Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ

Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree by Lillah Lawson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Thoroughly researched and meticulously structured in vivid prose, Lillah Lawson’s Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree brings the Depression-era US south to startling life. Struggling to survive in constant terror of diseases sown by poverty, of racist lynch mobs, and of evangelical threats of eternal punishment; O.T., a white farmer, is driven to alcoholism and Sivvy, a racially mixed aspiring preacher, hounded into madness by devastating grief—one unendurable loss after another. A cinematic exploration of a harsh and beautiful land, Lawson’s novel simultaneously plunges into the caverns of broken hearts, at every turn feeling everything so keenly that to read this book is to be swept along throbbing by currents tumbling and soaring.



View all my reviews

The King and the Quirky by Heather Siegel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Unputdownable and inspirational (advance review)

I devoured The King and the Quirky in a delightful weekend binge. Heather Siegel's delectable prose and gentle, self-deprecating hilarity make her memoir of love and marriage a joy to read; even as she discovers that the two conditions are not necessarily equivalent. What makes Siegel's perspective refreshing is its critical edge -- and consequently what her memoir is not. This is not How To Be Wonder Wifey. Siegel has not written How To Live (By Letting Your Offspring Do It For You), Embracing The Status Quo Guilt-Free, or even How To Be The Feminist You Think You Are. What she's written is a great story that questions every generalization: a story of a singular, complicated, ambiguous, and even self-contradictory protagonist, who just so happens to be Siegel herself, on a perilous adventure that happens to be Siegel's married life. What she seeks is some answer to the question of what she wants out of existence. She never stops trying (and trying and trying) to discover the person she wants to be. And her way of wondering about life is to live it: try running coffee houses, try stay-at-home mothering, try running an organic juice bar, a beauty bar, becoming a makeup artist, guzzling Xanax, and of course writing. In her quest for self-fulfillment, Siegel tries it all -- including giving up -- and along the way becomes an exceptional writer of unforgettable stories.




View all my reviews

Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization by Jan Alexander

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Dares to imagine a post-capitalist utopia.

To me great books are those that leave no perspective unquestioned. Definitely not the protagonists�. And not the author’s own either. In Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization, Jan Alexander dares to imagine what would happen if two precocious young women—one from a Chinese village, the other from New York City—envisioned an enlightened, post-capitalist world as well as the technology to make it a reality. But Alexander doesn’t stop there. Ms. Ming never stops questioning. How might a utopia inspired by an artsy Brooklynish neighborhood go horribly wrong? When capitalism, communism, and authoritarianism start blurring together, what’s a young woman who just wants to write all day to do? With an operatic and often hilarious cast of characters—including the far from flawless Ming, her green-card husband, a rapper from a rice paddy, and the legendary Monkey King himself—Alexander crafts a farsighted novel on a grand international scale with a discerning eye for vivid details and unintended consequences.

A favorite bit: "The more questions he pondered, the freer he felt."




View all my reviews

Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Other Stories
Maxim Osipov

Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Other Stories by Maxim Osipov

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Maxim Osipov's ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, AND OTHER STORIES hits chillingly close to home no matter where we are or what we want to think. "I'd been given a glimpse of a little slice if the world...a very brief glimpse of a very little slice -- but I saw it. I did." A masterpiece. The prose in this collection is everything I love about translated Russian lit. It makes English sound better. Osipov longs to find that kind of beauty everywhere, the beauty of classical music. But he's too observant to find it.

Another favorite bit (quoted with irony, considering Osipov's achievement): "If you ignore everything man-made, it's very beautiful indeed."

Favorite story: "After Eternity: The Notes of a Literary Director"



View all my reviews

Babylon
Yasmina Reza

Babylon by Yasmina Reza

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book needs patience but totally deserves it. Reminds me of Veronique Bizot. The absurdity of concepts we're supposed not to think about so that we can be reassured by them & pretend we're not living in a totally absurd crisis.

