steveatwaywords's reviews
1212 reviews

Much heat around this novel, a Booker winner nonetheless, and I can understand the perspectives from both sides, most carrying loads of presumption about what a reading experience should be. I prefer, so much as I can, to allow each book to speak to its purpose on its own terms, and then my reviews mark it to how well it was accomplished. 

To begin, I too, was off-put by the novel's style, at first: massive single-paragraph blocks with dialogue mashed in, the craftings of image or moment buried in unlooked-for details somewhere inside them. What was Lynch thinking? Shouldn't this be a gripping story of terror as a family falls victim to a growing autocracy and war?

Yes, it is. Claustrophobic, even suffocating, experiences a monumental blur, every event of life piled on top of another demanding our attention with equal fervor, who are we to understand and sort it out? This sense of overwhelm, as so many of us experienced during the politics of the pandemic, is tripled here. In brief, this is as much a reading experience as it is a literary novel of plot and theme.

Little need to detail the events of this woman whose men (father, husband, sons) are swept away by various circumstances to places dark and uncertain. Desperately she accepts her role of holding her family together, and at some point (you decide when but we will all disagree) her noble strength becomes ignorant folly. As the country and family slip apart, as the four children each suffer their trauma in unique ways, as tightly as the narrative camera focuses in on her, we see how easily--how anonymously--she might become a statistic of war, her story lost, disappeared.

And this growing tension is absolutely relentless. We might argue how many choices were actually available, about what sacrifices would "reasonably" be made when all is unreasonable. We might even argue responsibility for the suffering. But we will agree: the events are entirely too plausible, too hyperreal, too close to our fears and too (f)actual for communities who do suffer (and against whom we build walls).  

Build what you want. Lynch takes these walls apart, and some of us will still not believe.

Having read nearly all of Joyce's prose fairly recently, I understand now why so few praise his verse. It's odd, because it seems to me that Joyce did not spend half the reflected time considering structure and language of verse in the same manner as he approaches his prosaic narrative structures or philosophies of language use.

For that, then, this collection is eminently approachable by virtually all readers, easier to absorb even than Dubliners, which I suspect is a relief to many. But this places him in the broad realm of traditional (and often mediocre) poets, having little original to say and little said in an original way. The first collection (or single major work) is called "Chamber Music," and it is a long series of short poems which might be read together as the rise and debilitation of a romantic relationship. Each speaks much as one of the Romantic Age might predict.

Only the second section, "Pomes Penyeach" begins to approach the linguistic anxiety and passion which we find in his prose. Even here, however, the works are so brief as to feel experiments or tentative reaches into nuance. Joyce, oddly, is uncertain in his steps, less certain of what he believes his verse might convey.  The final poem, "Ecce Puer," feels conclusive only in its dismal tone so far difference from the rest of the collection. 

What are we to make of this? We know that Ezra Pound would not publish many of these (not in and of itself a condemnation, however). What we have is writing for a Joyce completionist (that would be me) but a reading as curiosity more than illumination.

Okorafor's take on cybernetic science fiction is fresh, fast-paced and compelling, with a fascinating world and a main and supporting protagonist I wanted to know more about, and this is rare in the genre, anymore.

Main character Anwuli (AO) is in a unique space as Other, one more or less self-designed after childhood tragedies. Her augmentations are Nigeria's new pressure point for prejudices, as are the borders between traditional and modern lifestyles. Soon paired with a traditional herdsman, the two represent the extreme ends of this dynamic world's victims: it's no wonder they ally. 

The novel moves very quickly from place to place as they seek refuge and we are given, I think, precious little time to reflect on most of it. The entire action for the book takes place in a little more than a single week's time. It's too bad, in one way, because all I could imagine as I read is that the world-building Okorafor has done here calls for more story, much more story. And so do her characters, who deserve the time to reflect on the significance of the decisions and power shifts implicit in their choices. 

