Category Archives: reviews

A WORLD BETWEEN, a novel by Emily Hashimoto, reviewed by Ashira Shirali

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A WORLD BETWEEN
by Emily Hashimoto
Feminist Press, 440 pages
reviewed by Ashira Shirali

A World Between book jacket

Let’s be honest—the chances of walking into a bookstore and finding a literary lesbian romance are low. You’re more likely to find an entire cookbook consisting of sourdough recipes. If you want the book to feature characters of color, your odds sink even lower. Emily Hashimoto’s debut novel promises to fill this lacuna. A World Between (Feminist Press, September 2020) follows the relationship between two women of color, Leena and Eleanor, through college and adulthood. The novel alternates between Leena’s and Eleanor’s perspectives, revealing the yearnings and anxieties of each as they grow apart and together.

There is much to marvel at in this debut. Hashimoto is adept at plotting. She pulls Leena and Eleanor apart with narrative developments that are both unexpected and believable. The novel heightens tension as we long for the two’s reunion despite circumstances, family expectations, and their own struggles. Eleanor and Leena’s conflicts are heartbreakingly realistic. Their fights remind us that in real life there are no villains or heroes, just two people whose earnest feelings clash. Hashimoto deploys details masterfully. She can bring characters to life with just a handful of words. When Leena cries in her mother’s car, she turns away because her mother “couldn’t stomach emotions of this magnitude.” The novel’s dialogue captures the rhythms of young people’s conversations, both the beat and the crescendos.

A World Between’s greatest triumph is capturing the shape, color, and texture of attraction between two women.

Despite these strengths, Leena and Eleanor’s honest, multi-stranded story is let down by the novel’s prose. Hashimoto’s similes fall flat as often as they succeed, and she pushes metaphors too hard. After describing how Leena responds to Eleanor’s body as if calculating an equation, Hashimoto writes, “If two trains were headed to Boston at one hundred miles per hour, how fast would Eleanor come?” There are awkward phrases which aspire to the literary (“she took a bite of her tongue”), and sometimes the writing elicits pure confusion. The novel could easily lose a hundred pages. In other places, however, the words delight—“It was quiet for a long time, dust settling on the ellipses of the moment.”

A World Between’s greatest triumph is capturing the shape, color, and texture of attraction between two women. Before Leena and Eleanor’s first kiss, Hashimoto writes, “Eleanor applied one hand to the bed between them.” ‘Applied’ beautifully conveys the trembling excitement of reaching for a first kiss. When Leena sees Eleanor on the street years after college, she thinks, “Her sweet face, her genuine smile. Invading her today.” The diction reveals Leena’s apprehension at seeing Eleanor while out with her boyfriend, and the powerful effect Eleanor still has on her. Distilling the intimacy between women in all its rawness and tenderness is Hashimoto’s strength.

Emily Hashimoto author photo

Emily Hashimoto

The novel’s attempts to reflect America’s diversity and the characters’ progressivism feel as heavy-handed as its metaphors. Although the novel does the crucial literary (and, indeed, human) work of telling the stories of people of color, immigrants, Jews, and other marginalized groups, by the end of the novel, this diversity feels contrived and unrealistic. Even the few straight White characters are ‘diversified’ by being in interracial relationships. Leena and Eleanor have identical political beliefs. Without specific and meaningful reasons behind these beliefs, they strike hollow and simplistic. Both Leena and Eleanor’s ambition in college is the platitude “[to] make a difference.” The two protagonists experience similar disillusionment when they realize their jobs will involve listening to bosses, not heroic acts of justice. Eleanor quits her job at a non-profit, telling her boss that she’s “sick of being told what to do and on your timeline.” These epiphanies would be trite by themselves, but they also seem unrealistic as they occur in the characters’ late twenties.

Eleanor and Leena’s intellectual myopia produces an immaturity that tests the believability of their characters. When Leena’s grandmother praises the education she received at a British school in India, Eleanor thinks Leena’s grandmother “seemed to be praising British colonialism.” She looks around for “someone to explain what the fuck is happening.” This reaction is better suited to a teenager who just learned about British colonialism in India, not an adult used to living in a complex world. When Leena finds out that a friend’s parents were deported, she thinks, “He seemed…okay. How was that possible?”

A World Between is importantly frank about sex between women. Their sex life is neither pornographized nor obscured, the two poles of how sex between women is depicted in mainstream media and culture.

Although Hashimoto’s diversity efforts feel manufactured, like a wooden puppet, her depictions of sex have the fluidity and heat of human bodies. The desire Eleanor and Leena feel for each other is tangible and all-consuming. A World Between is importantly frank about sex between women. Their sex life is neither pornographized nor obscured, the two poles of how sex between women is depicted in mainstream media and culture. When Eleanor and Leena dance together early in the novel, Hashimoto writes, “Up until this second, her interest in Leena was physical, no doubt, but she had been fascinated by the whole of her…With their bodies intertwined, all of that faded into the background…She wanted to fuck her.”

In A World Between, Hashimoto delivers a love story that portrays the depth of romantic attraction that can exist between women while escaping the trappings of cliché. Leena and Eleanor share moments suffused with love, but their relationship faces real-life challenges. There’s no neat ending in a shiny bow. Though hindered by uneven prose, A World Between is a moving portrait of the tensions, joys, and warmth that characterize a relationship between two women.

Ashira Shirali is from Gurgaon, India. Her stories have been shortlisted for the HG Wells Short Story Competition’s junior prize, The Adroit Prize for Prose, and other contests. Her work has been published in Cosmonauts Avenue, Hobart online, and elsewhere. She is a sophomore at Princeton University, where she studies English and Creative Writing.

GARDEN BY THE SEA, a novel by Mercè Rodoreda, reviewed by Anthony Cardellini

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GARDEN BY THE SEA
by Mercè Rodoreda
translated by Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño
Open Letter Books, 203 pages
reviewed by Anthony Cardellini

Garden by the Sea book jacketWhen I began my part-time job at a botanical garden in the fall of 2017, I had next to zero gardening experience, and I knew little about the different flowers and trees that grow in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. I showed up that first day completely unprepared, without so much as a pair of gloves. But I was lucky enough to be mentored by David, a man in his early thirties from Maine, who’d been gardening for several years. David explained to me the paradoxical nature of caring for gardens: gardens need constant attention, but they bear their beautiful fruits ever so slowly. At the heart of David’s message was that gardeners are transitory, but gardens remain. Our decades are their hours.

The unnamed narrator of Mercè Rodoreda’s Garden by the Sea is, like David, the consummate gardener. The years spent caring for his garden have imparted upon this narrator a unique understanding of time’s most closely-guarded secret: that it will always pass, without regard for the humans that attempt to confine it. He explains early in the novel the nature of a tree: “This tree has witnessed much grief and much joy. And it does not change. It has taught me to be what I am.” Rodoreda’s novel is a study of the way time passes, granting characters joyful years and grievous ones. She divides the novel into six sections, each of which describes one year that the narrator spends caring for the garden attached to a seaside villa owned by rich Catalans from Barcelona. Rodoreda uses the narrator’s gardening role to illustrate the ways in which time expands and contracts. There are no dates in the novel—only the slow passing of seasons, marked by changes in the garden. “They stayed later than usual that year,” writes the narrator of the villa owners at the end of the second chapter. “The leaves had already turned and many of the trees were bare … The sea was gradually leached of color and grew rough in the afternoon.” In this way, years pass—flowers bloom, die back, and then bloom again. The ocean intrudes and recedes.

Rodoreda uses the narrator’s gardening role to illustrate the ways in which time expands and contracts. There are no dates in the novel—only the slow passing of seasons, marked by changes in the garden.

In many ways, Rodoreda herself lived a life full of patience with time. Exiled from Spain because of her work for the Catalan government before the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda began her writing career in France. After settling in Paris, she was forced again to flee when the Germans occupied France at the start of the Second World War. In Switzerland, she continued to grow in prominence as a writer. For many years, she waited for the wounds created by Franco and the war to heal. She finally moved home to Catalonia in 1972, when she was in her sixties. She died in Girona in 1983.

Mercè Rodoreda author photo

Mercè Rodoreda

Like Rodoreda, the narrator in Garden by the Sea navigates through times of darkness and times of light as he tends to his flowers and trees. But while his own emotional state remains mostly steady, Rodoreda deftly employs him as a nucleus around which other characters’ sufferings revolve. Most of the novel exists as conversations between the narrator and the villa’s residents, who seek him out to air their problems, frustrations, and personal tragedies. An elderly couple visits and asks if he knows anything about their missing son. The stable manager vents about his unruly teenager. The neighbor wants advice for his own garden. And the narrator hears not just gossip but confessions of affairs, lost relatives, loveless marriages. Of one visitor he writes, “His eyes were beleaguered with a sadness I had never seen in anyone else’s eyes. It was almost imperceptible, but I sensed a perennial sorrow.”

But while Rodoreda’s narrator is frequently privy to the sufferings of other characters in the novel, he rarely offers them advice or tries to intervene and help their situations. In many cases, upon hearing about a character’s difficulties, the narrator doesn’t know what to say. A few times he even grows frustrated and wonders why he is so often sought out. And yet, his small house in the garden is a constant place of refuge and solace for many of the people at the villa, who talk through their sufferings with the narrator in a place free from judgment; a neutral ground. And the narrator’s belief that time heals all wounds is infectious—not just for the other characters in the novel, but also for the reader.

Rodoreda’s crowning achievement in Garden by the Sea is this character of the narrator. He takes advice from the plants he cultivates, loosening time’s grip on his life. But his is not an understanding that was arrived at easily; the final piece of his puzzle is achieved brilliantly through flashback—he has been deeply, indelibly marked by tragedy. Running underneath the surface of the novel is the tragic story of the narrator’s wife, Cecilia, whom the narrator describes as “tenderness itself.” His memories of her are powerfully evocative. In the first chapter, the narrator says, “Her loveliest feature was her hair: sun-golden, waterfall long. When I came back from the cemetery I pounded the eucalyptus until I bled … And at the moment of her death … the whole of me shattered.” These flashbacks emerge rarely and from otherwise ordinary conversations and descriptions, catching both the narrator and reader by surprise. Rodoreda’s stirring flashbacks demonstrate for us that the narrator is not the man he once was. Decades ago, he lived through the great tragedy of his life. Slowly, he has learned from his garden how to accept it. Now, in his own reserved and unique way, he imparts that knowledge onto the people around him. This is the essence of Garden by the Sea.

On one of my first days at the botanical garden, David pointed out to me the garden’s tallest tree: a southern red oak around 200 years old. “It’s at the end of its life now,” he admitted. “Doesn’t have much longer left.” I was still new at the time—I’d forgotten the way time works in gardens. I asked how much longer the tree had to live, expecting it to be a few months at most, but David told me it had somewhere between ten and fifteen years. When it died, a group of workers would come to remove it and then David would plant a new red oak, to watch over the gardens for another couple of centuries.

This image—a watchful, ancient tree—is the enduring image from Rodoreda’s work. At the end of the novel, the narrator and a neighbor walk for one last time through the garden. The neighbor says, “When these cypress trees are tall, you and I will have been beneath the earth for many years.” Our narrator’s response affirms what we’ve learned over the course of the novel: that it is not grief or joy that wins in the end, but time and its garden. As the narrator writes, “You know that my Cecilia died. Such is life. But while I’m here she won’t be gone, not completely … look at the garden now, this is the best hour, the best time to sense its vigor and capture its scent. One day if you find yourself walking in the garden at night, beneath the trees, you will see how the garden talks to you, the things it says…”

Anthony Cardellini is from Phoenix, Arizona. He studies creative writing at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he is the design editor for The Archive. His fiction has been published in Silk Road Review, Columbia Journal, The Drabble, and others. Connect with him on Twitter @a_cardellini.

LITTLE ENVELOPE OF EARTH CONDITIONS, poems by Cori A. Winrock, reviewed by Charlotte Hughes

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LITTLE ENVELOPE OF EARTH CONDITIONS
by Cori A. Winrock
Alice James Books, 85 pages
reviewed by Charlotte Hughes

Little Envelope Cover Art.jpgI read Little Envelope of Earth Conditions in late June, when COVID-19 cases were skyrocketing in the world and the nation—and at home. The May 24th New York Times front page, which listed the names of the 100,000 American coronavirus victims—a very public display of mourning and grief—was at the forefront of my memory, as were the more personal ways that I was mourning the loss of traditions, previous ways of life, time spent with grandparents and my fellow high school students alike.

Throughout her second collection of lyric poems, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, Cori A. Winrock explores the experience of mourning: specifically, the idea that grief is an ongoing, recurring experience that never truly goes away. It is simultaneously universal and intensely personal. She tells a compelling narrative about the loss of a mother and child, spanning from the vast emptiness of space to an ambulance in a parking lot to a placid meadow on the edge of a lake. The incalculable physical distance this book of poetry travels mirrors the incalculable distance a grieving person must travel to get back to earth.

I admire the cohesion of theme throughout Little Envelope of Earth Conditions. The very first poem in the collection, “What Would Happen to Your Body in Space Without a Spacesuit,” is set in outer space, a lonely place of physical isolation:

                             We learn to sleep
with our hands in the dark

of strangers’ mouths, keep our heads singing
in hopes of bringing our lost

helmets back. How warmblooded
the moon must still seem when seen from the earth.

The speaker grieves for a “lost helmet” that cannot be recaptured in space, just like a lost life cannot be recaptured on earth. Not only does this poem discuss celestial bodies, such as “the moon,” but it also discusses physical bodies. The physical bodies in this poem are referred to by the third person, a collective, to show that there is company in grief.

Later in the collection, Winrock moves to another place of grief—this time on earth—with the strong, surreal images of “Love Poem in a Time of Ambulances.” There is confusion in the core narrative of this poem, to reflect the disorientation of grief:

……….O altar of resuscitation… the ambulance as ablaze as the virgin
……….mary’s heart. And so what if these are my marys
burning? Or that I meant to say
……….my mothers.”

And O to be the curve of the ambulance’s bones,
……….its frame picked to glittering
in the parking lot

This poem’s speaker takes on different perspectives when talking about the ambulance—on one hand, the ambulance is a religious object filled with live-saving importance, described as an “altar” burning “ablaze as the virgin Mary’s heart.” But on the other hand, the ambulance is an animalistic object, described as a monster with “bones” and a “picked … frame”. The confusion in this poem continues with confusion about bodies. The speaker is not sure to whom some of the bodies mentioned in this poem belong—are “marys” burning, or “mothers”?

In the collection’s last poem, “How to Preserve a Spacesuit,” Winrock has moved locations once more, not to an ambulance or the depths of outer space, but to a meadow at the edge of a lake.

………….+
The birds are whistling better stitches

……….+
into the wind—fastening us

+
to the meadow… where we kneel

+
to fill each spacesuit

……….+
with flowers then light

……….+
them on fire”

Cori A Winrock author photo

Cori A. Winrock

The + sign is used to explore the many alternate possibilities, or what-ifs in grief. Emily Dickinson used this sign in her poetry as well, to signal and explore alternate words, lines, or phrases. It’s interesting, too, that + resembles a sewing stitch; imagery and diction of sewing, of mending, of fixing the bond between mother and child are present throughout this poem. In it, the mother and child have reached the end of their journey; they are not in outer space anymore, but are connected, or stitched, to the earth. They even go to “fill each spacesuit / with flowers then light / them on fire,” indicating that they are at the end of their journey—spacesuits aren’t needed back on earth. Like the title mentions, the spacesuit is preserved—its use is pretty much over, but it’s not buried or thrown away. It’s still present—much like grief.

Winrock leaves the reader at this placid, earthly pond, at the end of an extensive journey. Her intricate narrative incorporates quotes, unusual punctuation, and facts about sewing, outer space and moon landings. I admire her skill in bringing specificity and lyricism to grief, an overwhelming emotion that might at first seem insurmountable, but little by little, stitch by stitch, can be mended.

Charlotte Hughes is a high school junior from Columbia, South Carolina. She has attended the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio and is a reader for PANK. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Waxwing, PANK, and The UK Poetry Society, and has been honored by The Kenyon Review, Third Coast Magazine, Princeton University, and the Scholastic Writing Awards.

Cockfight, stories by María Fernanda Ampuero, reviewed by Ashley Hajimirsadeghi

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Cockfight
by María Fernanda Ampuero
translated by Frances Riddle
Feminist Press, 128 pages
reviewed by Ashley Hajimirsadeghi

cockfight book jacketIn her debut short story collection, Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero takes an unflinching and intimate look into the turbulent homes and lives of Latin American women. By placing her powerful, moving stories in settings like violent domestic households or lower income neighborhoods, the characters in Ampuero’s Cockfight combat their situations with acts of bravery, loss, and love. As the characters seem to suffocate in their environments, there are acts of bravery, loss, and love. The idea of a happy family is a myth and men are depicted as lecherous, terrifying creatures of the night. The narrators often are maids, young girls, and women wrenched into horrifying situations such as forced incest, rape, and human trafficking.

The thirteen stories in this collection feature a myriad of women: some brave, many abused, and others fearful of all the men in their lives. From the beginning, readers are faced with the tragedy of what it means to be a woman in contemporary Ecuadorian society. One in four women in Ecuador face sexual violence, while the rape of young adolescent girls remains a large problem. In Cockfight, the first story, “Auction,” features a main character who is kidnapped while in a taxi and is about to be sold on the black market.  In another story, “Coro,” a black maid’s room is broken into by wealthy, light-skinned women and shows the racial and societal inequalities in Ecuador. In a third story, “Mourning,” a mother celebrates her husband’s death and her newfound freedom. In each of these stories, Ampuero unveils a hard truth: behind closed doors, even people in the highest levels of society are not immune to suffering. Her stories are constructed from a feminist lens by creating realistic depictions of women. These women aren’t helpless and blameless victims in need of a savior; they are flawed and completely capable of inflicting pain on others, whether it’s through belittling their maid, acts of defiance in order to survive, or wishing death upon someone.

“Monsters,” the second story in Cockfight, follows the narrator, her sister Mercedes, and the maid Narcisa, where they live a upper middle-class lifestyle attending a religious private school, but their parents are often absent in their lives. The story takes place over the course of six months, while they’re still preteens. Mercedes and the narrator watch horror movies every night, despite their parents disapproving of their hobby. These movies are often grotesque, depicting beatings and torture of women, or, in some cases, young girls, like the sisters, being brutally murdered.

In “Monsters,” Ampuero strips the three girls of their youth by showing them how cruel the world really is. For Mercedes and the narrator, they learn of the abuse of women through film, but they initially see it as fiction. Because they’re watching horror films, it doesn’t seem like anything similar could happen to them. They are two preteen girls who lack any real problems up the events of the story; the extent of their biggest woes tend to be against the nuns running their school. As the story begins to unfold, they learn that reality is harsh, just like a horror film. The maid, Narcisa, who is fourteen and not much older, gives them a grave warning:

“[Their] arms burned as [Narcisa] repeated that now [they] had to beware of the living more than the dead—that now [they] really had to be more afraid of the living than of the dead.”

It is then that the films they watched before, the ones that gave Mercedes nightmares, start to seep into reality.

María Fernanda Ampuero

The story immediately following “Monsters” is called “Griselda.” Set in a poor neighborhood, it is narrated by an unnamed little girl with an unforgiving and blunt way of seeing the world. The narrator tells the story of Miss Griselda, the local baker who makes amazing cakes, who is found one night in her home covered in blood. As the neighborhood ladies gossip about what could’ve gone down, the narrator is unassuming, seeing the world for the way it is: full of pain. While everyone calls Miss Griselda an alcoholic, the narrator notices how Miss Griselda’s daughter, Griseldita, tries to dismiss the incident and perpetuates rumors by screaming at the neighborhood women to “mind their own business.”

Cockfight is an investigation of domestic spaces, women’s bodies, and the meaning of a coming-of-age story, one that strips the male gaze and sees the world for how it is: ugly, grotesque, brutal.

In “Monsters,” the conflict directly appears in the domestic space of the narrator, while in “Griselda” the violence is only seen from a distance and from an outsider’s perspective. Those who are from a lower class lack the privilege of being naïve about how the world truly is; this is shown through the narrator’s blunt, almost uncaring, style about what happened to Miss Griselda. Upon the loss of Miss Griselda’s cakes to the neighborhood, the narrator only says, “I didn’t give a damn about cakes anymore.” She watches the scene of the crime calmly, taking note of the growing bloodstained sheet and Griselda’s pushed aside panties. However, in “Monsters,” the narrator and her sister, Mercedes, are unable to describe their trauma. There is an absence of detail–it is only written that Mercedes screams upon seeing what’s happening. The lack of information about what’s truly going on in this story shows the disconnect between the narrator and reality, because what they witness is something they’ve only seen in movies.

Ampuero is unafraid in this stunning debut collection. She takes the language of suffering and abuse and turns it into a memorial for the living. While these are stories of tragedy, they offer an insight to the various issues plaguing Ecuadorian women. Cockfight is an investigation of domestic spaces, women’s bodies, and the meaning of a coming-of-age story, one that strips the male gaze and sees the world for how it is: ugly, grotesque, brutal.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an undergraduate at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her work has appeared in Into the Void, Corvid Queen, and cahoodaloodaling, among others. She attended the International Writing Program’s Summer Institute and was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. You can find her at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.squarespace.com

TIGERS, NOT DAUGHTERS, a young adult novel by Samantha Mabry, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

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TIGERS, NOT DAUGHTERS
by Samantha Mabry
Algonquin Young Readers
288 pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Tigers Not Daughters book jacketSamantha Mabry’s Tigers, Not Daughters is a modern-day ghost story that follows the Torres sisters—Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa—one year after the untimely death of their oldest sister, Ana. Wracked with grief, the Torres sisters ache for Ana; but their profound sadness is met with unexpected events that eventually make their sister’s presence known: raps on doors and windows, writings on the walls, sensory overload, recurring storms, flickering lights, dying animals, and one escaped spotted hyena lurking in the darkness of their neighborhood in Southtown. Ana reappears in a way the girls can’t begin to imagine and returns with a vengeance they don’t understand. Mabry tells a riveting tale of three sisters who discover the power of sisterhood and what it means to stay together despite insurmountable, unnatural odds.

What stood out to me while reading Tigers, Not Daughters was how colorful and tangible each of the Torres sisters is. Their characterization is well-rounded, Mabry vividly telling the story through the individual perspectives of each sister, as well as including a fourth perspective of a character that watches them from afar. Each sister is unique in not just who they are, but in how they grieve over the loss of Ana.

Jessica, the oldest of the newly-rendered trio, bears the weight of the entire Torres family on her shoulders, a weight that used to be Ana’s to carry. Jessica deeply admires her sister, so in her absence she willingly assumes the role of the head of the household: taking care of their good-for-nothing father, Rafe, looking out for her younger sisters, and working at the local pharmacy to help put food on the table and keep the roof over their heads. But grief warps Jessica’s admiration of Ana into an unhealthy emulation of her. To mourn the loss of her sister Jessica tries to become her sister. As Mabry writes, “She was wearing Ana’s lipstick, a dangerous shade of near-hot pink, as well as a bluebonnet blue sundress that used to belong to her older sister. It was several sizes too big and swallowed her up.” I love Mabry’s description of Ana’s clothes “swallowing” Jessica up because it serves more than to show what she looks like, it describes how Jessica feels. Jessica is stifled by Ana’s absence, and mimicking her sister leaves her empty with no identity to claim for herself. This lack of personhood results in Jessica’s second tell-tale trait: her anger. The author writes that “Jessica was mean because she was so full of life that it chafed her from the inside out.”

Samantha Mabry

Iridian is the second-oldest of the sisters, a quiet girl who Mabry describes as someone who “never went anywhere without three things: a worn-out paperback copy of The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, a black-and-white composition notebook, and a peacock blue ink pen.” Ana’s death causes her to seek refuge in the books Ana left behind, and she tries to process her emotions through writing stories in her notebook. What I find interesting about Iridian is how Mabry describes so much of her character through her name alone: she’s observant to a fault but her pain allows her to only see what she wants to see, shutting out everything else and using her imagination to fill in the rest. Iridian internalizes her grief, coming across as cold, unfeeling, and stoic; but in reading the book further I realized that the opposite of this was true. To quote the book, “She felt everything—too much.” Iridian hides so much of herself within the pages of books because, without Ana, Mabry writes, “the world seemed so hard for her to live in.”

Rosa is the youngest of the three, an adventurous spirit who finds solace in nature among the animals. It was Ana who discovered that Rosa’s love of animals is something more, something akin to magic, and she continues to be in the company of creatures after Ana’s death. To honor Ana’s memory Rosa communicates with animals, particularly fireflies. She’s described as “[wanting] the creatures of this world to know they were being heard.” I find Rosa’s character special in that, despite being the youngest, she’s actually the most level-headed of her sisters. I believe Rosa’s maturity comes from channeling her grief to build upon her unique gift. Ana taught Rosa to love her abilities, thus she spends her time doing what she enjoys. Through Ana’s past encouragement, Rosa gains a unique piece of herself in Ana’s absence, while her sisters lose parts of themselves.

Mabry spins this modern ghost story with a fierce yet subtle magic that courses through her words, each sentence coming together like an incantation—filled with intent, purpose, and emotion.

Mabry spins this modern ghost story with a fierce yet subtle magic that courses through her words, each sentence coming together like an incantation—filled with intent, purpose, and emotion. Mabry is no stranger to the fundamental tenet of writing: “show, don’t tell,” which makes the story so riveting. Ana’s haunting spurs a series of events that are all connected, and the author reveals the true reason behind Ana’s return by employing classic storytelling techniques.

Rosa is the first of the sisters who learns of Ana’s return—noticing an abundance of fireflies in the evening, symbolic of her sisterly bond with Ana. Iridian’s copy of The Witching Hour foreshadows the haunting of the Torres sisters nicely, Mabry even hinting at the book’s ending: “at the end of The Witching Hour, the ghost wins.” Between the perspectives of Rosa, Iridian, and Jessica lies a fourth narrative—a quiet observer in the Torres sisters’ tale, reminiscent of the chorus of a Greek tragedy. The narrator is privy to the lives of the sisters, offering a near-omniscient perspective that adds a refreshing depth to the story. The author teases the identity of the fourth narrator with contextual clues, such as “We were the first people to witness Ana come back as a ghost, and we considered ourselves lucky.” Mabry sprinkles the tiniest details that help move the story along like breadcrumbs to follow, and near the end of the book I was delighted to discover who the mysterious narrator was.

In their pain each Torres sister holds onto a piece of Ana for themselves, each one believing that they love Ana more than the others. Grief is a personal, individualized struggle that Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa know all too well, so much so that their own pain cleaves them apart. Ana is supposed to be the glue that holds them all together, so who are they without her? But the beauty of the Torres sisters’ bond is that it’s forged in this loss. Ana’s death and the return of her ghost forces them to lean on each other, to cleave back to one another in order to protect themselves from the wrath of their older sister.

I particularly enjoyed how Mabry conveys the story’s overarching theme: the power of sisterhood. She explores this topic both through the loss of Ana and through the lens of toxic masculinity. With Ana gone the sisters try to find comfort, solace, and healing in the men that surround them, but to no avail. The men in their lives are self-serving, twisting Ana’s death to fuel their own desires and stroke their own egos. Their father is so crippled by the loss of his oldest daughter that he neglects the needs of Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa. Mabry writes that “the weight of [his] neediness was heavy enough to crush all of the Torres sisters.” The boys that hang out in the house across the street always watch the sisters from afar but would hardly intervene to help them in their time of need. Somehow they think of themselves as the sisters’ “protectors,” the author quips, “which was a silly thing all boys thought.”

I loved how the strength of sisterhood is reinforced through the symbolism of the spotted hyena that escapes from the zoo as a result of Ana’s haunting. Spotted hyenas live in matriarchal communities where the females are bigger than the males, stronger than the males, and all rank higher than the highest-ranking male. Female hyenas are also vicious killers who will hunt together and do whatever it takes to protect the other females in their cackle. Mabry is very intentional in her symbolism, as the hyena’s presence is Ana’s way of sending a message to her sisters that they must always stick together.

Tigers, Not Daughters is more than a modern ghost tale. The triumph of this story lies in the rawness in which the tale of the Torres sisters is told. The sisters’ loss is delicate yet ferocious, at times whispering through the pages, other times roaring to be heard. Mabry explores the depths and tenderness of grief and longing through her wonderful characterization of the Torres sisters. And her story shows us that there is something to be learned from both the literal and figurative ghosts of the past, so long as you take the time to listen.

Kristie Gadson is a copywriter by day, a book reviewer by night, and an aspiring comic book artist in-between time. Her passions lie in children’s books, young adult novels, fantasy novels, comics, and animated cartoons because she believes that one is never “too old” to learn the life lessons they teach. Kristie resides in Norristown on the outskirts of Philadelphia PA, which she lovingly calls “her little corner of the universe.”

