So Much Blue (2017) by Percival Everett is the most conventional one that I have yet to read from him. Many of his books are formal experiments, and/oSo Much Blue (2017) by Percival Everett is the most conventional one that I have yet to read from him. Many of his books are formal experiments, and/or satirical, and often very different from each other. ?This one has some humor in it, but over all it is dead serious, the story of one man's-Kevin’s--secrets. There are three threads in the novel, tacking back and forth between them--1) an affair he had with a young Parisian woman (of 22) when he was there for an exhibition when he was in his mid-forties, a secret he never told his wife; 2) the story of his teen daughter telling him she was pregnant and agreeing to her demand to not tell his wife, and 3) the story of his having gone to El Salvador in his twenties with his friend Richard to bring home Richard’s drug-dealing brothers, Thad.
Yeah, he never told his wife about that, either. Richard figures in all these stories in that Kevin does tell him--his bff--all his secrets, and does not tell his wife. So it's a bit of a bro thing. And more generally, a wife thing, right?
I guess there is a fourth thread, too, in that Kevin is a well-known artist, who also keeps his painting to himself, never letting his wife ever see his work. Yeah, if you are counting, that’s now four huge secrets he kept from his wife, who figures in the resolution significantly, no surprise. I suppose the ultimate news is that Kevin is a self-absorbed, sort of bumbling jackass in almost every thread. He's in his own head, as his wife and kids make clear.
I thought it was well constructed, solid, and formally unremarkable. The affair was particularly unsurprising and cliched, I thought; Everett did nothing interesting with it except to make it clear it was not a good idea. Oh, and that it made him feel better about himself, he loved her for real, okay. For a few weeks. And the daughter secret goes even more badly than we expected; bad idea! Still, not a remarkable or memorable sequence of events.
The El Salvador sequence is somewhat more interesting, though it again makes him and Richard look clueless and naive. I guess when people talk about the book being funny in places, maybe they are referring to the almost comedic lack of self-awareness he has throughout his life. I mean, there was a revolution there in 1979 and these young college kids knew little about it, and, well, guns are fired and bodies pile up all around them. Kevin walsk by a little girl, dead in the street. He is trying to get to the airport and out of the country.
I guess one might say that the turning point (spoiler alert) takes place in that he decides to go back to El Salvador where he had walked by the dead body of a girl. He had just walked on, not knowing what to do when he saw the body, but he feels like part of his restitution means finding the father of the girl and saying he is sorry for his loss. To prove he actually cares about human beings; to show he has finally "grown up," in that sense.
So girls in peril are a central theme for this guy, and his becoming less self-absorbed in his late fifties: He got entangled with a young woman and probably hurt her; he hurt his wife and daughter, he ignored the dead body of a girl. I wouldn’t call this a man’s feminist turn, exactly, but his becoming more aware of himself and others would appear to be a good change for him. I won’t say too much in the way of specifics, but in the end he makes what seems like a symbolic move, to allow his wife to see his large canvas. The punch line? “So much blue,� she says. Again, I thought it was solid, good, a middle-aged male crisis book. Okay, it probably is a four-star book, but not for me right now, and less impressive for me than all the others I have read from him thus far, so 3 stars....more
Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's A New Name: Septology VI-VII (2021) is the third volume of what Fosse intended to be a single book, and is now availablNobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's A New Name: Septology VI-VII (2021) is the third volume of what Fosse intended to be a single book, and is now available as such. As with many great works, it took me a long time to figure out what this is about. In my initial review of the first volume I admit I kinda made fun of the mundanity, the repetition. While acknowledging that some interesting things were going on with the character, when I saw the words "hypnotic" associated with the prose, I used the phrase "sleep-inducing" to describe what is going on sometimes in that first volume. I regret that and feel foolish and ignorant about it. So I'll once again revise my reviews of the first two volumes to reflect my current view that this work is, like the other two novellas I read and liked, a real contribution to the history of literature, a great story about a simple rural painter, Asle, and his dead wife and his explicitly clear doppleganger.
The surface story of an aging, isolated painter, quietly spiritual, here comes to conclusion. The whole story takes place in seven sections, one for each day leading up to Christmas. Asle's world is small, painting every day, so,metimes seeing Åsleik, his neighbor and friend; Beyer is his gallerist who shows and sells his paintings. A doppelganger artist also named Asles. His dead wife, Ales, with him very day. We sometimes go into the past, and fluidly, quickly interchangable with the present. In the last week we meet two women who like the two artists, who look alike, both named Guro, one of them a woman he meets in a restaurant, one of them Åsleik's sister. I think it is all told in one unbroken sentence, all 667 pages!!
After what has been pretty steady pacing, abrupt but fluid shifts of point of view and time frames, there is an intensity in the final pages to underscore Fosse's intention to convey what is happening to the main character at the end, on Christmas day. Notes: Joyce, Beckett, language, great empathy for this man, for all of his characters. What is going on? Ultimately, mystery, magic; someone said Gregorian Chant; the music of Hildegard von Bingen, Tomas Transtromer, Tarjev Vesaas's The Birds, stories of simple people in the deeply spiritual struggles of their every day lives. And the place of art and its relationship--for a Christian artist--to God.
I don't know at this point in my life that I will take the time to reread it all, but I really should, now that I am just beginning to understand it, but I am not foolish enough to pretend that anyone can fully understand great works of art. As Ales says, art shoud also be operating beyond anyone's rational capacity to describe it. If it could reduced to an argumentative "point," it would not be art. Art lives in mystery. Fosse said it: "writing is a way to express the unsayable."...more
I Is Another is 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's second offering as part of his Septology, so this book is comprised of sections 3, 4 and 5. It’s aI Is Another is 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's second offering as part of his Septology, so this book is comprised of sections 3, 4 and 5. It’s a story of two doppleganger artists, or two different sides of an artist, both named Asle, one of them a widower whose wife's name was Ales, and his best friend is Åsleik. No, this is not a joke, and thank god Asle’s art dealer is called Bayer, eh? I know, most readers hate it when writers name central characters Eileen and Ellen, or graphic novels depict characters similarly. Well, the two Asles look alike and are both artists! Take that!
What the heck is the point, here, you ask? Well, it’s in part the old saw about identity, I think, that we are made up of the people we know best and love, we are at times interchangeable with them. This is of course most understandable in grief, with Asle, who talks with his dead wife as some do. But one Asle is a Christian, one is an atheist.
Book Two, I is Another, (which might remind one of Martin Buber's I and Thou, continues the story where book one left off, continuing this stream of consciousness narrative that slips between memory and present, and so on, sort of surreally at times. When the two Asles meet in a pub, that’s interesting. Early boyhood experiences are interesting, and sometimes a little disturbing, including an account of an assault by a man at an early age. It has echoes for me of Beckett, and maybe Knausgaard, what I’ve read of him, a detailed account of mundane life in a small town by an artist who is alone most of the time, thinking, talking to himself or Asle, which might be the sweetest part of the whole book, their faith, their love.
