Reading Well: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

Posted on February 15, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Akwaeke Emezi‘s Freshwater (2018) made a fair number of end of year lists, and deservedly so. It’s an inventive, compelling, and more than a little frightening novel that focuses on, depending on how you read it, a young woman struggling with mental health or a young woman possessed by a small variety of deities from her native Nigeria.

Your interest in the latter interpretation will largely determine your enjoyment of the book: as a novel exploring what it might mean to share your body with spirits, whose self-interest only occasionally overlaps with your own, Freshwater is a great read. It’s also not an easy one. There is sexual violence in the book, and, as a core idea for the narrative, a question of what is entailed in being used, in having little to no agency in what happens to your body.

For example, in order to shield the protagonist, a very promiscuous and sexually voracious spirit possesses her regularly. On the one hand, this prevents the protagonist from ever revisiting her rape; on the other, her body is in a very real sense not her own for nights on end.

One challenge for any book that delves into the supernatural is the author’s ability to keep the rules of those worlds consistent and understood, and Emezi does a very strong job of this, which means that, once you accept the general premise of what is happening, the rest hangs together.

The strongest parts of the book, for me, are when the spirits navigate their simultaneous disregard for the protagonist and their dependence on her in this strangely human world. They long both to return to the spirit world, but also to experience the human. It’s nicely done, and done without ever allowing you to lose your empathy for the protagonist herself.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

There is so much going on here that adds depth to the story, so much that touches themes of isolation and immigration and mental illness and the difficulty of navigating various structures of external power (bureaucracies in general, everyday racism, etc). I strive to, even in my totally fantasy based writing, to point towards other, larger themes as well, and I would do well to be as successful as Emezi is.

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Reading Well: The Second Life of Samuel Tyne by Esi Edugyan

Posted on January 29, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004) is the first of three novels by Esi Edugyan in the queue. This one follows a Ghanaian family that emigrates to Canada, settling into a fairly settled life in post WWII Vancouver and then relocating when the patriarch–the Samuel Tyne of the title–surprisingly inherits some land in a rural community. The immediate family is a foursome: a largely unhappy marriage that has produced a set of distant, problematic twins.

This was a surprising novel: it is not, or at least, not primarily, a novel of the immigrant experience, nor is it a novel centered on manifestations of racism in Canada in the last half of the 20th century, although both of those themes certainly inform and impact the narrative.

It is, far more, a novel about dissatisfaction, distance, and violence–both emotional and physical–in human relations. It may be bleakest novel I’ve read in decades, summed by this observation:

That was the nature of marriage, he thought solemnly, an argument that only ends with death.

Relationships in The Second Life of Samuel Tyne are rarely fulfilling, and only momentarily satisfying, for the most part–even an epilogue tracing the final years of the main characters falls short of any optimism in its resolution.

The story really centers around the fragile, and continually degrading, mental health of the twins, caught in a country and time without much support for either them or their parents. Friends, neighbors, and eventually much of the town gets caught up in their behavior, and their isolation remains a gulf the parents struggle to bridge.

I can’t say it was a pleasant read, but it was a minorly powerful one, and is certainly impressive as a debut novel: I look forward to the later works by Edugyan.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Edugyan paints a picture of the inner working of Samuel’s mind that is remarkably consistent and insightful. His flaws are on full display, but there is a consistency to his being that brings him into a full, three-dimensional, humanity. The fact that, as a reader, you can see him make his own bed does little to reduce our sympathy when he must lie in it.

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Reading Well: Milkman by Anna Burns

Posted on January 17, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Anna Burns‘ Milkman (2018) won the Man Booker Prize last year; as such, there are plenty of reviews of it to be found on the web (and is the second in back-to-back highly contemporary entries on Reading Well). I’ll just summarize the novel as a compelling exploration of life in a highly stressed community, where every action–and, indeed, most thoughts–full under intense scrutiny.

The specifics matter, of course: Milkman is set in Northern Ireland in the 70s, at the height of the violent clashes between British and Republican forces. This is not explicitly named in the novel, indeed, nothing really is: the main character’s dubious and part-time boyfriend is only referred to as maybe-boyfriend, her younger set of twins as wee-sisters, her elder siblings as first-sister or second-brother, and England as the-land-over-the-waters.

This is awkward at first, but easily adjusted to, and serves twin purposes: first, it speaks to the possible universality of communities in crisis and second, it reinforces the main antagonist of the novel’s role as an unknown and highly protected identity, only known as Milkman (not to be confused with real-milkman, who actually delivers milk).

