novels – Page 2 – Koba English

Shadow Speaker

Shadow Speaker was one of many, many books that got dumped on my TBR back when I had discovered that book blogs were a thing, so it’s been waiting there about as long as Bel Canto. Discussion with some friends about African mythology in Dungeons & Dragons reminded me of the book, and wouldn’t you know it was available at the library.

Shadow Speaker is set in a kind of post-apocalyptic future Niger, though civilizations in this world came out the other side more or less okay thanks to magic (or juju, to use Okorafor’s own terminology). Our protagonist, Ejii, can see in the dark and communicate with shadows (who take on a very ghost-like quality); other people can fly or control the weather. Ejii travels with a talking camel named Onion. Forests appear and disappear at random. Much of this juju seems to spring from Peace Bombs, devices set off by a radical Haitian environmental group immediately after some cataclysmic nuclear incident.

In addition to triggering juju in people and places, the Peace Bombs also did something weird to the space-time continuum, bringing it in closer contact with fantastic alien worlds. This contact has invited an escalated new threat: interplanetary war. Ginen, the world that seems to be the closest and most intimately connected with Earth, has a beautiful but delicate post-scarcity ecosystem that would be wiped out by the kind of pollution our own Earth has (so far) managed to withstand, and its desperate, reactionary leader is keen to launch a preemptive invasion to neutralize the threat.

This is the huge existential crisis that Ejii is dragged into. The chorus of shadows around her have commanded her to find the imperious Red Queen, Jaa, and join her on a diplomatic mission to Ginen. Also, as it happens, Jaa decapitated Ejii’s dictatorial father right in front of her when she was a young girl.

Nnedi Okorafor is no small potatoes author. She has a substantial body of work to her name, as well as multiple awards (including the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Eisner). But looking at the timeline, Shadow Speaker is early on in her career. It might only be her second novel, if I’m reading the timeline right? There were parts that I loved about Shadow Speaker but in the final analysis, it was just too clunky to really get into.

The good: The vibe of this book is great. Okorafor’s world is highly imaginative on multiple levels: the story requires her to establish not only a post-apocalyptic Niger, but also the rules of the a new magical system as well as the xenobiology of alien worlds. Those are a lot of plates to juggle, and on that level the book is exceptionally coherent. Everything about the setting slots together very elegantly. The world where Ejii has cat’s eyes and can talk to spirits in no way clashes with the world where interplanetary warfare looms at the threshold.

Where it falls down for me is just about everywhere else.

It’s unfortunate the original edition is out of print because I would have liked to compare the two. The most substantial change, from my understanding, is a new prologue for the latest Shadow Speaker, and it does the book a huge disservice.

In the prologue the reader encounters the Desert Magician, establishing a framing device whereby you, the reader, are a visitor in their tent and they are relaying you a story. Except not at all? There’s no reference to the framing device for the rest of the story, and then we actually meet the Desert Magician in the story being told. I didn’t think about the trainwreck of framing devices while I was reading because by that point I had forgotten about the prologue entirely, which is not great praise for the intervening pages.

But more than structural inconsistency, the prologue also sets up false expectations in terms of writing. Shadow Speaker came out in 2007 and the new edition is from 2023. The good news is that Okorafor has clearly grown as a writer, because the prologue has a sophisticated and distinctive voice throughout; the bad news is that the prologue sets the bar way too high for the rest of the writing to come.

The plot mostly seems there for the sake of the world. It’s not particularly complex and reads more like a series of disconnected episodes then an unfolding of events, where resolutions to crises have consequences that engender new crises. To name a couple:

The dramatic earthquake at the beginning of the story proper has zero ramifications for Ejii or anyone else in the village. It’s not what starts Ejii on her quest, it’s not what triggers Jaa’s departure from the village, it’s nothing. The one and only purpose it serves is to prompt a homework assignment from Ejii’s teacher that functions as a perfunctory flashback, but authorial necessity isn’t the same thing as plot necessity.

Not long after the earthquake, Ejii gets into a fight with her obnoxious half-brother. He shares their father’s views on the subjugation of women and has been needling Ejii for most of his existence thus far in the book. Like the earthquake, this altercation carries no consequences for anyone. Ejii isn’t in trouble or otherwise prevented from carrying out the quest given to her by her shadows, so the most you can say about this scene is that it establishes her character.

Ejii overhears Jaa asking her mother to take on Ejii as an apprentice, a call to action immediately made redundant by instructions from Ejii’s shadows. And while this is where Ejii first learns that Jaa plans to assassinate the leader of Ginen during the coming talks, this information in no way influences any of the decisions Ejii makes once she joins Jaa’s company. Most of the time it seems like she’s just forgotten it.

