wowzy this book is out! you can read it too! (i missed the subtext entirely when i read it. i'm so ashamed).
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i can't even begin to imagine what wowzy this book is out! you can read it too! (i missed the subtext entirely when i read it. i'm so ashamed).
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i can't even begin to imagine what the world will be like when this book comes out. let me take this back, since it's only a month from now. i imagine it will be pretty much as it is now, except many more people dead.
which leads me to say, maybe don't read this if anxiety keeps you up nights. wait a bit. read whatever makes you sleep. escape.
lydia millet has been writing about the demise of the world since at least the first book of hers i read, How the Dead Dream, which came out in 2009. HTDD is eerie and spooky, but, well, it was also ten years ago so i put back on the shelf it came from and tried to forget about it.
how fast we are killing the planet!
most of this book is, in fact, a little un-millety. it's narrated by a teenage girl, evie, who is all manners of sweet, and even though the demise of the world is here in spades, evie's and her friends' sweetness and uncanny political correctness, resourcefulness, and moral rectitude infuse the bulk of the book with a lovely tenderness. but of course millet will be millet so things are also magicky and strange and eerie and, well, as i said, read at your peril.
our writers are our prophets. they and the young'uns, who'll have to figure out how to live when everything goes to shit. at some point one of the young people in this fable says to the adults, "why didn't you do anything?"
the adult says, "what could i have done?"
"you could have gotten angry." (i'm paraphrasing and possibly inventing because it was late last night/this morning).
am i angry enough? i am angry plenty. could i do more? i honestly don't think so.
these are questions all of us must answer. we must be angry enough and we must do all we can. and if we are, and do, then we must read books like this and say, "i am scared but i'm doing all i can and it will have to do." then, we must get a good night's sleep because there is work to do and we need all the rest we can get....more
This gorgeously written novel is about, at least partly, the complicated grief of children, magnified as it is by their limited understanding of the sThis gorgeously written novel is about, at least partly, the complicated grief of children, magnified as it is by their limited understanding of the social mechanics of death and (all too often) by the failure of adults to help them through the darkness of loss. Adults of course have their own loss to contend with. But it's delightful to me to see more and more texts highlight how childhood is not a happy and carefree space, and how the tender, fragile feelings of children need as much or more attention as/than the delicate, fragile feelings of the adults who care for them. Nothing is as easy for kids as we pretend it is.
The first person narrator of this novel is eight when his beloved toddler sister dies. The little girl looms large in the young narrator's memory. She was everyone's joy and light. The three remaining siblings muddle through the aftermath of the child's death, creating ways to cope while the parents also fall apart.
If this is the premise, the novel is immensely more complex (isn't death always more complex than itself?). The narrator's family has recently immigrated from Taiwan and lives in a desultory part of suburban/rural Alaska. The children are fairly integrated with their peers, but the parents struggle with the stark professional demotion that tends to accompany urgent immigration, with cultural displacement, with poverty, and with their inability to function in a country that is not welcoming to them in any way at all.
This is all presented in a very understated, subtle way, so that it takes a bit to figure out what is going on. While the narrator is now an adult, he presents the events of his childhood as seen through his child eyes.
What struck me the most in this book is the brutality of global notions of masculinity. Much is expected from the father in this new land, but the father is not a strong man. Under the weight of the family's expectation and the multiple failures he inevitably encounters, he folds in on himself. There are no second chances for men who let their families down. Gentle, fragile masculinity doesn't have much of a place anywhere, but it really won't be forgiven at the harsh frontiers of immigration.
The final, spectacular chapters do tremendous work to bring home the hurt that inevitably follows childhood trauma. This novel is particularly urgent in this time of hatred toward immigrants of all stripes, and in particular about immigrant children. We are creating a generation of traumatized humans who will take way more than their own lifetimes to heal. Let's heed....more
this may not be everybody’s cuppa but it blew my mind so much I'm buying myself my own copy, re-reading it, and annotating it. also, if I were still tthis may not be everybody’s cuppa but it blew my mind so much I'm buying myself my own copy, re-reading it, and annotating it. also, if I were still teaching, i'd find a way to stick it into every damn class i teach.
i marvel at the genius of valeria luiselli. how could this book be more different from Story of My Teeth? valeria luiselli is a chameleon. you give her a topic, she molds herself around it and builds a beautiful temple of words and ideas.
at first i thought this was a memoir. i don't know how i missed the "a novel" under the title. then it dawned on me to check.
