficulties of such a change. As an example of the humor, an episode when a secret bag of marijuana is discovered:
As we later reconstructed it from what Primi said, Mami's first reaction was anger that we had broken her rule against eating in our bedrooms. (oregano qualified as food?) But when she opened the Baggy and took a sniff and poked her finger in and tasted a pinch and had Primitiva do the same, they were flabergasted. The dreaded and illegal marijuana that was lately so much in the news! Mami was sure of it. And here she'd been, worried sick about protecting our virginity since we'd hit puberty in this land of wild and loose Americans, and vice had entered through an unguarded orifice at the other end.
For the more serious aspects of the novel, see Carla's experience with slurs and cruelty in school:
And as the months wen by, she neglected to complain about an even scarier development. Every day on the playground and in the halls of her new school, a gang of boys chased after her, calling her names, some of which she had heard before from the old lady neighbor in the apartment they had rented in the city. Out of sight of the nuns, the boys pelted Carla with stones, aiming them at her feet so there would be no bruisies. "Go back to where you came from, you dirty (view spoiler)[spic! (hide spoiler)]" One of them, standin behind her in line, pulled her blouse out of her skirt where it was tucked in and lifted it high.
Alvarez uses directness and tenderness to respond and depict the cruelty inflicted on immigrant families, from the perspective of the immigrants themselves. This makes How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents a fluid, elegant, and emotionally affecting novel....more
This was a very odd book. That is the only word for it, odd. One day Jason Taverner is a TV star, the next he never existed. This throws him into closThis was a very odd book. That is the only word for it, odd. One day Jason Taverner is a TV star, the next he never existed. This throws him into close contact with a surreal and violent police state where "students" are trapped beneath college campuses and fighting to escape, with no legal existence, where to be without your official existence is to be sent away to forced-labor camps, to a world where everyone you meet is looking to betray you so as to avoid being betrayed themselves. It is an interesting exploration of this sort of alternate future--one that is perhaps much closer than anyone wants to admit, where security is the paramount goal of any and every action and to be outside of the system of security is to be its inhuman enemy. The book also employs a strange (And mostly unexplained) device of a group of genetically engineered near-superhumans called "sixes" of whom the protagonist is one. These individuals have preternatural good looks, strong minds and constitutions, etc., but the extent of their abilities is not really explored. nor is the purpose of their original creation ever provided. The way the novel deals with race is a troubling--black people are an endangered species, with carefully controlled reproduction and there are encounters with semi-magical black individuals, but none receive a real character or seem to be treated as fully human by the other characters and or the novel. Other races are not mentioned at all in this alternate 1988, as if they did not exist. The ending was a mixed bag. (view spoiler)[The whole experience was an effect of Alys's use of a drug that temporarily destroyed the mind's ability to perceive objects in space as exclusive, and thus dragged the user (and those the user interacted with/ thought about) into alternate versions of space, "irreal" ones as the novel calls them (hide spoiler)] This provides an opportunity for some interesting thoughts on the nature of space, time, and perception, but also cheapens the primary conflict of the first 2/3-3/4 of the book. There are also some interesting (if overly direct and sermon-like) moments where the nature of love and its purpose are explored: "Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. In some fashion you split with yourself and accompany it, go part of the way on its journey." In terms of style, the novel is at once clipped and languid:
Some irrational will within him made him want to appear, to be visible, to be known. All right, Jason Taverner, Buckman thought, you are known, again, as you once were before, but better known now, known in a new way. In a way that serves higher ends--ends you know nothing about, but must accept without understanding. As you go to your grave your mouth will still be open, asking the question, "What did I do/" You will be buried that way; with your mouth still open. And I could never explain it to you, Buckman thought. Except to say: don't come to the attention of the authorities. Don't ever interest us. Don't make us want to know more about you.
