Michael Kevane

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.

We read and discussed for my neighborhood book club. Highly recommend. Looking forward some day to being in the Gulf of Mexico, walking along a beach, drinking some coffee, walking streets of New Orleans, and having my digital voice assistant prompt me with references to Kate Chopin and the novel. It won’t “grab” the modern reader the way it must have in 1899, but it is very evocative and remains an early example of interiority 100 years after Jane Austen… Anticipating Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

I tried. I really did. and I wanted to like it. I really did. And maybe I thought I learn something; more dubious about that, but still a possibility. Failed. Total. The writing is godawful. Robinson’s intent is in the right place. The absolute right place. But intent matters for little when the reader is slogging, skimming, skipping by reading the first line of a section and jumping to the next. That is not a good sign. Eventually I could not take it. Robinson tries for the grab bag in terms of mishmash of characters, mishmash of styles, and like chatgpt a mishmash of truthiness… The initial heatwave apparently is the only memorable narrative element of the novel, since most reviewers refer to that, and at least in the next two-thirds I would agree. But I stopped. Sorry.

Tremendous short highly literary fiction. Loved it, perhaps because it is short. But so rich. I definitely could spend hours reading literary scholars about what Keegan does and how she does it. Filled with allusions, it seems, to mythology and Joyce… What could be more moody than the snow falling, on the living and the dead. Here is a relevant review by Mark Phillips.

Page turner police procedural. First one I read about the L.A. detective Harry Bosch. I’ll take Chandler, Chester Hines, or George Higgins I think. Serviceable, but I found the prose super-clunky and the characterization wooden. I can see the appeal. At the end I turned the pages so fast because I couldn’t wait to get out of the book, not because I was appreciating it.

Since I just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory (and will add Children of Time, but not Children of Ruin), I was thinking about what other sci-fi – fantasy novels I have enjoyed reading so much that I can see myself looking forward to reading again in 5 years (say)…. Here are the other 11, in no particular order:

*Bloodchild by Octavia Butler
*The Hainish novellas and stories, by Ursula Le Guin
*Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
*The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
*A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge
*The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
*Station Eleven, by Emily St. James Mandel
*Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn
*Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
*The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
*China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh

Gripping for the first 7/8, especially if you are familiar with the earlier novels of the trilogy. Tchaikovsky manages to join, in one novel, the space opera genre (new planets, new technologies, faster than light travel!), with the Ursula Le Guin careful anthropological detail about a small community, and a reader favorite, the looped story with slight variations generating the feeling in the characters and reader at the same time that “something is not right.” The corvids are a great innovation. The aliens are right here, if we take the proper time perspective and have a rich enough imagination (echos of Ted Chiang’s parrot short story?). But that last 1/8 was a hot mess in my opinion… maybe really careful reading would uncover what Tchaikovsky was doing, but I just found it poorly edited.

A well-written and interesting historical young adult novel about two survivors of slavery in early 1900s West Africa and Brazil.

Here is the link:

The first half was excellent. Just the kind of involved, detailed, ordinary life scifi, about a sub-light-speed travel to colonize a world far away. But the second half spiraled out, for me… and so I skimmed it. And a very clunky ending.