Michael Kevane

Historical non-fiction, immersing the reader in the world of lower Manhattan in the post-revolution period around 1790. New York just has about 25,000 residents. Sweet reconstructs the social world on a young woman Lanah Sawyer who is raped by a young landed gentleman Henry Bedlow. The rape trial was followed closely, and written up in summary form by a young lawyer, and commented on extensively by the press. Alexander Hamilton was one of the lawyers for the defendant. Many of Bedlow’s family (he was related to the Rutgers) left lots of records, too. And the “bawdy house” of Mother Carey, where Bedlow performed the act, was well-known. So in The Sewing Girl’s Tale, John Wood Sweet is able to give a compelling account. It makes me want to walk through lower Manhattan, with a new eye and appreciation for the early history of the place, which was so central to the early Republic.

Enjoyed this sprawling family saga, A History of Burning by Janika Oza. A boy from Gujarat is tricked into become an indentured servant building the Mombasa-Kampala railroad around 1900. After the end of his work, he remains and hardscrabbles a new life. His granddaughter Latika becomes a central figure for most of the book, as the descendants move to Canada after the Amin expulsion of 1972. If you liked the bittersweet coda of Mira Nair’s film Mississippi Masala you’ll definitely want to read this book.

Reading novels from Tanzania, in anticipating some travel for work there in coming months. Enjoyed this sprawling saga on a boy who grows up in Kilwa, half-Indian half-African, ends up becoming a successful doctor in Canada, and returns 30 years later. A small framing story, not really necessary, has a publisher listening to his story, with a view to bringing it to print. The novel covers about 100 years of Swahili coast history, which was nice for me. But as a literary work, the occasional magical realism, the poorly developed characters (Kamal’s mother, for example, is never really given any depth, perhaps correctly, since she i recounted form the view of the child who left her as an adolescent). Saida, remarkably, as a central element of the story, remains just a construction of Kamal’s childhood, and the denouement is a serious disappointment for the reader. So overall I would say worth reading if you have some connection to Tanzania.

My brother suggested this novel. It is well worth reading, though it demands a very lot from the reader. Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry is high literary fiction about a dreadful subject. (Barry is Irish.) The fogginess of protagonist Tom Kettle’s memories, and the misdirections of the plots, are quite deliberate. The style reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant. I wonder if that was deliberate? A Google search reveals that as of now (July 2023) no reviewers seem to have thought about a link. Would be fun to play literary detective.

A very (very) short book, which is the only reason I read it. You learn a little, you laugh a little, you cry a little. Well, maybe not… It is just a succession of battles (boy there were a lot) and Charlemagne rode (I assume? on a horse?) all over France, Spain, Italy, etc.

This is popular history, a narrative based on letters and records uncovered in various archives. I found it plodding, though the essence of the tale really helps one understand some aspects of the Atlantic world in 1767. Two “princes” related to a slave warlord in Calabar are enslaved (while many of their companions are massacred) by a rival warlord scheming with captains of slave ships. They are transported to Dominica. Because they speak English, and understand the slave trade, and personally know many captains and sailors, they are able to escape to Virginia. but they are enslaved again. They again escape and end up in Bristol. Eventually, they find their way back to Calabar, and end up becoming slave traders again. Ouf. Definitely worth reading.

Read this book in two nights, mostly skimmed the last third as it moved to a fairly predictable conclusion. A multiverse semi-thriller. Was remarking the other day that once Nolan introduced, in Interstellar, the visual of the multiverse, at the edge of the black hole, or who cares, really, that has given license to every writer and filmaker to appropriate the trope and imagine the multiverse as a series of doors. And you can go through them through some incantation or other. The OA did this really well, partly because it was hard and it might not work and it would be scary if you did it. But they too faltered (with Khatun/Baba Yaga fishing?). Anyway, this novel, Dark Matter, is basically a midwestern identity thriller (think Witness) with a little sci-fi dress-up. I needed an airplane book distraction, so it worked just fine.

