Reading Well: Provenance by Ann Leckie

Posted on September 24, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Set in the same universe as The Ancillary Trilogy, Ann Leckie‘s Provenance (2017) is, essentially, a police procedural. Leckie’s ability to create both characters you care about and cultural settings deep enough to hold your attention shines through, but your enjoyment of Provenance probably boils down to how much you enjoy whodunnits served up with heavy doses of political maneuverings.

This is very much old-school interpretations of WWI type stuff, where world (galactic, in this case) wars can be started or prevented by killing or saving Arch Duke Ferdinand. It’s full of intrigue, sibling rivalry, aliens in disguise, and sordid love affairs.

More interesting for me is an underlying conceit: the primary cultural group is obsessed with their own history, prizing memento’s from historical events–napkins used by so-and-so, invitations, pottery, each carefully signed and dated–as highly coveted objects of status. Selfies have been replaced by souvenir collages. The story hinges on the question of what happens when those relics are falsified, or when the events they commemorate are revealed to not have occurred in quite the way the history books declare.

I am curious about how long Leckie stays in this universe–there are certainly more stories to tell here, and while I think the Ancillary Trilogy is more rewarding than Provenance, I’ll be happy to stick around for a few more of them.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Write mysteries. The creative process behind them baffles me–I know so little about what is going to happen when I write, intricate plot points that are revealed by later action just seem like an impossible task. I am more likely to have a crime occur that is never solved, I think.

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Reading Well: Binti: Home & Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on September 14, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

These two books complete the trilogy started with Binti, and easily make Nnedi Okorafor the most reviewed writer here on Reading Well. Certainly, I am a fan, but that’s also a product of Okorafor’s tendency to write in what are at most long novellas: it’s all very easily consumed over just a few sessions.

Binti: Home and Binti: The Night Masquerade (both 2017) take up where Binti left off, and continue the story of our young, mathematically gifted namesake who remains precocious, emotionally scarred, and in therapy. This last is a minor plot point, but an example of how Okorafor plays with the genre, preferring to imagine Binti’s life as vividly problematic–and real–as it could be, instead of a boarding school fantasy set in a scifi context.

The final two books trace Binti’s return home, her discovery of some disturbing (yet somewhat obvious) revelations about her family’s past, and her role in brokering peace between two warring factions. There’s even a cellular reconstruction that is dramatic more as you wonder how Okorafor is going to ressurect Binti than thinking she might actually kill her main character.

Still, the story is creative as all get out, and the core characters–Binti, a peer compatriot, and the alien life form with which she is genetically bonded–are all well drawn. If you want to keep a finger on the pulse of contemporary YA fiction, and are interested in what a non-European take on that through a scifi lens might feel like, this is a rewarding, quick read.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

It’s nothing new: Okorafor’s creativity is immense, and daunting, and she respects it to the point that she doesn’t feel the need to over-explain parts of it. That may be the most impressive thing of all to me: the immense trust she places in her readers.

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Reading Well: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira

Posted on September 4, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Published in 2000 and translated into English in 2006, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is at most a novella, coming in at under 100 not-full-paperback size pages. The fact that César Aira has been successful publishing works at this length is quite remarkable. Aira had been unknown to me, clearly a lack on my part given his reputation as one of the more important voices in contemporary Spanish language literature.

Living somewhere at the edges of historical fiction, the story traces a trip made by the German landscape painter Johann Moritz Rugendas. There is some back story here–Rugendas is a minor, yet noteworthy, figure in art history, largely because of his contributions to the landscape painting methodology championed by Alexander von Humboldt and because of his prolific output which documented the peoples and practices of South America–especially Brazil and Argentina–at a time where little pictorial record existed for European consumption.

But the novella is really about art and the relationship of the artist to their art. Rugendas is repeatedly struck by lightning during a storm, an experience that leaves him both disfigured and in an uncertain mental state. There are no clear conclusions here: Aira seems to enjoy exploring the state of his characters without a need for a clear declaration of intent.

It’s a very quick read, and one that may stay with you longer than anticipated: Aira’s skill is obvious, and the questions raised about the source of art, the role of prescriptive systems of production in its creation (Humboldt had rules for the creation of landscapes, and for what made them worthy of being recorded on canvas), and the source of inspiration all play with each other in subtle and thought-provoking ways.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I tend to this length quite naturally (when not working on the massive, unending novel). So having a model for actually publishing them is somewhat inspiring!

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Reading Well: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Posted on July 27, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Published in 2017, Jesmyn Ward‘s Sing, Unburied, Sing is actually the 3rd entry in a loose trilogy, but it is the first I have read.

