Recently in Non-African novels and stories Category

I think part of me is a sucker for any book by Gallimard... the distinctive style and quality just makes you feel more intelligent.  And a commonplace: If you read it on an airplane while others people are reading either Kindles or trashy airport stuff, you feel like the complete college-educated snob that you really are! 

A Wikipedia contributor sums up the novel in one sentence: "It is the story of an Arab girl whose life is full of adventures. A brothel in Morocco, a Spanish slum, Parisian Bohemian life, and at last a trip to America, where she fulfills her dream of becoming a jazz singer."  That last part- about her having a dream, is not true really. And a relevant part of the story is that the girl is really more African than Arab.  I guess I should correct Wikipedia?

Overall the book was disappointing.  It is a novel intended I think for the teen reader from developing countries: the style is very straightforward, it is a "real" picaresque tale in that the narrator just keeps moving from place and situation to another, and things are always happening to her by chance... but it is real (=grim) in that the good things are all small good things (she finds a sympathetic friend; she learns she can sing and loves music) while the bad things are pretty bad (she fritters away her chance to be successful at music because she does not... what exactly?; she gets raped; she is abducted as a child...).  It is all really sad, but really true. 

Unfortunately for an adult reader like me, I could not invest emotionally in her life story... Le Clézio (deliberately?) makes her not very deep in her reflections about her situation (she makes the same mistakes, she doesn't reflect that she is making mistakes, she has no penetrating insight into the character of her friends).  I suppose at some level is it exactly what he set out to do- an account of an ordinary life that is extraordinary for his reader, because his typical reader is so privileged that the poverty and desperation the characters are in seems extraordinary.  But of course the situations described are very common and ordinary. 

So what to make of the whole thing? I honestly don't know my overall assessment... none of the real lyricism of other Le Clézio novels, nor of my current crop of favorites (Beppe Fenoglio and Alan Garner) and none of the hard-driving devilish clever sci-fi storytelling of my other current favorites (China Miéville, Vernor Vinge, Ted Chiang). 

It's like a food that is good for me... but the chewing and the swallowing leaves no taste or aftertaste.   I did enjoy reading the French though, because in truth the level is exactly my level.  I mean, it was wonderful to be immersed completely and not once come across a realization of my limitations as a French reader.

My favorite place in the world when I was a kid was the library. Our village library in upstate New York was the best of all. As my mother will attest, I could spend hours in there wandering about, collected a ridiculously large stack of books that no one thought I could read until three days later I demanded to go back to the library because I'd finished all of my books already.

When I was in preschool, I stayed with my grandparents a few days a week because they lived closer to my school, and it made everyone's life easier. My grandma used to pick me up around lunchtime, while my grandpa was still at work and we had "Grandma-Krystle" time. Since I was only like three or four at the time, I remember very little from those days. Except mozzarella grilled cheese sandwiches cut into four triangles and going to the library with her to check out those little Beatrix Potter books. I loved reading them over and over to my grandparents and then taking them home and forcing my little sister to let me read them to her. So I came across this on the "Letters of Note" website, and it brought me back to the good old days of visiting the library and reading about Peter Rabbit.

Apparently, the story started out as a letter to her friend's child and later she went back and expanded the story for her book. It's funny how that kind of stuff sticks with you more than 20 years later. If FAVL libraries have that long-lasting impact on just a few kids, I think it means we've done our job.

Here's the transcript of the letter from the website. Check out the actual website because they show the original letter with drawings. It's very cute!

Eastwood
Dunkeld
Sep 4th 93

My dear Noel,

I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were - Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter.

They lived with their mother in a sand bank under the root of a big fir tree.

"Now my dears," said old Mrs Bunny "you may go into the field or down the lane, but don't go into Mr McGregor's garden."

Flopsy, Mopsy & Cottontail, who were good little rabbits went down the lane to gather blackberries, but Peter, who was very naughty ran straight away to Mr McGregor's garden and squeezed underneath the gate.

