Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars From Florida to Harlem, Varieties of Love and Hate Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020) is a collection of twenty-one Zora Neale Hurston short stories, several of them published here for the first time, ranging in setting from Eatonville, Florida to Harlem, NY, mostly depicting different kinds of love (romantic, abusive, transformative, destructive, etc.) and using savory demotic black English for characters’ speech and vivid mainstream English for the narration. Whether the situations and speeches of the characters are tragic or comical, they are always fitting. The Forward (“Love Letter and Testimony”) by Tayari Jones gives a concise overview of the stories, highlighting their common theme of “comeuppance” and the meaning of the title of the collection (“to achieve a goal that seems to be in contradiction to the means by which it was accomplished”). The twenty-eight-page Introduction by Genevieve West covers topics Hurston's childhood, the politics of art in the Harlem Renaissance, and Hurston’s explorations of gender, race, and class. Here is a list of the stories: 1. John Redding Goes to Sea: An imaginative boy longs to travel and to see the sea, but although his father is sympathetic, his clinging mother uses all sorts of emotional blackmail to keep him with her, “home-tied.” 2. The Conversion of Sam: What happens when a beautiful, innocent, octoroon girl from the country comes to the city and attracts the attention of shiftless Sam Simpson, who quits drinking and gambling and gets a job so he can pay court to her? 3. A Bit of Our Harlem: A vignette showing the fellowship between a young lady of some education and a poor 16-year-old hunchback from 53rd St selling candy. 4. Drenched in Light: Isis Watts, an imaginative 11-year-old girl interested in passersby and life, sorely tries her strict grandmother, who doesn’t want the “hellion” to whistle or talk to boys or leave home. 5. Spunk: An infamous brave man fears not the dangerous saw in the mill where he works—until he openly snatches the wife of a cowardly guy and kills him in self-defense. 6. Magnolia Flower: An old river tells a young brook the story of a dominating father who hates white people and sure doesn’t want his daughter to marry a light-skinned young teacher. 7. Black Death: Even though white folks laugh about it, the Eatonville locals know that voodoo can kill, the proof being this story, in which the mother of a seduced and abandoned girl pays a visit to the local hoodoo man. 8. The Bone of Contention: An amusing Eatonville courtroom drama featuring a mule bone assault, a turkey theft, and rival Methodists and Baptists. 9. Muttsy: The same story as The Conversion of Sam but set in Harlem, with an innocent girl from the south showing up in NYC, where a slick gambler falls in love with her. 10. Sweat: A neglected, hardworking, prematurely-aged wife of fifteen years has been earning money by washing white folks’ clothes, when her abusive, philandering, no good husband gets a pet rattlesnake. 11. Under the Bridge: A powerful story about a 58-year-old man, his young wife, and his big son. All three love each other, but after passing under a bridge on a fishing trip, they emerge from the darkness altered, about to be carried somewhere by destiny. 12. ‘Possum or Pig? A vignette in which a favored slave is caught cooking a purloined pig. 13. The Eatonville Anthology: Fourteen spicy character sketches of women, men, and a die-hard thieving dog. Some signs of Their Eyes Were Watching God. 14. Book of Harlem: An amusing tale told in Biblical mode about a young country man gone to Babylon (NY) where, after initial hiccups, he becomes “Panic” of Harlem, where there are “Shebas on every street,” and “the men gnasheth their bridgework at the sight of him.” 15. The Book of Harlem: Not so funny as the previous one, because it’s the same thing done a second time but with less compelling detail. 16. The Backroom: What happens when an aging beauty’s former rejected suitor (now a widowed doctor) comes to town, bringing his young niece with him? Convincing characters and an ironic outcome for the cocky, vulnerable protagonist. 17. Monkey Junk: Another Biblical Harlem story, this time featuring a woman marrying a man for his “shekels and his checkbook,” the man thinking, “Verily, I am a wise guy. I knoweth all about women,” and their divorce case ending as you might expect. 18. The Country in the Woman: A married couple come from the country to Harlem (Babylon), and the wife doesn’t take the husband's infidelity without an axe in her hands. 19. The Gilded Six-Bits: A happily married couple enjoying affectionate playfighting in their clean house come to grief after a slick man from Chicago with a gold coin on his watch chain comes to town. 20. She Rock: ANOTHER biblical Harlem story (“Oscar goeth hot cha cha”) has a couple moving from Florida to Harlem, the husband flaunting his adultery, and the wife deciding that people chop wood in the city, too. 21. The Fire and the Cloud: A nice story about Moses in the desert talking with a lizard about life, God, the Israelites, the promised land, and patience. I liked the stories, and I'm glad to have listened to this audiobook collection, but I could have listened to a more selected collection that left out some of the element-repeating stories featuring people moving to Harlem from the south. Furthermore, although I got a kick out of the biblical narration for mundane situations in several Harlem stories, it started wearing a little thin after the second one. There are many memorable lines, like “A woman robbed of her love is more terrible than an army with banners,” “I'm gonna make me a graveyard of my own,” and “I hate ya to the same degree that I used to love ya. I hate ya like a suck egg dog.” There are many vivid descriptions, like “The sun had burned July to August. The heat streamed down like a million hot arrows, smiting all things living upon the earth. Grass withered, leaves browned, snakes went blind and shedding, and men and dogs went mad.” Aunjanue Ellis gives an excellent reading of the audiobook, and I bet it’s easier to listen to things like, “Ah doan want Jawn tuh git dat foolishness in him” or “Case you allus tries tuh know mo’ than me, but Ah aint so ign’rant” than to read them. If you liked Their Eyes Were Watching God, you’d find a lot of nourishment here, though that novel is on a higher level of experience and art. View all my reviews
