Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Slices of Harlem Apartment Life: “Is it despair or prevail?” Stories from the Tenants Downstairs (2022) is a set of eight slice of life tales depicting various inhabitants of Banneker Terrace apartment building in Harlem: Mimi, a young single mother trying multiple strategies to come up with $350 for rent, hindered by her sweet lead poison brain damaged little son Fortune; Swan, the boy’s father still living in his mother’s apartment realizing that despite a black president he and his freshly out of prison friend will never really change; Ms. Dallas, Swan’s mother trying to earn rent money while working two jobs, one as “para” chaperoning a special needs child at the precarious Sojourner Truth Middle School; an anonymous girl living in Clinton and mutely falling under the spell of Kandese, who, after being expelled from Sojourner Truth, stays the summer with her grandmother; Dary, a young gay man trying to become a hairdresser while not becoming a prostitute; Najee, a twelve-year-old writing a letter explaining how he came to start dancing for money on trains and cause a tragic accident; Neisha, an ex-gymnast and university dropout returning to Banneker to work on the Committee of Concern connecting a lawyer to residents on the eviction list (including the childhood friend who ruined her gymnastics dream); and Mr. Murray, a philosophical old man who likes keeping a low profile and sitting on the sidewalk playing chess with passersby. Many of the stories end abruptly without our learning how the protagonist is going to be. We get hints as to that when characters from earlier stories are referenced in later ones, but the stories are not linked plot-wise. In Swan’s story, he never mentions his son or Mimi; in Najee’s story, he doesn’t really mention Kandese; in Ms. Dallas’ story, she never mentions her grandson or Mimi). It’s not a composite novel. The stories mostly lack epiphanies and metamorphoses and often end on a note of quiet devastation. The characters have their dreams, but we know (and they mostly come to know) they ain’t coming true. The rap-like “Intro” ends, “Everybody got a story, everybody got a tale/ Question is: Is it despair or prevail?” And Fofana’s people rarely “prevail.” So I wince whenever a character says something like, “Imma get a job and buy a house for my mother.” I also get frustrated at key moments when the sensitive but often passive characters know they should say or do something but end up staying silent or watching. Author Sidik Fofana is showing how the difficult and stressful lives of people of color drain positive vigor from them, and it often makes for depressing reading. On the plus side, some of the characters have an impressively uncompromising pride and ethical standard. Although when pushed to it Mimi will charge double to do her friend’s daughter’s hair and use her son’s backpack to shoplift diapers, she will NOT move back home with her tail between her legs to live with her mother and four sisters on welfare; although Dary will have sex with a stranger in a DC hotel room, he will NOT take money for it. Small moments of resistance and integrity if not victory. These are stories FROM the tenants, so seven of them are first person, one second person, and each has a distinctive, savory, demotic, AAVE voice talking to the reader, like in this excerpt from the first story, “Rent Manual—Mimi, 14D”: “Banneker Terrace on 129th and Fred Doug ain't pretty, but it's home. Until now, it's been the same since you moved here when you was pregnant with Fortune. One long gray-ass building, twenty-five floors, three hundred suttin apartments. Four elevators that got minds of they own. Laundry full of machines that don't wash clothes right. Bingo room that the old folks hog up and a trash chute that smell like rotten milk.” Fofana writes conversations without quotation marks: You gonna go over there and live by yourself? Your ma asked. That’s what I said, Ma, didn’t I? Chase after a man that don’t want nothin to do with no baby? And how you gonna make for rent? Imma get a job like responsible people. I heard that before. And he writes lots of the n word and lots of the mf word and lots of slang and expressions like “be like that's what I'm tryna say,” or “I know suttin that make you happy,” or “big-ass pot.” The distinct voices of the character-narrators are enhanced by each story having a different—excellent—audiobook reader. My favorite is Dominic Hoffman as the old chess playing Mr. Murray (what a savory voice!), but Bahni Turpin as Mimi is also great. There is some telling social criticism, like about liberal white people naively thinking they can enrich ghetto kids’ lives by making them read literature* or about the trend in companies forcing low-income residents out and renovating apartments to get higher paying ones and upscale restaurants replacing older ones. *Actually, young and white Mr. Broderick, who constantly boasts about graduating from Harvard, force feeds Steinbeck and Shakespeare to the poor Sojourner Truth kids, and unfairly resents and scorns Ms. Dallas is a little too clueless to believe. As I am white, grew up comfortably, and only once temporarily got a mild taste of poverty (living on a TA’s salary in graduate school) and disappointment (having my cv rejected 300 times), it was illuminating, moving, and sobering to read these stories. I would read another book by Fofana. