Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat and Party of Two, by Jasmine Guillory

Breath, Eyes, Memory is a book that has been on my radar for a long time. I first remember coming across it in 1997 when I worked at a bookstore that stocked course books for NYU and the New School. I have no idea what class it was for, but someone had ordered it as a text book. I think the title struck a chord with me? For all these years, it has just kind of remained there, at the edge of my awareness. I actually have no idea how I ended up owning a copy or how long I've had it, though I think I must have found it at a thrift store, probably after I started reading for my world books project. I had it in the back of my head for Haiti, though I had a couple other books in mind for Haiti as well -- books that didn't center on emigrants. But, of course, large-scale emigration is a reality of modern Haiti. And immigrant stories are a major part of the American story. This book has both: the stories of those who emigrated, and of those who stayed behind. Best of all, for me personally, it has Brooklyn. A Brooklyn close to the one I live in. Physically close, at least. The narrator's mother's Brooklyn home is on Nostrand Avenue, which is my cross street today. On her arrival in Brooklyn, the narrator attends a Haitian Adventist school; I live directly across the street from a Haitian Adventist school. (Not the same school -- if the school in the book is based on a real school, I imagine it's one in Flatbush.) Even as a kid in Brooklyn in the 80s, our landlord was Haitian and his daughter was my babysitter. But of course, I also live (and lived) in a completely different Brooklyn. 

Families are complicated things. Breath, Eyes, Memory takes in four generations of women and the love and hurt between  them. This book beautifully, painfully illustrated how trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, from parent to child. It also leaves open the hope of breaking this cycle. 

When I finished Breath, Eyes, Memory this morning, I definitely didn't expect I'd finish a second book by this evening, but I went downstairs to check the mail and there was Party of Two waiting for me. I think I read Royal Holiday over two days, but that one aside, I've read every one of Jasmine Guillory's books in the space of a day. Her books are perfect for those days when you want to do nothing and read something that will leave you smiling and satisfied. I needed one of those days so badly after the week I had, so this book arrived at just the right moment. It was delightful in all the ways I wanted it to be. 

There There, by Tommy Orange

An interesting thing about There There is that it tells you from the very outset what it intends to do. It's an ambitious book that aims to tell stories that are unknown outside the community they come from. I had never given any thought to the urban Native American experience before reading this book, and certainly wasn't aware (or had never stopped to consider) that there were enclaves and communities of Native people in American cities. There There wants to tell you their stories. And it does. In less than 300 pages, Tommy Orange takes you through a large cast of characters, all with Native ancestry of some sort and ties to Oakland, California, living out a whole range of experiences, but with common threads. He does this so deftly that you develop feelings for characters you only spend a few pages with. It's really something. I feel like I have more to say about this book, but not the energy to say it -- it's been a rough few weeks -- so I guess I'll leave it there. 

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty, and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, by Ishmael Reed

A friend came to visit me a couple years ago and left this book behind. It was already on my to-read list at the time, but it got shelved and set aside. (My to-read list is very long, and in a state of constant fluctuation.) The events of the last couple weeks inspired me to make a conscious effort to read more African American writers and so The Sellout finally got its moment. Plus I got another tick on the list of Booker winners I've read; this one is extra special as the first American Booker winner. 

The Sellout is a brilliant work of satire. This bleak picture of de facto segregation in Los Angeles and the narrator's attempt to uplift his community by reinstating de jure segregation (or at least the outward appearance of it), includes some of the funniest writing I've ever read. There were lines (not a few!) that made me burst out laughing as I read on my couch. And there were lines that made me cringe, where I'm sure my face looked just like a wide-eyed grimacing emoji. And there were lines so perfectly true they stopped me in my place. 

I posted about this book on Instagram and a friend in Italy messaged me to ask if it was a good read. She has the Italian translation. (Lo Schiavista, it's called in Italian, which if I'm translating correctly means The Slaver.) It's hard for me to imagine how this book will translate; not into Italian, but to a reader not steeped in America's particular dysfunctions. I'll be curious to hear how she finds it. 

