Dance of the Jakaranda, by Peter Kimani

It was my mother who recommended Dance of the Jakaranda to me. I think she discovered it at the library. I started reading it after finishing Ambiguous Adventure and The Gloaming with the idea that I'd stay in Africa for a bit. But then I interrupted my reading twice to read other books; books not connected to Africa. 

Dance of the Jakaranda is set in Kenya, in two distinct periods: just after the turn of the century during the construction of the railroad from Mombasa to a port on Lake Victoria, and in 1963 on the eve of Kenyan independence. It could certainly be described as a multigenerational family drama, though oddly the generation in the middle is mostly absent from the book. The book centers on Babu, a worker from Punjab who came to Kenya to work on the railroad, and on his grandson Rajan, a popular singer. Events that took place in Babu's young life have effects that only become clear 60 years later.

The role of race, particularly as it was used during British colonial rule to pit its subjects against one another, is a central theme. One of the things this book did really well was remind me of the way Empire created new and frequently shifting routes and lands. In this respect, it reminded me a bit of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy. While I was on some level aware of it, I remember those books – particularly Sea of Poppies – really driving home the realization that movement wasn't just two way: from and to Europe/the West/the center of colonial power. The Ibis books are set several decades before Dance of the Jakaranda, but the boat at the center of the book (the titular Ibis) is transporting laborers from India to Africa, and has crew members hailing from Baltimore to southeast Asia. The characters in Dance of the Jakaranda are living through the waning of the British Empire and the changing maps that resulted. Babu came to Kenya from Punjab but at the time of Kenyan independence he's stateless.

I'd read five other Kenyan novels before this one, but all my the same author*: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (who actually blurbed this and is thanked in the acknowledgements). Two of the Ngũgĩ books I've read actually cover the same period (the eve of independence), but – the Ngũgĩ endorsement aside – Peter Kimani is from a different generation and it was good to read a different voice.

* This is true for me for a lot of countries: I've read 3 Turkish novels, all by Orhan Pamuk; 3 Salvadoran novels, all by Horacio Castellanos Moya; 3 Nigerian novels, all by Chinua Achebe; 3 Portuguese novels, all by José Saramago. There are some pairs too, but I won't list them. Anyway, it's hardly my top priority, but I do sometimes ask myself: should I be letting one author stand in for a nation?

Death of an Englishman, by Magdalen Nabb

Yesterday I went on a 5 mile walk. Ostensibly, my purpose was to pick up some film I'd dropped off at a darkroom that's a bit more than 2 miles away from my home. After I'd done that, I decided to visit BIG Reuse, a sort of mega thrift store that mostly sells appliances and furniture but also has a surprisingly large and well-organized book section. If you cut out just that corner of the store, it would be a pretty decent stand-alone used bookstore. Along with Magdalen Nabb's Death of an Englishman, I picked up The Needle's Eye by Margaret Drabble and I was especially excited to find a very nice edition of The Tale of the 1002nd Night by Joseph Roth. (They also had a copy of his The Emperor's Tomb, which I seriously considered buying but it was the older translation rather than the 2013 Michael Hofmann translation and I didn't quite trust it.) When I finished my shopping at BIG Reuse I'd been on my feet for probably two hours. I thought I might just catch the subway home, but I really didn't feel like getting on the subway. My feet were hurting badly. I'm sure I'm not alone in this: during the pandemic, my feet have become unaccustomed to nearly all my shoes and I keep discovering shoes I once considered comfortable are no longer comfortable. So, by some twisted logic, I decided to keep walking and to visit a shoe store that I like that was about a mile further on. I got to the store and bought a pair of sneakers (time will tell if they'll be comfortable for long haul walks, but I'm optimistic). I considered wearing them out, but from there it was just a few more blocks to a bus I could take home, so I thought I'd be okay (having endured three hours on my feet already at that point). However, when I got to the bus stop my transit app said the bus was 25 minutes away. Another bus that would also take me home was just another half mile on, so I kept walking. At the second bus stop, I sat down in the bus shelter, where the other woman sitting there told me she'd been waiting for an hour. (I don't know what was up with the Brooklyn buses yesterday!) Luckily, I only had to wait about ten minutes. Because in my mind I was just going out for a walk, I'd left the house pretty much empty handed; just my phone and keys and a tote bag to bring my negatives home in. Before leaving, I thought about bringing the book I was reading, but I didn't want to carry more than I had to. 