And so on, and so on. A secondary character dies tragically in a pointless conflict that functioned neither as a meaningful obstacle to characters accomplishing their goals or as a meaningful victory and development in personal growth. Things seem to happen to Ejii and her friend Dikeogu that mostly serve as fun hijinks rather than as a natural outgrowth of previous actions. It has the tone of a made-for-TV family adventure movie on 90s era Nickelodeon or Disney Channel: the children are the heroes tasked with saving the day, the immediate peril is almost non-existent, whimsy and wackiness is through the roof, the adults are forever cowed or outwitted by children.

The characters, sad to say, don’t make the plot failings easy to overlook. There is the vague shape of a character arc for Ejii—a shadow of one, if you will—but it never really takes form. The book explains to us that Ejii seems to be getting stronger and more comfortable with her powers, and more assertive and sure of herself, during her sojourn in the desert, but it’s never in relation to some incident or even effort on her part. There is an intimation that she feels bad about not being as skilled as her friends, who have had training longer than she has, but this is essentially only mentioned in passing. The challenges that Ejii faces where she’s called on to use her powers are for the most part easily surmountable and have the feeling of the tutorial level in a video game where you learn how to use a new skill. “Stand here and listen to the old man’s inner monologue. Respond appropriately. Achievement unlocked!”

Early on, the escaped slave boy Dikeogu meets Ejii and joins her on her quest, and while Okorafor is clearly trying to use Dikeogu and his backstory to explore how trauma and violent brutalization can leave permanent marks, it never lands as very nuanced (maybe a tall order when Dikeogu is never a perspective character). Mostly his interactions with Ejii introduce a lot of unnecessary screaming or shouting into the dialogue.

The adults around Ejii and Dikeogu seem like they would be compelling and interesting characters in their own stories, but obviously here they’re sidelined for the children. My ultimate conclusion is that the YA designation might have been an albatross around the book’s neck, as the weakest elements of the book seem to stem from attempts to keep it simple and superficial.

“Why are you reading YA books, then? All that stuff bugs you because you’re not the target audience, this is what kids and teens like!”

I mean, true. I just wish there was a version of Shadow Speaker that was like a hundred pages longer and that gave the story the complexity it deserved. Maybe that’s Binti?

Mord ombord (Någon ämnar mörda mig)

During peak corona days, I wandered down to an unofficial little free library someone had posted about in the neighborhood Facebook group to see what I could find. Mord ombord was one of the titles I brought back (on the basis that the title sounded like a fun murder mystery) but then I put off reading it for three years.

Now here we are!

This was the first I’d heard of American mystery writer Helen McCloy, despite several books and honors to her name. She was the first woman president of Mystery Writers and later awarded the title Grand Master by the same organization, in addition to an Edgar award for her literary criticism. Born in 1904, her mystery writing career began with the publication of Dance of Death in 1933 (or possibly 1938? I have conflicting data) and continued until her last novel, The Smoking Mirror, in 1979. She died in 1992, so I can only assume that she spent the 80s in comfortable retirement.

Mord ombord (previously published as Någon ämnar mörda mig) is the Swedish edition of McCloy’s 1947 She Walks Alone, and I have to admit that the English title isn’t nearly as punchy as the Swedish ones. I can only assume it’s a reference to this line from the book:

“Tony, did you ever hear of the Emperor Yao?”

“What on earth…?”

“He ruled China in its Golden Age. There is a saying about the peacefulness of his reign. ‘In the days of the Emperor Yao, a virgin with a bag of gold could walk alone from one end of the Empire to the other without fear of being molested.’ Since then, times have changed.”

The murders in question unfold on a ship from a fictional Caribbean country en route to New York. One of the passengers has been killed by a bite from the bushmaster snake under transport before the first port of call, where the ship’s captain brings the matter to the book’s detective, police captain Miguel Urizar. After a brief investigation, the coroner urges Urizar to declare the death an accident, but on a hunch Urizar decides to board the ship for the rest of its journey under the pretext of taking a vacation. This section closes with another death, after which the book skips ahead to give an account of some of the passengers’ whereabouts after docking in New York.

At stake in all of this is a package of $100,000 that everyone on board has reason to want to steal. But who’s willing to murder for it?

She Walks Alone has a somewhat unusual structure. It opens with a substantial first-person perspective, in the form of a letter “meant to be read in the case of my violent death.” This is the letter presented to Ulizar by the ship’s captain in the second section of the book and prompts his investigation into the matter. We follow Ulizar until the second death, at which point the narrative switches to a second letter, and then it ends in another third-person perspective for the parlor scene, which is satisfyingly enough set in an actual parlor.

These changes in perspective not only ratchet up the tension (McCloy knows how to write a cliffhanger!) but also contribute to the mystery itself. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that the shifting boundaries of what is knowable to the reader at any point in time play a decisive role in the mystery. It’s all very natural, however, and doesn’t feel particularly gimmicky.