It's hard for me to articulate what makes The Sellout so powerful. I think the narrator puts it best when he says, "It's illegal to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded, theater, right?" ... "Well, I've whispered 'Racism' in a post-racial world."

I pulled out Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down along with The Sellout last Monday, undecided as to which I should read first. Ishmael Reed actually gets a passing reference in The Sellout, when the narrator is taken by his father to Mississippi to engage in some "reckless eyeballing" in an attempt to expose him to direct racism. "Thanks to years of my father's black vernacular pop quizzes and an Ishmael Reed book he kept on top of the toilet for years, I knew that 'reckless eyeballing' was the act of a black male deigning to look at a southern white female." 

I had to read an excerpt from Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down for a class I took in 1999 (a portion of the book is reprinted in the Norton Anthology, Postmodern American Fiction, which was our text book). I remember liking the excerpt, but not much else. Several years later I found a used copy of the full book and picked it up. Like The Sellout, it has sat on my shelves since, waiting to be read. A certain logic told me I should have read Yellow Back Radio first: Ishmael Reed is a generation older than Paul Beatty and Yellow Back Radio was written nearly 50 years earlier. It's also a work of satire, an absurdist send up of the old west, among other things, with some supernaturalism and modern technology mixed in. A quick and entertaining read.

The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead, and The Hollow of Fear, by Sherry Thomas

I said recently that I feel like I keep choosing the wrong books to read. The Famished Road is still sitting on my side table with a bookmark at page 187, where I placed it on May 8th. For the past couple weeks, sitting on top of The Famished Road, has been James Salter's Light Years, which I started on May 25 and have been making my way through slowly, without ever feeling very motivated to read it. On Friday, I thought I would try and plow through it this weekend so I could move on (one unfinished book hanging over me is a situation I can make myself comfortable with, but two is hard for me), but when I picked it up yesterday morning and found that about 5 pages from where I was reading was the start of a new section, I decided to take that as an opportunity to set it aside for the longer term as well. So yesterday I started The Nickel Boys and today I finished it. 

I likely wouldn't have gotten around to it for some time — I never buy hardcovers, and rarely buy new books, but I have this copy of The Nickel Boys courtesy of my college roommate, Kelly, who mailed it to me from Oakland, CA along with Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous a few weeks ago. (Sometime before, I sent her Homegoing, Circe, and Conversations with Friends — trading books is great!) Kelly read it for a book club and it was right after the announcement of its Pulitzer win that she offered to send it, and she wrote me, "My bookclub members have been silent since the Pulitzer announcement. Covid got real serious while we were reading Nickel Boys and I am the only person who finished the book. It’s good throughout, but there is something kind of *no spoilers* to look forward to at the end. So I wonder if they are confused as to how this book could have won, while I am not at all." So, that was the information I had going in. Really that and nothing else — I avoid reading much about books I intend to read. What can I say: she was exactly right. The book is good throughout. It manages something that I think Whitehead managed in The Underground Railroad as well, which is to tell you about awful, and violent, and heart-rending situations in a way that is gentle but doesn't diminish the violence. I think this is a difficult line to straddle. 

This book was full of quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., as Whitehead says in the acknowledgements, "it was energizing to hear his voice in my head." With the bizarre cooption of King that is so common today, it was refreshing to read the contextualized, radical King. The central tragedy in The Nickel Boys is that the main character, Elwood Curtis, has this strong sense of right and wrong and justice. He believes. Even in the worst circumstances, he expects there will be an order to things. Early on in the book, when he's brought for punishment along with 3 other boys from the reform school he attends, he counts the lashes the others receive and tries to make sense of it, to estimate the number he will receive, as if there's a logic to the brutality that's meted out — a logic he can beat. He never really loses this sense: very near the end of the book is a sentence that really hit me to the core: "The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order." Elwood's belief in the fundamental justice of things is his beautiful, fatal flaw. 

With The Nickel Boys, I finally felt I had chosen the right book for the first time since The Dark Child (which, granted, was only a month ago — but still). It didn't hurt that it felt like the right book for right now. 