This unusual style worked for the novel, but I do not know how it would work for other stories, so I am intrigued to see if it is Dick's usual style or a fabrication for this particular piece of fiction. A good, if flawed and somewhat technically disconcerting and occasionally confusing read....more
Ozone Journal is an unusual and elliptical collection of poems, but it is one I am immensely glad to have read and am excited to explore further. The Ozone Journal is an unusual and elliptical collection of poems, but it is one I am immensely glad to have read and am excited to explore further. The poems of Ozone Journal deal primarily with closings, with shutting outs and shutting downs and keeping aways. They address genocide, parenting, AIDS, cultural destruction, the past/memory, and the intersections between these in many different combinations. The fantastic title poem does a particularly good job bringing disparate threads of these topics together in a fragmented and fluid piece that jumps off of the author's actual experiences when in the Syrian desert to find the remains of skeletons from the Armenian genocide. As an example, here is a (somewhat long) excerpt from "Ozone Journal":
2. All day I was digging Armenian bones out of the Syrian desert
with a TV crew that kept ducking the Mukhabarat who trailed us in jeeps and at night joined us
for arak and grilled goat under colored pennants and cracked lights in cafes where piles of herbs glistened back at me.
I passed out from sun and arak and camel jokes
in a massive hotel, my room opened to the Euphrates that was churning in the moonlight.
3. When I woke I was dreaming back to the '80s on Riverside Drive where Ani was born on a bright spring day,
in a decade of money and velvet when the plastic voice of Sinatra floated through fern bars where we lounged
with wine spritzers and lemon-drop martinis. It was silver palette and more than cuisine
with its encoded sense of ending and the smoked sable at Barney Greengrass
where we took Ani for brunch on Sunday when the morning was lit up and open,
. . . .
6. By noon I was leaning on the cotton white hospital wall, gazing at the islands of purple lesions on David's slightly swollen leg, the edema rising
in his groin, the sheets strewn and the IV dripping blue down the snaking plastic tube.
My year of magical thinking looped down the drain of my brain: "Take care, cousin."
I blew him a kiss,
The poem continues in this vein for the entirety of section two of the book, sliding back and forth between topics and producing a unique look at all of the themes through the lenses of the others (This poem is likely to be the second of the analytic projects I'm hoping to work on this summer) and makes each section at once a complete entity and part of a much larger whole.
The rest of the book performs similarly, although the shorter individual poems do not reach for the grand scope of "Ozone Journal" (or its semi-spiritual, semi-literal precursor "A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy" which was published in Ziggurat and which I found before moving into the title poem of this collection). Balakian immerses himself in the world in order to write about it and each poem displays an intense commitment to the world around us (something that I think is generally necessary unless replaced with an equally attentive commitment to the world inside our minds and inside a poem or story's alternate reality) which is expressed in specificity and in side-angles and sometimes in both. "Here and Now" illustrates this characteristic very smoothly with its opening: "The day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees. // When I tell you the day is a poem / I'm only talking to you and only the sky is listening." The poems of the first section tend to lean on the (somewhat) confessional side of the collection, evoking characters very similar (presumably) to the author, but these to display, if not the eye of fiction, certainly the clarity of hindsight and of associated insight, which gives them the same quality of "closing" found elsewhere in the book. He is not afraid to speak, as when he says, in "Providence/Teheran, '79", "I saw / red blindfold wrap American faces, / iron bars of a gate twist the windows of American // exceptionalism. Morning. Morning. No dream."
In spite of the collections intelligence and fluidity, it did just barely garner 5 stars, and that mostly on my excitement to spend time actively exploring the title poem. This is because the poems did not "stick". They were elegant; they were thought-provoking; I fully expect Ozone Journal to grow in depth and power each time I return to it (I hope to return to it; I hope to return to almost everything I read), but many of the poems were not memorable. I found myself looking at poems, unsure if I had read them until I had started (at which point I found them, once again, intriguing and ready for another look). I give it five stars in anticipation of growth upon re-visiting and my interest in the title poem, but feel the need to mention this problem as it stands....more
I fell in love with Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies from the very beginning and, if this book is any indication, her voice as a novelisI fell in love with Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies from the very beginning and, if this book is any indication, her voice as a novelist is as smooth and powerful as hers in poetry. This novel is told from the perspectives of the four Mirabal sisters, going from their childhoods to the present, spending particular time on the year leading up to the murder of Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa, along with their driver at the hands of the Dominican secret police on the 25th of November, 1960. Alvarez takes the four sisters and, through the frame of an interview/conversation with the one sruviving member of the family, Dede, recounts a fictionalized version of their lives and deaths. Alvarez says in her postscript, "And so it is that what you find in these pages are not the Mirabal sisters of fact, or even the Mirabal sisters of legend . . . what you will find here are the Mirabals of my creation, made up but, I hope, true to the spirit of the real Mirabals." This indicates the shape of the novel as a whole. Alvarez's story is fervently in support of these women and their cause, their fight for a free Dominican Republic and, by extension, a free world, but also determined to show not goddesses or saviors or women of miracles, but rather people who came by their courage in bits and pieces, made their stands out of necessity and compassion and dedication, and lived lives as wives and mothers as well as (or even perhaps in the same way as) revolutionaries. She draws on the historical record to create both the characters and the events, but in the end, this is still a work of tender, sensitive, galvanizing, fiction.