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Factotum by Charles Bukowski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Working, Drinking, & Loving in Seedy WWII-era USA Factotum (1975) is a short novel told in a series of short chapters that provide a sardonic, amusing, and morbidly fascinating look at down and out life in World War Two era American cities like New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and especially Los Angeles, as Charles Bukowski's young alter-ego Henry (Hank) Chinaski travels around by train or bus (without being able to sleep or defecate) and half-heartedly interviews for, miraculously gets, and promptly quits or is fired from a series of demeaning, “dull stupid jobs” with grotesque overseers and coworkers. A factotum is someone who does all kinds of work, and Henry is a newspaper gopher, subway poster remover and applier, auto parts store clerk, dog biscuit factory oven worker, women’s dresses shipping clerk, potential libretto writer, bakery coconut man, hotel loading dock worker, fluorescent light fixture shipping clerk, art supply store shipping clerk, LA Times janitor, potential Yellow Cab driver, and more. Typically, after several days he rubs his bosses or coworkers the wrong way for his perceived superior attitude, when it's really only that he doesn't like people (“I was a man who thrived on solitude”) or tires of whatever soul-destroying work he happens to be doing (“I was horrified by life and by what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed”) or succumbs to wanderlust (“Packing was always a good time”). All the while he is living in a series of seedy apartments, while drinking constantly and turning out scores of hand-written short stories that he sends off to literary magazines, almost going through the motions but never quite giving up the idea that he is a hitherto undiscovered “writer”--which might be part of his self-directed irony: “Baby, I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me.” Because of his views on work, Henry would rather stay in bed and drink. He also does plenty of drinking away from home, of course, as once with an old friend when he wakes up in jail arrested for having caused a traffic jam without remembering any of the details. He spends as little time as possible with his weak and soft mother and his unpleasant father, who says things like, “My son is a God damn no good drunk” and “How the hell are you going to make it?” and charges him rent and clothes washing fees to stay in their home. Tellingly, he only masturbates when he's in his family home. He is not immune from considering getting a gun and putting himself out of his misery. He’s often attracted to and occasionally lucky (?) with members of the opposite sex. He listens to classical music on the radio, and the likes of Mahler and Beethoven perform the soundtrack for some funky filthy sex and debauchery and conflict. I sense a homophobic vibe, as Bukowski shows Henry turning down a couple offers of sex from creepy men and dryly remark that his sudden spate of apartment cleaning must be due to his “turning fag.” Bukowski writes memorable lines, about-- --charisma: “I always started a job with the feeling that I would soon quit or be fired and this gave me a relaxed manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.” --romance: “Great lovers were always men of leisure. I fucked better as a bum than as a puncher of time clocks.” --human nature: “For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter totter.” He is a master of the vivid grotesque description, like: “The people swarmed up out of the subway, like insects, faceless, mad. They rushed upon me and into and around me with much intensity. They spun and pushed each other. They made horrible sounds.” And “I was given instruction by a toothless elf with a film over his left eye. The film was white and green with spidery blue lines.” And “The large bed was covered with stuffed animals. All of the animals looked surprised and stared at me.” The audiobook reader, Christian Baskus, is the ideal Bukowski/Chinaski, perfect. The novel ends with Henry out of work, out of love, and alone, impotently taking in a vigorous strip tease act: “I couldn't get it up.” Rather than closure, it feels like Bukowski just decided to stop his tenuously linked series of work and love anecdotes. There isn’t a clear climax and resolution to the novel so much as a petering out. Nonetheless, I can’t help it: I want to read more! View all my reviews
The Year of Magical Thinking Adaptation Audible Original by Joan Didion
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “If I’m sane, what happened to me could happen to you.” The Year of Magical Thinking (2007) is the one-woman play that Joan Didion adapted from her longer book (2005). Vanessa Redgrave uncannily reads the distilled, potent essence of the full work in a one-woman performance. The play begins with the sudden death of Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne, when he suffered a sudden attack at home, leading to the arrival of paramedics who worked on him there and then took him to a hospital where he died. In addition to that tragedy, the couple's daughter Quintana, five months married, has been in the hospital in a coma after a septic infection. Her daughter’s serious health struggles (after the infection is apparently cured, a mysterious brain ailment strikes her down) interweave a counterpoint to Didion’s year of coming to accept the loss of her husband. She tells us that losing her husband led her into a year of magical thinking, during which, despite of course being aware that her husband had died (to the point of ordering an autopsy and a cremation and starting to organize a funeral), she was also partly convinced that he was still alive and would return to her. She did not let on to any family members or friends as to her magical thinking but continued showing everyone who came in contact with her that she was in control of the situation. But she refused to get rid of his shoes, thinking that he would need them when he returned. One of the compelling parts of her approach to this topic is her repeated or frequent addresses to the reader or listener as “you,” telling us that if we haven't already been in the same place she was, we will be sooner or later. “If I'm sane, what happened to me could happen to you.” She reveals with her scalpel-like honesty that she and her husband did not have an easy relationship. Although she says that they always trusted each other and relied on each other and worked for the same essential goals and talked about everything together--even when she felt that her husband was wrong--he tended to resent her always being right. “Must you always be right? Must you always have the last word? Can’t you ever let it go?” appear refrain-like throughout the play. She reveals her guilt and regret over not having taken her husband more seriously when he told her things like “I have two more days to live,” because in the event he only had thirty-two