And it's clear to me that Okorafor has spent time in the world beyond this story's construction. We have a fairly elaborate mythology of the inventive moment which changes the African story in energy leadership and wealth. Regrettably, little is done with the story related to this plot beyond relating it. But it's a tantalizing conceit for more novels ahead.

Of course, too, Okorafor is a bit bound still by science fiction's traditional tropes; it is difficult to write about cybernetics, corrupt oligarchies, and "chosen ones" without falling into predictable patterns. There is more here that could be explored, if she would give herself the space to do it. As it is, much of what comes from the novel's conceit remains somewhat predictable: it would make, I fear, a forgettable movie if optioned as one.

Okorafor is a marvelous talent who, like other enviro-future writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi, could take on more ambitious projects still. I for one look forward to them.

So much has been written, and justifiably, about the social, political, and emotional impact of this book, and I can only underscore it. It is, at its front, a work of significance for its moment (and those before and after it), and so it exists and works differently from what we might call traditional literature: it is as much counter-narrative and manifesto as it is a novel.

I'll highlight a few areas which stood out for me, though, on the reading side of the book:

--A protagonist delicately placed between several conflicting ideologies and spaces, young enough to be poorly-equipped to navigate them expertly, yet also young enough to develop genuine agency and righteousness. I love a flawed protagonist who muscles (even stumbles) towards justice.

--Characters who--despite everything they directly witness--defy justice and sensibility for their own ideas of safety and power. Ironically and importantly, a comfortable white girl and an older black gang leader serve equally here.

--Families who define themselves--despite marriages, career, and class differences--by their relationships to one another, and that these bonds make them strong.

--Minor characters who themselves visibly fall into completely different positions of internal conflict from our protagonist and Khalil, who themselves struggle (at times unseen) with the decisions they must make.

Thomas, therefore, has crafted a microbrew of American race politics at a time when it was/is sorely needed. Does it sometimes miss a beat, have a stilted moment, too-handily arrange a scene? Remember what purpose the book serves. For me, the largest criticism I have of this work is hardly its fault: that the story is so "timely" (from tech to vocabulary) that the problems it addresses may tragically outlast its currency. 

Black Hole has earned its reputation as one of the best (and more disturbing) stories out there.  It's not just the unsanitary lives of 1970s teen drug use or nudity common to its pages, not merely the starkness of the black and white illustrations, but the strange normalization of an STD that physically, grotesquely, even cosmically, deforms young people which captures and repels us.  It's the complete absence of an adult world which has emotionally and psychically abandoned them all except through pointless media. It's the unreasoning escapism through hallucinogenics which confuses delusion with vision or even visionary awakening.

The allegory to our social and psychological approach to the AIDS epidemic is an obvious reading, but Burns does not allow us to see it merely as this. In brief, in many ways this disease "talks back," suggesting something more cosmic involved. And what is also clear: the disease is psychologically transformative, as well. An over-simplified reading ("This is a story of x") is in many ways a misreading.

That there is something else operating here, some other sense of (dis)order, is clear then, but Burns will never let us know precisely what that is. The naivete of its protagonists, all making fateful choices and fatal miscommunications, must in the end make some sense of themselves and their own desires, which--properly--is at the center of the story.

And this, I think, is where Burns falters at points. Rich in symbolism and foreboding which is never fully explicated or unraveled, distracted by subplots which undermine the larger terrifying themes (did we really need to add a murder mystery to all this?), I found myself leaving the otherwise absorbing story to wonder at how it was crafted, and that's never really a good sign. I wondered if Burns began his series without really having plotted its story arcs, without understanding where and how it might resolve itself. This is easy to understand with multi-volume graphic novels which are published across months or years. But this reality does not absolve the creator from nevertheless telling a satisfying story coherent and tightly focused. The Victorians did it with more ambition and fewer tools at their disposal. What's more, other graphic novelists do it:  I'm thinking of Tynion or Gaiman as obvious examples.

Even so, there is nothing I've read quite like Black Hole, and its images and deluded characters will not leave me anytime soon.  

Surprisingly fast-paced novel on language and how it shapes our thinking!