She Walks Alone is still in print and readily available, one edition in 2014 from the now-defunct imprint Murder Room and another from Agora Books as part of their 2020 “Uncrowned Queens of Crime” series. In their own words:

While Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh have held their own against the men of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in both sales and acclaim, most average readers rarely venture beyond the four queens. If classic crime ‘best of’ lists are packed full with a variety of men, it shouldn’t be so challenging to find more than just a handful of brilliant crime-writing women.

Agora believes there are female authors from this era whose heads still sit uncrowned. From discussions with the readers of its Crime Classics community to scouring historical libraries and coastal secondhand bookshops, the publisher has uncovered a few women worthy of the title.

But my copy wasn’t one of the new paperbacks; it was a Swedish hardcover edition from 1954 put out by Tidens bokklubb, translated by Erik Wilhelm Olson, about whom there is little to say. He was a literature and film critic for Svenska dagbladet, wrote several novels (I think novels?) and short story collections, wrote and directed a short film in the 1920s, and translated crime fiction into Swedish. His biography on Runeberg.org includes his portrait, so here you go:

Based on the language of the translation and the publication date, I would note some of-the-time racial terminology (which is, if memory serves, almost exclusively in the first-person perspectives and comes across as characterization more than anything else). But McCloy also clearly has some nuanced understanding of “the race issue” (as I assume she phrases it in English, based on the Swedish) in the US and presents the matter and her characters of color sympathetically. It’s hard to comment on the quality of the translation without having read the original, but I can at least say that I enjoyed it. As a writer and critic, it’s natural to assume that Olson had a good sense for what works.

I’ve deliberately avoided going into too much detail here because I think this is a fun, clever mystery and I’d rather prompt someone to pick it up and read it for themselves than pick it apart here and ruin the mystery. The clues are subtle, but they’re all there: this is a whodunit in the “the reader has all the tools to figure it out themselves” tradition. And while yes, Raymond Chandler, “the ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing,” there’s always an element of fun that’s ruined in a mystery when someone’s spoiled the ending for you—no matter how good everything around the mystery is.

Bel Canto

Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto was a long-time TBR resident based on reviews I had read in book blogs, which means I added it sometime around 2014? 2015? and then finally read it in 2024. I would scroll past its cover now and again, debating if I was really still interested in reading it, but every time it made the cut.

Now I’m not sure if it was worth it.

An unnamed Latin American country invites a prominent Japanese businessman to celebrate his birthday and hopes, by feting him with a world-famous operatic soprano, to encourage his investment in the country. A guerilla paramilitary group breaks into the party, hoping to kidnap the president, and when they realize he’s not there, they take the entire birthday party hostage instead. The hostage situation drags on for something like four and half months, until it’s brought to an abrupt and tragic end. Minor spoilers undoubtedly follow, but I’m deliberately avoiding what I consider the real showstoppers.

Bel Canto was already going in at a disadvantage because I read it as an ebook. I’m not trying to be a print purist; in fact I’m grateful for the many advantages of ebooks! I can bring a near-infinite library with me in my pocket when I travel (or end up unexpectedly hospitalized), I can continue to patronize my US library from overseas, I can keep up with time-sensitive publications without running out of shelf space. However, I also know that my focus can suffer with ebooks, especially with Patchett’s style of writing: slow, reflective, internalized. Format was undoubtedly a contributing factor to my overall negative experience of the book. But even if I had read the book in print, there were several authorial decisions that would have still broken immersion for me.

The biggest unforced error out of all of these was conflating translators with interpreters for the entire book. (Translators work with the written word, interpreters work with the spoken word.) One of the main characters is Gen, an interpreter for the Japanese guest of honor who ends up interpreting for the entire collection of hostages and guerillas thanks to his facility with some half a dozen languages: Japanese, English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, maybe others. I realize that people often use the words “interpreter” and “translator” interchangeably (or rather, just use “translator” for everything), and from any of the other characters this usage wouldn’t have bothered me at all. But any interpreter I’ve ever known has always made a point of 1) thinking of themselves as an interpreter privately as a matter of vocational identity, 2) calling themselves an interpreter when discussing themselves and their career with others, and 3) correcting people who call them translators. Spending a whole novel with an interpreter who thinks of himself as a translator, and calls himself a translator, and sees absolutely nothing wrong with being referred to as a translator, broke immersion for me.

A couple of smaller, fuzzier details that rang weird for me had to do with the Swedish accompanist. His death from diabetic coma checks out (source: my Type 1 diabetic brother), but his name—Christopf—is well weird. Of course, since the hostage situation was based on the Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Peru and the soprano was based on Karol Bennett, for all I know Christopf is also based on someone else Patchett knew in real life and I will put my foot in my mouth by criticizing his name as unrealistic. I’ll just point out that there are zero hits for “Christopf” on either Hitta.se or Ratsit.se, which goes to show how widespread the name is in Sweden. There was also an offhand description of Swedish that initially struck me as odd, but upon rereading I’m willing to retract the criticism.*

That said!

