Review: What My Bones Know, by Stephanie Foo

 

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma, by Stephanie Foo. Memoir. Published 2022 by Ballantine Books.

What My Bones Know came highly recommended from several sources, mostly people in the writing community concerned with writing memoir and reading memoirs about trauma and survival. It's a really great book.

Stephanie Foo grew up in California in a highly dysfunctional family and discovered that her myriad of symptoms and difficulties added up to a diagnosis of Complex PTSD; having reached that point, she started on the search for treatment options. This book documents that search, with memoir weaving through a narrative about what C-PTSD is, what's out there, and how she found a path to healing. Her background is in journalism and she puts her investigative skills to good use to create a compelling, moving story.

She does her weaving so seamlessly you barely notice as a reader; her journey and the way she expands beyond herself to talk about the larger issues around stigma, suffering and ultimately getting better are really one and the same. Foo is a skilled writer and charismatic too- honest and raw and real. I never felt like she was trying to portray herself in any particular way more than just tell her story, with all of her conflicts and confusion on display, her vulnerability and her successes, too. 

The book succeeds on all these levels and Foo creates a really satisfying and page-turning story about some pretty dark topics and times in her life. I think what pulled me along was the sense of optimism she has the whole time, the way she communicates to the reader that every step is a step forward. She celebrates the victories and treats the setbacks as just another bump on the road- but she's still on that road. I think anyone recovering from trauma or interested in the topic will find something good here, and memoir fans will appreciate her story which is both unique and universal.

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review.

 

Review: The Night Flowers, by Sara Herchenroether

 

The Night Flowers, by Sara Herchenroether. Fiction, Crime Fiction. Tin House, 2023.

Tin House is one of my favorite small presses; I almost always love anything of theirs I read. They are one of my go-tos for thoughtful, interesting fiction and The Night Flowers did not disappoint.

Laura MacDonald is a breast cancer survivor and librarian who is also an amateur genealogist; she uses her skills to help her patrons, and to further her own interest in true crime.  As the book opens she's just endured a grueling surgery and health crisis. She's also come upon a murder based in New Mexico; a young woman found dead with two children. In New Mexico, Detective Jean Martinez is working the cold case desk and trying to find the identity of the three dead people after more than twenty years. Laura travels to New Mexico and approaches Jean with what she's found. After a period of hesitation, the two women work together to identify the killer and bring him to justice.

As volume-ones in crime series go, The Night Flowers is a fun, interesting, well-structured read. It's character driven, which makes sense, because we're just getting to know these people- it's like their origin story, or the origin story of their partnership. The setting of New Mexico is vivid and immediate; I could feel the hot sand in my hair. Herchenroether also develops the victims' personalities through intermittent chapters that deepen the suspense and give them a voice. In other words crime fiction is littered with dead women, and while this book is no exception to that trope, it's nice that the author gives them some depth.

The book sort of reminded me of A Bad Day for Sorry, a crime novel I read a long time ago about women seeking justice for other women. I liked how Herchenroether mixed Laura's cancer story, Jean's marriage dynamic, the DNA pieces, and the backstory of the community where all this takes place alongside the victim's detailed story. I found the chapters in the victim's voice to be an interesting break from the traditional narrative. And I hope to see more books with Jean and Laura solving cold cases in the desert.

FTC Disclosure: I received an advance copy from Tin House though no review was promised.

Review: The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron

 

The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. Tarcher, 1992. Nonfiction.

So I've known about The Artist's Way for a long time; it's a perennial bestseller on creativity and getting over or through creative blocks. I had a copy on my shelf for years. I picked it up at one of the bookstores I worked at and it just kind of sat there. I thought about reading it but  when I opened it up it quickly became clear that rather than your average craft book, full of advice and maybe a handful of prompts, this book is a course you do, not just a thing you read.