what luiselli does with language here, gosh, it's spectacular. she layers it and layers it, and ultimately it's like layers of water in a clear pristine sea. it's all transparent and simple, really, yet the richness is visible.
and then you realize this is the first book luiselli has written in english, and you are absolutely astonished, because the writing is simply gorgeous and rich and fabulous.
this book is an object lesson about how to talk about oppressed others. luiselli, who is mexican, takes on the plight of refugee children who comes from central america to the united states. she discusses the idea of representation in the book itself (thus putting herself automatically inside the postmodern, or maybe the post-postmodern, since it's 2020 and we've all grown to incorporate identity politics into the blithe playfulness of pomo). how do you talk about the voiceless? the children are voiceless in so many ways! their voices very rarely get heard, and they are so young, and many of them speak languages for which there are no translators -- languages spoken by small indigenous communities, some of them multi-tonal languages that are difficult for westerners to learn.
the way you speak for others is, you don't do it. luiselli even says that publishing pictures of caged or crying refugee children is counterproductive. what does it do? what does it do? (i am still sitting with that one: me, it enrages me).
the way you speak about others is, you speak about yourself. how to find a way to do that effectively, well, that's the whole game....more
this is a fucking brutal book. anyone tells you otherwise, they are lying.
this novel starts as a murder mystery (with a pretty good idea of who the mthis is a fucking brutal book. anyone tells you otherwise, they are lying.
this novel starts as a murder mystery (with a pretty good idea of who the murderer is but who knows) then develops into a story about
* the dead-end lives of poor immigrants with no education and bottom-of-the-barrel jobs * institutional racism and the dilemma of whether or not to call the police when you are not white * the unforgiving weight of unsupported motherhood, at all social levels * asian masculinity (this topic has received a lot of attention lately on twitter, so if you want to know more do a search there) * the disaster that is foster care (i guess canada is not doing much better than the US * intergenerational trauma * the abandonment of children
this last is the most devastating aspect of the book. there is not a child, in this entire book, who doesn't suffer violence and whom adults don't fail, faultlessly or not.
inside this murder mystery lee packs a dense story of what it means to be an immigrant in canada (north america), and what it means to be a child who is betrayed at every turn of the way.
i had to stop a number of times to catch my breath....more
this book won the national book award. it's well written, deep and intelligent.
if you, like me, are extra super duper wary of YA this may not be the this book won the national book award. it's well written, deep and intelligent.
if you, like me, are extra super duper wary of YA this may not be the book for you. there are YA books that make it easier than this book does on us YA-skeptics.
the premise of this book is entirely irrelevant to the what this book is like, or whathis left me breathless. more when i recover.
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the premise of this book is entirely irrelevant to the what this book is like, or what it does. in fact, i have no idea what this book does or what is about (though i'll try to say something about this in a minute) but here is the premise: stephen florida (the strange last name is the result of a clerical error stephen decides not to fix) is the star of a north dakota university wrestling team and his one dream is to win the division championship in kenosha in his senior year. he has no ambition other than that and, if i remember correctly, no life goals of any kind, including life itself, after that.
so let me talk about a) Hanya Yanagihara's enthusiastic endorsement of this first novel and b) the cover.
i have no idea if gabe and hanya are MFA buddies or MFA teacher-student, but what i know is, if hanya endorses a book it is likely to be 1. awesome 2. weird as hell and 3. weird in the most awesome way possible. witness yanagihara's first novel, The People in the Trees, a jaw-dropping masterpiece of weirdness, daring, and writerly self-assurance. (gabe habash too seems to be quite undaunted by The First Novel; he goes all out on the weird).
the cover is gorgeous, but has nothing to do with anything. as it should. (just so you know: no large feline appears in this novel and the novel is not set in the everglades).
the closest i can come to box this book is in "coming of age," but heck, this is some coming of age. the most conventional coming-of-age feature of the book is the love story, but that too is, if not exactly weird, then complex and intense and adult.
this is writerly fireworks, a fabulous journey into the mind and adventures of an unpleasant character (by the end i wanted to be stephen's personal savior), a deep gaze into the heartbreak of teenage masculinity, a hard look at madness, and a major kick-ass vindication of all the mad paranoid obsessed people who find mad paranoid obsessive ways to keep themselves afloat.
also, if you are looking for a story, yeah, there is a hell of a story. (this is for you, simon)...more
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