It did make me more critically reflect on how Patchett describes the other languages in the book and there is a dodgy, hand-wavy ambiguity about how they’re described—even from the perspective of Gen, the gifted interpreter—that lacks the specificity of someone who feels comfortable speaking them. It’s unfortunate that this hand-waving is set up against the clear familiarity that Patchett has with opera. And if Patchett is comfortably fluent in any of those languages, then it’s even more unfortunate because she comes off as the exact opposite.

Speaking of the opera, it’s time to bring up one of my least favorite tropes: the healing power of music.

It’s maybe surprising that I would be annoyed by this trope since I’m a music person (see: the violin feels from Light From Uncommon Stars), but I would argue that it’s actually not at all surprising. It is the direct opposite of my lived experience that most people have the breathless, awestruck response to classical music that the characters in Bel Canto have. Of course there are opera lovers present at the party, and of course they love Coss’s voice, but Patchett imbues this soprano with an unearthly quality that entrances everyone present, including the guerillas holding them captive.

Or maybe I just have alto (contralto? tenor? my vocal range is sad) beef because sopranos already get all the love.

Anyway, I’d be willing to overlook those things but for one larger, underlying issue: MFA fiction.

A bookish friend and I have taken to using “MFA fiction” as a shorthand for a particular kind of overrated novel that I’m finding it difficult to describe now except: the purpose of MFA fiction is to show you, the reader, how enlightened the author is. Not just smart, necessarily. Not just educated. But also how emotionally transcendent they are. The narrative tone carries “a certain kind of false timidity” (to quote my friend), a self-conscious restraint and ironic distance. Outline is another great example of what we both consider MFA fiction. I think a lot of literary prizewinners are populated by this kind of writing because the judges like to think of themselves as equally enlightened beings.

Of course, I don’t have any specific illustrative quotes to present here, just “the vibe.” At this point I’ve totally failed at death of the author. Most of this review, most of my response to this book, is more or less based on what I assume Patchett’s motivations and background and intent to be, rather than the text on its own. The cool thing is that I’m just writing for this weirdo little blog and so it’s perfectly acceptable for me to fail at death of the author! Sorry Ann Patchett, you’re a more accomplished writer than I’ll ever be and I’m sure you’re a lovely person, but Bel Canto wasn’t doing it for me.

*Minus points for Gen learning Swedish from Bergman movies, though. It’s a cliche unworthy of what Patchett is attempting here.

La Vengeance m’appartient: Review

Marie NDiaye’s La Vengeance m’appartient came into my life following a positive review in Karavan (which I’m very var behind in my reading!). I had the good fortune to find it in my top three languages: the original French, and then translations in Swedish and English. I have enough thoughts there that I think they would detract from talking about the novel qua novel, so that’s a separate post.

While Maître Susane has risen from the working class to become a lawyer, she’s not quite the picture of unmitigated success that her friends and family assume her to be. After leaving a larger, much more prestigious firm to start her own practice, Maître Susane has struggled financially, taking on banal cases that only just barely cover her bills. All of this has the potential to change when Gilles Principaux walks into her office and asks her to represent his wife, Marlyne, who is currently awaiting trial for the murder of their three children. This would be an incredibly high profile case and the first major one since Maître Susane started her own practice.

There is a catch, of course. Maître Susane believes to recognize in Gilles a certain influential teenager from her youth. One fateful day, at the age of ten, she accompanied her mother in her work as a cleaning lady, and spent the afternoon in the bedroom of the family’s teenage son. Much of what happened that day is lost down the memory hole, including the name of the family, but Maître Susane firmly believes that whatever it was set her on the path to becoming a lawyer.

What happened that day? Was it Gilles that Maître Susane encountered, or someone else?

Alongside all of this, Maître Susane is also negotiating a complicated relationship with her own cleaning lady (a not insignificant expense that she can barely afford), an undocumented worker from Mauritius named Sharon. Maître Susane is desperate for Sharon’s approval, maybe even her friendship, to the point of growing resentful when her advances are rebuffed. The relationship is only further complicated when Maître Susane volunteers Sharon as a babysitter for her beloved goddaughter Lila.

As Maître Susane prepares Marlyne Principaux’s defense, the rest of her life spins out of control. Her parents, distressed at her renewed fixation on what happened that day in her childhood, eventually cut off contact with her; Sharon reveals that she has been taking Lila with her to other cleaning jobs during the day, including the elderly widow Principaux (perhaps the same Principaux?) and Maître Susane is convinced that the girl is suffering; even her own memory of recent events starts playing tricks on her (or are the people in her life trying to deceive her?).