I like some of the reflections on God and art, that Shining Darkness evidence of God that he sees himself in his painting. One thread is Asle I visiting Asle II in the hospital, as he had visited his wife there. Is it like seeing yourself dying, from the perspective of your younger self? Over time, the repetition in events, the everyday, and the language, has a somewhat lulling, somewhat intensifying effect as in a film by Bergman. Somewhat hallucinatory effects.
So, yeah, my initial review had this book as between 3 and 4 stars, and now I'm hooked on the language and this sweet character and his doppleganger (or his he imagining ths guy?!) and his talking to his dead wife, and his faith and struggles with the spiritual spects he sees in art....more
Trilogy (2016) by Jon Fosse features three closely linked short novellas (Wakefulness, Olav s Dreams, and Weariness) about two homeless people, Asle aTrilogy (2016) by Jon Fosse features three closely linked short novellas (Wakefulness, Olav s Dreams, and Weariness) about two homeless people, Asle and Alida, the latter about to give birth any day. They have some food, almost no money, and as is the obvious allusion, there is “no place at the inn� for them to stay. They are, in contemporary terms, unwanted refugees. The story is bleak and possibly inspiring, though these two wanderers seem lost and naive about how it is they may be able to survive.
As with A Shining, the first (and also short) work from Fosse that I recently read, there is something deeply allegorical about the work, with visions/dreams hard to separate from the couple’s walking reality. I won’t say here what happens later, but there are surprising turns, crime, and maybe some kind of redemption. Haunting, visionary, with simple language, and a more complex morality than I had expected from the author of A Shining, and based on the first novella in this Trilogy. Again, I see echoes of Dostoevsky and Coetzee, and also Beckett, interestingly. The poet Tomas Transtromer, Vesaas (The Birds, The Ice Castle). ...more
My first experience with 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's work. A short allegorical novel about death. A monologue of an older man who lives alone,My first experience with 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's work. A short allegorical novel about death. A monologue of an older man who lives alone, drives off into a snowy ditch, gets lost heading out to find someone to help him move his car. He takes us through his thought process as he (in the way of reported near death experiences) encounters a shining white light, and various characters he variously wonders might be angels? God? Death (in a long black coat)? Snow fall, increasing, losing his way, being drawn to the light out of darkness.
Then he seems to find his parents who beckon him to them. Mom castigates him as she might have done in his youth. We know little about the guy except he has not eaten in a few days. So that is ominous information. But his questioning about the luminous visions he encounters are sometimes entertaining as he questions his perceptions. Reminded me Beckett monologues. And the intense spirituality one associates with Dostoevsky. Or the allegorical work of Coetzee. Writers about religion, spiritulaity, in sometimes allegorical forms. I can't imagine that most people think this is best work--I had heard of Septology for that. But I'll (finally) dig into his stuff a bit....more
I liked James Sallis’s Drive, and so saw this later novel, Willnot (2016) and a review by Carol that convinced me to try it. The publisher misleads yoI liked James Sallis’s Drive, and so saw this later novel, Willnot (2016) and a review by Carol that convinced me to try it. The publisher misleads you a bit about what drives the book:
“In the woods outside the town of Willnot, the remains of several people have suddenly been discovered, unnerving the community and unsettling Hale, the town's all-purpose general practitioner, surgeon, and town conscience. At the same time, Bobby Lowndes--his military records disappeared, being followed by the FBI--mysteriously reappears in his hometown, at Hale's door. Over the ensuing months, the daily dramas Hale faces as he tends to his town and to his partner, Richard, collide with the inexplicable vagaries of life in Willnot. And when a gunshot aimed at Lowndes critically wounds Richard, Hale's world is truly upended.�
That’s an enticing description but the suggestion that this is some kind of mystery action thriller is misleading. There are dead bodies, there are crimes, but the focus of this book is Dr. Hale, his partner Richard, and the undercurrent of daily life in the small southern town of Willnot. So I agree with Carol and others that is a different novel than advertised.
“Days lumbered on, as they will. Miracles happen in the corners of lives, longings slumbered in our hearts.�
That's more like it, because as everyone seems to say, it is character-driven, not plot-driven. The plot as such is meandering, taking us into a consideration of sci fi, John Updike, lots of eccentric characters. If you came for the mystery you leave appreciating the relationship between Dr. Hale and his lover, teacher Richard. And their cat! I see it makes "gay fiction" lists, but their being gay is not really highlighted, as such, they are just accepted as actual people and an actual couple, imagine that. I liked it, a quiet, thoughtful book of literary fiction about this town, and what we can actually know about people there....more
I sat here for awhile just trying to determine if I would rate this three or four stars. It's a hugely popular book about a "semi-famous" (ooh, like MI sat here for awhile just trying to determine if I would rate this three or four stars. It's a hugely popular book about a "semi-famous" (ooh, like Miranda July!) middle-aged woman (45) (and ooh, Miranda July is this year 51!) who does different media "projects" (like Miranda July! Books and films and such) and is going through peri-menopause. She has a gneder fluid kid named Sam, and a husband named Harris, who she leaves to go on a road trip cross country to (see the Meryl Streep character in Kramer Vs. Kramer, only in this one it is first person, the woman's story) but before she gets more than a few miles down the road falls into passionate, disconcerting sex wiht a Hertz rental guy who happens to be one of her fanboys, as it turns out.
So, sometimes funny, sometimes sexy, sometimes deeply sad, but this midlife story (like so many men's mid-life crisis films and novels) is about lots of sex in order to hold the fewer of aging at bay. The fact that the Hertz dude is much younger and a hip hop dancer becomes both funny and an indication of her ultimate distance she has from him, except at this deeply visceral level. So as I said, all the sex scenes are well done, convincing, and ultimately satirical. So maybe I've said enough, except to say this trip down self-destruction lane does not stop there. She doesn't only have sex with men, but also women! So it's a bi book? Technically, but I don't think sexual orientation is the point, as she would have sex with anything that moves.
So it's about monogamy on some level, which we get to later, unsurprisingly., and its about motherhood, sort of, though Sam is not really central or as interesting as all the sex, though we could make an argument that the sex is also sort of peripheral to her own self-obsession. Harris is certainly beside the point. It's certainly about menopause, so it is meant to be a funy send-up of that experience.
I thought this was just a well told, straight-up mid-life crisis book which made me smile from time to time. It's maybe a 3ish star book for me--a guy, remember, not the target audience--that I think has some good writing in it. It's better of you can keep in mind that this is satire, meant to be played largely for laughs. I might read reviews now and move it down to three stars, I dunno.
