New Century Reading

They Came Like Swallows

They Came Like Swallows is a book I bought early on in the pandemic, interested in literature from other pandemics. But after reading a couple of other books about pandemics, I lost my taste for it. Christmas Day I found myself the recipient of a new, shiny Kindle, one much improved over my tortoise-paced older Kindle, and for some reason, I was inspired to open this book.

I'm glad I did. Can I recommend it to others? Perhaps only with the caveat that this is not a happy book; it's set in late 1918, and the flu pandemic is beginning to rage, and someone key dies. If you're not up for that, I certainly understand. But if you are, this is a lovely book about mourning, regret, loss, and the interiority of all of it. 

Slight spoiler: 

 

Ready?

 

The mother of a young family succumbs to the flu. We see the lead-up and aftermath of her death through the eyes of both of her sons and her husband. How they feel, how they register what's happening, is filtered through each of their points-of-view. That just increases the heartbreak in terms of how little they understand each other and how everyone is working through what's happened. The unnecessary guilt some feel, the laser-sharp focus on certain things they wish they had done differently--Maxwell details this in clean writing, not melodramatic or sentimental, just describing the way things are.

Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow has long been considered his masterpiece. That's not a book I loved the first time I read it. On rereading this summer with an online group, I developed a deeper appreciation for it. But for me, They Came Like Swallows is the better book, clearer, narrower in scope and ambition, and utterly successful. Your mileage may vary, depending on your love/lack thereof for So Long. 

Winter in Sokcho

This is such an odd, but interesting little book, which also, oddly, appears only to be available by Kindle in the U.S. right now, with a print book scheduled for 2021. I've seen it compared to Convenience Store Woman, which is an apt comparison, but Winter in Sokchu stands on its own. 

It's narrated by a young woman living in Sokcho, a city in the far north of South Korea, so far north that North Korea is a very real presence, a frightening one. A popular tourist spot in summer, Sokcho is fairly dismal in winter, cold and dreary in spite of K-pop blaring from radios and neon lights shining from cafes and stalls. This young woman works in a decrepit guest house that isn't terribly busy in winter. Her boyfriend is going to Seoul to become a model. Her mother is the very definition of dysfunctional, berating her daughter for both eating too much and not enough, and suggesting she go to Seoul herself for plastic surgery.

Then a French graphic novelist arrives. He has a series of books involving a hero traveling to different parts of the world, and he's chosen Sokcho as his next location. As she tries to serve him food and launder his clothes, she becomes interested in his work and slowly becomes conscious of the disparate parts of her life and how they fit together to make her who she is. She acts as tour guide, taking him to various local spots to give him a picture of what Sokcho--and she--really is.

The book is short and spare, with recurring themes--the narrator's mother is a fishmonger and specialist in the art of dissecting blowfish to deliver safe fugu from an otherwise toxic fish. The narrator tries to cook many times, but no one seems to like her work. Another guest at the guest house is a woman who's undergone extensive plastic surgery, from which the narrator watches her slowly recover, eventually unpeeling her bandages.

It's not that a lot happens in this book. It's largely character- and place-driven, but what interesting characters, and what an interesting place. When the author tries to describe Normandy to her in terms of how it was affected by WWII, she isn't having it:

"What I mean is you may have had your wars, I'm sure there are scars on your beaches, but that's all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that's been going on for so long people have stopped believing that it's real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it's all fake, we're on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We're living in limbo. In a winter that never ends."

It's a book that starts slow, then grips the reader as you go on. Glad to have read it.

Case Histories

Apparently I read Case Histories some time ago (and watched the TV series), because I rated it on Goodreads, but I didn't remember a thing about it. Which is fine, because it's a twisty, turny set of mysteries that is more fun to read if you don't know the outcome. This is the first in Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series. Brodie is a jaded former ex-cop/current private investigator whose personal life is in shambles. While he's trying to cope with his wife leaving him for another man, not to mention things in his past that haunt him, Brodie has a number of people reach out to him for help, people who don't appear to be in any way connected: Two women trying to find out what happened to their beloved younger sister, who disappeared as a young child; a grieving father whose daughter was murdered in her workplace, but the murderer was never found; a cranky elderly woman who believes people are stealing the cats she so diligently hoards; and a woman who wants him to find her sister, a woman who murdered her husband and disappeared.