From a technical standpoint, In the Time of the Butterflies is positively gorgeous. Dede's narrative makes up the largest portion of the book, but each woman receives a fully realized narratorial perspective. Each one narrates her sections in the first person, filtering the story through her most "defining" attributes--Minerva's command of theory and principle, Patria's religious devotion and love for her family, Dede's "solidity" and the burden of survival, Maria Teresa's gentleness. Alvarez also puts all of Maria Teresa's sections in the form of journal entries, giving her a very different tone from any of her sisters and allowing for the inclusion of crucial information about setting and revolutionary action in the form of diagrams and notes about the physical state of the notebooks. Similarly, Dede's sections move fluidly between present-tense third-person narration and her own remembrances and thoughts as she recounts and considers the story of her sisters and her place in the whole thing. Alvarez's prose is fluid and engaging: (from a section narrated by Patria after Minerva and Maria Teresa are imprisoned)
Over and over again, I saw the SIM approaching, I saw Nelson and Pedrito hurrying out the back way, Noris' stricken face. I saw the throng of men at the door, I heard the stomping, the running, the yelling. I saw the house burning. I saw tiny cells with very little air and no light. I heard doors open, I saw hands intrusive and ugly in their threats. I heard the crack of bones breaking, the thud of a body collapsing. I heard moans, screams, desperate cries. Oh my sisters, my Pedrito, oh my little lamb! My crown of thorns was woven of thoughts of my boy. His body I had talcumed, fed, bathed. His body now broken as if it were no more than a bag of bones. "I've been good," I'd start screaming at the sky, undoing the "recovery."
Alvarez's direct and detailed style brings out the feelings within each event of the novel, making the whole work as emotionally coherent as it is narratively so. ...more
I finally finished this wonderful book of poems tonight. Unfortunately, reading it over so very much time, my thoughts are a tad jumbled, but here goeI finally finished this wonderful book of poems tonight. Unfortunately, reading it over so very much time, my thoughts are a tad jumbled, but here goes. Diving into the Wreck is a masterpiece. Rich's poems are gorgeous, like in the first poem, "Trying to Talk with a Man": "Out in this desert we are testing bombs, // that's why we came here. // Sometimes I feel an underground river" and heartbreaking--"Rape" is a chilling depiction, creating an instantaneous need to throw it skittering across the table upon finishing and then scramble after the book to move to the next piece. The two long poems are markedly different from the rest of the book, but still manage to fit into Rich's explorations of darkness. Part four, "Meditations for a Savage Child," is one of these long poems and it explores innocence and "savagery" through motifs of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, science, and language, while the other "The Phenomology of Anger" is a whole-body shuddering, a violent ecstasy:
White light splits the room. Table. Window. Lampshade. You.
My hands, sticky in a new way. Menstrual blood seeming to leak from your side.
Will the judges try to tell me which was the blood of whom?
Diving into the Wreck sings for itself, a strong marker in the career of a remarkable poet. It argues passionately for compassion and careful understanding, encourages readers to start over learning with what it says and how it says it....more
Well, isn't this exciting, first book of the new year and it's a five star read. Crawlers is positively fantastic, singing its tales of family and groWell, isn't this exciting, first book of the new year and it's a five star read. Crawlers is positively fantastic, singing its tales of family and growth and sadness with impossible melodies:
They say she has to barter, and so she barters, tight-fisted, smirk-mouthed, sly eyed. Disdain: shop girls shake it out like gilded cloth, avert embarrassed faces. Disdain: the carvers curl it off like shavings, sweep away their polished smiles. Disdain: she winces from herself.