Delany is at once a sharp-skilled writer on topics abstract and challenging (how a brain functions, social-psychological insights, what it means to be 'discorporate') and sometimes challenging on topics which might be sharply-defined (action sequences with unspoken narrative leaps, dialogue with subtext too subtle to follow). Nevertheless, what I thought first upon reading this book (and after it was over) was that I wanted more.

His characters, major and minor, are rich in backstory without needless exposition; the world is massive in variation and function with little space given for its history. From the first pages, readers are set deeply into it and left to founder, but we are never lose ourselves from the tautly-told story offered. At once a novel of espionage and murder, its answer is cleanly resolved in the premise: how might a language's structure alter who and what we are? 

A reader today may have quibbles with the book: its worlds lean a bit heavily on the 1960s psychedelic scenes from when it was written. And, my personal trouble at times, the narrative dives into the languages themselves are fairly experimental and at times stream-of-consciousness, in keeping with the nature of those languages. However, these pages (not mere paragraphs) can become truly disorienting: but don't skip over them, because much of Delany's answers and vision lie in this very experimental text! (And to be sure, when I say that I wanted the novel to be longer, it was not to ask for more of this writing!)

What we are left with is a novel that pokes hard at a concept other writers have done far less successfully (Ayn Rand and Larry Niven each come to mind), but with stakes and consequences so high that we leave less worried for the future vision and more anxious for ourselves.

The most critical comments on Leroux's The Future say that it is a difficult read, not opening itself easily to reader immersion. They are not wrong. It is extraordinarily difficult to place one's self into a world of alternate history where familiar landmarks are completely rewritten, where the future itself has erased much that we know, and where narrative slides between unreliable narrators, many of them near-feral children. So is this therefore not worth its time? If you are seeking a novel of rollicking, page-turning adventure, then yes, move along. 

But careful readers find themselves looking for something familiar, then, to latch on to and fortunately, this is not too difficult, after all. This is a novel dominated by the very old and the very young, of those first to feel the effects of societal misfortune. Leroux's dystopia is a planet easing itself into death: pollutions and toxins, climate change, and long-failing governance. The older generations are left behind in squalor, and the young abandon the adults altogether to live their own made-up mythologies. All struggle through inevitable deaths: drugs, harsh winters, disease, and even tourism as the remaining wealthy pay to gawk at them in a form of "ghetto tours."

In this landscape, what hope is there? Somehow, Leroux works her characters to find answers old and even older. The strongest characters on both sides of adulthood are the novel's resilient women, thwarted and dismayed, but powering daily through their choices with compassion and determination, aging into new understandings. The earth, too, is an elusive and omnipresent character, suffering deprivation and abuse, but--through near hallucinogenic moments--guiding and offering, magically revealing, spontaneously returning. Alongside each other in the narrative, these two forces do not leave us in despair.

The book is not without its structural flaws, and I would be the first to say the entire work could stand a single revision for coherence. While its publisher and book cover point rigorously to the alternative history, for instance (one of the main reasons I picked it up along with its local recommendation), and while Leroux spends a fair space with its historical moment, she establishes no narrative or thematic reason to place her setting here. The story she is telling needs no alternative history at all; more, it is one of the reasons many readers find this a difficult read as it so powerfully erases our world map, and it further gives us reason to abandon the potent warnings the dystopian genre offers.

There are seemingly dozens of characters (I stopped counting how many children's stories are here), and managing all of their subplots is too much for readers, especially when the writer herself seems to abandon the reasons for some of the tellings: one character who gets a solid narrative section of background and motivation dies inexplicably off-stage some chapters later.  Most all of them are told in first-person (even the neighborhood dog gets a turn at point of view), but for what reason does each it is difficult to fathom.

And amidst this narrative disorientation, moments of faery-like nature magic appear. We would do well not to seek its explanation, something done by fantasy readers and literalists. Miracles are elusive, after all, are just sometimes recognized far after the event for what they are. And as one world creaks toward death, The Future seems to suggest that it will be all right, after all. One foot in each space; one love in each space. 

