“You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country,” a secondary African American character declares at an evening salon Ifemelu attends. Adi“You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country,” a secondary African American character declares at an evening salon Ifemelu attends. Adichie puts the lie to that statement: her slight outsider status allows her to cut through stereotypes and pretenses and get right to the heart of the issue. This novel may be seven years old (and hearkens back to the optimism of Barack Obama’s first election), but it feels utterly fresh and relevant at a time when we are newly aware of the insidiousness of racism. Again and again, I nodded in wry acknowledgment of the truth of Ifemelu’s cutting observations:
Job Vacancy in America—National Arbiter in Chief of ‘Who Is Racist’: In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here’s the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven’t lynched somebody then you can’t be called a racist.
Through Ifemelu’s years of studying, working and blogging her way around the Eastern seaboard of the United States, Adichie explores the ways in which the experience of an African abroad differs from that of African Americans. These subtleties become especially clear through her relationships with Curt (white) and Blaine (African American), which involve a performative aspect and a slight tension that were absent with Obinze, her teenage sweetheart. Obinze, too, tries life in another country, moving to the UK illegally. Although they eventually earn financial success and good reputations – with Obinze a married property developer back in Nigeria – both characters initially have to do debasing work to get by.
Americanah is so wise about identity and perceptions, with many passages that resonated for me as an expat. When Ifemelu returns to Nigeria after 13 years, she doesn’t know if she or her country has changed: “She was no longer sure what was new in Lagos and what was new in herself … home was now a blurred place between here and there … there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself.”
I loved Ifemelu’s close bond with her cousin, Dike, who is more like a little brother to her, and the way the narrative keeps revisiting a New Jersey hair salon where she is getting her hair braided. These scenes reminded me of Barber Shop Chronicles, a terrific play I saw with my book club last year. The prose is precise, insightful and evocative (“she would not unwrap from herself the pashmina of the wounded,” “There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing”).
On a sentence level as well as at a macro plot level, this was engrossing and rewarding – just what I want from a doorstopper. The question of whether Ifemelu and Obinze will get back together is one that will appeal to fans of Normal People – can these sustaining teenage relationships ever last? – but Ifemelu is such a strong, independent character that it’s merely icing on the cake. I’m moving on to her Women’s Prize winner, Half of a Yellow Sun, next.
[On one of my periodic trips back to the States, I saw Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speak at a large Maryland library soon after Americanah was published. I was hugely impressed with her in person: stylish and well-spoken, she has calm confidence and a mellifluous voice. In the “question” (comment) time I remember many young African and African American women saying how much her book meant to them, capturing the complexities of what it’s like to be Black in America.
Ironically, I have hoarded Adichie’s work over the years since then but not read it. I did read We Should All Be Feminists from the library for Novellas in November one year, but had accumulated copies of her other five books as gifts or from neighbors or the free bookshop. (Is there a tsundoku-type term for author-specific stockpiling?) Luckily, my first taste of her fiction exceeded my high expectations and whetted my appetite to read the rest.]
Here’s a book I wish I had written. “Waste not, want not” goes the aphorism, and Miles’s second novel explores both themes to their fullest extent: thHere’s a book I wish I had written. “Waste not, want not” goes the aphorism, and Miles’s second novel explores both themes to their fullest extent: the concept of waste – from profligate living to garbage and excrement – and ordinary people’s conflicting desires. In three interlocking story lines, Miles looks for what is really of human value at a time when everything seems disposable and possessions both material and digital can exert a dispiriting tyranny.
The novel opens on Thanksgiving 2007, with New York City buried under an early snowstorm. The nation’s annual excuse for gluttony makes a perfect metaphorical setting for Miles’s exposé of food waste and consumerist excess. Like Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, it’s a timely, humane response to the modern condition, especially the unavoidable fact of environmental threat.
This formed part of an article on my Best Fiction Reads of 2013 for Bookkaholic.
An excerpt of my full review is available to non-subscribers at BookBrowse....more
(4.5) A new classic of war fiction in the making, this kaleidoscopic, empathetic portrait of Australian POWs working on the Burma Death Railway during(4.5) A new classic of war fiction in the making, this kaleidoscopic, empathetic portrait of Australian POWs working on the Burma Death Railway during World War II was a deserving Man Booker Prize winner. Flanagan’s challenge here is to give literary form to the horrors of war, without resorting to despair or simple us-versus-them dichotomies. He maintains a careful balance of sympathy by shifting between the perspectives of the POWs and their Japanese captors, and by setting up a tripartite structure: a before, during and after that shows how war affects the whole of life.
