Yuppies

The other night on the subway, two young women were talking derisively about yuppies. Then one of them asked what yuppie even stands for and they tried out possibilities. They knew the Y was for young, but beyond that, they were lost. Young Unemployed Privileged People, one guessed? They seemed pretty sure the U was for unemployed, which struck me because yuppies were decidedly not unemployed. I don't want to extrapolate too much from this, but I do think it's interesting. When the term was coined, the object of derision was people who worked -- probably long hours -- in high-paying jobs. Now it's people who are so privileged that they don't have to work who are despised.

The Kingdom of This World, Alejo Carpentier

I was a good chunk of the way in -- but still far from finishing -- José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night when a scheduled vacation in Guadeloupe was drawing close. I had started it optimistically thinking I could finish it before leaving, but I was only about a third of the way through. This was decidedly not what I wanted to be reading on vacation in the Caribbean. Luckily, I came to a break between parts and so I set it aside to be resumed when I returned from vacation. Of course, I was then faced with the dilemma of what to read on my trip. I picked Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World in part because it was about the Caribbean (pre and post revolutionary Haiti, to be precise) and in part because Carpentier is who got me interested in Guadeloupe (via his Explosion in a Cathedral) and in part because the edition I had was well worn and the book is slim and it seemed manageable for my short trip. As it happened, I didn't pick up the book once while in Guadeloupe, but between a bit of reading the day before my departure and on my flights to and from Pointe-a-Pitre, I finished it, so I think I made a good choice. (We'll ignore the fact that I brought a second book with me in case I finished the Carpentier while I was away - hahahahaaaa...)

I was kind of disappointed in this book. I think mostly because of its brevity, which is, of course, why I picked it up when I did, so it seems kind of dumb to complain about it, but here we are. I was very excited to read Carpentier's treatment of the Haitian Revolution, and it just seemed light. While reading it, I felt like I knew either too much or too little about the Haitian Revolution going in. If I had known less about it, I might not have been so occupied with what was going on when; as it was, I kept wanting to refer back to The Black Jacobins, which I now intend to reread. My disappointment aside, the prose and the imagery in The Kingdom of This World were lovely. The book is told largely from the perspective of the slave Ti Noel and covers a long span of his life, with big gaps. This may sound a little odd without context, but I found the end of the book, when Ti Noel gives up on humanity and takes on non-human forms, only to discover the challenges of them, to be especially beautiful.

Ilustrado, Miguel Syjuco

I read Ilustrado because of Jesse Eisenberg. Right around the time I was putting together my list of countries and books, there was an interview with him in the Times Book Review where he mentioned having left it on a plane the day before. I wasn't familiar with the book, so I looked it up and when I learned the author was Filipino, I added it to my list. A few months later I found a copy and last week I decided to pick it up. As has been the case with several of the countries I've read books from for this "project," Ilustrado brought to my attention how little I know about the history of the Philippines.*

There are a lot of pieces to this book -- and sometimes I wasn't at all clear how they fit in with the larger story -- but at the center is the narrator, a Filipino writer living in New York, who is writing a biography of an older Filipino writer who had also settled in New York and whose death seems unresolved. I love a literary detective story, but the thing I really liked about this book was how the narrator turns out to be a mystery himself. As you learn more and more about him over the course of the book, you're forced to go back and reassess who he is and why he's telling this story. It never quite resolves, but the story has a lovely way of unfolding.

*Also embarrassing: It took me 3 tries to spell Philippines correctly.

My Michael, Amos Oz

When I was compiling my list of countries and authors and books, I immediately put down Amos Oz for Israel. He'd been in the back of my mind as someone I should read for a long time, so he was the obvious choice for me. A few months later, I found a copy of My Michael for $1 at a thrift store and so my Israeli book was selected. I hesitated a little when I read the back cover blurb, which described the book as chronicling a woman falling out of love with her husband. An intimate book about a couple's relationship wasn't quite what I had in mind for my representative book for Israel. However — and in retrospect this seems obvious — My Michael was about much more than a couple's relationship.* The book takes place mostly in Jerusalem between 1950 and 1960: Israeli independence is new; Israel is being populated with Jews from across the diaspora; the Suez crisis happens. The book is intimate, but the outside world is everywhere in it.