THE SPORT OF THE GODS, a novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar, reviewed by Dylan Cook

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THE SPORT OF THE GODS
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Signet Classics, 176 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

The Sport of the Gods book jacketFor the best experience, I recommend reading The Sport of the Gods outside on a cloudy day, rain threatening. As you fall in step with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s rhythmic prose, it’ll be easy to forget that you’re at nature’s mercy. Let the clouds decide whether or not you get to read uninterrupted. Subject to this force, you may more easily understand what the Hamilton family endures in this novel. As deceits and misfortunes pile on top of each other, the Hamiltons decide that nature can’t help but rain down upon them. Their breakdown is more than plain bad luck can explain, so they know that they are fighting, “against some Will infinitely stronger than their own.”

Even if you haven’t heard of Paul Laurence Dunbar, you’ve likely read lines of his poetry. Maya Angelou immortalized his poem “Sympathy” when she borrowed a line for the title of her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Discussing her influences, Angelou lauded Dunbar in the same breath as Shakespeare. Dunbar was born to former slaves in Ohio in 1872, right in the middle of the Reconstruction era. He began writing seriously as a teenager, the only Black student in his high school. He had some early publishing help from his friends Wilbur and Orville Wright (yes, those Wright Brothers) before publishing his first poetry collection, Oak and Ivy. From this collection’s success, Dunbar launched a prolific career that spanned over a dozen poetry collections, three short story collections, and a handful of novels. In nearly all of his work, he seamlessly transitioned between standard and vernacular English, a feat that earned him both praise and criticism. Perhaps most miraculously, he produced all of this work amid recurring bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism. Dying at the age of 33, Dunbar left behind a sprawling body of work that’s yet to be properly explored.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar

At the height of his literary power, Dunbar wrote The Sport of the Gods over the course of a month in 1901. The narrative centers on the Hamilton family, with parents Berry and Fannie and their children Joe and Kitty. Berry, a former slave, works as a butler for Maurice Oakley, a man who believes that, “there must be some good in every system, and it was the duty of the citizen to find out that good and make it pay.” Despite many years of loyal work, Berry Hamilton is expendable to Maurice. This tenuous relationship comes to a head when Maurice’s brother claims his money has been stolen. After years of saving, Berry happens to have amassed a fortune roughly equal to the amount that was stolen. For Maurice, this circumstantial evidence is enough to ensure that Berry is sentenced to ten years of hard labor.

With Berry’s good name defaced, the Hamilton family is ostracized from their community. They regroup and head north:

They had heard of New York as a place vague and far away, a city that, like Heaven, to them had existed by faith alone. All the days of their lives they had heard of it, and it seemed to them the center of all the glory, all the wealth, and all the freedom of the world. New York. It had an alluring sound.

The Hamiltons’ move to New York represents an overlooked moment in American history: the southern diaspora before the one we now consider the Great Migration. Before World War I and the Red Summer drove African Americans north, and before the Harlem Renaissance redefined literature, music, and art, there was a thriving Black population in New York City laying the groundwork. Dunbar’s novel introduces us to a turn of the century New York that contemporary authors like Edith Wharton never touched. Joe and Kitty, being young and ambitious, both make connections and find success working in music clubs. For the first time in a long time, the Hamiltons seem to be on the rise.

Even if you haven’t heard of Paul Laurence Dunbar, you’ve likely read lines of his poetry. Maya Angelou immortalized his poem “Sympathy” when she borrowed a line for the title of her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Only Fannie, the matriarch, can see the shadow still looming over the family. She comes the closest to forming a theory for the Hamiltons’ suffering. Fannie can’t bring herself to be happy for Kitty or Joe because she sees them being corrupted, commodified, and used by their friends and employers. From the moment she lays eyes on a music club, she sees it as, “a social cesspool generating a poisonous miasma and reeking with the stench of decayed and rotten  moralities.” The life they’ve built in New York, successful as it may seem, is built on the same shaky foundation that crumbled under Berry. No matter where they are, north or south, they can never let themselves get too comfortable. At any moment, the people whom they trust may turn on them, just like Maurice turned on Berry, and the Hamilton family will collapse again.

Reducing The Sport of the Gods down to its key themes may give the impression that the novel is overwhelmingly pessimistic, perhaps even nihilistic. This is a dangerous assumption. The novel does carry the weight of the Hamiltons’ grief, but it’s not hopeless. After all, both Berry and his children are able to find precarious levels of success. Dunbar balances two nearly opposing ideas. On one hand, he shows that success for African Americans is possible in spite of the racist systems that hinder it; on the other, he claims that this success isn’t success at all if others can take it away so easily. In this way, The Sport of the Gods vacillates between comedy and tragedy so frequently that the dividing line becomes useless. The overall effect may appear pessimistic, but it’s the productive kind of pessimism that mobilizes action. Joe eventually notices this, realizing that, “his horizon had been very narrow, and he was angry that it was so.”

Paul Laurence Dunbar died more than a hundred years ago, but one must still mourn a brilliant writer whose career was cut short. It would be decades before authors like Richard Wright and Ann Petry would take up the mantle and raise Dunbar’s questions with the same kind of intensity.

Still, it’s difficult to read The Sport of the Gods and not wish for more. More, not because the novel is incomplete, but because it raises the kind of high-stakes questions that linger and nag long after it’s finished. Paul Laurence Dunbar died more than a hundred years ago, but one must still mourn a brilliant writer whose career was cut short. It would be decades before authors like Richard Wright and Ann Petry would take up the mantle and raise Dunbar’s questions with the same kind of intensity. Had he lived longer, maybe his subsequent novels would have shepherded us towards a satisfying answer, but we can only speculate. As it stands, Dunbar’s work is an important literary bridge between Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance, bringing the whole picture into much clearer focus.

Author photo for Dylan CookDylan Cook is a student at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies English, with a concentration in creative writing, and Biology. He often reads and writes, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].

CLOTEL OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, a novel by William Wells Brown, written in 1853, reviewed by Dylan Cook

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CLOTEL, or, The President’s Daughter
by William Wells Brown
Penguin Classics, 320 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Clotel book jacket

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In 1998, scientists performed a DNA test to answer one of the longest-running rumors in American history. Historians could no longer deny the truth: Yes, Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. But plenty of people already knew that. William Wells Brown knew this beyond a reasonable doubt when he published Clotel in 1853, a novel that imagines the lives and tribulations of Jefferson’s slave-born daughters. The characters are all fictional, but Brown’s creative liberties stray little from reality. Masters frequently made concubines of their slaves, so why would Jefferson be any exception? Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal” were a farce in Brown’s eyes, because only in antebellum America could a president’s daughter be born in chains.

The 1850s were an uncommonly productive decade in American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 and Herman Melville published Moby-Dick a year later. Walt Whitman released the first edition of Leaves of Grass while Emily Dickinson trickled out the first of her poems. These works went on to become mainstays of high school and college curricula while Clotel, the first novel by an African American, undeservedly fell into relative obscurity.

The 1850s were an uncommonly productive decade in American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 and Herman Melville published Moby-Dick a year later. Walt Whitman released the first edition of Leaves of Grass while Emily Dickinson trickled out the first of her poems. These works went on to become mainstays of high school and college curricula while Clotel, the first novel by an African American, undeservedly fell into relative obscurity. Within its pages, Clotel mingles some of the best elements of each of these authors. Brown has Hawthorne’s critical eye for religion, Melville’s encyclopedic dedication to facts, and Whitman and Dickinson’s curiosity for human lives. At the same time, Brown writes with an authoritative talent for social commentary that places him in a category all his own.

William Wells Brown portrait, courtesy of WikipediaBrown was already an established name by the time he wrote Clotel. His memoir, the Narrative of William W. Brown, was one of the best selling ex-slave narratives of the 1840s, second only to that of Frederick Douglass. He wrote his debut novel while living in exile in England to escape the grasp of the Fugitive Slave Act. He returned to the United States to lecture on abolition across the country, all while continuing to write plays, memoirs, and other nonfiction. Clotel’s influence can be seen scattered throughout the American canon. Brown’s depictions of passing, “tragic mulatto” characters, and other racial themes would be further developed by contemporaries like Frank J. Webb, later writers like Charles W. Chesnutt, and much later figures of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

The novel may be titled for Clotel, but it divides its attention equally between Clotel, her mother Currer, and her sister Althesa. After Jefferson’s death, his daughters and Currer are sold to the highest bidders, by which point their relation to the former president has been ignored. The family is separated and spread out across the South. Clotel and Althesa are sold to men who intend to take them as illegitimate wives, while Currer has been sold to a tyrannical plantation owner. As each navigates the unique circumstances of their enslavement, each woman swims against the current to try to reunite the family.

By placing the women in dramatically different scenarios, Brown constructs a broad cross-section of the United States, from which he criticizes white America’s many faces of hypocrisy.

By placing the women in dramatically different scenarios, Brown constructs a broad cross-section of the United States, from which he criticizes white America’s many faces of hypocrisy. Clotel and Althesa’s “husbands” pretend that their marriages are genuine and loving, but they quickly relegate their “wives” to servants the moment the opportunity to marry a white woman arises. Masters turn to religion to justify the “peculiar institution” of slavery, but conveniently ignore scriptures that decry it. Brown dismantles the idea that the United States was a free nation for anyone besides white men, writing,

They have tears to shed over Greece and Poland; they have an abundance of sympathy for “poor Ireland;” they can furnish a ship of war to convey the Hungarian refugees from a Turkish prison to the “land of the free and home of the brave.” They boast that America is the “cradle of liberty;” if it is, I fear they have rocked the child to death.

As much as Brown rebukes white Americans, he also provides a valuable model for allyship. When Currer is sold to Reverend Peck, we are introduced to his abolitionist daughter Georgiana. She, unlike her father, sees slavery for the moral and religious atrocity that it is. Adhering to her principles, she badgers her father as he stubbornly ignores her. Her father’s death comes as a relief to her because she then gains the authority to free his slaves. Yet, Brown tactfully dodges portraying Georgiana as a white savior. Far from it, Brown is precise in noting that the slaves, through their own grit, saved themselves. Georgiana is an example of how whites could be helpful to that end, but are by no means the primary actors.

After Clotel is sold by her “husband,” she escapes and traverses the country while passing for a white man. She remains intent on finding her mother and sister, but she is obstructed along the way. The people she meets give the novel room to digress to describe the systems and circumstances that added to slaves’ oppression. Brown does not shy away from incorporating real examples of lynchings or slave captures to paint a grim portrait of the South, often citing newspaper clippings to ground his point. At one turn, Brown even describes how an epidemic of yellow fever in 1831 New Orleans disproportionately impacted slaves as they were forced to fill in for whites who had fallen ill. Soon, once tensions rose, protests caught fire, prompting Brown to ask,

Did not the American revolutionists violate the laws when they struck for liberty? They were revolters, but their success made them patriots—we were revolters, and our failure makes us rebels. Had we succeeded, we would have been patriots too. Success makes all the difference.

As the father of the African American novel, Brown’s work established the genre’s potential for invoking change. Clotel doesn’t just document America bending towards justice, it actively applies pressure.

As the father of the African American novel, Brown’s work established the genre’s potential for invoking change. Clotel doesn’t just document America bending towards justice, it actively applies pressure. Brown is always clear and concise in his demands. Even today, as oppressive systems have evolved into new forms, Brown’s words remain enduring directives for equality. In a philosophical moment, he describes how the first slaves were brought to Virginia only a few months before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. The passengers of each charted two halves of America that would run parallel to each other for centuries. Four hundred years later, the question Brown raises in Clotel still remains unanswered: “When shall one of those parallel lines come to an end?”

Author photo for Dylan CookDylan Cook is a student at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies English, with a concentration in creative writing, and Biology. He often reads and writes, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].

THE DARK HEART OF EVERY WILD THING, a novel by Joseph Fasano, reviewed by Michael McCarthy

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THE DARK HEART OF EVERY WILD THING
by Joseph Fasano
Platypus Press, 272 pages (forthcoming, September 1, 2020)

reviewed by Michael McCarthy 

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing cover art. A blue-green shape against a black background with white text

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In the moral universe of poet Joseph Fasano’s debut novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, death lurks in every corner of life. A father, bereaved of his wife, must journey through the teeming forests of British Columbia and hunt a fabled mountain lion, to him the very “mind of the wild.” Three years ago, it mauled his son, the father powerless to save him. Now, as he narrates his monomaniacal fight for survival, the hunt for the mountain lion becomes an obsession, borne of unfathomable grief, to exact revenge on a world that has stolen everything he loved.

It is a dramatic book, straddling the sentimental and the brutal. Accordingly, it divides each chapter into two sections, one to the hunt and the other to his marriage. While he recalls memories of his wife to last him through the cold and deadly wilderness, the memories end inevitably, as he fears his hunt soon will, in death. Loss is the overpowering theme of his life. When he returns to the woods to avenge his son’s death, he is chased by wolves and forced to eat snow, and he must reckon with the possibility that there are some things a man cannot save.

I use the word “man” deliberately. Despite its intentions, Dark Heart is characteristically masculine. For all the mystical poeticism layered over the hunt, it embodies a Hemingway-esque male fantasy. What’s more virile than roughing it alone in the wilderness, outfoxing ravenous beasts and still more ravenous hunters? While it strives for something nobler than its subject, its failure to address the gendered aspect of the father’s hunger for revenge chains the novel to the ground whenever it tries to soar.

Alongside his wife’s death, there is a more latent loss, another strike at his masculinity. Just as he lost his wife, he lost also his role as husband. This complicates his marital reflections in the wilderness. Is he remembering her or recreating her in his own image? Regardless, she comes across as a bland, incomplete counterpart to an obscenely masculine hero. He hunts; she dances. He shows his son how to build a house; she brings them lemonade. He gets to go on wild adventures; she tends to house chores. To his credit, he seems at least somewhat aware of this inequality. At one point, he recalls this exchange with a premarital lover:

“You are not ready.”
“For what?”
“To hold someone and not—” she searched for the words “—not make of her what you need.”

This could describe either Fasano or his protagonist.

It would be unfair, however, to characterize Dark Heart solely by its refusal to buck these misogynistic tropes. Rather, they read as something the novel struggles against. The narrative gropes for higher meaning through magisterial prose, equally concerned with philosophical abstractions as with blood-and-guts reality, and though it never fully succeeds, it reaches heights most books dare not consider. The prose alone can bring you to tears. It challenges, cleanses, saddens, lifts, pierces, and consoles, sometimes within a single paragraph. Take this passage as emblematic of the atmosphere Fasano conjures:

It was pleasant once to track in the early autumns, the chickadees and the violet-green swallow beginning always to sing their unfinished praise, the heron that always came north out of its range to cross once a season over the valley and disappear over the pines to god knows where. […] I’d loved it, too, the purring and caterwauling of the animal itself, and in the thaw of youth I’d believed in the myth that we were brothers, that if you hunger for something strongly enough in the night, strongly and without pride or malice, you become it, and whichever one of you is chosen to fall will yield itself willingly and truly in the nature of things, as a body at the high noon of its truth gathers back the vastness of its shadow.

If this language captivates you, so will the entire novel. Fasano is relentless in maintaining his narrator’s dense, hypnotic, imaginative voice. It accounts for almost all of the novel’s emotional range. Just as it details the father’s gory injuries and self-administered treatments, it gives way to moments of bracing tenderness. By now, the likeness to Moby-Dick should be obvious. (Really, just substitute a white whale for a mountain lion and a lost leg for a lost son.) When it isn’t bogged down in masculine reveries, it earns the comparison, describing universal themes with invigorating passion: mortality, grief, hope, darkness. Whether the prose succeeds in elevating the novel to the lofty existential plane it aspires to, the reader must decide.

Joseph Fasano author headshot

Joseph Fasano

If, in fact, the reader does decide. I still haven’t made heads or tails of the novel weeks after finishing it. Did I enjoy reading it? Frankly no. Has it fascinated me? More than almost any other book I can recall. It seems to me that this is how the novel was meant to be read. That is, not read but reckoned with. You must yield to its intense vision and follow the father’s voice to its last end. The novel doesn’t captivate you. It takes you prisoner.

After a story shadowed over by death, it ends on a note not devoid of hope. Fasano allows his protagonist to escape the book’s endless shadow, the darkness to lift, in a way utterly surprising yet perfectly fitting. Nevertheless, I lament the much richer novel he didn’t write. Clearly, he can write powerfully about anything he sets his mind to. I just wish he had devoted his capacious artistry to deconstructing the limiting gender roles that limit his own narrative. I find myself repeating a verse of a poem the narrator’s wife reads to him: “I wish what I wished you before, but harder.”

Michael McCarthy headshotMichael McCarthy is an aspiring writer of prose, poetry, and nonfiction from Braintree, Massachusetts who attends Haverford College, where he intends to major in English. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner.

ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS, a novel by Ocean Vuong, reviewed by Claire Kooyman

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ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS
by Ocean Vuong
Penguin Press, 256 pages
reviewed by Claire Kooyman

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous cover art. A black and white photograph of arms embracing a body

Click here to purchase this book

Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone. —Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong’s writing is steeped in memories, the history of which sometimes precedes him chronologically. This was true of his poetry in the collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, and it is also true of his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, recently released by Penguin Press. This novel is a recursive exploration of the path memories take through a family. The narrator’s life is impacted by the traumas his mother and grandmother suffered before he was born. As a very young child, Vuong’s narrator, Little Dog, learns quickly that not all authority figures can be trusted absolutely, and that even unconditional love has flaws. Throughout the novel, Vuong illustrates that we are all sharing space with the past, even as we exist in the present.

Little Dog (a nickname given to Vuong’s narrator by his grandmother as a way to make him seem less enticing to evil spirits who might steal him) writes to his mother as a way to confess and relate to her as an adult. His mother knows few words in her native Vietnamese or in English and cannot read, so she will never know what he is saying. The epistolary style of the novel, then, is ironic. Perhaps Little Dog knows that this is the only way he can explain himself to his mother, even if she will never understand; this style allows the narrator to express freely what they cannot discuss face-to-face. He brings up things his mother might not understand, like the racial heritage of American celebrities, and things too painful to discuss, even with time behind them. Even if most readers can’t directly relate to Little Dog’s Vietnamese immigrant heritage or the challenges of being gay, many children and parents feel unable to truly express themselves to the other, even without the burden of language standing in the way. This novel is like a book of secrets your mother or son might never tell you.

As a reader, one might question whether On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a novel at all. The writing fluidly switches from more traditional storytelling to something that resembles Vuong’s poetry. Is this a novel-length poem, or a novel written like poetry? He uses line breaks that a prose editor might assume were typos in a different work:

For summer. For your hands

were wet and Trevor’s a name like an engine starting up in the night. Who snuck out to meet a boy like you. Yellow and barely there.

Ocean Vuong author photo

Ocean Vuong

This passage about what Trevor is to Little Dog blends the best of poetry and prose beautifully. He disregards paragraphs and narrative for strong images and emotion; faced with white space, we linger on Little Dog’s hands reaching for Trevor the way that the narrator himself does in his memory. We feel the time he spent with Trevor, without it being explained to us in longform.

Vuong’s speedy switching between topics also evokes his poetry. Much of this novel reminds me of his poem, Aubade with Burning City—not just because it deals with fallout from the Vietnam War, but because of the stylistic way Vuong approaches his material. He approaches the themes of war, identity, and belonging from many angles, shows us the individual threads, and then weaves them together until the reader sees it was always one large tapestry. From “Aubade with Burning City:

Milkflower petals on the street
……………………………………………..like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright …

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.
………………Open, he says.
………………………………………..She opens.

The juxtaposed images found in this poem (milkflower petals, pieces of fabric, the bubbling teacup) are like the many disparate topics of Little Dog’s letters: Tiger Woods’s undiscussed Asian heritage, his grandfather’s significance in his life, his agreement with his mother about how hard it is to be different in America. In the novel, the sections are broken up by the different subject matter. But then, the themes coalesce: in both the novel and the poem, the present American influence is linked to mistrust and racism. Tiger Woods is part Asian, and a product of the Vietnam War—and Paul, Little Dog’s grandfather, is connected to him solely because of war, too. Much of the novel does this: takes disparate pieces and slowly pushes them together, until the reader can see the similarities.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous follows Little Dog as he grapples with his family’s identity, and the identity of being Vietnamese in a culture that attempted to destroy Vietnam. As if that weren’t enough, he also struggles to come to terms with being gay during the nineteen-nineties. His relationship with Trevor echoes his grandmother and grandfather’s during the Vietnam War: an interracial relationship with shame, remixed for the modern era. Like Little Dog, Trevor has pieces of himself that feel impossible to reconcile. Home is not a refuge for him; Trevor’s alcoholic father represents the popular opinion of a country and culture that do not understand either them, or gay sub-culture. Little Dog writes:

I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.

In the third section of the novel, an adult Little Dog returns to where he grew up to attend a funeral. In this portion, he also discusses the death of his grandmother, and the return of her ashes to Vietnam. Again, we see Vuong approaching the same theme from a different angle: many versions of the word home are returned to in this section—literally, the physical locations of Little Dog’s own home, and Vietnam, the original home of his family, and, less tangibly, the concept of home, of memory. He repeatedly says, “I remember the table” in this third section—sometimes referring to specific tables from his memory, and sometimes just discussing the idea of constructing, or reconstructing a memory.

Little Dog reminds us that memory is an active process, like art. Neither exists in a vacuum, but both are instead little universes unto themselves that are actively created by individuals with pasts. With much effort and introspection on Vuong’s part, they flicker, alive for a moment: briefly gorgeous in the mind of the reader.

Claire Kooyman HeadshotClaire Kooyman lives in Boulder, Colorado with her cats, Tom and Finn. She graduated from University of Colorado Boulder in 2018 with a degree in creative writing. She was recently published for the first time in Not Your Mother’s Breast Milk. She enjoys the view of the mountains from her balcony, and the sound of geese flying overhead.

CLEANNESS, a novel by Garth Greenwell, reviewed by Nikki Caffier Smith 

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CLEANNESS
by Garth Greenwell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages
reviewed by Nikki Caffier Smith

Buy this book on Bookshop.org to benefit Cleaver

Cleanness Book JacketThe week I read Cleanness, Garth Greenwell’s sophomore novel, I didn’t go outside. This was in Brooklyn during the third week of April, 2020—at the peak of COVID-19 cases in New York. We were warned to stay inside as much as possible, a difficult feat in a small one-bedroom apartment with a partner and two cats. I found myself lying about, staring at the ceiling, or cleaning, or reading, or cleaning some more. I found myself at odds: to go outside or stay in? To release my pent-up energy or do what I was told? Of course, in a case like this, staying in was the only conscionable thing to do. But the thought remained and followed me through my reading of Cleanness.

At its heart, Cleanness is a novel about duality: the duality of spirit, of desire, of self-perception. How one can be “dirty” and “clean” at the same time. With deft and expressive writing, Greenwell questions our understanding of these concepts. What does it mean to be dirty? What does it mean to be clean? To go outside or stay in. To stay in or go outside. Perhaps they are just two facets of the same thing.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Cleanness takes place in Sofia, Bulgaria, which will ring a bell for those who have read Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You. Both books follow the same unnamed narrator as he navigates life in this foreign country, searching for meaning, for feeling, for something he cannot quite name. And if What Belongs to You read as a kind of looking-in (at the narrator’s life, his past and his present), Cleanness reads more like an opening up: it peels back the layers that remained hidden in Greenwell’s first novel. We get a messier and even deeper sense of who the narrator is.

At its heart, Cleanness is a novel about duality: the duality of spirit, of desire, of self-perception. How one can be “dirty” and “clean” at the same time.

The novel is arranged into a lieder cycle (fitting with the narrator’s love of music and opera). Each chapter is sequenced to fit a specific pattern. The first section, comprised of three chapters, presents the narrator in three roles: as a teacher, as a sexual partner, and as a resident of Bulgaria. The second section explores his complex relationship with a Portuguese man known simply as R. The final section is set up similarly to the first, but in reverse order.

At times Cleanness feels less like a novel than a collection of short stories all concentrated on the different facets of a single man. And it’s true. Each of the nine stories in the book could stand alone, but together, they form a whole person.

The “separateness” of each chapter is no accident. It serves an important purpose: from the moment the novel begins, the reader is at the heart of the story. There is no single climax in this work, but rather climaxes throughout the ebb and flow of the narrator’s experiences. Greenwell is one of those rare authors who is not concerned with what the novel structure demands of a story, but rather how a story demands to be structured.

Garth Greenwell author photo

Garth Greenwell

And it’s not only the novel’s structure that mirrors the story it tells. Greenwell’s prose is intensely introspective, so much so that even in scenes with conversation, we still feel completely inside the narrator’s head. This is in part due to a complete lack of dialogue markers, which gives the novel a stream-of-consciousness quality and a poetic awareness that makes sense for Greenwell (who is a poet first and foremost). Greenwell’s prose elevates the narrator’s character, drawing him in sharper and sharper detail as we move along.

And here we are, back at the beginning. Back to the burning, acidic question that haunts every facet of the narrator’s life. What is cleanness? Is it wisdom that he can impart to his students? Is it connection to a country despite the fact that it doesn’t accept his queerness? Is it love? Is it the absence of shame? He struggles with desire, which looms over him, shameful and secret. Sex, for the narrator, is particularly resonant.

The sex in Cleanness is honest and explicit, sometimes violent, erotic, and brimming with meaning. And Greenwell doesn’t shy away from the messiness of sex. In reading these sections I was reminded of a long paragraph in the middle of What Belongs to You, in which the narrator recounts coping with an abusive, hateful, homophobic father in his adolescent years, absorbing his hatred and turning it inward. In Cleanness we see the grit and grime of this past displayed in sexual encounters. “I had never whipped anyone before,” the narrator explains, “but that was how my father had done it, taking the strap to us, as he said, that was how he punished us.”

He grapples with the desire to be punished and the desire to punish, feeling ashamed of both. The reader feels that pain and confusion explicitly. “Was it joy or defiance or despair, I wanted to know where one ended and the others began,” the narrator thinks. There is a constant push and pull, either a resistance or a giving in.

For who hasn’t wanted to do something they feel they shouldn’t? I think back to my desire to spend the day at the park when I had been warned to stay inside. There is shame in our desires. There will always be the public gaze looming over our decisions, over how we perceive ourselves. Will we choose to be dirty or clean? And where do we draw the line between the two? Can we definitively say that one is good and the other bad?

In the middle section, the narrator finds a release, a kind of brightness, in his relationship with R. About sex with R. he says: “Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did.”

But while he is grateful for the liberation from shame that R. provides him, the narrator still feels a dark longing. “I wanted something brutal, which was what frightened me,” he says, “I wanted to go back to what R. had lifted me out of…I wanted to ruin…the person he had made me.”

It is this inner war that makes Cleanness so relatable. For who hasn’t wanted to do something they feel they shouldn’t? I think back to my desire to spend the day at the park when I had been warned to stay inside. There is shame in our desires. There will always be the public gaze looming over our decisions, over how we perceive ourselves. Will we choose to be dirty or clean? And where do we draw the line between the two? Can we definitively say that one is good and the other bad?

At one point the narrator touches upon something, a release of shame, perhaps temporary, but there nonetheless. A stray dog comes to him in a moment of vulnerability for them both. It is a dog he knows well, and she wants to be let in. “She was dirty,” the narrator thinks. Then, in a moment of forgiveness, for himself, for the dog, he adds, “but what was a little dirt, I thought as I turned the latch, I should have let you in a long time ago, I said, I’m sorry.”

Nikki Caffier Smith HeadshotNikki Caffier Smith is a writer living in Brooklyn. She received a BA in Creative Writing from The Gallatin School at New York University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Typishly and Awakened Voices Magazine, and a short story of hers will soon be featured on Kaleidocast Podcast.

 

 

 

Sources:

Jones, Alden. “The Rumpus Interview with Garth Greenwell.” The Rumpus.net, 1 Feb. 2016, therumpus.net/2016/02/the-rumpus-interview-with-garth-greenwell/.

Kerziouk, Olga. “An Introduction to Bulgarian Literature.” European Studies Blog, 20 June 2016, blogs.bl.uk/european/2016/06/an-introduction-to-bulgarian-literature.html.

Wolahan, Emily. “5 Bulgarian Writers You Don’t Want to Miss: Center for the Art of Translation: Two Lines Press.” Center for the Art of Translation | Two Lines Press, 23 Feb. 2017, www.catranslation.org/blog-post/5-bulgarian-writers-you-dont-want-to-miss/.

WHAT I CARRY, a YA novel by Jennifer Longo, reviewed by Aja Todd

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WHAT I CARRY
by Jennifer Longo,
Random House Books for Young Readers, 336 pages
reviewed by Aja Todd 

Buy this book on Bookshop.org to benefit Cleaver

Cover art for What I CarryFrom the very first moment of her existence, Muiriel was born alone. Found abandoned at a medical center with no parents to claim her, Muiriel has lived in foster care her entire life. But blessed with a book of survival by naturalist John Muir and her experience in nearly twenty different foster homes, seventeen-year-old Muiriel knows she will not let her past dictate her future:

Aging out is terrifying.

Still…I can’t wait.