I was totally intimidated by the rules, the 3 pages of daily journal-writing, the tasks. The multitude of tasks. At least I was, until I needed to get unblocked vis-a-vis my own creativity earlier this year, and a trusted acquaintance suggested it to me. (Okay it was my therapist.) 

So I started to dig in. I was probably four weeks into it (so roughly in chapter two) before I got started on my own writing. And I haven't been able to stop since. The idea is that you do one chapter a week but the first chapter took me about 3 weeks between this and that.  Life gets in the way; just keep at it. Once I got going I got into a rhythm. Daily pages were no problem; I'm used to keeping a diary and honestly I liked "having" to do them. The tasks were also no big deal. They are basically little journal prompts and I used them as warm-ups before I worked on my own writing.

I kind of love this book and feel a lot of gratitude towards it. Some of the activities are a little dated (who does magazine collages? who even has magazines?) but I swear by its effectiveness. I finished weeks ago and still do daily pages religiously. It's my new "me time" in the morning. It's great. And I have more ideas than I know what to do with and more energy than I ever thought I would have.

This isn't a book to read; it's a book to use, and for me it was really helpful. I love all the positive self-talk, the affirmations, the opportunities for introspection. I just really enjoyed the whole process and recommend it heartily. If you're thinking about it, go get it.

 

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive a copy for review.

Review: Before My Actual Heart Breaks, by Tish Delaney

 

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Before My Actual Heart Breaks, by Tish Delaney. Fiction. Random House, 2021. 

Set in Northern Ireland in the latter years of the Troubles, Before My Actual Heart Breaks tells the story of Mary Johns née Rattigan, a woman we meet as a young girl beginning to dream about what life has to offer. Her dreams are cut short and Mary spends precious time alienated and resentful, watching her life take place in front of her, wondering how it will all turn out in the end. By the time she realizes what life has actually given her, it may be too late.

Before My Actual Heart Breaks is a story about family, growing up, and how to make a life when the life you wanted is snatched away and what is left may or may not be what you want. It's about taking joy in the everyday and the power of love to redeem our darkest hours and deepest disappointments. I wasn't sure where it was going at first but the book took some turns I didn't expect and I found it almost compulsively readable once it got going. It's moving and bittersweet, laced with genuine suspense and action, despite being mostly character-driven. The place and time are also vividly rendered- the countryside of Northern Ireland, the impact of the Troubles on everyday people, the details of everyday farm life at the time

I really enjoyed this book and would strongly recommend it to readers interested in the obvious topics but also to anyone who would enjoy a detailed and moving character study of a woman as she moves from girlhood to womanhood, and watching the ebbs and flows of an ordinary life. I won't forget it any time soon.

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review.

Review: Draft No. 4, by John McPhee

 

Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, by John McPhee. Essays. 2018, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

If you are interested in writing, particularly nonfiction, I think Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, by John McPhee, is probably essential reading.

It's divided into chapters by stage, more or less; he covers structure, revision, other things. Along the way he mixed in quite a bit of memoir of time spent writing for The New Yorker alongside legendary editor William Shawn. One of the most entertaining chapters covers fact-checking and the dogged professionals who do the meticulous work of checking his work. The most useful for me, from a craft perspective, was the chapter on structure; it had me drawing pictures in my notebook of the way my own writing might unfold.

I took my time reading it a bit at a time in between other things. I don't read craft books all at once. I have lots of page numbers scribbled at the end, things to refer back to, lines I liked, and a fair bit of underlining here and there. Not too much- I don't underline everything. But there are some gems. Sometimes he veers off into tangents, this or that story, background on something he wrote, an adventure somewhere, but it's all there to illustrate his points about effective writing.

It's definitely a book I'll keep in my library. I don't get rid of books on writing anymore; when I started writing again earlier this year I had to go replace a few that I'd discarded when I thought I wouldn't write again. Having Natalie Goldberg staring down at me from a shelf when I hadn't written anything in years was more than I could take. Draft No. 4 was the first book I read when I started writing again and it won't be the last, but it will the first to be added to my permanent collection.

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review.