Of course, as in any good mystery, there's much more going on than meets the eye, and back stories and memories are faulty to a large degree. In a couple of the cases, I figured out what was going on, but in the others, the endings caught me quite by surprise, but in a believable way. Atkinson is a fantastic writer--her Life After Life and A God in Ruins are among my favorite books ever. This is one of her earlier books, and the heavy plotting doesn't quite hold up by the end; there are tidy bows being tied up in the last few chapters. But the characters were so well drawn and so interesting, with all their individual flaws, that I didn't care. 

So, on to the next Jackson Brodie book: One Good Turn. I don't think I've read any of the other Brodie books, so I suspect I have some fun times ahead. 

Euphoria

After reading and loving Lily King's Writers & Lovers, I had some like-minded readers tell me they prefer her earlier novel, Euphoria. So I have now read it and can't honestly say if I liked one more than the other--they're entirely different books, with different aims and ambitions. But King is a hell of a writer, I can definitely say.

Euphoria is a fictionalized account of a specific time period in anthropologist Margaret Mead's life and career. I know little about Mead, but it doesn't seem to matter (although the novel did lead me to request a bio of her from the library). The premise is that she, her husband, and another young researcher end up in a bit of a work and love triangle in a remote area in New Guinea. The fictional Mead, Nell, is a renowned researcher married to Fen, a jealous (both professionally and personally) researcher who hasn't got her acclaim, and Andrew, who's just learning the ins and outs of studying people in remote areas. 

It's amazing to me that this book is only 257 pages long. King packs a lot in: The ethics involved in anthropology, societal mores, relationships between Western men and women in the early part of the twentieth century--that's just some of what's going on in this thought-provoking book. 

The one quibble I had is that the bulk of the story is told from Andrew's first-person point-of-view. There are a few places where Nell has the narrative, either through third person or through diary entries. I would have liked to be in her side of the story more. She was a fascinating character, and maybe even more of the diary entries would have been enough. But that's a quibble. Otherwise, this was a great read, and like I said, so very different from Writers & Lovers, and it makes me wonder what King will do next.

The True Deceiver

Oh, man, this book made me think so hard it almost broke my brain. Not because it's a difficult read--it's a deceptively (see what I did there?) simple read. On the surface, it's the story of two women in a small Scandinavian village, very remote, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else's business. Katri Kling is a 20-something living with her younger brother, whom the town regards as "simple." She is fiercely devoted to the truth, and people know better to ask her something they don't really want to know the answer to. But they also know she has a sharp mind and can help them figure out solutions to problems, and while a bit of an outcast, they can trust her.

Anne Aemelin is an older woman who lives alone in an old house far up a hill. Her family had money, and she's earned more by painting highly acclaimed and popular children's books (not unlike author Tove Jansson herself). She's largely content to live alone, but she doesn't have much of a head for business, and her affairs are bit muddled.

Katri wants something that Anne has: Money. So she works out a way to get it, and her plans set into motion a series of events that drastically change both women, leaving them each no longer sure about their place in the community, their sense of trust, their sense of themselves or each other. In the end, it's a book about what constitutes truth and honesty, and who gets to decide? And that's what just about broke my brain.

But I need to read more Jansson. I love everything of hers that I've read. 

Miss Iceland

Hekla wants to be a writer, a poet, in the great Icelandic tradition she's grown up in. But there's a problem. It's 1963, and she's a woman--and this is not a time when the Icelandic literary establishment has much regard for female writers. Hekla leaves her rural farm home for Reykjavik, thinking she might have better luck there. She moves in with an old friend from her small town, Jon, a gay man who moved to the country's capitol city in hope of meeting others like him. Both of them need jobs, and they find them: Hekla as a server in a hotel restaurant where she is harassed and ogled, particularly by a man who's determined to get her to compete in the Miss Iceland pageant, and Jon on fishing boats where the work is horrendous and he is bullied and beaten up for being gay.

Hekla, at least, begins to thrive. She works during the day and writes at night. But a trip to the local library introduces her to a librarian poet, who takes a fancy to her, and soon they're living together. Hekla can't bring herself to tell him she too is a poet and writer, sneaking out to Jon's home to do her writing while the poet is hobnobbing with other (male) poets. Eventually something has to give.

