"10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World" by Elif Shafak

Author Elif Shafak constructs a highly unorthodox frame for her narrative in 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. She starts off with the death of her heroine Tequila Leila, and how she can still notice and remember things for several minutes as she lies dead, newly murdered, in a dumpster. We follow newly-dead Leila along as she recalls things from her life; it revolved around a motley group of her devoted friends and would-be lovers. Through this device Shafak hones in brilliantly on the injustice, prejudice, greed, and inhumanity with which middle class and devout society deals with its outcasts. Powerful, creative, and compassionate, this book was short-listed for the 2019 Booker. No surprise there.

Tequila Leila was born Leyla, the daughter of a devout Muslim tailor in Van, in eastern Turkey. An uncle begins molesting her when she’s six years old, and this continues for a decade. In this cruel and unjust episode, Shafak shows the family using the very true-to-life strategy of blaming the poor girl so as to shield the uncle and the family from shame. She refuses the punishment of a face-saving marriage and runs away to Istanbul. Of course immediately on arriving in the big city, she’s sold into prostitution.

Four of her devoted friends are women, and none of them come from conventional backgrounds, either. There is the four foot-tall dogsbody at the brothel where Leila works; the over-the-hill cabaret singer whose voice and looks are gone; the frail, wasting-away Ethiopian whore; and the strapping six-foot-two trans woman who  provides a modernist, secular foil to all the backwater Islamic superstitions in which characters bathe and into which readers dip their toes.

With this squad, the author provides a cross section of oppressed women on the fringe of Turkish society. She instructs open-minded readers with the strongest and best tool in existence: clear, effective fiction. The interplay of these characters, and the one soon-to-be-ruined man who had been friends with Tequila Leila, after her death, forms the tragicomedy that makes up the last quarter of the book. There’s a wonderful suspense-filled sequence in which her friends rescue Leila from her (almost) unmarked grave and race across the Bosphorus Bridge ahead of the pursuing police just as the sun comes up from the Asia side.

Replete with topical social and political themes, full of vivid and well-rounded characters, deeply informed about human nature, both in individuals and in mobs, dosed with humor, and built on a highly diverting and unorthodox narrative apparatus, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is a rewarding, memorable read. I marvel at it and recommend it unreservedly. 

Read more »

"the book of form and emptiness," by ruth ozeki

Ruth Ozeki shows once again the Buddhist path to happiness in The Book of Form and Emptiness. As in 2013’s touching and memorable (and short-listed for the Booker) A Tale for the Time Being, Buddhist principles make a powerful appearance and form an influential background voice, deeper even than the voices heard by Form and Emptiness’s hero Benny. Our compassionate author offers to take us, her Kindergarten class, to a portal where The Way is apparent, in all its enigmatic glory and deceptive simplicity. It is the path on which young Benny takes his first confused, halting steps. Do yourself the everlasting service of picking this brilliant book up.

Benny’s father, Kenji, is fatally injured when run over by a delivery truck. Benny, a fourteen year-old at the time, and his mother Annabelle, must make a way for themselves in the world, bereft of the beloved and outgoing husband and father. Unfortunately, they enter a downward spiral, which forms the tense energy of the book.

Annabelle falls into a depression when she cannot keep up with the demands of her job; their duplex, in an unnamed West Coast city (but resembling San Francisco) becomes impassibly clogged with the trash bags containing her work-related archives. Benny begins to show schizoaffective symptoms: objects begin to speak to him—unhappy disused pots and pans, an angry pair of scissors, his scruffy second-hand shoes.

We focus on Benny’s halting and harrowing journey. He doesn’t trust the mental health system and doesn’t tell his doctor the truth. His doctor, in turn, launches Benny on an evolving cocktail of psychoactive drugs, which only makes his path murkier. Help shows up in the form of the Aleph, an alluring, substance-abusing girl a few years older than Benny. She’s allied with the “B-man,” a one-legged, homeless older Slavic gentleman whose real name is Slavoj.