Review: Tasting History, by Max Miller with Ann Volkwein

 

Tasting History, by Max Miller with Ann Volkwein. Published 2023 by S&S. Cooking.

Do you watch the YouTube channel Tasting History? You really should, because it's awesome. A couple of times per week,  host Max Miller cooks up some dish or other from the past. Could be anything. He peppers his demo with historical background and stories; it's super fun and Max is adorable.

He's been running the channel since 2020 and now he has his first cookbook. The book sorts recipes geographically rather than the more traditional way, by course, and that's fun. Most if not all of the recipes appeared on the channel and the book includes some helpful information about sourcing some of the more specialized ingredients and elements. There's a lot to enjoy here.

My husband wanted to dive right in when the book arrived shortly after its publication date and he made the gingerbread recipe.

Not traditional a traditional or modern gingerbread cookie, this is really ginger bread, made with stale bread crumbs and a lot of honey. The finished product is more like a weird candy or unusual dessert, best eaten bite-sized as the flavor is really strong and sweet. 

Glancing over the book, most of the recipes are pretty approachable but I would definitely read ahead of time if you plan to make something and keep an open mind about the results.

I can't wait to make more recipes from this unusual and delightful cookbook.

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review. I purchased it from Bookshop.org.

Review: How America Changed Yiddish, and How Yiddish Changed America, by Ilan Stavans

 

How Yiddish Changed America, and How America Changed Yiddish,  edited by Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert. Restless Books, 2020. Nonfiction.

If you are at all interested in the history of the Yiddish language this book is required reading.

We begin with the language as it originated in Europe- its origins and components, and then how it traveled to the Americas with the waves of immigrants and spread across the continents. The book covers its evolutions and uses in media, theater, literature and everyday life, including the ways it's still growing and changing. The book also covers the various efforts to document, preserve and standardize the language and literature in the modern era. Readers will learn about playwrights, musicians, actors, activists, labor movements, writers, linguists, book collectors, preservationists and ordinary people who keep the language alive. Communities from Brooklyn to Havana to Argentina get covered. It's really just chock full of information.

The book is full of excerpts from various works to illustrate the history, growth and ongoing power of the language and the culture around it. I read the book on audio and I would recommend you do it in print unless you must do books in audio (which is fine, it's still reading) only because it's basically an anthology peppered with narration and exposition, and the excerpts, which are plentiful and fascinating, would probably work better in print for most readers. But if you're an audio person knock yourself out.

I'm planning to buy a print copy for my own library and I really recommend it highly to anyone interested in the subject at all.

 

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive a copy of this book for review.

Review: Ariel Samson: Freelance Rabbi, by MaNishtana

 

Ariel Samson: Freelance Rabbi by MaNishtana. Published 2018 by Multikosheral Press NYC. Fiction.

Ariel Samson: Freelance Rabbi is a novel by and about a Black Orthodox Jewish rabbi living in Brooklyn, and it is pretty great.

It's set in the Midwood and Flatbush neighborhoods of Brooklyn as well as around Manhattan. So it's a very New York book. As the book opens Ariel has, though a series of circumstances, come to be the rabbi of a small and dilapidated shul, and he navigates and negotiates the community it attracts alongside his own complicated social and romantic life.

I enjoyed the heck out of this book. The narrator, who is not Ariel but someone else, is funny and fierce and unique. I don't think I've encountered its like before but the novel is not exclusively voice-driven. It works on a number of levels with richly drawn characters, a vivid setting and enough plot to keep us going especially as the book rounds the corner into its final quarter. I enjoyed how well he brings us into Ariel's world, how immersive the book is and how easy it is to find one's way around as a reader. He does a great job of dramatizing the back-and-forth inside of Ariel as well as all the drama swelling around him. And there is a lot of drama.

I also liked how the author balances action and drama with introspection. And I want to know more about the narrator, who seems to be a bystander of some kind. Maybe I missed it but I don't think we ever find out their identity. It's not a third-person omniscient; this person has an identity and a role to play in the story. Maybe we'll learn more in a sequel or in something else by MaNishtana in the future.