PS: This is rhe second book in a week that is in some sense a cautionary tale about one of the Deven Deadly Sins, Lust! The first was the pulpy noir book by Cornell Woolrich, Fright, that I just reviewed, about a guy who makes a fateful mistake some evening close to his wedding--He gets drunk with some random woman in a bar who then blackmails him for his "indiscretion." In this one, Lust looks convincingly fun for this woman, but it is obviously no happy solution for the woman in All Fours. Beware, my friends, of the dangers of Extramarital Sex, sayeth these writers!!
This isn't a particularly insightful quote, but it definitely helps to explain the title--whcih you already knew was about a sexual position), and gets at her humor: Jordi says everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable, but it’s actually the most stable position. She says: “It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.� So I think this remark is not just about a sexual position, but also the need for stability at certain points in your life. First th elaugh, then a touch of poignancy?
Here's another that gets at the ultimate purpose of the book: “Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,� she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’ �
This one aso points to this issue of a lack of contentment, which she doesn't have: �'I guess any calling, no matter what it is, is a kind of unresolved ache,. . . It's a problem that you can't fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will commit your whole life to trying. Every second you have is somehow for it.'�
Here's again something similar, something with a little poignancy that you do find throughout, and then, yeah, this slightly manic writing style that is sometimes engaging and sometimes (deliberately, because she is meant to be annoying and clueless, too):“Imagine getting up right now, slipping out the front door, and finding that all the women in the neighborhood were also leaving their houses. We were all running to the same field, a place we hadn't discussed but implicitly knew we would meet in when the tipping point tipped. We ran like horses, but we weren't horses, so after the initial hugs, there wasn't anything to do there in the grass. Everyone started checking their phones to see if their partners were calling. And they were not yet. We hadn't been gone long enough. Soon it was just a million women waiting for their mates to call, to be needed and then to fall into panic and guilt, to be torn, which was our primary state. Start the revolution here, now, in this field, or drive home and slip back into the fold, use the electric toothbrush, feel grim and trapped."...more
Since this is the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, I feel sort of sheepish or lame dissing this book, which is earnest, passionate, often lyrical, a cSince this is the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, I feel sort of sheepish or lame dissing this book, which is earnest, passionate, often lyrical, a celebration as much as an elegy for planet Earth. It is short, the shortest of the Booker longlist, focused on one day and sixteen revolutions of the planet in the International Space Station. It is not quite narrative, in spite of its story of a day and involving several characters traveling together, but we don't get to know any of them deeply. The sense to me is that this a kind of allegory, watching the planet from afar, loving it. It's less a novel than a kind of fictional essay infused with reflection.
In the process of revolving we see from afar lots of countries and landscapes that blend into each other, the point being, I think, that borders from hundreds of miles above do not exist in space. Geopolitical differences collapse. Differences between nationalities collapse as the folks on the journey get to know each other and mostly get along. These are people watching the planet and reflecting on it and to some extent their lives. And Life. There's a kind of abstraction or distance as the details of people and places matter less than the fact that this planet is being destroyed in many ways. And is still such a place of astounding beauty. So it sometimes feels almost desperate in its urgency, with a touch of despair. Understandably.
We get lists of famous characters in one place, one orbit, evil people and wonderful people, from Hitler to Einstein and so on. I kind of thought it might be a piece with Lydia Millet's memoir, We Loved it All: A Memory of Life, which I have not yet read.
Maybe I would have liked it more had I read it instead of listened to it, but it felt in spite of its passionate tone to feel distant to me in some ways. Maybe that speaks to my own sadness about the planet and all the ignorance about climate change and the emergency many deny. But I think lots of people should read it, and will read it thanks to the Booker Prize....more
A short first novel by Ananda Lima that is about a young Brazilian-American, linked stories within a story. I saw it had one story--that became my favA short first novel by Ananda Lima that is about a young Brazilian-American, linked stories within a story. I saw it had one story--that became my favorite--called "Ghost Story," and I liked the title, and I was hoping for a close link to Scheherazade--now there's a real devil, a guy who slaughters women who fail to tell him entertaining stories--so I listened to it and liked it for its "craft" ambitions, which it is more about than devilish horror.
Craft is a meta-craft book I though befitting a grad creative writing program, featuring the (minor) "horrors" of peer critique of the stories as we read them. I thought that was okay, having been through my own experience with that in my own MFA CW program. It touches on adapting to a new culture, DACA, and other contemporary issues, packing in lots of topics. When it began it felt very "now," as the woman meets the devil in a bar and I thought, eh, your worst jerk date as "devil," heh, but it goes beyond that, thankfully. ...more
“What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, y“What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.�
Creation Lake (2024) by Rachel Kushner was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Its press calls it a “propulsive page turner;� while I don’t agree with that, it does bear some resemblance to a “thriller� in that it involves an undercover “agent,� Sadie Smith (shh! An alias!), who is hired to undermine an anarchist (possibly ecoterrorist?) collective hiding out in a cave in France. Sadie, fired from her job with U.S. intelligence, is now working for the highest bidder: “It was a relief to be in the private sector,� she says, “where there are no supervising officers, no logbooks.� She’s willing to engage in seduction--sleeping with the enemy--and for much of the book her infiltration seems successful, but later we have questions about that; at any rate this is no page-turning thriller, for all its surface spy intrigue.
None of the characters in the book are particularly endearing, except maybe Bruno Lacombe Lucien, the collective ideologue (is he a crank? A cult figure?) who takes us into a host of anarchist/back to nature theories, some of which become persuasive, even to Sadie, ultimately. He thinks humans should return to the ways of the far past, laying out the history of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, he siding with the Neanderthals. One touchstone for the book is Guy DeBord, a French artist/activist from the Situationalist International, Paris, 1968, to help us understand some of the book's radical artistic background, but there are many other ideas and people from a range of sources that infiltrate this plot, such as it is. Late edition: Alwynne tells me that a writer Kushner admires, leftwing French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, is another key reference here, too.
Since I had just read a biography of Captain James Cook, I liked an anecdote in the book about Cook and (accomplished but misunderstood) Maori ocean navigators/mapmakers.
So it begins as a kind of novel of ideas, with a radical lecture by Bruno ala 1968 of the state of the world, and periodically returns to radical/unpopular ideas throughout. So, it’s less a book of character than ideas, except one might make a case for some change that takes place in Sadie at the very end. Sadie is sometimes played for humor, satire, as are other characters. But it’s not all satire. Sadie the seducer may have been seduced by the ideas of anarchist Bruno, and so may we be.