In their way, the pair try to care for Benny and guide him, in spite of how difficult he makes it. Along the way Benny’s mental state deteriorates, in large part because of his medications. He’s injured on more than one occasion, spends nights away from home, ditches school for weeks at a stretch and participates in a riot in the wake of the 2016 election. While objects become central to Benny’s life and consciousness, his mother’s lethargy and depression causes her life and home to become inundated by them. She hangs on to Kenji’s worn flannel shirts because she plans a memorial quilt; she doesn’t throw anything out. And her job generates countless trash bags full of paper files, floppy drives, CDs, and DVDs. She feels no ability to cope with the growing clutter that chokes her home and her life. She even looks to buy more knick-knacks to try to feel better.

And here we come to one of story’s main thrusts: in spite of the highly diverting profusion of things in our lives, and the seeming demands they make on us, we are in fact, each an integral part of a universe full of atoms, some of which have somehow helped us achieve consciousness. We’re just complex creatures precipitating out of stars’ life cycles. The things that speak to Benny—cranky file prongs and amiable rubber ducks, dismayed shards of glass and angry baseball bats—somehow show that human fabrication is no less a process of this universe, as much as the economic and social structures would like us to treat them separately.

Benny is the obvious protagonist throughout, but on reflection, I admit the centrality of Annabelle, too. Both lives become dismayingly cluttered (albeit with different things), and both psyches strain under pressure. Annabelle finds a book (or rather, the book finds her) on the Zen practice of un-cluttering her home, and this becomes a reflection of her recovery. Benny receives help from two very different new friends, and learns that maybe he’s not so mad after all.

I’m not sure what Slavoj Žižek is doing in the story, except providing Benny with some broad guidance in interpreting what he sees and hears. The Slovene poet and philosopher studied among other things, the Real, which in philosophical terms means the actual and authentic, the unchanging and eternal. The nature and epistemological implications of the Real force themselves into Benny’s consciousness forcefully, front and center. As a follower and interpreter of Lacan, Žižek would be directly on point as a current thinker and psychologist to bring in to this story. Further than these basic observations, I can’t go without more study. It’s an alluring feature of this book, with its plethora of alluring features.

Ozeki has many ambitions for The Book of Form and Emptiness. One obvious priority lies in the area of Buddhist teaching, where one finds enlightenment on discovering their true nature as inhabitants of an incomprehensible universe, consonant and consistent with it, and that one is also a universe unto oneself. She pulls another of her theses from the psychology of unorthodox states. Her character Benny hears voices not only of  objects, but voices also flow freely in the air, untethered to things. She acknowledges what she calls the pioneering work of Drs. Marius Romme and Sandra Escher, “for their experience-focused, non-pathological approach to perplexing states and unshared experience.” She includes web addresses for two organizations which deal explicitly with the experience of hearing voices.

And she wraps all this up in a vivid, wrenching story of loss and recovery and coming of age. It’s full to the brim with compassion, full of surprises, gratifying to the end. Ruth Ozeki ranks in the very vanguard of current novelists.

 

Read more »

"Matrix," by Lauren Groff

Matrix is the quasi biography of Marie, an illegitimate millstone around the neck of Eleanor of Aquitaine, living in the second half of the twelfth century. Marie is too tall, raw-boned and unappealing to be married off and consigned to obscurity, so when she is 17, Eleanor banishes her instead to a nunnery. She is thus sent from the comfort and gaiety of the French court to the boggy and foggy island of Britain. In Lauren Groff’s hands, Marie’s journey promptly gratifies the reader’s expectations of Marie’s mettle, and then grows to include her magisterial and deft stewardship of the abbey. And beyond these rewards, we are treated to Marie’s mystic side, in which she sees rapturous visions which guide her earthly agenda and impress the nuns in her care of her saintly nature.