I'd recommend it to just about anyone. Go order it from Bookshop and read it please.

 

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review.

Review: Milk Fed, by Melissa Broder

 

Milk Fed, by Melissa Broder. Published 2021 by Scribner. Fiction.

I'm a big fan of Melissa Broder and her books tend to be of a type, so if you like one you will like the others. The others are The Pisces, a 2019 novel about a woman who falls in love with a merman, and So Sad Today, her 2016 collection of essays.

Milk Fed is about a young woman living in Los Angeles, Rachel, who is hungry. She is hungry for food; she counts every calorie, obsesses over every bite, every morsel of food. She is hungry for love as well, and for a time she can satisfy both hungers with Miriam, a young woman who works in a frozen yogurt shop. Rachel becomes passionately attached to Miriam who is both very religious and possibly very straight. Or maybe not. But anyway things don't really go well here.

Milk Fed is a lot messier than The Pisces, emotionally and viscerally messy in a way that might be a little much for some readers. Rachel is not totally likeable in the sense of being virtuous but I do think she is very real and relatable if exaggerated maybe. She projects her own desires onto Miriam the zaftig gourmand, but she is expelled from her paradise eventually and must deal with her own issues sooner or later.

I loved this book like I do all of Broder's books, for that mess, that realness, that raw portrayal of female passion. The book has a lot of graphic sexual content that may not be for all readers.  I read this a while back, not long after it came out, during the period of time when I wasn't blogging and it was one of the books that made me want to return so I could talk to you about it. (I got a galley somewhere, maybe at work.) I recommend it to readers of Lisa Taddeo, Kristin Arnett, Ottessa Moshfegh and Alissa Nutting especially. Worth a look if you're up for something different.

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review.

Review: Jersey Breaks, by Robert Pinsky

 

Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet, by Robert Pinsky. Published 2022 by W.W. Norton & Company. Memoir.

For those of you who don't know Robert Pinsky he is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and taught at Harvard and Wellesley, among other places. I sort of got to know about him in the 1990s and 2000s as a public figure around Cambridge, Mass. And now I live in New Jersey so it's fun to read about his life here and get a sense of history.

He grew up in New Jersey in a colorful, diverse community and the book covers his life in non-chronological form, mostly about his growth as a writer and poet and his career in academia. I actually forgot that he taught at Wellesley at one point (where I went to college) so it was fun to rediscover that and hear about the community of writers in and around Cambridge in the 1970s-1990s or so. 

The book is a relatively quick read; I was reading two chapters a night but after about the middle of the book I slowed down because I was enjoying his voice so much. It feels like he is chatting to you. He is such a good writer and the book is immersive and pulls the reader along with its current. I felt like I got a good sense of the things pushing and pulling him in different directions, his influences both literary and familial. His personal life takes a back seat here at least after his childhood, which he narrates vividly.

Over all it was a really satisfying read and I could even see re-reading it at some point which I seldom if ever do with nonfiction. It does also make me want to seek out his poetry. Highly recommended.

Review: Vernon Subutex, by Virginie Despentes

 

Vernon Subutex, by Virginie Despentes. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne. FSG Originals, 2019.

Vernon Subutex is the first of a trilogy about a French guy named Vernon who has lost his job and his apartment and is sort of bumming around Paris couch surfing with a colorful cast of friends and lovers, former and current. It reads like a series of character sketches and interlinked short stories. It's blunt, raw and full of explicit language and characters that run the gamut of French society, at least on the margins.

I started reading this in the fall and put it down for a while when I got a copy of Abraham Verghese's new book. That was a chunkster and it took me a while and in the meantime I kind of forgot about Vernon. I picked him up again a few weeks ago and I found that diving back into this world was pretty effortless. I chalk that up to the format; each chapter more or less focuses on a different character so it's a little like watching a TV series where you get a brief recap at the beginning of each episode.