Me: I was 15 in 1968 and I actually read then what was going on in Paris because I was reading about politics here, during the sixties, a time of political assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, race riots, bra-burning, the war, Earth Day, all of it. I went to “information� sessions in Ann Arbor in my teens about the Weatherman, Black Panthers, SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), student activism; people gave me copies of Marx and Mao’s Little Red Book and writings from Malcolm X. I followed with interest eco-terrorist movements, beyond Greenpeace. I didn’t advocate or engage in violence, but I understood the argument: We are at war over the environment with the fossil fuel companies. We are war with the military-industrial complex about the fate of the planet. How can this war be best fought? With flower power?
I and others were probably on (minor) FBI lists just for opposing the war, for giving money to Greenpeace and other environmental orgs, though we viewed it all as participating in democracy. Until Kent State and the killing of students commenced. The killing of students protesting a war a majority of Americans had come to see as immoral?! “Our country, love it or leave it,� was a common response then to any criticism of American policy. So I read the (failed) radicalism of this book with some sad memories of lost hopes for the transformation of the world into the Age of Aquarius. But I like a lot of what Bruno says about how to survive/disrupt late stage capitalism. His question is relevant:
Currently, he said, we are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is: How do we exit this car?
Kushner is interested in various notions of radicalism as strategies against the current state of affairs. Her book The Flamethrowers looks at Italian activism from another generation. But in Creation Lake, we get a picture of sixties radicalism undermined by the participants� very youth (most of these folks were very young, of course!), a question about the depth of their commitment, sexism, lack of political coordination on the left, and so on. Can a small pocket of hippies/yippies/Marxists really create a cultural revolution against the Godzilla of capitalism?...more
The Safekeep (2024) by Yael Van Der Wouden, her first novel (?!) is shortlisted for the 2024 Man Booker prize. I was busy and into other books, had trThe Safekeep (2024) by Yael Van Der Wouden, her first novel (?!) is shortlisted for the 2024 Man Booker prize. I was busy and into other books, had trouble concentrating on it at first, but my third time in beginning it was a charm. It grows on you, builds suspense, and a twist at the end makes it clear this is a different book than it appeared to be, where you see everything in a different light. It reminded me of Patricia Highsmith in its mystery, it’s insinuation of the darker side of human nature. It’s also beautifully erotic, which is to say it is sexually explicit, speaking of:
"[T]he secrets of the body unfolded in the night."
But if you are thinking (as I was) that this was just a very good psycho-sexual drama, a vein of political reality that emerges, as it is set in 1961 Holland and this moment in time reaches back to WWII. Maybe that’s the closest I will get today to spoilers as this is a book a lot of people are just now reading because of the Booker attention, obviously.
Bare bones: Orderly and repressed Isabel lives in a big (one is tempted to say gothic, as a nod to maybe Daphne DuMaurier, Shirley Jackson, Highsmith, as the house is a key “character� in the novel that breathes and speaks and has a relevant history) house. As in many? all? gothic stories from The Fall of the House of Usher (oh, throw in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Castle of Otranto) on, we can see an analogy between the troubled people living in a troubled house and the body as (always already) the decaying prison-house of the soul. I repeat that line from above:
"The secrets of the body unfolded in the night." Tortured bodies/minds, tortured house.
Isabel is visited by Eva, and by Isabel's brother Hendrik and his friend Sebastian. The relationships between all these folks interweave and hothouse sweat DH Lawrence and Ingmar Bergman notes of psycho-sexual intensity, dark secrets, eroticism, slow-burning, elusive, and then exploding in intensities of various kinds.
I guess I wanna say that I think it is difficult to write well or with any originality about sex, but this author does it very well, lyrically. . . and, uh, passionately. But all the writing is powerful throughout with more than physical or romantic implications. You have been successfully misdirected if you think (as I did) that this is just a hot book, as I keep saying. It's so much richer than just that.
I was somewhat disappointed in the ending initially which I would like to talk about, but won’t. The author had been criticized for it in some reviews, I heard, so I read her strong defense of it and ya know, I’ll buy her argument. Read this book, trust me! I listened to it and the readers were fantastic in creating just the right tone, but I'll buy it and read it again, now knowing the ending....more
Field Gray (2010) is Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther #7, and his most ambitious novel thus far. What he wants to accomplish in his series is to help you Field Gray (2010) is Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther #7, and his most ambitious novel thus far. What he wants to accomplish in his series is to help you get to know a “good German� detective who is nevertheless unavoidably compromised by doing work in Berlin sometimes for bad guys such as Nazis since the thirties, through the war and into the fifties. In this book Bernie is shipped from Havana to the US to Berlin to Paris and back to Berlin again, recounting his history from the thirties and forties wartime when he did work for the Nazis and other evil taskmasters, managing to do good things in spite of his various boss’s purposes.
When Kerr’s completed his Berlin Noir trilogy in the nineties, there were of course holes in both Bernie’s story and in the actual world history of fascism. So these subsequent books help to fill in the gaps. This book begins in 1954 in Havana where Bernie tries to escape from the island with a Hemingway-esque character and a woman, and ends up in Gitmo, where he is interrogated and sent to a prison in the US, where he is interrogated, then sent to Landsberg in Germany in 1954 where he is interrogated about having been imprisoned for a year of hard labor in Minsk in a Russian POW camp, and then he's sent to Paris in 1940 and back again to Berlin.
So Kerr tries something new, for him, a series of stories told in a series of interrogations in captivity about who he was and what he knew and why it is he might have worked for the Nazis when he claims he never was a Nazi. In each of them he tells of his having encountered and soiled by evil characters, from the rise of the Nazis largely unimpeded (or even supported) by Russia and the Allies until they finally unified to defeat Hitler. So in many ways it feels like a way of creating a Bernie Gunther memoir through his answers to questions by his captors.
Kerr does voluminous research he details in an appendix, infusing this history through his fictional mc Gunther, making it clear that no one was innocent; all these countries he has worked in--Germany, Argentina, Cuba, The US, France, all had shameful times in their histories. You don't like the fact that Germany had concentration camps? Well, Kerr makes clear Russia, France, Argentina, all had camps like this, (Kerr in his appendix reminds us that French concentration camps are vilified in Arthur Koestler’s The Scum of the Earth). All these countries did terrible things, whether we might think of their actions as “justified� or not (the world hated the Nazis for good reasons, but was the revenge rape of thousands of Berlin women by the conquering Russians in any sense justified?). All the countries that defeated Hitler had deep strains of anti-semitism, and Kerr makes it clear that, for instance, many thousands of French citizens compromised their country through collaboration with the Nazis during the Occupation (also see Patrick Modiano’s Occupation Trilogy).
One thread that links all the stories is the worldwide search for evidence against real life villain Erich Mielke, a Nazi thug and head of the East German Secret Police, dubbed "The Master of Fear." Mielke was one of two triggermen in the 1931 murders of two Berlin Police captains. He escaped to Russia, but returned eventually to, among other things, oversee the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall. When Mielke was a communist dissident youth in 1931, Bernie had saved him from being killed by brownshirts, and Bernie encounters him from time to time over the years. All these secret organizations want Bernie to help find Mielke, and. . . he does!