There is a lot to unpack in this book and quite frankly I don’t think I’m capable of it (writing two weeks or so after I finished reading it). I loved this book and my review cannot do it justice, but I’ll try anyway.

In a way, La Vengeance m’appartient has a lot of the trappings of noir, even though I don’t think it could be strictly classified as such. Psychological thriller? Raymond Chandler once claimed that “the ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing” and that’s what you get here. None of those seemingly urgent questions in the above summary are answered conclusively; we are presented with a life in turmoil that is only partially resolved by the end of the story. The point is not the meticulously pieced together mystery but rather the externalization of the subtle dramas and tensions of interpersonal relationships. The chaos that Gilles introduces in Maître Susane’s life had really already taken root inside of her long ago. She seeks approval and understanding from everyone—from her parents, from the teenage maybe-Principaux, from her ex (and father of her goddaughter), from Sharon, from Lila—and fails to obtain it anywhere.

Maître Susane is, in the parlance of our times, “hashtag ‘relateable.'” Her ambivalent relationship with her parents—simultaneously yearning to unburden her heart to them while also sensing that they would only be equally ambivalent about such a confession—is a familiar one, likewise her demanding urges with Sharon. On one level Maître Susane is magnanimous and forward thinking with Sharon: she is handling Sharon’s visa case for free, she pays her fairly and on time, she doesn’t have excessive demands in terms of labor. But she also clearly expects to be repaid for these favors with a more personal relationship, thereby crowning her (and here I’m using my own phrasing, not NDiaye’s) a Good Ally TM.

Part of the reason La Vengeance m’appartient might have been such an experience for me was that I read much of it while I was visiting my own parents, so I was already swimming in all those kinds of feelings already. Now that I’m well into adulthood, am I living up to my parents’ expectations for me? Their hopes? Am I even living up to my own? Maître Susane and I are around the same age, after all. There are absolutely biographical reasons that I was so taken with this book. But regardless, NDiaye touches on a lot of contemporary suffering and struggles with a deft, elegant hand.

Summer

I have a vague memory of being recommended Ali Smith’s Summer last year by a friend of a friend who teaches English at the university level, but my memory of his recommendation (“It’s like the book version of what we’re doing right now, people having conversations just like this”) so misaligns with what happens in the book that I wonder if I missed something. Or maybe Summer ended up on my TBR for other reasons and the English professor’s recommendation was something else entirely. I also learned, long after I finished it, that Summer is the last of a quartet and that several of the characters had appeared in the previous installments.

Basically, I came in to this book all wrong, so this is going to be an extremely…unfair? confused? unhelpful?…review for anyone who actually has the full context for the book. Sorry.

A pair of siblings—teenage environmental activist Sacha and her proto-edgelord younger brother Robert—end up befriending a pair of adults and, along with their mother, make a quick trip in a post-Brexit, mid-Covid England to return a lost/stolen item to its rightful owner. Based on what I’ve read in other reviews, most of what happens in Summer builds on stories and characters established in the previous three books and maybe? maybe not? ties up some loose ends.

Despite my clearly misguided expectations, I really liked Summer. Smith balances a relatively large cast of characters well, keeping their internal monologues consistent with how they’ve behaved from other character’s perspectives.

Mostly.

There is a missed opportunity with Sacha and Robert’s mother, the sole Leave voter in the group: when the book comes around to her perspective, Smith doesn’t really bother to speculate her motivations or feelings about Brexit and that feels like a cheap out. Its absence is made even more noticeable when you consider how much time we spend with Robert, who is currently acting out through extremely anti-social behavior.

On the whole, though, the different perspective characters feel distinct. Sometimes authors love the sound of their own voice a little too much and when they attempt an ensemble cast, characters lose all personality when it’s their turn to pilot the ship. Even if everyone has more or less similar politics (Brexit aside), Smith avoids that particular trap.

People who had read the previous three note in their reviews that Covid seems shoehorned in based on everything else, but I didn’t really walk away thinking “wow those lockdown bits were a bit tacked-on and weird,” so perhaps that’s an advantage of coming at the book from the completely wrong angle.

My only criticism, which is perhaps more of a reflection on me and the kind of person I am, is that I felt a bit manipulated by the inclusion of Vietnamese refugee Anh Kiệt. The parallels to the internment of “enemy aliens” in the UK during World War II are enlightening and fair to make, and I don’t begrudge Smith that point at all. However, Anh Kiệt himself gets pretty limited time in the story. Sacha writes to him twice throughout the book (and we see both pieces of correspondence) and we get to read his single reply to her, full of enthusiasm and optimism and hope, in the somewhat limited and uneven language you would expect from someone who acquired English informally and later in life. As far as character development goes, it’s not much, and it comes off as romanticized and idealized. His reply to Sacha is the last chapter of the book, which on the one hands lends it some gravitas, but that doesn’t make it any less flat. For comparison’s sake, the flashbacks to the World War II internments are longer (probably, though I didn’t go back and count up the pages, but they feel longer) and through the perspective of a character with fluent command of English, so his depiction is a bit more detailed and multifaceted. Never mind that this character apparently is the central figure in one of the previous books.