It is magnificent.

The plot is disarmingly simple: two children, deeply dependent on each other; a mother prone to violence and drug use; a grandfather trying to provide a safe and stable world; a grandmother suffering from cancer. Add a road trip to fetch the children’s father on his release from prison, sprinkle in incisive details of rural poverty and a dash of magical realism, stir it up, and that’s it.

But, there is so much more: there are the literal ghosts of the past that litter the Mississippi delta, there is the heritage of second sight that traces through the family, and above all else, there is the language. Ward’s words are magical, surprising, lyrical, and richly emotive. It’s probably not a book for everyone: the subject matter is difficult (drug use, child abuse, and contemporary and historical racial violence all play a part) and the emotional honesty often unsettling.

The novel alternates its point of view each chapter, which works exceedingly well in Ward’s hands. Each voice is distinct and, as importantly, each character’s innate intelligence and insight shines through: even for those whose actions are problematic, their motivations are clear and understandable.

There are some things to nitpick–a level of repetition of character traits, some scenes that don’t do enough to move the story forward. Whatever. For me, this novel was an amazing ride, one that left me immediately ordering the preceding two books.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The language. Ward’s sentences skip and stutter, offering sharp insight and surprising connections between the landscape, the weather, the characters’ emotions, and their internal and external struggles. The skill and creativity that is on display is, for a writer, both inspiring and intimidating.

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Reading Well: Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Published in 2016, Sylvain Neuvel‘s Sleeping Giants is the first book in a trilogy. It’s a delightful, surprising, quick read, exploring what might happen if we discovered a giant robot powered by massively advanced technology whose pieces are scattered across the globe, buried deep under the Earth.

We don’t get very far in book one–really just to the putting the pieces of the puzzle together. What makes the book so engaging is Neuvel’s success in a form that would seem to resist deep engagement with the reader: most of the chapters are interviews between a nameless government operative (think Deep Throat from the X-Files, if the reference makes sense) and the main characters. There is no description, just the interview transcript. The other chapters are diary entries.

Yet, somehow, the characters shine through and their struggles–with each other, with solving the puzzle of the technology, with its implications–all matter, and are handled quite effectively. I was surprised to reach the end wanting to read the rest of the trilogy, but I was, and I look forward to doing so!

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The form thing is the clear accomplishment here. To succeed at a structure that, if described objectively (a series of interviews punctuated by a small handful of journal entries), I think many would insist that is a pretty difficult road to travel for what is, essentially, a first-contact sci-fi story. But it works, and thinking about why and how seems worthwhile. (Hint: characters you care about matter …)

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Reading Well: Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

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

Lucifer’s Hammer, first published in 1977, is a result of the fruitful collaboration between Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. This is a page-turner of a sci fi/disaster novel, focusing on the impact of a sizable comet colliding with the Earth.

The book got some attention at publication for its attempts at being “scientifically realistic” (whatever that means) at depicting the devastation such a comet strike would cause. I wonder if those models hold up 50 years on: we’re talking about 800 foot tidal waves and the simultaneous activation of most volcanic activity on the planet, with strikes concentrated from the California coast through the Gulf of Mexico and into the Atlantic. It reads plausibly, though.

The novel suffers from being a product of its time in two ways. First, the Cold War mechanics of the geopolitical reactions to the comet are clearly rooted in the realities of the 1970s (and are key to a nice plot line that revolves around a US/USSR joint attempt to observe the comet from space); second, the non-western world gets pretty short shrift. Africa is dismissed with the destruction of its coastal areas and South America is waved away as being awash in chaos and revolution.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is how much time–nearly half the novel–is spent before impact, introducing a large cast of characters in different Californian locations, ranging from a playboy who jointly discovers the comet to various politicians to a gangster looking to take advantage of rich people fleeing their homes to just “normal” folks reacting to the possibility of a looming disaster. There is an attempt to build some suspense as to whether the comet will hit or not, but the cover and the blurbs on the back of the book (not to mention the title) give that away well before you start reading.

Still, it’s a nice choice, as it makes the characters matter to the reader in ways that otherwise could be more challenging; and, it raises the stakes for seeing how these characters will respond to the disaster.