Another real life character that weaves his slimy self through these stories is General Reinhardt Heydrich, the head of the Gestapo. In 1938 Heydrich, working for Himmler, enlisted Bernie to solve the murders of young women in Berlin (the subject of The Pale Criminal), but nevertheless later sent him to the front to fight--and get captured by--the Russians when he refuses to cross certain ethical lines.
Bernie is cynical; can you blame him? He distrusts the Commies as much as the Nazis: “I’m tired of the whole damned business. For twenty years I’ve been obliged to work for people I didn’t like. Heydrich. The SD. The Nazis. The CIC. The Perons. The Mafia. The Cuban secret police. The French. The CIA. All I want to do is read the newspaper and play chess.�
But to be clear; as all countries during the twentieth entury prove morally compromised, on the glbal level, so is Bernie compromised for working sometimes for monsters.
This book is dark, dark, dark, but near the end Bernie is reunited with his lover from the last book. So can love counter all? We shall see. This is a five-star book of historical fiction for the sheer ambition of it, all the dots connected between the conquering and conquered, and we increasingly like Bernie, though the book is challenging, tough, harder for me to get into than some of the other books; maybe it's that it attempts to do too much at times, thus four stars....more
Runner-up for the 2024 ŷ Fiction category. I voted for it. Of new books, and maybe all the books I read this year, this I niw choose as my favRunner-up for the 2024 ŷ Fiction category. I voted for it. Of new books, and maybe all the books I read this year, this I niw choose as my favorite, and her best so far (though I will also recall the emotional impact Normal People had on me, that was even more viscerally gut-punching).
Intermezzo (2024) is Sally Rooney’s fourth novel and is wonderful, her most developed work, though it is a piece with all the previous work: It features deeply flawed, often unlikable people making terrible life mistakes, in part because they are utterly unable to communicate with each other. But I just flat out loved it. It’s formally her most ambitious work, a series of interlocking pieces, shifts, variations on a theme, but I definitely also found it profound, and profoundly emotional, leaving me in tears as Normal People did. But I already know, as with many readers, some will stop reading because they find all the main characters screwed up. But that is exactly the point, as always with Rooney, as you get angry at them, and they either learn from their mistakes or not. Ultimately, I think it is her most hopeful book, but you have to read it all the way through to see it! One of the best books of the year, definitely.
To be clear, this is a novel, and not a musical work. An intermezzo is a movement coming between the major sections of an extended musical work (such as an opera). The events of the book happen between the death of the father and the time in which they may be able to go on. Inter, in between. And also it has something to do with chess in which a sudden move that impacts the game happens, as occurs between the two brothers early and again later in the book.
What’s it about? Grief, as so many works of literature tend to be. Facing death, surviving the deaths of others, sometimes falling apart in the process. And relationships, learning to talk and understand each other, as grief goes on. And people do crazy impulsive things sometimes in grief. Are they necessarily the wrong decisions? We’ll see.
And the novel is about what it is that fiction/stories can do that argument/logic cannot. I am a fan of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, a sort of aphoristic or zen koan-like series of meditations on the nature of language and reality. The book begins with a quote from him about language and chess, and returns to him explicitly in the end. Wittgenstein initially worked within the umbrella of positivist philosophers--The Vienna Circle--in his time to create a structural framework for thinking about the nature of knowledge. And Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of mathematics. Logic. Reason. Order.
The point of all this was to find some basic explanatory principles for how the world works. And Wittgenstein in Logico Tractatus laid out his highly influential views on this subject. But he shifted his views later, when he was near suicidal, after having worked teaching children in the mountains, and thus his later work, Philosophical Investigations, took another direction, to undermine our sense of certainty about what we think we know about knowing.
“How often in life he [Ivan] has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand.�
“Language doesn’t fit into reality like a toy fitting a slot.�
Sally Rooney was an internationally successful debater in college and soon after, and now is a novelist. Debate is a fiercely competitive activity focused on argument, evidence, logic. Her two main characters in this book are males, for the first time in her novels, two competitive, abrasive/distant brothers, whose father has recently died--Peter, 33, a successful lawyer, solicitor, and Ivan, 22, a rising chess player. Both of these activities we may associate with logic, reason, order, rules to follow. They don’t like each other, and they don’t really “get women� who might operate--in this book at least--in different spheres than they do, at least emotionally, but also maybe in ways of knowing the world.
Ivan, following his father’s death, develops a relationship with an older woman, Margaret, who is 36 (and he’s 22), his first real relationship, something neither family would approve of, since she is technically still married, though he is an alcoholic, whom she left. Peter’s first real relationship was/is with Sophia, who got in a terrible accident after which she ended the relationship, encouraging Peter to seek someone else. He then slept with many women, including at present 22-year-old Naomi. These May-December relationships are highly frowned on by friends and families, indicators of instability. Can they possibly work? But look at those matching pairs, in this book; there's a kind of formal cast to this strategy.
So, these boys are at odds with each other, and they both disapprove of each other's choices with women, ironically. Margaret is estranged from her husband and finds it difficult initially to talk to Ivan, this chess nerd who seems self-absorbed, someone Peter refers to as probably autistic. Peter can himself be a callous asshole; he loves both his ex Sylvia AND this young college student Naomi.
In all the scenarios depicted here, it seems like societally we generally have rules for how to think of these things. But what if people do not fit your categories? Sure, we all disappoint each other, but we also have the capacity to surprise each other. Men, as Naomi says to Ivan, are “dogs.� Or they can be. But love in all its marvelous variations is also possible. Fiction--and not debate, nor law, nor chess, with all their potential impressive rational marvels, she’ll say--may be the best way to undermine the reductive expectations we have for thinking about the potential for human relationships. To imagine a future--which is what fiction can do--is to live, really live.
“Doesn’t the feeling between people have a truth of its own? Not in the sense of formal propositional truth-value, no. But then why does that word, ‘truth,� have a certain sensation to it, which is not exhausted by the formal definition?�
*At one point Margaret’s art centre presents a pianist playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, 32 variations on a theme. Ivan loves Bach, and Rooney would seem to be toying around with a variations of perspectives on themes here.
*The formal structure of this sad grief tale is actually I think comedy, with lots of variations on themes and switching characters. Two pairs of May-December. When Peter is in crisis, both Naomi and Sylvia come to his rescue. When Ivan is playing a big match, both Peter and Margaret show up to support him. Unlikely pairs. So much sadness within the story, but seen from a distance, a crazy dance happens.
