New Century Reading

In the Night of Memory

I think In the Night of Memory is the third part of a trilogy that I'm reading kind of out of order. First I read what I think is the second back, The Road Back to Sweetgrass, and I'm waiting for the first book to arrive from the library. But it appears the books are stand-alones, so the order won't matter. 

This book is again the story of Native Americans from a fictional northern Minnesota reservation. Some of the characters from Sweetgrass appear here too, but the story centers on two sisters, Azure and Rain, and their mother, Loretta. As the book opens, the drunk Loretta delivers her 3- and 4-year-old daughters to the county, which has terminated her parental rights. Loretta leaves, and the girls have no idea if they'll ever see her again.

We see their childhoods, a series of foster homes of varying quality and care, until finally someone who knows Loretta tracks them down and brings them to a Native family in Duluth. Here the girls finally have a real home, with a family that cares about them. But not a family that knows where Loretta is, for Loretta is one of many missing Native women, gone without a trace.

So it's a topical book, although the focus is more on the daughters than the missing mother, which makes for a better story, I think--the left-behind girls, always wondering where their mother is, the girls forced to undergo things no child should ever have to experience, yet who have each other and that, sometimes, is all that's left, but it's enough.

My one quibble with the book is that there are so many characters that it's hard to keep track of them all, and at times the overall momentum of the story seemed slowed by the introduction of new people and stories, or quick recaps of stories I remembered from the previous book. I would have liked this book to focus simply on Azure and Rain, because they're compelling and interesting, and I cared very much what happened to them.  

The Juniper Tree

First off, if you're interested in reading Barbara Comyns' The Juniper Tree, I strongly suggest first seeking out the Grimm fairy tale of the same name. Be forewarned: Disney isn't going to be able to turn this fairy tale into a charming children's movie any time soon. 

But besides being able to compare the original fairy tale to Comyns' take on it, it's interesting to see what she does with the fairy tale tropes in her novel. To avoid spoiler-land, I'll just say the story starts with a young woman down on her luck, an unwed mother whose own mother seemingly hates her, and now the young woman (Bella) is homeless with her child. 

Her luck turns, though, and before long she's running a small antique shop and living in the apartment in the back. It's not big or fancy, but it's comfortable; she loves the work; she finds a good nursery school for her daughter. So life is much improved. She even begins making friends, including the wealthy Gertrude and Bernard, who take a shine to her and her daughter. 

And that's when it all goes awry.

Comyns is a delectably creepy writer. I will say I found the book slow in the middle. For another writer, I might have given up. But I had a suspicion based on having read Comyns before, and having read the Grimm tale, that my patience would be rewarded. So I stuck with it, and I was right. It didn't end the way I thought it would, but in some ways, it's more subversive than the fairy tale.

And that's all I have to say about that.

All That Is Left Is All That Matters

A little boy tries to shield his father from traumatic memories. A loner man barely lets his guard down to try and get to know two neighboring children when fate steps in. Hell's Angels come to a remote bar in California and try to call the bluff of its owner. Another little boy tries to make sense of marriage and male-female relationships. And, perhaps most traumatically (and yet beautiful), a man discovers his dog is growing razor blades that pop out of its skin.

A friend referred to this collection of stories as "elegiac" on Goodreads, and that's a very apt description. There is so much looking back, trying to account for life while later in life, while facing down old age and the end we all know is coming. At times I struggled, just a bit, with that; I'm most likely past the halfway point of my life, but not necessarily ready to go into an elegiac stage myself. 

But Mark Slouka's stories are wonderful, if painful at times. He's an excellent short story writer, an author who understands how to work with the form. In just a few pages, he tells a story, gives a glimpse of life that's unforgettable and resonates.

And that dog story (simply called "Dog")--well, if you've ever had a beloved dog in your life (or any loving pet), it's a tough, tough read. And yet, beautiful. 

So glad my friend posted her review of this on Goodreads, and that it caught my eye. I feel like I've been put through the wringer reading it, but it was worth it. So worth it.

The Road Back to Sweetgrass

This was a happy discovery for me. A friend recommended it as it's set in northern Minnesota, and I'm writing a novel set there too. For that alone, it was worth the read. But it was also happy to discover another Native American author from Minnesota who's writing thoughtful, interesting work.

The Road Back to Sweetgrass is the story of several women on a northern Minnesota reservation and how their lives play out as well as intersect. It covers a lot of ground, from misplaced romance, to Native children being taken from their homes and sent to boarding school, to Native women being forced to give babies up for adoption and then being sterilized without their permission, to what makes a family, to what it takes to survive. Throughout it has a close, loving look at Native American culture of the last 50 years, as well as absolutely gorgeous nature writing.