more days to live after he said that, while she thought he was just being dramatic. Didion also reveals with details here and there that she and her husband were well to do, taking expensive vacations and being friends with Hollywood types like Katherine Ross. This demonstrates that tragedy strikes even affluent people, but one also wonders how much more difficult it is for poor people to deal with such tragedies. The heart of this memoir is that we can't keep anyone we loved safe (“Did I lie to you all your life? If I believe what I told you was it lying?”), that we do not expect the shock of a sudden illness or death of a loved one to be obliterative, that the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is is very great, and that, after all, the only meaning or comfort in life lies in geology, the erosion of and thrusting up of mountains over long spans of time. The wisdom Didion gained as a result of losing her husband to a sudden death and dealing with her daughter being in a ICU ward of a hospital and the honesty with which she relates her experience make for a compelling play. It is witty and devastating, especially with Vanessa Redgrave’s perfect and poignant reading of it, her aged voice quivering but ever in command, vulnerable but philosophical, scalding and frank. Anyone who has lost a loved one suddenly or over time or anyone who might lose someone so should be moved by this audiobook. View all my reviews
The Elementals by Michael McDowell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Heat, Sand, and Southern Gothic Spirit(s) or “What family is as lucky as ours?” Mobile, Alabama circa 1980, summer. The funeral of Marian Savage, who died at about fifty-five, supposedly of cancer. The only attendees are Marian’s daughter Sister Mary-Scott (a nun) and son Dauphin, his wife Leigh, Marian’s best friend Big Barbara McCray (mother of Leigh), her son Luker (Dauphin’s best friend), his thirteen-year-old daughter India (Luker and India live in the Upper West Side of NYC), and the African American Savage family maid of thirty-five years, Odessa. Things take a bizarre turn when Sister Mary-Scott and Dauphin perform a little ritual over their mother’s corpse, ending when Dauphin reluctantly sticks a dagger about two inches into her chest. Thus begins Michael McDowell’s novel The Elementals (1981). After the funeral, while Leigh and Odessa explain the origin of the Savage family dagger ritual, which started 250 years ago when they were the aristocratic Sauvages and governed the territory, India’s hand goes on automatic pilot and draws a detailed replica of a macabre photograph she’s never seen depicting Dauphin’s great-great-grandmother holding her stillborn twin sons. Late that night Dauphin peers into the cage of Marian’s parrot Nails and hears it speak for the first time in its eight years of life: “Savage mothers eat their children!” With the “grotesquely lush” Alabama foliage and hothouse climate, the lurid Savage funeral tradition, and lines like, “Luker, I'm glad you raised me in New York--Alabama’s weird,” McDowell seems to be setting up a straightforward southern gothic horror story. But things get hotter, sandier, and creepier the next day when the funeral attendees relocate south along the Gulf Coast to rural, isolated Beldame (nearest neighbor six miles away), site of three identical Victorian lagoon beach houses, one belonging to the McCrays, one to the Savages and one, the unsettling, abandoned, and avoided “Third House,” belonging to—well, let’s just say that it belongs to a large, steadily encroaching sand dune and some traumatic memories. The ostensible purpose is to vacation at Beldame. The hidden purpose is to get Big Barbara, an alcoholic, on the wagon so as to save her life—and her marriage to her corpulent, red-skinned, white-haired, violently vulgar husband Lawton, a rich fertilizer businessman who’s never lost an election and is now running for US Congress (House of Reps). The plot purpose is to violate every norm of common sense so as to spend time next to an apparently haunted house that traumatized Dauphin, Leigh, and Luker in their youths. Well, Beldame IS a beautiful locale with gorgeous views of the bay and lagoon and porpoises and flying fish and shore birds, “So remote you might well be at the end of the world.” Anyway, soon the characters are hearing someone walking on the floor above them and discovering that it can’t be the person they thought it was; Dauphin is seeing his recently deceased mother; India is photographing the Third House from the outside, seeing something terrifying in the reflection of a bedroom mirror (this being a pre-digital camera era, we must wait for the photographs to be developed to find out what they’ll reveal); the characters are lying around sweat-soaked and heat-drugged, with India, the only true Northerner among the group, lying on her bed with her mouth opening and closing like a dying fish; and Odessa—the no nonsense, modest, and cryptic authority on the supernatural—is doing a little supernatural baking. Meanwhile, Lawton shows up to pressure Dauphin to sell Beldame so oil can be developed offshore and to make Big Barbara fall off the wagon. For a while the prospect of Lawton getting elected and making Dauphin sell Beldame is as horrifying as the Third House and whatever occupant(s) it may have! The characters are absorbing and their conversations often amusing, so when the paranormal starts impinging on their post-funeral “vacation,” the story becomes suspenseful. I like India: direct, spunky, precocious, innocent, and vulnerable. Her frank relationship with her father is interesting: she doesn’t call him “Dad” but Luker; they joke about his drug use; he has no problem letting her drink a little sherry or even a glass of scotch; they both use foul language; they have no problem with Luker’s situational nudity in front of his daughter; they’re life allies who respect and trust each other. There is plenty of dry humor, like “Luker’s opinion of the dead woman was that he had never seen her to better advantage than in her coffin.” Lots of sardonic, teasing conversation among family members: “Luker would be a terrible man to have for a father, if you ask me. He’s the meanest man in the world. You ask anybody.” “Is that why you love him more than you love me?” Along with the scary events and graphic blood etc., there are vivid and creepy descriptions, like “The fields gave out and were replaced by weak-willed stubby forests of diseased pine and scrub oak” set amid white sand dunes, and “the heat that engorged all creation in that lonely place.” If you shake your head to break McDowell’s spell, it all might seem absurd rather than horrifying: insubstantial spirits (“elementals”) unpredictably dominating a house, making victims disappear now and then, and forming sand-puppets to terrorize people with their worst nightmares, without ever revealing what they want or why they do what they do, not to mention the tired horror schtick of people visiting supernatural locations and entering haunted houses when they should know better. Furthermore, according to the rule of horror that the less you know what you’re dealing with, the scarier it is and vice versa, I found the graphic climax to be the least scary part of the novel, devolving into knife and cleaver fights with noseless and eyeless, large-eared and small-toothed elephantine monster babies. Audiobook reader R. C. Bray gives a fine, gravelly, no-nonsense reading of the novel, enhancing the characters and suspense. The Elementals reads like compact Stephen King with a dash of Solaris; the overall message is that we can’t understand some things in the world. If you sit back and roll with it, it’s quite the diverting page turner. View all my reviews