(from part three of "Baggage") Each poem fills its space with gorgeous sound and intense feeling. For an example, here is Part 5 of "Spider Bite" the first poem in the book:
I remember it like it was yesterday: three children sent to an empty room, and
I mean empty--not a piece of paper, not a chair, the rough-dyed carpet so raw
it scorched us through our shorts--left to ourselves to play. So obvious, yet imagine
the shock of saying the words out loud: "Not happy," the youngest of us open-mouthed,
open-eyed, as if the world at last made sense.
In this collection, Anderson explores the family--all kinds of families--and the societies in which they exist. Often she draws from her own childhood, from her personal family, but just as often she is talking about the world family, or a family of friends, or the family of a person who could be her but doesn't have to be. Crawlers deals with the nitty-gritty of life, the things that crawl on us, get under our skin; the broken families pretending to be whole, the whole ones waiting to break, the cracks in the world and the bugs and demons that seem to claw their ways up out of them. "Black Hole" is the story of every pain that isn't said, the injustices that aren't righted, the fear and indifference that can sneak in so easily. And yet, Anderson does not despair. In "Floating Gardens" she offers origin stories, hope tempered with failure, hopelessness with success. In "My South", she issues a challenge: "list out / everything you want that child to learn, / today, tomorrow--all the ways you can / imagine for these women to be good." I could continue to work through each poem indefinitely--there seems to be an endless supply of beauty and meaning to uncover in this collection, an absolutely perfect way to start my reading year....more
This was an extremely solid collection of poems. Anderson fills her book with clever commentary on humanity and gender and its role in social interactThis was an extremely solid collection of poems. Anderson fills her book with clever commentary on humanity and gender and its role in social interaction. In terms of sound it bobs along, floating more like a series of long and lingering notes than a song or chant: "Swerving to miss a swell of forget-me-nots, the mower/ shears the statue's toes. Now parted lips and half-shut eyes/ show for what they are: not rapture, not even anguish." ("Nymph"). This is maintained even when the poems have fairly short lines, like in part one of "Eight Fears," "Aulophobia: Fear of Flutes":
Right or wrong. Three silver birches bar the window. So nearly straight. Wind thin as a shiv. Desperate teeth behind their silver bar.
Anderson also delights in wordplay and exciting, unusual words--like "glaucous," a sort of blue-gray-green, and the gaming over repetition that made up "Talking Sickness." Many poems dealt with gender and the way we navigate it. The poems examine ideas like what it is to "Walk Like a Man," or who is a "Loose Woman." In "Following Fred Astaire", Anderson plays with all aspects of romance and love and family via questions of gender and selfhood. Every poem is well-crafted and the whole collection fits together seamlessly into a larger question of what makes identity and how a person fits into the society around them....more
This was spectacularly disappointing. Merrill's verse was smooth and elegantly crafted--although decidedly lacking in moments of astonishing brilliancThis was spectacularly disappointing. Merrill's verse was smooth and elegantly crafted--although decidedly lacking in moments of astonishing brilliance--from beginning to end; I couldn't detect a metrical misstep or moment that was not expressed precisely in the entire massive work. Unfortunately, the content of the poem was beyond frustrating. The whole of The Changing Light at Sandover claims to be poems of transcriptions of Oijia board sessions that Merrill performed over a number of years with his partner David Jackson. Each book of the poem is a distinct series of sessions with progressively "higher" spirits, full of supposedly meaningful and astonishing revelations of great import about the spirit world. What I actually found in this poem was a long chain of improbabilities and inconsistencies that I could not shape into any sort of relevant information about life her in the world of the living nor believe as a possible set of truths about a hidden plane of existence. For example: in Ephraim, we are told there are nine levels of the afterlife and souls go through long cycles of reincarnation before eventually semi-inevitably ending up as "patrons" trying to get to the ninth level by helping free other souls from reincarnation. Then in Mirabell we are told, no, that's wrong, actually those levels are "the Bureaucracy" where the "Lab souls"--souls specially engineered for "densities" are stored when their lives are done and "mined" for "densities" for future lab souls in a quest to perfect human souls. But only middling lab-soul-type souls are there. The ones with the most engineering are forever reused and tinkered with (especially 5 particular great ones) and the rest of souls are left alone. Then in Scripts for the Pageant we are told that that isn't right either--or at least not the whole story. Densities aren't as important as we were told and Mirabell had it wrong too--to a point-- and the 5 are still around, but also not, and--surprise!