Then, late in the book Rooney quotes James Joyce, who says of his intense erudite classic Ulysses, “There’s not one single serious line it.� So consider that. Because Ulysses is indeed a serious work of fiction, with at least one frame being comedic, surely. In comedy there's always misunderstanding between people; they can't communicate, messes are made. Is this actually meant on some level to be a comedy?! In the end, things usually work out in Shakespeare's comedies, and as at the sexy end of Ulysses--Yes, she she said yes yes yes. I already said this was her most hopeful book!
*There’s a lot of wild, manic stream-of-consciousness driving each of the principal characters, at least Ivan, Peter, Margaret and Naomi. Presents a fine set of psychological portraits. But the whirl in it of what to do, what do I think, the crazy turmoil of emotional thinking that may have you spin out of control during grief, that could be seen as comic, in a way, from a distance, as painful as it is at the time. I mean honestly: Peter has sex with both Naomi and Sylvia within twenty-four hours and seems to promise each of them he will marry them. Not funny. Or, from a certain perspective, comedy? Not for these women, of course, but I'll just say: These women become friends.
*This book is also very much about the mysteries of love, as many many novels--and romantic comedies!!--are:
“Nothing he has done or felt in this regard before has prepared him remotely for this new experience, with Margaret: the experience of mutual desire. To feel an interpenetration of thought between the two of them, understanding her, looking at her and knowing, yes, even without speaking, what she feels and wants, and knowing that she understands him also, completely.�
I think it’s wonderful, and I spent a crazy lot of time with it, well-spent. But why does she time and again tell me stories of people who are difficult and struggle with relationships and yet bring me to tears, finally, and many times? Maybe this book--like Normal People--is actually written by Sally Rooney for me? Certainly this issue of the failure to communicate is at the heart of most of our struggles on the planet.
*One might reflect on all the wars and angry confrontations between (principally) males on this planet right now, from increasingly autocratic, strongman perspectives. The depicted confrontations between the brothers--including physical violence--may be a reflection on men and their inability to talk with each other, leading to violence again and again.
*This book has more wonderful descriptions in it than any of her previous books, so is thus less minimalist than any of her earlierwork, basically mostly dialogue. So much beautiful writing, some of it lyrical descriptions of nature (which is a staple of romantic comedy!):
“Golden green fields stretching out into the faint blue distance. Limitless clear air and light everywhere around them, filled with the sweet liquid singing of the birds.�
“She had been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life.�
“Life (because of Ivan, for Margaret) has slipped free of its netting.�
“People aren’t themselves when they are grieving.� (think: Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck, magic)
“You know he really loves you�--Naomi, to Ivan, about his brother Peter, whom he has said he hates
“Sitting there beside him quietly she seemed to embody the inexpressible depth of his misunderstanding: Of her, his brother, interpersonal relations, life itself.� (Margaret, and Peter, the two Decembers, sitting outside the room at Ivan's chess match, supporting Ivan, loving him, and why not?)...more
I bought this book because of the title, Cheap Therapist Says Tou’re Insane (2023 by Parker Young, which made me smile, and because at least one of y I bought this book because of the title, Cheap Therapist Says Tou’re Insane (2023 by Parker Young, which made me smile, and because at least one of you said it was awesome. I had started it a couple times, and now finish it; I didn’t finish it because I didn’t like it--it’s always amusing--but because I wasn’t so taken with it that I felt compelled to finish it. It has youth written all over it, like recent MFA program style, though I could be wrong. It may have old age written all over it that is masked by a youthful exuberance. I am not trying to be condescending, but maybe I am. There’s some inside jokey-ness to it I appreciate about it, but then again, maybe I don’t. Call it absurdism, with a touch of paranoia.
Wait: why is Parker Young writing about me? So I decided to sit down and read the whole damned thing all the way through, throw caution to the wind, though I still broke it up with the reading of Simenon. So maybe this review will get confused by that reading, cuz it’s noir, and mystery, but not as funny as Young, but maybe this isn’t as funny as it seems! But probably it is.
The first story, “Golden Hour,� is about a man who thinks everyone hates him and that he is being followed by someone who looks like him. He sees a woman through a window carrying a knife. As the man following him closes in he knocks on the woman’s door to borrow his knife. She doesn’t let him in and the man speeds down the street, as the man closes in, and in a feedback loop (spoiler alert?) he continues to “try and figure out why everyone hated me. I knew I was being foll.� That is a kind of funny joke I laughed aloud at, not original, but way cute. Noir paranoia, played for laughs. Good opening story.
Many stories have clever, smart-ass hooks such as the opening to “Collaboration,� ”I was writing a fantastical story about two little sheep that have nowhere to go but up.� In the night the writer realizes his wife is changing the words to his story--more paranoia. The female sheep has the name of his wife, Tina, and “my name is Colin, and can you guess what the male sheep’s name is?� Colin watches a lot of tennis, which he says “I would never do. The writing about it, that is," though he does watch tennis all the time and it is in the story. And so on. Falling down down down the rabbit hole, Alice or in the tornado, the house spinning and a lamp hit her head, Dorothy! Hey,who hit Parker’s head? Or is it me?
“Carbon Monoxide� is about a guy, through all events in the story, is terrified there is a gas or carbon monoxide leak. No one else believes him! He insults people about their dog and runs outside as they want to kill him for the insult. What does this work remind me of? Little Murders, a 1970 film by Jules Ffeiffer about a dogshit photographer who gets his work published in art magazines, as everyone has multiple guns that they shoot randomly out of their windows for no particular reason. Cultural insanity, cultural commentary, is the point. Black humor. Capturing the political insanity of our times, like what?! You want WHO to be the Attorney General of the United States of America?! Coo coo for coconuts cray cray. Pop goes the weasel!
“Surveillance� is about a guy watching a live feed of his brother who may or may not be robbing a jewelry store. He may be carrying multiple phones, has multiple girlfriends. Ends in violence, again. It has Marx Brothers about it, that’s it!
As in “Oven Blew Up� where a guy’s oven blows up, then a replacement oven blows up, then an armoire they put in place of the oven blows up. You get the point. Happens to you all the time, I know. HIs wife and kids don’t believe him when he says they are in danger and may have to move. So it’s Hitchcock’s solitary ordinary man on a train, the world going crazy dragging the man into it.
I read them all though some more closely than others and they are all a bit different and a bit the same and make me smile most of the time. Wait: This guy is in Chicago! I live in Chicago! Maybe I am this guy! Maybe he has a gun and is following me! Why does he look like me?!
“Writing Fiction� has this insight: “Writing fiction is like trying ot figure out who ate the salami by eating the salami.�
Exactly.
“It’s like sending your kids away to orphanages and expecting them to track you down later in life to say, Dad, you’re beautiful.�
“It’s like visiting your tombstone for something to eat.�
Keep writing, dude! Someone read my review and read the book and call an editor to get this published in a major publication and give him a lot of money and give me a cut for this review promoting his work. My usual fee is like 20% but we can talk details later.