The pastiche or collage graphic memoir by Nora Krug, Belonging, traces her increasing curiosity about her family’s involvement in supporting the Nazi Party and the persecution of Jewish people in the 1930-45 period. Was her grandfather a reluctant follower, compromising his values because the price of resistance was too high? Or was he, and other family members, active Nazis? Along the way, discussions of collective guilt, memory, ties to family, self-identity, etc. are explored. The collage and drawing work is striking and well-executed. It almost feels like a day trip through a long, extended, museum gallery. Super-interesting. My one quibble, that I can understand, but at the same time cannot understand, is why Nora’s father and sister AnneMarie never spoke again. Nora’s father’s childhood and adolescence was likely (from the graphic memoir) filled with abuse, and the trauma presumably remains even 70 years later.

I am almost finished with the 3rd part of this four-part experimental novel, and it is possible I will never read the last part. It turned into a slog. The first part is a “sensational” novel about the main characters, Benjamin and Helen Rask. Presumably you want to read it because of the unimaginable luxury of a JP Morgan type financier in the roaring twenties, and the unhappy fate of his wife, submitted to quack mental illness cures of the period. But it is just dull. The discussions of finance are Econ 1… Maybe high school Econ, actually. Full of pat clichés about “capital.” The second part is Rask’s ghostwriter’s “rebuttal” memoir in the style of Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth. So pretty boring too. Then the point of view shifts to Ida Partenza, the ghostwriter of Rask’s rebuttal memoir. Trouble is, she and her poor Italian anarchist father are pretty boring also. It’s as if allusion to the really interesting history of the period was enough to make a novel readable. The fourth part is Helen Rask’s diary entries and notes, and skimming through them I was just like, “Wut?” So sorry, can’t recommend… it just seems to be missing some key elements of a good novel.

Just So Happens, by Fumio Obata, is a lovely muted watercolor graphic novel leaving the lingering impression of melancholy and longing. The story is more an impression- just ordinary things that happen, and the hints of deeper meaning remain just hints.

It becomes a bit tedious, Green Hills of Africa, by Ernest Hemingway, does, especially for a vegetarian. A lot of meat, a lot of gratuitous killing of animals for no reason. But the writing is as usual a master class in crispness. And several devices work well, POM for poor old momma. The trading of literary anecdotes. And the cast of characters is always interesting. Even more interesting for me is the arrogance of not speaking more than a few words of any of the local languages (including Swahili) but not hesitating to sketch characters and imagined backgrounds, projecting all kinds of biases onto the large retinue of servants, guides, trackers, hanger-ons, skinners, drivers, gun carriers, etc. It’s breathtaking. Someday a good Tanzanian writer will reverse the gaze.

I hard a very hard time finishing This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It is a set of letters between two time travelers from the future. They are semi-omniscient (they can inscribe letters in cells of berries that the person receiving the letter will eat, in the past? etc.). That part of time travel is not really dealt with at all. There is almost no description of the post-future societies. These strange creatures, however, long to be middling poets from the 19th century (i.e., Bob Dylan?). Their prose I found excruciating. Midway through the novel they decide they are in love with each other. The prose gets more maudlin. Ugh!

I randomly picked up this short novel, Ernest Gaines, The Tragedy of Brady Sims, in the library. It is set near Bayonne, Louisiana. Spare prose; ugly reality of African-American life and race relations. It could be 1950, it could be 1990. Small population, very insular. Violence and stress are part of everyone’s life. The prison, Angola, looms large. As a picture I appreciated it; as a novel I found it lacking. Most of the novel uses the device of the chat in the barbershop, recounting the events. Then for two short closing chapters Gaines changes the point of view. To me, these did not work at all.

Excellent retelling of the Greek myth, from Circe’s point of view. She is a sympathetic character, who evolves over the course of the novel. Miller keeps the story moving along. It is refreshing. The denouement is full of dread, yet turns out to be quite different from what one was imagining. Odysseus is a particularly well-drawn character.