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Little Bukowski Goes a Long Way… Hot Water Music (1983) consists of thirty-six typical Bukowski short stories. They are mostly sordidly real but sometimes magically real and feature few epiphanies or transformations or triumphs but mostly endings where life in all its squalid glory goes on. The stories feature LA underbelly denizens like physically and or psychologically mutilated alcoholics, gamblers, writers, artists, editors, students, professors, prostitutes, fans, femme fatales, housewives, beggars, and bartenders. Many a first-person appearance by Henry “Hank” Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter-ego. And many of the third-person narration protagonists just happen to be alcoholic writers not unlike Chinaski. The stories may shift into fantasy, as when a jealous skeleton throws a drink in the face of a bar customer after a woman who claims to have seen Joan of Arc burn gives him a hot kiss, or as when a woman’s brother teleports into the protagonist’s home right when he’s in his bed about to climax-cheat on his wife with the woman, or as when a husband and wife spend the night shooting each other with their gun and are woken up in the morning by the police complaining about domestic quarrel situations. The suspense-pleasure in reading the stories lies in wondering what dirty sexy gross person or event or situation will manifest next in Bukowski’s deadpan, dry, drawling voice, perfectly channeled by audiobook reader Christian Baskous. The best stories are humorous, irreverent takes on poets and poetry readings and the writing profession. I really like most of the Chinaski stories, especially the two about the funeral of his father. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of unpleasant, unenriching stories. These feature graphic violence, sex, and political incorrectness, especially regarding women, as in a line like, “a local feminist poet who had grown tired of blacks and now fucked a doberman in her bedroom.” Though Bukowski loved women in his way, his male characters say things like, “A female seldom moves away from one victim without having another,” and “Of course women were all crazy. They demanded more than there was.” And some of the women are monsters preying on men, liable to do something like bite off a piece of one’s penis during oral sex or drive off with one’s wallet, clothes, and car keys while one is in the motel shower. Mind you, Bukowski’s men often deserve such treatment, and the line “What women and men did to each other was beyond comprehension” echoes through the whole collection. Bukowski writes vivid descriptions like “She tasted like old postage stamps and a dead mouse,” “It was a nice Southern California morning, smoggy, stale, and listless,” and “Her eyes were large, stricken, and stale.” And lines that ring with dry wit and raw truth, like-- “They kill people by the millions in wars and give out medals for it.” “There was nothing worse than a reformed drunk and a born again a Christian, and Meyers was both.” “Love is a form of prejudice… You love what is convenient.” “The waiting room was full of people with no real problems: gonorrhea, herpes, syphilis, cancer, and so forth.” “The only people who know what mercy is are those who need it.” References to Presidents Carter and Reagan, the Falkland’s War, and women’s lib date the stories, but on the other hand the sordid and hence vibrant human condition and cynical takes on America feel universal. As do references to the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner, Pirandello, Hesse, Chopin, and Camus. (Bukowski writes a funny riff on Camus’ existentialism being compromised by his elegant writing that reads like that of a man who’s just finished a rich steak dinner accompanied by fine French wine.) I mostly enjoyed the collection, but several Bukowski stories go a long way, and about a third of the way into the collection, I started getting jaded, and by the end I was ready for the end. View all my reviews
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “A hairbrush is NOT a gun!” First, I love the voice(s) and manner of audiobook reader Bahni Turpin, who really enhances Angie Thomas’ YA family romance race novel The Hate U Give (2017). The story is told (in de rigueur YA present tense) by 16-year-old Starr Carter, whose home is in the Garden Heights “ghetto,” where shootings, robberies, and drugs are common and normal jobs, well-equipped schools, and social services rare. When she was ten, her best friend Natasha was shot and killed while playing at an open fire hydrant, after which Starr’s parents put her and her younger and older brothers in the mostly white Williamson Prep school in the mostly white (and largely gated) Riverton Hills community 45 minutes away. As a result, Starr has been dividing herself into two personas in two worlds, Garden Heights Starr and Williamson Prep Starr, unable to speak her natural language or show her true feelings to her school friends. In the beginning of the story, she loses another childhood best friend, Khalil Harris, her first crush, when a white policeman pulls them over after a party and shoots Khalil three times in the back as he’s reaching for his hairbrush and asking Starr if