Wednesday, June 27, 2018

The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)

A southern girl corresponds with God and with her sister, a missionary in Africa.

Book Review: The Color Purple is a classic, and deservedly so. It's a subtle and deceptively simple books that covers a surprisingly broad range of issues and ideas: race, women, religion, colonialism, and then combines them: "the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know." Wonderfully and intelligently written, Alice Walker's brilliantly animated characters refuse to be victims, they persevere, they overcome ... somehow. Despite the horrific acts, the abuse and betrayal, the heartbreak, the anger and misery, the core of this book is kindness and love. Even in the midst of the worst, Walker still sees the possibility of redemption, forgiveness, and reunion. There is so much wisdom in The Color Purple, so many brilliant lines: "that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if cut a tree, my arm would bleed." Walker combines experience with a deep insight into human nature. I couldn't read this slowly enough to appreciate all that I read. There may be some books that are mandatory re-reads. I'm not sure why it took me so long to read The Color Purple, but I'm very glad that I did. I think Alice Walker must be as sweet as sweet tea.  [4½★]

Monday, June 25, 2018

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante (20

The conclusion (Book 4) of the story of Lina and Elena.

Book Review: The Story of the Lost Child is subtitled Maturity, Old Age. The culmination of the four books. In each book, something new strikes me about the depths of these novels. How political they are, for one thing. Also, none of Ferrante's narrative is wasted. Every scene has meaning for some later moment. Incidents in the earlier books reach fruition in The Story of the Lost Child. Events from the past always recur; actions in childhood become reactions in adulthood. The differences in the childhoods of the various characters later lead to their political and social views, such as whether they're fascist or communist and their attitudes towards the treatment of women and the proper response to such treatment. The immense detail of these novels shows the importance of the elements of women's lives, as equal to that of men's lives. Ferrante's novels make me think of names such as Proust, Tolstoy, Trollope. The Story of the Lost Child, like the other novels, is an easy and quick read, but always many-layered with writing that is powerful and magical. The ending of this book, and the series, was just the ending it had to be, coming full circle with the first pages of the first novel. But as Ferrante has said, this is really a single 1700 page novel. What is revealed is the staggering complexity of the bond ("friendship" is too weak a word) between Elena and Lina, and the impressive complexity of the four volumes of the novel. She has also said that she loved most writing the first and fourth novels, and it shows as the beginning and end, the alpha and omega of the story, complete the circle. I think Elena Ferrante is the brilliant friend.  [5★]

Friday, June 22, 2018

Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton (2011)

Comics for readers, lit and history majors, and generally bright and educated people, all sorts.

Book Review: Hark! A Vagrant is for those who are both well-read in the classics and willing to laugh at their favorites. The very first strip, eviscerating the Bronte sisters, will tell if this book for you. The invaluable Kate Beaton is that rarest and best of all possible humans, a polymath with a vicious sense of humor. The comics range wide over literature, history, pop music, super heroes, contemporary culture, and classical music. Even Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes. Be prepared: Hark! A Vagrant can be humbling when you find blanks in your learning that you didn't know were there. There were bits I missed. But there's also an upside: Googling Wolfe and Montcalm I repaired some gaps in my Canadian history. There's even an index! Beaton has a unique and galloping sense of humor that I began to treasure the more I read. What kind of mind comes up with a Dracula joke about turnips? Hark! A Vagrant is a perfect gift for that widely-read or over-educated person in your life. Or even better, yourself. Count me a fan.  [4½★]

Monday, June 11, 2018

"The Rememberer" by Aimee Bender (1997)


A woman's lover, Ben, a sad, thoughtful man, begins to devolve, "experiencing reverse evolution," becoming regressively an ape, a sea turtle, a salamander.

Story Review: "The Rememberer" (link at end of review -- pls feel free to read and come back) is a very short story that seeks to open up the world, to provoke thoughts, ideas, wonder. Bender makes little effort to direct our understanding of the story, encourages free ranging thoughts about it. Ben says, "We're all getting too smart ... there's too much thought and not enough heart ... we think far too much." It's true, humans were never meant to be this smart, no animal was meant to have so much effect on the world. We have created weapons that can make the world uninhabitable, we pollute the entire planet, we destroy ourselves even as we wipe out other species. The narrator goes to a college to consult an "old biology teacher," but science is not the answer, science has no answers, providing just an inaccurate mess. We are not the crown of creation, but have "become death, the destroyer of worlds." Perhaps one answer to the sorrow this future causes, is to go a different direction, become less human, to defect from the breed of destruction. But this devolution is also suicide (is this all a parable about sadness and suicide -- perhaps, but probably not). As Ben becomes progressively less human, he is less Ben, less the being that the narrator has a connection to, until she has to just let him go (hmmm, back to the suicide parable ... ?). Although we are a horribly destructive race, with no end of massive crimes against humanity and the planet, it is also, unredeemable as we are, who we are and all we've got.  [5★]

https://www.youtube.com/redirect?v=QSk6MfEtywU&event=video_description&redir_token=2DCWs6p1xU6Lvo4Z1EUvEINF_DV8MTUyNDQyOTMxOUAxNTI0MzQyOTE5&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.missourireview.com%2Farticle%2Fthe-rememberer%2F

Friday, June 8, 2018

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston (2018)

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston talks with the last American slave brought from Africa.

