Weekly Recap June 27-July 3 2021

Fellow readers, I am proud to announce my participation in a new challenge: longform reading. At the urging of my very nice Discord friends, I have elected to page through Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick over the course of the next two months, discussing plot and character along the way. So far I am enjoying both works—I expect the latter to become one of my favorites—but they are not the only things I have been reading. This week I managed to complete five books:

Ormeshadow by Priya Sharma

A boy comes of age on a hostile farm rumored to be the resting place of an ancient dragon. What could have been a tender, devastating fairy tale is incinerated by the dullest prose I’ve ever read.

“Sleep and death are not the same” (151)

A Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov

In a collection of short stories inspired by the author’s experience at a rural hospital on the eve of the Russian Revolution, a newly-qualified doctor comes into his own. Bulgakov’s black humor and evocative prose hang a guiding lamp for everyone who has suffered from impostor syndrome—or who just loves to hear a gory tale from an old friend.

“Forty-eight days ago I qualified ‘with distinction;’ but distinction is one thing and hernia is another. Once I watched a professor operating on a strangulated hernia. He did it, while I sat in the amphitheater. And I only just managed to survive…” (21)

 

Thrall by Natasha Trethewey

Poems inspired by mixed-raced people in art history and the ambiguous figure of Trethewey’s whte father. The poetry is not as animated as Native Guard, but cool and clever like a shellac eye.

“If I tell you such [taxonomic] terms were born in the Enlightenment’s hallowed rooms, that the wages of empire is myopia, you might see the father’s vision as desire embodied in paint, this rendering of his wife born of need to see himself as architect of Truth, benevolent patriarch, father of uplift ordering his domain. And you might see why, to understand my father, I look again and again at this painting: how it is that a man could love—and so diminish what he loves” (“Torna Atrás,” 49)

The World of Extreme Happiness by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig

Sunny, a laborer from rural China, awakens to the abuses of the capitalist system as she is swept up in a PR campaign for the factory where she works. While the themes this play covers—political protest, class divides and sexism—are always relevant, the script is almost entirely devoid of style or invention.

“MR. DESTINY: Everything starts with a Dream. Fight, Sunny. Reach out, grab your dreams by the balls and don’t let go until they become your reality. Go back to work. Talk to your boss. And CHANGE YOUR DESTINY!” (30)

Confusion by Stefan Zweig

The narrator recounts his youthful obsession with an older professor whose intellectual passion and volatile personality belie a heartbreaking secret. Zweig conveys the narrator’s inner bi disaster™ by going ham on the metaphors, which makes the story enjoyable but somewhat melodramatic.

“How I suffered from this man who moved from hot to cold like a bright flash of lightning, who unknowingly inflamed me, only to pour frosty water over me all of a sudden, whose exuberant mind spurred my own, only to lash me with irony—I had a terrible feeling that the closer I tried to come to him, the more harshly, even fearfully he repelled me” (67)