That's the story at the heart of Miss Iceland. The title and cover might lead some to think this is a light, frothy story, but it's anything but. In fact, it's fair to say that it's a fairly sorrowful book, although the author's writing style is so spare that the reader doesn't drown in it. Jon's despair at being gay in a time and place that condemns it is heart-wrenching. He follows the news about Martin Luther King's work in the U.S., saying that if King can succeed in making Black people equal, maybe someday the same will be true for gays.

Hekla wants only to write, and to be taken seriously as a writer. She increasingly realizes that may never happen in her home country. Together, she and Jon figure out a path forward for each of them.

I really loved this book, except the ending was abrupt, and I wasn't entirely clear what it meant. But even saying that, it stayed with me for days, kept me thinking about the ending, wishing I knew more of Hekla's life beyond the book, and finally, I ended up requesting another book by the same author from the library. I suspect I will be looking for more work from her.

The Butterfly Lampshade

I had an unusual experience with this book. I loved her previous novel, The Peculiar Sadness of Lemon Cake. But I struggled with the beginning of this one. It seemed kind of aimless and a bit confusing time-wise. I got to the 50-page point--yes, I'm one of those with a fairly strict 50-page limit--and turned to Goodreads to see what other people who read the whole book had to say. I often do this, looking particularly at 2- and 3-star reviews to see if the things that bother me in the first 50 pages continue to be a problem, and then I can decide whether to continue. Sure enough, those ratings indicated that several readers found these things to be a problem throughout the book.

But I found I couldn't quite give up. I decided just to read a few more pages and see how things went. 

I finished the book in one sitting and gave it 5 stars on Goodreads. 

I can see why some people don't like it. It's a very quiet book. There are plot points, yes, but this is more about character. Most of all, it's about Francie, whose mother's mental health has never been stable (and Francie doesn't know who her father was). But when Francie is young, her mother has a horrendous breakdown. Francie is sent from Portland, OR to live with her aunt and uncle in Los Angeles. In the tumult around this enormous change in her life, some peculiar things happen to Francie.

Now, as an adult, she's still trying to sort through the things that happened, trying to recover memories, trying to make sense of everything--all while always having a subconscious fear of whether or not her mother's mental illness might be hereditary (a fear clearly shared by her aunt). Is Francie doomed to end up like her mother?

That's compelling, right? But really got me was that while Francie obviously experiences terrible trauma, author Bender took the approach of surrounding Francie with people who are flawed, yes, but who love her and want to help her. Her own mother loves her very much and in her better moments, realizes that she can no longer care for a child. Her aunt, uncle, and younger cousin make her part of the family, giving her a stability she had never had. 

Maybe it's the pandemic, or the nasty aftermath of the US election, but that kindness and love just won me over. It's never sappy or sentimental. Bender is good about reminding us that no person and no family is perfect. But watching this fragile young woman grow up and do the best she can, surrounded by people who are doing the best they can--honestly? I'm choking up right now, just thinking about it. I choked up several times while reading. There are hard things in this book. But there's always kindness. And right now, that's an amazing message of hope. 

One other aspect interested me: Much of the book (told first person POV by Francie) uses a very passive voice. That falls into that category "things generally not recommended these days in the literary world." But I think it works beautifully here, as Francie is someone who has little agency and is someone to whom things happen, out of her control, especially as a child. It's no wonder she'd speak in a passive voice.

Transcendent Kingdom

When I read Yaa Gyasi's debut novel, Homegoing, I thought it was wildly ambitious, but ultimately flawed--too many characters, not enough time with any of them. But I noted in my review that I wanted to read her next book.

And was that ever the right call. Transcendent Kingdom knocked me right out. Instead of tracing many generations of people, Gyasi focuses more closely, taking a first person point-of-view to look at the havoc and harm one family experiences when a teenage boy becomes addicted to opiates and dies a horrible, premature death.

That's the major plot line of Kingdom. For those who like a book with a ton of plot, this may not be the choice. For me, it had enough plot, but what it really had was deep, deep dive into character and philosophy. The narrator, Gifty, is the younger sister of the opiate victim. She's already got a lot on her plate: Her parents came to the US from Ghana, seeking a better life before she was born, but her parents' marriage ended up in trouble, and her father returned to Ghana. Her brother's addiction and death sent her mother into a frightening spiral of depression and hopelessness.