A favorite bit: "'All under control' has the virtue of closing the chapter that's barely opened. The line says nothing about reality, nor even about the speaker's state of mind. It's a rather practical kind of existential readiness - a standing to attention. And funny too."



View all my reviews

Dog Meat Samosa
Stanley Gazemba

Dog Meat Samosa by Stanley Gazemba

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


ADVANCE REVIEW

From perspectives vast and intimate, from the morgue in an impoverished hospital to a ghost-infested boarding school . . . Stanley Gazemba describes, in his inimitable, deceptively gentle prose, the bicycle repairman, the pygmy brewer, the albino grocer, the housekeeper who “takes her lesson from the big cats that rule the savanna,� and the multitude of others who struggle for survival in Nairobi by courting shadows. In “this city of many secrets,� nothing is sacred, for desperation sours every breath. Gazemba sings of it like drums sing. With dignity and bravado. And uncomfortable clarity.

A favorite story: “Hearse for Hire.�

A favorite passage: “Mysterious disappearances, all of them, and only one thing in common—the men had all been bald. It was an old story . . . The machines had to be appeased before they could commence work. It was their way, and had been so ever since the days of their forefathers.�



View all my reviews

Square Octagon Circle
Ellie Ga

Square Octagon Circle by Ellie Ga

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Reading becomes diving in this astonishing palimpsest by Ellie Ga, SQUARE OCTAGON CIRCLE. There are books on top of books, images upon images, transparencies on top of pages on pictures of graffiti on concrete walls. There is language on top of language. Concrete on marble, water on stone. The sea is on top of the ancient statues and columns of pink granite and the lighthouse.

In Ga’s quest to learn everything she can of this drowned Egyptian lighthouse; translations, myths, interpretations, misinterpretations, regime changes pile meaning upon meaning, resulting in a lush and motley reef of a book. To my eyes and hands each page feels like a kelp forest of pages.

With patience, with gentleness and quiet reminiscent of the great Sophie Calle, Ga handles layers of story like they are skins of leaves. She follows them with a gaze that does not push them, flippers and fingers that do not press them or ravish them, instead holding back . . . (the eye at the beginning of the book is a painted eye on the surface of a boat).

Some of this is by necessity. In her attempt to piece together bits and pieces of stone and speculation, which are all that remain of Alexandria’s Pharos lighthouse, Ga meets barriers at every turn. Sometimes made of stone, sometimes of water, sometimes paper and bureaucratic machinery. She’s not permitted to take photographs of artifacts in Egypt. Drawings aren’t permitted either except with permission from an unreachable government office. “Ever since the revolution this is the way it is,� one official tells her. She resorts to other people’s photographs. To photographs of photographs in other people’s books. Her photographs are beautiful. Her collages want to be looked at slowly and in stages. Returned to. I’m thinking she wants me to swim through them.

Even where Ga could press down on the surface of a story, she refrains. As when she meets the filmmaker Asma El Bakri, who campaigned to save the ruins of the lighthouse from crumbling under concrete blocks dumped on top of them by cranes. Ga gives us only a glimpse of the surface of the filmmaker’s story. She gives us surfaces beside and scattered over surfaces. As one marine archaeologist says to her, “a decomposition and recomposition of surfaces� that refrains from delving below “seems to be a handicap, but it gives you time to think. It forces you to invent, reflect . . .�

And so even as I dive into the book—a metaphor which, from my first glance at the cover and on every page, Ga seems to want me to take seriously—I experience a growing sense that the deeper I dive, the more irreparably I’m tethered to the surface. The farther I swim, the sooner I must lift my face out of the water. This is true even when it comes to “diving into� something’s history, “immersing ourselves� in what seems to be the life of an object or a person. Especially when that life is underwater, a milieu that’s not our own. We cannot leave behind our airiness forever. We cannot be without it. “I find memory works very differently when you are underwater. Everything seems very clear but as soon as you surface . . . ,� says Ga in a hanging thought.

