steveatwaywords's reviews
1212 reviews

Let's start with the main criticisms about this book: it moves slowly and it has very little of what is popularly demanded these days: page-turning action. I, too, wondered for a time where MacInnes was going with In Ascension, but I reminded myself about that old concept of the author-reader contract: I as a reader promise to give the book my fair attention and the author in return promises to make it worth my while. I'm glad I stayed.

I will not reveal the big moments here--this is all spoiler-free, I think--but they come in small doses right along the way. Perhaps to the surprise of all those DNFers (the ones who Did Not Finish), just about everything in the books early and middle chapters becomes vitally woven by its ending, and that's quite a range of detail.

MacInnes' first-person narrative of a young, ambitious, but emotionally distraught female microbiologist Leigh digs fairly deeply into her family relationships, her collegial relationships, and how her competencies themselves may mask other issues. Her initial project work on a deep sea anomaly equally lays fundamental groundwork not just in biology, but in her particular framing of the importance of that science. Like the best hard-science fiction novels, MacInnes does not get squeamish over detailing thicker principles of molecular engineering nor later of space travel. Better than many such novels, though, we find that this orientation is actively working to develop the strengths and psychological stress marks on our narrator Leigh. More, as we will discover, it is these moments--a photograph of a childhood sister-love, a phone call of passive-aggressive blame, a regret over a loss, a wounded nostalgia over idealism--that become almost essential to a larger question completely.

And what is In Ascension about? Crafted in our own environmental politics advanced to a point of crisis, one may expect the title to be spiritual in nature. I will only say, though, that it has far more than a single meaning. With the wonder and reverence of an Arthur C. Clarke novel, and a willingness to allow the uncertainties of science lead us to deeper questions, <i>In Ascension</i>  will leave readers both fulfilled and bewildered. It teases old SF tropes without lazily fulfilling them; and it offers instead a completion of Leigh's personal and scientific journal which is uniquely and wholly satisfying. 

Yes, it's a big book, and readers who seek a page-turner need not stop here.  If instead, however, you miss the novel that isn't afraid to find that the most particular details--right down to the molecule--are themselves momentous, settle in.

It's rare that I come across a writer so abstracted that I can make little of what I am reading. Mackey has largely succeeded here, though, and I admit that my rating is part of my quandary of what to think about his largely-acclaimed poetry.

I admit, too, that a lot of stream-of-consciousness work, at its most raw, defies identification as open, conscious art or literature. Uniquely personal, heedless of coherence, a true stream of consciousness is unapologetic about its opacity. Fortunately for us, Mackey is not so dead to readership. Instead, we have what appears to be an incantation, a reverie, an invocation, of ancient gods and spirits--not all African, by the way--as they revisedly incarnate themselves today, sometimes through the work of musicians, sometimes in moments of solitude and despair.  

Even so, while I can make my way fairly well through Joyce, or perhaps more appropriate here, the poetry of Fred Moten, Nathaniel Mackey's pages invite readers mostly to be carried along for the ride, regardless of comprehension. In some ways, the concept of "comprehension" itself is what is being challenged.

In one of the center sections, however, he offered me, at least, a bit of a liferaft, a letter written to one of his editors or commenters, in which we offers some hints about what he is up to, though even this, set in the book as itself a section of a larger poem, does not articulate the whole. 

Mackey does have a coherence of themes or motifs, and it is clear he is in some ways conscious of maintaining their integrity even while calling upon his spirits--philosophies of gratuity, of worthiness, of appeal, all subtly wend their ways. 

For some time in the reading, I was convinced that part of my problem was a basic unfamiliarity with enough African lore and tradition to give this poetry proper credence. And I still believe this is somewhat the case. But Mackey clearly is not so firmly rooted in black history for this to explain it, completely. 

And I am unfortunately left to puzzle over what remains as I might at a modern art show or an obscure wine tasting, surrounded by those who at least make the noises of acclaim, whether or not they can enter Mackey's verse. 

This is my first Ogawa read, and it certainly will not be my last. Her work, Revenge is next, I think, especially after I recently read the short story "Welcome to the Museum of Torture." 