There is something … innocent about Lucifer’s Hammer. We are a bit desensitized to dystopian futures, and most contemporary writing move very quickly into the rapid destruction of morality and ethical behavior. Niven and Pournelle don’t avoid those topics, but this novel is grounded in a time when our faith in science, technology, and even humanity was higher than it is right now. That makes it a surprisingly refreshing read.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Niven and Pournelle make some interesting choices in the final 1/3 of the book in terms of not detailing major events, but rather moving straight to a scene after the event, and using that to both shed light on what just happened and hit a beat in the plot of the characters involved. It’s a challenge to pull off–and they largely do–and something I think I could learn from, as I tend to want to write out every. single. thing. that happens.

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Reading Well: 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

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

This is the second book by Paul Auster to appear here, after In the Country of Last Things. 4 3 2 1 is a much more literary, serious work, and one that explores a concept dear to most writers’ imaginations: what other lives could be lived by a character?

Starting with a single chapter about the first of his family to emigrate to America, the novel divides into four streams, each following the life of the same character through four different possible lives. In each, his parents are the same people, but their circumstances change, sometimes slightly and sometimes quite dramatically; likewise a set of characters–friends, lovers, extended family–appear in multiple streams, sometimes as bit players and sometimes with leading roles.

Auster tends to write in very long sentences, sentences that often go on for a page or more, extended by a prolific use of commas, with clauses and detailed explanations sprinkled in for good effect at every turn, creating a slow, languid rhythm that carries the novel forward, and making it a gentle read containing detailed explanations of the motivations and reactions of his characters, something that makes it even more surprising when the narrative finally comes to rest, pausing for a moment with the calm respite of a period, and perhaps a descriptive clause. Whew.

As long as that stylistic choice is not offputting, the book is consistently good and at times fascinating: all four versions of the protagonist are deeply involved in sports (baseball and basketball, sometimes singly and sometimes both) but the eventual role of that involvement varies greatly; his childhood is formed by the different fortunes encountered by his parents and, equally, their different reactions to those circumstances; even his search for love and friendship is similar, yet unique, across the four stories.

Auster clearly has a great love for New York–while the protagonist is raised in suburban New Jersey, his escapes to Manhattan are consistent throughout, and the wider, global events of the 1960s are seen through the narrower lens of NYC and, more specifically, the happenings on and around the Columbia campus.

There is a risk in this kind of endeavor that the exercise overwhelms the narrative–that is, the sleight of hand involved in the four parallel stories becomes the primary focus. Auster avoids this (although some may disagree about the success of the final chapter, which re-unites the narratives), and provides a rewarding, intriguing read.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I am sometimes tempted by the long sentence thing. They feel much more “literary” somehow, but I can’t really pull it off. More than that, the confidence that is needed to take a not-terribly-unusual writing exercise and turn it into a successful novel is admirable, and something I certainly don’t have at this point.

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Reading Graphically: Five Graphic Novels

Posted on June 9, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{After a really nice run of novels, I took a break to dig through a pile of unread graphic novels. More and more, I like having a record of what I read in the entirety, so here are some quick notes on them as well.}

Your Black Friend and Other Strangers by Ben Passmore. The opening story, which gives its title to the collection, won many awards–and quite deservedly so. It’s a direct, moving, and powerful piece focused on the intersections of race, community, and friendship. The rest of the pieces are pulled from earlier in Passmore’s career and vary quite a bit. He’s at his best at two extremes: direct, political pieces that reflect his time spent engaging in direct action protests (including the Charlottesville protests of last summer) and abstract, dream (or nightmare) like pieces that are really meditations on a mood.

Herman by Trade by Chris W. Kim. Speaking of mood pieces … Herman is a loner who works in urban sanitation. He has a gift: he can physically transform himself into anybody else. Throw in a casting call for a film about street performers, and out comes a story about the nature of identity and performance. It is enigmatic and ambivalent, and that makes it compelling, although it certainly requires an openness to a determined lack of explanation.

M.F.K. by Nilah Magruder. This reads as if it is the first entry in a much longer story. It is engaging and lovely, but wildly incomplete. The story focuses on two young people: the boy raised in a remote village and yearning to explore the wide, wide world; the girl a foreigner found wounded in the surrounding desert. Throw in some magic and some recurring threats, and you have the first chapter of a longer adventure. This was released last fall, and I do hope we get more.

Josephine Baker by Catel Muller & José-Louis Bocquet. Over 400 pages of comic here, plus biographical notes for another 100 or so, all dedicated to the life of the iconic Josephine Baker. It’s a pretty typical graphic novel biography: short on critique and certainly a bit on-the-surface. At the same time, what a life! If–like me–you were unaware of her WWII activities, or her constant financial hardships, or her “rainbow family,” or her ongoing significance in French popular culture, or, or, or … well, it’s all worth knowing.