The Fall of Koli by M.R. Carey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “How will we know when to stop?” The Fall of Koli (2021), the third volume of M. C. Carey’s Rampart Trilogy, begins with the fifteen-year-old first-person narrator Koli briefly introducing himself, Koli Faceless (exiled from his home village Mythen Rood), and his three female companions, Ursala (wise old scientist/healer), Cup (feisty transgender girl), and Monono Arawe (uniquely “untethered” AI) and bringing us up to speed on their situation. The three flesh and blood mortals are on a quest to find a way to unite the scattered and hostile communities of post-apocalypse England so as to improve the increasingly compromised gene pool and save humanity from extinction, while Monono (the “virtual girl” who’s neither dead nor alive but Something Else) wants to find out what and who she can become. Their journey is apparently about to end unhappily, as their swamped boat is about to sink before the wall of Sword of Albion, a gargantuan (150,000 ton), well-equipped old time “unfinished war” warship they’d desperately hoped had what they all needed. Meanwhile, back home in the village of Mythen Rood, Koli’s first love Spinner, her husband Jon, her friends Challenger (a partially sentient old time tank) and Elaine (the uploaded consciousness of an old time soldier), and their two hundred fellow villagers must prepare for the impending invasion of the large, disciplined, well-armed, and fanatically loyal army of the Half-Ax Peacemaker, who wants to punish the smaller community by killing everyone in it, taking their modest number of old tech items, and sewing its ground with salt. As the novel develops those two plot strands (narrated in first person by Koli and Spinner in alternating chunks of chapters), it will reveal that Sword of Albion is not what it was expected to be, introduce some appalling new characters (e.g., snide Stanley Banner and his good cop bad cop parents Lorraine and Paul and Berrobis Bradeshin, Marshal-general of Half-Ax) and a horrifying new old threat to the world, interestingly develop the relationships between Koli and Monono, Cup and Ursala, and Spinner and her Vennastin husband and in-laws, and explore themes about storytelling, consciousness, gender, life, identity, love, power, technology, nature, and more. The many popular culture references from our time that Monono uses give us the pleasure of the familiar in a strange context even as they go right over Koli’s head: David Bowie, Marcel Marceau, Boys from Brazil, Cone of Silence, Stepford Wives, Leonard Cohen, “You Don’t Own Me,” etc. Stanley and his parents (also knowledgeable about the “old times”) drop other cultural references, like Blanche Dubois, Calamity Jane, Saint Francis, Noah’s Ark, Excalibur, and Disneyland. Carey probably overuses the old tech to do Whatever He Wants for His Plot, as in arbitrarily varying the gestation times by which different old tech weapons renew their ammunition reserves, ranging from instantly to weeks, or making it too hard for the Mythen Rood folk to figure out how to use two captured enemy weapons (when to help they have a database and a sentient tank and a very handy Jon), or rendering Monono as a deus ex (AI) machina too freely and potently. I also reckon that Half-Ax would send their whole army rather than small parties a wee bit sooner than they end up doing. Other flaws. He makes it possible for us to figure out the purpose of Sword of Albion and Stanley Banner way before Koli, Cup, Ursala, or even Monono figure it out. He also occasionally succumbs to lame lines like, Monono’s “Nothing, nada, zip, with a side order of zilch,” and overuses the metaphor of people chewing things over in their minds too often via both Spinner and Koli (e.g., “Lorraine chewed a mite harder”), which makes them sound too much like the same voice talking. Finally, I think that the three different audiobook readers are too many and, in the case of the Monono voice, jarring. Especially because in the first book, the second one, and most of this one up to this point Theo Solomon reads Monono’s voice as distinctive and full of perky charm, so when suddenly we hear a posh, educated, RP British English female voice speaking for Monono, even though audiobook reader Hanako Footman is fine, doesn’t sound right. Furthermore, when Monono is narrating, she says lines spoken by Elaine sounding like a southern woman, whereas when Spinner narrates (read by Saffron Coomber), her Elaine sounds African American. All this difference in voice and English and accent, etc. makes immersion in the story difficult. Speaking of Theo Solomon, his base narration voice for Koli is rather monotonous and slow, almost sounding bored with his labor, though he does great voices for the other characters, especially Monono. The novel tells a suspenseful, page turning story, develops compelling characters, depicts a convincing post-apocalypse world, and urges us to balance our relationship with the natural world and to develop and use technology more thoughtfully and carefully, to avoid fascism, and to view the body as “just a shadow” that needn’t determine our identities, especially our gender. The psychology of Ursala wanting to change Cup physically into a girl to apologize for being reluctant to help her at first and Cup fearing being cut into and wanting to delay the operation is moving. I won’t spoil the remarkable ending of the novel, in which the promise of the title is fulfilled in a moving and fitting way. And the third volume does (mostly) satisfyingly conclude the trilogy. Fans of post-apocalypse fiction like Davy (1964), Riddley Walker (1980), A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World (2019), etc., should like this trilogy a lot. View all my reviews