Note to author: You ARE insane, man, but I don’t say that like it’s a bad thing. Give me a call! I'm in the book. ...more
“We are the maids / the ones you killed / the ones you failed.�
In the end of The Odyssey, Odysseus hangs twelve maids he felt may have been disloyal t“We are the maids / the ones you killed / the ones you failed.�
In the end of The Odyssey, Odysseus hangs twelve maids he felt may have been disloyal to him when he was on his two decade travels or, odyssey). Shortly before this, Odysseus slaughters all the suitors who tried to step in and “hook up� with Odyssey’s wife Penelope. Penelope is the very model of the faithful wife: Hubby gone, twenty years, in which time she raised a son, managed the house and empire, and never gave in to the temptations of the suitors.
These maids, before being killed by Our Epic Hero, forced the maids to clean up the bloody mess of the suitor slaughter. We never know the maids� names. Of course, because they are maids, working cvlass women.
Margaret Atwood has problems with some of this story, especially the disrespect for Penelope and her maids, so decides to write a novella, The Penelopiad (2005) to help us reconsider things. We see events in part from Penelope’s perspective, but the Greek Chorus here is comprised of the Maids (whom she names The Chorus Line, ha), who actually are given voices at last.
Atwood doesn’t trust the epic storyteller (and liar) Odysseus, who after fighting in the Trojan War and sleeping with goddesses (because how could he not? Goddesses, duh! And, you know, you can’t expect A Man to be celibate for twenty years!) returns to tell his tales. Unreliable narrator, much? Though to be fair, if the big O gets questioned, you gotta do the same with Penny in this story, yes? I mean, did you get a look at some of those hunky suitors? Come on, Penny Lane! Tell us another one!).
But seriously, who speaks for the maids, and attempts to correct aspects of the story? Penelope, and Atwood. Which is also to say they speak for any women ignored, slandered, assaulted, murdered. Non-famous women, unlike Penelope and her famously gorgeous cousin Helen of Troy.
Rewriting iconic stories is part of the history of literature, of course. John Gardner’s Grendel. Recently, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. And stories told from the perspective of minor characters have developed their own tradition, such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. This is a good one, for substance, but it feels at times to me more like a critical feminist essay than a story--very prosaic writing, on the whole. But it is a very good critique, finally, making a very good point about the epic tale where the Male Hero gets defied as the women are ignored (and/or killed).
The Penelopiad was adapted for dramatic production here at the Goodman Theater in Chicago March 2024. I was supposed to spend a recent evening there also going to workshop, and post-performance activities, but last Wednesday I had retinal surgery and am legally blind (i.e., no reading and writing) for a few weeks (??!), though here I am hunting and pecking and getting help with editing. . . but I should be okay in a month. I'll say 3.5 stars, rounded up, but I bet it would have been a more enthusiastic review had I actually seen it. But if I can I'll still get over there to see it and let you know. ...more
I have read almost all of Elizabeth Strout's novels, especially all of the (as of 2024 5) Amgash (Illinois) series novels, including this one, and theI have read almost all of Elizabeth Strout's novels, especially all of the (as of 2024 5) Amgash (Illinois) series novels, including this one, and they all are interconnected, all worth reading. Well, I think all of Elizabeth Strout's books are interconnected, making up a growing world. She's one of these writers that is really accessible, writing beloved bestsellers, but also critically recognized for making that accessibility look easy, granted a Pulitzer Prize for Oliver Kittredge, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for O, William! in 2022.
I am reading dark noir detective fiction and ghost stories for courses I am teaching this fall, and they depict generally bleak views of human nature, so Tell Me Everything is a kind of welcome departure from that as, without ignoring the ugliness of the world, it is ultimately life-affirming.
"Love is love."
“And who—who who who in this whole entire world—does not want to be heard?�
"All these unrecorded lives, and people just live them."
"What does any one’s life mean?�
But if any of those quotations seem sentimental or cliched to you, I have to say that in the context of this story they nevertheless work, because if you know the people in this story cycle--Lucy Barton, Olive, Bob Burgess, Margaret, Pam, William, and so on--you want to be in this world and hear their insights and suffer with them. Off the top of my head there are many writers who create such warmth and urgency for kindness and understanding in highly respected literary fiction--Louise Penny and Kent Haruf are a couple of them that come immediately to mind, and of course there are many more.
What are the key features of this book? Well, the gang's all back, mostly in Maine. Crotchety Olive, now 90, tells Bob Burgess to tell writer Lucy Barton she has a story to tell that she might be interested in, and this leads to some regular storytelling exchanges. But isn't this what friendship really is about, an exchange of stories? "Tell me everything!" you say to your friends when you see them. It's the foundation of friendship, storytelling.
Another key feature is the closer and closer relationship developing--in part through storytelling and listening--between Bob Burgess and Lucy Barton.
Then a third dimension of this book I guessed came with the age-appropriate watching by 60+ year olds in this country of things such as Only Murders in the Building (and/or many highly popular true crime podcasts), and Louise Penny's mysteries. There's a murder of an ex-lunch lady they used to call Beach Ball and then Bitch Ball at the school, that juvenile stuff. Bob, a former defense lawyer, takes the case, and while the whole group doesn't exactly Scooby the whole thing to a resolution, some of our friends do chip in info, as with Louise Penny's Three Pines group of friends. I wish the murder took a greater role, actually, but it's still pretty good.
The murder of course gets solved, but this mystery is no greater than the mysteries of the human heart that Lucy/Strout explore in this book, where we learn humans are like shifting sand, or puzzles, not always making sense in what happens across their lives.
And we get back to the Burgess Boys and the mystery of who is responsible for the death of their father, a lifelong process that in many ways remains a never-ending mystery.
Don't read this as your first Strout. Start with the first Amgash books so you can get the back stories for this novel. Read Olive Kittredge. If you just picked this up you might say this is a three-star book, but for most of us who know this world, this is a five-star book, or at least four. It's probably a four-star for me but I can't be objective about Strout. I loved it and read it as fast I possibly could. I could hardly put it down, and as you know, I read a lot, often several books at once. I'm going to go back to read the ones I haven't yet read!...more
National Book Award for Fiction, 2024! Runner-up for the 2024 ŷ Historical Fiction category.
James (2024) as you probably already know is PerciNational Book Award for Fiction, 2024! Runner-up for the 2024 ŷ Historical Fiction category.
James (2024) as you probably already know is Percival Everett's rewriting of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, or now, James, to give him more respect. Since everyone is either reading it or recently has read it, and has read Huck Finn, I won't spend too much time on the plot, except to say that it is quite often early on faithful to Twain's tale, then departs from it in useful ways increasingly as we proceed.