I can’t help believing I will be okay. Maybe I’m setting myself up for spectacular failure, but all this time I’ve been so lucky; if I am as perfect as I can be, I bet I can stave off the likely possibility of being homeless within a year, or pregnant, or dead. Outcomes for kids who age out with no family are mostly a nightmare, and it makes me furious. I refuse to let the stupid circumstance of my birth ruin me. I am a Muir, for Christ’s sake! Not in meaningless blood, but in what truly matters. I believe that the nurses who held me and named me could tell John Muir’s singular life force is in me and in our shared name, and I will end my childhood the way it began: alone. Finally free to live and take care of myself in the wilderness of the wide world.  

I hope.

In her latest novel, What I Carry, Jennifer Longo brings us on a heart-warming journey of independence, love, and vulnerability. While it can be difficult for anyone as a teenager to find their place in the world, Longo delicately conveys what it’s like for a girl who never had a solid foundation to start with. For Muiriel, she believes her only true home is the unchanging outdoors —the forest, the night, the stars  — and the only foundation she can ever rely on is herself.

That is, until Muiriel meets her final foster mother, Francine.

Across Seattle waters on a thirty-minute ferry, Muiriel appears to find paradise in the cozy home of Francine. Unlike past caretakers, Francine’s interests are all too similar to hers. While others enforced rigid boundaries on Muiriel, Francine gives her something she’s never experienced before: freedom. Freedom to take her time and adjust to her surroundings, to explore her new town, to meet new people. To Muiriel, it all feels too good to be true. Despite her instincts to survive and disconnect from the world, Muiriel starts to find comfort with Francine who strives to understand her; she makes friends who like her for just who she is; she even gains an opportunity for the career of her dreams. There doesn’t appear to be anything holding her back from a promising future.

But it’s difficult to trust others; it’s even more difficult to trust happiness.

Jennifer Longo

Longo’s What I Carry wonderfully explores that specific, transitional moment in one’s life. A moment that isn’t pushed forward by external events, but the struggles within oneself. Throughout the novel, readers learn why Muiriel carries herself as she does, and why being presented with this new support system is all too strange for her to accept. Too often in fiction, characters in foster care are shown as victims rather than people who, like anyone else, are just trying to survive. Muiriel represents that survival. Her strong sense of justice, independence, cautious behavior, yet love for other people show what she needed to get through the rootless life she has had so far. And while readers may find this new home an obvious solution to Muiriel’s uncertain future, her experiences have proven the danger of staying, and it all may be too much of a risk to take.

The story of Muiriel teaches us the importance of learning someone’s circumstances before judgment, the patience pain needs to dull, and the strength that is needed not only to be independent but to depend on someone. Through the beauty of that small town, the comfort of Francine’s home, and the openness of new friends, Longo shows us the power of love beyond family ties.

Aja Todd HeadshotAja Todd is a growing writer and editor from Chicago. She  earned her Bachelor of Arts in Fiction at Columbia College Chicago, where her work can be seen in Columbia’s Hair Trigger anthologies. She worked at Cleaver Magazine as an editorial intern in Spring 2020.

TO THE BONE, poems by Angela Narciso Torres, reviewed by Alina Stefanescu

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TO THE BONE
by Angela Narciso Torres
Sundress Publications
e-chapbook, 34 pages
reviewed by Alina Stefanescu

To The Bone is a book about the particular sort of remembering that accompanies losing a parent to Alzheimer’s. The poet’s mother is brought tenuously, haltingly, on the page. A sense of slippage is accomplished through layering, repetitions, and fluctuating temporality to reveal how a disease of memory appears to the mind struggling to find shore in presence.

“If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot.” So begins the first line of “If You Go To Bed Hungry”, a series of adages and if-then statements, the superstitions handed along by a mother, which establish place as memory, itself, or the act of remembering.

The next poem, “Sundawning”, is dedicated directly to her mother, Carmen. Here we enter the recurring sensory themes and motifs: the piano music, the scent of “guava and rust”, the mother’s hands on the piano, her voice singing kundimans. Pacing isn’t so set so much but stanza-length or white space but through the use and repetition of certain verbs, and this sort of verbed breath-making sets Torres’ poetic voice apart.

The use of italics to offset the mother’s words renders them stable, set apart from the unreliable shifting text. There is a sense in which italics also hallow these words like a song refrain; the italics tell us what to remember:

The sweetest meat clings—
she insists. Peels a mango.
Amber rivers training her elbows.
A trail of L’Air Du Temps wafts
in her wake.

The perfume, translated as Air of Time, and various scents, act as anchors through which the mother is held in place. Scent is our most animal memory, our strongest connection, our pheromonic drive, an elemental and intimate way of knowing, and Torres returns to certain scents as if to draw more from them.

Rosaries are recurrent motifs, whether in dreams (see “Sundowning”) or in the title, the frame itself, as in “Self-Portrait With Rosary Beads”:

I am olive wood,
carmelian, plastic, black onyx. Am rosebuds
pressed into fragrant spheres. Your heat
is my mask; your worry, my fire. Pick
your mystery.

Time, space, and personhood blur; the point of view is somewhere outside the narrator, in the air between daughter and mother. We see this in “The Immigrant Visits Her Mother,” a long stanza with tiny twists after enjambments, and the emptiness that seeks the italics of the mother’s voice–the one that was real. Insofar as Alzheimer’s asks one to recreate the absent mother, to fill the vessel they’d abandoned, the poem is an act of preservation that crumbles as it proceeds.

Even when using first-person, Torres rarely inserts herself into the poems; she is there as an archivist, a witness, a keeper of memories. There are multiple I’s. “Narrow Bed” is heartbreaking in its gaps, its chunks of white space, its details–a still-damp blue robe, “a narrow bed” in a row of narrow beds, “chenille slippers”, and “why am I here“–that existential question which acquires a different valence in the context of a disremembered life. This question is worse, somehow, in the mouth of amnesia, in the unmoored self.

Torres offers piano music as a language that hasn’t been lost between mother and daughter. In “Fugue and Prelude,” music serves as a metaphysical metronome, keeping time between the then of childhood and the now. The narrator marks time as “decades of preludes ahead”. In “What I Learned This Week”, the taut tercets circle the question of time–what time is, what it means to know in time:

……..Some say music memory
is the last to go. Still, I have no windfalls

for the empty baskets of my mother’s eyes.
When I returned from Manila, the peonies I’d left

in half-blossom were stunted by spring storms.
A bud that will not bloom is called a bullet.

Pain is carried in blossoms and botanical elisions. In this way, loss is personalized without the poet claiming it.

In “Recuerdo A Mi Madre”, the narrator watches her mother sleep when she was still intensely inhabited, still herself” as recognized by others. The poet continues:

……..I dipped my pen
in father’s tears. To know

my mother requires
the patience of a miner

carving amethyst from rock.
To know my mother

is to memorize
a labyrinth of longing.

Again there is “her guava scent” accompanied by piano music, “prayer and dirge”, and the longing, named this time, as labyrinth. There is no motion forward, only a circling with no relief or reprieve. There is no kenosis, no spiritual revelation–just the slow theft which becomes part of the seam of things.

Angela Narciso Torres

Torres grapples with difficult questions by using botanical and entomological metaphors as a sort of counterpoint to carry the weight. I loved “The Abscission Layer’s form–a diptych in two-columns, one column constructed of words from an encyclopedia article on leaf layers, the other column a loose collage of words from diagnosis, folk remedies, “the jagged calligraphy of twigs”. I read it vertically and horizontally several times, and found new things in each layer of this leafing. “Some Uses of Friction” approaches the issue of assisted living and her mother’s care by using data about insects, building a metaphor from cricket wings, to inhabit, rather than resolve, insoluble tension.

“Self-Portrait As Revision”, an anaphora of “I am” statements, offers the most exposed view of the narrator. The “I am” sets out a solid presence, a voice which can be held accountable, an active being rather than one who is acted upon. Since Alzheimer’s is a story of helplessness for all parties, and there is no bystander–no one who is not a victim– I value this poem’s attempt to speak for the poet, and how it shifts directly into “Sea Psalm”, which addresses a god in psalm form, both visually and lyrically. “Let me begin again, Lord.” In this revision, however, the poet returns to a reliance on something outside the self, a note of supplication.

The poet continues reaching towards her mother in “Pearl Diving”, a list poem in eight sections, through kundimans and rosaries. There is an image that haunts me in this poem–an image of the mother’s hands praying an “invisible” rosary, running her fingers along beads in the air. And “What Happens Is Neither” beginning nor ending. The loss continues in the land of remembering the mother whose memory no longer includes her husband.

There is no resolution, no revelation, no final reckoning. “Trees know best the now of things,” the poet says in the book’s final stanza. In the slight inversions of syntax, the use of botanical certainties, the absence of an inhabited, stable narrator, Torres leaves us with the mother’s words lined up like rosary beads to fondle again, again. It is difficult to write loss in Alzheimer’s without losing the integrity of the subject, and I admire Torres’ skill in keeping love entire without minimizing the cruelty of diseases which attack memory.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others.  More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com or @aliner.

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook

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MINOR DETAIL
by Adania Shibli 
translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
New Directions Books, 144 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook
Buy this book on Bookshop.Org

Book cover for Minor Detail: Adania Shibli. Torn photograph of face over photograph of the desert.Tables need at least three legs to stand; guitar strings only ring when taut around two points. Minor Detail, Adania Shibli’s third novel, takes its title as a challenge: how much can hinge upon one moment? How can a single moment of pain bridge the past to the present? 

Shibli, a novelist and academic, is one of the few contemporary chroniclers of the West Bank. Her writing is concise. All of her novels fall under two hundred pages, all of her sentences are pared down to the bare minimum. In describing her new novel, Shibli said that her writing philosophy boils down to, “what is written, and what should never be written.” Her careful narration is more than the iceberg strategy of implying a story beneath the surface. Instead, Shibli’s writing is in tension with what it cannot say. Information is cut out not because it’s useless, but because, like the sun, it’s too painful to look at directly. 

The novel is split into two nearly equal parts that mirror and distort each other. It begins in 1949 in the Negev Desert. Israel has just gained independence, but their military presence lingers, leaving an Israeli officer and his unit to comb the desert looking for anyone who can be deemed suspicious. The officer has no name or features. He’s given only enough detail to suggest a form from his outline. He is one man and he is fifty men, each more hostile than the last. Shibli’s narration puts him on a leash and scrutinizes his every move. After he’s brutally bitten by a vague “creature,” he sets out to kill every spider in his path. Was it a spider that gave him his wound? Probably not, but he can’t bring himself to heal without inflicting pain somewhere. It becomes a part of his routine. He lives, he eats, he breathes, he hates. 

Adania Shibli author photo

Adania Shibli

The officer’s penchant for hate becomes the fulcrum that pivots to the second act. Under the officer’s hand, the soldiers find a Bedouin camp, kill the inhabitants, and torture a young girl. Routine hate. So routine that, in the present day, a young woman is intrigued by the event because of, “the date it occurred, perhaps because there was nothing particularly unusual about the main details.” Enter a new, nameless representative: a Ramallah woman who pays more attention to outlines than the bodies that fill them. As she investigates this murder, pieces of 1949 (the desert, the officers, the spiders) bleed through time into her life. Her obsession with minor details from the past blind her from properly seeing the present. She travels from Palestine deep into Israel, retracing the Bedouin girl’s path, retracing her history, but never approaching an opportunity to rewrite it. 

The officer’s penchant for hate becomes the fulcrum that pivots to the second act. Under the officer’s hand, the soldiers find a Bedouin camp, kill the inhabitants, and torture a young girl. Routine hate. 

It’s from this repetition, this historical déjà vu, that emerges Shibli’s narrative control. The novel’s halves are linear in themselves, but their entanglement prevents them from ever being distinct. Time vacillates between the past and the present. Just as the events of the past shape the present, experiences from the present shape how we interrogate the past. A lot has changed since 1949. By land area, Palestine is a small fraction of what it used to be. But, as Shibli reminds us, the people are still there, and they are far from minor. The nations have changed shape, but the terms of war have remained the same. With them, the experiences, casualties, and memories of war continue into the present. Shibli demands that they be heard, because the present can never improve without reconciling the past. 

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead! Actually, it’s not even past.” No novel exemplifies this maxim better than Minor Detail.

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead! Actually, it’s not even past.” No novel exemplifies this maxim better than Minor Detail. It’s rare that a novel so subtle in its construction and sparse in its prose can cut so deeply. Shibli warps time, collapsing the past and present, to depict a Palestine that has learned to live with wartime atrocities, “in everyday life.” In the novel’s present-day half, war lives as an unwelcome, unhealthy, and unyielding presence. Like polluted water, it can be easy to ignore if you’re not the one who has to drink it. Shibli’s novel is an order to look, listen, and taste for yourself. 

Author photo for Dylan CookDylan Cook is a student at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies English, with a concentration in creative writing, and Biology. He often reads and writes, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected]

 

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS, a memoir by Jenn Shapland, reviewed by Claire Oleson

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MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS
by Jenn Shapland
Tin House Press, 266 pages
Reviewed by Claire Oleson

The book jacket for "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers" by Jenn Shapland. A navy blue book cover with a pleasing font in green and white.

Click to purchase this title.

Jenn Shapland’s hybridized memoir and biography straddles what its seemingly-impossible title suggests: an ability to write about oneself by writing about someone else. Far from taking on a myopic or narcissistic project, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers i​s eager to talk about the self for the sake of empathy, to revive written-off lives, to question presumed heterosexualities, and to make a bodily connection with now-irrecoverable marginalized bodies. Spurred by discovering letters written between the Southern playwright and novelist Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie, Shapland dives into the paper trail of a writer she wasn’t previously researching. On the hinge that the letters she discovered while interning at the Harry Ransom Center were highly unexpected love letters between two women, Shapland opens the door into the book that follows and into her own still-forming identity simultaneously.

So much of this biography lives in flux. It jumps anachronistically between times and places, between Carson’s young adulthood, her time at Yaddo (an artist’s retreat in Saratoga, New York) and at the February house (an artistic commune in Brooklyn), and even back and forth between Carson’s narrative and Shapland’s personal life. The empathetic bridge Shapland constructs between herself and Carson McCullers is, too, incredibly watery and mobile. It’s a bridge set up largely on the word “queer,” which here can mean gay, LGBTQ, bizarre, failing at normalcy, and or can denote relationship between a myriad of these possible definitions. This bridge is crossed through mutual identities, through a longing for a lesbian history, which, as Shapland writes, “there hardly is,” and through a desire to find the language to cross a long-held lexical gap and retrieve the queer narratives that a normative history would abandon.

Consciously situated in this lexical gap that queer women have historically occupied, (particularly closeted queer women from points in history where queerness was not eagerly recorded and was often intentionallly erased,) Shapland’s experimental work of nonfition digs through muddled archives searching less for Carson’s exact life and more for the possiblility of her love. Shapland has written a speculative investigation on purpose. As she remarks “In a world built by men for men and their pursuits, a woman who loves women does not register– and is not registered, i.e. written down” she shows a sort of thesis early on: an intention to write down, to name, and in doing so, to have something which she, too, might go by. Unequipped with the word “lesbian,” McCullers calls “the women she loved her ‘imaginary friends’” and permits, even insists, that they navigate a space between the real and the covert, the actualized and the forged. The reader watches McCullers, without a vernacular for her loving, married  twice to the same man whom she narrowly escaped dying with, given something of an extension, a clear empathy in the writing and recording that Shapland offers here.

Jean Shapland Author headshot

Jean Shapland

As it embarks on an entirely unestablished form of biography, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers​ is not afraid to show itself in progress. Readers encounter Shapland contending with partial accounts, content at finding shards and glimpses rather than neat and finished stories. Carson McCullers is also shown struggling with partial stories, unsuccessful pursuits of women she adored, and an unclear conception of her own sexuality and identity amongst real “imaginary friends.” Shapland sees this struggle for identity, this existence outside of easy or clearly accessible language, as a familiar “protracted becoming.” Shapland shows that queer history is always in contention with loss, with a lack of resources, of material, of proof, and even of language with which to preserve and communicate itself. To see Carson’s queer life amidst biographers who would straight-wash it, Shapland suggests “you have to read like a queer person.” It is less an immediate sharing of language, and actually, as Shapland astutely writes, a shared “dearth of language” that most characterizes how a contemporary queer writer might connect to one locked in a time where she could not easily write herself down.

There will always be less queer history than history. It may always be called “queer history” in a need to specify itself whereas the defaulted histories, the overwhelmingly heterosexual, white, male, and colonialsit histories will be, Shapland demonstrates, “given the benefit of the doubt.” Perhaps because of its roots in this sense of incompletion, as the book unfolds, it is always showing its own process rather than presenting a finality. Shapland notes that memoir itself “is peeking into the windows of your own life. A voyeurism of the self. An interior looting” and that in her work, she is “perched outside [her] own house as [she tries] to see into Carson’s.” Structured in short vignettes, some no longer than a page, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers​ arguably navigates queerly as well– maybe because it wants to, but also, more likely, because it has no other way to be. It is a queer piece of writing that teaches queer readership simply in being read. To empathize with Shapland’s work sifting through transcripts of Carson’s therapy sessions, which Carson recorded with the intention of writing her own biography, is to empathize with the longing to find longing that might look like your own. Here lies what the book might be said to be “about.” Less than any one life story, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers d​ etails a search and a want, a need for connection, and an effort to acquire language for what so much of history has deemed unspeakable.

Shapland peeks in to Carson’s life at different windows, detailing flashes of her living, her marriages and divorces with Reeves McCullers, her relationships with women, and her life’s possible relationship to Shapland’s own. In its sentences, this book opens the cupboards of Carson McCullers’ life and exhibits little-known inventories of Carson’s personal and emotional materials, down to a lost ashtray. However, as a whole, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is much less about Carson McCullers and much more about a need for queer women and queer artists to know that their lives are not alone, are not only in silences between speech, and have existed long before they were able to be spoken of.

Yes, unfailingly, the narrative is peppered with knowledge of Maggie Nelson, ​Buffy the Vampire Slayer, t​ he visual language of androgyny, Audre Lorde, and many other notes that may linger longer in a queer readers’ ears as a language that lingers behind individual words. It is fun and sad and as contemporary as it is historical, pulling from highly academic, nuanced, and difficult ways to relate to obscured literary pasts as well as punchier ways of relating. One of the latter is communicated early on in the text when Shapland writes “Like, ​same​” in response to Carson’s title ​The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. F​ rom examining Carson’s wardrobe to eating pizza in Carson’s home in Georgia to unearthing the medical aftermath of her strokes to combing through her photographs, Jenn Shapland is, as she puts it “hunting lesbians” where other writers have only found Carson’s “traveling companions, good friends, roommates, close friends, dear friends, obsessions, crushes” and “special friends.” Shapland is renaming, is making real and whole the imagined and the partial.

Backed by extensive research, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers ​closes the lexical gaps that concern its opening with belief rather than a documented citation. Shapland decides that “When Carson says she was in love, I believe she meant she was in love.” With this act of believing comes an invitation to the reader, an ingenious and vital request to join Shapland in the same language, to allow a love to be sufficient to be known and named and sustained on its own mere utterance. Shapland’s writing transcends genre and bends established modes of language. She takes a grammatical descriptivist’s approach to liberating queerness form erasure, and, in insisting it be written, allows Carson’s history to become a bridge to readers and writers now, permission to have a history in the first place.

Claire Oleson Author PhotoCleaver Poetry Reviews Editor Claire Oleson is a writer hailing from Grand Rapids Michigan. She’s a 2019 grad of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. Her work has been published by the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, Siblíní Art and Literature journal, Newfound Journal, NEAT Magazine, Werkloos Magazine, and Bridge Eight Magazine, among others. She is also the 2019 winner of the Newfound Prose Prize. Her chapbook is forthcoming in May, 2020. Contact her by email. 

POETIC ANATOMIES: Dissecting Form and Formlessness in Poetry, a workshop taught by Claire Oleson | January 16 to February 20, 2021

antelope skeleton

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE, Image as an Engine in Poetry, a Workshop taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson | September 19 to October 24, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE, Image as an Engine in Poetry, a Workshop taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson | September 19 to October 24, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE, Image as an Engine in Poetry, a Workshop taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson | July 11 to August 15, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE, Image as an Engine in Poetry, a Workshop taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson | July 11 to August 15, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS, a memoir by Jenn Shapland, reviewed by Claire Oleson

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Book Jacket

An Interview with Claire Oleson, author of THINGS FROM THE CREEK BED WE COULD HAVE BEEN, by Andrea Caswell

Things From the Creek Bed jacket copy

BURIED ALIVE: A TO-DO LIST, poems by Carole Bernstein, reviewed by Claire Oleson

jacket art for Buried Alive

99 NAMES OF EXILE, poems by Kaveh Bassiri, reviewed by Claire Oleson

Jacket cover 99 Names of Exile

PORTRAIT OF A BODY IN WRECKAGES, poems by Meghan McClure, reviewed by Claire Oleson

PORTRAIT OF A BODY IN WRECKAGES, poems by Meghan McClure, reviewed by Claire Oleson

TART HONEY, poems by Deborah Burnham, reviewed by Claire Oleson

TART HONEY, poems by Deborah Burnham, reviewed by Claire Oleson

BLACK GENEALOGY, poems by Kiki Petrosino, reviewed by Claire Oleson

BLACK GENEALOGY, poems by Kiki Petrosino, reviewed by Claire Oleson

FLOWER WARS, poems by Nico Amador, reviewed by Claire Oleson

FLOWER WARS, poems by Nico Amador, reviewed by Claire Oleson

HEMMING FLAMES, poems by Patricia Colleen Murphy, reviewed by Claire Oleson

HEMMING FLAMES, poems by Patricia Colleen Murphy, reviewed by Claire Oleson

THE LOVERS’ PHRASEBOOK, poems by Jordi Alonso, reviewed by Claire Oleson

THE LOVERS' PHRASEBOOK, poems by Jordi Alonso, reviewed by Claire Oleson

YOU ASK ME TO TALK ABOUT THE INTERIOR, poems by Carolina Ebeid, reviewed by Claire Oleson

YOU ASK ME TO TALK ABOUT THE INTERIOR, poems by Carolina Ebeid, reviewed by Claire Oleson

DISINHERITANCE, poems by John Sibley Williams, reviewed by Claire Oleson

DISINHERITANCE, poems by John Sibley Williams, reviewed by Claire Oleson

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT, poems by Melody S. Gee, reviewed by Claire Oleson

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT, poems by Melody S. Gee, reviewed by Claire Oleson

EDIBLE FLOWERS, poems by Lucia Chericiu, reviewed by Claire Oleson

EDIBLE FLOWERS, poems by Lucia Chericiu, reviewed by Claire Oleson

THE ROYAL ABDULS, a novel by Ramiza Shamoun Koya, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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THE ROYAL ABDULS
by Ramiza Shamoun Koya
Forest Avenue Press, 303 pages
Reviewed by Beth Kephart

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Cover of The Royal Abduls: Ramiza Shamoun Koya. A view across a golden lake of apartment buildings, which reflect the Taj Mahal onto the water.

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Where do we belong, and to whom? Are we most ourselves when we are by ourselves, or are we most free when rooted deep inside family responsibility?

During the day and a half that I ravenously read Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel, The Royal Abduls, I asked myself these questions. I leaned into the lives of Koya’s magnificently drawn characters, into the nest of troubles they inadvertently twigged together, into the love they did not know how to express. Or forgot to express. Or ran out of time to express.

As it happens.

The Royal Abduls is a family story about an Indian-American boy named Omar, his parents, his aunt, his grandparents, and his friends. Every character here is reckoning with a post 9/11 world and its overt and unarticulated prejudices. Omar, who is eleven when we meet him, has recently adopted an Indian accent and is researching (and fantastically embroidering) a family history no one has actively passed down. His aunt, the persuasively particular evolutionary biologist Amina, has just moved to DC, Omar’s hometown, to join a toxic research lab. Omar hopes his aunt will help decode the mysteries of his family’s past and immediate present. At the very least, perhaps she’ll transport him to a local cricket game and yell spontaneous insults with him at the opposing team. After all, Amina has just left a long-term boyfriend who had hoped she’d settle down with him, and Omar is the closest thing to a son Amina will ever have, and so there should be privileges.

Ramiza Shamoun Koya author photoWith clear but never plain language, Koya allows her story to unfold—Omar’s troubles at home, Omar’s troubles at school, Amina’s challenges at the lab and challenges as the aunt she tries so hard to be. Spectacularly plausible but original, well-paced but sensuous, Koya’s plot thickens with events Amina cannot control. Omar’s plight as a young boy judged by the color of his skin and the lonely desperation of his fantasies is deeply moving. Amina, like most of us, does not have answers for the questions that he asks:

She searched her mind for the words that could soothe the hunger in his heart and the fear in hers. She understood his ache for reassurance that their family, history, the world made sense. But all she could think to tell him was that he should find a way to escape into an inner world, to fiercely guard his solitude. Because there were no guarantees, and there were always people who were disappointing and cruel, and you could go your whole life searching but never find a place where you belonged. But she couldn’t say that, not to an eleven-year-old.

Amina loves but she’s always running. She admires commitments she can’t make. She endlessly judges herself, asking herself (and so asking us) whether our passions have as much value as our actions:

Did studying insects count for anything in such a world? She doubted it and yet she had no choice; this was what she loved to do, it absorbed her. She had fought for this career, and she didn’t want it cheapened by the fact that she was a passive bystander in a world that demanded impassioned activism. If she were a better person, she would be protesting and supporting legal action and spending her money on campaigns. Or fighting for the freedom of women, Muslim  women like her mother’s mother and sisters and cousins, in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or Nigeria…. But instead she would go to the Himalayas to stalk wild things and pray not to be disturbed.

Don’t read The Royal Abduls if you are hungry; scene after scene steams with a dish, a scent, a meal. Don’t read it if you prefer the kind of stories whose endings you can easily predict; the ending of this story aches and it is earned.

Do read The Royal Abduls if you are searching for hope in a complicated world—not every day hope, not the Hollywood version, but the kind that honors the nearly irresolvable dualities of ourselves. We’ll never have everything we want because we’ll never know just what we want. We’ll never be who we want to be, because our changeable world keeps reconfiguring our options. What we can do, Koya suggests, is stop protecting ourselves from love, on the one hand, and stop hoping that love won’t be messy, on the other. Because love is messy. Love is a question we can never perfectly answer.

Beth Kephart author photoBeth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist, and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. A memoir in essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press in February 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

SQUARE HAUNTING, nonfiction by Francesca Wade, reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

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SQUARE HAUNTING
by Francesca Wade
Tim Duggan Books, 383 pages
 
reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

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The book jacket for "Square Hunting." Portraits of Virginia Woolf, H.D., Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, and Dorothy Sayers are outlined in several bright colors.

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In a short piece of writing on “London Under Siege,” written during World War II, Virginia Woolf wrote that “everybody is feeling the same thing: therefore no one is feeling anything in particular. The individual is merged in the mob.” Reading these words now, as we live through a different collective social crisis, I am reminded of the significance of individual intellectual and emotional life as a key form of sustenance and even political action.

I came across this quote in Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, an examination of the intellectual and personal lives of five furiously independent women living in Mecklenburgh Square, at the far edge of Bloomsbury, between the two world wars. In her introduction, Wade expressly notes that “these women were not a Bloomsbury Group: they lived in Mecklenburgh Square at separate times, though one or two knew each other, and others were connected through shared interests, friends, even lovers.” All five women were searching for ways to find fulfilling and engaged public lives in times of emergency, yet their views on how to do this often radically differ.

The emphasis in Wade’s book is on individuality, these women’s rooms of their own, rather than a monolithic view of a ‘feminist life.’ Besides Woolf, Square Haunting introduces us to the poet H.D., the classicist Jane Harrison, the economic historian Eileen Power and the detective novelist Dorothy Sayers. The vision of gender itself presented throughout the book is complex. H.D., once called the “perfect bisexual” by Freud in their analysis, wrote, “I have tried to be man or woman but I have to be both.” Sayers enjoyed wearing men’s clothing, writing “if the trousers do not attract you…for the moment I do not want to attract you, I want to enjoy myself as a human being.” These women are ambitious, not simply as women, but within their respective fields.

So how does Wade show this? She brings us through the peculiar turning points in which all these women lived in Mecklenburgh Square. These moments of transformations range from H.D.’s youthful tumult and unhappy first marriage to the late years of Harrison in which she turned abruptly from classics to Russian literature. Square Haunting is an episodic book, though one full of reverberations across different times. In the space of this review, I can’t hope to cover the full range of stories in the book. The two final sections, on Power and Woolf, had a surprising urgency as I sat reading during our current state of emergency.

Power was trained as a Medieval Historian at Cambridge and started her career as a lecturer there until 1920, a time when women were still not granted full membership of the university. She moved to teaching at the London School of Economics, an incubator for the developing Labour Party and a home of progressive ideas. Power was invested, both in her historical work and political engagements, in internationalism. She was an enthusiastic proponent of the League of Nations, the aspirational united global front set up after the First World War. Her major 1939 lectures on the wool trade in English medieval history, meanwhile, writes Wade, viewed it not as a time of small self contained communities but rather of

‘large scale international trade.’…For Eileen Power, the greatest horror of war lay in its negation of personal bonds: its infringement on private freedoms and its disdain for the human values of empathy and tolerance. As a historian, she wanted to mobilize against fascism and nationalism, and to affirm, through her writing, the value of a cultural tradition that transcends borders and rejects parochialism.