I really enjoyed the heck out of this book and I definitely plan to read the sequels. I don't have a ton to say about it besides that. Despentes is a terrific writer; the characters are varied and very well drawn and it moves along at a good clip. I recommend it for readers interested in contemporary French life and life outside the main streets and tourist destinations. She doesn't shy away from showing some very ugly facets of life and some unlikeable characters but the overall experience for me was so enjoyable and fun.

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review.

Review: A Girl's Story, by Annie Ernaux

 

A Girl's Story, by Annie Ernaux. Seven Stories Press, 2020. Translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer.

A Girl's Story is a memoir about Ernaux's late teen years including her first sexual experience and its fallout. It's a dense and moving piece, made more so by the device of telling her story as though it's happening to someone else, as if the "girl of '58" is someone else. Ernaux refers to this self as "her" and "she" rarely breaking into the first person except to narrate her own efforts to tell the story of her younger self. The effect of this is profound alienation.

I found myself underlining so many passages. The last page of my copy is a list of page numbers. At the beginning she talks about what is was like for her when it was over, this romance:

"Everything you do is for the Master you have secretly chosen for yourself. But as you work to improve your self-worth, imperceptibly, inexorably, you leave him behind. You realize where folly has taken you, and never want to see him again. You swear to forget the whole thing and speak of it to no one."

But this is impossible as evinced by the existence of this book. "Both these periods of time are at once lived and imagined." An important line for the memoirist.

I loved this book deeply. I want to find a French copy so I can re-read it and get the quotes I liked in the original, not that I'm sure the translator hasn't done a wonderful job but still. Since I can read it in the original I really want to. I have so much to say about this but I don't feel like this is the right place for those thoughts though they may end up somewhere else.

Anyway another fine entry in Ernaux's piecemeal autofictional series.

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review.

Review: Normal People, by Sally Rooney

Normal People, by Sally Rooney. Hogarth/PRH (2019).

I waited kind of a long time to read Normal People, but not before watching the Hulu series that I think came on in early 2020. Anyway that's when I watched it, my second pandemic Sunday-night series, something to watch while my husband had his D&D game. I didn't really like the show though I did (hate)watch the whole thing. So much angst! I loved the book though and in the end I think it was one of the actors that ruined the show for me. Rooney's writing, her attention to detail and carefully wrought insights into her characters, are what make the book so special.

Normal People is about the romantic relationship between two Irish young people, Connell and Marianne, in 2010s Ireland. It's set between their hometown of Carricklea and Dublin where the two attend Trinity College. I lived in Dublin in 1995 and anyone who knows me knows the country is dear to my heart. I typically say "I love Ireland so much it hurts" and reading a novel set there in a recognizable era is a treat. One of my many passages I underlined in the book:

Dublin is extraordinarily beautiful to [Marianne] in wet weather, the way grey stone darkens to black, and rain moves over the grass and whispers on slick roof tiles. Raincoats glistening in the undersea color of street lamps. Rain silver as loose change in the glare of traffic.

Brings me right back. 

Anyway. 

Connell and Marianne start sleeping together in secondary school. Connell is a cool kid, a footballer, and Marianne is a social outcast, a wealthy girl in a working class town and a nerd to boot. Connell's mother works as a cleaner in Marianne's house, if the social dynamic were not otherwise clear. Connell keeps his relationship with her a secret; Marianne knows this and accepts it, thinks it's what she deserves. When they both wind up at Trinity their dynamic is reversed; Marianne finds that her social class and intelligence allow her to fit right in while Connell struggles for his footing. Neither wants to be open about their relationship, past or present.

They continue to circle around each other, sometimes together and sometimes with other people and Rooney seamlessly and skillfully alternates their points of view as they grow up and work out what it means to be healthy, what it means to be normal, and what it means to be in love. Is it dating- hanging out with someone because they tick a box, are cool, acceptable, cute and fun? Or maybe it's something else, something beyond logic and common sense, an invisible tether that runs between you and another, something that binds you to them, maybe forever.