I do wonder whether Groff set out to propound the life of a saint, but it doesn’t matter. The life she provides us is, in the most straightforward way, that of a woman of vast abilities and an indomitable will. She carves out for herself and her “daughters”—the nuns in her care—an island of safety and devotion in a very hostile and suspicious world. She guides her charges through treacherous times; she takes over an impoverished abbey and guides it through the “interesting times” of Richard the Lionheart versus his royal brother John, all the while building its holdings—a labyrinth confounds outsiders who would broach the defenses—and it becomes the leading abbey in terms of wealth and prestige on the entire British island.

Groff endows her heroine with impressive political savvy and resourcefulness—this is my favorite feature of the character and the novel. This shrewdness serves her well with her ongoing jousts with the outside world, particularly with her monarch and former close associate, Empress Eleanor. Marie also must call upon her wits when dealing with the sometimes rebellious nuns serving under her. The author handles these episodes with a deft touch, showing the abbess’s intelligence and indomitability in shining, gratifying form.

So this is a book portraying a petit monarch, a woman who decides to build an impregnable fortress-like settlement for herself as much as for English nuns. Groff shows her further assurance (as though any were necessary) as a novelist of the very first rank. Unreservedly: take it up!

 

Read more »

"Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari teaches in the History Department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Presumably he teaches history, but it seems equally likely that he instructs in anthropology or logic. In Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind, he demonstrates his mastery of these disciplines, in addition to history. Sapiens contains a brief review of such human constructs as civilization, the power of the human imagination to make the human way of life possible, nay, inevitable, and the rampant, often incorrect assumptions people make about modern life.

We lead off with the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years ago,  roughly during a time when our African forebears shared the planet with other beings of the genus Homo, like Homo erectus in eastern Asia, Homo soloensis on Java, and on the island of Flores, in the same area of the world, Homo floresiensis, a dwarf human which evolved independently. This doesn’t count Homo neandertalensis of Europe, Homo denisova of Siberia, and yet two more of African origin, Homo rudolfensis and Homo ergaster.

About 70,000 years ago, after developing new ways of thinking, and in particular, communicating, troops of anatomically modern humans marched out of Africa into the Arabian Peninsula. In a remarkably short time they—we—occupied all of Eurasia, and by 30,000 years ago, Australia. Following the Cognitive Revolution was the Agricultural Revolution, occurring about 10,000 years ago.

The ability to domesticate plants and animals led to such innovations as the stratified society, in which ruling elites organized and controlled planting, harvesting, and storing agricultural surpluses, and dictated the lives of non-elite people. A good portion this section recounts the function of such convenient falsehoods as money, religion, and empire, and how they made the Scientific Revolution (ca. 1500 CE) possible.

This book is one large dose of perspective. In plain, convincing fashion, Harari lays out in broad brush strokes the trends and influences which have brought us to where we are today. The book is an excellent encapsulation of humanity’s past in that it reminds us of how briefly we’ve been around the planet, and how we came to dominate it. It  ends with a brief but unsettling section of speculation on the race’s future.

As an example of its kind, Sapiens is focused, direct, and convincing. It also has Harari’s clear perspective on past and current trends, so it is well-recommended.

 

 
 

Read more »

"A Room Made of Leaves" by Kate Grenville

 

In A Room Made of Leaves, the splendid Kate Grenville takes the scanty historical materials covering the settlement of Sydney to build a narrative of Elizabeth Macarthur, settler and early wool entrepreneur in New South Wales. In 1790, Mrs. Macarthur, wife of Captain John Macarthur of the New South Wales Corps, was the first wife of a British soldier to arrive in Sydney. It’s well-established that her husband was at the least a prideful and disputatious man, and made things difficult for himself and all around him, including, of course, his wife.

Every marriage has its own emotional tenor and nuances, and Grenville supplies these for the Macarthurs brilliantly. Balancing what we know of the captain’s character against the undeniable achievements of his wife, this author-supplied shading feels inevitable, spot-on. Other unknowable particulars, such as Elizabeth’s marriage prospects or the couple’s courtship, we gladly leave to Grenville’s highly capable imagination. Suffice it to say these treatments are every bit up to Grenville’s mastery, proving once again why she is among the first rank of novelists today.