When the bus is running an hour behind, you know you have a long ride ahead of you even once it arrives. There will be people waiting at every stop, and people who need to get off at every stop. I had gotten on at the first stop, so was fortunate to get a seat before the inevitable rush, but I knew it would probably be close to an hour before I got home. (I could have been home in probably 20 minutes if I'd decided to take the subway rather than the bus, and I truly can't account for my decision; I have a weird partiality to the bus.) Fortunately, though I hadn't brought my own book, I had picked up three books while I was out. Being that I was already in the middle (nearing the end, in fact) of another book, I thought I should start the book I would likely finish fastest – the Magdalen Nabb was the obvious choice.

I'd read one other book from the Marshal Guarnaccia series back in 2016, but I was pleased to find that Death of an Englishman was the first book of the series because I've accumulated a few of the others over the years with the intention of starting from the beginning. (A bias of mine that I have written about before.) Set in Florence, circa 1980 this book describes an Italy that is still feeling the effects of the postwar period. I'm much more familiar with the period in the two decades or so following the end of World War II (in fact, I'm much more familiar still with the decade or so before the war than I am with the decades after), and I was surprised in this book to find those kind of aftershocks still present. The mass migration of the poor from the south of Italy to the north (and beyond into other parts of Europe) is subtly at the center of this book. (Now, sometimes, things go the other way. In Sardegna, I met a cameriere who came from Liguria to work there in the season.) Magdalen Nabb was an English expat living in Florence, and she likes to poke fun and the English and the Italians – and, at the center, how the two cultures are foreign to one another.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong

I'd seen a handful of people I knew post about Minor Feelings on social media, and I suppose that's how I came to be aware of it. I'm not sure why I remember this particular post so distinctly, but I specifically remember one acquaintance posting a photo of her hand holding the book on a plane, so it must have been before the start of the pandemic in the U.S., and so it also must have been just after the book was released. I made a mental note. A few weeks ago my father was visiting and on a stroll through Crown Heights we came across a stack of books on a stoop. My dad is always on the lookout for books, so we stopped to look. Several were ARCs or review copies, which I usually avoid. (When I was younger, I used to love getting my hands on galleys; they made me feel like an insider. But somewhere along the line I lost interest in that feeling, and at the same time started to be put off by the incompleteness of galleys, the low quality cover images, the missing pieces.) But seeing Minor Feelings, I decided to grab it even though it was an ARC. In fact, there's also a certain upside to books that I don't care about as objects. Last month, I took a trip and brought two books with me: this and Senselessness (my edition of which, as I mentioned when I wrote about it, is terribly marked up). I thought if I read them and finished them while I was away, I wouldn't mind leaving them behind. (Of course, as it turned out – as it nearly always turns out when I bring books on trips – I didn't read either, and I brought both back home with me.)

This weekend, I went on another trip. I took the train to upstate New York to spend Mothers' Day with my mom. I was only going to be away for about 24 hours, but it's a two-hour train ride each way, plus another hour or nearly an hour on the subway to and from Penn Station, and I do sometimes read when I'm at my mom's house, so – to be safe – I thought I had better bring a second book in addition to the book I was already reading. On the train up, I read one chapter of the novel I was reading and found I wasn't really in the mood, so I switched and read a couple chapters of Minor Feelings instead. On the train back, I read a few more chapters, and on the subway home from Penn another chapter still. By the time I got off the subway, I had just 50 pages left to read. I was just two chapters short of being able to leave it behind at the Tiny Free Library between the subway and my apartment (though having carried it upstate and back, those last three blocks can hardly be called an additional burden). I got home and hoped to finish it before an evening meeting, but I was still 10 pages shy of the end when I had to set it aside to take my call. I finally read the last few pages around 9:00 last night.