I want to highlight two small realizations from the novel. First, if I had not read
Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s The Dirty Dust, I don’t think I would have recognized Milkman as belonging to what I interpret as an explicitly Irish tradition. There is a rhythm to the writing, a repetitiveness and circularity to its structure, that feels directly related to Ó Cadhain, but also to Synge and Beckett (and those names emerge solely out of my ignorance of the tradition–I’m sure scholars and deep fans of Irish writing could correct/expand the list).

In any case, it was nice to have my reading of Milkman deepened by that recognition. It also led to realization #2:

This is one of a very small number of books I’ve ever read where I found myself saying, I bet the audiobook of this absolutely rocks. Much as when reading The Dirty Dust, I found the linguistic patterns to be slow reading, and while I appreciated them–especially their rhythm and their tendency to go off-kilter in the midst of repetition, throwing in items that weren’t quite similar to the rest of the list–I thought the impact would be even greater listening to the text.

Milkman isn’t a quick read, nor an easy one: it is powerfully disquieting, and its focus–on the constant threat of retribution and violence, not those actions themselves–lends an air of foreboding that permeates acts as normal as running in a park or watching a sunset. But it’s a worthwhile read, for sure.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I haven’t read anything else by Burns, so I don’t know if the style of Milkman is hers in a more pervasive sense, or is one she adopted for this novel particularly. Regardless, it serves her well, and I don’t have a sense of that kind of voice in my own writing.

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Reading Well: There There by Tommy Orange

Posted on January 6, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

There There (2018) has found its way onto several prominent end of year lists, which makes me feel quite au courant in this entry in Reading Well.

It’s Tommy Orange‘s debut novel, and speaks–from about a dozen different perspectives–to the contemporary and urban experience of a cross-section of Native Americans in and around Oakland (some are from other Western states, but all are converging towards Northern California).

What is most striking is Orange’s insistence on wrestling with the always-challenging notion of Indian identity within a contemporary, post/modern context. The teenagers are lost online, the adults are puzzled by this behavior, the discoveries of shared ancestry are facilitated by Facebook, traditional dance is learned from YouTube.

And little of the contemporary world helps: the outlook for Native communities, whether on or off government declared reservation boundaries, is bleakly complicated. And the questions of what it means to be Indian have certainly not grown simpler over the decades.

The plot is inevitably violent, building towards a confrontation at an event known is The Big Oakland Powwow, and there is something akin to terror in watching it slowly unfurl. But Orange manages that with a deep humanity in his characters, and by nicely capturing the range of experiences they present, both in terms of their levels of allegiance and interest in their cultural roots and in their abilities and opportunities in navigating the obstacles common to the economically disenfranchised in contemporary America.

The novel also manages to nimbly, and without comment, avoid cliché. There are no magical saviors here, no deep fountain of wisdom accessible only to those deemed closer to the Earth. That he does that while still weaving an ending that echos quite palpably with historical massacres and strategies of resistance is startling and powerful.

The range of voices and the inter-relatedness of the characters can be challenging to track at times, and perhaps a few of the perspectives are too similar to cleanly differentiate their voices in the reader’s mind. Still, an impressive debut, with some powerful moments.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The multi-perspective thing is really appealing in a ton of ways, but I struggle with–shock of shocks–the plot skills that are required to pull it off. It’s not just different characters, it’s different characters that are converging and overlapping and interacting around a central sequence of events.

Also, Orange gives a great shout-out to one of my favorite discoveries of the past few years, the hip hop collective known as A Tribe Called Red, which brings Native musical traditions into direct conversation with hip hop and EDM to great effect.

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@The Movies with PopPop: Roma

Posted on December 22, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Roma, a 2018 Netflix film written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is wonderful. It’s a story of an upper middle class household in Mexico City in the early 1970’s, and Cleo, the young woman who works for them as maid and nanny (one of several household employees).

It’s more “a day in the life” (or many days) than a plot driven film, though during its course the head of household husband/father leaves, the wife struggles with the aftermath, Cleo gets pregnant, and there are student riots and attacks on them by a quasi-government militia!

The film though is about the relationships within the family; the class and race issues (all the servants, e.g., have clearly Indian features and the wealthy do not), and the tension in Cleo being both a loved and valued member of the family – she is not thrown out after getting pregnant – and a household servant. There are no real villains, though lots of human actions with consequences, and it’s a family for which one might want to work if one had to! The acting is first rate, and the black and white photography magnificent.

Above all, it seems to capture the specificity of a particular time and setting, while making it universally relevant. Cuarón describes the film as semi-autobiographical of his own childhood.