she’s OK. The traumatic experience sends Starr wrestling with her guilt over having abandoned Khalil after going to the white school, with her awakening social conscience, and with her desire to keep a low profile as the only eyewitness to the shooting. As she watches the ensuing protests and riots over the killing (called “the incident” by the police, “the murder” by an activist attorney), gets interviewed by the police and the DA, and deals with her family members and friends, she finds it increasingly difficult to keep her two worlds separate. Will the merging of her two worlds be a wreck or a metamorphosis? Will she use her voice or remain safely anonymous? Will Khalil get justice, or will his killer get off scot-free? Will her father let her mother move the family out of Garden Heights to be safe or insist on staying to improve the community? Will their Garden Heights grocery store remain untouched by the riots? Will her complicated family grow closer or implode? The way Thomas answers such questions makes for a page-turning novel that is topical with the police killings of black people while staying universal with the relationships between family members and friends of highly wired teenagers. The novel depicts African American culture and human nature while dealing with interracial problems and enrichments. The book is not an anti-police diatribe, as Starr’s beloved surrogate father Uncle Carlos is a cop who genuinely wants to help Garden Heights and regrets temporarily assuming the worst of Khalil after he’s killed. Moreover, there’s lots of humor throughout, especially in the conversations between Starr and her family members and friends, which Angie Thomas writes with a fine-tuned ear for how kids and adults think and talk. There are funny scenes, like when Starr’s ex-gang banger and ex-con Black Panther and Malcom X idolizing father explains why Harry Potter is about gangs or discovers her *white* boyfriend Chris (“Y'all act like this dude been around a minute”), or when Starr and company tell Chris strange white behaviors so he tries to tell them strange black behaviors. And Starr’s salty grandmother steals any scene she’s in. While telling a realistic story about race, violence, and voice, the novel presses a lot of YA buttons, channeling a bit of Harry Potter (with the commentary on Rowling’s series and the outsider at school setting), a bit of the Hunger Games (with the first-person present-tense narration and themes relating to media and image), and a bit of Twilight (with the high school romance between apparently mismatched but ideally suited couple). Unfortunately, Thomas also indulges in the YA genre’s Righteous Punch of the Asshole, when Starr has had enough of her self-centered, manipulative, defensive, racist Williamson friend Hailey. Starr’s three-day suspension and her mother’s, Just-because-someone-says-something-you-don’t-like-doesn’t-mean-you-should-punch-them, are drowned out by the approval she gets from her father, brother, “sister,” friend, gang members, and author. In addition to referencing much popular culture (e.g., Starr’s beloved Jordan basketball shoes, Drake, Idris Elba, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, IHOP, Tumblr, Taco Bell), the novel depicts much African American culture, from Black Jesus, Huey Newton, dap, and “the Talk” about how to act when the police stop you if you’re black, to spicy Black English and slang like “a’ight” (all right) and “You just mad he threw you out,” “Loud-ass music,” “Giving Denasia Allen some serious stank-eye,” and “It's dope to be black until it's hard to be black.” She also writes some neat figures of speech, like Rosalie is “an African queen, and we are blessed to be in her presence,” “Suddenly I'm Eve in the garden after she ate the fruit,” and “’Love you’ isn’t as forward or aggressive as ‘I love you.’ ‘Love you’ can slip up on you, sure, but it doesn’t make an in-your-face-slam dunk. More like a nice jump shot.” And life wisdom, like “What's the point of having a voice if you're going to be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?” “People make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them,” and especially Tupac’s, THUG LIFE: “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone.” Maybe Starr’s family is a little too good to be true. She says at one point, “Embarrassing dancing and dysfunction aside, my family is not too bad,” and despite their arguments, they are (almost too) ideally supportive. I wonder how the novel would be if her family were truly broken like Khalil’s. Although I like the presence of Chris, who gives white me an outsider’s view of the black culture of the novel, I also think that Thomas takes the easy way out by not writing any scenes with his white parents. On the other hand, I think Devante (a Khalil-like Garden Heights youth from another broken family) is an unnecessary distraction during the climax. Anyway, overall, Thomas tells a suspenseful, moving, funny, and necessary story, and I’d like now to read her more recent Garden Heights novel Concrete Rose about Starr’s father when he was a teen. View all my reviews
Wonder by R.J. Palacio