First, do not enter this work thinking you know how books and stories work. Ogawa is going to teach us something new. The narrative success of it may be in question, but there is little doubt that the initial discomfiture and confusion readers experience (both in setting and in narrative pace) are a critical part of what she is up to. For these reasons, if we enter the work seeking a clean and simple "answer" to the mystery of social memory loss, like it's a thriller or detective novel, we will equally be disappointed. Let the novel work on its own terms.

When we do, we find a psychological and emotional dysphoria, an internal world broadcast outward into an external dystopia. Or is it the other way around? In any event, our narrator is herself a writer of novels about writing, memory, and language, themselves highly allegorical. So there is a meta-level to this novel, as well. Which is most significant as a tale to follow?

Along the way, we have plenty of near-nameless characters who test the premise: how should we respond to a world where, each-by-each, its objects are dismantled from both reality and memory? What is the purpose for knowing an objective truth which nevertheless is not shared by a community? How much forced deprivation can or should a people accept before responding? What degree of impoverishment can be normalized? 

I've seen other reviews which place specific allegorical meanings to this novel (mental health metaphors, totalitarian economic policies, marriage, etc.), and I won't say they are wrong. But Ogawa's surreal narratives (or magically realistic ones) don't just echo Orwell or Murakami or even Dazai. But she here has tendrils of memory in all these writers while still taking us, inevitably, somewhere else altogether.

Let me start by saying there is a lot "wrong" with this book some 60-odd years after its publication. Reynolds is a major figure in a different era of science fiction. His all-male cast postures about itself, beating their intellectual chests at each other, oblivious to their own ironic impetuousness. The debates they have across the book, clearly timely in their day, are sophomoric and idealized representations of complex theories represented here in brief spats. And the arguments themselves obliviously ignore the academic work that had already long been established in anthropology, race politics, and economic and sociopolitical thought. 

This "crack" team of star explorers sets out to bring two "primitive" worlds of people up to a level of development suitable for joining a new human federation of planets. Yet they set out and make it most of the way through their voyage only to exclaim that none of them have yet considered how they will do it!

Okay, so that seems like enough reasons to attack the work. Let's take a moment and set all that aside (not an easy task!) to talk a bit about what Reynolds is up to. He has set up a thought experiment, a theoretical political question of capitalism vs collectivism, and decided to conduct it in a narrative simulation. If you could conjure a world almost hypothetically a blank slate, which method (in the grand scheme) would "raise" society more effectively? For its time, the posing of the question alone is intriguing.

But Reynolds is not done, even so. This is a short work, so I won't spoil the ending. Instead I will speculate that this very thought experiment is itself a guise to what he actually has in mind. 

The story, clearly, is far from flawless. At times, the hypothetical focus that should dominate our discussion is diverted by needless and distracting detail. (Does it matter, for instance, across a fast 50 year history, that a particular valley had a chokehold that allowed a single battle to shift?) But . . . But . . . when the book is over, the "scientific method," empiricism under glass, is a subject more relevant still. And for this, fairly fun.

While profound, Eliot's play is a style which, I found, only vaguely echoes that of his poetry. Told in verse and in a classical style (the poor resemble a Greek chorus and are answered by opposing groups of voices), where Anouilh's dramatic telling of the slaying of the Archbishop Thomas Becket is a fast-moving account of friendship grown distant, Eliot (who wrote first) narrows the scope dramatically to Becket's last month.

In the first act, knowing he is likely doomed if he remains in England, he is symbolically tempted to take another road to save himself. Much like Christ's temptations, he is offered the means to compromise, ones that have so often been accepted by his peerage. Unlike Jesus, he is offered a fourth temptation, that of the paradox of hoping with pride to be rewarded by Heaven. 

These Tempters re-appear in worldly guise in Act 2 as the King's barons come to murder him. Eliot presumes we know the history already. The historical politics which brought them all to this moment is lengthy and complicated. It was reduced but explained in Anouilh's play; in Eliot's the dramatic impact of the lines might be lost in performance if the audience is unfamiliar with motivations.

And then, in a harsh shift in the telling, our knights turn to the audience to explain and justify themselves, to suggest the mitigating circumstances which might absolve. It is as if Eliot understood that the setting of his drama made too clear a distinction between savior and sinner. Or is that his intent? 