See it – it’s both on Netflixand in theatres.

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Reading Well: The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

Posted on December 20, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

You may have noticed that I usually don’t read mutli-volume entries in order. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy (The Fifth Season [2015], The Obelisk Gate [2016], and The Stone Sky [2017]) is so good it made me break that rule, and I steamrolled from one to the next to the next.

I have a confession: Jemisin is hailed (along with Reading Well favorite Nnedi Okorafor) as a leading voice in the next generation of science fiction/fantasy, and specifically of what is termed afro-futurism. Should be exactly in one of my sweet spots.

I read something by her many years ago, I don’t even remember what, and it just left me … unreactive. This was before Reading Well, so I didn’t have to think about the reaction much, just shrugged, tossed it aside, and moved on.

Having read this, I’m pretty sure the fault was in me.

Let me be clear: this is not “great literature.” This is a page-turning fantasy epic that is richly and deftly constructed, a world that, with very little exposition, feels deep and real and whose impossibilities are shrugged off willingly. That’s a great achievement.

Add a central character who veers between courage and anger, between moments of potentially world-changing possibility and the particular grief of mothers whose children are lost to them; toss in a complex system of social control that is–and yet is not–slavery in different clothing, and you have a magnificently compelling story.

The setting is a world ravaged by tectonic disruption: every few centuries, this manifests in global catastrophe, placing humanity in a very subsistence rhythm: there are times of plenty, and then seasons of total lack, where even the flora and fauna become aggressive and deadly. There are some people–and the main character is one–who have a genetic ability to calm, if not control, the Earth itself, using this ability to lessen the impact of the constant tectonic churn.

If the genre is one you read, and the setting has the faintest appeal, read The Fifth Season immediately. I suspect you will pick up the other two shortly thereafter.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Creating a world this rich with this little exposition is a great feat: Jemisin’s conception of this world is consistent and true and what you don’t know emerges in ways that are a natural progression of the story. Just fantastic.

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Reading Well: Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

Posted on December 5, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I really loved Sing, Unburied, Sing and when I realized it was the third book of a loose trilogy (connected by geography, not by characters as far as I know), I got the other two books into my queue.

Where the Line Bleeds (2008) is the first of those three, focused on a set of twins in rural Louisiana in the months before and after their High School graduation. A lot of the comments about Sing, Unburied, Sing apply here: the book is lyrical and generous and fantastically empathetic to slices of American, and specifically African-American, life that are usually either hidden or portrayed in fairly simplistic ways.

A minor example: the twins are both tempted by illegal means to generate income and wake up early on the weekends to tend their grandmother’s yarn and garden.

In other words, the characters–the twins, their immediate family, the network of aunts/uncles/cousins that surround them, the rest of the small-town community–are woven from strands of real life, frayed and intertwined and knotted as that is.

The flora and fauna of their world–the streams and rivers, the parks and forests and yards, the snakes and dogs–are very well drawn, and those elements combined with the ever-present, oppressive heat and sweat and swelter all add to a palpable realism that is maintained throughout the story.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Weave a full and compelling narrative out of such a small thing. There is less plot here than a passage of time, and while there are moments of conflict and resolution, struggle and success, the overall arc of the book is merely a slice of life deeply rooted in a handful of characters and their community.

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Reading Well: Trickster Books

Posted on November 25, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{I’m prepping for another class, and these are more a product of wanting to keep recording most everything I read here. These are very worthwhile books, each with a significant blindspot that, while important to consider, also does not reduce their overall worth as resources on the subject of tricksters.}

I first bought Robert D. Pelton‘s The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight (1980) in 1991. I did not read it for many years, and then found it absorbing and compelling when I did. It was only later, on a second pass through it while writing my dissertation that I realized that Pelton had clearly had much of the same academic training I had, which was a bit of a shock.

It stands up to a third reading, but it’s a bewildering text in many ways. Pelton’s presentation of the trickster figures of the Ashanti, Fon, Yoruba, and Dogon peoples (Ananse, Legba, Eshu, and Ogo-Yurugu respectively) is nuanced, complicated, sophisticated, and sympathetic. It’s also almost bizarre in its avoidance of the question of Pelton himself, his “armchair” relationship to his subject matter, his (presumed) whiteness, and the politics involved in reading so deeply into “the other.”

Pelton is quite aware of the dangers of interpretation at a distance: in one of the best lines of the book, as a reaction to the heavy-handed attempts at interpretation of West African culture by a host of Europeans (Dumézil, Jung, many others), he writes

The Ashanti, however, are not trying to say something; they are saying something.