First he ate some lettuce, and some broad beans, then some radishes, and then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley; but round the end of a cucumber frame whom should he meet but Mr McGregor!

Mr McGregor was planting out young cabbages but he jumped up & ran after Peter waving a rake & calling out "Stop thief"!

Peter was most dreadfully frightened & rushed all over the garden, for he had forgotten the way back to the gate. He lost one of his shoes among the cabbages and the other shoe amongst the potatoes. After losing them he ran on four legs & went faster, so that I think he would have got away altogether, if he had not unfortunately run into a gooseberry net and got caught fast by the large buttons on his jacket. It was a blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new.

Mr McGregor came up with a basket which he intended to pop on the top of Peter, but Peter wriggled out just in time, leaving his jacket behind, and this time he found the gate, slipped underneath and ran home safely.

Mr McGregor hung up the little jacket & shoes for a scarecrow, to frighten the blackbirds.

Peter was ill during the evening, in consequence of overeating himself. His mother put him to bed and gave him a dose of camomile tea, but Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.

I am coming back to London next Thursday, so I hope I shall see you soon, and the new baby.

I remain, dear Noel, yours affectionately

Beatrix Potter

I sort of wonder that I had never heard of Eleanor Farjeon, but I found a remarkable book of hers (Kings and Queens, a first edition from 1932 for $2!) and so I started reading about her.  Her sensibility = mine.  I wish she were alive today.  BTW, she wrote the poem "Morning has broken" that Cat Stevens made famous.  And also a children's book called Cats Sleep Anywhere... could it get better than that?

From "The Little Bookroom":

Steven Millhauser, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, has received the Story Prize a $20,000 award for his collection "We Others."  My daughter and I greatly enjoyed Cynthia Ozick's reading of "In the Reign of Harad IV"

If you like cerebral science fiction, very thoughtful, then Ted Chiang's stories and novellas are for you.

Stories of Your Life is a collection of eight stories from 1990-2001 that comes with a little note at the end meant to "inspire" the reader to learn more.  Very earnest.  I really liked the ideas... but it was like listening to college roommates discuss philosophical ideas.... each story was (as the notes make clear) a philosophical idea that they got turned into a story.  So the writing isn't fluid, and feels forced.  Not like Chiang's story "Exhalation" (of 2009) that I thought was really nicely written. 

The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which I finished over the last two days, is much better.  But not quite Kazuo Ishiguro-quality.  The novella is very reminiscent of Never Let Me Go, the difference being that Ishiguro is such a great writer that he can take the point of view of the clones, while Chiang is still not quite ready for that challenge (which he did rather well in Exhalation) and so he does the safer thing, narrating from the viewpoint of the "creator".  But the novella is wonderful reading nevertheless, and Chiang does a remarkably economical job of conveying personality, character change, and a realistic and likely world of the future (i.e. about 25 years ahead).  It is the genre of Pinocchio stories (AI, Hal-2000, etc.) and I would love to teach a freshman seminar someday reflecting on this genre... what makes us human, after all?

I am looking forward to reading more from Chiang... I mean, I'm waiting for Vonnegut's future dog to deliver more stories, because I don't remember Chiang's future stories yet.

My colleague Michelle Burnham teaches a course with this book, so I decided to read it... and was quite impressed.  The prose is very straightforward and clear, little subtlety there, but the clarity focuses attention on the back and forth device of Cecelia reflecting on her life as she sits in a jail cell over the weekend, shifting from her childhood to the present...

It's a nice novel about identity, sometimes a little earnest, but the character of Cecelia is never really that sympathetic, so there is a tension between the earnestness and knowing that the person may not actually be someone you would like... she makes a lot of bad choices, for complex reasons. 

So in some sense there is not a lot of judgment going on; and Hale avoids easy solutions, although the contrived ending was the equivalent of a novelist's easy way out... I wish she had stayed true to the novel's tone.