* Similarly, the book I read from Japan was a very intimate book made up of letters between an ex husband and wife, and yet it also felt very much about Japan and life there in the 1980s.

Home, Marilynne Robinson

For the first hundred pages or so, as I was reading Home, I wished I had read it sooner after finishing Gilead, which I read a couple years ago. I found myself struggling to remember the characters and histories from the first book. I remembered some details, but not others. But as I read on, my memory and lack thereof started to feel right. It was at the moment that I realized the two books covered the same time period (which probably happened for me later in the book than it should have) that everything started to click. I knew one big secret, and knowing that made it feel like I was in on something. But other facts I had forgotten - or that simply weren't in Gilead - kept cropping up. The book covered familiar ground, but I learned new things and got a deeper understanding from it.

Marilynne Robinson seems to tell stories by first withholding information and then letting out little pieces bit by bit, and it's really lovely. In the case of Home, this method of storytelling seems particularly true to the characters and the reserve they have with each other. The secrecy and tender duplicity practiced by the characters in Home struck me as very Protestant and very familiar. This story felt like it could have taken place in some offshoot of my own family tree. One thing I loved about this book - and probably part of made it feel like my family - was the food. Every food Glory prepared in Home sounded like something my great aunt Gladys might have cooked up for a family meal.

Now I need to decide if I should read Lila right away or wait a couple years.

The Dog Stars, Peter Heller

It has been a long, long time since a book -- or anything really -- produce as strong an emotional response in me as The Dog Stars did. It hit me hard. I cried on the subway, I cried at work, I cried on the subway some more, I cried in bed, and I cried and cried on the couch with my therapist talking about loss and a future alone and going on despite everything. Either because of or despite the 36 hours of emotional anguish this book caused, I'm not entirely sure how I felt about it. It's hard to say that this was quite my favorite thing about the book, but I think the strongest thing about the book was that I really identified with the narrator. The book is set in a post pandemic future with few survivors, and yet I found the narrator's condition and response to be imaginable. Probably my favorite thing about the book was the dog (and the narrator's relationship to it). And (I don't think this is exactly a spoiler - you know it has to happen) that's why it broke my heart. Another thing I loved happens very late in the book when two lambs are relocated via small plane. The lambs freak out then calm down and narrator says something to the effect of, "for all they knew this was the next step in the normal life of a sheep" and I just loved that.

Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey

One day last week, I unexpectedly finished the book I was reading on my lunch break and I can't handle a bookless commute, so I went to the Goodwill to find something to read on my ride home. I should really plan better; I do this rather often.* I was definitely swayed by the quote on the cover claiming it was "one of the greatest mysteries of all time," but it's not really a mystery novel. I was not at all familiar with the history of Richard III and the two princes in the tower, so I wasn't even aware of the mystery at the center of the novel, which is presumably what is being referred to as among the greatest mysteries. I didn't love this book, but I do enjoy anything that includes a complicated family tree that I have to refer to again and again in the frontispiece.**


* I say this, but I'm not sure I mean it. I sort of love the randomness that comes with having to choose a book from an uncurated collection. I've ended up reading some very good books I might never have sought out specifically.

** I don't know which I like better: frontispiece family trees or frontispiece maps

The Jackson Brodie novels, Kate Atkinson

I'll still be a book behind, but I decided to kill 4 books with one post (or something) by writing about Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels all at once. I've read all four of them (Case Histories; One Good Turn; When Will There Be Good News?; and Started Early, Took My Dog) in the last 6 months and the last two in January of this year.

I started watching detective TV shows maybe 4 years ago and gradually they became the only TV shoes I could tolerate. I often half joke that I have terrible taste in television, but it's true that what I look for in TV is very different from what I look for in other entertainments. TV satisfies a certain mindless, escapist need for me. I don't like my TV to be too dark or too serious or too drawn out. I avoid programs that don't resolve in a single episode. Much of what is praised as the best television is just not for me. I like exactly the kind of detective programs that Kate Atkinson subtly derides here and there in her books: cozies set in English villages, especially if they're also period dramas. Not much gives me as much pure pleasure as a 90-minute murder-detection-resolution cycle. After a couple years of watching detective programs, I thought maybe I should give detective novels a try. I'm glad I did.

