Although of course I know it’s still going to stay summery for a little while yet, September is tomorrow and my brain still thinks that means that it’s fall now. It’s hard to believe that we’re rounding into the last few months of the year, but before we get into that, let’s look back at the month that was.
In Books…
- Gichigami Hearts: Misaabekong means “the place of the giants”, and that’s what the Ojibwe people who lived there called it in recognition of the large rock formations in the local landscape long before white people showed up and called it Duluth. Gichigami is, of course, the Ojibwe name for Lake Superior. I’d found myself becoming irritated by family histories a few months back, but either this was the exception that proves the rule or Linda LeGarde Grover is simply a better writer than the others. It’s not strictly a family history, though that and memoir are probably the most prominent threads of this slim book, under 150 pages in my edition. There are also a few poems, some traditional stories, a little bit of local history (including a legend about an Ojibwe man who emerged one day from the rocks and attempted, unsuccessfully, to communicate with the white people he found, eventually walking off never to return). I’ve never been to Duluth, my own love for the big lake is based in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and I worried in the beginning that I was going to have a hard time connecting with this book, so deeply rooted in place, because of that, but those fears turned out to be unfounded. LeGarde Grover’s voice drew me in and kept me engaged, even as the book flitted between genres. She touches on issues like the poisonous legacy of residential schools and the devastating effects of alcoholism on Native American families in a way that is deeply powerful for not feeling preachy…she simply talks about how the people in her own family were impacted by them, and even though they aren’t foregrounded in a way that makes it feel like she’s highlighting them for your attention, the message isn’t difficult to suss. The structure of the book, told in short segments/essays, helps it keep moving, but there’s enough common ground running throughout that it doesn’t feel disjointed. I was really impressed by how lovely I found her writing and I am very interested in reading her novels now! This will probably hit hardest for Great Lakes people, but I think anyone could enjoy reading it and I would recommend it.
- Etna: A dog, still really a puppy, is taken from his home on a farm on the coast in a country where a war has recently started. He is given the name Etna, and the other dog he is traveling with is named Fuji. The dogs are dropped off at an American military camp, where they and many other dogs go through training, learning how to sniff out bombs. Etna is assigned a partner, Jason, who works closely with Fuji and her own partner. The war lasts for several years, and by the end, Jason and Fuji are gone. And so Etna, with nowhere else to go, decides he wants to go home. He sets out on a journey that takes him on trains, into a city, up in the mountains, across a river. He meets new dogs, other animals, and humans who may either hinder or help him. A seasoned veteran, he knows that what was once his home is almost certainly gone, but he goes on anyways. It’s apparently a very Odyssey summer, though not only am I sure that the Nolan movie also coming out a few weeks ago is pure coincidence, this has only a very loose connection with the Odyssey in that it tells the story of a soldier’s winding way home after a long war. Though it does have characters named Jason and Achilles, which feels like a wink to those who know Greek legends. It’s quite a short book, but packs no less of a punch for its brevity. “Told from the perspective of an animal” is a narrative technique that can go gimmicky but by and large I tend to enjoy, and this is a well-done example so it worked for me. I appreciated that Paul Yoon didn’t plunge whole hog into trying to flesh out a fully-realized worldview for animals but let the story stand on its own merits. With a straightforward plot and a sympathetic-but-not-especially-developed protagonist, the book rests on its themes: the arbitrariness of war and who survives it, the destruction it brings that reverberates throughout the natural world, the importance of remaining open to connection, and of course the impossibility of ever going home again. Is any of it particularly new or revelatory? Not really, but in a world where war continues to happen despite all the reasons we all know that it shouldn’t, a story that asks the reader to think about its true costs is as relevant as ever. Etna’s travels were rendered very compellingly, and I would recommend this book!