Francesca Wade headshot

Francesca Wade

Reading Power’s passionate arguments for what she called “world citizenship” is striking now, as we find ourselves on a precipice between global solidarity and parochial isolationism. Power, notes Wade, was “always determined to define herself in opposition to what she thought of as stereotypical ‘Bloomsbury,’” focusing her gatherings in Mecklenburgh Square on “action, not aesthetics.” Woolf moved to Mecklenburgh Square as World War II raged and London lived in fear of bombings. The question which would occupy her was “how to go on, through war.” She moved through it writing through a complex tangle of the past and the present. She began writing her biography of the art critic Roger Fry, finding the current crisis “not so real as Roger in 1910 at Gordon Square, about which I’ve just been writing . . . how I bless Roger, & wish I could tell him so, for giving me himself to think of—what a help he remains—in this welter of unreality.” She also began writing about her own memories, finding them “‘more real than the present moment,’ and…she was able to ‘spin a kind of gauze over the war’ by retreating into a world that existed only in her mind.” Slowly, this extended to the present as Woolf “decided to interweave vignettes of the past with diary-like entries on the present.” In Woolf’s section, a commitment to creativity and individuality become what Wade terms “a form of resistance” amidst crisis.

Visiting Mecklenburgh Square through this book allows for a useful escape from our current moment to understand it better. Jane Harrison wrote, inspired by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, that “each of us is a snowball growing bigger every moment, and in which all our past, and also the past out of which we sprang, all the generations behind us, is rolled up, involved.” Wade’s book is the ideal type of biography for the moment with layers of enjoyable historical detail of all kinds as well as an argument for the independent life. By going into the past and particularly past moments of crisis, it is possible to start imagining a future.

Author Photo of Gabriel ChazanGabriel Chazan is an art historian and writer. Gabriel completed an MA at University College London and BA at Sarah Lawrence College. He writes a newsletter on art and books on The Expanded Field.

POLITICS IS FOR POWER, nonfiction by Eitan Hersh, reviewed by Brian Colker

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POLITICS IS FOR POWER
by Eitan Hersh
Scribner, 288 pages
reviewed by Brian Colker

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Book jacket for "Politics is for Power." Male and female figures with speech bubbles outlined in the American flag. Motif in colors are red, white, blue, black.On a recent Sunday under quarantine, my spouse Susan Sheu and I donned costume wigs for our Zoom meeting. Twelve volunteers from the Los Angeles area sat at our respective kitchen tables, couches, and easy chairs and wrote postcards for California 38th District assembly member Christy Smith, who is running for Congress via a special election on May 12. Susan came up with the concept “wigging out for Democracy”; she thought that wearing wigs would be a festive and interesting way to make the Zoom meeting less tedious. It worked well: despite the quarantine and general malaise, wearing the wigs did add levity and made the afternoon go by faster.

Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, believes that Zoom meetings like this are critical for progressives. In his new book, Politics is for Power, he contrasts volunteer activity with posting rants on Facebook or watching the news, which he brands “hobbyism”. For decades, organizers from Saul Alinsky, infamous ‘radical’ and author of the classic Rules for Radicals,  and Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz, the intellectual godfather of Obama For America, have pondered how to get liberals off their couches (and off social media) to take meaningful action.

Hersh wants to know why so many educated white Americans consume a tremendous amount of news but rarely volunteer or perform any type of political activity. One-third of Americans spend two hours a day on politics, and 80% of this group are hobbyists. Most hobbyists are men, and they tend to be white. Hersh’s theory and worry is that hobbyism masquerades as activism, leaving a vacuum that bad actors or extremists are filling. He gives the ominous example of the North Carolina KKK helping get opioid addicts off the street and then recruiting them. The Klan is pursuing political power.

Author Photo of Eitan Hersh

Eitan Hersh

Prior to 2016, I was one of the hobbyists that irritate Hersh; after 2016, I became an activist (he uses the word ‘volunteer’). Hersh has had a similar journey: he and I both have the fanaticism of the newly converted. Hersh’s analysis veers off track in places, but I support his general thesis: partisan news consumption is rampant, and bad for democracy, and is hurting the volunteer actions that would strength the country. We need to rebuild the state parties from the ground up, and to do so means engaging face-to-face with neighbors in a way that delivers service to them.

Hersh traces hobbyism to the decline of party control over the nominating process (i.e., the popular primary model—which started in 1972) and the rise of cable news in the 1990s. Since the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and the advent of cable, news has become written for outrage and to entertain partisans. This combination of populism and an unrestrained political media business model has created political news consumers.

This has caused partisanship to explode. As one would expect, the most partisan people tend to be the best informed. However, despite the popular cliché of uninformed rubes consuming Russian propaganda, the best informed are the biggest consumers of fake news:

The researchers found that participants who were most interested in and most knowledgeable about politics consumed fake news the most. Those people weren’t easily duped by the lies of fake news stories. They were sophisticated consumers who sought the fake stories because they are junkies.

Hersh’s conclusion is that hardcore partisans are literally addicted to the highly partisan rivalry, identical to a rabid sports fan. They are also less likely to interact with those on the other side (or, presumably, to volunteer).

The make-up of the most engaged donors and primary voters have become sharply ideological on both sides, so that moderate politicians are disincentivized from running for office, and those in office are punished for compromise and rewarded for starkly partisan positions. The media environment is amplifying this—conflict is more entertaining than long, technical debates that grind towards legislative compromise:

On cable and social media, ideologues call out politicians who veer toward compromise. They one-up each other in taking more extreme positions. A politician presents a proposal, and a news network can instantly find someone who is outraged that the proposal doesn’t go far enough to please her or her side. To an audience, the outraged hot takes are more interesting that the commentators praising compromise or deals that cede an inch to the opposition.

The fact that media broadcasts conflict, and partisans share these clips on social media, make politicians focus on their media presence and image, to the detriment of their relationships across the political spectrum.

woman in long purple wig; man in shaggy black wig; political attire

The author Brian Colker and spouse Susan Sheu hosting a “wig” party on Zoom in April 2020.

Hobbyists are drawn to national politics almost exclusively—Hersh likens it to casual football fans watching the Super Bowl. They ignore statewide contests (other than voting down ticket) and have a dismal record voting in local political races, in which less than 1 in 5 voters participate. Local news is boring and for wealthier hobbyists, it doesn’t really matter much. Working class, immigrants, and other vulnerable groups have a much greater stake in local elections because those policies impact their daily lives. Hobbyists focus on emotional issues —think puppy mills—and on charismatic leaders and gossipy races. It’s the theater, not the power, that excites the hobbyist.

Hersh has a test for those who believe they are doing something more than news consumption: he asks if anyone would notice if you stopped your activity. For those volunteering, there tends to be a commitment and a network that expects the volunteer to show up for events and actions. Dropping out would lead to questions about what happened and why. Passive news consumers have no such expectations or relationships. Rachel Maddow doesn’t call viewers when they skip her news hour.

Hersh’s evidence of hobbyism is stark—less than 5% of the general population did any volunteering at all—a single action—for the 2016 elections:

Among daily news consumers in 2016, less than 4% reported doing any work whatsoever on behalf of a campaign or party that election year. Even among those who reported they were afraid of Donald Trump, only 5 percent reported that they did any work to support their side.

And even that number is largely exaggerated. It is not for lack of leisure time—Americans average 5 hours a day of it, which is largely spent watching something. African Americans and Latinos are three times likelier to volunteer than whites, due to a collective sense of threat and bound fate. More affluent whites lack this fear and can afford to treat politics like sports —something to be passionate about, but ultimately entertainment that has little bearing on their lives.

Hersh offers several explanations as to why this is: local party organizations are very weak (by design, as a reaction to the corruption and racism of local leaders in the 1940s-1960s) and the actions they ask volunteers to take don’t feel very meaningful—using a canned script to call, text, or door knock with—and they tend to be very top down.

Interestingly, sociologist Theda Skocpol notes that Tea Party Republicans are much more comfortable with this top-down model than liberals, which explains why the Tea Party was very effective during the Obama years. However, it is unclear why this is the case: other than resorting to gross generalizations, like Republicans are more authoritarian and follow orders unthinkingly, what would explain their willingness to volunteer more? I would want to know if they are more motivated to action by fear, for example.

Throughout the book, Hersh interviews people who have become political organizers and describes how they learned this activity and what they’ve done with their power. The thread through all the cases is that political organization is all about local, face-to-face networks and providing something the community needs—helping neighbors with their immigration issues, helping neighbors get someone onto a local school board, helping neighbors solve a problem. By providing basic services like babysitting, disaster relief, and elder services, Democrats can rebuild political power at the grassroots level. Providing services could be the secret sauce to building networks—especially across partisan divides.

Where I take issue with Hersh is his approach the book as both a neutral analyst and as a burgeoning democratic activist. His analysis of political partisanship and the media are framed as a ‘both sides’ argument. This ignores major differences in the two camps. The Democratic party, and progressives, have moved leftward since the 1990s, but the Republican party and Conservatism has become so ideologically extreme as to be unrecognizable as a mainstream political party. According to the Manifesto Project, which analyzes political platforms across the globe, the American Republican Party has grown more akin to a European far-right party. Per the New York Times’ analysis in June of 2019:

According to its 2016 manifesto, the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany — mainstream right-leaning parties — and closer to far-right parties like Alternative for Germany, whose platform contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.

Tea party Republicans denying Obama was a US citizen, stoked by their version of ‘mainstream’ news, is hardly equivalent to liberals protesting a ban on Muslim immigrants, an outright xenophobic and illegal policy. Since Trump’s election, his party has embraced anti-democratic attacks on the rule of law, the separation of powers, the media, and on voting itself. Opposition to this administration is not just liberal partisanship equivalent to the Tea Party movement. Resistance groups like Indivisible rose in 2016 as a desperate attempt to rescue American government itself, in addition to advancing a liberal policy agenda.

The book would have been stronger had Hersh not attempted to generalize his argument across the political spectrum. He is clearly not a Republican of the Trump era, nor does his analysis touch on why they have embraced radical anti-democratic values which would have been unthinkable as recently as the early 2000s.

Hersh describes on a key element of volunteerism that is highly problematic—the boring and robotic nature of volunteer engagement. Scripted calls, texts, hand-writing writing postcards and door knocks are not exciting ways to pass the time. This may explain a fundamental reason why people choose passive consumption over volunteerism—the former is effortless. Saul Alinsky, in Rules for Radicals, discusses a principle of organizing—it must be creative and have an element of fun. Hersh misses an opportunity to go deeper on this subject, because it is crucial for understanding the disconnect between the hobbyist and the volunteer. The local leader who rules the small organization recruit for foot soldiers to do the tedious work. For many affluent whites, this work is uninspiring and beneath their perceived skill level. Mid-career professionals do not relish tedious work, but more to the point—they don’t like following directions.

Volunteers need to feel better after an event. It is not JUST about servicing their needs—their emotional need for connection and efficacy must be harnessed. The same rules for talking to voters apply to volunteers—they need to be offered a genuine ability to contribute in a way THEY find meaningful. If a hobbyist is induced to make phone calls for a campaign, she or he will need to be recruited and managed with care to ensure it is a positive experience and it will be repeated.

One reason the Obama campaign was so successful in recruiting huge numbers of volunteers is that it encouraged small local groups (five to ten people) to work together. People were able to work with their friends and feel like they had a lot of autonomy. It also allowed the groups to be nimble and change strategy as the campaign went on.

Hersh’s book is an important one for Democrats and those who oppose Trump and Trumpism in 2020—we will need an army of volunteers to take back power at the local, state, and federal level, and hopefully the book will motivate some hobbyists to turn off the news and get off twitter.

Author Photo of Brian ColkerBrian Colker is a management consultant for benefit organizations and a grassroots organizer in Los Angeles. He is CFO of the Grassroots Democrats HQ.

The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories
by Joyce Hinnefeld
Wolfson Press/American Storytellers Series, 97 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

The Beauty of Their Youth book jacket

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Some attributes of the fine short-story writer, as noted and further refined while reading Joyce Hinnefeld, who also happens to be a fine novelist (read her In Hovering Flight, if you haven’t already had that pleasure):

To be precise and precisely patient.

To enter quickly into the whole world of the thing with a minimum of explanation and a surfeit of knowing.

To arc toward the kind of surprise that does not shatter the hidden rules of the story.

To make of language something vital.

There are five Hinnefeld stories, four of them previously published in literary journals, in The Beauty of Their Youth, a release from the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. One is about the legacy of a “pool of desire.” One is about the accessorizing of a family crime. One is about the tragedy of idle desires, another about an artist and his elastic resume, and another about a mother and daughter on a trip abroad and the reverb of the personal past. The stories take us to Bucks County, PA, inside the pages of a Carson McCullers book, toward Everglades gators and gun shows, through the annals of art, across parts of Greece and Rome—a tour of landscape and psyche that is seamless, self-assured, quietly inventive. Hinnefeld doesn’t break her own spells. She doesn’t remind you that she’s writing.

While every piece in this collection is mesmerizing in its way, I wish to highlight the two bookends. “Polymorphous,” which opens the book, is launched by a first paragraph that contains a thousand seeds but remains rooted in a single patch of earth. Everything that is to come is augured here: Joan’s relationship with herself, Joan’s relationship with her neighbor, Joan’s relationship with her world, Joan’s relationship with time. It’s worth quoting in full, for what it teaches us about Hinnefeld’s method, which is to say her artfulness with encapsulation and the care she takes to be thorough but not didactic :

By the time she was 20, with a little baby and a household to run, Joan had already started to seem like some sort of local exotic to her friends from high school, home from college on their breaks. All because she canned her own vegetables and sewed her own clothes and breastfed her son, at a time and in a place where those things wouldn’t come back into fashion for a good while. Now, forty years later, she still gardened and canned and sewed. She’d even gone back to school and finished her own degree eventually, with a nice and useless and exotic major in English. But by now the things that made her colorful in the eyes of her friends and neighbors was her weekly outing with her eighty-year-old neighbor, a gay man named Richard Meredith.

Richard and Joan are prickly friends. Richard’s own exotic past contains complicated secrets. A pool of desire in that Bucks County land percolates with still-unanswered questions. History wields power over both these characters and they wield power over each other, the ebbing and flowing of which provides the tension in the story.

joyce hinnefeld author photo

Joyce Hinnefeld

In “The Beauty of Their Youth,” a mother and her 20-year-old daughter travel to Greece and Italy—the mother with hopes both of strengthening the bond with her daughter and of revisiting the people and places she remembers from an abroad summer years before. Fran, the mother, is both claiming and reclaiming, in other words, whereas Miranda, the daughter, is determined to see this new-old world through her own eyes. When the two meet up with Fran’s long-ago lover (in Greece) and long-ago friend (in Rome), Fran is confronted with a new and unwelcome version of the mythology she’d webbed around her youthful adventures. She is forced, as Hinnefeld writes, to reckon with some of the ways she’d not been trusted, some of the ways the world hides the most human parts of us from view:

There were things you didn’t post, Fran thought now, wide awake at three AM. Often the most important things, the things that had indelibly shaped your life. Your family’s secret history. Your marriage to a junkie. Your daughter’s slow, sure drift away from you. Your husband’s thoughtless and fleeting affair all those years ago. And your chronic thoughts of leaving him.

Hinnefeld writes empathetically. She writes, too, with lacerating emotional economy. In between she layers in the world—its reflective surfaces, its values, its artistic traditions, its gators, the secrets that are suppressed until they aren’t.

Beth Kephart author photoBeth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist, and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. A memoir in essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press in February 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

 

 

 

 

THE ROYAL ABDULS, a novel by Ramiza Shamoun Koya, reviewed by Beth Kephart

THE ROYAL ABDULS, a novel by Ramiza Shamoun Koya, reviewed by Beth Kephart
THE ROYAL ABDULS by Ramiza Shamoun Koya Forest Avenue Press, 303 pages Reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Where do we belong, and to whom? Are we most ourselves when we are by ourselves, or are we most free when rooted deep inside family responsibility? During the day and a half that I ravenously read Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel, The Royal Abduls, I asked myself these questions. I leaned into the lives of Koya’s magnificently drawn characters, into the nest of troubles they inadvertently twigged together, into the love they did not know how to express. Or forgot to express. Or ran out of time to express. As it happens. The Royal Abduls is a family story about an Indian-American boy named Omar, his parents, his aunt, his grandparents, and his friends. Every character here is reckoning with a post 9/11 world and its overt and unarticulated prejudices. Omar, who is eleven when we meet him, has recently adopted an Indian accent and is researching (and fantastically embroidering) a family history no one has actively passed down. His aunt, the persuasively particular evolutionary biologist Amina, has just moved to DC, Omar’s hometown, to join a ...
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The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld, reviewed by Beth Kephart

The Beauty of Their Youth book jacket
The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld Wolfson Press/American Storytellers Series, 97 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Some attributes of the fine short-story writer, as noted and further refined while reading Joyce Hinnefeld, who also happens to be a fine novelist (read her In Hovering Flight, if you haven’t already had that pleasure): To be precise and precisely patient. To enter quickly into the whole world of the thing with a minimum of explanation and a surfeit of knowing. To arc toward the kind of surprise that does not shatter the hidden rules of the story. To make of language something vital. There are five Hinnefeld stories, four of them previously published in literary journals, in The Beauty of Their Youth, a release from the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. One is about the legacy of a “pool of desire.” One is about the accessorizing of a family crime. One is about the tragedy of idle desires, another about an artist and his elastic resume, and another about a mother and daughter on a trip abroad and the reverb of the personal past. The stories take us to Bucks County, PA, inside ...
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SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN, poems by Gregory Djanikian, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Soujourners of the In-Between Book Jacket
SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN by Gregory Djanikian Carnegie Mellon University Press, 90 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In his new heartbreaking and affirming book of poems, his seventh, Gregory Djanikian writes past complexity toward the elemental and the binding. He unites the “beautiful and the raw,” plays no tricks, displays no tics, exploits nothing but the moment and the thought that accompanies it. He finds the reader wherever the reader is, then webs her into his space and time, a place where a hand run along the back of a cat returns “the animality of my own skin/the trees in slanting light,/ the blue sky breathing its blue/down to the greening fields.” (“What Is a Cat But a Voice Among All the Other Voices”) In Djanikian’s space and time, the end may be near, it may be hastening toward us, but it is still, as yet, a yonder. Sojourners of the In-Between is organized into five escalating parts. It’s a little noisy in the opening pages, full of harbingers and yelling priests, a street corner mime, the clink of wine bottles, a stained tablecloth, “The world’s blips and pings, street traffic,/glass clatter, hammer clank…” ...
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DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY, a novel by Julie E. Justicz, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Degrees of Difficulty jacket cover
DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY by Julie E. Justicz Fomite, 300 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Many years ago, as a feature writer for a magazine, I spent weeks visiting with a family whose oldest son communicated not with words but with his body. He said yes or no, go away or come near, I don’t want it or I do by hurling himself toward gestures of acceptance or disdain. He was a beautiful boy, nearly adolescent, larger than his mother who was struggling now to control his outbursts by setting him into a warm bath or hugging him close and overwhelming to his father, who had left his job so that he might try to build a school that was just right for his own son and others. This family was among the most extraordinary I’ve ever spent time with—full of love, chasing hope, unwilling to give up on this first-born child of theirs, and yet so devastatingly exhausted. I thought a lot about this family as I read Julie Justicz’s novel Degrees of Difficulty. Here the child at the center of the heartbreak is third-born Ben, born with damage to his twenty-first chromosome, an “omission in the blueprint” that has ...
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RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL by Faith Sullivan, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Ruby and Roland Book Jacket
RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL by Faith Sullivan Milkweed Editions, 256 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Books recalibrate our imaginations. They expect us to make room, to put on our nearest pair of shoes and walk the hall, the street, the cornfields, whispering to ourselves and to the wind. When Faith Sullivan began writing what has become known as her Harvester books—novels like The Cape Ann and The Empress of One and Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse—she invited readers to join her in a fictional Minnesota landscape, then gave them many reasons to return. Sullivan’s Harvester is a palpable place. Its people are relatable and real. They carry burdens and they engage in kindness. Their bones bend with the hills. Now midway into her eighties, Sullivan is still finding, within Harvester, commonplace stories of everyday appeal. Her new book, Ruby & Roland, begins not in Harvester, but in Illinois, where Ruby Drake is living an idyllic childhood with a childlike mother until her parents are killed in an accident. The orphan moves in with one family and then with another, packing tokens of her youth and holding memories near. It is at the Schoonover farm, in Harvester, that Ruby becomes who she ...
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THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING, a memoir by Long Litt Woon, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Cover art for The Way Through the Woods
THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING by Long Litt Woon translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland Spiegel & Grau, 292 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver  When I read memoir I want: something to crack and something to rise, something to arc and something to stream, something to move across the page and, as it does, to move me. I bought Long Litt Woon’s The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning for the promise embedded in the premise. How would Woon make her way back into the world after the shocking, sudden death of the fifty-four-year-old husband with whom she had spent all her adult years? What do mushrooms have to do with recovering from such a loss? Does anybody ever actually recover? Woon, who moved to Norway from Malaysia as an exchange student at the age of eighteen and stayed because of her love for her husband, Eiolf, is not, as it turns out, interested in the literary fissures and expansions and movements that generally interest me. Her prose, as translated by Barbara J. Haveland, is determinedly straightforward, lavishly undecorated, direct and directly to the point. Her ...
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ART CAN HELP, essays by Robert Adams, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Art Can Help Book Jacket
ART CAN HELP by Robert Adams Yale University Art Gallery, distributed by Yale University Press, 88 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart  Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver “[I]f you begin with an idea you’re usually beat before you start,” writes Robert Adams in Art Can Help, as he tries to imagine Edward Ranney photographing the Canyon del Muerto, and, so, here I begin, having been holding this slender silver volume in my hand all afternoon, interrupted only by the sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower and the smell of some ambient spray paint. (A long sentence, a beginning.) The book marks Adams’ attempt to dissuade his readers from Jeff Koons-style glitz, which is to say “imitations that distract us or, openly or by implication, ridicule hope.” We are reminded of the power of art, Adams suggests, by studying art that is real. The work of Edward Hopper is here in these pages, as are the images of Eugene Buechel, Ken Abbott, Julia Margaret Cameron, Dorothea Lange, and others, but if you are already concluding that this is a book of pictures and captions, you’d be wrong. This is a book of eclectic wisdoms and collegial awe. “I am asked with ...
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THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO, a novel by Carlo Collodi, reviewed by Beth Kephart

THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO, a novel by Carlo Collodi, reviewed by Beth Kephart
THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO by Carlo Collodi illustrated by Attilio Mussino translated by Carol Della Chi MacMillan (1926), 401 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart The Oldest, The Newer, and the Four Pinocchios The Pinocchio in the book on my lap is not the persistently gullible feather-in-his-cap Disney version with the Jimmy Cricket conscience and the wish-upon-a-star existence. My Pinocchio—La storia di un burattino—comes from the mastermind himself, the Italian serialist Carlo Collodi, born Carlo Lorenzimi, who didn’t start writing for children until late in life. He’d been in the seminary as a young man. He’d volunteered in the Tuscan army. He’d written satire, translated fairytales, and by the 1880s, it would seem, he was primed for his most memorable creation. You don’t have to stretch to note the parallels that dominate our news cycle. Donald J. Trump was prefigured more than 130 years ago.  If Disney’s Pinocchio is an affable, pliable ingénue who was reconfigured, according to the lore, to look more like a boy than a puppet, Collodi’s is an anti-hero—a wooden thing with barely any ears who mostly can’t see beyond his own nose, no matter its current proportion. He is persistent, insistent, impossible, exasperating, willfully obtuse, a ...
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THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW Beth Kephart and Bill Sulit Interview Each Other

juncture03
THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW by Beth Kephart For many years, my husband, William Sulit, and I have collaborated on projects for corporate America—annual reports, commemorative books, employee magazines. When corporate America changed—when the cultures shifted, the ideals, the relationships—we began to explore a new idea, a company we could create and manage as our own, a company through which we could define the quality of the product and the nature of the conversation. We have called that company Juncture Workshops. Through it we offer memoir retreats, a monthly newsletter, and video essays that showcase the work of memoir masters and offer ideas and prompts. As with most things, of course, it all sounds easier than it has been. Here we provide a behind-the-scenes look at our memoir-steeped lives, post video production. ◊ STORY: They would need a teleprompter. They would need a script. They would need umbrella lights, an iPhone mic, a steady camera, an army of tripods. They would call this thing that they had made their Juncture memoir shorts (and here those things are: www.udemy.com/the-stories-of-our-lives/learn/v4/overview). Lessons on writer’s block. Lessons on illness. Lessons on time, or nature writing, or the kitchen. They would twine Mary-Louise Parker and James Baldwin, Abigail ...
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THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU, a young adult novel by Beth Kephart, reviewed by Rachael Tague

THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU, a young adult novel by Beth Kephart, reviewed by Rachael Tague
THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU by Beth Kephart Chronicle Books, 256 pages reviewed by Rachael Tague When I sat down to read Beth Kephart’s newest novel, This Is the Story of You, its title and cover art caught my attention—personal, serene, then chaotic. I read the first line of chapter one—Blue, for example—and fell in love with the writing. A quarter of the way through the book, I adored each character, and connected with Mira, the narrator and protagonist. Kephart’s mesmerizing writing, wonderful characters, and themes of strength and endurance thrilled me from beginning to end. Mira Banul is “medium everything—blond, built, smart.” She lives on Haven, where “We were six miles long by one-half mile…We were The Isolates. We were one bridge and a few good rules away from normal. We were causal bohemians, expert scavengers, cool.” Haven, a tiny island on the East coast, is a vacation destination in the summer. At the end of the season, the year-rounders return to their school in a refurbished bank and rule the island after-hours. Mira’s best friends, Eva and Deni, have done everything together for as long as they can remember. They work together, study together, compete together, and ...
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HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart reviewed by Stephanie Trott

HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart reviewed by Stephanie Trott
HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart Gotham Books, 254 pages reviewed by Stephanie Trott It is a rainy Tuesday in January and I lace up the new cherry-red boots before heading out the door of my warm little warren. Through the stone-laden campus, across the slippery streets of town, and onto the train that will take me into the city. I am in my final semester as an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College and I still have not learned to buy shoes that fit my feet — I dig into the walk through West Philadelphia, burdening myself with blisters that will not heal until the first flowers have shed their petals to spring. Stumbling onto the porch of the old Victorian manor, I step into the most challenging, inspiring, and rewarding fourteen weeks I’ve yet experienced: I step into Beth Kephart’s Creative Non-Fiction class. Flash forward one and a half years later and I am standing on the back steps of my first apartment, wearing shoes that (finally) fit and hooting jubilantly at the tiny brown box in front of me. I hug the cardboard to myself as though I could absorb the details ...
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DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart reviewed by Michelle Fost

DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart reviewed by Michelle Fost
DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart illustrated by William Sulit New City Community Press, 190 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost When I lived in Philadelphia, I sensed its history underfoot. One pleasure of Beth Kephart’s lively new historical Philadelphia novel is the strong fit of the writer’s project and the story she tells. In Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent, Kephart looks at material from the past that we might consider lost to us and demonstrates how traces of that past stay with us through research and writing. In her story of William Quinn in 1870’s Philadelphia, too, much has been lost. As fourteen-year-old William goes in search of what has been taken from his family and as he thinks about what he is missing (including a murdered brother and a father in prison), we see that a great deal of what is loved can be recovered. William internalizes his brother Francis’s voice and can imagine what Francis would say to him at an important moment. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent shines as a novel about grief itself, suggesting that in thinking about what we miss, we keep what’s missing alive. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent opens with a haunting ...
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WILLIAM SULIT, Chicken Dance

WILLIAM SULIT, Chicken Dance
CHICKEN DANCE by William Sulit & Beth Kephart Digital 3-D Design A conversation between a writer wife and her artist husband, in a quest to understand Important Subject: A chicken BK: You spend hours in your garage studio (among the ghosts of a skinny car, in the shadow of night visitors, within walls yellowed by old fuels) fiddling with electronic pencils and twinned screens, and you come up with ... a chicken? Why a chicken? How did your chicken begin? WS: It began with a sphere about the size of a golf ball. I'm sure electrons are involved but what is really being manipulated are vertices. This chicken was really a way to test 3D printing technology (color and all). No lofty idea—just that as someone who works with 3D "art," I wasn't going to leave that stone unturned. BK: And I thought I had married into lofty. Didn’t you promise me lofty? Okay, then. You began to pull and poke at this thing, began to manipulate these vertices. The computer can’t resist you. There isn’t any tactile feel to this material, no smell, nothing that gets your hands dirty. Do you still consider this art? Because, at the very ...
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SCRABBLE by Beth Kephart

SCRABBLE by Beth Kephart
SCRABBLE by Beth Kephart I said it would be nice (look how simple I made it:  nice) not to be marooned in the blue-black of night with my thoughts, I said the corrugated squares of the downstairs quilt accuse me, I said the sofa pillows are gape-jawed, I said there are fine red hairs in the Pier 1 rug that will dislodge and drown in my lungs, I said I can’t breathe, I said, Please. It wasn’t hard. But you were asleep by then, west to my east, uncorrupted by the plain and the soft of my imagination, the occasional and wire whipped and cruel:  you couldn’t be touched; you wouldn’t stir; you. I broke and I climbed out and I climbed through and I climbed down into the blue black red threads and sat until a fat clack cracked the hollow between the walls and I knew that it was the long-nailed scrabble of a squirrel or the procrastination of the fox or the wolf that is my thoughts. That was the first night after. Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of fourteen books, most recently Small Damages, named to many best-of-year lists.  Three new books are set to be ...
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SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN, poems by Gregory Djanikian, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN
by Gregory Djanikian
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 90 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Soujourners of the In-Between Book Jacket

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In his new heartbreaking and affirming book of poems, his seventh, Gregory Djanikian writes past complexity toward the elemental and the binding. He unites the “beautiful and the raw,” plays no tricks, displays no tics, exploits nothing but the moment and the thought that accompanies it. He finds the reader wherever the reader is, then webs her into his space and time, a place where a hand run along the back of a cat returns “the animality of my own skin/the trees in slanting light,/ the blue sky breathing its blue/down to the greening fields.” (“What Is a Cat But a Voice Among All the Other Voices”) In Djanikian’s space and time, the end may be near, it may be hastening toward us, but it is still, as yet, a yonder.