Last weekend, I also needed a break from Light Years that wasn't The Famished Road (or vice versa) and I had recently received The Hollow of Fear in the mail via PaperbackSwap. I thought it would be the perfect thing because I wanted something that was basically pure diversion, but I'm not sure it worked out that way. I did read the whole thing in 2 days, but I didn't get much pleasure out of it. That probably had as much to do with my own mood as with the book. The last couple weeks have been rough for me for reasons I can't really articulate because I don't really understand them myself. Partly, I think it's just that the external events are finally getting to me, whatever that means. For the first two months of being home, I felt I was adapting surprisingly well to never leaving the house. In fact, I still feel that way. To the extent that I've left, I've mostly done it because I feel like I have to for other people. In any case, Memorial Day weekend, I had a 4-day weekend, which I had been looking forward to and then I found somehow unsatisfying. The following weekend, I had taken a day off for my birthday, so I had another long weekend and this was the weekend when I read The Hollow of Fear. I think my looming birthday (I have started to acknowledge that birthdays make me emotional) and the various commitments I felt related to it were contributors to my mood. In any case, I thought that this would be the perfect thing to get me out of my mood, or make me forget it for a while, but in fact I felt like I just read it dutifully. In other circumstances, maybe I would have found it fun. It's hard to know.

The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante, it seems, won't go away. My reaction to My Brilliant Friend was lukewarm, so I haven't bothered to read the remaining books in the Neapolitan series, despite owning all of them. On top of my ambivalence about the book, I find I have a more generalized recoiling in response to Ferrante. Some of it, I think, was the ubiquitous awe in which she was held so suddenly — it seemed to me out of nowhere — about five years ago. And then, I can't place quite why, but her anonymity annoys me. I didn't find out her identity was unknown right away; in fact, not until well after I read My Brilliant Friend. When I did find out, it just felt like one more thing not to like. As it is sometimes hard to separate the persona of work's creator from the work, this fact of her anonymity, which seems itself to have become something of a persona — quite the opposite of what you expect anonymity to offer — kept needling its way in as I read, leaving me with a faint distaste. I acknowledge that this is on me, not her — whoever she is. Back when I read Trick I went down something of a Ferrante rabbit hole and I'm afraid maybe Domenico Starnone — whose books I've really liked — is ruined for me too, now. By some reckonings, the first book of Starnone's that I read, Ties, is in fact a sort of companion book to The Days of Abandonment telling the same story from the husband's perspective. This nugget, of course, also remained in the back of my mind as I was reading: were these stories the same, I asked myself.

I've had The Days of Abandonment for as long as I've had the Neapolitan books, and had considered reading it a few times, but always found the blurb a bit off-putting: did I really want to read about a woman driven to madness when her husband leaves her? (Turns out I probably didn't.) It was this Lit Hub list of The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages that provided the nudge that got me to read it now. I still haven't felt myself to be in the right place to go back to The Famished Road, so I thought a short, distracting read might be in order. I thought I'd read it in a day or two; I read it in five. What I felt I needed at this moment was a book that I wanted to pick up, or that I didn't want to put down. The Days of Abandonment was not this. I would read a few pages — it has conveniently short chapters — and then not want to go on. I might pick it up again an hour or two later, and do the same thing again. That's how most of the reading went until yesterday morning, when I still had 100 pages (i.e., more than half the book) to go, and I decided to just get it done. Get it done by lunch, or abandon it, were basically the options I gave myself and — I realize this is a little ridiculous, but the fact that I had another book I was avoiding definitely played into my decision to go through with reading this one. I'm not sure how well I can articulate my complaints about the book. I will say I wish I had checked doesthedogdie.com before starting this; I probably would have skipped it if I had. (How was I to know there would be a dog?) But, mostly, I just didn't find the narrator all that sympathetic or relatable or compelling. (I realize sympathetic and relatable, perhaps, ought not to be disqualifiers, but I had trouble bringing myself to care.) 