Book Review: Barracoon, subtitled The Story of the Last "Black Cargo," couldn't find a publisher almost 90 years ago when Zora Neale Hurston completed it, her first book. Finally rescued from an archive at Howard University, the now-published manuscript is horrific, disturbing, and profoundly sad, but also a testimony of almost inhuman strength and resilience by Oluale Kossola, a man who is all too human, becomes all too real. The name given him in the United States was Cudjo Lewis.

The manuscript of Barracoon was difficult to sell as Kossola's tale revealed that he had been sold by black Dahomians to white slavers. Alice Walker notes, "One understands immediately the problem many black people, years ago, especially black intellectuals and political leaders, had with it. It resolutely records the atrocities African peoples inflicted on each other, long before shackled Africans, traumatized, ill, disoriented, starved, arrived on ships as "black cargo" in the hellish West."  As Hurston (known for being politically incorrect) says in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road: "The white people had held my people in slavery here in America. They had bought us, it is true, and exploited us. But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me." Problematic at the time was that Kossola reported that when brought to the Southern United States the Africans were mistreated and abused by native-born slaves. Another difficulty was that it was written in dialect, which Hurston refused to change. I'm always suspicious of the use of dialect as it can feel demeaning or condescending, but Hurston was an anthropologist and believed it her scientific duty to preserve Kossola's speech. His language actually became hypnotic, absorbing my mind and my thinking. For the curious, a "barracoon" is a type of structure built on African coast to hold future slaves until enough are gathered to fill a ship for transport to the Americas. How horrible to have such a word.

But the birth of Barracoon is not the strength and heart of this account of a life. That is the voice of Kossola, his humanity, vitality, and personality searing through his words into the reader's mind. Hurston devotes five pages in Dust Tracks on a Road to her interviews with Kossola. She notes he was "a cheerful, poetical old gentleman in his late nineties, who could tell a good story." He married his wife, Seely, and they had six children, but all predeceased him, leaving him alone. He still equally missed his family in Africa. "I lonely for my folks. They don't know. Maybe they ask everybody go there where Kossola. I know they hunt for me."  Huston concludes her pages with: "After seventy-five years, he still had that tragic sense of loss. That yearning for blood and cultural ties. That sense of mutilation." Barracoon is a difficult but necessary book. What is revealed is the life story of a person, a human being, which makes all the more challenging, impossible actually, the belief in the right to enslave a human being.  [5★]

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith (2007)

Girls and boys and boys and girls.

Book Review: Girl Meets Boy is Ali Smith on a frolic having all the fun she wants to have. In fact, I think she enjoyed writing it a wee bit more than I absorbed reading it. It was entertaining, charming, fun to read, no complaints. Come on, there's suffragettes and gender bending! Her writing is wonderful as always. But I should acknowledge that not being learned (so few of us read Latin these days) I haven't read Ovid's Metamorphoses (which allegedly inspired Girl Meets Boy) -- and naturally I'm of the school that Ovid is best read in the original. My knowledge ends at Wiki. But my main regret is that as much as I was entertained while reading, just a few weeks later I retained very little. A quick and fun read, but for me at least, not a life-changing book. I take all the blame. On the other hand, Ali Smith is always good, Girl Meets Boy is quite short, reading it was a romp, and a re-read may well be in my future.  [3★]

Monday, June 4, 2018

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (2009)

Struggling Houston lawyer Jay Porter stumbles across corporate greed and political tricks in 1981.

Book Review: Black Water Rising may've been disappointing because of the hype. I'd heard such good things that my expectations might have been unreasonably high. I loved the premise, the social commentary was good, the characters were fine, but the plot was slow and the mystery not too mysterious. I had little trouble putting the book down, which is a bad sign when reading suspense. This is the first novel in Attica Locke's "Jay Porter" series, so a certain amount of table setting is expected, but there was waaaay too much back story and angsty flashbacks. Cleverly setting the novel in 1981, pre-cell phones and Google, Locke opens up the possible story lines, but it also led to some factual and historical blemishes. A fine read, no real problems, but Black Water Rising didn't make the next volume in the series (Pleasantville) irresistible.  [3★]

Friday, June 1, 2018

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante (2013)

The third volume in the story of two women connected at some profound level by fate, karma, the stars ... .

Book Review: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay covers "Middle Time" in our saga. I've never used the word "monumental" in a review, but it's certainly coming to mind now. The third book in a tetralogy (another word I've never used) serves a certain purpose and this book delivered. Many doors were opened, few doors were closed. The final 33 pages were an effort to cause me a nervous breakdown and ended on a cliffhanger (not literally). I felt I was watching a film and yelling "Don't go into the basement!" How to deal with intelligent people doing stupid things? The characters begin to take on a life of their own, the unexpected occurs regularly, and just how Italian these books are finally struck me. Of course, there's a certain universality because of Ferrante's microscopic observations and precise descriptions, but Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is also very, very Italian, culturally unique. Here the educated Elena finally discovers feminism (a subtext in the previous books): "The solitude of women's minds is regrettable." She begins to form her own thoughts and beliefs on issues confronting women. But it's not enough. After making a new (male) friend, Elena's husband says: "Finally a person it's worthwhile spending time with." Heartbreaking. Despite how good it is, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is a conduit, a bridge from the first two volumes to the last. As that it works well -- now I can't wait to read The Story of the Lost Child.  [4½★]