To glimpse even a surface in Ga’s book of surfaces, I must look through other surfaces. I must look through the photograph of branches to the photograph of the statue of Ptolemy, through the photograph of Greek-Egyptian Ptolemy to the photograph of a Roman coin. When we go underwater, everything we see we must see through other thicknesses. Through blue fluid waving. Through greenish-yellow plankton and around the traces of fishes. We are always disoriented there even when we think we’re not. We are always disoriented when we dip into the story of another. Whether they’re human or lighthouse. History is surfaces brushing together.

Geometrical drawings, see-through photographs, notes, photocopies, sticky tabs crisscross one another on a single page, producing at their intersections dark ripple zones. Like when currents meet in water. Or air and light meet water. A single page might have five authors. Five languages together on top of each other, peeking out telltale from underneath each other, in the cosmopolitan history of the Pharos Lighthouse. The submergings, surfacings, and sinkings of the lighthouse have to do sometimes with colonialism, sometimes geology. Sometimes with love of wondering and of drowned things.

On some pages I see Ga’s hand holding transparencies in place or preparing to sweep them away. I see my hand holding her page or preparing to turn. So in some sense reading really is like diving. Both bodily. Both interactions with strange outsides adding layers of finger oil or fish oil to one another. I too am eighty percent water.




View all my reviews

What Empty Things Are These
Judy Crozier

What Empty Things Are These by Judy Crozier

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


As soon as Adelaide Hadley finds herself in want of a bookmark, you will be rooting for her. Domestic crisis or no, her page of Wilkie Collins must be bookmarked! I sometimes wonder how the plucky heroines of historical fiction get to be so, well, plucky. Most of them seem cursed with pluckiness upon conception. But not Adelaide. She has to earn her pluck. She has to earn it and work at it, and let me tell you it is hard—especially in nineteenth-century London, where women of every class are expected to be virtually incapable of discerning their own priorities, let alone making decisions or (heaven forbid) reading and writing. To decide even to attempt such unfeminine faux pas requires a resolve that Adelaide must struggle to sow within herself and nurture, having been stifled all her life not just by patriarchal society, but also by violence and a loveless domestic life; belittled even by her son, imprisoned in needlework and heavy furniture, confined by hoops and veils and crinoline that barely allow her to move. In beautiful and subtle prose, J.L. Crozier weaves portraits of Victorian women of all stripes—from wealthy wives in gilded cages to servants, street urchins, and spiritualists—together in a dark tapestry as seen through Adelaide’s eyes while she herself, marginalized and powerless, dreams of independence.



View all my reviews

Memoranda
Michael Martone

Memoranda by Michael Martone

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Micro-stories of the unadmitted, overlooked, ashamed. I cringe, cower, want to cry sometimes (Memo on page 5: the reefs�). Other times, I feel bad for wanting to laugh, but I do it and enjoy myself. Isn’t that almost everything we want from a book?

A favorite bit: “This button must be constantly depressed. Constant depression. Simple physics. One pushes down and the earth pushes back.�




View all my reviews

Edge of the Known Bus Line
James R. Gapinski

Edge of the Known Bus Line by James R. Gapinski

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Dark snark at its best. Creepy as Stephen King’s Desperation but closer. Closer to home. Sounds too messed up to be reality, but it is. Value is arbitrary, uselessness is arbitrary, to be useless is to be thrown away, Out of Service, and to be out of service doesn’t mean to disappear. It means to hang around, ignored, long after you don’t want to anymore, like plastic bottles in the ocean. In Out of Service, all you’re good for is your meat, which doesn’t do anybody any good. Like all a plastic bag is good for in the ocean is poisoning animals who don’t deserve to be poisoned. Reality. And if only it wasn’t so easy to enjoy. Gapinski’s prose has the funny-creepy air of the too-familiar, the cynic’s way of being so indifferent that you have to laugh, only of course nobody’s perfectly indifferent. Out of Service is where hopelessness falls through its own cracks and keeps on falling.

A favorite bit: “…hardened surfaces always reveal themselves to be illusions…�




View all my reviews