Toward the end, as the narrator starts to come out of her mania, I did finally find some points to connect to. As she accepts facing the future without her husband, she finds she must differentiate herself from him, to strip away the traces of him that have become part of herself. She experiences some fear about what will be left when this is done. This was a feeling that was very familiar to me. I often say I grew up with my husband. Not literally: I was 21 when we met — but I spent nearly my entire 20s with him. I became an adult with him. (And he with me: we're the same age; I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of what I've experienced is mutually experienced by him.) We split up well over a decade ago, but even today I'm sometimes (though quite rarely now) aware of his influence. Sometimes it's his taste that dictates mine. Sometimes it's the opposite: I find I'm still rebelling against him to assert my own preferences. Ferrante captured some of this experience, which went a small way toward saving the book for me. 

Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi

I don't really know anything about Oman. In fact, I had to look it up on a map to be certain of where it was. (I knew it was on the Arabian peninsula, but not the particular geography.) I certainly don't know anything about its history. I wouldn't say this was a handicap exactly when reading Celestial Bodies, more that reading it made me aware of how completely outside my knowledge base Oman and its history are. I don't think I've ever read a book from a country I knew so little about, with the possible exceptions of Mauritius and Equatorial Guinea. Those, at least, I didn't have to look up on a map. (Though I did have to look up Annobón, the island province of Equatorial Guinea where By Night the Mountain Burns takes place.) In any case, somewhere I heard about Celestial Bodies. I added it to my World Books List and forgot about it. And then it kept reasserting itself. I bought it - I thought! - on a whim one evening when I decided to order a bunch of books I'd never heard of on bookshop.org. Then when it arrived, I realized I had heard of it: it was already on my World Books List! Then, a couple days later, I saw that Idlewild Books, which this year has been hosting a Women In Translation book club had selected it as the June book for their club. Clearly, this book had been in the periphery of my vision for a little while and I just failed to make the connections. In any case, after finishing This Is How It Always Is, I took a day off from reading. (I know: a day. But for me a day off is unusual, especially these days.) I was on the fence as to whether to go back to The Famished Road right away (spoiler: after finishing Celestial Bodies, I was again on the fence as to whether to go back to The Famished Road right away; I did not). I decided it would be a good moment to start Celestial Bodies and get it read in time for the Idlewild Book Club, should I decide to join.

The book feels very disjointed. It's a family drama spanning a bit over a hundred year period, told in short chapters focusing on various characters. One narrative recurs, is written in the first person and takes place in the present, while the rest are second person snippets from various points in the past, and yet that first person narrator somehow doesn't feel like the central character. Toward the end, I did understand a certain cohesion, and as I write this I see it almost more clearly. The celestial bodies of the book are the characters, the way they orbit and move around one another, sometimes drawing near, other times very remote. When I got this conceit (which is laid out pretty explicitly somewhere in the last 50 pages), I loved the idea. I saw, in retrospect, that there had been hints earlier, but I wish they had been a little stronger. Now, as I think about it, is the first person narrator like the sun? with all the other characters orbiting around him? I don't think that's quite it. It's not meant to be so heavy-handed, I think. More, it's an a way of understanding how human relationships actually work -- one I find very appealing. 

This Is How It Always Is, by Laurie Frankel

This Is How It Always Is was the third book I read for my book club. I thought I would manage reading 2:1 personal books to book club books, but I keep mucking up the timing. So, a week ago, I started another book (The Famished Road) which, like two weeks ago, I had to set aside to read my book club book this weekend. Perhaps part of the problem is I keep selecting somewhat challenging books for my personal reading (well, except for The Dark Child, which I read in a day - though maybe that was part of the problem too). The next book club book is a book I've already read, so I guess I don't have to worry about this situation happening again for a little while at least. 