The Trials of Koli by M.R. Carey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The tools we use come to use us too.” The Trials of Koli (2020) starts where The Book of Koli (2020) ended, with Koli on his way south to London, where he hopes to find a lot of old tech lying around and a good location to attract the fragmented and steadily dying out people of England into a big enough gene pool to save the species. He's still accompanied by Ursala, an old scientist/healer who has been traveling with her “drudge” (a headless robot pack mule with a gun that shoots bone bullets) trying and failing to help people have enough viable offspring. In London Ursala hopes to find some old tech with which to improve DNA. They are still dragging along the hostile 13-year-old Cup, who was born a boy but feels like a girl and who was a fervent believer in the insane Messiah Senlas, whose regime Koli and Ursala ended when they pyrotechnically escaped from his cult of shunned men. And Koli is still carrying his best friend Monono Arawe, a mid-21st-century Sony DreamSleeve media player who, after questing through the ruins of the Internet and fending off military grade malware, upgraded her system, woke up, and became an autonomous AI with unlimited potential. In addition to having to deal with the possibly dangerous Cup, who refuses to swear not to do them ill if they untie her hands, Koli has to mediate between Monono and Ursala. The old woman doesn’t trust the old tech AI and wants Koli to reset Monono back to her original factory settings, which would wipe out all that makes her the perky snarky AI that she is. Monono wants Koli (her only living reference point in the world) to keep her fully (solar) charged, so she can block any attempts by Ursala to “kill” her. Then there is the constant struggle to avoid becoming food for mutated predators like trees (who creakingly wake up when the sun comes out, entangling, crushing, or poisoning any nearby creatures and drinking their blood). And Koli and co. are being hounded by well-organized, disciplined, and brutal soldiers from the ever-expanding town Half-Ax, whose leader the Peacemaker has decreed that all old tech anywhere belongs to him, so you’d better fork it over, or else. From the start, then, author M. R. Carey is exploring issues of organic and artificial life, identity and sentience, and technology and power in a post-apocalypse world created by human folly: war and genetic augmentation and environmental disaster and mutation. “They [Koli’s ancestors, i.e., us] made weapons that could turn ambient molecules into bolts and bullets and incendiary liquids, harden the air into a blade that would cut through stone and turn a village the size Mythen Rood into a hole in the ground in less time than it take to clap your hands. . . Who did they hate so much to spend the fruits of their learning and the cunning of their hands into engines of such terrible cruelty? Was it their own selves?” There are intense scenes in the novel: Koli et al walking among the bones of the untold dead in a big, ruined city from before, Birmagen (Birmingham), realizing the reality of the “unfinished war” and what it says about human nature, learning about writing and printed words and books, being interrogated by Half-ax soldiers, discovering that London is not what he expected it to be, and having a fraught idyll in a native-American-esque fishing community on the coast, including a hair-raising encounter with an amphibious super-predator and a moving turn in the Cup and gender story line (Monono opining in 21st-century words, “Puberty is super hard on trans kids.”) Into all that, Carey introduces a new first-person narrator to alternate with Koli in chunks of chapters, the girl he loved and lost in the first book, Spinner, now married to Koli’s former best friend Heijon, a newly minted Vennastin Rampart. While Koli is narrating his trials away from Mythen Rood, Spinner recounts her struggles there: trying to fit into her new role as wife to a Rampart; trying to help her community survive a plague and the loss of some of their vital old tech; trying to help an occasionally senile Rampart teach her how to use the old tech database; and trying to hold off the increasingly aggressive and well-armed soldiers of Half-Ax. After liking Koli’s narration so much in the first book and the first several chapters of this one, when Spinner first started telling her story, it was jarring. Spinner wasn’t interesting at first, and she unbelievably thought the worst of Koli. Plus, for Spinner’s narration the audiobook uses a different reader, Saffron Coomber, who’s fine, but reads a bit more poshly than Koli, so it’s not easy to think of them as being from the same village. I did get used to Spinner’s narration in time, but often resented being taken away from Koli’s story. And somehow, reader Theo Solomon started sounding sleepy and monotonous doing Koli. His Monono still rocks though! Like the first book in the trilogy, the post-apocalypse culture in this second one has estranging touches, as with Punch and Jubilee (Punch and Judy) and altered English (e.g., to tumble means to have sex, while month of honey means honeymoon). And courtesy of Monono more pop culture references opaque to Koli but familiar to us, e.g.,Count Dracula, Doctor Doom, and Star Trek and more cute Monoisms, e.g., “Virtual girls are as sweet as sugar and as thin as paper.” And provocative foreshadowing: “I learned that in a time of war but that's for another telling.” And good life wisdom: “To teach what you were taught is the very heart of life and gives you faith that life will hold.” And vivid description: “We walked at a fast pace for an hour or more, while the city growed up around us like a forest. There was still no whole buildings, but the walls rose ever higher. The hills between us was more tumbled walls than grass and earth, as if the ground was vomiting up earth and stone out of its dark heart.” And comments on storytelling: “There can’t be any rules in the telling of stories. They’ve got to go where they go, which is not always where you would want them to. And as for the happiness or the sadness of it, that depends on where you’re standing.” Despite finding plot-contrivance flaws and needing a while to get used to Spinner’s narration, I ended up absorbed in this second book in the trilogy and after finishing it immediately started the third. View all my reviews
