The Beautiful Struggle – 5/5 Stars
I never taught in Baltimore City, but I did teach in Baltimore County, where Ta-Nehisi Coates spends part of high school. (I was two schools over, but the idea was pretty much the same there). So the result is some familiarity here. If I ever met Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think what I would want to tell him is when I was brand new to Baltimore, so when I scheduled my meeting with the MVA (DMV) I went to the Mondawmin Mall location, where things did not go as planned.
Coates writes this earnest and touching and at times even sweet, and at others rough memoir about growing up with his father. His father was a former Black Panther who lost favor with the national organization, but still believed in the cause. This meant that he was incredibly well-read and knowledagable and thoughtful about what America is and what it means to be Black in America. Separate from this, he was a man who….hmmmm….there’s no real nice way to put it….focused equally as much attention on women as he did anything else. But this was combined with a sense of responsibility and loyalty. So Coates grows up with several half-siblings.
The memoir splits its time between Coates and his brother (one family) and their dealings with school, girls, the law, etc and that of his father and mother, who have their own fractured history. It’s an earnest and honest memoir that goes after some truth, and it’s a quietly beautiful rendering of a childhood and adolescence.
Buck – 4/5 Stars
There’s a scene in the middle of this memoir by MK Asante where he finds his mother’s diary and reads through parts of it. This moment becomes a last straw kind of moment between the two of them as he’s been taking a dark path in his life further and further. But for the memoir, and what I can only assume is a reckoning and a reconsiliation when he’s older this diary becomes a counter melody to the main story here. MK Asante grew up in Philadelphia, and when he was an adolescent his brother is sent away to Arizona to live with an uncle as a way to give the family some breathing space. This is a kind of traumatic irruption in Asante’s life (to say nothing of his brother’s) and creates further problems when his brother is arrested for statutory rape. His brother claims that the girl lied about her age, but regardless, he’s 17, and she’s 13 and the state of Arizona tries and convicts him. He’s sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Asante spirals out from this in further ways. The various traumas pile up and his life becomes a push and pull of high energy manic-almost episodes and a sense of an impending crash at some point in the future. This leads us back to the diary. Here we get that other narrative not to cast doubt necessarily Asante’s poetic prose, but to add a structure to it as well. His mother is going through her own kind of spiral but still provides an adult’s sense of things. Asante’s prose is consistently written from a ground-view of being a kid, and this is both it’s biggest strength here, but also limits what we can directly know.
There’s some playing around with memories that couldn’t quite line up and there’s at least factual error that feels a little off, but it’s a strong memoir.
Guerilla Warfare – 3/5 Stars
I mean I don’t even really know what I could possibly say about this. I live in a country and inhabit a body/identity that is much more likely to be on the receiving end of guerrilla warfare (and has been in the last 70 years), so there’s not a whole lot I can say about this book that offers up much in terms of a fair or resonable critique. It’s interesting to me how very specific it is in the details of structure and supply lines — it reads like an army manual.
It’s also interesting how straightforward this book is about indoctrination and propaganda as a tool. As US citizen, we like our propaganda hidden and not talked about, thank you very much!
Consider This – 3/5 Stars
A series of short essays and moments cobbled together from public readings, writing workshops, and other writing adventures by Chuck Palahniuk in the form of writing advice. This is a several steps up from a book like “Save the Cat”, which is perfectly instructive, and by admission of Palahniuk himself several steps down from John Gardner’s “On Writing Moral Fiction”. The advice in this book seems positioned to take would-be writers and give them the push they need. He begins with a warning for everyone to not become a writer and spends a lot of the book cataloging the help and lucky breaks he got along the way, highlighting among other things that help he got and the ways his which his very nature, something that can’t be emulated, positioned him. The advice is perfectly good, and clearly geared toward the type of writing that Palahniuk is known for, and if that appeals to you, here you go.