These particulars are a matter of public record, but as is so often the case, the public record leaves a great deal to be desired—and corrected. I’ll start by citing some of the bare background. Elizabeth Macarthur managed the first and most exemplar wool station in Australia. Her husband made two journeys to England, each of these under either arrest or a cloud of suspicion, and his absences totaled 13 years between 1801 and 1817. During that time, Elizabeth bred and developed the fine wool-producing sheep that eventually led to Australia’s first-in-the-world wool industry that thrives to this day.

A Room Made of Leaves has its flights of poetry, however; this is no dry tome. The established fact of Elizabeth’s ability as an amateur astronomer and botanist was celebrated in  1920s newspaper accounts. Grenville reaches a level of poetry in treating her ongoing studies with Lt. Dawes, the first Royal Astronomer of Australia. The author bestows her soaring language on Elizabeth’s quest for knowledge as she braves the novelty of the observatory’s remote location and the difficulties of reaching it (pp. 195-196):

Each step revealed a new marvel: a view through the bushes of a slice of harbour rough and blue like lapis, a tree with bark of such a smooth pink fleshiness that you could expect it to be warm, an overhang of rock with a fraying underside, soft as cake, that glowed yellow. The wind brought with it the salt of the ocean and the strange spicy astrigency given off by the shrubs and flowers. There was an almost frightening breadth and depth and height to the place, alive with openness and the wild energy of breeze and trees and the crying gulls and the brilliant water. Alone, a speck of human in a place big enough to swallow me, I looked about with eyes that seemed open for the first time. … It was not a long track, but it was a journey into another landscape, another climate, another country.”

Such are the treats we expect and welcome from Kate Grenville. She has produced a fine, nuanced, and fully fictionalized version (which from me is the highest praise possible) of a historical person. In the process she honors one of Australia’s most important and influential pioneers, one who feels the guilt at the treatment of the Aboriginals—and who admits her own complicity in it—but one who bravely raised her children and her ran agricultural holdings in the face of steep odds. With this memorable book, Grenville does her bit to redress the prejudice against women’s accomplishments and gives us a vivid personal retelling of a unique moment in history.

Read more »

"Restoration" by Rose Tremain

The marvelous Rose Tremain renders a highly memorable protagonist—one hesitates to call him a hero—in her 1989 novel Restoration. Sir Robert Merivel, who receives his title during the narrative, is too lustful, too tipsy, and too gluttonous to be an example of virtue, particularly in Restoration England, where our story is set. Charles II takes the throne Parliament restores to its king, the country tired of, as the author says in her Afterword, “… [keeping] their thoughts obediently turned to a Protestant God who commanded civic duty, modesty, hard work and self-sacrifice.” Tremain renders Restoration London, with every trend, every thought, every fashion, and every favor emanating from the Monarch, in such delicious detail, that you will be swept up.

Under Charles, Britain rushes to embrace the new mania for personal gain and all things shallow and showy. Robert Merivel reflects this mania, and in fact, seeks to be an exemplar of his time. You could say, without fear of contradiction, that he accomplishes this. I would dare to say that his reverses do nothing to alter our opinion—he’s still an exactly typical man of court. We meet him while he’s studying anatomy at Cambridge. This discipline he falls out of in short order: his father is glove maker to the King, and he brings Robert and introduces him to His Majesty. Robert is overwhelmed in the Royal presence, physically ill and unable to stand and present himself appropriately. Thus does Charles’s presence affect him through the entire book.

By her own account, Tremain wrote Restoration during the 1980s as an indictment of Thatcher’s greedy and preening England. It feels even more timely today, a mirror to modern Western consumerism and income inequality run amok. It remains on point, it exhibits Tremain’s unflagging skill in evoking a time and place, and focuses its first-person energy on a highly entertaining, and at times even sympathetic, character.
 