Sojourners of the In-Between is organized into five escalating parts. It’s a little noisy in the opening pages, full of harbingers and yelling priests, a street corner mime, the clink of wine bottles, a stained tablecloth, “The world’s blips and pings, street traffic,/glass clatter, hammer clank…” (“Music Making”), the bark of a neighbor’s dog, that aforementioned cat, who also sings. The world buzzes and the poet heeds, his poems derived from hub-bub, his language caught up with the sounds.

Section 2 finds the poet this side of aggravated—privately annoyed by the poor conversationalist, a little superior to a neighbor named Grace, irritated by the stranger who sits beside him at a concert. From “And Another Thing:”

Such dislike for the woman who’s come late
to the concert making our whole row rise just
as the tenor sax hits its high E-flat and now
she’s sitting next to me and texting—my god!—
during the drummer’s lithe percussive
rhythms which are not my rhythms judging
by my heavy foot beats ….

By the time Djanikian’s narrator is, toward the end of section 2, officially unnerved, we are too, “… pacing the afternoon/like a high-wire walker/from room to room/counting the steps.” (“Loose Ends”) What is one to do with all that noise? Where is one to file the irritants?

Gregory-Djanikian

Gregory Djanikian

Now something tilts. Now, in the final three sections of the collection, Djanikian turns his focus toward the things that fall away and the things that will remain, without us. The poems see beyond the irritants toward the bats from which we keep our distance, the loosestrife in the garden, the touch of a wife’s hand to the “soft lips” of a cow, the material accumulations of our lives. The poems here are clear-eyed and life-besotted, they are quieter, unafraid of (but not lethal with) uncertainty. The poet has time to think. He has time to stand. He has time to wait, but what is he waiting for? For a letter to arrive? For a cat to sing? For an answer from a person no longer with him? Djanikian’s mother imagines her own passing in one poem. Djanikian imagines his own heaven in another. There is too much of everything. There is too little. From the poem “An Uneven Dozen”:

Antinomies
The paradox of time, giving me too much time
and sometimes not enough at the same time.
Morning, evening. Seconds, years.
When I’m late for everything.
I’m early for everything else.

In the final glorious poems of the In-Between, it is always about time—about time and how we live it. Searingly unpretentious, the closest thing to authentic I can imagine, Djanikian’s lines provide a kind of shelter, as, with him, we watch and wait and wonder.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist, and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. A memoir in essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press in February 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

 

HOW TO BUILD A HEART, a young adult novel by Maria Padian, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

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HOW TO BUILD A HEART
by Maria Padian
Algonquin Young Readers, 339 pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson

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How To Build a Heart jacket cover

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Isabella Crawford doesn’t keep secrets, she guards them. Protects them:

People love to talk about themselves, and if you keep directing the conversation and questions back to them, they leave the interaction with the impression you’re the absolute best. Even though you haven’t told them a damn thing.

I’m crazy good at this game. And I’ve had years of practice.

For Izzy, a failure to safeguard a secret means the life she meticulously crafted for herself is in jeopardy. She’d prefer not to keep most of her life hidden away; but she also knows that the less you share about yourself, the less you get hurt.

In her new novel How to Build a Heart, Maria Padian brings us into Izzy’s world with one of her biggest secrets: she’s poor and lives with her mother, little brother, and dog in Meadowbrook Gardens, a trailer park on the outskirts of town. Aside from her best friend and closest confidante, Roz, nobody knows where she lives – or how she’s lived. And she intends to keep it that way.  

However, that’s only one of the things that Izzy chooses to keep to herself. She keeps her interactions with Roz hidden from her mother (who deems Roz “a bad influence”) and she never tells anyone that she and Roz have a penchant for spying on popular guys named Sam Shackleton (in his own backyard). Izzy’s teachers and classmates don’t know she’s one of the only kids in her school who still uses a prepaid cellphone and has to buy her own minutes.

Maria Padian Author pic

Maria Padian

In one seemingly-perfect moment the opportunity of a lifetime presents itself to her family: they can get a new house—an actual house—through Habitat for Humanity. All that’s required is putting in a few hundred hours of sweat equity and telling their story to the surrounding community to help raise funds for the build. This means that everyone in Clayton County—from her school friends to her classmates—will know her most closely-guarded secret.

It’s here Padian takes the reader on a deep dive into the many themes of this book, all bound by a single overarching question: what is the price we pay for keeping secrets?

Padian explores this question through a balance of vivid description and witty, discerning storytelling – giving a refreshing zeal to Izzy’s first-person narrative. It’s this balanced writing style that helps envelop the reader in Izzy’s world. Her emotions run raw across each page, written with a passion fueled by Padian’s shared personal experiences.

Through Izzy we begin to consider the weight secrets hold. Izzy’s mastered art of keeping secrets is built upon the ability to lie, or at the very least withholding the truth. Lie after lie, she keeps parts of herself private from others at the expense of her own happiness, unable to live her life to the fullest. Izzy’s secrets also hold a greater burden; her desire to keep her lifestyle hidden puts her family’s new Habitat home in jeopardy. Without her cooperation, their story may not be impactful enough to get the support they need to build. The only other option is to get the help of their estranged Crawford family, but her mother’s own secrets prevents that from happening. Then there’s Sam Shackleton who – through a series of well-timed coincidences – has taken a fancy to Izzy, which will end her friendship with Roz if she finds out.

The secrets that surround Izzy – those she keeps and those kept from her – become the cracks that weaken the foundations of her life: family, friends, opportunities, love, and fulfillment. She thinks secrets are necessary for survival, but what Izzy and the reader come to realize is that secrets and lies only help you survive, honesty and truth help you live:

…Secrets don’t stay secret for very long. It all comes out, in the end.

Padian’s How to Build a Heart encourages us to embrace our authentic selves by letting go, not only of secrets, but of the desire to hide parts of ourselves in hopes that others will accept us. The key to building a heart, as Padian passionately writes, is a solid foundation of self-acceptance. Once Izzy begins accepting who she is, the need for keeping secrets diminishes. There are, of course, secrets we are all entitled to; however, this book teaches readers that some secrets are a heavy burden. Through honesty, the truth unburdens us of our fears, releases us from what holds us back, and frees us to live our lives to the fullest:

I cannot remember the last time I felt so light. Maybe it’s because my arms are finally empty of stones.

Kristie Gadson is a copywriter by day, a book reviewer by night, and an aspiring comic book artist in-between time. Her passions lie in children’s books, young adult novels, fantasy novels, comics, and animated cartoons because she believes that one is never “too old” to learn the life lessons they teach. Kristie resides in Norristown on the outskirts of Philadelphia PA, which she lovingly calls “her little corner of the universe.”

INCIDENTAL INVENTIONS, short pieces by Elena Ferrante, reviewed by David Grandouiller

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INCIDENTAL INVENTIONS
by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein, illustrations by Andrea Ucini
Europa Editions, 112 pages
reviewed by David Grandouiller

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“Me” who? We’ll always know too little about ourselves.—Elena Ferrante

Incidental Inventions book jacket. A woman in a red dress peaks out for behind a white curtain

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Who is the Italian novelist we call Elena Ferrante? Since her first novel’s publication in 1992, she—with the help of her publishers—has carefully maintained the real author’s anonymity. Many readers have treated this guarded privacy as a playful challenge, making theories and guesses, particularly in recent years as Ferrante has become increasingly celebrated. The Italian philologist Marco Santagata, after analyzing her oeuvre, suggested she might be the writer Marcella Marmo (Marmo and her publisher denied this). More controversially, the journalist Claudio Gatti dug up financial records to claim that Anita Raja is the author behind Ferrante—others suggest it may be Raja’s husband. One can imagine the confirmation of one of these claims could incite a variety of reactions in Ferrante’s readership, but there’s a more fundamental question behind that of the author’s identity: why do people want to know?

What makes some readers so curious about a writer’s “real life”? Do we (because I’m one of them) want the fiction to absorb reality—to make a fiction out of the writer? Or are we trying to absorb fiction into reality? Maybe we feel alienated by the wall that is fiction—artists giving their eyes and minds and hearts and imaginations to the reader without having to give themselves.

“I refused to form a relationship in which I would be in a subordinate position,” writes Ferrante, “forced to yield to the enormous power of someone who is silent while you ramble on, asking you questions without ever really responding to yours, concealing from you his drives—while you reveal yours in the most vulnerable way.” This comes from Ferrante’s new book, Incidental Inventions, a collection of weekly columns written for The Guardian from January 2018 to January 2019, released in November from Europa Editions. In this passage, she’s talking about therapy, but the description could be applied equally to a readership, and the idea of her relationship with readers makes this book particularly striking—a pseudonymous fiction writer exposes to the reader a comparatively unmediated self. The wonder she expresses is presumably her own, the shame, the joy, the generosity, the fear, the pride.

I say, “comparatively unmediated,” because in nonfiction, the writer assumes responsibility for the narrator in a way the fiction writer doesn’t, but this is not to say the narrator and the writer are the same—there is always mediation. In David Shields’s collage manifesto, Reality Hunger, he quotes memoirist Patricia Hampl saying, “It isn’t really me; it’s a character based on myself that I made up in order to illustrate things I want to say. In other words, I think memoir is as far from real life as fiction is. I think you’re obligated to use accurate details, but selection is as important a process as imagination.”

I suppose Hampl’s distinction is slightly beside the point when it comes to Ferrante, who does not exist. If the writer’s relationship to the narrator is the defining difference between nonfiction and fiction, what does the term nonfiction even mean when the writer’s identity is unknown? Can I really call it “comparatively unmediated”? Can I say, “The wonder she expresses is her own?” Does it even matter? Does it make my encounter with this narrator less legitimate? In the new book, Ferrante goes further than Hampl and points out the artifice inherent in writing at all:

My effort at faithfulness [in writing] cannot be separated from the search for coherence, the imposition of order and meaning, even the imitation of the lack of order and meaning. Because writing is innately artificial, its every use involves some form of fiction. The dividing line is rather, as Virginia Woolf said, how much truth the fiction inherent in writing is able to capture.

Maybe this is all I should need from a narrator—an effort at faithfulness as she constructs a self on the page. This makes me think, too, of how much the writer’s work, in this respect, is the work of every social being, how identity is often performance, in life as much as in art. “I invent myself for a journalist,” admits Ferrante, discussing her practice of taking interviews only by correspondence, so she has time to consider and compose her answers, “but the journalist—especially when she is herself a writer—invents herself for me, through her questions.”

If I begin to think of all human intercourse this way, I’m free to stop thinking of the invented narrator, in fiction or nonfiction, as a wall between the writer and me. I can begin to understand intimacy as the goal of invention. The writer behind Ferrante can’t give herself to readers, because the self can’t be contained—what she can do is create an artificial container, pour as much of herself into it as she wants, then offer it to the world, printed and bound and accompanied by Andrea Ucini’s illustrations. Which brings me back to the book—I’ve put off discussing it directly for too long.

In the fifty-one columns that comprise Incidental Inventions, each around five hundred words, Ferrante responds to prompts presented to her by Guardian editors at her own request. “I had no experience with that type of writing,” she explains in her introduction, “and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do it […] I told the editors I would accept the offer if they would send me a series of questions.” Her self-awareness and humility are attractive, and the title itself—Incidental Inventions—understates the sense of purpose with which the narrator navigates each topic. But these pieces aren’t the work of someone who’s just trying her hand. Short and tightly woven, each of them meanders the landscape of the writer’s memories and thoughts with a practiced nonchalance, driving all the while toward a kind of volta in the last few sentences, and ending, usually, in a punchy, epigrammatic final line: “What perhaps should be feared most is the fury of frightened people” or “We can be much more than what we happen to be” or “All in all, I’m doing fine.”

I wish the prompts had been printed with Ferrante’s pieces. I wondered, leafing through this calendar of idiosyncrasy, about her reactions to the editors’ questions, and also about how forward the editors had been, knowing how carefully Ferrante maintains her anonymity. How many questions did they ask that related directly to her biography, and did she resent it when they did, or did she take it in stride, being used to it by now? Do any of these columns answer the questions directly, or does she interpret them freely, wandering the open water once the coast is out of sight?

These are greedy questions, in some ways—the person Ferrante presents in this one-sided conversation is already so full and rich. We get reading recommendations, film recommendations, career advice. We learn about her first love and about the reasons she laughs when she does, about her fear of old age and her fear of letting her fear be seen. We learn why she admires her daughters and why she admires women who chose not to be mothers. We read some of what she thinks of Caravaggio, exclamation marks, religion, sex, Italian fascism, of lying and learning and change. She says a lot about writing—writing when you’re young and when you’re older, writing before bed or when you wake up, smoking while you write or writing after you’ve quit smoking.

And underneath all these things, providing the energy with which she propels each thought, is the wonder, “the wonder—the wonder of knowing how to read, to write, to transform signs into things.”

◊

As I write about Incidental Inventions, I’m thinking of another book that I consider linked to Ferrante’s collection—In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, published in English in 2016. The books share many characteristics: both were written in Italian, both translated into English by Ann Goldstein. Both writers are women whose novels are internationally acclaimed but who, before these books, had published little nonfiction. Each of these books was conceived as a series of weekly columns for a periodical (Ferrante for The Guardian, Lahiri for Internazionale).

Lahiri’s book is more focused than Ferrante’s. It follows a progression: she learned Italian, moved to Italy, transitioned from writing in English to writing in Italian. But she strikes many of the same topics as Ferrante—the wonder associated with learning to read, for example, or their interactions with journalists. Each of the books has a chapter on writing in a diary, in which they both describe having outgrown the diary. Ferrante remembers having begun to invent things in her diary when she was young, to account for lost time or missed entries, and so she gave up journaling and wrote stories instead. Lahiri, as an adult journaling in a foreign language, says, “Writing only in a diary is the equivalent of shutting myself in the house, talking to myself. What I express there remains a private, interior narration. At a certain point, in spite of the risk, I want to go out.”

A diary is not totally unselfconscious or unmediated, but this going out is still a momentous turning point in the life of the writing. A more elaborate, more conscious performance by the narrator is necessary, or at least expected. This going out is what Ferrante’s and Lahiri’s writings have in common, an emphasis on establishing a consistent voice, a persona, a narrator to whom readers can attribute each thought and experience, so that we begin to fill out the image of a figure, even if it isn’t exactly the image of the writer herself. Ferrante speaks in similar terms about the accumulation of qualities which makes possible the idea of a film star she admires: “[Daniel Day-Lewis] is a sort of title by which I refer to a valuable body of work […] If he should suddenly be transformed into a flesh-and-blood person, poor him, poor me. Reality can’t stay inside the elegant moulds of art; it always spills over, indecorously.”

But maybe it’s exactly this indecorous spilling that some reality-hungry readers want. “Books are the best means […] of overcoming reality,” writes Lahiri, but maybe we want reality to overcome the book. Maybe we want the diary and not the story. Or the diary as well as the story. Is that possible? Where do we find it?

“Literary novelty,” writes Ferrante, “if one wants to insist on the concept—exists in the way each individual inhabits the magma of forms he is immersed in. Thus ‘to be oneself’ is an arduous task—perhaps impossible.” I think this is true, and it makes me wonder: how little advantage do most writers take of the diversity of possible forms available to them? And would employing a greater range of forms fragment the invented narrator in such a way that readers would get (maybe not a truer but) a different kind of insight into the person behind the persona?

I think a form that does this fragmentation well is the “crônica.” A giant in this tradition is the Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector. Her Selected Crônicas, published individually in the Jornal do Brasil between 1967 and 1973, is like an encyclopedia of short forms—they range in length from a single line to one or two thousand words; they are proverbs, parables, and myths, short stories, reflections, interviews, memoirs, bits of transcribed dialogue, brief scenic sketches. Lispector makes little or no distinction, across these columns, or even within each column, between the fictional and the real, though she uses both first- and third-person narration throughout. This wide range may not have been a transgression of genre, in Lispector’s context, since she was taking advantage of the freedom of the form, which her translator, Giovanni Pontiero, calls, “a genre peculiar to Brazil which allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone,” he says, “is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or weekly columns in the European or U.S. press.” But to bring her indiscriminate range into a different literary context could be transgressive, could be productive.

Ferrante’s columns are not generically transgressive, except inasmuch as the frame of anonymity produces a unique reading experience. They’re much more consistent, even conservative, in style and structure—which is certainly not a weakness. But I think it’s important to note, by way of comparison, the possible breadth of the form she’s working in, and to call the breadth good. Ferrante’s narrator maintains her integrity, her wholeness, however artificially. That’s a different kind of victory than Lispector’s, but all of these writers help revive in us “the wonder—the wonder […] vivid and lasting.”

Author Photo of David GrandoullierDavid Grandouiller lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he writes about faith and religion, Christian education, film, cats, and music. He is a third-year candidate in the MFA in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University and the Nonfiction Editor at The Journal. His essay, “Holy Uselessness,” was a finalist for the 2019 Orison Anthology Award in Nonfiction, and a group of his essays won the 2019 Walter Rumsey Marvin grant from the Ohioana Library Association.

 

 

Source for the biographical Ferrante info:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-unmasking-of-elena-ferrante

OUTSIDE MYSELF, a young adult novel by Kristen Witucki, reviewed by Donna W. Hill

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OUTSIDE MYSELF
by Kristen Witucki
Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 232 pages
reviewed by Donna W. Hill

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Outside Myself book jacket

Click here to purchase this book

Superbly written, Outside Myself by Kristen Witucki gets to the heart of the human experience. Blended and broken families struggle with issues that tear parents and children apart. Trying to do their best, they are fettered by incomplete and often false information. At the center of it all, two very different blind characters, determined to create their own place in the world, grapple with the negativity in their families, communities and themselves.

Outside Myself covers roughly fifteen months from May 1994 to August 1995. It is told by two narrators; Tallie, a young and precocious blind girl, and Benjamin, a withdrawn grandfather who works at a library for the blind. They represent different age groups, genders, races, belief systems and causes of blindness, growing up in different eras with different rights under the law.

Tallie, the child of a broken marriage, attends a Christian youth group, where she realizes that some of the kids want to pray for her healing. She wonders why so many people are invested in her becoming sighted. Whether through medical advances or faith healing, their actions say they can’t accept her as she is. Even her father believes he must keep her safe until she can get an operation to restore her sight. Tallie knows what being ostracized and bullied means, but she grapples with her own insensitivity to others.

Divorced and estranged from his family, Benjamin rents a tiny room in the house of an elderly woman and her thirty-five-year-old, dope-smoking grandson. Through memories of his early childhood, we learn he once had some sight – not enough to fit in with the sighted world and too much to fit in the visually impaired one. He was out there on his own, trying to have more sight than he did. He could focus on just one print word at a time. “Everyone was in denial about the vision problem, even me.”

An avid Braille reader, Tallie wants to learn more about the cure her father has mentioned so she calls the adult section at the Library for the Blind and speaks with Benjamin. For the first time, Benjamin shares his own blindness with a client and challenges her beliefs. Tallie has never encountered a blind adult and, though angry, is intrigued by him. Their interactions help Benjamin examine his role in his family’s separation, while Tallie begins to seek independence from her own family.

Kristen Witucki, author photo

Kristen Witucki

Witucki interweaves the two points of view with uncommon agility. Her ability to blend action, dreams, and memory allows their stories to unfold smoothly, drawing the reader into their separate worlds, even as she brings them closer together. Music, literature, and the love of learning are lifelines throughout the book. There is a commentary on Heidi, Swiss author Johanna Spyri’s classic children’s novel. Tallie’s concern for dry leaves and Benjamin’s relationship with the moon provide glimpses into their inner lives.

Misconceptions and stereotypes about blindness persist. The book helps readers consider that sighted people don’t always have the answers and highlights some of the challenges they have maintaining the attitudes of hopefulness and curiosity necessary for blind people to make a leap into an independent, nonvisual lifestyle.

Witucki’s experiences have placed her in an ideal position to tell this gripping and necessary story about the struggles and triumphs of life without sight. Born totally blind, she earned three master’s degrees in teaching gifted students, creative writing and teaching students with visual impairments and she is the Curriculum and Content Editor, Blindness and Visual Impairment at Learning Ally, the world’s largest library of volunteer-narrated books.

Outside Myself is unique in many ways, not the least of which is its double, first-person point of view. Carefully constructed with clear, concise language, nuanced characters and unexpected twists, it is an inspiring and enjoyable read. This beautiful and honest story of a mentor relationship reaches into several worlds to expose the deepest pain and the greatest triumphs of the human spirit.

Donna W. Will author photo with guide dogDonna W. Hill is the author of the educator-recommended young adult novel The Heart of Applebutter Hill, a fantasy for middle school and older readers. Find it in print and eBook versions through Amazon and other outlets. It’s available through Bookshare and Learning Ally for readers with print impairments. A former Philadelphia street performer, songwriter and recording artist, Hill lives in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains with her husband, her guide dog and their rescued kitty. Learn more at DonnaWHill.com

 

Purchase Outside Myself in Print, eBook & Audio Formats

Outside Myself is Kristen Witucki’s first full length novel. Purchase it and The Transcriber, a story for adolescent emerging readers, and follow Kristen at:

https://www.amazon.com/Kristen-Witucki/e/B00BCQVL4K%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Audible has Outside Myself Narrated by Stephanie Keefer and Royal Jaye. Listen to a Sample at:

https://www.audible.com/pd/Outside-Myself-Audiobook/B07CY6KGFQ

Options for readers with print impairments

Outside Myself is available through the National Library Service for the Blind & Physically Handicapped (NLS), part of the Library of Congress. Both books are also available through Learning Ally.

 

 

 

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov reviewed by Dylan Cook

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SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES
by Varlam Shalamov
translated by Donald Rayfield
New York Review Books, 576 pages 

reviewed by Dylan Cook

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Sketches of the Criminal World Book Jacket. A black-and-white photo of a raven sitting on tree logs in front of empty desert

Click here to purchase this book

A man gets ready to murder his boss with a pickaxe. A woman is grateful that her newborn twins don’t survive. A doctor refuses to treat new patients, fearing that someone has been sent to kill him. Characters like these populate Varlam Shalamov’s criminal world, the depraved underbelly of society born and bred in the Soviet prison system. Many of the criminal world’s citizens were locked up under vague pretenses of “counterrevolutionary activity,” so why should they uphold the laws that failed them in the first place? Why not murder and steal before your neighbor beats you to it? Morals, after a while, can become relative. Life in prison may get easier without a domineering boss, cheaper without children to care for, and safer without new faces in the ward.

Varlam Shalamov was a natural dissenter. Born to an Orthodox priest in 1907, Shalamov lived as a staunch atheist. As Josef Stalin rose to power, Shalamov joined a Trotskyist group in direct opposition to the new government. There, he helped distribute pamphlets that were highly critical of Stalin, leading to his first imprisonment from 1929 to 1932. He continued writing politically charged pieces that brought him in and out of prison camps in Kolyma, the Far East of Russia, from 1937 to 1951. In the decades that followed, Shalamov documented his experiences through thinly veiled fictions in the six-part Kolyma Stories. The first volume, published two years ago, contains an updated translation of the first three parts, with stories that have been widely known since the 1980s. By contrast, many stories in Sketches of the Criminal World were only recently discovered and appear here in English for the first time. Together, the two volumes constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s fiction. While his writing was suppressed in the Soviet Union, his stories leaked out into Europe and beyond, placing him on the world stage as one of the foremost chroniclers of the gulag. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, admitted that Shalamov’s personal experience in the prison system was “longer and more bitter,” and that Shalamov shed necessary light on life in Soviet prisons. Only in 1987, five years after his death, were Shalamov’s stories published in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev’s more lenient policies.Given his history, it’s unsurprising that Shalamov’s work is itself a protest, battling opinions on multiple fronts. Many “stories” in this collection are simply essays masquerading as fiction, offering Shalamov a platform to comment on literature, incarceration, and the intersection of the two. Russian literary giants like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky, and Babel were all too mawkish for Shalamov’s taste, and their attempts to accurately write about criminals simply missed the mark. None of these authors lived among criminals, real criminals, long enough to properly understand their rituals and influence. Shalamov did. By writing these stories, Shalamov was providing what he thought was the most genuine account of the gangsters who lived in and controlled Soviet gulags. There is nothing redemptive about these characters—they’re no Robin Hoods or Jean Valjeans. For Shalamov, criminals are not romantic ideals; rather, they represent the nadir of human morality.

There are two breeds of criminals in Kolyma. First are the freiers, the petty criminals that have no place in the criminal world. Most of these people were taken in under Article 58, a part of the Soviet penal code that allowed the government to arrest citizens under any suspicion that they were disloyal to the state. These everyday people that struggle against the system are the “criminals” that Shalamov fears are being canonized. They’re far from the hardened criminals, the gangsters, that live and thrive in this system. Being a gangster is more than a career, it’s a generational calling. The gangsters in Shalamov’s writing are the sons and grandsons of gangsters, and they bear children to one day fill their shoes. Naturally, the gangsters prey upon the freiers, stealing bread rations from them and murdering them when convenient. The freiers want to survive; the gangsters want to wield more power. Shalamov, through his first-person narration, does not firmly align himself in either camp. He treats both sides equally, and by doing so, he gestures towards the transition from freier to gangster, from human to inhuman. In “The War of the ‘Bitches,’” the narrator witnesses rival gangs in conflict. As the “war” presses on, the gangs begin recruiting both freiers and gangsters into their ranks. The narrator watches inmates futilely join and switch sides, asking:

How? Could the ceremony of kissing a knife change a criminal soul? Or had the notorious crook’s blood changed its chemical composition in the veins of an old crook just because his lips had touched a steel blade?

Reading Shalamov often feels like a quick slip into darkness. Many of his stories are poignantly short, often fewer than five pages, some no more than a paragraph. Today, these would likely be categorized as flash fiction, offering glimpses into characters’ lives without any direct plot. Shalamov knew the effect of this length, and he used it with great precision. His shortest stories focus in on an object or moment and strip them of their familiarity. In “Graphite,” one of the most famous stories from the collection, Shalamov directs his attention towards pencils. Pens, he says, are the preferred writing implement in prisons. Only indelible ink ensures that gangsters cannot cheat in a card game or that doctors cannot alter a death certificate. Pencil marks can be erased and changed to change fate, so pencils are seldom found in Kolyma. In a few pages, Shalamov turns graphite into an unattainable luxury. He shows that the criminal world is not entirely isolated from the civilian world, but runs parallel beneath it. Pencils are simply one of the freedoms that become alien when crossing over into a prison camp like Kolyma.

The natural world that houses these prisoners is just as antagonistic as any gangster or mob boss. High in the Arctic Circle, Kolyma winters last for nine months of the year, and the short summers are hardly enough to thaw the ice. A short walk can become dangerous as frostbite can set in within minutes. Out of both respect and fear for this environment, Shalamov’s writing is that of a naturalist. Describing flora and fauna are some of the only times Shalamov embellishes his usually terse prose style. Stories like “The Path” and “The Waterfall” depict the brief Kolyma summers and the respite that they provided. Natural warmth like this was a gift of hospitality in an otherwise unrelenting environment. “The Resurrection of the Larch,” more than any other story, shows the inextricable tie between the prisoners and nature. It was common for prisoners to send larch branches to their families, not because they were particularly pretty, but because they could come back to life in a glass of water. By sending home life, prisoners could send a message, more tangible than a letter, that they were still there. At the start of the story, the narrator writes:

In the Far North man looks for an outlet for his sensitivity, when it hasn’t been destroyed or poisoned by decades of living in Kolyma. A man sends an airmail parcel: not books, not photographs, not poetry, but a larch branch, a dead branch from living nature.