I recognize that This Is How It Always Is is an important book, on some level. As one reviewer on Goodreads wrote, "we need LGBTQIAP+ stories that don't end in tragedy." I agree entirely, and this is a start at that. But this book felt, to me, a bit like an after school special. It tackled a hard topic in an instructive manner. It felt like its purpose was to give parents and families tools to navigate raising a transgender child (or really any child today, who is part of a generation whose experience of gender is different from the one I and my generation had growing up). I won't go so far as to claim I don't need help navigating this myself. I know I'm still biased by the binary understanding of gender that I grew up with. I do training on diversity and inclusion in my professional life, and one of the things I tell people is to listen, learn, and take cues from younger generations to understand what gender means to them, because that is their reality and we're living in it too. That's something I strive to do in my own life, and this was one of the major lessons of the book: the children (and not just the trans child) understood things the parents couldn't. My big complaint, really, is that I'm not looking for heavy-handed lessons in my literature. In fact, reading this was almost like work. (I'm actually contemplating recommending this book to my boss.) 

I have some other complaints too. I was a little resistant to this book before I even started it. The thought I kept having was, "I don't want to read a book about parenting." (This very much IS a book about parenting.) Now, as someone who does try to reflect on and poke at my own biases, I have to admit there's something going on here that's probably worth exploring. I especially don't want to read a book about an upper middle class white parents with five kids that is explicitly about raising those kids. This is just not something that interests me. This feeling didn't go away, even as I was reading the book. It's engaging, it's easy to read, and I want to participate in my book club ... so I just kept going, but I found some of it very tiresome. The portion of the book where the mom and kid up and move to Thailand for a few weeks (months?) was much more interesting to me than, like, the daily parenting and schooling and feeding in the rest of the book. This is my own bias, and I recognize it. The other thing that bugged me about the book, which I guess I've sort of alluded to above, was just the straight up privilege. I say this as an upper middle class white person, but it was just so unrealistic. An ER and later family practice doctor supporting her family of 7 (seven!!) on a single salary? In Seattle? The struggling writer husband, struggling to write a book for close to 20 years, and like, it's no big deal? The weird pressure from her fellow family practice doctor to go to Thailand (and/or run their practice's social media??)? The book was tackling one challenging aspect of this family's life, and to do that every other challenge they faced was essentially elided.

The Dark Child, by Camara Laye

I have had this copy of The Dark Child (sometimes translated as The African Child, titled L'Enfant Noir in the original French) for 25 years. It was assigned reading (which I did not read) for an African Religion class I took at Oberlin College. I think I was on page 2 of the book when I first asked myself, "why did it take me so long to get around to reading this?" Although I've had this book for 25 years, have moved it who knows how many times, and I don't know why it took me so long to get to it, I can tell you why I decided to pick it up just now: it was the reference to it in the recent NY Times "By the Book" interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (I love the "By the Book" interviews, regardless of who is being interviewed.)

The Dark Child is a memoir of Camara Laye's childhood and youth in Kouroussa in Guinea, and his later schooling in Conakry leading up to his departure for France to continue his studies. The whole book is suffused with nostalgia, particularly the early chapters, describing Camara's early childhood, which have the almost dreamlike quality of drawing up very distant memories. (You would think he was older than 25 - that is, that he was further removed from his childhood - when he wrote this!)

The book describes the rituals and magic of everyday life in Upper Guinea, and though he has taken part in or experienced them, Camara treats them with a bit of wonder that must have come from his own remove. You can sense his own lament at not having striven to understand more when he was fully immersed in that world. The book is also full of love: it's dedicated to his mother, and the love between her and him is so palpable in the text that I'm tearing up now just thinking about it. But the love in the book extends also to his father, his uncles on both sides of the family, his friends, and even to the places of his youth. You can feel a warm affection throughout.

This was truly a stunning book. I'm sort of sorry I waited so long to read it, but maybe now was just the right moment. I'm not sure I would have appreciated it 25 years ago the way I did today.