Minor Feelings is divided into seven chapters, each of which is or is almost a stand-alone essay. There are threads that weave through the whole book, but also some of the essays seem to stand so much on their own that they forget or don't acknowledge they're part of a larger book. (This isn't really a criticism of the essays; just something that I noticed in reading them back to back to back.) A couple of them are really wonderful. I was particularly struck by the chapter called "Portrait of an Artist" about the artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Her book Dictee is one I remember seeing around from my time working in bookstores more than 20 years ago; that must have been around the time of its re-release. I read an article about her again much more recently and decided to seek out a copy of Dictee. I've had it for about a year now, but haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Hong's exploration into Cha's murder, her insistence on telling the story (and her interrogation into why it hadn't been told), was eye-opening. The chapters called "Stand Up" and "Bad English" also really stood out for me. In the chapter called "An Education" Hong goes deeply into friendships she had at Oberlin College, where it seems she and I must have overlapped. She mentions having attended Oberlin in the first chapter, but it was only when I got to "An Education" that I seemed to remember having heard earlier that she went there, and now I see that we're the same age. There was a passing mention in that chapter of someone I immediately recognized from my own time there, and suddenly I realize that we must know some of the same people. Her two friends, who have been anonymized, must have known my closest friend while I was there who, like Hong's friends, was a woman of color and art major (a department, as Hong points out, that was dominated by white men). I spent three miserable semesters at Oberlin before dropping out, and reading this chapter brought back everything I hated about it. I couldn't read it from any distance.

The particular strengths of the individual essays aside, this book feels important because of its voice. The titular "Asian American reckoning" has been a long time coming. The idea that Asian Americans are doing just fine has been belied in the last year with the dramatic rise in violence against Asian Americans, but I don't think it's changed the sense that Asian Americans don't face the same challenges that other people of color in the U.S. do. This is something I've seen up close in my professional life. Years ago, when I was in grad school, I remember a conversation about diversity in which a professor of mine actually said out loud, "We don't have to worry about Asians; they're doing even better than white people." I was furious, but struck dumb. I went home that day and found all kinds of data to dismantle my professor's statement and I typed it up coolly into a short little essay and shared it with her and my whole class. She never responded. That was 2012, but I still come across that attitude regularly. In the field I work in, Asian Americans are overrepresented, relative to their population in the U.S. There's a widespread belief that we don't have "to worry" about Asian Americans in our diversity efforts. But even as they're "overrepresented" in the field, taking that representation into account, Asian Americans are underrepresented in leadership roles. And furthermore, Asian Americans aren't equally represented; the group of people who can be described as Asian American is incredibly diverse, and the wealth and education gap within that group of people is huge and persistent. This book speaks with a fury that was absolutely refreshing. I'd like to send a copy to my old professor.

The Gloaming, by Melanie Finn

I wrote a little about how I ended up purchasing The Gloaming back when I wrote about Seeing People Off. Having finished it today, I just went back to the Two Dollar Radio site and purchased both other Melanie Finn books they publish (they have a great deal they call the "Double Exposure Sale" where you get a steep discount when you buy two books by the same author, but I would have been happy to pay full price based solely on how much I loved The Gloaming! Actually, just check out all their sales; I'm sure it will be worth your while.) 

I almost don't know what to say about this book. It was astounding and beautifully crafted. It centers on Pilgrim, who has been left by her husband for another woman, and who was the driver in a deadly car accident in a Swiss town where she has no connections. In the wake of these events, she leaves for Tanzania on what can only be described as a whim. She takes up residence in a remote village on the Kenyan border, but trouble seems to follow her. The Gloaming is suspenseful and filled with an ominousness that leaves the reader right on the edge of doubt, wondering if the apparent threats to Pilgrim are real, or if the sense of a threat is a product of her own guilt and grief. The book takes several unexpected turns, and just continually hovers in this place where you don't have quite a firm grasp on what is real – in the most wonderful way. It's incredible.