Map of Russia with the Kolyma Region shown in red. Modified from Wikimedia Commons.

Map of Russia with the Kolyma Region shown in red. Modified from Wikimedia Commons.

 

To Shalamov, survival itself was an act of defiance. Staying alive meant that your will was stronger than the prison systems. In the most personal, autobiographical story of the collection, “The Examination,” Shalamov recounts the process of becoming a paramedic. In his early years as a prisoner, Shalamov worked in coal and gold mines. He fought to become a paramedic, a less strenuous job, knowing full well that his body likely couldn’t take more abuse in the mines. Shalamov’s life comes down to a chemistry exam given by an indifferent proctor. Chemistry, we learn, is one of his weaknesses because his chemistry teacher was executed for counterrevolutionary activity. Now, the knowledge he was robbed of is the only thing that can save him. Living through his exam meant living through his sentence, a win against the Soviet government. “I survived,” he writes. “ I walked out of hell. I finished the classes, ended my sentence, outlived Stalin, and then returned to Moscow.” In a world shadowed by Stalin’s Iron Curtain, the general secretary is very rarely mentioned. Shalamov uses the name sparingly, only when he’s sure of a victory.

“How does someone stop being human?” Shalamov poses the question to the reader many times throughout his stories. Slowly, he begins to answer it by offering bite-sized portraits into life in a Soviet gulag. Bringing clarity to an oppressive regime’s darkest moments wasn’t pleasant for Shalamov, but it was necessary. Doing so could have easily placed him back in Kolyma, but political dissidents like Shalamov have to take that risk. His relentless, macabre imagery is painful, both for the subjects and for the author who is reliving these moments. The fact that Shalamov was able to produce these stories at all is a testament to his integrity as an artist and documentarian. He leads us down the path towards inhumanity. He shows us that this path is lined with theft and murder and indecency, but he never outright blames anyone for following it. The criminal world could not exist without the government that created it, so this journey is just a symptom of the Soviets’ immoral, self-serving policy. Shalamov lays this bare as he brings us all the way to inhumanity. Only then, lost and battered, can we start answering the bigger question: How do we go back?

Author photo for Dylan Cook

Dylan Cook author photo

Dylan Cook is a student at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies English, with a concentration in creative writing, and Biology. He often reads and writes, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].

YEAR BY YEAR: Poems by Lynne Sachs reviewed by Sharon Harrigan

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YEAR BY YEAR: Poems
by Lynne Sachs
Tender Buttons Press, 64 pages

reviewed by Sharon Harrigan

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

YEAR BY YEAR: Poems by Lynne Sachs book jacket; varying years written in alternating text types

Click here to purchase this book

When Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she asked herself one simple question: How have the private, most intimate moments of her life been affected by the public world beyond? The poems she wrote in response turned into this book. One poem for each year.

Sachs is a well-known experimental filmmaker. Year by Year is her first book of poetry, and in many ways it can be appreciated as the logical extension of her career as a visual storyteller. She describes her films as combining “memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes.” Such a description might also be applied to her poems. Year by Year dips into memoir when it recounts events in her personal life. The glimpses into current events have a documentary feel. When Sachs describes moments she was present for but cannot possibly remember, such as her own birth, the book takes us into fictional territory. The hybrid form (memoir/documentary/fiction) is one experimental element. But even more innovative is the way she often presents us with two versions of the same poem. The handwritten draft and the final typeset poem face each other, resembling a book of poems in translation where the original and translated versions run in parallel.

I first read Year by Year in two sittings, focusing only the final versions of the poems. It is unusual for me to consider a poetry collection a page turner, but this book was. It propelled me through time from the poet’s birth to the birth of her daughters and beyond, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Iraq War.

On my second read, I scrutinized the handwritten drafts alongside the final versions, one poem at a time, letting them resonate individually. The experience was fascinating not only because it showed what choices the poet made to tighten each poem, but also because reading the two versions side by side created a not-quite-synched stereo effect, or perhaps something close to a superimposed image in a film.

In “1962,” for example, the final version reads: “Two baby girls brown and blonde/at home with mom and a nurse.” The draft version is less distilled, but it has its own appeal: “A plan, an American plan, two eggs any style, not the Continental breakfast, baby girls blonde and brown at home with mom and a nurse, a black woman whose name no one remembers.” In particular, the fact that no one remembers the nurse’s name, in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1960s, sets the stage for the Civil Rights events that will happen in the later poems.

In “1966,” “fields of daddodils that never drooped” becomes “Droopless daddodils.” The conversational tone shifts to a pared-down diction that sounds more childlike and more artful at the same time.

Lynne Sachs

Lynne Sachs

The draft version of “1978” includes “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which the final version simply calls, “a feminist book on the body/I wish I loved.” The line breaks allow us to read the sentence as a whole and as a fragment, at the same time. We infer that the narrator wished she loved the book, but also that she wished she loved the body, the female body, her own body, enough to be comfortable learning more about its sexual functions. Having the name of the book on the facing page adds to the emotional impact, because so many of us know that book well, a cultural touchpoint that reminds us of how uncomfortable it can be to attempt to claim our bodies as our own.

The first poem in the book sets the tone by introducing the concept of time—the time of day, the time of year, the time of life of the poet’s parents when they became her parents: “Born at dinner time on an August evening,/the child of a twenty-one and twenty-three-year-old” are the opening lines. The use of time adds to the cinematic quality of the poem, grounding us in an “opening shot,” instead of the abstract or fuzzy entrance to a poem that a reader might expect. .

The poem “1964” immerses us in a scene that shifts from close up to zoom, from a little girl’s room to the vast night sky. We see the magical thinking of a young child, who might believe she can reach the stars or that she can change her parents’ behavior. The poem suggests the lack of control children have in their lives and the way they cope by refocusing their attention outward. As Sachs puts it, “My mother and father are fighting on the other side of the door./I lick the window next to my bed and pretend to taste the stars.”

It is not surprising that a poetry book by a filmmaker is lush with images. Even something as visually static as a phone call becomes vivid and tangible in “1982,” when the narrator is making a transatlantic call to her brother: “His hello transforms this dirty glass box/into four dynamic movie screens.” The poem then offers us glimpses of what the narrator imagines she sees on those screens, the events she is missing by being far from home. The poems also sometimes convey abstract concepts as physical objects, such as in “1961” where the future is a crystal ball that the newborn drops from her hands. It shatters and scatters “down the hall/out the front door of the hospital/into the sweltering darkness.” The “camera” zooms in to the tiniest of hands and then pans out to the room, the building, the outdoors. We can imagine two different “cameras” filming at the same time at vastly different scales.

Natural beauty and headline-making violence appear in the same stanza, showing, with that juxtaposition, that we cannot escape from the world around us. In “1999,” for example, “In our front yard now, Columbine grows wild./With each bloom, I think of her, a mother too.” The narrator cannot even look at her Columbine flowers without thinking of the Columbine school shooter. Again, Sachs uses something visual and concrete to pan over to the homophones they might prompt in a reader and writer alike.

Similarly, in “2004,” the narrator’s daughter’s first solo ride on the subway is made to coexist  with explosions in the Madrid metro by terrorists. The public and the private collide in its own kind of explosion on the page in a visual way.

The book ends with the fifty-year-old narrator looking back over her life—another visual reference. The scene is her birthday party, where she “perform[s]/split-second happiness for the camera.” The last stanza reads:

I catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror
take another look at my own silent film
and listen once again to the soundtrack
I’m playing over and over.

This scene can be interpreted literally as the narrator watching a film she made. But the “film” is also a metaphor for her life, her private and public memories, and, by extension, this book. The last line is “I’m playing over and over.” As an artist, Sachs keeps playing, again and again, with each of the thirty-three films she has made over the decades and now, with her first book of poems, which are just as inventive and fresh, just as delightfully playful with form. These poems are innovative but never intimidating or deliberately opaque. Instead, they invite us in, encouraging us to play along. They give us a structure to enter into our own retrospective lives, our own distillations of time, our own superimpositions of the newsworthy world onto our most intimate moments.

Sharon Harrigan Author PhotoSharon Harrigan is the author of the novel Half (University of Wisconsin Press, June 2020) the memoir Playing with Dynamite (Truman State University Press, 2017). She has published more than fifty stories, essays, and reviews in the New York Times (Modern Love), Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include: finalist, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for the Novel; International Book Award, first place in memoir, second place in new nonfiction; May Sarton Book Award finalist; Kinder award for best short story from Pleiades; Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award from Key West Literary Seminar; Sarah Pennypacker Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and Ted Berrigan Award from Naropa University. She teaches writing at WriterHouse, a literary center in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 

THE GREATEST LANDSCAPE HE HAD EVER SEEN by César Valdebenito, translated by Toshiya Kamei

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Barren desert landscape
THE GREATEST LANDSCAPE HE HAD EVER SEEN
by César Valdebenito
translated by Toshiya Kamei

In the summer midday, he was seated on a blanket in his underwear, with his boots on. His horse was five or six meters away while his gaunt dog Toby was asleep. He had turned on the radio and was listening to the news, but twenty minutes later he got bored. About fifty meters away his flock of sheep wandered. Robust, peaceful, and healthy, they kept grazing. He grabbed his rifle, which he had brought back from Pueblo Seco, Mexico a few years earlier. He had always wanted to try it, but he had never found the time or the opportunity. He was one of the best shooters, if not the best in that mountain range and had always wanted to know how good he was. What had stopped him? He had no answers. So he took aim at the nearest tree. The shot sounded and the leaves shook. The dog woke up and the horse jumped. Then, with great deliberation, he aimed toward his herd. He gunned down a sheep with the first shot. The horse trotted away. With amazing quickness, he aimed at the horse. For a moment he followed it with the crosshairs and, seconds later, knocked it down with another shot. The horse kicked and lay there. He kept aiming at the flock and knocking down sheep. Each time one fell, he lowered his rifle and gazed into the landscape. He felt the warm air as the sun scorched the earth. He felt drops of sweat forming on his forehead. He continued firing for three or four hours. After that, the flock had been halved. The dog watched the sheep raise their heads and then continue to graze. As the dog observed, sometimes they collapsed or disappeared behind the horizon. “See, Toby? I’m very good, aren’t I?” said the young man. Then his cousin arrived on horseback. He came full gallop. He stopped about thirty meters away and shouted at him what the fuck he was doing. “You’re nuts! You’ve gone totally nuts! Bernardo!” shouted the cousin. But the young man aimed at him, fired, and gunned down the horse he was riding. The cousin ran out and got lost in the plain. In the middle of the afternoon, gunshots were heard throughout the region. The young man had already been surrounded by PDI agents and public security officers. But still, from time to time, he loaded the rifle and aimed at a sheep. The last image he would ever see was his dog looking at those sheep and the sheep looking at him. In the end he would think this was the greatest landscape he had ever seen in his life.


Born in 1975 in Concepción, Chile, César Valdebenito is a poet, writer, and essayist. His books include the novels La vida nunca se acaba (2017) and Una escena apocalíptica (2016), as well as the short story collections El bindú o la musa de la noche (2017) and Pequeñas historias para mentes neuróticas (2018).

Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas. His translations have appeared in venues such as Abyss & Apex, Cosmic Roots & Eldritch, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Helios Quarterly Magazine, and Samovar.

 

Image credit: Ivars Krutainas on Unsplash

THE BOOK OF SARAH, a graphic memoir by Sarah Lightman, reviewed by Emily Steinberg

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THE BOOK OF SARAH
by Sarah Lightman
The Pennsylvania University Press, 237 pages
reviewed by Emily Steinberg

The Book of SarahSarah Lightman’s poignant, engrossing and poetic graphic memoir, The Book of Sarah , leads the reader on an epic odyssey, moving back and forth in time, from the author’s early twenties as an uncertain, dependent, and depressed young artist to a confident forty-five-year-old woman who is finally the architect of her own life.

Raised in England in a traditional Jewish family, Lightman perfectly plays the role of the sheltered, good daughter, but is squelched, suffocated and empty inside. She became more Orthodox as a way to feel part of something larger. She wrote to me in an email,  “I had great feelings of inadequacy and no idea about how to navigate life. I think religion can tell you how to live and it is easier than that long, painful journey of working out who you are and making up your own mind about things.” A late bloomer, she eventually discovered she no longer needed the architecture of orthodoxy and began building a “scaffolding of self” with permission to live her own life.

The heart of Lightman’s book is her art, and the black and white graphite drawings of architecture and often overlooked everyday objects are particularly forceful and beautiful. Intensely drawn, with energetic, almost obsessive marks and stark contrast of dark and light, we view sides of buildings with fire escapes, exteriors of family homes and dining-room table and chairs, interiors and exteriors of her boarding school outside London, her books, her therapist’s office, chairs and shoes.

line drawing of fire escapes

Lightman writes and draws about being a young artist, anxiously uncertain of her abilities.

 

line drawing of a bag of salad

“I worked through a salad as I waited for a rejection from a gallery.”

She writes beautifully of the overlapping of life events , or as she puts it, “The maths of life. A birth. A death. A Marriage. A death. Someone’s happiness. Someone else’s tears.”  She seeks love and relationship, but doesn’t know herself and so can’t know another.

line drawing of a toothbrush

“I had a toothbrush next to mine, so did that mean I was your girlfriend?”

Life evolves. She finds Charlie and has a Traditional Jewish Wedding. Then, her Grandfather is in Hospital and “we visit him everyday and read him psalms.”  She muses about motherhood at thirty-six, describing her son Harry’s arrival and what was like to be a new mom.

Life isn’t perfect for Lightman, but she finds a place of contentment that is enough. While searching for a scaffolding to build her life on, we see it was there all along in her art and in The Book of Sarah, Lightman leads us to a place that is both gorgeous and profound.

line drawing of a baby's head

“Oh my little Love.”

Sarah Lightman author headshotSarah Lightman is an artist who writes, draws and paints about her life experiences. She is co-founder of ​“Laydeez do Comics,” an international forum for women comics artists and editor of the incredible Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews, (2014), a collection of the work of eighteen international Jewish female auto-bio comics artists. She earned a PhD from The University of Glasgow in the field of Women’s Autobiographical Comics.

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Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist and has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently, she has been named Humanities Scholar in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine where she will teach medical students how to draw their own stories in words and images. Her visual narratives No Collusion! (2018), Paused (2018), Berlin Story: Time, Memory, Place (2017), A Mid Summer Soirée (2015), Broken Eggs (2014), and The Modernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver Magazine. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins). She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State Abington. You can see more of her work at emilysteinberg.com. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].

 

DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY, a novel by Julie E. Justicz, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY
by Julie E. Justicz
Fomite, 300 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Degrees of Difficulty jacket cover. A young shirtless boy in swim goggles stands in front of a turquoise wallMany years ago, as a feature writer for a magazine, I spent weeks visiting with a family whose oldest son communicated not with words but with his body. He said yes or no, go away or come near, I don’t want it or I do by hurling himself toward gestures of acceptance or disdain. He was a beautiful boy, nearly adolescent, larger than his mother who was struggling now to control his outbursts by setting him into a warm bath or hugging him close and overwhelming to his father, who had left his job so that he might try to build a school that was just right for his own son and others. This family was among the most extraordinary I’ve ever spent time with—full of love, chasing hope, unwilling to give up on this first-born child of theirs, and yet so devastatingly exhausted.

I thought a lot about this family as I read Julie Justicz’s novel Degrees of Difficulty. Here the child at the center of the heartbreak is third-born Ben, born with damage to his twenty-first chromosome, an “omission in the blueprint” that has resulted in “the recessed jaw that would lead to feeding issues, the missing kidney due to frequent injections, hospitalizations, IV medications. And later, the seizures: Body-wracking grand mals that daily medications could not control.”

Julie E. Justicz author photo

Julie E. Justicz

Ben is a young teen when we meet him. Attempts to find a boarding school where he might fit in have failed, mostly coming to violent ends. Perry, the father, keeps searching for a placement—leaving home often on his quest. Caroline, the Shakespeare-expert academic mother, can’t maintain her focus, can’t do much of anything, in time, but swirl a sedative into her tea. Hugo, the middle child, understands his brother best of all. Ivy, the oldest, can’t wait to leave home. Ben’s fractured chromosome is the primary narrative in each character’s life, and each character is presented separately by chapter, fracture by fracture.

The story begins in April 1991. It ends in April 2008. Sometimes chapters will close just as the crescendo of a crisis is reaching its fever pitch, leaving the reader to turn to the page toward a scene from months or years later, when the aftermath of the terror has now been woven into the characters’ new realities—a marriage under strain, a daughter in revolt, a middle child assuming increasing responsibility for Ben. We soon keep our eye primarily on Hugo, whose love for his brother and his ability to understand him have been rendered with heartbreaking tenderness.

Here, in the early pages, Hugo is rigging up a tricycle so that he might give his brother, with his twisted leg and nonverbal desires, a chance at a favorite pastime—speed. It’s Hugo’s voice that we hear:

“Yep. Hugo’s here. Now lean your choice, man, a left—this way, or a right—down there.” Ben sat perfectly still, trying to process the instructions, and Hugo took another blessed moment to breathe. Air moved through his lungs thick and warm as blood. The kudzu-swallowed trees added an iridescent sheen to the hazy sky. And the continued cicada sawing, a southern city’s jungle pulse. Shickkaw, shickkaw, shickkaw…. Hugo drew another deep breath; shicckaws ricocheted in his head. Sometimes he thought he could live like this, live with Ben forever. Sometimes he felt that he had already drowned.

Justicz writes with precision and authority. She knows chromosomes, Shakespeare, medicine, the rules of group homes, the bewilderment of unanswerable questions, such as: “Could a child ever ask too much of his parents? And if he did, what should a parent ask in return? That the child go away?” She also understands that real people cannot live without hope—and that readers are real people. There are infinite difficulties in Degrees of Difficulty. But there is also the glisten of redemption. We read across all that time and all those pages to discover (with gratitude) just what that glisten is.

Beth KephartBeth Kephart author photo is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of numerous essays, and the co-founder of Juncture Workshops. Her newest book is a collaboration with her artist husband—an illustrated journal called Journey: A Traveler’s Notes. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

GRAND UNION, short stories by Zadie Smith, reviewed by Eliza Browning

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GRAND UNION
by Zadie Smith
Penguin Press, 256 pages
reviewed by Eliza Browning

Book Cover Grand UnionSince the release of her enormously successful first novel White Teeth in 2000, Zadie Smith has regularly published novels and essay collections, including last year’s acclaimed Feel Free.

Grand Union, a collection of nineteen works of short fiction, represents an exciting addition to her oeuvre. The characters it features—black and white, young and old, male and female, gay and straight, and hailing from both sides of the Atlantic—are as diverse a cast as populate her novels, but their stories veer from the first-person narrative to the nonlinear and surreal to the essayistic. Form is experimented with, even scrapped altogether. “Mood” collages fragments of ruminations on modernity, including imitations of Tumblr posts. “Parents’ Morning Epiphany” is an analysis of a child’s homework. What ties these stories together is not subject or theme, but Smith’s witty, thoughtful, and culturally attuned voice.

Politics hover in the background of many of the stories, although their references are typically oblique rather than overt. Rather than tackle the major issues head-on—Brexit, Trump’s America—they quietly remind you now and again of the world we live in. In “The Lazy River,” British vacationers seeking escape from the pressures of everyday life in a Spanish resort are occasionally flung back into reality with the occurrence of ordinary events: “The tomatoes are in the supermarket. The moon is in the sky. The Brits are leaving Europe. We are on a ‘getaway.’ We still believe in getaways.” The story ends with the unnamed characters sitting on the balcony after putting their children to bed, “where we look up his Twitter, as we have every night since January.” He isn’t named, he doesn’t have to be. It’s enough that the modern reader will immediately catch this reference that speaks to the state of the world today, an effect Smith masterfully achieves.

As much as her characters try to ignore the machinery of global politics, they will return to it, quietly, at the end of each day. Though not explicitly acknowledged, their concern will materialize as a sense of generalized anxiety that runs perpetually in the background, such as the parents’ worry for their children’s safety while strapping them into trampoline harnesses. It’s these children they will try to shield from danger, from ever-advancing technology (“the obscene bulge of those iPhones”), and from politics themselves.

Zadie Smith author headshot

Zadie Smith

Of course, in some cases these references are more transparent. In “Downtown,” a female Jamaican artist narrates her dissatisfaction with her life and the world on the day of Brett Kavanaugh’s swearing-in. “Brett had proved once again that whenever a young Brett is born in these United States, born with a dream, that dream can truly come true. Yes, sir, if your baby Brett really puts his mind to it—if he believes, if he has faith, if he is a he, and if he is called Brett—he can do whatever it is he puts his mind to, and that goes double for all you Troys, Kips, Tripps, Bucks and Chads.”

How can this be happening, Smith seems to ask, despite all the other once-unbelievable things that have happened the past two or three years? And yet it happens, over and over again. We are the world that created Brett Kavanaugh. Throughout Grand Union, prejudice rears its head: racism and transphobia against the aging Cabaret star in “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets,” echoes of police brutality in the tremendously affecting murder of a black man in “Kelso Deconstructed” (set in 1959). These characters, unlike the vacationers in “The Lazy River,” do not have the luxury of ignoring these lingering realities; they live them every day.

Some of the most affecting stories follow the perspectives of children or young adults as they struggle to find their place in the world. The wonderful “Sentimental Education,” reminiscent of some of Smith’s earlier novels, focuses on the sexual history of a young woman and her relationship with one of the only other black students in her college. The opening story, “The Dialectic,” centers on the turbulent relationship between a single mother and her headstrong daughter. Like the characters in “The Lazy River,” the mother and daughter are on a seaside vacation, a liminal space which seems to function as a gateway to address larger truths. Some stories are more successful than others. While much of the familial interplay and interaction between a young boy and girl in “Just Right” rings true, a similar relationship— between a teenage boy and a young girl he is escorting to a funeral in “Meet the President”— falls flat; much of the plot is bogged down in dystopian details.

With Grand Union, Smith presents a vibrant, wildly digressive collection of stories that captures the full scope of her wit and imagination. It’s different from her earlier fiction, bolder and more adventurous but with the same sparkling tone, and at the same time quietly and heartbreakingly prescient.

Eliza Browning headshotEliza Browning is a sophomore studying English and Art History at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Her work has been recognized by the YoungArts Foundation, the Fitzgerald Museum, and the Poetry Society of Virginia, among others. This past summer she was an intern at Cleaver and a writing fellow in the Counterclock Arts Collective.

RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL by Faith Sullivan, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL
by Faith Sullivan
Milkweed Editions, 256 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Ruby and Roland Book Jacket. Two shadowed figures sit under a large tree in front of rolling golden hills

Books recalibrate our imaginations. They expect us to make room, to put on our nearest pair of shoes and walk the hall, the street, the cornfields, whispering to ourselves and to the wind.

When Faith Sullivan began writing what has become known as her Harvester books—novels like The Cape Ann and The Empress of One and Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse—she invited readers to join her in a fictional Minnesota landscape, then gave them many reasons to return. Sullivan’s Harvester is a palpable place. Its people are relatable and real. They carry burdens and they engage in kindness. Their bones bend with the hills.

Now midway into her eighties, Sullivan is still finding, within Harvester, commonplace stories of everyday appeal. Her new book, Ruby & Roland, begins not in Harvester, but in Illinois, where Ruby Drake is living an idyllic childhood with a childlike mother until her parents are killed in an accident. The orphan moves in with one family and then with another, packing tokens of her youth and holding memories near. It is at the Schoonover farm, in Harvester, that Ruby becomes who she seems meant to be—a reliable and literate farm girl. She plants seeds and she harvests. She cans and she bakes. She makes the mess of mincemeat and then scrubs away the mess. It’s a happy existence, but happy, Sullivan knows, is not enough. Complications make a novel novel, and so Sullivan has her Ruby fall in love with the beautiful, blue-eyed Roland, whose equally beautiful wife, Dora, lies inconsolable in an upstairs room, following the death of her infant daughter.

Faith Sullivan, author headshot

Faith Sullivan

Things move at a rapid clip. Glances become touch. Touch becomes sex. Joy becomes guilt. Dora suspects that her husband is cheating, but, following another tragedy, she must accept Ruby’s help in her house. To whom must one be true? That’s the story here. Are we better people when we walk away from those we love? Best when we decide that the thing that we want most is not ours to have?

With her orphan start and her borrowed homes, her love of the seemingly unattainable Roland, and her domestic duties in an unhappy house, Ruby may be Jane Eyre inspired but she is also very much her own character, capable (most happily) of seeing the beauty of her world. She notices “the heavenly perfume of good clean smoke wafting up to one’s bedroom at night when the sky was ebon and the stars icy.” (34) She appreciates the piano music that drifts out of open doors and the one “moved along the wooden walk as if in the pages of a novel.” (32) She’s living her life, in other words, and in living hers, we, the readers, are escaping ours, walking the hills and riding the trains, wondering whose happiness should matter most, burnishing the secret that propels the novel forward.

Reading Sullivan is like spending time in a hammock beneath a tree on a day when there is just the right degree of breeze. Somebody’s baking peach pie and the air is sweet. Somebody’s dog is singing.

Beth Kephart is the author of more than two-dozen books, an adjunct teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and the co-founder of Juncture Workshops. Wife|Daughter|Self: A Memoir in Essays will be published by Forest Avenue Press in spring 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

BURIED ALIVE: A TO-DO LIST, poems by Carole Bernstein, reviewed by Claire Oleson

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BURIED ALIVE: A TO-DO LIST
by Carole Bernstein
Hanging Loose Press, 80 pages.
reviewed by Claire Oleson

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

jacket art for Buried Alive

Click here to purchase this book

From satirizing the mechanics of the American workplace to discovering motherly devotion in the myth of Persephone, Carole Bernstein’s third poetry collection Buried Alive: A To-Do List takes readers through caves and coffins alike, showing what living things still kick inside the previously presumed-dead.

The book follows a loose chronology, drawing from glimpses of her living to form the picture of a complete and complicated life. Bernstein is unafraid in her direct examinations of familial sexual abuse, injury and aging, and the unfolding joys and strains of motherhood in clear, occasionally very casual language. This book trusts its reader with image and metaphor but also consciously stays married to narrative; a majority of the poems in Buried Alive: A To-Do List navigate by chronology, desiring to approach the terrifying and mundane with equal clarity.

Before the life of the speaker unfolds, the second poem and the titular piece of the book takes us to her coffin. In “Buried Alive: A To-Do List,” we see the speaker contend with waking up buried alive, a circumstance which prompts them to list tips for enduring their own situation. The tone in this poem resembles that of many others in the book, tackling both a morbid humor and a clear horror. In this voice, the buried-alive speaker advises themselves to:

Calculate the gravid mass of Amalthea, a moon of Jupiter.
Order a pizza using reverse osmosis.
Pretend a demon is fucking you.
Beg for your mommy, and everyone’s mommy,
even though you’re over fifty.

Here, and throughout the collection, there is a haunting synthesization of humor and fear. Nothing can really be done in this coffin besides wait, but this doesn’t stop worlds of thought from blooming in the speaker’s mind. The audience is invited to “Try to see the puckered satin lip-like folds/ inches above your face,/ you just know it’s pink and livid, like a fleshy diseased vagina.” The folded insides of the coffin itself may be static, but the lines that detail them are anything but. The poem moves from genitalia to contemplations of the post-mortem to being “relieved that you can stop worrying/ about being buried alive someday.” Inside horror, we are at least given one less thing to worry about.

Mirroring the oxymoronic title, the poem ends with an exhibition of both life and death. The entombed woman remembers a day in winter when she bought a newspaper for an elderly man who was incredibly grateful. She closes her eyes and remembers the cold day, remarking “Already you can see your breath.” The reader is left on this exhale of warm breath in chilled air, a sign of living and a possible stand-in for a last breath, clever in its ability to be read as both. The sardonic and sincere share these stanzas, flooding a single coffin.

Author headshot for Carole Bernstein

Carole Bernstein

The book returns to the subterranean in “The Visit” where “a flashlight rolls over the walls of a cave” that proves to be a pregnant uterus. The fetus’s presence is likened to newly-discovered cave-drawings as the sonogram presents its “grainy screen” “this tiny, blurry, leaping bison or bear.” The ambiguity of the screen, the touring of the uterus as a container for life, and the lack of clarity of what the life itself actually looks like all gesture back to titular poem. Though there is a clear and bright hopefulness in this discovery, this “first art we know” in a body that was thought infertile in the poem immediately prior to “The Visit.” Still, this life emerges in conversation with the deaths around it. The cave and the coffin each show signs of the living and the departed, neither simply houses one or the other, and in this way Bernstein complicates the funeral and the delivery room in the same breath.