Having discovered Grover, I'm also happy to see she has other books published, including one just a few months ago. I suspect you'll see her name on this blog again.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

It may be that I went into this book with too-high expectations. Ocean Vuong is a gifted poet, of Vietnamese ancestry with parents and grandparents who experienced the Vietnam War firsthand, and he's gay, so certainly it seemed like he had a rich amount of source material at his disposal for his fiction debut. And in fact, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous does seem to be highly autobiographical. It's about a young man, Little Dog, growing up with his mother and grandmother who escaped Vietnam and tried to find a better life in the U.S. It's about being an outsider and not understanding either the language or the culture of one's adopted country. It's about watching his mother and grandmother battle mental illness no doubt provoked by the war. It's about realizing he's gay and exploring that aspect of his life. It's about going to college, learning to read, learning to write, even while his mother cannot read nor write and mostly only speaks Vietnamese.

The book is told through a series of letters he writes to his mother, even though she can't read, analyzing their lives together and what has happened to them. He's a fearless writer, not shying away from the abuse his mother rained on him at her worst moments, or the abuse she herself received at the hands of his father. He writes movingly about his early sexual experiences, the good, bad, and ugly. He writes about being taunted at school, or in his neighborhood because his mother bought him a pink bike because it was the cheapest, and she didn't understand what that meant for a boy in America. And he writes about his mother working for years in a nail salon, ruining her own hands, and the time he watches her helping an amputee get a pedicure.

So there was much that was breathtaking. But my hesitation with the book comes directly from its poetic nature; for every sentence or scene that I sighed with admiration over, for its beautiful use of language and imagery, there was at least one scene in which poetry took over entirely and the novel lost momentum. There are long sections of stream of consciousness which, while lovely to read, don't contribute to the book. At points he plays with form, as a poet will do, but it doesn't necessarily add anything to the novel.

Which I suppose raises a question of poets and novelists. Not that writers only have to choose one or the other; luminaries including Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, and the queen of stream-of-consciousness herself, Virginia Woolf, all wrote prose and poetry. I think--for me, at least, and take this with a grain of salt because Vuong's novel is getting stellar reviews and ratings--the poet overtook the novelist too many times and lost sight of the novel. 

Lanny

Wow. This book. I'm not sure what I expected. I'd read and liked Porter's earlier book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and this one sounded different, which it was. And I'm struggling with how much to disclose, because I don't like to give spoilers, but without doing so, it's hard to explain what made this such a riveting read.

So I'll just give the basics. The Lloyd family has moved to a small British village an hour away from London. Father Robert is gone a great deal, earning lots of money. Mother Jolie is a former actress who is trying to write a true crime novel. Their only child, Lanny, is a bit of an odd duck, not in an evil or harmful way, but definitely not like the other boys. Trying to find something for him to do, Jolie connects with Pete, locally known as Crazy Pete. He's an artist of some renown, and soon he's giving art lessons to the attentive, appreciative Lanny.

And there's also Dead Papa Toothwort, a mystical/mythical being--or is he real? Or is he real and mythical? Whatever he is, he's very interested in the villagers--especially the newly arrived Lloyd family and their intriguing young son.

And that's all I can say, except that what I expected from the novel after this set up didn't happen, and I could hardly put the book down, and Porter is a hell of a writer, and I can't wait to see what he does next.

The Years

It's a little intimidating to try and talk about a Virginia Woolf novel, especially while I'm still mulling it over days after finishing it, and believe I may have barely scratched the surface of what's going on in it. But that's part of the brilliance of Woolf, I think, that her work is often so thought-provoking and multilayered. 

In The Years, we see various members of the Pargiter family at various points in their history. The book opens in 1880 and ends in the late 1930s, years of significant change in Britain, encompassing WWI and the end of the Victorian era, among other important historical points. Woolf touches on British colonialization, women's rights, class systems, and the Irish struggle, along with several other topics. 

To do this, she looks closely at a number of Pargiters who are committed to one set of opinions or another about these various issues and historical moments. But she's also examining family relationships and how they stand up over generations (or don't), and how different personalities evolve and affect each other.

I know from reading Woolf's bio and diaries that this book was an enormous strain on her to write--it took five years and nearly caused a breakdown. At the time of publication, it became her biggest-selling title. The story, while still using her stream-of-consciousness prose, is a bit more straightforward and easier to read than, say, The Waves. There was much I enjoyed in The Years, and Woolf's writing was absolutely beautiful throughout. But overall, I'd put it behind books like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse in overall quality. I loved this segment, in which a younger family member is at a party and watching how people interact:

"It's no go, North thought. He can't say what he wants to say; he's afraid. They're all afraid; afraid of being laughed at; afraid of giving themselves away. He's afraid too, he thought, looking at the young man with a fine forehead and a weak chin was gesticulating, too emphatically. We're all afraid of each other, he thought; afraid of what? Of criticism; of laughter; of people who think differently....He's afraid of me because I'm a farmer...And I'm afraid of him because he's clever...That's what separates us; fear, he thought."