The Conservationist, by Nadine Gordimer

It took me two weeks to finish The Conservationist, which is not terribly long, and I even paused to read another book in the middle. And yet, two weeks just now feels like an eternity. This book dragged for me, though it was occasionally quite moving. Like The Sea, which was the book I finished immediately before starting this, I picked up The Conservationist during one of the periods in which I was actively collecting Booker prize winners (in fact I think I picked them up right around the same time). This shared the 1974 prize with Stanley Middleton's Holiday, a work and author totally unfamiliar to me. Nadine Gordimer, meanwhile, has been a familiar name to me for several decades. In addition to The Conservationist, I also have a copy of her book July's People, which I believe belonged to my parents, but this is the first book of hers I've read.

The book centers on Mehring, a wealthy, white, anglophone South African businessman. He's part of the problem, stuck in the past (or more accurately in the perpetuation of the present, because it's true that apartheid lasted for another 20 years after this book was written). He's purchased a farm 30 miles outside Johannesburg, and over the course of the book he develops a strong attachment to the land, while moving further and further from his human connections.

Much of the book consists of Mehring's internal running monologue, memories of conversations, and things he wants to say but doesn't. Among his recurring thought trains are memories of conversations with an ex lover. He had an affair with a married activist who has been forced to leave the country, and he has not gotten over it. We only ever get his perspective, but I found the dynamic of mutual disrespect very interesting. She, an anti-apartheid leftist and he, a willing beneficiary of apartheid. Each dismissive of the other as simplistic. Yet, clearly his feelings for her are stronger than he lets on, or even accepts to himself.

He has a troubled relationship with his teenage son, a liberal who sympathizes with Namibian independence, and has a friendly relationship with the farm workers and local shopkeepers. He has imaginary running conversations with his son, as he tries to understand him, but he's never able to vocalize his thoughts when he's actually face-to-face with him.

Occasionally the book picks up the narrative outside Mehring's head: amidst the goings on among the African workers on his farm; recounting the conversations among the Indian family who run the local shop. These interludes give the reader a glimpse of how Mehring is really seen by others. They also show the insider/outsider dynamic of language. Mehring doesn't seem to see his own exclusion when others are speaking their own language, or to even be able to imagine that anything said in those languages might be of interest to him.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman

This was another one for the book club. I guess we're meeting every 2 weeks, which I guess means it will consume more of my reading than I expected it to. Last weekend, after I finished my puzzle, I started Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist and I read it daily in the mornings and evenings through the week, but it's a slow read, so I realized yesterday I had better set it aside to read the book club book and go back to it when I finished. I thought I had checked out the e-book of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine from the Brooklyn Public Library, but it turned out I had checked out the Spanish language edition and the English language edition wasn't available from there or the NYPL, so I had to buy it. I should have planned better.

Things did not start off auspiciously. I was ambivalent going in. I was a little mad at myself for not having finished The Conservationist already. I was annoyed that I had messed up the library thing and had to spend $9.99. And I just wasn't sure about the book. And then when I started it, I had the sense for a while that reading it was a very bad idea. There were several times when I thought this book would have to be a new addition to the list of books I had to stop reading because I was sure terrible things were going to happen to the central characters. Although I was fairly certain this was a book with a happy ending, I found myself quite anxious for the first 90 pages or so. I was afraid of what I would have to go through before I got to the happy ending. There was one chapter that was particularly painful. (This sometimes happens to me in the most unexpected places, and definitely comes down to my own mood. Like, I love rom coms, but sometimes I can't bear watching them because I know I will have to sit through the misunderstanding that threatens to end the relationship before the eventual reconciliation.) But then things picked up, and this morning I found myself looking forward to reading the book. I had to stop when I sensed a very cringey moment coming on and it was immediately followed by a section break, with the new section under the title "Bad Days." Oh no, I thought. I set aside my iPad and had a piece of cake and thought maybe I would wait until tomorrow to go back, but after the cake I felt able to face the book again and, in fact, the thing I had been dreading did not happen (though arguably something much worse did). The truth is that terrible things did happen to Eleanor Oliphant, but they happened before the book even begins and the whole book is about her own coming to terms with them - and with herself, with the support of friends. As things looked up, I found myself tearing up often. The resolution was a bit too simplistic, but it was sweet (borderline saccharine, if I'm honest) and comforting.