Despite its regular use of sarcasm and its deployment of humor to both survive and illuminate the world it inhabits, Buried Alive: A To-Do List demonstrates a heartfelt love for the living. This love is made clearer and better for its confrontations with death, as is seen in “Pumpkin,” a poem where a pet cat being euthanized because

A thing in her head was pressing on her brain,
the little cat-brain that had known me,
kept her body warm, observed the rain,

There is immense tenderness held in this small space where a sudden rhyme brightens the otherwise dismal lines. This rhyme emerges without an established rhyme-scheme, softly hinging a defunct neurology to the weather. Embracing this unexpected whimsy, Bernstein’s following tercets occasionally, but do not always, rhyme while showing the death of this cat that cradled knowing of its owner in its brain. The emergency eventually calms and “Something at some point loosened, breathed.” The reader knows in the given context that this is a death, but Bernstein has already shown us breathing both ending and starting lives, and like the unexpected rhymes scattered without clear pattern, there is a soft glow of unpredictability offered in this detail.

Again demonstrating a link rather than a division between living and dying, Bernstein offers another sort of softness in “Domestic Interiors.” The speaker folds worn undershirts which are “soft as silk, soft as nothing” as

Our daughter, a small bundled person deposited carefully on the
bed while I folded laundry—too young to even roll, she lay,
shifted, breathed, sighed, looked at the ceiling fixture, heard the
light report of the clothes shaken out, the gentle thud of
towels—

Alongside the laundry, the infant is rendered almost another object, a bundle of something that invites touch. Possessing a texture close to shirts owned for years, the newborn lies still until the mother conjures her as a young adult, iterating “I must not keep her.” At once a baby soft among soft objects and “now a woman in boots, long brown hair and a big bag of books,” the child is simultaneously possessable and untouchable. The mother implores the shirts, asking if they remember the baby. This longing question also works to ask the audience: what can be held? Bernstein has shown us life in containers, life in an organ and life a casket that resembles the genitalia that typically leads to that same organ, but neither place can hold that life indefinitely. The softness that this book tours, from the satin interior of the coffin to the bundled worn clothing on the bed, are textures Bernstein makes both deeply inviting to caress and legibly temporary.

Carole Bernstein’s Buried Alive: A To-Do List encourages dying and living, newness and wornness, to share a sensation under the same hands, in the same lines. These pieces are not delineations between the sensations of loss and life, but rather, they are sites for their coexistence. From trauma to satire to placing a toy unicorn on your desk at work to stave off isolation and nihilism, Bernstein’s poems showcase something worth laughing at and something worth crying over, and do so, critically, at the same time.

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Cleaver Poetry Reviews Editor Claire Oleson is a writer hailing from Grand Rapids Michigan. She’s a 2019 grad of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. Her work has been published by the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, Siblíní Art and Literature journal, Newfound Journal, NEAT Magazine, Werkloos Magazine, and Bridge Eight Magazine, among others. She is also the 2019 winner of the Newfound Prose Prize.  Contact her by email. 

EMPTY WORDS, a novel by Mario Levrero, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

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EMPTY WORDS
by Mario Levrero
translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott
Coffee House Press, 122 pages
reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Empty Words Book Jacket

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Mario Levrero’s Empty Words is no ordinary novel. Organized as a series of handwriting exercises, Empty Words offers a look inside a novelist’s mind as he attempts to improve himself by improving his handwriting. Originally published in 1996 in Spanish, it is Levrero’s first novel translated into English. Annie McDermott, who introduces English language readers to Levrero, has translated other works from Spanish and Portuguese, and her translations have appeared in many places, including Granta, the White Review, Asymptote, Two Lines, and World Literature Today.

At first blush, however, Empty Words appears to be an unusual work to translate because it is ostensibly less of a narrative and more of a meditation on language itself. After all, it is structured as a series of handwriting exercises. But it becomes clear rather quickly that translation does not hinder the reader’s ability to appreciate Empty Words because that meditation on language and the shape of individual words creates a narrative of its own. Words do not exist in a vacuum, and the narrator’s efforts at writing words without meaning is futile. Both the shape of the letters and the words those letters form convey meaning. As Empty Words has semi-autobiographical undertones, it is ultimately the perfect introduction to Levrero for readers of English who might have otherwise remained unfamiliar with him and his work.

Levrero was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. He died there in 2004. Levrero has been referred to as the Kafka of Uruguay, possibly because his first novel, The City, published in 1966, was inspired by Kafka. In fact, Levrero once said that The City was “almost an attempt to translate Kafka into Uruguayan.” Levrero also claimed that he “didn’t realize it was possible to tell the truth” until he read Kafka. But despite such high praise, Levrero himself tended to shy away from such recognition, often avoiding publicity altogether. Further, as Annie McDermott put it in her translator’s note, he denied the existence of any literary career.

But Levrero does have a literary career, and Empty Words, through its series of handwriting exercises, showcases a talent for probing the innerworkings of an individual’s mind while writing about something ordinary and mundane: penmanship, handwriting. The handwriting exercises form the core of what the unnamed narrator, a novelist and writer, terms “graphological self-therapy.” As explained to the reader from the outset, the theory behind graphological self-therapy is that “by changing the behavior observed in a person’s handwriting, it may be possible to change other things about that person.”

This motivation for performing the exercises establishes an intimate space, where penmanship may reveal anxieties. The reader then has access to the innermost thoughts of Levrero’s anxiety-riddled protagonist. Although the focus is apparently on “draw[ing] the letters one by one and giving no thought to the meanings of the words they’re forming,” the narrator ultimately ends up considering the meaning of the words, all of which culminate in a humorous and engaging meditation on daily life and one’s own existence.

Mario Levrero author headshot

Mario Levrero

By structuring Empty Words as he does, Levrero may be implicitly asking the reader whether we can derive a deeper meaning from the shape of the letters, the form of the handwriting, just as the narrator asks this question of himself. Can the shape of the letters tell us something that the words themselves cannot?  To be clear, the novel is all in typeface; we do not see any handwriting. We only hear (or rather read) about the narrator’s difficulties with forming certain letters. “[H]ow the hell do you do a capital S?” Later on, a paragraph is devoted to improving “r’s”—“[r]ound and round the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran.”

But this is hardly a book of repeated words and letters. Indeed, any concerns that the exercises are a “clumsy substitute for literature” are unnecessary. A discourse on the shape of letters becomes an opportunity to step inside someone else’s mind. Why is he picking these words? Is he struggling to focus on the exercises? Why? Is there something else he wants to write rather than focusing on the exercises? It inevitably becomes like reading a diary that was not meant to be a diary. But because words inherently express ideas, meaning is inevitable.

To discover the meaning behind Levrero’s words takes patience. Empty Words does not follow a linear storyline (even if each handwriting exercise is dated and appears in chronological order). But Levrero encourages the reader’s patience by peppering the novel with clever and rather dry humor. The reader is incentivized to keep turning the pages to find the next digression from handwriting exercises to deadpan observations about daily life.

translator Annie McDermott headshot

Annie McDermott, translator

These observations crop up as the protagonist deals with his anxiety, with an impending move to a different house, and with the tense relationship between his dog, Pongo, and a white cat that appears one day. For example, taking a deadpan tone, Levrero’s unnamed novelist observes that his handwriting is messiest when he smokes more cigarettes than usual. He then concludes that “bad handwriting is caused by anxiety.” In other words, bad handwriting is evidence of anxiety, which must mean that the anxiety has subsided when the handwriting improves.

Although a short novel, Empty Words is the type of work one might start and stop somewhat frequently given the lack of a linear of plotline. Levrero seems to be aware of this possibility. Specifically, just as the reader may interrupt her reading of the novel, Levrero inserts various household interruptions that distract from the effort at perfecting the shape of letters. But these interruptions and distractions do more than reflect the potential that the reader may be experiencing something similar. Indeed, they add a richness by inviting the reader into the daily life of the world inside the novel. For example, the narrator’s wife and stepson keep different schedules and have different priorities that interfere with any strict focus on handwriting exercises.

After establishing this tension, it becomes especially easy to understand his trouble falling asleep when he knows his wife and stepson are awake and cannot be relied on to turn off the lights and the television or “refrain from making any noise once [he has] fallen asleep.” In this way, the non-linear structure succeeds: it is the logical choice for a novel about anxiety and self-improvement because anxiety and life hardly follow a linear trajectory.

In addition to these external interruptions, Levrero includes internal interruptions where the narrator interrupts himself. As often happens, he gets “carried away by the subject matter and forget[s] about forming the letters.” In a way, this makes sense, even if “sense is nothing but a complicated social construct.” Letters, too, are “a complicated social construct” that provide a framework for sense. By focusing on his handwriting, on something so mundane, his mind wanders. Perhaps, Levrero is also contemplating the reader’s mind wandering in these moments. But it is in these moments that Levrero shines as an author and McDermott as a translator, pulling the reader back into the novel. For example, in an early exercise, it is explained that “[t]o get anywhere in life, you have to believe in something. In other words, you have to be wrong.”

Such a strong statement tends to grab the reader’s attention and maybe refocuses the narrator, too, on the task at hand. At times, “despite the psychological pressure . . . to do other, more urgent work,” the handwriting exercises are prioritized because of their potential for self-improvement and what they might reveal about identity and personal principles. Of course, who knows if this “graphological self-therapy” leads to self-improvement. Levrero never actually says one way or the other. The narrator becomes more reflective as the novel progresses, but his anxiety remains in the background. But even if the exercises do not create the type of self-improvement that the narrator hopes for, they do provide a vehicle for offering a number of insights on life, which Levrero somehow offers without becoming cliché.

Levrero considers the ambitions we hold for ourselves—that “sometimes it’s no bad thing to aim high, especially in a field where everything colludes to make you aim low, where mediocrity is what really impresses people.” This sentiment is also part of the core of the novel. Self-improvement based upon improving handwriting is a high ambition, which common sense would suggest may well be futile or at least encourage low expectations of success.

But Levrero’s work is also a meditation on figuring out what we want to say. After all, even though the whole novel is apparently about forming letters (and not the words those letters form), there are frequent digressions and attempts to articulate any number of concerns or thoughts. In doing so, it is not unusual to get frustrated at “not being able to condense [the] story, to get to the heart of what [we] want to say.” We may “tr[y] again and again, and every time [we] end up going around in circles and getting lost in minor details.” For as much as the narrator gets lost in minor details, it is precisely those minor details of forming certain letters, looking after his dog, and engaging with his wife and stepson that make the novel so compelling. Sometimes, going around in circles is simply the point.

Levrero also makes a point about figuring out how identity evolves over time. At the end of the novel, the narrator explains that “[w]hen you reach a certain age, you’re no longer the protagonist of your own actions: all you have left are the consequences of things you’ve already done.” Perhaps, then, the benefits of improved handwriting are limited, and any self-improvement cannot wash away the consequences of prior decisions. Similarly, the writing itself outlives the writer, so at some point, even when the writer is gone and no more can be said, the consequences of what was previously written remains.

Or maybe, Levrero’s point is that arriving at any of these insights requires attention to ordinary activities like forming the shape of the letter “r.” In a tribute to the ordinary, Levrero creates an extraordinary work, reminding readers that words will never be empty.

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Ashlee Paxton-Turner in front of a bookshelf

Ashlee Paxton-Turner is a native of Williamsburg, Virginia, and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was an English major with a creative writing concentration. A former Teach For America corps member in rural North Carolina, Ashlee is now a lawyer and graduate of Duke University School of Law.

THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING, a memoir by Long Litt Woon, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING
by Long Litt Woon
translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland
Spiegel & Grau, 292 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver 

Book jacket for "The Way Through the Woods." Green leaf-like pain strokes; bold white text.

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When I read memoir I want: something to crack and something to rise, something to arc and something to stream, something to move across the page and, as it does, to move me.

I bought Long Litt Woon’s The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning for the promise embedded in the premise. How would Woon make her way back into the world after the shocking, sudden death of the fifty-four-year-old husband with whom she had spent all her adult years? What do mushrooms have to do with recovering from such a loss? Does anybody ever actually recover?

Woon, who moved to Norway from Malaysia as an exchange student at the age of eighteen and stayed because of her love for her husband, Eiolf, is not, as it turns out, interested in the literary fissures and expansions and movements that generally interest me. Her prose, as translated by Barbara J. Haveland, is determinedly straightforward, lavishly undecorated, direct and directly to the point. Her structure is neither chronological nor intuitive. She holds her memories of her husband close, revealing little of the man she clearly loved, disclosing only the smallest glimpses of herself. She begins:

This is the story of a journey that started on the day my life was turned upside down: the day when Eiolf went to work and didn’t come home. He never came home again. Life as I had known it was gone in that instant. The world would never be the same again.

It’s the mushrooms that primarily preoccupy Woon in this book—the hunt for them in Norwegian forests, the challenges presented to amateur students and foragers, the friendships that begin to form over mushroom-themed meals, the way Woon’s “concentration is sharpened and the tension mounts” as she goes out into the Fungi Kingdom and reports back on the wildly interesting species that bruise, poison, delight, elude, or (depending on your preference) catalyze hallucinations.

Woon is, as it turns out, a terrific guide to mushroom secrets, scents, and dishes. She gets so good at this mushroom thing that she passes the difficult-to-master inspector’s exam. Her plainspoken prose provides essential clarity when she reports, say, on the fact that “the bulk of the mushroom consists of a dynamic, living network of long, shoestring-like cells known as mycelium, which spread underground or through trees and other plants,” then goes on to describe the world’s largest organism, the honey fungus, which “covers a stretch of woodland corresponding to almost four square miles” and is “estimated to be between two thousand and eight thousand years old.” It’s interesting stuff, riveting in its way, and about halfway in I decided to stop looking for the lyric leap so that might I experience this tale the way Woon chose to tell it. To follow her as she zags from morels to brain mushrooms, from the vocabulary of mushroom smells to the art of catching mice, from psychedelia to mushroom “bacon.”

Sure, I would have liked to have seen so much more of the husband that was tragically lost too soon; Woon shares a few tidbits, but we rarely meet Eiolf inside a scene. Sure, I would have liked to have known more than what Woon shares about the essence of her once-shared home. But the more I read, the more I remembered that this memoir had not been written for me. It had been written because Woon discovered, in the dark country of her grief, so many lanterned forests. She discovered mushrooms hiding in plain sight, and she took them into her kitchen, and she invited friends, and she was alone no more.

◊◊◊

Author Photo of Beth KephartBeth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than two-dozen books, an adjunct teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and a co-founder of Juncture Workshops, which offers memoir resources and teaching. Her first memoir in many years, Wife|Daughter|Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press in early 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

ART CAN HELP, essays by Robert Adams, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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ART CAN HELP
by Robert Adams
Yale University Art Gallery, distributed by Yale University Press, 88 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart 

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Art Can Help Book Jacket

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“[I]f you begin with an idea you’re usually beat before you start,” writes Robert Adams in Art Can Help, as he tries to imagine Edward Ranney photographing the Canyon del Muerto, and, so, here I begin, having been holding this slender silver volume in my hand all afternoon, interrupted only by the sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower and the smell of some ambient spray paint.

(A long sentence, a beginning.)

The book marks Adams’ attempt to dissuade his readers from Jeff Koons-style glitz, which is to say “imitations that distract us or, openly or by implication, ridicule hope.” We are reminded of the power of art, Adams suggests, by studying art that is real.

The work of Edward Hopper is here in these pages, as are the images of Eugene Buechel, Ken Abbott, Julia Margaret Cameron, Dorothea Lange, and others, but if you are already concluding that this is a book of pictures and captions, you’d be wrong. This is a book of eclectic wisdoms and collegial awe.

“I am asked with surprising frequency, ‘How do you know where to make pictures?’” Adams, himself a famed photographer of the American West, announces as he ponders Eric Paddock’s miniaturized views of Colorado’s byways. Adams answers the question like this: “To the extent there is a rule, the answer is that it is usually where you stop long enough.”

(Where you stop. Long enough.)

Robert Adams author photo

Robert Adams

The earned erudition is useful, it seems to me, for novelists and poets, memoirists and playwrights who wonder—an occupational hazard—where and what the story is. Indeed, so much of the book serves as a primer for the questing soul, as Adams encourages beauty without sentimentality; heralds the plausibility of gifts; hails Terri Weifenbach’s portrait of a hovering bee “as aeronautically improbable as an angel.” Adams reminds us that “some of the best photographs are both discouraging and encouraging at once.” He prompts us with this thought: “Is there anyone more comically, more courageously of another world than a grade-school music teacher, especially a band teacher?”

(Imagine a story about that. Pause to see it.)

When Adams quotes from Emmet Gowin, who photographed the Nevada test range—“What we all want in our lives is a way to put ourselves into accord with the mystery out of which we came and into which we will return.”—we have no choice but to close the book and close our eyes and ponder what this means while, beyond, the lawn mower mows and the can of spray paint sprays.

Adams wants us to take heart from the form of art. He wants us to choose to care. He knits a line from Marilynne Robinson into a brief appraisal of Dorothea Lange, and then, after all of this, he stands back and informs us that “We are in important ways the sum of the places we have walked.”

(Where have we walked?)

Which leaves those of us who have gone a handful of years without the sight of something new, those of us who have been walking with familiar dust upon our shoes, those of us who have felt the perimeters of our lives squeezing in, squeezing tight, grateful for the ambulation of this book, the places we have traveled through it, the pause that it has pressed upon the beginning, and now the end, of the afternoon.

◊◊◊

Beth Kephart is the author of more than two-dozen books in multiple genres, an adjunct teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and the co-founder of Juncture Workshops. Her essays appear in Ninth Letter, Catapult, Literary Hub, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere, and a new memoir in essays, Wife|Daughter|Self is due out in spring 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

 

 

 

 

BLOODY SEOUL, a Young Adult Novel by Sonia Patel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

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BLOODY SEOUL
by Sonia Patel
Cinco Puntos Press, 276 Pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson

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Bloody Seoul jacket art

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To Rocky, the city of Seoul is truly something to behold. Sprawling skyscrapers dare to kiss the sky, thousands of lights rival the sun at night, and millions of people bustle through at any given moment, while the Han River remains a calm force through it all. And it will soon be his to rule, just like his father, the leader of the city’s most notorious gang, Three Star Pa.

However, despite Rocky being the sole heir and next in line to become the big boss, his father refuses to turn the gang over to him. Frustrated, Rocky isn’t entirely surprised. It’s one of too many unanswered questions that plague him, especially since his mother’s faded memory threatens to slice the edges of his own mind like a knife.

Aim. Throw.
Sixteen times, one for every year of my life.
Aim. Throw.
Ten times, one for every year mom’s been gone.
Aim. Throw.
Ten times, one for every year Dad’s been the most pissed off person I’ve ever known.

In Sonia Patel’s poetic, fast-paced and electrifying second novel Bloody Seoul, the thread of Rocky’s past unravels the life he has carefully planned. Molding his life to mirror his father’s, he leads his own Three Star Pa gang made up of his closest friends. He beats up his weaker classmates, fist fights to defend his turf against rival gangs, and torments Ha-Na, a mixed Korean and Indian girl whom he regards as an easy target. Rocky’s life is structured to form the future he desires; but his mind frequently dives into the pool of reverie, where the ghost of his missing mother beckons and the needles of his fractured family sting.

Sonia Patel Author Headshot

Sonia Patel

What makes Rocky’s story so tangible is how Patel invokes memory and stitches it throughout the first-person narrative. Rocky’s past comes forth by means of his senses: he sees a family photo and remembers a time when his father was happy, he feels his mother’s love within the careful stitch work of the handkerchief he keeps, and smells her scent when he smokes her favorite brand of cigarettes. He also hears her humming when he plays his favorite songs and feels the presence of his uncles when he eats their favorite dishes. Memory is naturally triggered by the five senses, and Patel uses these to further develop Rocky’s character and have us connect with him.

The memories of his past reveal many open wounds, forcing Rocky to confront his father about what really happened to his uncles, his mother, and their family. But his father answers Rocky’s questions with threats and bruises, a direct violation of the first code of Three Star Pa: Family comes first. Family is to be protected at all costs. His father’s blatant disregard of that code forces Rocky to realize his father’s true nature and the lengths his father will go to get what he wants.

There are many ways I’m like my dad, many ways I want to be like my dad, but killing people isn’t one of them.

Patel’s writing shines. Her words flow across the page like a poem – descriptive yet succinct, observant of an entire world in so few phrases. Her writing style reflects Rocky’s character. It is observant, wastes no time equivocating, and takes everything in while focusing on what’s most important with sharp precision. The language may seem shallow at first – like Rocky’s perception of his own life and goals – but the more Rocky plunges into his memories, the deeper the language pulls readers in.

Patel explores how the interconnectivity of memory and family shapes one’s identity. Rocky’s identity is hugely shaped by his relation to his father and Three Star Pa, which had always remained unchallenged. Memories of his past and, most importantly, of his mother undermine this identity, causing it to crack and break. His journey toward redefining himself is a difficult one that readers can relate to. Who are we if not an extension of our family? When memories of a difficult past cause us to break away from our families, how do we go about defining ourselves without them? And who do we let in to our chosen family?

To these questions, Rocky learns there is no easy answer. Discovering who we are is simply that: discovery. And there is no end to it. It’s a journey with no set destination, and in the face of hardship all we can do – all we must do – is keep moving forward. Bloody Seoul teaches us this lesson through colorful and subtly powerful storytelling, gripping readers from beginning to end. A one-of-a-kind read.

New life just around the bend.
More happiness than I can comprehend.

◊◊

Kristie Gadson is a copywriter by day, a book reviewer by night, and an aspiring comic book artist in-between time. Her passions lie in children’s books, young adult novels, fantasy novels, comics, and animated cartoons because she believes that one is never “too old” to learn the life lessons they teach. Kristie resides in Norristown on the outskirts of Philadelphia PA, which she lovingly calls “her little corner of the universe.”

TIGERS, NOT DAUGHTERS, a young adult novel by Samantha Mabry, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Tigers Not Daughters book jacket
TIGERS, NOT DAUGHTERS by Samantha Mabry Algonquin Young Readers 288 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Samantha Mabry’s Tigers, Not Daughters is a modern-day ghost story that follows the Torres sisters—Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa—one year after the untimely death of their oldest sister, Ana. Wracked with grief, the Torres sisters ache for Ana; but their profound sadness is met with unexpected events that eventually make their sister’s presence known: raps on doors and windows, writings on the walls, sensory overload, recurring storms, flickering lights, dying animals, and one escaped spotted hyena lurking in the darkness of their neighborhood in Southtown. Ana reappears in a way the girls can’t begin to imagine and returns with a vengeance they don’t understand. Mabry tells a riveting tale of three sisters who discover the power of sisterhood and what it means to stay together despite insurmountable, unnatural odds. What stood out to me while reading Tigers, Not Daughters was how colorful and tangible each of the Torres sisters is. Their characterization is well-rounded, Mabry vividly telling the story through the individual perspectives of each sister, as well as including a fourth perspective of a character that watches them from afar. Each sister is unique in ...
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HOW TO BUILD A HEART, a young adult novel by Maria Padian, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

HOW TO BUILD A HEART, a young adult novel by Maria Padian, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
HOW TO BUILD A HEART by Maria Padian Algonquin Young Readers, 339 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Isabella Crawford doesn’t keep secrets, she guards them. Protects them: People love to talk about themselves, and if you keep directing the conversation and questions back to them, they leave the interaction with the impression you’re the absolute best. Even though you haven’t told them a damn thing. I’m crazy good at this game. And I’ve had years of practice. For Izzy, a failure to safeguard a secret means the life she meticulously crafted for herself is in jeopardy. She’d prefer not to keep most of her life hidden away; but she also knows that the less you share about yourself, the less you get hurt. In her new novel How to Build a Heart, Maria Padian brings us into Izzy’s world with one of her biggest secrets: she’s poor and lives with her mother, little brother, and dog in Meadowbrook Gardens, a trailer park on the outskirts of town. Aside from her best friend and closest confidante, Roz, nobody knows where she lives – or how she’s lived. And she intends to keep it that way ...
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BLOODY SEOUL, a Young Adult Novel by Sonia Patel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Bloody Seoul jacket art
BLOODY SEOUL by Sonia Patel Cinco Puntos Press, 276 Pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver To Rocky, the city of Seoul is truly something to behold. Sprawling skyscrapers dare to kiss the sky, thousands of lights rival the sun at night, and millions of people bustle through at any given moment, while the Han River remains a calm force through it all. And it will soon be his to rule, just like his father, the leader of the city’s most notorious gang, Three Star Pa. However, despite Rocky being the sole heir and next in line to become the big boss, his father refuses to turn the gang over to him. Frustrated, Rocky isn’t entirely surprised. It’s one of too many unanswered questions that plague him, especially since his mother’s faded memory threatens to slice the edges of his own mind like a knife. Aim. Throw. Sixteen times, one for every year of my life. Aim. Throw. Ten times, one for every year mom’s been gone. Aim. Throw. Ten times, one for every year Dad’s been the most pissed off person I’ve ever known. In Sonia Patel’s poetic, fast-paced and electrifying second novel Bloody Seoul, ...
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WORTHY OF LOVE, a young adult novel by Andre Fenton, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Worthy of love book jacket
WORTHY OF LOVE by Andre Fenton Formac Publishing Company Limited, 199 Pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Two hundred and eighty pounds. For Adrian Carter that number isn’t just his weight, it is his shame. A shame he tries to hide underneath layers of black clothing but still faces every day as he is bullied for his size. Tired of the constant ridicule and feelings of inadequacy, Adrian decides enough is enough, and he vows to shed the pounds one way or the other…no matter the cost. Andre Fenton’s heartful debut novel Worthy of Love follows Adrian as he struggles not only with his weight, but with his own sense of self-worth. Candid, earnest, and full of emotion, Fenton gives us a unique yet personal story about one journey toward self-love. Desperate to drop his weight, Adrian scrounges up enough money to enroll in a few kickboxing classes. Along the way he meets Melody Woods, a skinny, quirky girl with a passion for health and fitness. Strong-willed but gentle, Mel’s confidence shines – which both intimidates and enthralls the less confident, timid Adrian. Much to Adrian’s surprise, Mel is unfazed by his size and decides to help ...
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A DANGER TO HERSELF AND OTHERS, a young adult novel by Alyssa Sheinmel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

A DANGER TO HERSELF AND OTHERS, a young adult novel by Alyssa Sheinmel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
A DANGER TO HERSELF AND OTHERS by Alyssa Sheinmel Sourcebooks Inc, 338 Pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Hannah Gold was supposed to be enjoying everything California had to offer; getting ahead on her studies at a collegiate summer program; hiking through the mountains and sunbathing on the beach; enjoying her summer with her roommate and new best friend, Agnes. That is, until Agnes falls and lapses into a coma, and Hannah finds herself institutionalized in a seven-foot by eight-foot room, where she doesn't feel she's supposed to be at all. Alyssa Sheinmel's engrossing novel A Danger to Herself and Others, is an intriguing page-turner set almost entirely within the walls of a mental institution. It delves deep into Hannah's mind as she wrestles, not only with what happened the night of Agnes’ fall, but with her own mental state. Reminiscent of Ken Kesey's classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hannah is this story’s R.P. McMurphy – the intelligent, conniving, and self-proclaimed “sane” protagonist of her own narrative. She goes about her first days studying her surroundings, taking note of certain privileges that will get her ever closer to freedom (group showers, cafeteria access, and ...
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CHEESUS WAS HERE, a young adult novel by J.C. Davis, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

CHEESUS WAS HERE, a young adult novel by J.C. Davis, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
CHEESUS WAS HERE by J.C. Davis Sky Pony Press, 242 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In the small town of Clemency, Texas Sunday morning worship is even more important than Friday night football. With a population of 1,236 and only two churches in town, everyone looks forward to putting on their Sunday best and lifting the Lord’s name on high. That is, everyone except Delaney Delgado, the main character in J.C. Davis’ debut novel, who chooses to spend her Sundays working at the local gas station. Her sanctuary lies behind the cashier’s counter where she’s free to observe the spectacle without having to engage in any of it. However, when her coworker discovers the face of baby Jesus on a wheel of Babybel cheese, Clemency goes into a frenzy of miraculous proportions. Word travels fast in a small town, and it isn’t long until news of baby Cheesus spreads like wildfire. Del watches in horror as her quiet life becomes an uproar, with classmates and citizens claiming they were healed after they gazed upon the blessed wheel of cheese. How anyone could believe in miracles—or God for that matter—is beyond her; but matters get ...
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HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD, an anthology for young readers edited by Kelly Jensen, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD, an anthology for young readers edited by Kelly Jensen, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD edited by Kelly Jensen Algonquin Young Readers, 218 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Feminism. It’s an ideology that has long been approached with trepidation, met with both skepticism and controversy. There have been countless articles, papers, films, and books exploring and defining the concept. However, Here We Are is more than a series of essays on feminism. It’s a collection of stories, blog posts, comics, drawings, and interviews featuring an array of different voices – each more unique than the last – describing what feminism means and how it plays a role in our lives. Each page encourages readers to think about how they, as individuals, can relate to a belief that strives to unite us as a whole. “The people and the world around us shape our individual path to feminism…The journey is always changing, always shifting, and influenced by our own experiences and perspectives.” The book is structured like a scrapbook, having a combination of calligraphy, designs, and doodles drawn across the pages, accenting each chapter. Not only is this visually appealing, it creates a sense of comfort that softens the intensity of the subject matter. Through its playful design ...
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RANI PATEL IN FULL EFFECT, a young adult novel by Sonia Patel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