Gerald’s Party – 3/5 Stars
This book is kind of Robert Altman film by way of JG Ballard, if that sounds appealing. Specifically we are Gerald’s birthday party. He’s around forty, friends and family have gathered, there’s drinking, and smoking, and flirting and hints at affairs. There’s also a murder immediately, in the first line that is, and a police investigation, and then several more murders, and a lot of performing. In fact the whole book is a straight performance of post-modern structure and playful momentum. It’s most like books like Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World (which came after) and High Rise (which came before) as well as some plenty other influences and influenced.
Snow Country – 4/5 Stars
One of the things that hampers my understanding of the world is how class functions. I get “class” in terms of economics and in terms of the vulgar trappings of it, but I will forever remain a Daisy Miller who doesn’t understand the deep architecture of class when it comes to an actual-existing aristocracy or former one. This book explores a “doomed” romance between a man and a geisha, who tries to hide being a geisha for the longest time. One of the other things that’s lost on me — less so an American but as a 21st century fellow — is how a relationship that barely gets established can doom anyone in any real capacity. I am not claiming it doesn’t make sense, only that the real sense of feeling and understanding it passes me by.
Thousand Cranes – 3/5 Stars
One storyline that Kawabata often returns to is old man and young woman, and especially where a man has had an affair with a woman when he was young, and then years later, has an affair with a young woman, often associated in some way with that older woman. It’s interesting how old world this feels (in terms of literature) and how unfortunately universal of an idea it seems to be of older men trying to reclaim their youth. That’s not to say that Kawabata’s novel allow this to happen very smoothly that is.
Beauty and Sadness – 5/5 Stars
A writer goes back to meet up with a woman he once had a short-lived affair with. This affair happened when they were both quite young, but she was 16 at the time and ended up getting pregnant and ultimately not having the baby. Then, as happens, he wrote a novel about the experience which became his most well-known novel. When he finds her, she’s reticent to see him, but also she’s the madam of a famous geisha house now, and then this presents a possibility. A young protege of hers decides that she’s going to lure the man in and get the best of him. Things don’t go well.
This is very simple in its presentation (in a deceptive way) but the story at the heart of it is complex. It’s also a novel (like a lot of Kawabata) that feels much older than it ultimately is.
The Man Who Watched the Train Go By – 3/5 Stars
A short Simenon novel that is and isn’t a mystery about a man who is slowly coming to the understanding that he’s wasted his life and might just want out.
The Mahe Circle – 3/5 Stars
A short Simenon novel that is and isn’t a mystery about a man who is slowly coming to the understanding that he’s wasted his life and might just want out.
The Engagement – 3/5 Stars
A short Simenon novel that is and isn’t a mystery about a man who is slowly coming to the understanding that he’s wasted his life and might just want out.
The Hand – 3/5 Stars
A short Simenon novel that is and isn’t a mystery about a man who is slowly coming to the understanding that he’s wasted his life and might just want out.
Williwaw – 4/5 Stars
Gore Vidal’s first novel, which he begain we he was 17 or so and a fresh recruit to the navy, involves a small naval vessel patrolling the Aleutian Islands in the months or so before the second world war. The title comes from a certain kind of weather event, a strong wind storm combined with snow, that doesn’t tend to last very long, but still can cause a lot of damage. The book itself is about the various crew members of the ship, but especially the tense relationship between a young enlisted man and a veteran noncom officer. This relationship falls apart over an argument about a local prostitute and a lot of toxic mansculinity. When this comes to a head, the coming storm will raise some important questions about the right way to deal with the resulting conflict.
The Double Helix – 3/5 Stars
I feel like in high school biology every one was required at some point to watch the Jeff Goldblum adaptation of this book, from which I can only remember one thing, Jeff Goldblum riding a bicycle, a gif of which almost certainly would have the same appeal as the Kermit riding a bicycle one.