--one of the people that first appeared in Mirabell is secretly Plato--one of the five--and been keeping it a secret and the lab is just a small part in a vast elemental game played by the angels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Emmanuel on behalf of God Biology (first mentioned in Mirabell) and his sister Nature/Psyche/Chaos. Then in the Coda we are told that Ephraim--the ghost from the beginning who had it all wrong--is secretly Michael and this was all an elaborate plan to step Merrill and Jackson through the revelations slowly. I couldn't handle the inconsistencies and the elements that seemed more hogwash than even I (an avid reader of speculative fiction) could suspend my disbelief for: like the idea of six Atlantises in Mirabell. Critics cited on the back plate of my copy compare this to Eliot's The Waste Land, but I couldn't see it. The Waste Land is difficult, yes, confusing, yes, sometimes nonsensical, yes, but its confusions sing a song of truth that spells out a beautiful and chilling message that is relevant to life as we live it. I could not find the connection of this work to real life--the "questions about sacred poetry and the relation of the individual to the cosmos" that Charles Berger invokes on his assessment ofScripts Maybe I missed something, but I stopped finding it remotely believable in Mirabell, stopped having any real interest (even as simply curiosities of thought--as "what ideas may be presented?" questions) in the "mysteries" during Scripts, and was too tired and frustrated to even muster anything besides bored annoyance when "The Higher Keys" (the coda) unveiled its "surprise" about Ephraim himself. Merrill's craft just garners this three stars given its lack of brilliant moments but the content problems and my inability to pull any scrap of large thematic meaning out of the work (which could very well be me, and not a lack in the poem) kept it from going any higher from the instant I began Mirabell....more
Amy Tan's beautiful exploration of the (an?) Asian-American experience blew me off my feet. This novel gets to the heart of the relationship between mAmy Tan's beautiful exploration of the (an?) Asian-American experience blew me off my feet. This novel gets to the heart of the relationship between mothers and daughters, the effects of immigration, and growing up with immigrant parents. Each of the sixteen stories is at once self-contained and fluidly joined to the rest of the novel to show the lives and characters of these eight women--four mothers and their grown children. In the way of the best fiction, it is at once universal and specific; Tan's tales speak to anyone who has ever had parents or children, but could not happen outside of the Chinese-American immigrant universe in which they are set and from which they come. Opening in the wake of the death of Suyuan Woo, each section contains four stories, one from each family of the Joy Luck Club, a group formed by Suyuan first to deal with the pain of the Japanese invasion of China, then with the troubles of being an immigrant to the United States. As each mother and each daughter (with the exception of Jing-Mei Woo, who narrates four) tells her two stories, each section builds on the previous into a narrative of links and breakages, pain and joy, learning and teaching and learning again along the ties of family and culture. As the novel proceeds, the tenuous love felt within each family is tempered and pressed, so that by the fourth section, "Queen Mother of the Western Skies", each mother and each daughter discovers how to bridge the gap between China and the USA that comes between them. In the final chapter, Jing-Mei says, "now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood. After all these years it can finally be let go." The American daughters can learn from their Chinese heritage, and the Chinese mothers understand their American family. This novel tells about the vitality of family, of the past, of memory and storytelling, and they way that all of these become necessary parts of each of our selves.
Tan's writing is elegant and smooth, pulling her character's voices into sharp focus. When Ying-Ying St. Clair begins her first tale, she says, "All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. And because I moved so secretly now my daughter does not see me." Each story sings and grows, flitting back and forth between the present and the past, San Francisco and China, as in An-mei's response to her daughter's failing marriage, "Magpies":
I know how it is to be quiet, to listen and watch, as if your life were a dream. You can close your eyes when you no longer want to watch. Bit when you no longer want to listen, what can you do? I can still hear what happened more than sixty years ago.
As each story piles onto the last, Amy Tan's sparkling prose makes the whole novel have the effect of layer upon layer of shimmering gauze--like a dress that acquires its rich blue-green color from a thin series of progressively darker and bluer fabrics in the skirt. This book grows more serious and beautiful as it proceeds, even peppered with humor and levity like "You can't have luck when someone else has skill. So long time ago, we decided to invest in the stock market. There's no skill in that. Even your mother agreed." The whole work comes together into a gleaming tale of family and remembrance, hope and pain, tradition and near-iconoclastic modernity. A beautiful and well-crafted work of fiction....more
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