Rooney goes to some dark places seeking answers to these questions and others in this insightful, challenging book that readers might find triggering for any number of reasons. I did. Some readers will simply not care about these two and their issues and that's fine too. Even though there were no big surprises (the adaptation is very faithful to the book) I really loved the book and will return to those underlined passages every now and then.

Review: The Colony, by Audrey Magee

 

The Colony, by Audrey Magee. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (2022). Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.

The Colony is a taut, beautiful novel set on a fictional Irish island in the 1970s, at the height of the Troubles, about an isolated community of Irish-language speakers and their interactions with two outsiders- a French linguist named Jean-Pierre Masson, determined to preserve the Irish language and make a name for himself in academia, and an English artist named Mr. Lloyd, determined to revitalize his own career as a painter.

A distinguishing feature of the book is the way Magee alters the tone and style of the narration depending on who is the focus of any given scene; when we're focused on Mr. Lloyd, Magee uses staccato sentences that almost read as poetry. With Masson, we are treated to an almost stream of consciousness style. The two men come to conflict over two characters- young James, a budding artist, and his mother, Mairead, both Lloyd's model and Masson's lover. And they conflict over the subject of Lloyd's contamination of both the language and the lifestyle of the island. James wants to leave, go to London and pursue painting but he is under great pressure to stay and embrace a more traditional lifestyle.

Magee intersperses the narration and the shifting viewpoints with accounts of sectarian violence taking place during the time. I found this both alienating and grounding. It took me off of the island and into the country's larger problems but it also helped to orient me and remind me of what was at stake for the characters. Both Masson and Lloyd have their own issues and baggage related to colonialism and occupation, and neither man is neutral or entirely self-aware. 

I enjoyed the book very much and would recommend it to readers of literary fiction generally and especially of course to those interested in Ireland. If you've seen the film "The Banshees of Inisherin," this is less melodramatic but I felt like the characters were just as complex and the perspective it had on the sectarian conflict a little less metaphorical if you will.

Definitely check it out if anything here ticks a box for you!

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review. I purchased it at Nantucket Bookworks on Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Review: The Tale of Princess Kaguya: Picture Book, by Isao Takahata

 

The Tale of Princess Kaguya: Picture Book, by Isao Takahata, published 2022 by VIZ Media.

A lovely picture-book adaptation of the 2013 Studio Ghibli film, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, this volume brings the movie to the palm of your hand and allows you to experience or share this moving and complex story in a simplified version appropriate for young children.

Princess Kaguya is a being who comes to Earth from the Moon to experience the joys and sorrows of human life. She is raised by a bamboo cutter and his wife; the bamboo cutter has his own ideas about what her life will be like and she struggles to make sense of it all.

It features beautiful artwork from the film and enough story to get by on;  I actually couldn't think of much that the book left out from the 2-hour-plus movie and yet I was able to easily finish the book in one sitting. 

The story comes from a 10th century Japanese story called The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. I like how Takahata's retelling places the emphasis on the princess and touches on contemporary themes like a woman's place in society and the cost of social stratification alongside the traditional touches.  It's all very low key compared to the movie and the sexual themes are also downplayed in picture book version somewhat.

This would make a lovely gift for a child or for yourself if you are a fan of the movie. You should play the soundtrack in the background as you read for something like a fuller experience.

Review: Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction, by Ilan Stavans

Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction, by Ilan Stavans. Published 2021 by Oxford University Press.

This is a book that does what it says on the label. It provides a very short introduction to Jewish literature. The book, pocket sized and clocking in at about 116 pages of text, is broken up into chapters covering various areas of Jewish fiction and nonfiction, more or less chronologically starting with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Stavans is a professor at Amherst and a scholar with deep knowledge of his subject; I encountered this book as a part of a course I'm taking with him on early Jewish literature but this book covers pretty much everything. (He also wrote the book I've been listening to for a while, How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, which goes into much much more depth on Yiddish literature.)