An absence of speech marks can at times foster detachment from the characters, but the writing is unfailingly beautiful. Japanese death poems and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” weave through as refrains, and the language is lyrical even when describing atrocities: corpses are “drying dark-red meat and fly-blown viscera.” As the poem by Issa used as an epigraph reads, “In this world / we walk on the roof of hell / gazing at flowers” – finding whatever shards of beauty and love we can, even in nightmarish circumstances.
(Flanagan’s father, a survivor of the Burma Death Railway, died on the day Flanagan finished writing this novel.)
Jane Austen meets Downton Abbey is the crude shorthand, but this novel is so much more. I hardly dare say it (Janeites are a fearsome bunch; such talkJane Austen meets Downton Abbey is the crude shorthand, but this novel is so much more. I hardly dare say it (Janeites are a fearsome bunch; such talk could get me lynched): Could this be better than the original? Pride and Prejudice, that is. Perhaps better is not the right word, but fuller: Baker’s is a fully convincing and unbiased vision of early nineteenth-century English life, featuring multiple classes and races – and it doesn’t airbrush away unpleasant bodily realities.
Longbourn is (for the most part) meticulously contemporaneous with the action of Pride and Prejudice. A house the size of Longbourn was run by a small band of servants; all Baker has done in the way of invention is to give faces and stories to those previously nameless below-stairs characters – expanded roles for Mr. and Mrs. Hill (the latter both housekeeper and cook); young maids Sarah and Polly; and a new footman with murky origins, James Smith.
Our protagonist, housemaid Sarah, is a feisty heroine from the lineage of both Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre; indeed, the first line is particularly reminiscent of Jane Eyre: “There could be no wearing of clothes without their laundering.” Like Miss Eyre, Sarah is an eager orphan who turns to books for temporary escape from her troubles; like Lizzie, she faces a similar choice between two very different suitors; and again like Jane, she will set off on a fraught, solitary adventure to secure true love.
Baker builds sympathy for her characters by shifting between third person limited perspectives; usually that point-of-view will be one of the servants’, as in Sarah’s view of Jane Bennet: “She was as sweet, soothing and undemanding as a baked milk-pudding.” But occasionally readers are privy to the thoughts of one of the Bennets themselves; here is Mary, for example: “the distraction of those silly sisters…If they could but think of higher things, of music, religion, good works, instead of officers.”
For the most part, though, we are limited to knowing whatever the servants can overhear or imply. The Bennets’ utter obliviousness to the reality of life for the lower classes is slyly juxtaposed with a growing awareness of the brutality of slavery. Even on the second page Baker shows concern for those “people of color” omitted from Austen’s world: “the sun would be shining on other places still, on the Barbadoes and Antigua and Jamaica where the dark men worked half-naked, and on the Americas where the Indians wore almost no clothes at all.” Footman James is a committed abolitionist, with a copy of Wilberforce by his bedside, and Baker gives a significant role to a new black character, Ptolemy, the Bingleys’ footman (who turns Sarah’s head).
Baker expertly mimics Austen’s trademark use of free indirect speech and witticisms. A prime example is when Sarah is sent out in the pouring rain to fetch decorations for the Bennet girls’ dancing shoes (whereas the original text has the anonymous and passive “the very shoe-roses for Netherfield were got by proxy”). Sarah never has to open her mouth to issue this deliciously snide response: “The ladies could like the shoe-roses or they could lump them. Indeed, she would rather like it if they lumped them. She rather looked forward to their having to lump them.”
The epigraphs heading each chapter come directly from Pride and Prejudice, but I only found one line of word-for-word lifted dialogue in the main text – eagle-eyed Austenites, correct me if I am wrong, and let me know if you spot the same line I picked up on! [If you search the P&P e-book (free here on Project Gutenberg), you’ll be interested to learn that there are in fact allusions to a Longbourn footman and a serving Sarah, in chapters 7 and 55, respectively.]
Where Longbourn diverges most noticeably from Pride and Prejudice is in its unflinching portrayal of the physical reality of early nineteenth-century life: chilblains, scars, lice, reeking chamber pots, animal slaughter, napkins soaked with menstrual blood, even underarm hair (you mean the Bennet girls had hairy pits?! – say it ain’t so!). Even behind the fine appearances of the Netherfield ball guests, all Sarah can see is “the same old freckles and wrinkles and bad breath and smallpox scars and limping gout...Her envy puffed up into smoke and was gone on the wind.”