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Extraordinary Ordinary Extraordinary Boy Wonder (2012) by R. J. Palacio is a funny and moving novel about a ten-year-old boy who was the unlucky winner of the genetic lottery, born with an incredibly rare genetic condition (craniofacial anomaly) such that the doctor thought he’d die, and his survival ushered in an infancy and childhood of operations to build his face and seal his cleft palate. August (Auggie) Pullman says he’s really an ordinary kid and would be normal if other people saw him that way, but even after twenty-seven surgeries his face looks as if it had been melted by fire and still horrifies children and repulses adults. Auggie takes his condition and its effect on people philosophically and humorously but also sensitively (he is a human being who can be hurt). In his passion for Star Wars and his love for the family dog Daisy, he feels like a real, relatable kid. He is disarmingly dependent on his parents, liable to whine and cry and sit on their knees and cuddle with them. The book begins with the end of Auggie’s days of home schooling: his protective parents want him to start growing up by entering the fifth grade at Beecher Prep for middle school. Will it be as his father fears like sending “a lamb to the slaughter”? I found it hard to stop reading because I needed to find out what would happen to Auggie or what he would do next. One of the (mostly) effective things about the book is that Palacio writes it in eight parts (each with many short chapters, the book following the YA trend of short chapters and sentences), and while Auggie narrates three of them, the other five are narrated by other children: his older sister Via (a high school freshman), his friend at school Jack, another friend at school Summer, Via’s boyfriend Justin, and Via’s ex-best-friend Miranda. At their best, the different parts give different insights into Auggie and his situation and into the challenge faced by all kids entering adolescence. For example, whereas Auggie refrains from describing his face, only saying, “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse,” his big sister Via describes it in appalling detail, as well as frankly expressing—without rancor—what it’s like to be the oft-neglected sibling of such a younger brother. And Jack’s narration reveals how a well-meaning, kind kid could in a moment of thoughtless fitting in unintentionally hurt someone. Perhaps Palacio tries too hard to distinguish Justin’s narration from the others by having him talk in present tense with lower case pronoun i, and had she replaced his narration with that of Auggie’s Eddie Haskel-esque nemesis Julian she might have deepened her novel. Sometimes a character says something that doesn’t ring true, as when Auggie talks about walking back from a school event “in that giggly kind of mood” with his friends (I can’t imagine a ten-year-old boy saying “giggly”). Though her narrators are at times too intelligent and articulate for kids (a feature of most YA fiction), overall Palacio captures the voices of ten-year olds and fourteen-year olds, with plenty of “likes” and “Dudes” and slang and cultural references. She also nails the trials and tribulations of middle school and high school, with their homework, projects, lockers, lunchtimes, cliques (jocks, popular kids, nerds), etc., though the Principal Mr. Tushman and teachers like Mr. Browne, who has the kids in English learn a character-building precept each month, may be a bit too good to be true. Much YA fiction features special kid heroes who feel different from everyone else, and by being so special Auggie is no different. Apart from his facial condition, he is one of the smartest and funniest kids in his class. He is brave to put up with the quick look away adults do when they meet him for the first time and months of near total ostracization and hurtful teasing from his peers, including the Plague game they play whereby anyone who accidentally touches Auggie becomes infected. Helping him through all this are his friends and exceptionally loving and supportive family (Justin and Miranda admiringly prefer the open and warm expressions of love and down to earth humor of the Pullmans to their own families’ distant relationships). Strangely, Auggie seems uninterested romantically in Summer, an intelligent and beautiful biracial girl. Whereas his friend Jack tells Auggie that Via is “hot” and comes to have a crush on Summer, Auggie himself never seems to think romantically or fantasize sexually about her or any girl or woman (not even Princess Leia in a bikini with Jaba the Hut!). One would imagine him feeling a pang about Jack (with his normal good looks and lively personality) liking Summer, but he reveals no jealousy or despair. I started to get crushes on teachers when I was about five and on girls when I was about nine, so I wonder why Pallacio neuters Auggie in the book. It is another example of presenting him as ordinary in his words, despite his face, but really making him unnaturally extraordinary. (view spoiler)[While the first parts where Auggie is getting used to school and making friends were the best, moving me to tears or chuckles, the ending indulges way too much in the special child’s desire to be affirmed. The book should end after a three-day, two-night nature outing Auggie’s class goes on, during which an ugly verbal and physical assault on Auggie by some older kids from another school finally secures him the support, respect, and affection of his classmates, but Palacio botches