His voice is engaging and while the book feels like a big checklist, it's never dull or dry. He provides pencil sketches of the lives and works of everyone from Fernando de Rojas through Susan Sontag and I found myself taking notes for things to check out or look for and even though I am not new to the subject I still learned quite a bit. I was particularly drawn to the chapters on translation and criticism as these were not things I expected to read about and found them very interest-piqueing.

The only issue I had is that I felt like there could have been an entire chapter devoted to Russian writers. But maybe you need a whole book for that subject and there are Russians sprinkled throughout in particular in the chapter on people who wrote in Yiddish.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone interested in the subject and I think even if you already know a lot, Stavans provides a pretty broad and wide-ranging panorama and you'll probably find something new and interesting to investigate in your own reading.  It has definitely earned a permanent place on my reference shelf.

Review: The Promise, by Damon Galgut

 

The Promise, by Damon Galgut. Published 2021 by Europa Editions. Winner of the 2021 Booker prize.

I've been a fan of Damon Galgut's for a while; a look at my "Reviews by Author" tab will yield at least one review. I read In a Strange Room and Arctic Summer and admired them both. I picked up The Promise as soon as it came out and was delighted when it won the Booker Prize for 2021.

Here he tells the story of the Swart family- mother Rachel, father Manie and their children Astrid, Anton and Amor. The book opens with Rachel's funeral and a promise she made to Salome, the family's maid for years, to give Salome the family's home. It's made in a very casual Howards End fashion, verbally and with no legal weight, just the weight of intention. Will the promise ever be fulfilled, and will it even matter?

Tragedy befalls two of the Swart children and by the end only one is left standing and it will be up to that person to decide the first question, and up to history to decide the second.

I enjoyed the book. It is dark, and there's not much light at the end. Galgut writes the book with a mix of emphasis on voice and plot. For a book that often felt moody and meandering a lot happens. Perspectives shift quickly and time moves around in funny ways. Each chapter is ostensibly devoted to a different character but it really comes back to Amor and Anton and their rocky and hard-to-pin-down connection. 

When I think on it after a few days, I think I found the premise unconvincing and arbitrary, and the fact that we never see Rachel and Salome's relationship happen in real time makes it seem that much more remote. We get a better sense of Amor's connection with Salome but that comes towards the end so we have to take a lot on faith. The book opens with Rachel's death and everyone is so distracted by Rachel's retrenchment into her Jewish faith that her promise to Salome is treated as something beneath their notice. And Rachel's wishes are treated with a mixture of contempt and bewilderment on the whole so this one is no different.

That siad, it's a book I'd definitely recommend to the literary fiction reader. It's tough and merciless at times and hopelessly heartbreaking at others. Galgut deserved his prize.

I did not receive this book for review.

Review: Tampa, by Alissa Nutting

Tampa, by Alissa Nutting. Published 2014 by Ecco.

Tampa was my last read of 2022 and sits well alongside my first, Julia May Jonas's Vladimir. Both are bonkers books narrated by highly unreliable women with basically no concept of their own extreme myopia when it comes to their lives and behavior. Tampa's Celeste is a mid-20s middle school teacher married to a police officer. She is sexually obsessed with boys in their early teens; 16 seems to be her upper limit but she likes her lovers to come in just under that. Her marriage is basically a sham as she plots and calculates and grooms her next boyfriend, cherry-picked right from homeroom.

She is pretty revolting, objectively speaking, and even subjectively; Nutting doesn't do much to make her charismatic, or particularly smart, or nice, or anything else that might complicate the situation. That's fine. I don't need my heroines to be nice. What she is, is very single-minded to the point and past it, of obsession. Her appeal to the boys basically comes down to her hotness. When she begins an affair with Jack, a student in her class, he fantasizes about marriage while she wonders how she's going to dump him when he ages out in a year or so. Then Jack's father takes an interest in the hottie helping his son with his homework, and events veer straight off into the absurd.