Nonetheless, I don’t think there’s anything here that will upset Austen lovers, while there is plenty that should draw in new fans. I think Longbourn might particularly appeal to those male readers who have previously professed that Austen isn’t their cup of tea: who are too jaded and knowing, or just too darn cool, for this chick stuff. They will find that there is just the right level of earthiness here to root the romantic plot in reality. Kudos to Jo Baker, and bon appétit to all you lucky readers who soon get to encounter this terrific novel for the first time.
(See my recent interview with Alysia at BookTrib.) When Alysia Abbott’s mother died in a car accident, her father Steve took his three-year-old daught(See my recent interview with Alysia at BookTrib.) When Alysia Abbott’s mother died in a car accident, her father Steve took his three-year-old daughter off to San Francisco, where he could be out and proud as a poet and gay activist. In her memoir, Fairyland (recently named a Stonewall Honor Book in Non-Fiction for 2014), Alysia reflects on her unorthodox upbringing, which proved to be both a curse and a lucky escape. An aunt had offered to take Alysia in; if Steve had accepted, “I would have grown up in the suburbs with a mother and father, two brothers, and a dog named Pokey.” Instead, she grew up surrounded by drag queens and homosexuals. “It’s a bad kind of life you’re giving Alysia, growing up around queers,” one of Steve’s boyfriends remarked to him.
Although she had a constant sense of fitting in neither in the gay nor the straight world, Alysia strangely relished being “the only child among adults and the only girl among men.” In this sensitive memoir, small moments often reveal bigger truths. For example, the true weight of being without a mother is symbolized by wanting to know why she didn’t pee standing up like her father – so he taught her how. Steve Abbott’s own writings (poems, journals, comic strips, and especially his wonderful letters) are a treasure trove for the reader, as are the black-and-white photographs of Alysia and her father.
“If he was sometimes a failure as a parent, he was always a noble failure,” Alysia writes. “There were no models. For better and for worse, my father was making up the rules as he went along.” Especially during her teen years, they were both figuring out who they were and testing their freedoms. Alysia developed a strong love for punk/indie music and for 70s/80s sitcoms; she was intrigued by the portrayal of ‘normal’ family life. She attended a bilingual private school and spent a summer and then a year abroad in Paris during her time at NYU. But as Steve grew ill and Alysia had to become his primary caregiver, their roles were reversed.
There was something very special about this father-daughter relationship. With her mother gone, they clung to each other even more. “I never liked my self as much as the self I saw reflected in my father’s eyes.” On the one hand was their fiercely private partnership; on the other hand were the wider outworkings of San Francisco’s gay community. It’s all here as background: the Anita Bryant affair, Harvey Milk’s assassination, and the terrifying rise of the AIDS epidemic, which would kill Steve Abbott, too, in 1992. I got the sense that he was almost childlike in his sensitivity – he had an openness to emotion and experience that sometimes left him wounded. “It was as if AIDS had reduced Dad to his essential core, which was gentle and good,” Alysia muses.
She gives a tender portrayal of this Fairyland’s loss of innocence: “I believed that this decade might carry us away on the back of a winged horse. But by decade’s end, the fabulous creatures had mostly perished.” This memoir may be painful reading at times, but that makes it no less essential. As Alysia concludes, “This queer history is our queer history,” and we all need to be informed.
With thanks to Emily Cary-Elwes at W.W. Norton & Company. I was provided with a free copy of the book in exchange for my honest review....more
If I’d had my way, the 2013 Man Booker Prize would have gone to this novel-writing documentary filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priestess from British ColumIf I’d had my way, the 2013 Man Booker Prize would have gone to this novel-writing documentary filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priestess from British Columbia, Canada (by way of Japan). A Tale for the Time Being is a rich reflection on what it means to be human in an era of short attention spans, the dearth of meaning, and imminent environmental threat.
The time being: the present moment is what we’re stuck with now and must embrace. The time being: in the Buddhist viewpoint, each human is entrapped by time, which means that we are all in this together; this is an Everyman tale.
On present-day Vancouver Island, “Ruth,” a Japanese-American novelist who is attempting to write a memoir of her mother’s slow demise from Alzheimer’s but has a bad case of writer’s block, stumbles across a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the beach. Inside she finds a cache of old letters and a teenage girl’s diary, disguised as a copy of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.
The diary belonged to sixteen-year-old Nao (pronounced “now” – is it all starting to fit together?) Yasutani, who cheerfully and informally confides in her imagined reader about her life. The past few years in Tokyo have not been easy for her – she’s been the victim of extreme bullying at the hands of her classmates, and suicide seems to run in the family – but she has a guardian angel in the form of her great-grandmother, Buddhist nun Jiko, who is approaching death at age 104 but still represents the voice of wisdom and a timeless perspective.