RANI PATEL IN FULL EFFECT, a young adult novel by Sonia Patel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
RANI PATEL IN FULL EFFECT by Sonia Patel Cinco Puntos Press, 314 Pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In her debut young adult novel Rani Patel in Full Effect, Sonia Patel takes us back to the era of faded box cuts, high-top Adidas, and gold chains as thick as your wrist; to the era where hip-hop reigned supreme and rhymes flowed out of boom boxes like water down Moaula Falls. The year is 1991, and here we meet Rani Patel, a straight-A student council president by day and an emerging rapper under the stage name MC Sutra by night. In a one-of-a-kind mixture of nineties slang, pidgin Hawaiian, and traditional Gujarati, Rani's story is told from a perspective that's undeniably fresh and unapologetically raw. From the very beginning the book ensnares you with a powerful scene of Rani shaving her head after seeing her father with another woman. As her tears fall so, too, does all of her hair, giving herself the Indian mark of a widow. Her father once meant everything to her, and she meant everything to him—or so she thought. He lovingly called her his princess, and for a time they were ...
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LOCAL GIRL SWEPT AWAY, a young adult novel by Ellen Wittlinger, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

LOCAL GIRL SWEPT AWAY, a young adult novel by Ellen Wittlinger, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
LOCAL GIRL SWEPT AWAY by Ellen Wittlinger Merit Press, 269 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Ellen Wittlinger's Local Girl Swept Away is a gripping story of loss, denial, and deception wrapped up in a page-turning mystery that’s hard to put down. When Lorna is pulled underwater during a storm, her death shakes the community of Providencetown, but no one is more shaken than her best friend Jackie Silva. Lorna was everything Jackie feels she isn’t: untamed, beautiful, brave, and outgoing—not to mention lucky enough to have had Jackie’s crush, their best friend Finn, as her boyfriend. Jackie is the undisputed number two and it's something she has accepted about herself. But, with Lorna gone, life becomes confusing and uncertain. Who is she now? In Lorna’s absence, Jackie slowly builds the strength to rediscover parts of herself she had forgotten. Her love of photography takes on a new fervor and, through the camera lens, she experiences the parts of her life that still hold meaning. Her increased volunteer work at the Jasper Street Arts Center opens doors that she didn’t know could be opened: a chance at getting into her dream school, the Rhode Island Institute of design, and ...
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BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA, a young adult novel by Laura Moe, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA, a young adult novel by Laura Moe, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA by Laura Moe Merit Press, 252 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson At some point in our lives, many of us bury parts of ourselves that we aren't ready to face. These layers can form over time; from people we've encountered, from situations we've endured, or from issues we've found lodged deep within our psyche. They can protect us, like a shield, from life's many fluctuations, and they can contribute to a great part of who we are. However, this protection can come at a cost–we can become distant, untouchable, and unreachable to those we love or resist the change we need to grow. In Laura Moe's debut novel, Breakfast with Neruda, we journey with Michael Flynn as he learns to peel back the layers that have shielded him for so long. We first meet Michael spending the summer cleaning his school, which serves as the first part of his two-part sentence after detonating his locker in an ill-conceived attempt to destroy his ex-best-friend's car. Through Moe's simple, yet, descriptive, writing, we soon realize that being condemned to custodial work and having to repeat his senior year are the least of Michael's worries. I go out to my car ...
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A 52-HERTZ WHALE, a YA novel by Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

A 52-HERTZ WHALE, a YA novel by Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
A 52-HERTZ WHALE by Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman Carolrhoda Lab, 197 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson When a humpback whale becomes separated from its pod, it emits a unique song in an effort to find its way back to its loved ones. When certain people experience feelings of isolation, they seek companionship through indirect social interaction. Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman's A 52-Hertz Whale explores the nature of loneliness through a series of email correspondences, all between people with little else in common other than the desire for understanding. From the conversations of these starkly different people springs a series of beautiful, if uncanny, friendships. A 52 Hertz-Whale reveals that some of the most meaningful relationships can be forged even when the only thing we have in common is the fear of being alone. Fourteen-year-old James Turner ("[email protected]") sends his first email after discovering that his adopted humpback whale, Salt, was separated from its migratory pod. Recent film graduate Darren Olmstead ("[email protected]") receives the long email detailing James' efforts to uncover the lost whale’s whereabouts, and a plea for Darren's assistance. What a kid from a middle school social skills class wants with the guy who ...
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MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPAN, a novel by Multatuli, reviewed by Dylan Cook

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MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPANY
by Multatuli
translated by Ina Rilke and David McKay
New York Review Books, 336 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Cover art for Max Havelaar. A volcano erupts at night

Click here to purchase this book

“I call a man a fool if he dives in the water to rescue a dog from sharks.” This is our introduction to Max Havelaar—a champion of the people, even irrationally so. He is a Dutchman who stands with Indonesian farmers. He is a bureaucrat who pushes against the orders of his superiors. Havelaar is a rare figure of compassion in the midst of Dutch imperialism, one who has the temerity and know-how to make tangible change. And, despite all of this, Max Havelaar is a minor character in the novel that bears his name.

Max Havelaar is likely an unfamiliar title to most American readers, and the Netherlands in general is an often overlooked source of literature. But make no mistake: the world over holds Max Havelaar in high regard. I recently had the chance to talk to a born-and-raised Dutchman, and I asked him if the title rang any bells. “Of course,” he told me. “It’s a classic, everyone reads it.” Think along the lines of Pride and Prejudice. In his short but poignant introduction to this edition of the novel, Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer makes the bold claim that Max Havelaar is one of the most important novels of all time. There’s a reason this novel caught the attention of writers like Karl Marx and Thomas Mann, and there’s a reason that when Freud drew up a list of ten great authors, Multatuli stood on top.

Multatuli is the mononymous pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker, the son of a Dutch sea captain. The name “Multatuli” stems of Latin and roughly translates to, “I have suffered greatly.” When he was just eighteen, Dekker sailed on one of his father’s ships to the Dutch East Indies where he worked in finance before shifting into a government position. After nearly twenty years there, he rose to become the Assistant Resident of Lebak, but, after disagreeing with the Dutch colonial system, soon resigned and returned to the Netherlands. A few years later, in 1860, he would publish a novel about a man who becomes the Assistant Resident of Lebak, only to become disgusted with Dutch imperialism.

Photograph of Eduard Douwes Dekker; 1820–1887

Eduard Douwes Dekker, or Multatuli

Max Havelaar is a highly fragmented, nonlinear text. The novel features several narrators, depending on how you count, and the plot can quickly become cumbersome and difficult to follow. It begins with Batavius Drystubble, a coffee merchant in the Netherlands. He recounts the exact process of how this novel was written, all the while describing the highly political field of coffee brokering and how it requires the majority of his attention (“My business is my life” becomes something of a mantra for his narration). Along the way, Drystubble encounters an old acquaintance, Shawlman, who entrusts him with a packet of his writings, an eclectic mix of poetry and essays that Drystubble claims is the source material for the Max Havelaar portions of the novel. Of course, Drystubble is so engrossed in his work that he cannot possible spend his time writing, for his business is his life. Thus, he enlists Ludwig Stern, a friend of his son’s, to write some of the chapters regarding Havelaar. Only then, a sizeable chuck into the text, does the story of Max Havelaar begin.

The two narrators are not shy and frequently speak directly do the reader to voice opinions and curate information. The source material from Shawlman lingers overhead, and Drystubble and Stern routinely reaffirm that they must cut out certain details that won’t add anything to the novel. These metafictional moments make it feel more apt to group Multatuli along with early postmodern authors than with contemporaries like Hugo, Tolstoy, or Eliot. Multatuli constantly reminds us that he is writing a novel in the same way Italo Calvino reminds us that we are reading a novel. In the revised 1881 edition of the novel, Multatuli added an extensive network of endnotes, inserting everything from new details to personal opinions. He wanted the reader to know that the narrative is deeper than what exists on the page, and he did so in the same way that David Foster Wallace would in Infinite Jest more than a hundred years later.

You see, reader, I am searching for the answer to that how? Which is why my book is such a mixed bag. It’s a book of samples: take your pick.

While Multatuli should be commended for his efforts to restructure narrative, one must consider the downside of taking such risks—there are unfortunately many times where he sacrifices clarity for creativity. The narrators provide so much of their own commentary that it is often difficult to get situated as the reader is torn between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies. The novel itself is so restless that the reader is  never allowed to get immersed into a single narrative thread. To be frank, the style and structure of this novel read not quite unfinished, but a bit undercooked. For modern readers, there are many points where it may just seem easier to put down this book in favor of something a little more palatable. However, it is important to acknowledge that Multatuli wasn’t trying to write something beautiful and easy to swallow. There is no room for poetics in Max Havelaar because Multatuli’s goal was to inspire mutiny. The value in this novel is in what Multatuli says, not how he says it.

With that in mind, it’s crucial to understand Max Havelaar within its historical context: Multatuli may not have written with beauty, but he certainly wrote with contempt. When this novel was first published in 1860, European imperialism was more than three centuries old. The vast majority of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East were all under European rule. Any voices that challenged this system were usually mild enough to be suppressed. Max Havelaar is the rare exception. At every opportunity, Multatuli describes the faults of Dutch imperialism. Frequently, the novel digresses into essayish passages against the Dutch that are often more gripping than the surrounding narrative. Critiques are written with surgical precision, always attacking the Dutch and sparing Indonesians. There are no slurs or stereotypes in this novel. There is nothing that paints native Indonesians as anything “less.” On the contrary, Multatuli treats the minutiae of Indonesian life with utmost respect to show his countrymen exactly how equal they are. Unlike Mark Twain, Multatuli was able to write about an oppressed group without including subtle linguistic cues that reinforce their marginalization.

Part of what makes Multatuli so adept as an exponent is his remarkable understanding of why. He does not settle for simply stating that oppression exists. Instead, he clearly explains how oppression is a systemic condition. Through Havelaar, we learn about the tactics of Dutch imperialism that perfected their hegemony. Dutch imperialists effectively made native Indonesians subjugate their compatriots. In the imperialist system, Dutch officials would appoint natives, called adipatis, to control smaller stretches of land. The Dutch would subsidize each adipati’s lifestyle, making them rich. If an average farmer had any grievances, they would direct them towards the newly aristocratic adipati. The Dutch washed their hands of blame because their subjects likely never saw a Dutchman’s face. Indonesians could never effectively rebel against the Dutch because they thought their problems were internal. The Dutch created a perfect system of exploitation, allowing them to create famines in Indonesia, home to some of the most fertile land on Earth. This is just one example of abuse. Multatuli gives us dozens.

Any turmoil that is impossible to conceal is blamed on a small gang of malefactors who will no longer cause any trouble now that overall contentment prevails. If want or famine has thinned the population, it was surely the result of crop failure, drought, rain, or something of the sort, and never of misgovernment.

Of course, any time the narrative begins to describe the atrocities taking place in Indonesia, Batavius Drystubble interjects. This is business after all, isn’t it? And his business is his life (it’s no coincidence that the capital of the Dutch East Indies was Batavia). If the Dutch do not maintain their control over Indonesia, then the coffee industry in the Netherlands will certainly collapse. For Drystubble, one of Max Havelaar’s narrators, imperialism is necessary for economic survival. Any element of the novel that critiques the Dutch system is most assuredly written by Ludwig Stern. Max Havelaar, as magnanimous as he is, becomes less important as the two narrators vie for power over the message. Stern calls for change, while Drystubble calls for stasis. Multatuli highlights how the complacency in existing systems causes change to lag, even in the face of necessity. In the context of the novel, Max Havelaar is a past tense character. Despite the progress he personally made, he did little to affect the Dutch system that Drystubble and Stern live in in the present. Multatuli did not merely want to proselytize, he wanted to show that progress is a generational process.

At the end of WWII, European imperialism was vulnerable enough to be toppled, and Indonesia was one of the first nations in this new world liberate itself. In August 1945, before the Pacific War had fully ceased, Indonesia declared independence. Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, cited Max Havelaar as a personally influential text. Many Indonesians today agree, which is remarkable considering the novel wasn’t translated into Indonesian until 1972. Indonesia was a model for a path to independence that other nations could follow, and within the next three decades most of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East would be politically decolonized. Much of the world outside of the United States understands Max Havelaar’s role in this domino effect. Reading this novel shows the absolute earliest stages of revolt in a way that’s still resonant. This is the undeniable importance of this novel. Few novels have had such a profound effect on global politics, and that feat ought not to be ignored. Max Havelaar may not be the most leisurely read, but, at the very least, it’s worth knowing the name.

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Author photo for Dylan CookDylan Cook is a student at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies English, with a concentration in creative writing, and Biology. He often reads and writes, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].

PASSING FOR HUMAN: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR by Liana Finck reviewed by Alexandra Kanovsky

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PASSING FOR HUMAN: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR
by Liana Finck
Random House, 222 pages
reviewed by Alexandra Kanovsky

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Passing for Human cover art

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Liana Finck wants to be seen. In creating Passing for Human, a graphic memoir and her second full-length work, she constructs her life story as Leola, and in doing so fantastically reimagines her youth and early adulthood in a quest to be seen and heard—by peers, by readers, and by herself.

Over the course of the novel Finck not only passes for human, but her work dissects what it means to be human. She ponders how to describe this sensation and ultimately realizes that “a human is someone who can see humanity in things”; the work is dedicated to exploring this experience and expression of humanity.

In creating Passing For Human Finck has tapped into the potential of the graphic medium to convey personal histories and memoirs. This is particularly true of Finck’s use of an animate shadow to represent her creativity and strangeness. (“Once upon a time, I lost something. Let’s call it ‘my shadow,’” she writes on the first page.) The shadow is clarified and strengthened by its visual representation, leading the reader to look forward to the moment when Leola and her shadow are finally reunited. The text also invites the reader to question their own personal definition of humanity and how it’s expressed in their lives. Passing for Human ultimately succeeds as a gorgeous tale about the trials and intricacies of anxiety, self-discovery, and the quirks of humanity.

Echoing Peter Pan, Passing for Human chronicles Leola’s quest to recover her shadow, a dark mirror of herself that offers companionship as a child and grows to represent her creativity and uniqueness. Leola thinks of her shadow as human, which is a testament to her own humanity. Finck’s drawings are particularly effective in detailing Leola’s introspection and tender relationship with her shadow and herself.

In a fit of insecurity at age eleven, Leola sends her shadow away and thus loses part of herself. This loss of her shadow signals a decline in her childhood creative freedom; Finck writes that “I was a real artist until I turned 11.” Of this point in her life, Finck describes how “I got my wish. I became someone else. Whatever happened over the course of the next ten years—did not happen to me.” Regardless of Finck’s disownership of her experiences, Leola’s story continues.

Leola and her shadow image

Leola and her shadow

 

The small and spritely illustrated Leola flits through her memories, both honest and anxious in her storytelling. She juxtaposes chapters describing her lonely childhood at a Montessori school run by nuns with anecdotes about a confused and undefined romantic relationship with “Mr. Neutral,” a comic artist who she classifies as her soulmate but who fails to be a reliable presence in her life.

Finck honors the parts of herself she inherited from her mother and father by devoting chapters to their individual and collective stories. Her mother, the bright and ambitious Bess, gives Leola the gift of the shadow. Bess’s shadow is a constant companion and friend, guiding her in her choices and encouraging her creativity, but as Bess’s early marriage implodes and she returns home, away from her abusive partner, she cuts her shadow free. Bess continues her schooling and becomes a brilliant architect, designing a perfect house for her new husband, Shamai, and their infant daughter Leola. This home is a repeated image throughout the text; a curved building shrouded in shade from the mountain behind it, the house is the essence of Leola’s close-knit home life and her childhood solidarity.

Childhood home image

Childhood home

Shortly afterwards, anxious Leola changes tactics and restarts her memoir with the story of her father, the affectionate doctor Shamai, who shares his otherness with his daughter. Finck writes that Shamai is “secretly a huge weirdo;” he is “a stranger […] somehow zipped into a human body,” and he imbues the same sense of outsiderness in his child, a fact that concerns him deeply. Only later in her life Leola will acutely feel this otherness bestowed upon her by her father; she feels as if both of them are “passing for human,” just as she classifies her shadow. Here again, the concept of defining humanity is explored; Leola describes her father as not fully human to indicate not only his outsider status but his sense of discomfort with the world around him.

The penultimate chapter recounts Leola’s childhood from her shadow’s perspective; readers are meant to assume that Leola finally triumphs in reconciling with her other self and childhood creativity. This climax is visibly different than the rest of the work; the background is the inky black of Leola’s shadow and Finck’s lines are light scorings on this dark background, but her scratchy and doodly style are consistent. This chapter draws the reader into the world of otherness that Leola struggles with throughout the text.

Reunion with shadow image

Reunion with shadow

 

Liana Finck author photo

Liana Finck

The narrative is peppered with interludes: short chapters detailing Finck’s interpretation of the story of creation, whimsically designed tessellations, and detailed and colorful chapter and cover pages. These constant restarts and intermittent doodles create the essence of the artist’s space and mind. Instead of presenting an unrealistically tidy retelling of life, Finck’s work mirrors the ephemeral haze of memory. Her assured and scrawling line drawings of animals and humans, sometimes featuring comically intense expressions of joy or despair, lend the text the quality of a childhood dreamscape that is not fully understood until adulthood.

Passing for Human chronicles not only the story of Finck’s parents and her own childhood, but the process of her creating her graphic memoir. She is plagued by anxiety in the face of detailing her personal history; these gnawing worries take the form of rats, sitting on her shoulders and nibbling at her graphic form.

Leola's worries image

Leola’s worries

Finck does not suppress any of her apprehension in her writing, and allows the rats to convince her to continually restart her story; thus, every chapter features a cover page and is titled “Chapter 1.” The repeated image of adult Leola pulling a blank sheet of paper towards her and doodling the heading Passing for Human is a merry-go-round of anxiety; the reader’s experience is akin to consuming the first chapters of several books in a series, randomized in sequence and abandoned shortly after commencing. Finck views the process of creating Passing for Human as not only producing a product for the reader, but an experiment in self-discovery. The heart of the work, with all its cyclical thoughts and false starts, is the process of Leola, and thus Liana, finding her lost shadow, her talent, her strangeness.

Restarting her work image

Restarting her work


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Alexandra Kanovsky headshotAlexandra Kanovsky is an avid reader and editor and a recent graduate of Kenyon College, where she majored in English and completed her thesis on girlhood in graphic novels. She has interned and worked for a variety of literary locales including Restless Books, Lime Books, and Impress Books. She also served as the Editor-in-Chief of HIKA Literary Magazine, Kenyon’s oldest literary publication. Alexandra can be reached at [email protected].

 

I AND YOU, stories by J. David Stevens, reviewed by David Amadio

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I AND YOU
by J. David Stevens
Arc Pair Press, 64 pages
reviewed by David Amadio

Cover art for I and You. Black Chinese characters over a grey backgroundMany of the characters in J. David Stevens’s four-story collection I and You are Chinese immigrants; the author himself is not. In the book’s introduction, Stevens confides that he might never have written about these characters if not for the relationship with his wife Janet, whose ancestors left China in 1899 and later settled in Richmond, Virginia. Reflecting on the source material for his multi-generational narratives, Stevens, whose Mexico is Missing and Other Stories won the 2006 Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction, admits an apprehension of the age: “[A] part of me still wonders if such stories cross a line, if appropriating segments of our shared history—or Janet’s history alone—is more rightly suited to intimate dialogue. I worry the art is too opportunistic.” This concern is real, and the author is right to acknowledge it. But his outsider’s rendition of the Chinese immigrant experience is respectfully nuanced, and while he does not share the same cultural background as his protagonists, he deeply values their stake in the larger human dilemma that fiction is taxed to solve.

Author photo of J. David Stevens

J. David Stevens

 

The ways in which his characters perform their “liminal identity,” reacting to the dueling social pressures of China and America, give the stories a quiet yet potent drama. In the titular “I and You,” the “I” belongs to the narrator’s seven-year-old self, struggling to learn calligraphy under the exacting Mrs. Lu; the “You” follows his gradual foray into the wider American world, first as a student and then as an accountant for a pharmaceutical company. While on a business trip to Guangzhou, his white bosses hold the “You” to a stereotypical standard, bidding him to procure civets—small, weasel-like mammals thought to be a delicacy in that part of China—from a local market. Mrs. Lu imposes a different set of criteria on the “I,” but mastering a thousand-year-old art form proves no less painful than searching for dinner amid caged reptiles and cats. Though he doesn’t find the civets, he does achieve temporary success painting his name. It turns out that pleasing Mrs. Lu and failing his bosses both result in a feeling of dislocated pride, which prompts the narrator to concede, “There are worse fates than a life caught between true happiness and sorrow, never seeming to touch either.”

Wei-ling, the central character in “Old San,” teeters on a similar emotional threshold. Abandoned by her husband and all but forgotten by her two grown sons, Wei-ling mourns “the family she had lost,” at times feeling lonely and useless. It is Old San, the elderly man for whom she is primary caretaker, who enlivens her with joy and purpose. So close is their bond that even when she is not by his side Wei-ling still senses him next to her, a phantom of interdependence. We learn that Old San was long ago a victim of a hate crime, and arranging a meeting with his now publicly contrite attacker, a celebrity, becomes Wei-ling’s driving need. If she cannot fix the sad things in her life, she will be “indispensable” in repairing the one sad thing in his. But the meeting turns into a photo-op for the celebrity and his agent, and here, instead of probing Wei-ling’s thoughts on the spike and taint of the moment, Stevens reverts to an image of the caretaker and her charge on a busy New York street, the old man “rock[ing] against her like a boat against its buoy.” A fitting simile, but the reader expects Wei-ling, who understands the language of loss, to address, either directly or indirectly, this new injury of the heart.

“Cleave” is about a brief love affair between a pair of female graduate students, Kara and Minzhi, and presents another shift in default perspective for the Other-seeking Stevens. When the story opens, Kara is in a long-distance relationship, and she half-heartedly believes that learning how to cook Chinese for her girlfriend will save their shaky union. Minzhi, who is engaged to a man back in China, takes Kara on as a student, and what starts out as a lark soon becomes a “collaboration,” a “haven from the everyday” where Kara’s “desire to take chances” increases with each new dish prepared. Following the first and only time they make love, Kara asks Minzhi to break off her engagement and stay with her in the states, to which Minzhi shakes her head and replies, “Americans.” In this soft indictment of Kara’s naivete, Stevens is saying that Minzhi’s freedoms—both social and sexual—are not as guaranteed as her lover’s. Therefore, she must be precise, “like a knife sure of its cuts,” in how she honors the ones she loves, a skill that Kara is just beginning to learn and may never fully master.

Minzhi’s rigid rapport is echoed in “Turkeys,” the collection’s final story, and its best. Raymond Chan’s monomaniacal father wants him to play football, and to ready him for an upcoming tryout he subjects the fourteen-year-old to a near-constant training regimen. “Old questions” about his father’s past nag at Raymond, clouding his pigskin focus. The successful tire salesman deserted his first wife and young daughter when he emigrated from China, and for this reason Raymond feels an ambivalence toward the man, respect as well as censure. The ghosts of that former life lurk at the plot’s periphery, as do the wild turkeys from which the story gets its name. The turkeys, one of Stevens’s strongest extended metaphors, are a feathered fly in the ointment of civilized suburban society, “breaking skylights, scratching paint jobs, and leaving a formidable layer of feces that was almost impossible to scrape off once exposed to daylight.” The birds’ “one insane summer” analogizes Raymond’s performance at the football tryout, where he “throw[s] instinct to the wind and beat[s] back against” the austerity of his father.

With I and You, J. David Stevens has set an example worth following. Rather than continue to shy away from “that different face,” writers  might take the preliminary steps to honestly engage it, to “cross a line” both personally and artistically, to observe, relay, and “comprehend the alienation and dislocation” in the lives of people like Raymond Chan, or Minzhi, or Wei-ling. As a response to those who might criticize Stevens for exercising his privilege, I would argue that his collection is more appreciation than appropriation, an obeisance to the immigrants who inspired it. Stevens claims that immigration is not a “finite proposition,” that the newly arrived are never done settling, never done merging. If that is the case, then the act of receiving those immigrants is also an incomplete process, but these stories serve to make it less fraught, less complicated, less strange.

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Author photo for David AmadioDavid Amadio teaches Creative Writing and Composition at Lincoln University, where he also edits the campus literary magazine, SIMBAA. He received his MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University in 2001. His work has appeared in Talking River, Masque & Spectacle, Packingtown Review, and The San Francisco Examiner. He lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two children.

YOUR STRANGE FORTUNE, poems by Chloe N. Clark, reviewed by K.C. Mead-Brewer

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YOUR STRANGE FORTUNE
by Chloe N. Clark
Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 56 pages
reviewed by K.C. Mead-Brewer

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Jacket Cover for Your Strange Fortune; two way reflection of bare tree against clouded sky

Click here to purchase this book

I first encountered Chloe N. Clark through her prose, but even then, it was clear to me that she was a poet. Her work often feels multimodal in form, something that shines as a written text but that also seems eager to be performed aloud. Her debut collection Your Strange Fortune is no different, full of rich and devastating moments, each poem stretching with fresh life on the page or on the air. Some of these poems also function as works of visual art, such as “Flora and Fauna of the Outer Rings,” embodying their meaning in shape as well as word.

Fans of Clark’s work will recognize some of these poems from her chapbook The Science of Unvanishing Objects, but not only is there a wealth of new poetry here, the way she’s reframed these poems gives each line new energy and weight. The collection is offered, from the title onward, as a fortune-reading for the reader. Your Strange Fortune whispers in your hands, and you’re struck with the odd feeling that perhaps the book’s seeing through touch like an octopus, examining the love and lifelines of your unsuspecting palms. In other words, this poetry collection reads its readers as they read it, creating a reciprocal acknowledgement rather than simply a unilateral communication. The book warns you of this exchange more than once, each section grinning with a sly new epigraph: the first from a Fortune Cookie, the second from a Magic 8-Ball, the third from a Children’s Fortune Telling Game, and the last appears to be from the poet herself.

Clark begins with “Automatism; or What to Visit in My Town,” a poem about a woman who collects hands—the true window into the soul for any self-respecting fortune teller—its opening rhythm redolent of that classic Once upon a time:

There was a woman
kept hands
lined up in jars
along her walls

headshot for Chloe N. Clark

Chloe N. Clark

Holding the book, reading these lines, it’s hard not to also wonder if the poem’s a bit confessional as well. It’s hard not to wonder if Clark, or perhaps the collection itself, is confessing to being like this woman collecting hands and hands and hands (read: stories and stories and stories), hoping that one of them will catch a customer’s (reader’s) eye such that the customer reaches out and laces their fingers together in a moment of connection and understanding. This desire for connection may be especially poignant for readers today, navigating a world where lines are being drawn starker and starker, walls built taller and taller.

Clark organizes the collection into four parts, Past, Present, Future, and Now. The Past, as you might imagine, is haunted. It’s full to the brim with Longing and all of Longing’s children: ghosts, myths, monsters, and gods.

Clark wastes no time in introducing these children, drawing readers next into the troubled waters of “Like Acheron but Not.” The river here holds echoes of an old pain, things decayed, scorched, and covered up. The river’s creator asks her sister, do you wonder what the river feels like?

but I shook my head
afraid that she
might tell me the river
just felt cold.

Afraid that the river’s pain – her sister’s pain – might be meaningless, afraid that something powerful has been (or might be) diminished, that it might “just [feel] cold.” That “just,” heartbreaking in its reduction of all the river might truly be and feel. In “I Believed Not in God but in Gods as a Child,” the narrator helps build a funeral pyre in the wake of an apocalyptic event and, while sorting the dead’s belongings,

…….I found one tiny
notebook, worn
to softness and most was smudged away
except the letter I
and I wondered if it was the
word. What was useless was burned, paper starts the quickest.

The Past is haunted by this fear of powerful, magical, beautiful things being diminished, and by the longing for them to have any meaning at all. You can see it not only in the story of this poem, but in its shape. The way Clark lends weight and longing to “one tiny” through the line-break, creating a dangling sense of hope that perhaps this isn’t such a small thing after all, perhaps it means something. She capitalizes on this hope, suggesting that, despite the notebook being worn, despite most of its contents being smudged away, there still might be meaning here in the sole-surviving and notably-capitalized “letter I,” the line standing alone like the letter itself, a pillar of hope and intention, a word or a beginning or— Or another “useless” thing tossed onto the fire. The devastation of an entire apocalypse felt in the burning of a single notebook, a single letter.

But as the Fortune Cookie, “circa pre-collapse,” warns us: “If you look too often to the past, you’ll never see where you’re going.” And besides, not all ghosts live in the past. In “The Double Dark Theory of Our Universe,” Clark cracks open the pain of possibility, writing:

I too believe that our lives are
not as interwoven as we are led to
believe, that you and I were
only coincidences in the others
timeline. Still, something

Something remains. Something hangs there and needles us