 

Read more »

"The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien

 

Near the outset of Flann O’Brien’s wild The Third Policeman, the unnamed first-person narrator and his business partner Divney settle on a plot to murder Mathers and steal his fortune, purportedly kept in a steel cashbox. In short order the deed is done (by our narrator), after which the narrative takes a turn, plunging us into the confusing, the confoundingly funny, and the downright weird. Fortunately, O’Brien plays with our minds and our language is a most diverting way, and I found myself laughing while I worried for our hero, almost certain to die.

I can do no better than quote a few passages, to give you the flavor of the book: on an outing with a police Sergeant, the narrator and a man named Gilhaney search for Gilhaney’s stolen bicycle (Chap. 6):

We were now going through a country full of fine enduring trees where it was always five o’clock in the afternoon. It was a soft corner of the world, free from inquisitions and disputations and very soothing and sleepening on the mind. There was no animal there that was bigger than a man’s thumb and no noise superior to that which the Sergeant was making with his nose, an unusual brand of music like wind in the chimney. ”

Chapter 6 again:

Before we had time to listen carefully to what he was after saying he was half-way down the road with his forked coat sailing behind him on the sustenance of the wind he was raising by reason of his headlong acceleration.

‘A droll man,’ I ventured.

‘A constituent man,’ said the Sergeant, ‘largely instrumental but volubly fervous.”

 

Such are the locutions of our characters, but I have not spent any words on the outré buildings, oddball, unexplained plot events, and existential threat which our narrator in turn faces. I have also not mentioned the cockeyed life, work, and honored reputation of the writer, experimentalist, and philosopher de Selby, about whose work our narrator is something of a scholar. Discussions, asides and lengthy footnotes leaven the early chapters, and make their highly comic appearance throughout. I have no idea what the author means with this addition, except to double our fun.

This novel will amuse and bemuse you, and you will wonder a few times, what is the point? There is definitely a point, dear readers, and well worth sticking around through the 19th-century horror passages for. This novel is a classic of its type: dark, atmospheric, and laugh-out-loud funny. 

Read more »

"The Living Sea of Waking Dreams" by Richard Flanagan

 

In The Living Sea of Waking Dreams author Richard Flanagan tells the story of Anna, an  architect working in Sydney, but born and raised in Tasmania. As Anna approaches her sixtieth year, her mother begins to fail, and Flanagan plays out this  family drama against a 21st-Century backdrop of apocalyptic environmental disasters. Society’s resulting unspooling reflects that of Mother Earth’s suffering ecosphere, and all this serves as backdrop as Anna and her two brothers hash out what to do about their own mother. The brilliant Flanagan not only poignantly shows human weakness in the face of loss, he manages to skewer our modern grasping mania for material wealth at the same time. It’s a daring, balanced, bravura performance.

Anna and her second brother gang up on the ineffectual older brother to overrule him and dictate the care their mother will receive. The results are ghastly for poor Francie, the mother, who must endure months and months of progressively more agonizing treatment until she can no longer express herself: she’s unable to repeat her pleas to be let go. Just when descriptions of the mother during her hospital stay become unbearable for the reader, they get worse. Just as Anna’s own perceptions of herself becomes shaky and maybe unreliable, we find ourselves instructed to believe them; this pitches the story into fantastical realms, which ratchets the tension further.

Does all this sound unappealing? Does it sound depressing? It might, depending on your preferences. But: Flanagan’s construct and treatment will reward you with his keen eye for modern greed and arrogance, both personal and societal; the dynamics of present-day privilege, based as it is on balance sheets personal and financial; the utter disregard for Earth’s natural and human resources; a family’s callous treatment of its one member free of mental instability; and a professional woman’s harrowing journey to life-threatening illness.

Almost too many themes to recount: a heritage of family strife, deriving at least in part from a priest’s pedophilia; a natural environment reduced to smoke and ash, which Flanagan uses to confound everyone’s sight and breathing; the injustice resulting in grasping and wielding the power inhering to wealth; the distracting and counterproductive effect of social media; a close-up journey with a woman losing her senses. The myopic attention to these themes is so close and the telling so unrelenting that we are startled by the late appearance of a party from outside, a party who introduces a hopeful element whether we deserve it or not. But that’s the beauty of Flanagan’s work here. He reminds us to keep our perspective on the larger picture and to nurture hope in it.