My initial reaction to finishing Summer, with Anh Kiệt’s optimism and nearly Pollyanna spirit, was to get a bit choked up at the goodness of the world and the undaunted spirit of hope etc. etc. Then I got annoyed at myself for getting choked up, because in a book full of research this is still fiction and who’s to say if Anh Kiệt ever existed. It’s the same “too good for this world” characterization of Ali from Där vinden vilar, but the book situates Ali so thoroughly in his community that it’s easy to read this idealized teenager as the hopes and desires of a family, of a village, of a country. Anh Kiệt doesn’t have much of a pre-refugee identity or status, so he feels like a narrative device cynically designed to elicit a reaction out of me, and I hate that in a book.

On the other hand, I read L’elegance du herisson and cried at the end all three times, so I like to think I’m not entirely heartless. What makes it effective there but cynical in Summer? I guess the answer is: the time I spent with the characters in question. We spend a lot of time with Renée in L’elegance du herisson since she’s one of the point of view characters. The same, even, with Ali in Där vinden vilar. But Anh Kiệt only gets his single chapter at the very end.

Or maybe the problem is me.

Soul Mountain

I picked up Gao Xingjiang’s doorstopper from the “leave a book, take a book” library at a hostel in Beijing in 2010. After a couple of half-hearted starts, I finally read it in 2024.

One more for the reading stats!

I liked the pointlessness of it all, how Soul Mountain is basically a collection of stuff without much of a structure and no plot to speak of. I liked the split of “I”/”you” perspectives, I liked a lot of the descriptions of the landscapes. It’s the kind of book I can easily return to again and again: there’s so much rich imagery, reflections, descriptions to get lost in, without having to keep all the threads of plot or character relationships straight because there are none!

I clearly tilt towards books that are thinky thoughts interspersed with nature and travel writing.

What I liked less was how Gao can’t seem to get beyond objectifying women any time they turn up. Either the male narrator (text makes it very clear that “I” and “you” are both men, so even with death of the author etc. I’m comfortable slotting this into “problems of the male gaze”) finds a woman attractive but childish or otherwise laughable, or he finds her unattractive and morally repugnant. Regardless, her sex appeal or lack thereof never goes unremarked. A recurring “she” who is part of the “you” chapters gets this the worst: she starts out as attractive and charming, but as things progress she turns more and more impulsive, childish, and petulant.

Who hurt you, Gao?

I would love to know how translator Mabel Lee felt about those moments in the text, how she thought about translating them, if she thought about them at all. I wonder if women in Gao’s other work fare any better than they do in Soul Mountain.

Mumbo Jumbo

Ishmael Reed managed to escape my attention until someone mentioned his play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda in a podcast I was listening to. In lieu of being able to see it staged (I guess I could still read it…), I added his novel Mumbo Jumbo to my TBR. However many years later, I found a copy of it at a bookstore in Chicago. (Not the same one where I found Refuse to Be Done, for anyone keeping track at home.)

The Knights Templar, along with the fictional Wallflower Order, are at work during the 1920s to stop a virus called “Jes Grew,” originating in Black culture and music, that leads to a sense of euphoria uncontrollable dancing. Working against them is PaPa LaBas, a Vodou priest on the trail of a MacGuffin that, united with the virus, will bring an unprecedented new age of freedom and human expression. The Knights, of course, want this MacGuffin destroyed. In the end LaBas is unsuccessful, but fifty years later LaBas is confident that a new opportunity to bring Jes Grew and another iteration of the MacGuffin together is waiting just around the corner, noting that several cultural trends of the 70s are identical or similar to the ones that gave rise to the virus in the 20s.

That summary does a huge disservice to the book, though, since all of that plot is really there as a vehicle for satire and social commentary. It reads a lot like the Illuminatus! trilogy, or what I remember of it anyway, except I never felt like Illuminatus! should have been part of my literary education. In that sense, Mumbo Jumbo has more meat on its bones. It’s another title for my list of “books that I am surprised (not really) were never assigned reading,” which started with No-No Boy in 2017.

Där vinden vilar

Out of all the books I’ve read in my life, in all the places, Samar Yazbek‘s Där vinden vilar was the first to have me so engrossed that I missed my stop on the subway. Maybe that’s really the only review I need to write.