Which is where they needed to go because otherwise we'd be in Melodrama Country and nobody wants that. This book is wild ride into the ridiculous, like if Lolita was a comedy and instead of being emo Humbert was a little more direct about his sexual appetites. (I wonder if what happens to Jack's father is a callout to Dolores's poor mother.) We get to know a lot about Celeste's prodigious appetites.

Celeste never really loses her solipsism, even as she ends up so far off track you wonder if she'll ever make it back. I think the book is a raging success, not the least of which because Nutting's writing is so good and convincing and even if you hate Celeste and what she's doing you'll still want to see how it turns out. She doesn't come away unscathed and there is an interesting question or two raised about the nature and meaningfulness of consent and agency. But it's not too deep. 

Tampa is a great one for the beach bag; I bought my copy, the only one I found in stock after looking for it in several bookstores, in a resort town bookstore where the bookseller was a huge fan. I'm a huge fan of Nutting's ever since Made for Love, her subsequent book (Tampa was her first novel) and Tampa certainly cemented that. With the right twists in your sense of humor you might be too.

I did not receive this book for review.

Jewish Book Month: LGBTQ Rep

 

Milk Fed, by Melissa Broder. 2021, Scribner.

Milk Fed is the second novel by Melissa Broder, late of The Pisces and the essay collection So Sad Today. It is about a young woman named Rachel, a lesbian with eating disorders and a bad relationship with her mother, who falls for Miriam, a young Orthodox woman who relishes her food but can't quite return Rachel's sexual appetites.

I loved this book the way I loved Broder's other books, for its extreme candor when it comes to women and bodies and sex and this time, food. Rachel meets Miriam at a frozen yogurt bar and is immediately smitten both with Miriam's creativity and relaxed attitude towards food and with her sensual body. Being with Miriam is feast for Rachel, but Miriam hesitates when it comes to fully engaging with Rachel sexually.

The book is raw and explicit when it comes to both Rachel's emotions and her physical and sexual hungers. If you've read Melissa Broder before you know what to expect. I found it to be a moving and intense love story, about the two women and about Rachel's struggle to find balance and acceptance in all areas of her life.

Review: People Who Eat Darkness, by Richard Lloyd Parry

People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo- and the Evil that Swallowed Her Up, by Richard Lloyd Parry. 2012. Farrar Straus and Giroux.

Lucie Blackman was a young Englishwoman in her early 20s when she and a friend decided to travel and work in Japan to have fun and earn some money. They each took a job in a "hostess club," where young women chatted up and entertained (mostly) Japanese men and thereby encouraged them to buy expensive drinks. Part of their job also involved going on dates (dōhan) with the club's customers, to encourage further visits and patronage of the bar. Then one day Lucie disappeared. 

When Lucie's story starts, it's so ordinary. Parry describes her normal family, predictable path through school and early career, regular friends and boyfriends. Going abroad should have been just another fun chapter in her life- not something everyone does, but not that unusual. I went to Ireland for a summer after college, not to pay off debts but just to travel, have an adventure, get away from home and be independent for the first time. Lucie had traveled as an airline hostess but this was her first time living in another country and everything should have been fairly straightforward. And it was, until she crossed paths with a predator.

When Lucie disappeared, her family sprang into action to find her. What follows is frustrating and drawn out, made more complicated by a slow-lurching Japanese justice system along with other factors. Parry describes the action in page-turning terms and he brings everyone to life on the page, from Lucie to her father to the alleged killer. I really wanted to see how this story would turn out even when it felt like disappointment was looming.

As true crime goes it's gripping and intense and filled with detail about the Japanese police, court system and hostess bar scene. I felt like I learned a lot. There's a lot of weird stuff that happens, but Parry's writing is immersive and will keep you reading well into the night. I've had this book on my radar for a long time and enjoyed it, insofar as you can enjoy a story like this.