In a modified epistolary format that includes diaries, letters, e-mails, and an abstract of a disappearing journal article, Ozeki builds her gentle academic mystery: where did the lunchbox come from? How did it wash up in Canada? Are Nao and the other diary subjects still alive and well, or did they die in the 2011 Japanese tsunami? Alternating chapters contrast Nao’s diary entries with Ruth’s reactions and commentary a decade later. Yet, in a delicious outbreak of magic realism, it seems Ruth may actually have some power to change Nao’s fate.
This is a superbly intelligent novel, with concerns ranging from ocean currents and pollution to the wacky quantum physics theory of multiple worlds. Ultimately, it is about being happy in the here and now – not looking to the past or the future for contentment or hope; and not indulging in regret or wishes. As the character Ruth states in the epilogue: “I’d much rather know, but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.”...more
A sophisticated epistolary exchange between two fictional authors, based on the not-quite-love affair between Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell. WitA sophisticated epistolary exchange between two fictional authors, based on the not-quite-love affair between Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell. With or without knowledge of its historical inspiration, though, this is an erudite and affecting novel.
Novelist Frances Reardon and poet Bernard Eliot meet at a writers’ colony in the summer of 1957. Frances senses traces of John Donne in Bernard’s spiritual poetry, and Bernard loves Frances’s biting satire about a group of nuns. They begin a correspondence, discussing their writing but also, increasingly, their personal lives. It is evident from the start that Bernard adores Frances, but Frances is slower to succumb to romantic feelings. (“Whirlwinds can’t love slugs” is how she self-deprecatingly phrases her dilemma.) Over the course of a decade and more, they suffer mental illness, alcoholism, romantic betrayal, and loss of faith, but theirs remains the one great love affair of their lives.
Intelligent and classy, but also a good old-fashioned love story.
Sparkling with wit and richly philosophical, this is a debut novel not to be missed.
Rounded up from 4.5 - I think this could well be a favorite.
[I reread this to compare it with the account self-published by Afarin Majidi, the stalker he refers to as “Nasreen” here. I was slightly less impress[I reread this to compare it with the account self-published by Afarin Majidi, the stalker he refers to as “Nasreen” here. I was slightly less impressed this time around: the technology talk feels outdated, the sections on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and a trip to Israel are less than relevant, and the tone is at times too defensive and self-referential. But the heart of the book – the bewilderment at being a victim of character assassination and the lingering paranoia based on years of harassing e-mails – struck me as being as strong as ever, even though I don’t have the personal parallel to the situation that made it so resonant for me when I revisited the book later in 2013. Also, compared to Majidi, he has a better psychological grasp of himself, and of his stalker. So 4 stars this time averages out to 4.5.]
A riveting, digressive and at times rather terrifying account of a years-long online harassment campaign that left the author shaken and questioning his own character. A memoir so intimately honest, so effortlessly literary, that you will be drawn into the whole unsavory tale – caught up in the emotions classical tragedy induces: terror, pity, but ultimately relief that this nightmare isn’t happening to you.
(And still I wonder, why such virulent hatred for this book on Goodreads? It was one of my top five nonfiction titles of 2013!)
James Lasdun, a British novelist, works as a professor at the New York State Writers’ Institute in Albany. An attentive student he calls “Nasreen” set out to virtually destroy his reputation through stalking and cyber terrorism. Nasreen accused him of plagiarizing her work, showing prejudice against Arab students like herself, and even having her drugged and raped at the magazine office where she worked. On one level, these allegations were utterly ludicrous. But on another, they were often difficult to refute. He was all at once “confronted by something unassuageable and beyond all understanding: a malice that has no real cause or motive but simply is.”
While making an objective presentation of the facts of the five-year stalking attack, Lasdun also gives his story surprising depth and detours – incorporating personal and family history; discussion of the origins of anti-Semitism, via a trip to Jerusalem; and a tour through his literary antecedents, especially D.H. Lawrence, whose New Mexico ranch and shrine (see my article on Literary Grave Hunting) he visited on a train ride across America to an engagement in California.
Throughout, Lasdun ponders the difficulty of truly comprehending another’s point of view; “So much depends on where you begin the story you are trying to tell, which in turn, as far as I can see, depends on whom you happen to like most, or dislike least.” His beautifully introspective style is worth quoting at length:
now that the saga has entered its fifth year and I have given up waiting for it to stop, I find myself simply wanting to make sense of it. Why is this happening? What does it mean? I want to understand this tormentor of mine who knows the workings of my mind so intricately and uses them so cleverly to make me suffer. I want, as St Augustine said, ‘to comprehend my comprehender’. I want to know what she thinks she is doing...Why is she devoting so much time and energy to making and pressing and elaborating these accusations? What happened – between us, or to her alone – to make my unremarkable existence matter so much to her?