There is nothing really amiss about this brief curiosity from 1937: van Loon offers a quick history of movable type, suggesting that there was quite a bit more to the story of Gutenberg than our middle school education told us. Van Loon's contention is that Gutenberg was not singularly responsible for his famed invention--and perhaps stole it from a Dutchman. Moreover, several civilizations had versions of movable type centuries before the German inventor. 

Instead, he argues, a number of circumstances (the invention and geographic manufacture of paper, economic need, and even the Phoenician alphabet) brought together a moment that afforded the necessity for a modern printing press. 

True enough. Though it almost seems, at one level, that van Loon, with less than verified evidence,  is compromising the fame of a certain German inventor at the time of this writing, Europe in 1937. He says that he is fully aware of ironic nationalist tendencies, and that undoubtably similar motivations might work to elevate anyone to hero status, as well. 

But his theme is quite a bit larger than a simple history, of course. Watching over his shoulder at the mobilizing German armies, he makes it clear by the end what he is thinking, in all caps:

"The future happiness of the human race depends upon just one thing - international cooperation." And thus, the global history of the invention of printing is an argument against a coming war.

 

Worth the read, if for nothing else, this political aim and the fascinating assemblage of historical pieces which brought us to print.

This is my first novel by Llosa, and I can only start by calling him one of the more unique storytellers I have read. I was at first a bit disoriented by his approach, not merely that the chapters are told out of chronological and narrative sequence, but that the structures of the two trading narratives are so inherently different.

And this, of course, is a large element of what The Storyteller is about: our main narrator seeks to understand the role of the sacred hablador in the Machiguenga tribe of the Amazon, an indigenous culture less and less removed from his contemporary Peruvian culture. Confronted by the question of whether the modern world can or should leave the indigenous cultures alone, by what might be lost should we intervene, the narrator is compelled to tell his own story from "without," for he can never get past that cultural barrier more sacred than religion. The storyteller hablador carries nothing less than the culture's identity.

What is left but to allow the other narrator to speak as hablador himself?  Llosa offers little assistance in explaining what we encounter with this narrator but the words, the structure of the telling, the narrative markers, are all unique, as is the vocabulary of the Machiguenga which employs seemingly only two time words ("before" and "after") and only a single word for any individual, oneself, and the sun ("Tasurinchi"). The effect, once we become accustomed to it, is to literally reframe our own thinking about that outsider question.

Colonization, industrialization, superstition, misogyny, and other difficult themes are explored from this "inside" narrative to, I can only say, great illumination. There is no "noble savage" discourse here, but a thickness of telling reminiscent of LeGuin's style. I thought, too, that a key element of the story also turns Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" on its head, most necessarily. 

We can leave a novel with more questions than answers. But in the best of them, as here in the capable hands of a master, our questions emerge more relevant, more nuanced, more true.

A collection of essays we might more commonly describe as personal essays or narrative journalism, the editor of this now older text makes a large (and oft-repeated point) that "creative nonfiction" is not widely accepted and that therefore what is done here is vital to writing.

Okay. We can ignore that Montaigne (originator of the essay form) and hundreds after him wrote such essays, and we can ignore that so much journalism today (well, since the 1990s, I think) recognizes openly the role of the journalist's framing of a story and so actively incorporates themselves into the telling of the story. Be my guest. But did you have to demand that every one of your contributing writers parrot their concerns about "creative nonfiction," as well? 

So, despite recognizing the important work Gutkind has done in his teaching and publishing, his heavy-handed work in editing here was off-putting.

Nevertheless, the book remains a potent collection of essays from some very fine writers (think Diane Ackerman and Ntozake Shange, Francine Prose and John McPhee, etc.), and no reader will leave this read unenlightened on any number of topics, from bigoted fathers and Emmet Till's legacy to brain-damaged narration and early navigation techniques, from the links between culture and food to metaphors and from Jewish divorce rituals to hunting wolves. I was not bored by a single essay, and each made for both a relaxing and compelling exploration.