As an adult, Gifty has become a scientist, studying addiction. But emotionally, she's stalled; she can't make friends or manage long-term relationships. And among other things, she reflects largely on her evangelical upbringing and early belief in God. 

It's such a thoughtful book, one that really fleshes out Gifty and her family, that I became very involved and actually choked up a bit at a couple of points--rare for me, who usually needs more visual cues for that to happen. I ended the book feeling like I'd had a privilege in being allowed to read it. 

And yes, I am fully on board for Gyasi's next book.

Between the Acts

Well, I did it. I read all of Woolf's novels in publication order this year, in spite of the pandemic. This final book is a melancholy way to end. As usual, there's some gorgeous writing and a lot of interiority (is that a word? Guess so, Grammarly's not flagging it). I feel like this is in some ways a return to a more traditional novel format, but with touches of the stream of consciousness of The Waves. 

The plot, what there is of it, centers on an English country estate where the creme de la creme of the village arrive to attend a pageant put on by the locals, focused on British history, ancient and modern. Among those watching: Giles and Isa, who are having marital difficulties. The book is told as one long story, no chapters, with scenes of the pageant alternating with the breaks between the acts, as Giles and Isa circle each other and ponder their marriage and lives.

Woolf did not actually finish this book. She had a complete draft, but committed suicide before doing final revisions. It's hard not to wonder what she could have done. I felt the book was somewhat uneven, the pageant scenes way too long. Yet the ending was beautiful and heartfelt, as was much of the writing:

"How am I burdened with what they drew from the earth; memories; possessions. This is the burden that the past laid on me, last little donkey in the long caravanserai crossing the desert. ... That was the burden, she mused, laid on me in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must remember; what we would forget."

The book is set in 1939, but Woolf worked on it up until her death in 1941. There are traces of hopelessness, and hints to the worsening political situation in Europe. That gives the book its melancholy, especially knowing Woolf's personal history. Yet it ends--slightest of spoilers--with a trace of hope, which itself is sad, given that Woolf lost all her hope. 

Uneven though it is, I found myself moved, and want to get an annotated edition. I'm sure I missed a lot of subtext that foot/endnotes would help with. 

 

 

Such a Fun Age

This book. Wow. Knocked me right out. I hate to even try and synopsize it, because I'm not going to do it justice. But I'll try: Affluent influencer Alix (white) needs a nanny, so she hires, part-time, Emira (Black), a nearly-26-year-old woman who's floundering after college and worried about hitting age 26 because she'll be dropped from her parents' health insurance. Emira is all too aware that she's floundering, especially compared to her friends, who are moving up in their careers, earning good money, and--of course--having health insurance. Yet Emira actually loves her job caring for toddler Briar, and grows very close to the little girl.

Late one night, Alix has an emergency and calls Emira for some last-minute sitting. Emira's been at a party with friends, but leaves to help, taking Briar out to the local grocery store, a place Briar loves. Unfortunately, shoppers and the store manager assume something is wrong with a young Black woman dressed for partying walking around a grocery store with a young white child late at night. Emira is able to call Alix' husband, who comes and rescues her.

But that's just the beginning. As much as Emira just wants to forget that night, and as much as Alix wants to overcompensate for it, neither can quite escape it in ways they can't foresee.

Yes, this is about social injustice and how a Black woman will be more quickly vilified than a white woman. But that's not all it is. It's about class, but it's also about looking beyond class, or looking into class roots. It's about women and friendship, and how Black women can be similar in their friendships to white women, but also about how they differ. It's about parenting and judging parents from the outside.

This is a debut novel that's so assured and confident, and it made me think of a Black author, sadly I can't remember which one, who posted something on Twitter about how it's harder for Black authors to gain traction in publishing, so they may write several novels before breaking through, while white authors get published much earlier. That means a Black author's first published book is likely to be more polished than a white author's book, and truly, I have read some seriously half-baked debuts by white authors. 

One place where author Kiley Reid shines is in her portrayal of Briar. Kids are hard to write. But Briar is real, fierce, funny, and frustrating. As a friend on Twitter said about this book, we need more Briars and fewer Alixes in the world. Another is the ending. There were a million ways the ending could have gone wrong, or wrapped up in tidy little bows, but Reid doesn't do that. So yes, I loved this book, and anticipate reading it more than once.