A nice review of the authors work and life is here, and a summary of the first part of the novel:

In ... The Jailing of Cecelia Capture... Hale's themes were living on welfare, single-motherhood, disrupted families, racism, and identity struggle. The story begins in jail, where Cecelia Capture, a young Native American woman is kept for drunk driving and - as it turns out later - for welfare fraud she committed years ago in order to be able to survive as a young, poor single mother. In her prison cell, Cecelia reminisces about her childhood, with a father constantly drunk and a mother who tries to get rid of her frustration over an unhappy marriage by intimidating and humiliating Cecelia. Trying to escape her mother's tyranny, Cecelia moves to San Francisco, but soon is confronted with another problem when she, still a teenager and without a permanent job or higher education, gets pregnant.

I've started to read some of his stuff and really like it...

Were there any formative experiences that led you to become a science fiction writer?

Probably the most formative experience was reading the Foundation Trilogy when I was about twelve years old. That wasn't the first science fiction I had ever read but it's something that stands out in my memory as having had a big impact on me. Reading Asimov and then Arthur C. Clarke when I was twelve definitely put me on the road to being a science fiction writer.

Read the full interview here.

I can't remember where I read the blurb for this book, but I checked it out of the library and it was truly dark and amazing noir about the hustling (carny's mentalists, seances) of the 1930s and 1940s, as people got richer but were still pretty naive... fun to view it through the prism of Burkina, where I am always shocked by how gullible people are to rather obvious hustles.  Reading this novel, you'll never wonder again what a "geek" means.... a picture emerges from the words that is terrifying, repulsive and compelling at the same time. 

The author, William Lindsay Gresham, led a pretty interesting (volunteered in Spanish Civil War- maybe he knew Durruti?!) but ultimately sad life (suicide in 1962).  Amazing to me that former magician James Randi collaborated with Gresham on a book about Houdini, and he's still alive... somehow the idea that someone is out there who knew Gresham very well is mind-boggling, after reading the novel.  Great prose writer.

One of these days my sister Bridget Kevane is going to read and write about African literature (si, tu) but until then, I really enjoyed this latest by her... the whole piece is here in Tablet Magazine:

"Another jewy piece by that jewish girl/ in the poetry scene who keeps/ being all jewy, talking about being jewish, writing/ about being jewish .../ jew, jew, jew, jew, jew," is the battle cry of Vanessa Hidary, the Hebrew mamita. She is a slam poet known for her curves and for dressing like a Puerto Rican; big hoop earrings, tight jeans, hair pulled tightly back in a glistening high ponytail, great red lipstick, high heels. When I met her in New York at her favorite haunt, Starbucks, I admired her playful nom de plume, Hebrew mamita, for its mix of high-brow and low-brow culture, the former being the ancient language of Israel, the latter being the catcall that most self-respecting Puerto Rican girls cannot live without. (I am from Puerto Rico and know the catcall well: Though we hate being harassed, we also hate not being whistled at. And Jewish men do not whistle at women with curves or at all, for that matter.) Alas, Hidary has not one ounce of Puerto Rican blood in her. Does it matter?

One of the books that most profoundly influenced me in college was something I read, as a junior I think, on my own, a copy of a book I found in a thrift shop: Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves.  The idea of really taking your life into your hands and literally saying goodbye to all that was something that never really had occurred to me as a possibility.  I think I ruminated on that for years, and still find it a tremendous inspiration (whatever the actual details of his life etc.)

I was reminded of this because my kids and I are watching I, Claudius.  Terrible over-acting, but the stories of intrigue are incredibly compelling to the 9-13 year old set. 

And then, I was reading a few comments on Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's "A Brief Encounter with the Enemy" in a recent The New Yorker, and one commenter used the "sad sack" phrase... suddenly I remembered Sad Sack, which I read voraciously as a kid.  My brain made all kids of connections.... stunning!