As you may know, Huck Finn, once seen as the coming-of-age anti-racist Great American Novel, has been cancelled by folks on the left and right in recent years, and so is taught less and less, alas; on the left, it is decried for the use of the "n" word throughout, and maybe because doesn't quite take the horrors of slavery seriously enopugh, written as it was by a white writer? On the right, twisted logic has it that it is racist because it is anti-racist, anti-slavery and critical of American history and the American South (you have by now heard the defense of slavery for all that blacks supposedly "gained" from the horrific and indefensible desecration of black human beings.
But to my mind Everett both rescues Twain's book from the trash heap of literaray and cultural history and also critiques it in admirable ways. Everitt, a creative writing and literary theory professor at Stanford, takes a look at slave language as he has Huck speak "slave" dialect for social and political purposes even as learns to read, and read political and racial philosophy, write his own slave narrative, and speak--as Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington and countless others--in the language of the white "educated" majority.
Twain's book is the tale of the coming of age of a young white boy who escapes the torments of an abusive father with his friend who is escaping slavery. But Huck is young, and his understanding of slavery comes to him as it seemed to come to a lot of American, gradually, naively, or even deliberately passive about it (as was true even of Lincoln). Twain titles his book "Adventures" and sometimes seems to highlight the humor in some situations, but Everett knows that the Underground Railroad was no adventure. Everett's book emphasizes the brutal violence of this era for blacks, at the hands of cruel "masters" and their overseers.
And without saying too much here, Everett has James commit violence (as he did in his last book The Trees). The systematic rape of black women slaves is not something many people really want to read about or want to recall in American hsitory, but Everett importantly goes there, sharing that James's wife and daughter had been sold to a despicable "breeding farm."
For more than half of the book I felt this was good, but less inventive than The Trees, or Erasure, or I Am Not Sidney Poitier and so many others. It's part of a very fine tradition such as J. M. Coetzee's rewriting of Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe, in Foe, where the mute black islander speaks, or Dickens's David Copperfield mapped onto contemporary opioid-riddled Appalachia in Demon Copperhead. Of course we need to hear the black perspective on slavery as James does when he reads a slave narrative. But finally I thought it became powerful in the study of langauge, in its endorsement of stories--and here, black stories, of course--in the writing of American history and the formation of selves. I liked many of the new revelations and confrontations in this book that Everett knows will raise questions for all readers. Highly recommend....more
Erasure (2001) by Percival Everitt is a smart satirical novel about the racist assumption of the (white) publishing industry that black authors must wErasure (2001) by Percival Everitt is a smart satirical novel about the racist assumption of the (white) publishing industry that black authors must write from stereotypical perspectives on the lives of some black people. Ghettoes. Exploitation. Blaxploitation. Think: The Wayan Brothers comedies about black grads of film and theater school who can only get roles as gangsta rappers and thugs. The Cosby Show territory. I thought of Sonny Chye’s graphic novel, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Liew, that explores similar territory with respect to Asian actors in the film industry. American Fiction, a 2024 Academy-award -nominated film with Jeffrey Wright also nominated as best actor, is based on Everitt’s novel, and I just saw it and liked it a lot. Success is the best revenge for Everitt? Read on.
The protagonist, Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a professor of English literature, whose siblings like him all have doctorates, has written many critically acclaimed novels but has never attained popular fame nor fortune (ah, like Everitt; this book seems like auto-fiction in that respect). One day he sees that a black woman has written We's Lives In Da Ghetto, which becomes a national best seller, and she a critical sensation. So authentic! Though Ellison learns the author went to Oberlin, worked in the publishing industry in New York, and wrote the novel after visiting relatives in Harlem for a couple days. This enrages Ellison, especially when he sees the author has a six-figure book contract and a movle deal.
Ellison himself (like Everitt) has been told his work is not "black enough". He decides to write a satirical response to We's Lives In Da Ghetto (which I read somewhere may have been based in part on Richard Wright's Native Son [1940] and Sapphire's Push [1996]. He calls his own novel My Pafology, before changing its title to Fuck. His pseudonym is Stagg R. Leigh ("Stagger Lee" is an American folk song about the murder of Billy Lyons by "Stag" Lee Shelton in 1895 Sensationalizing black violence and poverty in popular culture is the key issue here). The entire short novel is included in the book, which humorously achieves widespread popular and critical acclaim.
Ellison makes it clear that he is black, has been the victim of racism, and loves black artists and authors, even those writing in vernacular black English, but for instance. his tastes in music include Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker and Ry Cooder, among others. In other words, don’t pigeonhole him!
Everitt teaches literary theory and creative writing, so I liked his references to theories of language about the nature of “erasure� through narrative:
“Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing�-- Roland Barthes, in The Death of the Author
But I also like the other references to “erasure� of identity in the story, as Monk’s mom has Alzheimer’s--her memories are daily erasing, and his gay brother’s identity suffers from another kind of erasure as well. Monk’s sister is killed (erased!) as she works in the nineties in an abortion clinic. The past erases over time in some ways for Monk’s family. Did love and laughter ever exist? Yes, love is real as evidenced by Monk’s devotion to his mother, and the wedding of the family maid, and so on. This is a rich novel which I highly recommend, though if you saw the movie, Everitt’s book is grittier and potentially more offensive (or even funnier?) than the more light satirish film....more
J. M. Coetzee’s The Pole is a short novel about Wittold Walccyzkiecz, a Polish pianist, known for his interpretations of Chopin, who becomes infatuateJ. M. Coetzee’s The Pole is a short novel about Wittold Walccyzkiecz, a Polish pianist, known for his interpretations of Chopin, who becomes infatuated with Beatriz, who helps organize his Barcelona concert. Beatriz is not exactly happily married, but she is not particularly attracted to The Pole, physically, emotionally, or artistically--she doesn’t even like his somewhat clinical interpretations of the music.
Then there is the language; she doesn’t speak Polish; they have to depend on a third language to communicate. Translation is, Coetzee, suggests, a key challenge in human relationships, including romantic ones. We never truly understand each other. One thing Coetzee is getting at here is the world wide problem of understanding each other across barriers.
Beatriz is in her forties; Witold is 72, so there’s that possible barrier.
And yet Beatriz--the reference is to Beatrice, the love object of Dante’s Divine Comedy, in love but never to truly be together, unrequited love-- succumbs to the intriguing and flattering seduction, a cascade of letters, invitations. I was reminded of Joyce’s “The Dead,� with its lyrical, haunting melancholy.
The language, the experience of, music, is also central to the tale. As is poetry, as Witold writes poetry to his love.
This short tale is experienced mainly through the perspective of Beatriz, wondering about the nature of love and the mystery of E. M. Forster’s injunction to “only connect.�
A master class in writing, a novella that asks you to reflect and question as much as it tells a complicated story, ...more
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