Lasdun has a few ideas but no firm conclusions. I have never encountered a more powerful psychological battle of wills in nonfiction, and Lasdun’s prose – meticulous, self-examining, and never maudlin – is perfectly matched to the task.
(A shorter version also appeared in an article on the Best Nonfiction Reads of 2013 for Bookkaholic.)...more
Mathis’s debut novel is the achingly sad saga of one black family making their way north and fighting to break free from poverty and prejudice.
In the Mathis’s debut novel is the achingly sad saga of one black family making their way north and fighting to break free from poverty and prejudice.
In the early years of the 1920s, Hattie Shepherd longs to escape from Georgia, where her father was lynched. When she marries August, they set off hopefully for Pennsylvania only to watch their seven-month-old twins, Philadelphia and Jubilee, die of pneumonia despite Hattie’s desperate ministrations.
This loss will haunt Hattie throughout the years to come, even though she bears nine more children (who, together with the dead twins and a granddaughter, form the twelve tribes of the title – an explicit echo of the dozen tribes of Israel in the Hebrew Bible). Violence, disappointment, love affairs, and discrimination: from the 1920s through to the 1980s, Mathis traces an American family in crisis and suggests that, clichéd as it may sound, love may have the power to heal what seem like fatal emotional wounds.
Each chapter shifts to the perspective of another of Hattie’s offspring, in either first- or third-person narration, making for an impressive variety of voices and styles. Readers gain an intimate view of each of the children, but also of Hattie herself, through the composite, peripheral glances each chapter allows. Hattie is a troublesome yet compelling character; as cold as she often seems to her children, she feels things deeply. One perceptive daughter realizes “She’d never seen her mother laugh…She’d never seen any joy in her at all. Hattie had been stern and angry all of Bell’s life, and it occurred to her that her mother must have been very unhappy most of the time.”
Mathis’s novel is also strong at the level of language and allusion; she subverts scriptural narratives even as she relies on them for structure. The pattern of devoting one chapter to each family member reminded me of Hanna Pylväinen’s excellent We Sinners, while the portentous biblical rhetoric, applied to the reality of southern and/or African-American lives, recalls not just Morrison and Walker but also William Faulkner. It’s no surprise that Oprah Winfrey chose The Twelve Tribes of Hattie for her book club relaunch. With writing this confident and characters this convincing, it will be a pleasure to await Mathis’s next work of fiction.
(This review formed part of an article on my Best Fiction Reads of 2013 for Bookkaholic.)...more
Waterstones, a leading bookstore chain in the UK, chose as its Book of the Year for 2013 a novel that was first published in 1965, sold a paltry 2,000Waterstones, a leading bookstore chain in the UK, chose as its Book of the Year for 2013 a novel that was first published in 1965, sold a paltry 2,000 copies and fell out of print within a year. That novel is Stoner, long the obscure preserve of a few dedicated American scholars but finally entering into popular knowledge. It was re-released in the US and UK in 2006, and has been championed by authors such as Ian McEwan, Bret Easton Ellis, Colum McCann and Julian Barnes, who calls it “one of those purely sad, sadly pure novels that deserves to be rediscovered.” In the last nine years its readership has grown steadily.
All the same, the odds are that you have never heard of novelist John Williams, or of Stoner. If you’ve seen a few too many Judd Apatow movies recently, you might be expecting some kind of pothead comedy, but nothing could be further from the truth. Instead Stoner is a quiet masterpiece about the humble life of a college professor named William Stoner; it is simultaneously ‘about’ very little but also encompassing the whole of a life, with all its minor triumphs, disappointments and tragedies.
Stoner has a raw truth and brilliance that make it essential reading. On nearly every page you will encounter a line that stops you short, that speaks so authentically to the human condition that you gasp to think Williams understood you, the reader in 2013, so perfectly. I won’t spoil the beauty of the final chapter for you, except to say that it surely has one of the best deathbed scenes ever to grace world literature.
What dispiriting smallness there is to this character’s life (and to Williams’s too?) – and yet it contains everything worthwhile: love, struggle, marriage, career, affair, fulfillment, illness and death. I can hardly recall the last time I read a more powerful or affecting novel, even though not much happens. Like another lost classic I’ve profiled, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Stoner is much more about atmosphere than plot – and that melancholy atmosphere will stay with you for longer than you might expect. A book for the ages....more
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