Best Wishes by Mike Richardson & Paul Chadwick. A love story in contemporary Manhattan, with a drop of soap opera and a larger dollop of thoughts around the significance of marketing. The plot is well-structured, although there is never any real doubt as to the resolution of the central love affair.

 

 

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Reading Well: Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Posted on May 26, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi‘s Kintu (2014) has received a lot of positive buzz, even being hailed as the first great Ugandan novel, whatever that means (I don’t mean to dismiss the praise, rather to problematize the terms first, great, and Ugandan).

It’s an ambitious novel: over 400 pages, and spanning several generations through Ugandan history. The plot revolves around a distant, not-quite-mythic ancestor who, through some unfortunate events, is the subject of a curse that is transferred across successive generations of twins.

The characters, for me, increase in their richness and individuality as the novel progresses, and the incorporation of the modern world into the social fabric is handled deftly. The major historical upheavals–the arrival and departure of the British, Idi Amin’s rule and removal from power, the HIV/AIDS epidemic–are all dealt with an understated realism that strikes me as highly accurate: that is, these things were part of everyday life, they were part of the circumstances through which lives had to be navigated, and people did so with widely varying degrees of sophistication, understanding, and success.

Because of the buzz around the novel, I couldn’t keep the question of what makes this Ugandan out of my head as I read: certainly, all of the details are deeply rooted–the settings, the historical events that are referenced, the cultures that are detailed and represented are all highly specific and very richly presented. And, it may be true that novels this deeply set in Uganda are few and far between. But in the end, I think Kintu belongs to a specific sub-genre of multi-generational studies of families with rich historical settings. In this, for example, it shares genre space with Some Sing, Some Cry.

If that sound interesting, and you are either curious about Uganda or know enough about it to want to immerse yourself in it, you will most likely enjoy Kintu immensely.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The thick representation of a local culture is always an aspiration for me: I want my writing to be set somewhere specific, even if that place is generated from my imagination.

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Reading Well: Tricia Rose on Hip Hop

Posted on May 11, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

You may have noticed a lot of content on hip hop here lately …

As part of that, I re-read Tricia Rose‘s 1994 book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America and read for the first time her 2008 work, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop–And Why It Matters.

Black Noise remains a compelling work, and it deserves its place in the annals of scholarly work on hip hop. Note that both of these books are academic. They aren’t particularly theoretical or particularly dense, but they are detailed: it is not enough for Rose to claim that part of the originating context of hip hop involves urban decay; instead she traces that historically over the course of several pages.

Rose does a great job following the development of the art form while remaining focused on interactions between the historical facts and both the cultural and commercial forces at work. It is very much a work of its time: there is still a sense of optimism about hip hop, and there is still a notion that it will play a positive role in voicing the experience and concerns of (mostly) urban, (mostly) non-white populations that were, at a minimum, highly marginalized.

Which brings us to The Hip Hop Wars, published fourteen years later … Rose opens by declaring that

Hip hop is not dead, but it is gravely ill. The beauty and life force of hip hop have been squeezed out, wrung nearly dry by the compounding factors of commercialism, distorted racial and sexual fantasy, oppression, and alienation. It has been a sad thing to witness … It wasn’t ideal by any means: Carrying many of the seeds of destruction that were part of society itself, it had its gangsters, hustlers, misogynists, and opportunists; it suffered from the hallmarks of social neglect and disregard; it expressed anger and outrage in sometimes problematic ways.

Indeed. From there, though, she picks up on part of what made Black Noise such a great book, refusing to be drawn into simple-mindedness on either side of the debate. The rest of The Hip Hop Wars is separated into ten chapters, five focusing on common critiques of the genre and five on common defenses of it. Doing this allows her to complicate the issue, recognizing both the ridiculousness of claiming hip hop is the cause of a “decay of American values,” and refusing to concede that the presence of a few politically conscious artists means hip hop doesn’t have a political issue.

#BestBits

Black Noise‘s greatest contribution to the discussion is, I believe, the application of Arthur Jafa‘s categories of African-American expression to hip hop. The interrelated manifestations of flow, rupture in line, and layering offer a richly nuanced lens through which to interpret the art.

In The Hip Hop Wars, I was most appreciative of her constant reminder that hip hop exists as a commercial product, and while she never explicitly invokes Foucault, there a is a whiff of his presence in the way she unpacks how the figure of the pimp (or the gangster or the whore) is both created by artists and demanded by commercial interests in the wider culture.

#BottomLine

If you’re looking for historical context on the art form, and if you are interested in moving the discussion beyond the obvious, these two books are highly recommended.

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