This book tells the story of James Watson and Francis Crick winning the Nobel Prize for creating the well-known double helix model for the structure of DNA. Starting by taking the book where it is, this is the story of Watson as a wayward postdoc jumping from project to project to grab whatever funding he could. This also means picking up and putting whatever skills and expertises that those differing degrees would require as well. He even at one point considers going back and getting a PhD in Chemistry as well. All the while poor Francis Crick can’t quite finish his first.
The meat of the book is the pursuit of the correct model, with a kind of momentum pushing at them from Linus Pauling’s similar search. Watson and Crick are the heroes here, and Pauling is seen as a good natured adversary, who very graciously accepts defeat. He would also go on to win two Nobels on his own, so he’s not complaining.
Also not complaining is poor Rosalind Franklin who is almost entirely left out of the book except as a thorn in the side of the researchers. She correctly doesn’t want to work with the fratboy Watson, not because the work isn’t vital, but because a) it’s not really her field and b) he’s unprofessional and rude to her (and clearly a gloryhound). There’s a more or less generous afterword trying to apologize for the tendentious nature of their relationship, but she’s dead at this point so it doesn’t really help her.
The Promise – 4/5 Stars
The recent Booker Prize winner by the South African writer Damon Galgut begins with a dying white matriarch making a promise to her Black housewoman. This promise, that when she dies, one of the house on the compound will becomes the housewoman’s, is overheard by the dying woman’s young woman. After the death, amid the chaos, the daughter tells her father about the promise. He doesn’t really take it on. She also tells the housewoman and her son, her brother, and a few others. This promise doesn’t come to fruition.
In the succeeding years, the family does what families do, live, split apart, come back together, and fracture even further. One of the truths of 20th and 21st century life is the disillution of old institutions when they no longer remain profitable or useful. Families are often one of these. The novel follows us into the older middle age of that young daughter and the question remains throughout the book of what happens to a promise deferred, especially one’s written in dying breaths.
The book has incredibly strong writing that sometimes offers little by way of footholds for the reader. There’s a kind of impressionistic quality to a lot of this book, and the result is a kind of airiness. You might also be senstive to the idea of a book written about race and racial dynamics between Blacks and Whites, especially in a country like South Africa, but I do think it works here to some significant degree.
The Crazy Kill – 4/5 Stars
This is a crazy kill. We open the novel at a funeral. The people at the funeral are gathering for refreshments when someone notices that a member of their party, a preacher is banging on the door. But he can’t be banging on the door because he’s in the bedroom. When they finally open the door, it’s him. He tells them that he was pushed out of the window and survived the long fall by landing on a vegetable cart down below. When they look down there, they see the cart, but instead of the ministers, there’s a body with a large knife sticking out of it.
The neighborhood explodes with accusations, gossip, and dirt as the two detectives Coffin and Gravedigger show up and try to figure things out.
Pafko at the Wall – 4/5 Stars
For this review, I am specifically reviewing an adapted version of this story and performed by Tony Shaloub, Zachary Levi, and Billy Crudup. Both Tony Shaloub and Billy Crudup are very good in their readings, but Zachary Levi is really really great here.
The novella takes place at the final game of the NLCS known for “the shot heard round the world” where Bobby Thompson hits a walk-off homerun and sends the Giants to the World Series. The novella is a carnival of voices — members of the audience, the radio annoucers (including Jackie Gleason), players, coaches, etc. It’s a brilliant explosion of noise that is expertly read by the three actors.
Yellow-Back Radio Broke-Down – 3/5 Stars
You’re always in for something when you read an Ishmael Reed novel. For example, this book takes place in the “wild west” but also includes Ancient Egyptians (something a LOT of Ishmael Reed novels include) and Thomas Jefferson, and lots of other things.
The experience here is of a timeline that is not a flat circle ala True Detective, but a flattened spiral, so that the various links overlap consistently and always exist in reference to each other.
This is the story of a cowboy called the Loop Garoo Kid and what happens when he finds himself in the dying town of Yellow Back Radio. It’s a wild ride.