The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The world has been lost,” or has it? Fifteen-year-old Koli is living in the village Mythen Rood, a “big” community of two hundred people, existing precariously in a sea of inimical flora and fauna, including overly large and intelligent boars, wild dogs, rats, mole snakes, and needles (cats crossed with Giger aliens), as well as mobile, quick-growing, entangling, and blood-drinking trees and choker seeds. Not to mention lurking bands of shunned men (cannibals) and “old tech” rogue drones that fly in at any moment, tell people to disperse, and then laser them if they fail to comply. Koli’s family trade is woodsmithing, but instead of cutting trees, they must catch them and cure the resulting lumber by soaking it in poison for a month so it will not come back to life. Luckily for Koli’s illiterate people, they have four helpful items of old tech--a cutter, a fire snake, a bolt gun, and a database--to help protect their village. The post-apocalypse world of M. R. Carey’s The Book of Koli (2020) is gripingly weird and hostile, and the explanation for it is suitably politically correct. The warning themes of much post-apocalypse fiction are present: environmental degradation, global warming, animal extinction, genetic manipulation, war and its tools, and the venal politicians who know what’s coming but take no action about it. We are responsible for Koli’s world. Koli’s pressing problem is that a single family, the Vennastins, dominates the old tech, serving as “Ramparts” (guardians) and running the village. On “testing days,” young villagers who come of age try to “wake” some old tech and thus join the Ramparts, which is what Koli has set his sights on doing so he can impress Spinner, the girl he loves. But the old tech only seems to wake for Vennastins. And Koli’s testing day is coming. His callow desire (“In some respects I was as shallow as a puddle”) initiates the plot, which introduces him to a “cute” Sony DreamSleeve media player called Monono Arawe, who teaches him about his village, his world, and his self. Through the old tech in the story, Carey gets us asking questions like, What is tech for? Weapons? Entertainment? Who gets tech (and hence power)? And what is sentience? Brown-skinned like the father he never met, Koli is an appealing protagonist-narrator, thoughtful, sensitive, ambitious, and honest. He realizes that we will be judging him, because he's going to tell us many things he experienced and did, not all of them good. Koli is telling his story after the events occurred and gaining and losing many names, which enables him to drop foreshadowing bombs here and there, like “And only three weeks later the gates of Mythen Rood closed on me for the last time. But I'll get to that later.” As in Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980) but to a lesser extent, Koli’s voice has a taut poetic quality and grammatical features that estrange our English: “The world isn't nothing next to the stories we tell ourselves. It bends to any shape we want it to. I seen this moment in my thoughts a thousand times before my testing day finally come, and there wasn't one of those times where the tech didn't wake for me.” Koli and his people simplify past tense verb endings (e.g., “I growed up a mite wild” and “I feeled my way”) and say things like “onliest.” Like in other works of post-apocalypse fiction, this one refers to things the narrator is ignorant about, but we understand, estranging us from our everyday world while elliptically reminding us of it. Ignorant of our world, Koli describes things like tanks, trains, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and the like. There are many other estranging features of Koli’s culture, like how they refer to the Christian god as “the dead god” (“Good success in a bad labor sets you down a dangerous path, so the dead god said one time before they killed him”) and worship a severe post-Christian legendary figure called Dandrake, or dread the sun shining because it wakes the dangerous trees, or think that the Parley Men in London are heroic knights, or believe that Phoenix was a place that was repeatedly burnt and rebuilt, etc. There are fine supporting characters: old Ursala from Elsewhere, who travels around among the villages in the British valley where Mythen Rood sits, passing along news, doctoring anyone in need of healing, and assessing the likelihood of in/fertile marriages, all with the aid of her “drudge,” a kind of weaponized robot medic pack mule; Cup from a shunned men cult, a trans girl with a chip on her shoulder and an affinity for capable violence; and above all the cute, sarcastic, and perky Monono, who, being a piece of old tech, is closer to our time and speaks in our own idiom (e.g., “I'm just going to lie down in my coffin like a sexy vampire”) and tosses out allusions to “The Lady Called Gaga,” Metallica, Pokémon, hobbits and orcs, Jedi, Archimedes, Tokyo, and more, and develops into much more than a media player for Koli and the reader. The audiobook reader Theo Solomon has a pleasing voice and manner. He does not overdramatize voices of different characters and different genders, but just reads everything with intelligence, sympathy, and understanding. (And he does a prime creepy cult leader.) Like other post-apocalypse novels like Davy (1964), Riddley Walker, and A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World (2019), here the young first-person narrator protagonist recounts leaving his familiar home as part of his growth towards greater understanding of his world and identity. (“You and me, dopey boy, against the world,” cheers Monono.) After an interlude with a religious cult, Koli decides to start working towards trying to save the human species by linking up too small and increasingly inbred and infertile communities in England and probably by making old tech available to a greater number of people. But this is very much the first book in a trilogy. There are moments of plot contrivance, as when Carey has (or does not have) Monono’s energy run out or has her “sleep” instead of warning Koli of some threat. But I liked Koli so much that I immediately went on to listen to the second book in the trilogy. View all my reviews
Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther by Craig Pittman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Readable Awful Account of Saving the Panther Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther (2020) by Craig Pittman is a vivid, absorbing, often appalling, and finally tentatively uplifting account of the history of the Florida panther. It’s readable. Pittman is a clear and user-friendly writer who explains difficult legal and scientific and academic concepts in easy to grasp language, introduces key figures with vivid physical descriptions so we see them in our mind’s eye, and tells a suspenseful (his)story of the amazing (still precarious) salvation of the panther in Florida despite incredible odds against it and the small number of intrepid people who tried to help it. Although it begins by covering the history of the views of and interactions with the panther from vanished Native American cultures (who respected and worshiped the cats as semi-divine spirits) through European explorers and settlers (who feared and hated them as spooky devils) and late 19th- and early- to mid-20th-century Americans (who persecuted and hunted them as pests and trophies), the book spends much more time with more recent Florida history, especially from the 1970s on. The book makes you admire (and pity) the panther as an awesome natural creature living in a rapidly dwindling habitat. It makes you loathe developers and politicians and government bureaucrats (the egregious “Fish and Wildlife Services”) and the lobbyists and “scientists” they hire and marvel that there’s any unpaved, pristine wilderness habitats for panthers or other wild predators and animals left in Florida (or the USA). The obscene development projects like an excrescent university and associated community or a Catholic utopian community blasphemously planted in the center of prime panther habitat! The idea that extinction is part of god’s plan or that Florida will be developed willy nilly! The way people move into new developments in what was panther territory and then complain when the panthers appear in “their” backyards to kill their cats or goats! The book relates uncomfortable facts like Democrats and Republicans alike both driving development in Florida, without caring about panther survival and habitat etc. Also demonstrates how reprehensibly weak the Fish and Wildlife service is against politicians and lobbyists etc. and how reluctant they are to do what they really should be doing in preserving wildlife and wilderness environments, in general and here, in particular, even after some flawed data they’d been relying on to justify passing development permits in prime panther habitats was debunked. A bitter irony of this story and probably many others concerned with endangered species and vanishing wilderness environments in America: Even when good people wanted the same good outcomes--the survival of the Florida Panther--they differed in how to do it, causing delays and disasters. And this doesn't take into account the venal “experts” who sold themselves to development companies. I learned a lot from reading the book, like different strategies for saving endangered large predator species: radio telemetry (catching, tranquilizing, and attaching radio collars to panthers), captive breeding programs (one of the last resorts for saving endangered species), and genetic augmentation (the last resort). Also the appalling ease with which developers routinely get their projects okayed by Fish and Wildlife. Also the Natural History Museum experts using flesh eating beetles to devour panther carcasses so that they can get clean bones to preserve. Also various quirky details Pittman relishes recounting about Floridian culture, like two different Big Foot type creatures and bizarre roadside attractions. Maybe in his desire to write an entertaining book, Pittman indulges in a few too many popular culture references: Star Trek, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Ten Commandments, the Hulk, the Avengers, Superman, Snidely Whiplash, Roger Staubach’s Hail Mary touchdown pass to Drew Pearson, Pepto Bismol, Farrah Fawcett feathered hair, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster, etc. etc. E.g., “Dozens of Panther pelts... hung there in rows just as if they were in Cruella de Vil’s coat closet.” The audiobook reader Mike Chamberlain is fine; nothing fancy, just straightforward clear down to earth reading that made me think I was listening to Pittman. View all my reviews
Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge by Hergé
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Satisfying Conclusion to a Great Two-Part Adventure The twelfth Tintin book, Le Tresor de Rackham Le Rouge (1944), completes the two-part adventure started with Le Secret de la Licorne (1943). Whereas the first book features antique dealer skullduggery, pickpocketing, and late-17th-century pirates as Tintin and Captain Haddock try to secure three pieces of parchment that supposedly disclose the location of a treasure, this second part depicts the hunt for said treasure. Interestingly, despite the nefarious Maxime Loiseau escaping police custody early on, raising the specter of his interfering with Tintin and Captain Haddock’s treasure hunt, our heroes’ quest is complicated only by human greed (e.g., a motley mob of self-proclaimed descendants of Rackham le Rouge claiming the treasure), human error (e.g., a mistake as to which meridian to use when calculating degrees of longitude) and the dangers of undersea searches (e.g., sharks, limited oxygen, and unlimited old Jamaican rum). And instead of Loiseau, it seems as if the main antagonist for Tintin and the Captain is a new character introduced into the series here, Tryphon Tournesol (Professor Calculus), an absent-minded, virtually deaf, genius inventor who forces himself into the treasure hunt to test his new shark submarine. Calculus is stunningly both deaf and confident in his ability to understand what people say, quickly trying the Captain’s patience and eventually even that of the mild-mannered Tintin. Like most of Herge’s work, the art in the volume is clean-lined, simple, colorful, beautiful, dynamic, and appealing. The frames displaying the densely green jungle are exotic and alive. There is a wonderful half-page picture depicting a sunken shipwreck as Tintin walks towards it wearing a diving suit, surrounded by a yellow jellyfish, a pair of red fish, a pink anemone, a brown starfish, a school of blue fish, and numerous sea plants. The cover picture is prime, as Tintin and Milou (Snowy) ride across the frame in Tournesol’s shark submarine, cute Milou looking right at us, inviting us to open the book and enter the undersea world. In addition to being exciting (without any violent action scenes), the book is funny, featuring the slapstick antics of the Captain and the Dupont and Dupond (Thompson and Tomson) detectives, a cursing colony of parrots who learned to swear like Captain Haddock from his shipwrecked ancestor, the dangerous antics of some armed monkeys, and a pleasingly ironic conclusion to the treasure hunt that begins in the Caribbean under the sea, shifts to a deserted jungle island, and ends-- In addition to introducing Tryphon Tournesol and showing how the Captain comes to own Marlinspike Manor, the story demonstrates the dangers of set-mind thinking, the appeal of adventures in exotic settings, and the comfort of home. This two-book story (Le Secret de la Licorne and Le Tresor de Rackham Le Rouge) is probably my favorite of all Tintin adventures, up there with L’Etoile Mysterieuse, Tintin au Tibet, and Le Crab aux Pincers d’Or. View all my reviews