Ambiguous Adventure, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane

When I reorganized my fiction collection early on in the pandemic, putting my books in order by the author's birth year, I discovered that Cheikh Hamidou Kane was the oldest living author in my collection. I think I must have done the reorganization right around the time I read The Dark Child by Camara Laye because I remember thinking I should read Ambiguous Adventure just after finishing The Dark Child. It took me a year to get around to it. The two authors sit right next to one another on my shelf; both were born in 1928 in villages of what was then French West Africa, Laye three months earlier (if Wikipedia is to be trusted*) in the interior of modern-day Guinea and Cheikh Hamidou in the far northeast of present-day Senegal. But while Laye has been dead for more than 40 years, Cheikh Hamidou is evidently still alive (and well I hope!) in Senegal. 

Besides their age and relative proximity, there are some parallels between the stories in The Dark Child and Ambiguous Adventure – and some interesting contrasts. Both are coming-of-age stories of boys born in villages where they receive their early education before going to modern colonial schools, and eventually to France. The Dark Child is more strictly a memoir an ends before Laye arrives in France, while Ambigious Adventure covers its protagonist's time in France, as well as his return to Africa. But the more interesting difference is their childhood experiences. Laye came of age in a village where traditional African religion was practiced. While he did attend French school, the influence of the colonial authority feels remote in his book. Cheikh Hamidou's protagonist was raised in a strict African-Islamic community, and the tension between the local traditional education and what is being offered by the colonial schools is the first example of the fundamental tension that runs through the whole book. When the protagonist begins his studies at the French school and particularly after he leaves for France, he begins to feel cut off from his childhood and his faith. His detachment can't be repaired, even by his return home.

While Laye and Cheikh Hamidou are only five years younger than the great Senegalese writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène**, there's an important generational difference that came up in Ambiguous Adventure. Sembène, who was born in 1923, left Senegal in 1944 and fought in a colonial infantry regiment during World War II. In Ambiguous Adventure, there are Africans who have returned after having fought in the war. The stories from those who, like Sembène, went away and returned contributed to the local understanding of France and the larger world. Sembène left again to live in France in 1946, and only returned to Senegal when it became independent in 1960. After his education at La Sorbonne, Cheikh Hamidou returned to Senegal in 1959 as part of the French overseas government, and on Senegalese independence quickly rose in the Senegalese government***. Laye, for his part, returned to Africa in 1956 and to Guinea when it became independent in 1958, where he too became a government official.

* I only question this because Laye's birth date is listed as January 1, and when I looked up Ousmane Sembène's birth date, which is also listed as January 1 (though 1923 in his case) it gave me some pause, but perhaps they really were both New Year's babies.

** As an aside, I feel very fortunate to have gotten to see Ousmane Sembène in person in his lifetime. I guess he did an American tour on the release of his film Faat Kiné. I saw him introduce it with a Q&A at the Harvard Film Archive when I was living in Boston in 2001 or 2002, though I didn't get around to actually reading one of his books (God's Bits of Wood) until 2018.

*** If you want to know anything at all about Cheikh Hamidou Kane, I hope you read French because his English-language Wikipedia page is 3 sentences long. Camara Laye's and Ousmane Sembène's French Wikipedia pages were also somewhat more helpful than their English-language counterparts. 

All the Names, by José Saramago

I started All the Names in early March and read it for about 2 weeks before I had to stop and read some book club books and then decided to read other books for various reasons. Between setting it aside on March 14 and today, I probably read from it on 4 days. This is the third Saramago book I've read (the fourth I've attempted) and I've found them all slow going. The other two Saramago books I finished, I loved in the end. I can't quite say that's true of All the Names. As always with Saramago, the language is gorgeous. There's a sly humor that I love. But this book didn't affect me in quite the way the others have. 

All the Names follows Senhor José, a clerk at the Central Registry in an unnamed city. His workplace is where the records of all births, marriages, and deaths are held. The records of the dead enter what is essentially a bureaucratic black hole, a dark space in the rear of the office, which must continually be extended to accommodate the additional dead. Senhor José collects tidbits about certain famous people and in the course of his research, he chances on the record of an ordinary woman, who becomes an obsession for him. Her record serves as a revelation to him, showing how little the Central Registry actually "knows" about the people in its records. His desire to discover the real woman takes him out of the routine of his life and makes him do things he never would have considered previously.