This is Eliot, after all, and while I have outlined the framing of his play, it is in these lines that subtler themes are drawn, not merely of political power which bespeaks its own sense of reason, and not merely the temporal and spiritual consequences between act, word, and inaction. One can find here, too, an earthly argument which stands both strong and impotent against a reckoning of faith it will never understand.

"Human kind cannot bear very much reality."

This is a brief work, but at its best a slow read with reflection. And while I wrote that Anouilh's work benefits from its staging to reveal its drama, Eliot's is quite the opposite. It demands to be read.

Anouilh takes the historic murder of Becket and focuses it upon the imperative of two friends, one who despite expectations outgrows his own nihilism, and the other who fails to grow at all. Place these two in spaces of feudal power, asks questions of medieval faith, and we have a play that speaks in unexpected directions, despite anyone's historical background or interest. 

It might be more difficult in the reading of this fast-paced work to appreciate some of the moments of intensity--we are accustomed to wait for swordplay and one-liners (both are here)--that truly power this drama: a moment in a bedroom where Becket mutters, a miscued word by the king, the second half's occasioned and ironic dialogue with the Lord Christ, the words not dared spoken at all.  An adept staging reveals them as Anouilh undoubtably envisioned. 

Yes, questions of loyalty, friendship, love, codes of honor, politics, devotion to God -- any of these could make a fine drama in and of themselves, but Anouilh weaves them all masterfully. What is more, the historical mistakes are retained for the sake of this drama. (For instance, Becket was far more likely a Norman than Saxon, which would unbalance much of this work's dramatic element.) 

And for me, the too-brief dramas of the minor characters speak most powerfully of all of it: The Queen, Gwendolen, the Monk, all in some way casualties of this tragic misadventure between men who love.

Some have called Carter's works re-envisioning, but this suggests that she somehow sees something new or other in our fairy tale "classics," that she is updating them for modern mores. I don't think so. Carter's magic is more a re-discovering or an uncovering, an exposing of what we have always known but perhaps were anxious about saying quite so baldly. And she does more, still.

Voluptuous, sensual, misogynistic, violent, Carter's tale nevertheless offer a powerfully feminine opening of traditional sublimation. Now, the historical and developmental order of how we understand this may largely depend upon the angle of your glance. Was Little Red Riding Hood once an older adult tale that had over time been reduced to a children's admonition? Then Carter helps us see again what it always has been, no matter how well censored?  Did Beauty and the Beast always have Jungian resonance, aspects of our psychological unconscious lying beneath, from which Carter tears the cloaking skin? And is the seductive power of these enduring tales only in their hinted allure, their enticing suggestibility, and not their lewd exposure?  

However you reason it, the "suggestions" beneath are primally sensuous, physical, and self-absorbed. And Carter not only draws these meanings up to visibility, she also re-cloaks them in new story, themselves lush with ambiguity and suggestive in their own right. Most powerful of all, these indulgences, just as the reader's in immersing, push against our modern mentality, revise our framing, demand we question.

There is so little space between beauty and vulgarity in Carter's work: the labyrinthian style poses questions all its own. For whom are these stories? Always for us.

This is my first book by Machen, but hardly of this genre of "gentlemanly narrative" and the horror of other realms. A number of white British men set out to live their lives with varying levels of curiosity in the occult realm--after all, what else could occupy them from their endless succession of wealthy dinners and distractions? At first, it is difficult to see how all of the chapters intersect, but soon enough, the various scenes resolve to discover that a great evil--tragically experimented with in the first chapter--is not done with them.  And, little wonder, it manifests in the guise of a woman.

Let's not spend overmuch time dealing with the misogyny and latent classicism and racism which is overwhelming present in these old stories. Check. Ditto. It's here. But this is a review of the story and its crafting. The more important cultural and political talk about these books belongs in a more important space than this.  

What did interest me, though, about Machen's structuring of the story is the shifting of chapters between scenes and characters, absenting some altogether and then pointing at a quirk of one or another at length. I'm not certain that this is effective narration, but it did disorient me some, basically off-loading the horror to the margins. And this is where it largely stays. Every moment of terror and true danger occurs in retrospect through the telling of stories 1st or even 3rd hand in the relative comfort of someone's study. Even the resolution will not have its moment in action but as told first in preparation for and then as afterword. "I plan to do this," and then, "Here is how it went." Yes, to consider what they confront--the Great God Pan, perhaps?--is truly a terrifying conception. But Machen never really lets us get too close.