A young soldier in the Syrian civil war has been grievously injured by friendly fire. Ali’s struggle to reach the shelter of a nearby tree is interspersed with flashbacks to important people and moments of his short life. The lyrical translation from Marie Anell paints a vivid picture of a dreamy and mystical young man with a deep reverence for nature, completely ill-suited for the battlefield. Yazbek also uses this limited perspective to depict dictatorships from a grassroots, ground-up perspective.

If there’s any criticism to be made, you could argue that Ali is deliberately crafted to have the maximal emotional impact; to be the perfect war casualty. He is just too kind, too innocent to be anything but deeply sympathetic. The comparison to Frère d’âme is a natural one to make here, given their similar topics and structures. In Frère, however, it seems like Diop makes at least some effort to present unsavory or off-putting aspects of Alfa’s character alongside his more admirable traits. As a result he ends up as a perhaps more realistic, or at least more typical, teenage boy.

But I think if Yazbek had taken the same approach, it would have landed very differently, potentially undermining the point of the book. In a way, Ali is less of a character and more of a symbol, a way to link the anonymous violence of the battlefield to the people and the communities it devastates. He’s the best parts of everyone’s lost son, the physical embodiment of the collective hope a village or town has for their young people, the perfect angel doting parents see in their children. Alfa’s story is about himself; Ali’s story is about the people around him.

Singulariteten

Balsam Karam is my most recent Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: I first heard of her when an Internet associate announced that he had been invited to host a panel discussion called “Read the World,” with Karam as one of the guests, at the Fold literary festival. Not long after that, a précis by Karam about Brazilian author Jeferson Tonorio was featured in the issue of Karavan I was reading at the time. Then when skimming the events for Litteraturmässan I saw that she would holding a talk with Peter Englund about the role and potential of libraries. Three points make a line and all of that.

I looked up Karam as soon as I learned she wrote in Swedish, always trying to fight the inertia to read books in English by default. If the timestamps in Discord conversations are anything to go by, then, I’ve been working on Singulariteten since February 20. I have Händelsehorisonten on deck, too, but Singulariteten was just so much that I might admit defeat with Händelsehorisonten for the moment and save it for later.

Singulariteten is a tale told backwards, starting at the end of two stories, two lives. The paths of two nameless women cross, briefly, along a trendy corniche in the tourist district of an unnamed country recently emerged from (or perhaps still intermittently engaged in) sectarian violence. One of the women is a mother in search of her missing daughter; the other is a pregnant tourist who witnesses the first woman’s suicide. Later, back home, she has a miscarriage. Out of this intersection unfolds lifetimes of loss and trauma, as the rest of the book looks back to tell each story in its entirety. The whole thing is so grim and heavy that I was surprised when the living, breathing Karam in the discussion on stage was light, breezy, quick to laugh and quick to make jokes. Serious emotional whiplash.

Which is not to say that Singulariteten was so dour and joyless that I didn’t enjoy it; I came out the other end with a sense of satisfaction and catharsis (Aristotle would be pleased). This was due in part to the dense, complex language that forced me to read passages multiple times and to construct little sentence diagrams in my head, so all credit to English translator Saskia Vogel for excellent work. This isn’t Karam’s first novel, but thanks to Vogel it’s the first available in English.

The topic matter does prompt reflection over the kinds of novels we expect from certain kinds of authors. I want to say that there’s a James Baldwin essay, perhaps his own commentary on Giovanni’s Room, on the limitations of being expected on certain topics (in Baldwin’s case, racial discourse) simply by virtue of a facet of one’s identity (race), but maybe that essay doesn’t exist. Maybe I’m thinking of (and misremembering) “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Unsure. But there is a tension for me because I can’t help wondering: for a Kurdish author like Karam, do publishers, reviewers, readers expect a certain kind of book? If Karam had instead written an easy read feel-good romance, would it still have been published? (I have every confidence that it still would have been good.) Or do themes of being marginalized, racialized, and elsewise Othered have a demonstrably limited appeal to a mainstream audience that mean they get scrubbed down and sanitized? (Thinking again of Giovanni’s Room, which Baldwin was advised to burn lest it alienate his audience.)

Nell Irvin Painter to the rescue, with this essay for LitHub that I got in my inbox this morning but that is not yet available on their website.

I asked: who can I and we write about when I and we are Black authors? Those accomplished authors I mentioned [Imani Perry, Honorée Fanon Jeffers, and Zora Neale Hurston] wrote about Black people, and Black people and race in America are the subjects of virtually every book by a Black author of fiction, of nonfiction, and of journalism. I’m tempted to conclude that literary convention limits Black authors to a limited range of subject matter. Yes, there’s infinite variety within the realm of Blackness. Yet still, Black people only.

Painter is describing an English-language publishing industry with an American audience, but I think there are parallels to be made with Sweden. In the end I suppose I just have to trust in the fact that Singulariteten demonstrably exists, and take the book as proof of the fact that Karam wanted to write a story, any story at all, and accept that speculation about how that story may or may not have been crafted according to particular expectations from her publishers as unknowable and therefore irrelevant.