- The Book of Salt: A boy, Binh, grows up as the youngest of four sons in Vietnam. His father, devoted to the Catholic Church, is violent and abusive to his wife and children. As he grows into a teenager, his older brother Minh, who works as the sous chef in the home of the Governor General of Indochina in Saigon, springs him from their father’s house by finding Binh a position with him. Things seem to be going well enough, Binh is learning some basic French…and then the new head chef arrives from France. He and Binh begin fooling around, and when the truth is of course eventually revealed, Binh is dismissed not only from his job but his home. With nowhere else to really go, he gets on a ship, and eventually, winds up in Paris. After some initial bumps, he ends up in a position where his still-terrible French is not much of a hindrance…as the cook at the home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. There he meets a young American man who attends the salons the women host, with no way to know whether this love affair will end any more happily than the last. As a very character-focused reader, I have a high tolerance for books with no plot, but this one was outside the boundaries of even my patience. Very little actually happens, which isn’t a dealbreaker for me usually, but the way this is structured robs it of any sense of momentum. The narrative switches back constantly from Binh’s childhood, his early days in Paris, his days with Stein and Toklas, with little in the way of obvious reason. It made it very difficult for me to get connected with the book or with Binh as a character, who was curiously flat despite having the story told from his perspective. He’s emotionally closed-off and self-destructive, but not in a way that’s rendered as especially dynamic or interesting, just kind of nonsensical. It doesn’t make sense that a man who makes his living as a cook would deliberately cut himself on his hands. That’s a heedless, reckless kind of self destruction that doesn’t match up with the way he’s otherwise portrayed. But I got the sense that Monique Truong was less interested in plot and character and was trying more to draw attention to themes and her prose stylings. To start with the latter, there are some very lovely turns of phrase in this book. The problem is that there are arguably too many, so the flourishes don’t come off as masterstrokes but as the product of a writer who wasn’t interested in killing any of her darlings during editing. When there’s so much imagery, none of it makes the impact that it could. Thematically, I felt like the book was trying to make points about language and understanding, most of all, but also about colonialism, belonging, identity, the way being other can render one both hypervisible and invisible at the same time. But none of it was done particularly well. Binh’s lack of proficiency with French (or even the English spoken by his employers) is constantly referenced, but not only does it not make sense that he wouldn’t have picked up at least a modicum of functional French over the several years he lives in Paris, he’s also depicted as having a deep, sophisticated understanding of what’s being said around him. It doesn’t hang together. On the issue of race, it felt like I was supposed to take something away from the fact that Binh’s lover, Marcus, is himself of mixed race and passing as white. But nothing was actually developed. I was ultimately quite frustrated at the end of reading this book, it felt like there had been little glimpses of a much better one that could have been but it never materialized. If you have a particular fondness for a lush, almost flowery prose style, this might be something you’d enjoy but overall based on my own lack of enjoyment, I can’t recommend it.
- The Last White Man: Anders is a fairly typical young man. He works at a gym. His relationship with his father is fond but not close, especially after the recent loss of his mother. He’s been hooking up relatively casually with a high school classmate, Oona, who recently left college and came back to her hometown, in part because of her brother’s death by overdose. And then, one day, he wakes up and finds himself transformed. Once white, he no longer is. He doesn’t seem to be himself, just with more melanin. His body and face are fundamentally different to himself and others. He’s not the only one…all across his unnamed country, people are changing in the same way Anders did, apparently at random. In a world where race is a significant component of social identity, this creates tension and unease, and eventually violence. Anders and Oona become nervous to be seen together as an interracial couple. Eventually, just existing places Anders at risk. But as more and more people change, the world around them has to, too…doesn’t it? I wanted to love this book so badly. I thought Mohsin Hamid’s previous book Exit West was a masterpiece, and this feels like it’s playing in similar thematic territory. What if race, like the country one lives in, could change in an instant? What if the people who didn’t want it to be that way panicked, and tried to resist that change with force? What would it mean to be a part of a group that enjoys a greater ease of existence just because of the way they were born, which then finds that their unearned privilege could be placed in jeopardy, and there’s nothing they can do about it? But while Exit West spun a short, powerful story around these issues (also centered on a pair of young lovers), The Last White Man fell flat for me. Neither book is doing anything all that special with character, the couples at the heart of each book are sympathetic but mostly intended as proxies through which the reader can enter the world…though it was interesting to me that while Exit West focused people who were doing the migrating, the less initially privileged group, this time around Hamid tells his story through people who start out white. Though there are few supporting characters here, it did also feel a bit odd that we never got a glimpse into how people who were always of color viewed the transformed white people. Were they pleased to see the new development, feeling some schadenfreude at watching white people struggle to acclimate? Unhappy that it brought additional negative attention to their communities? Both? Something else entirely? It was clear through the omission that he didn’t intend to explore that angle at all, but I still found myself unsatisfied by it remaining outside the narrative. The prose itself also felt less engaging than his previous work that I’ve read. As readers of this blog know, I love a run-on sentence, but it was taken to a point here that was distracting to me. I kept waiting for the story to build up to something more significant, to have something interesting or new to say about racial perception and society, but to me, it never felt like it did. He’s still an author I’m very interested in new work from, I’ll be very excited to see what he does next, but this one was a miss for me and I can’t recommend it to anyone else either.
