Weekly Recap July 12-July 17 2021
I am proud, fellow readers, of my accomplishments this week. I read eight books! This is admittedly the result of having tons of free time, but I feel proud of my progress nonetheless. I also got back my copy of Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night. Although I read that book a week ago, I will include it alongside this week’s reviews:
Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night by Sindiwe Magona
Stories from the perspectives of Black South African girls and women before the end of Apartheid. The most successful piece are the innovative monologues which peel back the pretense of the hypocritical medem-maid dynamic, but the collection as a whole is disappointingly conventional.
“Now, I have to be careful I don’t find myself in another soup. Women like talking about each other and then forget they said what, and before you know it you will be answering questions about what you said to whom about whom. I have no time for that. But I would be lying if I said their stories are uninteresting” (15)
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
The story of poet and translator Jakob Beer, from his rescue by a Greek geologist during WWII until after his death in 1993. The structure is listless and the prose, while suitably haunted, fails to distinguish the book from the throngs of 21st-century literary fiction.
“I tried to bury images, to cover them over with Greek and English words, with all the geologic eras. With the walks Athos and I took every Sunday into the ravines. Years later I would try a different avalanche of facts: train schedules, camp records, statistics, methods of execution. But t night my mother, my father, Bella, Mones, simply rose, shook the earth from their clothes, and waited” (93)
Martyr by Marius von Mayenburg
Benjamin, a teenage boy from a secular liberal milieu, shocks his friends and teachers by turning to Christian fundamentalism. Very rarely does a play manage to be so provocative and so elegantly written at once, but translator Maja Zade’s decision to transpose the setting from Germany to England weakens its thematic integrity.
“DIXON: Some pupil turns into a Jesus freak, okay, it’s not nice but is it going to get any better if you start freaking out as well?
WHITE: I’m not freaking out…I have to understand him before I can change him” (36)
Cities of Refuge by Lori Gemeiner Bihler
The experiences of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in London and New York, including work, family arrangements and assimilation, compared. Aside from being a competent nonfiction book, Bihler’s work happens to be a very useful resource for my vampire history novel.
“While immigration restrictions and the types of American and British entry visas granted affected refugee rates of acculturation, the greatest factor in their divergent rates of integration was, undoubtedly, World War II…Had Britain not suffered from the threat of a Nazi invasion, the German Jewish experience in London would probably have more closely resembled the experience of refugees in New York” (155)
Quaint Honor by Roger Gellert
At an English boarding school in the 1950s, a manipulative dare between students threatens to collide with a homophobic witch hunt. I hope that many plays like this one—clever and honest without dipping into pity-mongering or fetishization—rise from the attics of less-forgiving years to challenge inferior titans like Spring Awakening.
“TULLY: I’m not fooling myself. I’m not trying to smother my better nature. There’s no sort of angry little voice buried away in a dungeon, howling at the back of it that it’s wrong. How can it be wrong? What possible harm can it do to anyone else?” (72)
The Founder of Modern Russian Literature™ relates in verse the tale of the titular dandy and his ill-fated friendships with two young Romantics. While I could appreciate Pushkin’s functionally-immortal story and its Decemberist undercurrents, I didn’t vibe with Stanley Mitchell’s polite, clumsy translation.
“So, our light-headed tribe, now roaming,
Grows up, gets animated, seethes,
Sees off its ancestors with wreaths.
But our time, too, is coming, coming” (52)
RUR by Karel Čapek
In the play that invented the word ‘robot,’ a team of scientists and businessmen struggle to hold out against the AI apocalypse of their own making. Caught between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War, with ties to the Bible, Shelley’s Frankenstein and the changing face of industrial capitalism, Čapek’s work is more literature than early science fiction.
“DOMAIN: Perhaps we’ve been killed this hundred years and are only ghosts. Perhaps we’ve been dead a long, long time, and are only returning to repeat what we once said…before our death. It’s as if I’d been through all this before. As if I’d already had a mortal wound—here, in the throat” (75)
The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander
Taran, a lowly assistant pig-keeper, runs after an oracular pig and into a magical adventure. The plot is tropey—it may have laid the foundation for many of the tropes it depicts—but fast paced, and so cute that I might just have to read the next four books.
“Most of us are called on to perform tasks far beyond what we can do. Our capabilities seldom match our aspirations, and we are often woefully unprepared. To this extent, we are all Assistant Pig-Keepers at heart” (iii)
Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison
Three essays exploring the under-discussed “Africanist” presence in the American canon. Morrison is the best literary critic I have ever read, and I only wish there were more analyses to read.
“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny” (52)
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