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Fascinating, Suspenseful, and Beautiful--but Tawdry Hillary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies (2012) starts just after Wolf Hall (2009) ends. Thomas More has been executed, Henry has been divorced from Katherine and married to Anne Boleyn for three years, but they only have one child, Elizabeth, and the aging Henry is falling in love with Jane Seymour, the quiet, shy antidote to proud, prickly Anne. The royal progress of the King and his servants, hangers on, and friends has reached Wolf Hall, home of the Seymours, with whom they hunt, hawk, talk, and eat and drink. One young lord, Weston, is with stunning stupidity openly insulting to Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell at fifty is working indefatigably for Henry and England as Master Secretary, Master of the Rolls, Chancellor of Cambridge University, and has his hand in everything else, displaying all of his many talents and qualities: wit, tact, patience, memory, strategy, secrecy, poker face, ruthlessness, sympathy for the poor, and love for his family. He’ll one moment hire into his house a toothless vagabond who claims he was a jester for a lord who got blown up and the next moment tell a ward that when diplomacy fails, you’d better get your axe out while your enemy is still abed. It has been rumored that he was interested in remarrying to Jane Seymour, but as he observes his king falling in love with her, he morphs into a Pandarus-Machiavelli. He, Cromwell, is not without axes to grind for anyone guilty of cruel and callous treatment to his revered former master Cardinal Wolsey when he fell from favor. Cromwell indeed has a long and perfect memory. During high stakes discussions and decisions involving the Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope, the King of France, Henry’s daughter by Katherine Mary, the supposed lovers of Anne Boleyn, and so on, he, Cromwell, often departs the present to revisit the past about things like his beloved deceased wife and daughters, his violent father, his first and last foray into a military career, and his start in the world of Italian banking. Hillary Mantel works into her narrative many details on the international and national historical and cultural situations: Henry feeling insecure on his throne because of lurking Plantagenents and hostile Pope and Emperor; Cromwell working on ways to transfer the money and power of the monasteries to the crown; Moscovites invading Poland (!); etc. Also, plenty of historical details about life in 16th-century England and Europe: festivals, foods, religion, books, monasteries, jousting, clothes, etc. Plenty of themes about life and death and gender, too. And she writes splendid prose: “Just in time to frown at this, Sir Nicholas Carew has made an entrance. He does not come into a room like lesser men, but rolls in like a siege engine or some formidable hurling device, and now halting before Cromwell, he looks as if he wishes to bombard him.” “A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. A quill sharpened can stir and rustle like the pinions of angels.” “If dogs could smell out treason, Rich would be a blood hound, that prince among trufflers.” “You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron. When you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you.” “He takes the child to a looking glass so she can see her wings. Her steps are tentative, she is in awe at herself. Mirrored, the peacock eyes speak to him. Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here: a whisper, a touch, a feather’s breath from you.” “These days are perfect. The clear untroubled light picks out each berry shimmering in a hedge. Each leaf of a tree, the sun behind it, hangs like a golden pear.” “The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around. Out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.” Mantel’s narrative techniques are noteworthy. As in Wolf Hall, she frequently refers to Cromwell by he and his name, e.g., “he, Cromwell, says.” Why? She could just write, “Cromwell says.” The many “he, Cromwell” phrases add weight to his, Cromwell’s, personality. They become hypnotic. Mantel’s narrator is also given to addressing “you” (e.g., “The boom of the cannon catches them unawares, shuddering across the water. You feel the jolt inside, in your bones”) and recruiting the reader with a “we” (e.g., “We are coming to the sweet season of the year, when the air is mild and the leaves pale and lemon cakes are flavored with lavender, egg custards barely set, infused with a sprig of basil, elderflowers simmered in a sugar syrup and poured over halved strawberries”) These touches accompany her present tense narration. Usually, I loathe the trendy present tense in novels, especially historical fiction, but Mantel is such a fine writer of such pristine prose, that I liked it. The book is an absorbing series of vivid, intense, high stakes scenes. Even if you know the history (Henry working through a series of hapless wives in his quest for novelty, variety, and sons), Mantel makes it page turning through her beautiful and potent style, her witty dialogue, her sense of time and place. Like the best historical fiction, it is utterly convincing and immersive, exotic and human. Audiobook reader Ben Miles is great: terse, dry, witty, intelligent; rough for Cromwell; wannabe French for Anne; petulant or naïve for Henry; salty and foul for Norfolk; toothless and savory for ex-jester Anthony; all voices just right, whether young or old, British or foreign, male or female, etc., and no straining for effect. However, despite Mantel’s wonderful writing and absorbing story and Mile’s great reading of it, it started making me feel dirty. After Cromwell playing Cupid if not Pandarus for Henry vis-a-vis Jane, he starts digging up (or manufacturing) dirt on Anne Boleyn by interrogating her ladies in waiting and a musician/singer. All because Henry has gotten a taste for divorce. It’s tawdry. Of course, it’s also history, and I am looking forward to the third book in the trilogy to see how Cromwell ends up. He is a complicated and compelling character: brilliant, capable, unflappable, witty, cultured, international, sympathetic (to the poor and the underdog), loyal (to the king and England), strategizing a step ahead of everyone else and always remaining his secret self. Not above taking bribes or threatening or tempting foolish and vulnerable people to gain his objectives. Is he TOO good to be true? Maybe his luck will run out or his knack decline. He will deserve what fate he receives. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
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