- Lakota Woman: Mary Brave Bird lived less than sixty years, but it was quite an interesting life. Born on the Rosebud Lakota reservation in South Dakota, she was raised in her early years mostly by her grandparents as her mother was studying and her father had left. It was a precarious existence from a financial/material comfort perspective, but she was loved and had no less than most of the other people she know, so barely understood that they were poor. Eventually, like so many Native American children, she was taken off to boarding school, where the standard of living was not much higher but she and her classmates were subjected to physical and attempted sexual abuse by the nuns and priests who ran the school. She and a friend published an underground newspaper to expose the staff’s misdeeds, which made her unpopular with them and she was routinely punished, including beatings, for minor infractions of the rules. She left without graduating at 15, getting into drunken shenanigans and engaging in petty crime with other teenagers, drawing the ire of the deeply racist local police, always happy to have an excuse to be violent even to the point of deadliness with Indians. Pregnant at 18, she entered the orbit of young activists in the American Indian Movement after meeting the medicine man Leonard Crow Dog and participated in the occupation of Wounded Knee while in the final stages of her pregnancy, eventually giving birth to her son Pedro there. Crow Dog, over ten years her senior, was drawn to her and repeatedly proposed marriage until Mary accepted. She moved in to his small house on his family’s land, becoming a stepmother to his three children as well as parenting her own son, constantly tending to not only their family but the endless guests who visited the already overstuffed residence. Leonard was prosecuted by the government for his activism, and after his conviction he was moved around constantly, with Mary trailing after in order to be able to visit him. After appeals, he was released, and resumed his position as a spiritual leader in his community with Mary by his side. This felt like an odd sort of memoir, not because Mary’s life wasn’t sufficiently remarkable, but in its style and presentation. She’s very matter of fact in her prose, which creates an impact when she casually relates acts of violence and cruelty (like her sister’s unconsented-to hysterectomy when she went to the hospital to give birth), but also makes for an a narrative without emotional peaks and valleys. Heightening the emotional flatness is her apparent disinclination to really talk about her feelings in the book…it must have been quite frightening to be heavily pregnant during Wounded Knee but she never really gets into it, or for that matter any of her feelings about being young and pregnant. Her devotion to her husband once they marry is clear, she follows him as he’s transferred between prisons and works hard to help secure his release, but his three proposals are not related with any sense of romantic pleasure. I don’t feel inherently entitled to anyone’s innermost thoughts and feelings, but it’s unusual for a memoir to offer so little psychological insight. She seems the most engaged when she talks about religious rituals, like eating peyote and the Lakota sun dance, but though they’re clearly meaningful to her it’s hard to convey that sort of spiritual experience in words. She doesn’t seem particularly interested in trying to convey the American Indian Movement in any way outside her own involvement/experience, I wish I’d learned a little more about how it all worked. It’s a valuable collection of insights from a woman who experienced firsthand Indian boarding schools, reservation life in the Dakotas, the American Indian Movement’s time at Wounded Knee and what it was like to be married to a prominent AIM leader, but as a reading experience it leaves a lot to be desired. If you’re interested in what she has to say, it’s worth reading, but don’t expect anything polished. Otherwise, it’s a miss.
- Untold Night and Day: The summer in Seoul is punishingly hot. A woman, Ayami, who used to be an actress, works at an odd community theater, where she sells tickets to and introduces audio recordings of plays. The theater is about to close, and Ayami isn’t sure what she’s going to do for work next. She’s been taking German lessons from a woman her boss knows called Yeoni, who asks her to pick up a European poet from the airport and accompany him as his translator as he visits the city. After they close the theater, she and her boss go to dinner in a restaurant that is completely dark. Then they decide to go see Yeoni, coming across a very odd scene in their travels to find her in which a bus drives in circles, around and around. But then again, maybe that’s not true at all. Maybe Ayami is older, a poet herself. Maybe she’s adopted and never meets her real mother. Maybe she’s the daughter of a pharmacist, taken away when her father flees justice after murdering his wife and storing her body in the attic. Maybe she was actually named Yeoni by her birth family and is reunited with them on a television talk show. Maybe she’s in her late 20s. Maybe she’s significantly older. It’s very difficult to provide any sort of plot overview of this book, because an incoherent plot is sort of the point. There’s a jumble of images and motifs: a woman with a pockmarked face, being immersed in total darkness, a poet, etc, and they are constantly being remixed and recycled over the course of the four alternate stories the book presents about Ayami. As a very literal reader, I don’t tend to respond to books that are deliberately exaggerated or overly symbolic, so the surrealist atmosphere of this book was never going to be for me. But I can usually tell what a book is going for even if I don’t personally get on board with it, and that just wasn’t at all the case here. I have no idea what the book was trying to communicate, what story (if any) it was trying to tell. The best thing about it was that it was short. This was an extreme mismatch of book and reader, I just don’t think I was the right audience for whatever it was trying to do, but obviously I can’t recommend it because I did not at all like it!