I have a much higher tolerance for dark and unresolved stories in books than I do in TV. It's a good thing because the Jackson Brodie books are, while not utterly grim, not the TV cozies I love either. (There is a BBC adaptation of the novels and I wonder if I would enjoy it; I suspect I might not -- the books are spread across several episodes apiece.) In my very limited reading within the genre, I've noticed there is a type of detective that shows up here and there who, unlike the masterful detectives of my preferred TV shows, does not have a particularly brilliant mind, but who does the grunt work of being a detective and kind of just happens to be in the right place at the right time to solve the crime. (If indeed he solves the crime at all.) Jackson Brodie is one of these. He seems to stumble into and out of most of his cases despite himself. It's not that he's a bad detective and it's not bumbling comic relief (though sometimes the absurd situations he finds himself in are laugh-inducing); if anything, this seems more realistic than the highly perceptive genius model of detective. While Brodie himself is reasonably sympathetic, it's the other characters that populate the books that I've found particularly compelling. I really enjoyed all four books, but without question my favorite was When Will There Be Good News?, which features two central characters who really drew me in: a smart, independent teenage girl who just needs a little stability in her life; and a woman with a seriously troubled childhood who has gotten her life totally together as an adult. These two - and especially their relationship with each other - kept me reading late into the night. But all the books feature compelling characters who have complicated, tender relationships among each other. When I finished the fourth book, I was very disappointed to discover there is not (yet, I hope!) another.

In a funny aside, I took a lunch break partway through writing this and after eating I went to a thrift store near my office where I sometimes go to browse during lunch. There was another woman looking at books there and she picked up a copy of One Good Turn. Of course I interjected and recommended it.

Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau

We're not even a full month into the new year, and I've already allowed myself to get behind in writing about the books I've read. Last weekend, I finished Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau. This takes care of one of the non-country countries on my books from every country list: Martinique, which is an overseas department of France. Unlike some books I've read in this ongoing project, this felt like a very good book to count as representative of the country (if any book can be so). It covers Martinican history from the latter part of the slave era up until the late 20th century. Although it's about a different place, it felt to me like Texaco picked up where Explosion in a Cathedral left off. Particularly in the early part of the book, the uncertain status of slaves as the island waited for word of abolition from mainland France, reminded me of the regular theme of waiting for news to cross the ocean in Explosion in a Cathedral.

I struggled a bit with Texaco. I would occasionally find myself reading for pages only to realize I had drifted off and didn't know what had happened. The book got easier to read toward the second half when the voice switched from the narrator's father, Esternome, to the narrator herself, Marie-Sophie (as told to an amanuensis). It's hard to say what my favorite thing about Texaco was. Esternome and Marie-Sophie were both extremely compelling. The book is about losing everything you have and having to start again, over and over and over. One of the lovely ideas in the book is how maintaining a connection to the past, remembering the old ways of doing things, makes that starting over possible. Much of the hope in the book comes from knowing it's been done before. It's a kind of unusual idea of progress.

The Infatuations, Javier Marías

This book was gorgeous. The writing, the themes that kept repeating: just beautiful. I'm not positive, but I think the thing I liked most in this book was a description of the aftermath of a death, all the little things that are left in a state of non-completion when death interrupts someone's life. Marías -- or the narrator -- refers to "the novel with the page turned down, which will remain unread, but also the medicines that have suddenly become utterly superfluous and that will soon have to be thrown away..." and many more things. The character in the novel has lost her husband, but I read that passage and immediately thought of the bottle of pills I got for my old cat's stomach illness two days before she died -- nearly a year ago. The almost full bottle is still sitting on top of my fridge. My cat aside, this book dealt in lovely detail with the space we take up in the world and what happens to the the people and objects we affect when death removes us.