it by going on to depict an excrescent triumphal graduation climax (maybe my junior high school was unusual, but we only had a ceremony when we actually graduated, whereas Auggie’s school has a ceremony for the fifth and sixth grade students). Auggie’s special award (“the Henry Ward Beecher medal to honor students who have been notable or exemplary”) and standing ovation reveal what has been developing throughout the novel: despite his saying he’s ordinary (XBox, hot dogs, Star Wars, etc.), Auggie is extraordinarily intelligent, humorous, articulate, loving, and loveable. As his mother says, “You really are a wonder, Auggie.” I’d have preferred him to have just survived his first school year with other kids without the standing ovation. (hide spoiler)] Readers who want a feel-good story that will make them empathize with (and want to be kind to) articulate, sensitive, and funny kids who are physically very different should like this book. It reminds me a little of Diary of a Wimpy Kid infused with kindness. View all my reviews
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Never love a wild thing” In a bar in NYC in 1956, the anonymous narrator (a writer) sees a photo of a “primitive” African sculpture depicting a woman who can only be Holly Golightly. Had she really been to Africa? What was she doing now? Where was she? Was she dead, crazy, or married? The narrator then remembers and tells the story of when, back in the autumn of 1943 during WWII, he moved into the Upper East Side brownstone apartment above Holly’s and, while trying to become a published writer, became friends with her and learned her personality and past and loved her and lost her. Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) is therefore a nostalgic novella painting a portrait of NYC in the early 1940s and especially of the small-town Texas child-bride turned “café society celebrity and girl about NY.” Holly is “two months shy of nineteen” when the narrator first meets her. Her business card says her occupation is “traveling,” and her apartment always looks like it’s just been moved into. She doesn’t like zoos with all their caged wild animals. She carries herself with a self-amused attitude, calls people “Darling,” and sprinkles her conversation with French words, like “Not un peu bit.” She smokes and drinks. Her varicolored blond hair (cut like a boy’s) and green eyes light up the air around her. She’s elegantly thin, healthy, and clean. What does she do for money? Go out with men who pay for her entertainment and give her nice gifts. She sometimes sleeps with them in her apartment, but also says, “I’ve only had eleven lovers—does that make me a whore?” According to O J Berman, the Hollywood agent who took Holly under his wing when she tried to but gave up becoming a movie star, she’s a phony, but a real phony, because she believes all the fictions she fabricates. Whatever she pretends or believes, Holly wants to stay true to herself and wants to find a place where she belongs, a real-life place that makes her feel like breakfast at Tiffany’s (where she goes when the “mean reds” hit her). “Be anything but a coward,” she says. The movie with Audrey Hepburn as Holly (apparently Capote wanted Marylin Monroe to play the role) generally follows the spirit and action of the novella, with some exceptions. The novella’s ending is more poignant, sad, and somehow hopeful than the corny, unconvincing movie ending. There is no romance between Holly and the narrator in the novella, much though the narrator would have wished there to have been. George Pepard is miscast as the narrator in the movie, while Mickey Rooney’s playing a Japanese American (with buck teeth, accented English, and hysterical behavior) must be a landmark in offensive Asian stereotyping, while his character’s role in the novella, the professional photographer Mr. Yunioshi, is much more benign and underplayed. Capote writes vivid descriptions (e.g., “Rusty’s raw baby buttocks face” or “She gleamed like a transparent child”) and funny lines (e.g., “I like a man who sees the humor [during sex]. Most of them are all pant and puff”). There is Capote’s self-deprecating take down of aspiring “serious” writers: “I’ve never been to bed with a writer. Are you a real writer? Does anyone buy what you write?” But although there is plenty of NYC in the story—e.g., Central Park, the Frick Museum, Sing Sing prison, some street and shop names, the city lights, etc.—Holly dominates. If you like well-written character studies about independent, strong, witty women who know how to use men to get what they want but who always seem lonely, unlucky, and sad, especially such stories set in NYC in the 1940s, and if you don’t mind some dated details, including some insulting references to homosexuality and race, you’d probably like the story. It isn’t as norm-challenging as it seemed in the late 1950s and early 60s, but it is entertaining and moving. Audiobook reader Michael C. Hall gives a professional performance without overdoing it. View all my reviews
