Weekly Recap August 8-August 14 2021
Fellow readers, I feel accomplished. This week, I managed to finish nine books, including one I’ve been reading for more than a month and a half. I even managed to find a new favorite, but the quality of books was overall quite mixed:
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Dana, a Black woman from 1975, is mysteriously and repeatedly transported to antebellum Maryland to save the life of a brutal ancestor. With plain, brutal prose and a gripping plot, Butler’s most famous work makes an uneasy home between science fiction, historical mystery and enduring political literature.
“There had to be some kind of reason for the link he and I seemed to have. Not that I really thought a blood relationship could explain the way I had twice been drawn to him…What we had was something new, something that didn’t even have a name. Some matching strangeness in us that may or may not have come from our being related” (29)
When a murderess pleads the belly, a jury of twelve matrons must investigate her integrity and challenge their own. This play is made of sweat and blood and milk and soot and stardust, and I dream of staging it one day.
“ELIZABETH: There is a woman there in need of help. She is a nasty, stupid, wicked wretch, and I mean to save her life” (24)
The Hare by César Aira
An English naturalist ventures into the pampas in search of an elusive treasure—a flying hare, a Mapuche chief or a Hapsburg diamond—and finds himself in a knotty adventure that overturns his world. All of Aira’s work makes me extravagantly happy, and although this has not unseated An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter among my favorites it is great work on colonialism, the mutability of race and the beauty of language.
“His emotional life had dried up years earlier—when in the first flush of his own youth, he had lost someone he loved who might have taught him to cry. From that day on, he had never felt the sense of dread that is a natural part of life: he could see this now, when he was least expecting it, but in someone else” (66)
The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea
The (fictionalized) first twenty years in the life of Teresa Urrea, Mexican folk saint and revolutionary. Even if this book isn’t a modern classic like it wants to be, it’s probably the most well-written, exciting story I’ve read this summer.
“All these women, Huila thought: Mothers of God…These twisted ones tied to their pallets, these barren ones, these married ones, these abandoned ones, these whores, these hungry ones, these thieves, these drunks, these mestizas, these lovers of other women, these Indians, and these littlest ones who faced unknowable tomorrows. Mothers of God. If it was a sin to think so, she would face God and ask Him why” (92)
Wet Weather Cover by Oliver Cotton
On a rainy, miserable shoot in rural Spain, an American actor feuds with the British thespian sharing his trailer. Not so much a battle of wits as a clash of assholes, and surprisingly unpleasant to read.
“BRAD: You’re the one who thinks we should all be watching the stuff and you’re the one who’s been prancing around the stages of Europe in a pair of tights. You want to play Othello and Lear and all the others—so how come you can’t remember a single line?” (43)
The Diary of Lady Murasaki by Murasaki Shikibu
Fragments and opinions from the life of the Heian noblewoman who wrote The Tale of Genji. For a few moments, Murasaki manages to reach across a millennium and gently punch me in the chest.
“Aware of my own insignificance, I had at least managed for the time to avoid anything that might have been considered shameful or unbecoming; yet here I was, tasting the bitterness of life to the very full” (34)
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruis Zafón
On the streets of fascist Barcelona, a boy unravels the mystery behind his favorite book. Some stories can survive the fact that their authors don’t really understand women; in this one, the plot threatens to buckle under its own accumulated misogyny.
“I imagined Julián Carax at my age, holding that image in his hand, perhaps in the shade of the same tree that now sheltered me. I could almost see him smiling confidently, contemplating a future as wide and luminous as that avenue, and for a moment I thought there were no more ghosts there than those of absence and loss and that the light that smiled on me was borrowed light, real only as long as I could hold it in my eyes, second by second” (147)
The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada
Three employees at a sprawling, anonymous factory lose track of their purpose and, eventually, their humanity. While Oyamada provides a suitably soul-crushing, morbid setting, the brevity of her work prevents it from unleashing its full horrific power.
“As I opened the basement-level door, I thought I could smell birds” (3)
In the fictional Indian city of Brahmpur, four families juggle familial expectations, post-partition politics, and their own desires in the search for suitable matches. After spending 1350 pages with Seth’s sparkling, multifaceted characters, I cannot help but long for a few more pages.
“Every man’s love life is interesting. If he doesn’t have one that’s interesting. If he has one, that’s interesting. And if he has two, that’s twice as interesting” (516)
Comments
Post a Comment