(Bi)Weekly Recap Jul 18-July 31 2021
Fellow readers, I apologize for my absence last week. On Saturday the 24, I had just picked up Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, the largest book I’ve read to date. I spent the rest of the week finishing it, so I hope I can make up for lost time with this bi-weekly recap:
Trying to Find Chinatown by David Henry Hwang
The lesser-known plays of the Asian American playwright behind M. Butterfly. None of these works are as mature as the one that made Hwang famous, but each contains the flashes of cynicism and empathy that illuminate his best work.
“MA: If I dont get rich here, I might as well die here. Let my brothers laugh in peace...I’ve got to change myself. Toughen up. Take no shit. Count my change. Learn to gamble. Learn to win. Learn to stare. Learn to deny. Earn to look at men with opaque eyes…’Cause I’ve got the fear. You’ve given it to me” (87)
Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump
Claude McKay Love, an ordinary Black teenager from South Shore, struggles to find his place in the indifferent, racist climate of the Obama era. While this book is a great reference for students of Chicago, its writing style is quintessentially YA and since I turned 14 that whole genre has been hollow to me.
“Black America still isn’t free. And black men are still dying. And black women are still dying. And there’s anger, yes, there’s anger. And that anger has to go away when you go to work or go to school or ride the bus or go to the grocery store or go to a movie downtown. And that anger has to go away—if it doesn’t, how do you survive?” (77)
Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura
A young boy comes of age in a poor, coastal Japanese village whose survival depends on wrecking and scavenging ships. This story is not a gothic epic, as it was advertised to be, but a lonely slice of life that is almost too conventional to be worth reading.
“When his father had left, entrusting the well-being of the family to someone as untried as Isaku, he must have been well aware that a death among them was a very real possibility…he felt himself teetering in the wind off the sea, immersed in the sound of the waves” (69)
Fireflies by Luis Sagasti
A handful of illuminating stories from history and literature, tied together by themes of trauma, creation and ascent. The connections in this book are artfully drawn and occasionally terrifying, and by its end I wanted to read about everyone mentioned between the pages.
“Constellations, says Vonnegut. Like strands of white wool in the middle of the Arctic; taut, frozen, barely visible. Or rather only the knots that hold them together are visible, and they look like stars” (35)
An intellectual Iranian family leaves the chaos of revolutionary Tehran for a remote village that plays host to jinns, curses and otherworldly nature. Azar borrows heavily from Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude, and while she does not surpass her mentor fans of one will certainly find the other enjoyable and inspiring.
“Here and there a passerby who had missed the last buses looked up at the star-filled sky and wondered where the deluge was coming from. It was only the homeless addicts and vagabond lunatics whose inner eyes saw that a river of tears up Vali-asr Street flowed ahead of five thousand despairing, crying ghosts marching like a vanquished army, occasionally leaning against old plane trees and keening in a funereal lament” (76)
A girl reflects on her adolescent infatuation with a teacher and its deadly consequences. A slightly more melodramatic (and sapphic) version of Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, i.e. fun, artsy and snappy but not particularly profound for this asexual.
“I think the passion that devoured me at that time was the passion of curiosity. Once, as I was watching her like this, she suddenly opened her eyes and caught me. Her glance held me for a moment, and I was too fascinated to look away. Her glance was piercing, not unkind but terrifying. She was searching me. What did she see?” (31)
The sole survivor of a shipwreck immortalizes its ill-fated final voyage: its crew, its prey and its captain’s monomaniacal obsession with the titular white whale. Verbose and glorious, and if Melville is not quite the American Shakespeare he is something deeper altogether.
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?” (283)
Joseph and his Brothers by Thomas Mann
A 1500-page retelling of the biblical story with added religious, sociological and psychological insights. While I appreciated Mann’s cosmopolitan world, I don’t think he fully succeeds in humanizing the characters that inhabit it.
“Is there no stopping in the plunge to the bottomlessness of the well? Of course there is. Not much deeper than three thousand years down—and what is that compared to the fathomless depths?” (40)
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