Last week I read Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions. Some of her recurring themes of loneliness and simplicity are there, but these were clearly first attempts, and not really that great. Certainly not as good as Coming of Age in Karhide and some of the other shorter pieces she wrote later. City of Illusions in particular was quite flawed. For a good reader, like me, it just didn’t make much sense. Planet of Exile, dealing with social upheaval and intercultural communication, likewise had characters that were a strange mix of sharp perception and arrogant ignorance. They seemed to not ask questions of others, not really even curious. Which of course is the first role of any explorer worthy of the name.

Has to be the laziest writing this side of typing, but not going to disrespect the sheer volume of interesting information about the development and applications of CRISPR. I have little idea about the science, and know enough to see that metaphors (“a cutting frenzy”) are probably not at all apt, but still, you get the idea. He introduces a whole cast of characters, and gives up short profiles. A long book though… frequently repetitive. I was glad that he dropped the “curiosity about the hilahila” bit, which after the third time was becoming labored? The casual stereotyping is also out of hand. Why does he feel the need to ascribe personality traits to a cultural group? He never met a shy, introspective, self-effacing American? Probably there are shorter versions of this book that do a better job? For all his access, the biography is fairly superficial. And the discussions of ethics! Oh my goodness! If someone took a class on ethics in college they are somehow ready for the discussion? At least have the courage to recognize they all seem to be amateurs, because nothing suggests they devote anything more than a few minutes a day to causal introspection.

The Corner that Held Them, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, traces 50 years of a small Benedictine convent in England during the time of the Black Death (1349-82), through the acts and thoughts of many of the nuns (and the men, bishop, priest, and bailiff). Much is petty, and there is no discernible major story arc (through perhaps it all leads to the damaged Dame Sibella’s ambiguous act of self-liberation). The accumulation of lives, spent together, knowing one was staying together until death, is striking for the reader. And as is well-known, Warner is a master writer. I opened the novel randomly to this sentence: “Yet the afternoon was not entirely unpleasant, for his seat by the window was cushioned and he could look out and see the dragon-flies darting over the moat, or the aspen quiver of the reflected sunlight on the mossed wall, or a water-rat swimming across and dragging its wheat-ear pattern of ripples after it.” The benefit of my age is I used to collect wheat pennies (before the Lincoln Memorial was on the back), so I know exactly what a wheat-ear pattern is! One of the very best scenes in the book belongs to a man… he discovers the ars nova in a leper colony.

A very messy, moody “mind-bendy” intersecting story. Maybe modeled on Michael Cunningham’s styles and themes? I slogged (sorry) through to almost the end and then just skimmed. I suppose there is an audience for this, but it was not me. I enjoyed the idea of the B-grade TV show Raider being a touchstone for a person, in terms of first exposure and referent for certain emotions. We were just watching Pitch Perfect last night and the writers clunkily have Kendrick watching The Breakfast Club with tears in her eyes. So a reasonable device. But the noirish “I don’t know how I got here and cannot remember yet something is wrong with reality” approach repeated over and over for a couple hundred pages got tiresome for me. The Lev character was poorly sketched, in my opinion. If he is going to be so central, he had to be more compelling. Many other characters, (Min, Jem) also seemed to merely serve as foils to construct the plot.

My sister recommended V.V. Ganeshananthan’s novel “Brotherless Night.” It is a very straightforward “historical fiction” account of a young woman’s experiences during the Tamil Tiger civil war against the Sinhalese government of Sri Lanka. The reader learns a bit of history. I wouldn’t say it is a highly literary novel; the prose is straightforward. The characters remain fairly static. The mysterious K. and T. after a decade of experiences in war seem hardly changed. The young woman protagonist Sashi similarly has no epiphany or like. If the intent is to present the matter-of-factness of actions in a slow war like the Sri Lanka civil war, then it does that admirably. if the intent was to present “a private affair” then I would take Beppe Fenoglio.