- The Hummingbird’s Daughter: Teresa Urrea was not born into auspicious circumstances. Her indigenous mother, Cayetana, called The Hummingbird, was just 13 or 14 when she was knocked up by Tomas Urrea, the philandering owner of the ranch where she and her family lived and worked. When Teresa (or as she’s usually called, Teresita) was still very small, Cayetana dropped the child off with her sister and never came back. The girl, unloved by her aunt, sleeps wherever she can, including sometimes with the pig. Her life changes, though, when she comes to the attention of the ranch’s native healer/medicine woman, Huila, who takes the child under her wing and begins to teach her what she knows. As she grows into a teenager, not only does Teresita become increasingly skilled at her work, her position as one of Tomas’s several illegitimate children becomes known…first to her, and then to everyone else. But even though things start to seem to be looking up (Tomas acknowledges her and brings her into his home, her talents are admired and utilized by the ranch’s laborers, she has warm and close friendships with other young women), trouble is brewing. Tomas’s already unsteady relationship with Porfirio Diaz’s regime in Mexico City becomes even more strained, and then Teresita herself is brutally assaulted by a man and left for dead. She lingers for a few days after being discovered, but her life slips away and her funeral is imminent. And then she wakes up, at first seeming little like herself, taking in almost no sustenance. It’s not long before she comes back to herself, but she’s fundamentally changed. Where she once was a gifted healer, she’s now performing miracles, which she as a faithful Christian believes are worked by God through her hands. She quickly becomes a local legend, dubbed “Santa Teresita”, with people coming to Tomas’s ranch from hundreds of miles away in the hopes of having their pains eased. She speaks to the gathered people about their inherent rights and dignity, making her dangerous to the government and it is only a matter of time before she’s forced to flee. It feels like been a long time since I’ve really sunk my teeth into a long book, and reading this one made me realize how much I’ve missed them. Luis Alberto Urrea tells this story, about members of his own family (Teresa was his great-aunt, I believe) with an epic scope, taking his time to create a richly-realized world and fully develop many of the people within it. I am often critical of books that pad their page counts by indulging in overly flowery writing or side plots that don’t matter, but even some of the sections that felt a bit draggy when I was reading them (like the moving of Tomas’s operations from one ranch to another and the journey of the laborers and livestock to get there) turned out to enhance the scope and depth of the story he’s telling. The character work is fantastic, we read along with years and years of Teresita’s life, Tomas’s life, Huila’s life and I got emotionally invested in all of them even though I found the portrayal of Tomas to be dated (his predation on often very young women in his employ is treated as a sympathetic character flaw, fixed by the love of a good woman young enough to be his daughter, rather than as a disturbing decades-long pattern of sexual assault). I am seldom very interested in magical realism, but it’s harmless enough here, and I appreciated that along with awe about the magic, the reader is asked to consider the political implications of a woman performing miracles and encouraging the underclasses to think of themselves as full people with rights in an authoritarian state. This book is high-quality storytelling, and I’ll be seeking out the sequel along with more of Urrea’s work because I really enjoyed reading it and would recommend it!
In Life…
- C started pre-K: Nevada doesn’t have state pre-K for the majority of kids, so we’re still at the same place he started in the spring, but now he’s learning things to get him ready to go to real school next year, which is mind-blowing to me. I feel like he was just a little baby but he’s growing so much!
- I went to Chicago for a show: Bebel Gilberto’s Tanto Tempo was perhaps the most defining album of my years in law school, I listened to it endlessly as I studied, learning the words to the songs phonetically. So when I found out she was doing a small tour for the 25th anniversary of the album, I dragged my friend Crystal to Chicago to go with me, since it’s not a very long train ride from Michigan to get there. It was really cool to get to see the album performed live, and especially to get an extra day with my bestie to toot around a very fun city.
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