The most moving part of the book for me was when Senhor José visits the Central Cemetery, a sort of sister bureaucracy to the Central Registry. Like the Registry, the Cemetery is continually expanding to accommodate the new dead, and yet remains largely unvisited by the living. In a miles-long walk through the cemetery, Senhor José walks through the history of humanity in his city. 

I wouldn't say that I didn't like All the Names, but the entire book felt like a metaphor for something that I wasn't quite able to grasp.

Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

On the heels of rereading The Dream of My Return last week, I pulled out the copy of Senselessness I picked up at a used bookstore in San Francisco shortly after I read The Dream of My Return for the first time. I noticed too late – after buying it – that it was a heavily marked up copy. I hate reading books with writing and highlighting in them; I find it distracting. I kept intending to get a new copy, but held on to the marked up one in the interim. Today, I decided to read it despite the annotations. 

I'm glad I read Senselessness in close proximity to The Dream of My Return. In many ways, it's similar. It's a first-person narrative by a Salvadoran writer who has been forced to flee El Salvador after having written critically about the government. He's come to an unnamed country – probably Guatemala – on a 3-month contract to copy-edit an 1100-page report of testimonials to the atrocities perpetuated by that country's military against various indigenous populations. Day after day, he reads accounts of the most horrific scenes. In a notebook, he writes down the sentences and phrases from these accounts that he finds most affecting – and they are truly affecting. But they begin to haunt him. As a reader, we suspect he's going mad (as do many of his acquaintances in the book). He suffers from crippling paranoia – but is it paranoid? 

Returning to The Dream of My Return, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

My father was visiting last weekend and somehow we got to talking about Central America. I reminded my father about Eduardo Halfon, whose book The Polish Boxer I had loaned him after I read it a few years ago. Reading it, as well as his Monastery, made me curious to visit Guatemala. By contrast, the two books I've read by Horacio Castellanos Moya have left me with no urge to visit El Salvador. As my dad and I were conversing I started pulling books off my shelves. I tried to send him home with The She-Devil in the Mirror with the explanation that it might give him some sense of life in San Salvador, but he asked me to give it to him at a later date. And while I was there, I also pulled out The Dream of My Return, my favorite book from 2016.

I didn't have much to say about it when I wrote about it at the time, apart from that I loved it. I'm glad I went back to it. I saw more in it this time. It also provided an interesting contrast to The She-Devil in the Mirror: I saw parallels to it when rereading The Dream of My Return that I hadn't seen before. There's a similar unearthing of a complex truth through a series of what seem to be offhand remarks or remembrances. The book covers four weeks or so, during which the narrator starts seeing a doctor, who also practices homeopathy, acupuncture, and hypnotherapy. What the reader learns about the narrator – and what he learns about himself – takes almost the form of analysis. (In fact, he attributes his own state of mind to the hypnotherapy he's undergoing.) What at first reads as the (hilarious) addled rants and reckless behavior of an alcoholic takes on more depth as we learn of the trauma after trauma the narrator experienced in his youth in El Salvador in the period leading up to and during the civil war. These memories reemerge as he's on the verge of returning to El Salvador to start a new life, and is asking himself whether he's paving the way for his own death.

Red, White, and Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston; Dog Symphony, by Sam Munson

Red, White, and Royal Blue showed up in my mail last Thursday. I had intended to go back to the Saramago book I started before The Memory Police when I finished the latter book, but thought I could use a fun break – and it was just that. The book exists in an alternate reality where a woman (not Clinton) won the 2016 election and the events of the book all take place in a completely unrecognizable 2020. It imagines a romance between the half-Mexican-American son of the sitting U.S. President and an English prince. The British royalty in the book exist in an even more altered reality, I suppose to avoid using any existing members of the royal family; so, while Obama was the last US president in this book, Queen Elizabeth has never existed. Instead, there is a Queen Mary, who's about Elizabeth's age; to be followed in line by a Princess Catherine, who married a film star; she, in turn has three adult children the youngest of whom is the love interest in the book. (He is the Prince of Wales despite being the youngest, a detail that confused me for a long time -- we meet him at his brother's wedding but the relative ages of the royal kids is not totally clear early on in the book, and I kept assuming as Prince of Wales he must be first in line for the throne, but no. I hardly consider myself to be informed on the Royals, and perhaps this wasn't so much an oversight as something else to clarify that these aren't the real Royals? Who knows.) There were all kinds of bits in this book that were just a little too far-fetched and I didn't particularly believe in the characters, but it was a quick enough and fun enough read to overlook all that for the most part. 