Indeed they are, and that something is not dependent on Western eyes for its explanation or understanding, Pelton’s included.

My suspicion is this is mostly a product of being written in the 1970s: there is a sense that what is missing most from The Trickster in West Africa is another chapter that situates Pelton’s scholarship within those frames, but academic awareness and grounded critique of those things blossomed in later decades. Regardless, what is present in the book is illuminating, and while much of it is difficult to grasp–at their core, West African trickster figures embody a host of contradictions that resist resolution as part of their very definition–wrestling with the ideas here is well worth the effort.

Lewis Hyde‘s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998) is an intelligent, wide-ranging romp through an impressive mind. Hyde–of whom I know very little–clearly spent a long time thinking about the Trickster figure, and what emerges is erudite and illuminating, and brings together figures as diverse as Hermes and Frederick Douglass into engaging conversation with each other.

For the most part, it works: that is, the points Hyde makes are salient and hold together, and while I don’t know that he really does much to analyze Trickster figures in their own contexts, he certainly helps enlarge our understanding of how they may function for contemporary readers.

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Reading Well: Two Short Story Collections

Posted on November 15, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I’ve written about both Jeff Vandermeer (The Southern Reach trilogy) and Sarah Hall (The Wolf Border, The Electric Michelangelo, and Daughters of the North) before. Vandermeer sits clearly in a post-Lovecraft tradition, somewhere between horror and the merely psychologically disturbing, a style that adapts very well to the form of the short story. Hall is one of my favorite contemporary authors, and a prior short story collection, The Beautiful Indifference, was also quite, quite strong.

Both Vandermeer’s The Third Bear (2010) and Hall’s Madame Zero (2017) are solid collections, and there are, between the two, a small handful of truly standout entries.

The title story of Vandermeer’s collection is a thoroughly creative riff on a common fantasy context–avillage threatened by a violent external force–and The Goat Variations may be the most creative exploration of President Bush’s response to the events of 9/11 you’ll ever come across. There is a degree of self-indulgence in some of the other stories, but none of it ruptures the consistency of supernatural voice that makes Vandermeer’s fans so loyal. If that’s up your alley, you’ll greatly enjoy The Third Bear.

Hall’s collection is more even, with the opening and closing stories the really outstanding pieces. Mrs. Fox is a meditation on love and sex, with an anthropomorphic twist that makes it more than memorable, and Evie is a stunning work, thoughtful and subtly feminist in nature. It looks at a change in personality, probing whether and how it matters if we know the cause of new or altered behavior.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Create mood like Vandermeer and describe the natural world like Hall. I mean, if I had to choose one of these authors to emulate, it would be Hall–she has more range, and a style more conducive to supporting multiple, different novels. But I’d take being able to do either.

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Reading Well: Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

Posted on November 2, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

JD Vance‘s 2016 mid-life memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis generated quite a bit of buzz when published, and it’s pretty easy to see why, as Vance’s account of his upbringing in rural poverty is a compelling read. Add the fact that Vance emerges (after transformative time in military service and at Yale) as a staunch social conservative, and the appeal of the book becomes even clearer.

The personal story is everything you would expect: heart-breaking and inspirational and full of characters that both fulfill and invalidate pre-existing stereotypes. As a primary example, the quasi-stable source of love and positive regard for him are his grandparents, especially his grandmother, who is a demanding, foul-mouthed, gun-toting, hyper-protective woman, capable of both tough and soft love as she sees fit, with tough love often involving believable threats of firearms.

Vance’s social analysis is predictable: he sees some of the ways in which government intervention could assist, but he never wavers from a demand that personal choice and individual responsibility are key elements: that is, improving schools is great, but if parents don’t care, what good can it do?

The problem, of course, is that the answer is, a lot, as it provides another venue for what Vance sees as crucial to healthy development: engaged, positive role models.

Vance also stays away from the concept of whiteness for the most part, neither wrestling with how it formed his community, nor with how it played to his advantage as he moved through the wider world. That’s fine–there is no ethical imperative for him to write about it–but it does sit at the center of the debate Hillbilly Elegy contributed to, and as such its overall omission is striking (he writes about being white; that’s a different thing the structure of whiteness).

Still, especially if you are curious about what rural poverty might look like in 21st century America, it’s a worthwhile read.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Dunno. I read this because a friend wanted to. I have never been drawn to writing a memoir, and I don’t read a lot of this kind of non-fiction. I do think that Vance’s ability to create his family on the page is admirable: his relatives come through as fully realized, three dimensional people, and that keeps the book from sliding into a dry piece of social observation.

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