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Biblical, Ebonic, Sensual, Sad, Funny, Revelatory Dusk in Eatonville, a small all-black town in Southern Florida in 1928. Janie Crawford Killicks Starks Woods returns to her house in town after having been gone almost two years living with her third husband, Vergible Woods, AKA Tea Cake, in “the muck” of the Everglades: planting and picking beans, hunting and fishing, dancing and storytelling, laughing and loving. Janie has returned to Eatonville after burying Tea Cake. Walking in unaffectedly sexy and free forty-year-old beauty though clad in muddy overalls, “her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt,” barely noticing the greedy-eyed men or the envy-eyed women of the town, Janie is magnificent. No matter that the women cruelly gossip about her, hating her for looking younger than forty, for having been married for twenty years to Joe Starks, the town mayor and post master and store owner and de facto emperor, and then for having had the temerity after Joe’s death to turn down all the older decent single men’s offers of marriage in order to run off with Tea Cake, a man without fixed occupation at least ten years her junior. Janie’s only friend in town, Phoeby Watson, visits her to give her a plate of mulatto rice and to hear what happened to her while she was away. The rest of the novel depicts Janie’s life story up to that point: her attempt to find a way to live so as to “utilize myself all over.” To live not as her loving but limiting grandmother wanted her to (marrying for stability not love) but rather as she had felt during a sensual epiphany beneath a blossoming pear tree at age sixteen “With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!” Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a rich, potent novel composed in two registers: the standard-English third-person narration that is Biblical, poetic, ironic, and sensual; and the Ebonic dialogue that is demotic, southern, witty, and colorful. The gap between the two is striking, as in the following passage: “They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Pheoby eager to feel and do through Janie, but hating to show her zest for fear it might be thought mere curiosity. Janie full of that oldest human longing—self revelation. Pheoby held her tongue for a long time, but she couldn’t help moving her feet. So Janie spoke. ‘Naw, t’aint nothing’ lak you might think. So ‘tain’t no use in me telling you somethin’ unless Ah give you de understandin’ to go ‘long wid it. Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide. Looka heah, Pheoby, is Sam waitin’ on you for his supper?’” I’d never read anything by Hurston before, and her writing amused, moved, and enriched me. The vivid descriptions of everything from barbecued meat (“the seasoning penetrated to the bone”) to love: “He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom, a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps, crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.” And the savory characters’ lines: “If dat was my wife, I’d kill her cemetery dead,” or “Put me down easy, Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate,” or “Ah’m gonna sweep out hell and burn up de broom.” There is much about the human condition as differently experienced by men and women. Janie’s first two husbands have no appreciation for her mind or soul, wanting only an obedient worker in the house who is thankful to be kept therein. Of her first marriage, we read, “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.” Her second husband thinks women and chickens are of equal intelligence and that she should be grateful for what he gives her, though “She got nothing from Jody but what money could buy.” Janie is thirsting for love and poetry--the bees among the blossoms--and experience: “You got to go there to know there.” The novel also says much about the difficulties of black life in America, in ways still relevant today. Janie’s grandmother (who as a slave was raped by her master) tells her, “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out.” Partly as a result, “us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come roun in queer ways.” White and black bodies (really all the same of course) are treated with egregious difference after a hurricane. Then there is the pathetic skin color snob Mrs. Turner who takes to Janie because of her coffee and cream-colored skin, Mrs. Turner telling her that she’s too good for the dark-skinned Tea Cake and scorning dark black people as an affront to her white God. Speaking of God, the title of the novel refers to a moment of existential fear during an apocalyptic hurricane. This connects to a provocative earlier passage: “All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. . . Fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars, the beginning of wisdom.” As she reads the audiobook, actress Ruby Dee savors every word, from the narration to the black vernacular, convincingly voicing all manner of characters and moods. She makes the audiobook a five-star experience. (I'd give the novel itself four stars because I thought some of the humorous scenes of people debating or teasing go on a little too long.) Evocative blues guitar picking periodically closes or opens scenes, perhaps to start or end different audiobook disks. Readers who want to see a mother of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker at her peak or are interested in the African American experience centered in early 20th-century Florida but speaking to all people in any time should read this book. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University