I think I've written before about how I wasn't much of a reader growing up, but perhaps what I haven't written about is the fact that I grew up surrounded by books. My father worked in bookstores when I was a small child, and when I was about seven he moved over to publishing. Our apartments were full of books. When I was little I remember stacks of books on the floor inside our bay window. Later, we moved into a bigger apartment and my dad built shelves that covered one full wall and went all the way up to our high ceilings. Most of our collection – at least what I remember – was art books and fiction. My mom had books of her own too. She was a French major in college, and she always had a small collection of French language books. In publishing, my dad worked in trade sales, so he visited bookstores constantly and attended Book Expo America (ABA back then) every year. The publisher my dad worked for was one of the larger independent houses, and he distributed a bunch of smaller independent publishers, among them New Directions. This is why a lot of the books we had around our house were New Directions publications. I think I believed, even as a child, that they were somehow different and important. Here I am as a tween, proudly wearing my New Directions t-shirt. (I wish I still had it! And I wish I could tell what cassette I'm holding too. Can you?) 

I was thinking about all this on Sunday,* when I went to the Little Free Library by my apartment to drop off Red, White, and Royal Blue and, while there, grabbed Sam Munson's Dog Symphony. I'd never heard of the book or its author. The little New Directions logo on the spine – an image that's been familiar to me my whole life – was enough of a selling point for me. I started it as soon as I got home (despite the fact the stack of other books I was ostensibly already reading). It's a slim book and I thought I would be done with it the following day, but events took an unexpected turn and I didn't read at all between Sunday and yesterday, so I finally finished Dog Symphony this evening. It's a very strange book, set in a post-epidemic Buenos Aires, a city haunted by packs of dogs roaming the streets each night. There's a sinister pseudo-police force; competing factions of humans, some of whom believe the dogs are the reincarnated dead; a belligerent narrator who gets progressively more bruised and beaten as the novel goes on; and an odd assortment of characters who are just trying to live normal lives in far from normal circumstances. The book was bizarre, short, and satisfying.

* Funnily enough, the day after I wrote the first part of this I heard John Darnielle being interviewed on All Of It. The conversation was partly about books and at one point Darnielle was talking about a New Directions book from the 1950s, where there was a list of other books published by New Directions. He said interspersed with familiar names like Sartre, were authors and books that were completely unfamiliar to him and then he said something like, "If it was good enough for New Directions in 1951, it's probably good enough for me." I'm not alone in trusting them implicitly.

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa

Yoko Ogawa first came to my attention as someone whose books I might want to read a couple years ago and I picked up her book The Diving Pool, but I didn't get around to reading it right away. When The Memory Police was selected for my Women in Translation book club, it became the book that introduced me to her instead. 

The Memory Police is a haunting book. I enjoyed it, and yet I don't feel I have a lot to say about it. (Which, in itself, feels like a sort of reflection of the book.) The narrator is a novelist, living alone in the house she grew up in after the long-ago death of her parents. She lives on an unnamed island where things entire concepts and categories of things – disappear with some regularity. Most people move on and forget immediately; at the moment an item is disappeared, they are instantly cut off from it – they no longer relate to the item it once was. But a few people remember, and those people are the targets of the Memory Police. The narrator is a regular person, who forgets, but her mother remembered. This is perhaps what gives her added sympathy for the people who remember and leads to her decision to protect and hide her editor, another rememberer. It's hard, as a reader, to bear with her as she goes about complacently accepting each new disappearance; in this, we relate to the editor, who can't fathom the extent to which the loss is meaningless for those who don't remember. He tries and tries to re-stir memories in her. Now and then they do come back in the tiniest flickers. 

The book really does leave you wondering who is worse off: the narrator who forgets, and only feels a vague emptiness or deadening, or the editor, who remembers everything, but must live hidden away, forever outside the world for his own safety.