Homeboy

I summarized my “acute TBR” a few weeks ago thusly:

the English translation of Frère d’âme, Homeboy (borrowed from a bookish friend), Händelsehorisonten and Singulariteten (ahead of another bookish acquaintance’s panel moderation with author Balsam Karam in May), and a pair of niche but mercifully brief Swedish reference books before a test in October (and ideally before a third English reference book arrives sometime next month).

Since then I have finished Frère d’âme, one of those Swedish reference books, and that third English reference book. And now Seth Morgan’s Homeboy! Will I wrap up the acute TBR before my trip to the US rolls around in May? Who knows!

This particular entry on the acute TBR was more acute than I realized at the time. By the time this post goes up, the book’s owner will be en route back to the UK, unlikely to return to Sweden again. I could have returned it to him unfinished, of course, and eventually procured my own copy. Or I could have held on to it and returned it on a future visit—a bold move on my part, but I know I would have followed through. Nothing wrong with either of those!

But Homeboy wasn’t just any recommendation—it was one that came up in a conversation about what I term “bagel books,” books that you like so much you simultaneously want to tear through them as quickly as possible and never want to keep reading because you don’t want them to be over. A bagel book is a very particular, almost hallowed kind of recommendation. Being able to spend a friend’s farewell party talking to him about one of his own bagel books was therefore an appropriate and meaningful send-off.

Personal circumstances aside, Homeboy is also an interesting work from a historical? biographical? perspective, the only novel from the man who was Janis Joplin’s fiancé at the time of her death. That’s the other reason I was keen to get into the book, even though by all accounts Morgan and Joplin had a really dysfunctional relationship. You could make an argument that Morgan was a contributing factor in her overdose, even, but that’s neither here nor there. This isn’t about my weirdly in-depth knowledge of Janis Joplin’s biography, it’s a book review!

In my farewell party extemporaneous analysis, I described Homeboy as a mash-up of Elmore Leonard and Jack Kerouac, though my friend didn’t entirely agree, so take that with a grain of salt. The plot centers around the theft of a rare diamond, the Blue Jager Moon, from pimp Baby Jewels Moses by protagonist Joe Speaker, and everyone’s subsequent attempts to recover it. Joe wants to eventually move it and get clean; Moses wants it for blackmail material over a judge on the California State Supreme Court; Officer Tarzon needs it as evidence to put Moses away and complete his own private revenge.

There’s a lot more than that going on, but reading it in summary isn’t the same thing as reading the book itself. Homeboy has an ensemble cast of street life characters who all have assorted arcs, rises and downfalls interwoven with the main Blue Jager Moon narrative. Morgan also has a knack for the right kind of details that make even one-off side characters instantly distinctive, like dealer Rigo La Barba:

Rigo La Barba slumped on the nod in the crushedvelvet front seat of his ’62 Impala lowrider at the corner of Sixth and Mission. He was called La Barba, the Beard, after his carefully groomed goatee.

Next to the highgrade chiva he dealt, La Barba was proudest of his lowrider. It had jeweled vanity mirrors attached to the sun visors, a miniature crystal chandelier in place of the dome light, a goldplated chain steering wheel, and, next to the ivory Virgin atop the minklined dash, a keyboard on which he could play “Besame Mucho,” “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” or, more to the point, “Chinga Tu Madre,” according to his cholofied caprice. Over twentyeight handrubbed coats of topaxflake lacquer, sequined rococo script announced La Barba’s philosophy on one rear fender: Low ‘n’ Slow; and on the other he christened his chrome galleon Crystal Blue Persuasion.

Joe hits up La Barba once for some heroin and that’s it. We never meet La Barba again.

The whole thing is great fun and imbued with a surprising amount of pathos; I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t been turned into a movie yet, given the break-neck pace and the visuals, both comic and gory. Speaking of which, there is a fair amount of casual gore, and in fact a fare amount of casual just-about-everything. A good chunk of the story is set in prison, and when we’re not in prison we’re following the progress of pimps, hired goons, or sex workers, so it’s a lot. The two things worth mentioning are:

Someone could probably write an essay on Baby Jewels Moses and anti-Semitic tropes. Is it so cartoonish and over the top that it circles back to become lampshade and subversion? Is it just Problematic? I’m not equipped to answer these questions.
Someone could a probably write another essay on gender and sexuality in prison culture as depicted in Homeboy. The “queens” in the prison are central characters to some of the later events and fellow prisoners are mostly untroubled by their gender presentation. The AIDS epidemic also looms large in portions of the novel, with sympathetic rather than terrified undertones.

A fun, meaty book. A bagel book, even.