 

Feast Your Eyes

Feast Your Eyes is way up there on the best books I've read so far this year. It's based loosely on the story of Sally Mann, a photographer who got into hot water in the 1980s for exhibiting photographic artworks featuring nude children playing. The book is also a tip of the hat to such photographic geniuses as Diane Arbus and Vivian Maier.

Author Goldberg has moved the story to the late 1950s and early 1960s, which gives her latitude to explore an earlier, even harder time for women and female artists. Lillian Preston is the gifted photographer here, but she's also an unwed mother--quite scandalous at that time. Lillian is passionate about her photography, and to say that she's raising her daughter Samantha in unconventional circumstances is putting it mildly. But one thing that draws them closer is the photos she does of her daughter in various spontaneous situations. In fact, the young Samantha is quite proud that her mother includes some of these photos in a gallery exhibit. It comes as an enormous shock to find that not everyone views them as art; Lillian and the art gallery owner end up arrested, and it's not long before Samantha's classmates at school have heard about it from their parents and make her life a living hell.

This sets up the decades-long story to follow, as Lillian tries to pursue her art, and Samantha tries to cope with the fallout. It affects their relationship as mother and daughter, but Lillian also has a hard relationship with her own parents (especially over the out-of-wedlock child), and how the three generations dance around different values and takes on morality is thoughtfully explored, as well as societal expectations of women at various times in history. It's also at heart a close look at mother-daughter relationships, the misunderstandings and unsaid things that happen. 

So it's a book both wide and narrow in scope, and Goldberg does an amazing job with it. Even though the year's just halfway done, I'm pretty sure this will be on my "best of" list in December.

Rules for Visiting

Oh, how I loved this book. Admittedly, I went into it with low expectations. The summary sounds a bit twee: A forty-year-old woman, single, living with her father and spending her work time taking care of trees and plants for the local university, unexpectedly earns some additional paid time off, and decides to go visit friends from her past to understand what friendship means and who her friends are.

It could have been unbearably precious, but, at least to me, it was anything but. May Attaway, our narrator, has a quiet, thoughtful voice that fits the character perfectly. As she calmly spools out her story, which includes some relevant family history, she also tells us about trees and their characteristics. I saw on Goodreads that some people found that annoying, but I found it lovely. I'm no expert on trees, but her passion about them was contagious.

As part of her extra time off, she visits four old friends who are now all over the country (and one in Britain). Each visit is different; each visit has its own challenges; each leaves her pondering the topic of friendship even more deeply.

That's it, pretty much. There's not a ton of plot. And I was more than fine with that. Author Kane's writing is so beautiful, and frequently shows a quiet, wry humor, such as when a friend asks her if they aren't being rather slothful:

"I told her avarice, envy, pride, lust, and wrath harm others, and gluttony is bad for your health. But sloth is just a willingness to move slower than others and that's not a crime. I've always thought despair should be the seventh deadly sin instead."

Or:

"Perhaps a best friend is someone who...holds the story of your life in mind. Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through a long rest. Maybe that is friendship. A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don't have to be repeated."

A lovely, quiet book. 

 

 

Walkabout

Well, this is a strange, unsettling little book that belongs on the same bookshelf as A High Wind in Jamaica and Rock Crystal. It was originally published in 1959, and later made into a movie that apparently drastically changed the story. Having read the book, I find I have no interest in the movie.

Walkabout is the story of Mary and Peter, two youngsters who are the only survivors of a plane crash in the Northern Territory of Australia. They were on their way to visit family in Adelaide, far from their home in Charleston, SC. They have no idea how vast Australia is, or where exactly Adelaide is, or what's safe to eat or drink. So it would appear their fates are sealed.

Until they meet an unnamed Aborigine boy who is on a walkabout, a rite of passage for his people. They have no language in common, and the teenage Mary is appalled by the Aborigine's nakedness, but all quickly realize that the Australian needs to help them get back to civilization. 

So he leads them, teaches them by example how to catch fish and find edible plants, how to start a fire, how to safely put it out. They exchange a few words between them. Peter quickly grows fond of the Australian and emulates him, while Mary, raised in a Southern society that is suspicious of the intentions of black males, keeps her distance. There's a push and pull among the three of them, until a dreadful misunderstanding takes place that leads to death.

This is a hard book to wrap my mind around. That Mary and Peter refer to the Aborigine as a "darky" and later to "pickaninnies" is repellent to my 21st-century ear, but at the same time--and it may be my hopeful 21st-century mind--I feel like the author was trying to say that the Southern Americans weren't right either. 

But there's also a kind of "magical Negro" aspect to this. And yet, and yet, it was published in 1959. Attitudes were different. 

I don't know. The descriptions of Australia were beautiful, the story striking, it gave me a lot to think about, and I daresay I'll read it again someday. The introduction by Lee Siegel in my edition makes a strong case for this being a retelling of various Christ stories, and I'd like to look more closely at that too.