Stick with this one. It’s distressing, dismaying, and at times deeply pessimistic, but it’s Flanagan. I need not say more.

Read more »

"Count Four," Poems by Kieth Kopka

Count Four arrives as Kieth Kopka’s debut poetry collection; it contains some 32 pieces informed by working class struggles, and populated by the denizens of working class backwaters. Kopka turns a felicitous phrase on occasion, but overall this collection reads like flash fiction written in verse form. In seedy or shady or poverty-stricken circumstances, his characters strive to rise above the lots they have been handed; mostly there are no answers here, only disturbing questions.

Kopka does flash his torch on some very arresting juxtapositions: John Wayne the movie hero with John Wayne the cancer victim; stolen clothing piled high enough on a bed to reach a crucifix on a wall; Henry Ford and square dancing; accidentally running over a squirrel in the road and a faulty parking meter robbing the poet of time. These stark comparisons indicate if not a hopelessness, a  nagging doubt in the value of effort.

I found some truly memorable, and sometimes admirable, imagery here. In “Cold Pastoral” Kopka brings into the same short poem: a speaker combining the re-enactment of a Civil War battle and a desire to fix the landscape by driving a Zamboni machine. In “Monument” the poet’s character has been arrested for suspicion of arson and is beaten by a “chubby rookie” cop: “my compliant frame / absorbing each swing / of his nightstick, / until finally I, too, / start to take shape.”

In “Homecoming,” the speaker’s cousin Danny comes home for a family dinner wearing a blond wig and asking to be called Danielle. The first person narrator takes over doing the dishes and tosses Danielle a dish rag, inviting her to kitchen duty: “I lace my fingers into hers, and we plunge / them into the clogged basin, together pushing / through whatever remnants are left.”

Kopka truly has a poetic sensibility, especially a knack for yoking startlingly disparate elements into the service of a single clear message. There is a power here, certainly, however much one might wish for a more exalted diction.

 

 


 

Read more »

"Maison Cristina" by Eugene K. Garber

 

In Maison Cristina we encounter Peter Naughton, an old man whose son has committed him to the care of Catholic nuns in a New Orleans facility for mental patients. Author Eugene K. Garber shows off his protagonist’s learning throughout the book. He’s a  teller of stories, a knower of arcane facts, an inveterate user and weaver of words. The nuns at the Maison enlist his help in treating a haunted young woman who has been scarred into silence. This is quirky, memorable, and affecting work.

Garber does not concern himself with clinical details as Naughton and the young woman, Charlene, become cured, or at least rehabilitated to the point of release. He spends his energy instead on twirling two spookily related narratives, the one with which Naughton regales the young patient, and the story of Naughton himself. As the novel progresses, these tales become intertwined, until at length, readers realize they have become one and the same. The quotation marks fall away; the character telling the story merges with the author. It’s an interesting effect, the author managing to bring greater immediacy to Naughton’s searching, yearning life, and his compelling stories.

I found the episodes describing his unstable family disturbing—they kept me at a distance. Clearly these are meant to ground Naughton’s own instability in the believable. For me, they felt diffuse and confusing. If Naughton is still hallucinating about dead or absent people, why is he being released from the hospital? The intermittent appearances of his personal demon is more of the same, in my view.

Naughton the character is the best thing in the book. Quite intelligent, supremely well-read, he acts with charity towards his fellow patients and unstinting deference towards the nuns charged with his care. Conversations with his therapist Sister Claire, and with Mother Martha, the director, unfold with kindliness and crackle with sagacity when dealing with recondite issues of language, mental health, and morals.

At length, these are what Maison Cristina is about. Don’t approach this book expecting logic when dealing with therapy or any dependable rendition of familial relations. If you seek startling images, elevated learning and language, and deep respect and affection between learned, well-meaning people, you will find these convincingly rendered, even instructive.

 

 

Read more »