More than twice, I wondered if the motivation for this evil was political justice against rich white men (as it surely would be if written today), but no, Machen approaches the story with seemingly no irony at all. The rich white men have been set upon; and they will be defended in this story nearly 150 years old. And don't forget: the evil the woman does upon them is only insinuated, perhaps the real terror which is whispered of only in the oblique terms of white men in their clubs and studies. 

In this sense, the book offers no twists or surprises; more it is a conventionally-situated dive into what will ultimately become a sub-genre of horror called pulp or Lovecraftian horror. Sinister, yes, but altogether "comforting" in its performance.

P.S. Just found out that Stephen King called this one of "the best horror stories ever written." Sorry. Steve.

I've been looking forward to this powerful work for a while, and I'm so glad I finally got to it. It's a read that will stay with me for many years, already ranked up there with Erdrich, Momaday, and others for the impact it has made.

Equally, I wanted to like it enough for a full five stars, and there is plenty of reason to praise it. Orange offers us about a dozen different characters across a few generations, their stories original in their tangled interweaving, their pasts various chapters of social, domestic, and political shredding, and the language which presents each of their points of view nearly unique. Everything about these people is real, genuine, painful and resigned, loving or jaded. Their reasons for converging on a powwow in Oakland are equally varied, and one wonder how they will ultimately meet, what fruits will come of the gathering, if any.

But this is where Orange, I think, sold his own story a bit short. All plot directions point to the powwow at the end of the book, the place where they will gather. Orange even offers an interlude to the narrative to discuss the nature of powwow. The set-ups are all there.

But I think Orange didn't trust his own narration, his own characters, to do their work at the end. Resolution to a story anymore doesn't mean a fairy tale closure of character arcs, nor does it mean that everyone finds what they need; just as often, stories find their way to unexpected spaces, to questions, or the absence of resolutions at all. But Orange--a younger writer still, thankfully, who has many more novels left in him, we hope--chose to resolve his story through an action sequence which spoke to none of what he set up in the first two-thirds of the book.

True, this was the goal of some of the characters attending, but one of his characters actually thinks this, and not much of a spoiler since it is revealed in the first dozen pages: "Who steals from a powwow?"  The heist idea is the least important motivation from the entire novel, especially as its potential significance culturally is never explored.

   As it happens, the only unresolved question readers are left with is one about a plotting element: What happened to x? instead of anything which was meaningful to the beautiful interior conflicts he had created. One may argue that the resolution was "realistic" and "taught a lesson," but such trite arguments are matched by the overdone television plots which offer exactly the same levels of insight.

The good news is that Orange is a real talent, a writer unafraid to take risks with form or subject, who looks baldly at topics many Americans are blind to, who can write points of view in an ironically academic realm or an ironically street-level one. As short as the work is, as many characters as he paraded before us, I still want to learn more of them. And more good news: he's still writing. 

It's safe to say I have never read a collection of contemporary poetry quite as targeted and profound as this one. Lewis demonstrates through a range of style and poetic subject (personal, mythological, sociological, art historical, familial) the racist objectifying and mythologizing of the black female body and of the concept of beauty.

It's most significant section, the middle of the book, is something so unlike Found Poetry that I hesitate to describe it that way: a massive collection of the plaque descriptions of artwork across time and culture whose subjects are black women. It is an overwhelming, swelling, suffocating stream of images and coldness, revealing what passed for enlightened cultural preservation but is in fact something quite apart. I felt as I read it that I was passed from the poetic altogether . . . 

But Lewis does not leave us there, and where that closes and the final section opens we see a resolve to confront it with life itself. 

Here she is early in the book (line spacing incorrect):

For a certain amount 
of rupees, the temple’s hired a man to announce 
to tourists . . , During the medieval 
period virgins were sacrificed here.

His capitalist glance mirrors our Orientalist tans.
You're lying, 1 say. Save it 
for somebody pale. He smiles, passes 
me a bidi. I’m bleeding, but lie 

so I can go inside and see 
that burnt, charred piece 
of the Goddess that fell off 
right here.

...I have to go back 
to that wet black thing 
dead in the road. I have to turn around.
I must put my face in it.