I got involved in a one-off project in September and October that kept me from updating this here blog. I enjoy keeping the blog going, and so I’m pleased to resume at least the monthly book reviews (with the monthly podcast reviews going up on my Shortman Studios blog later this week). I also have some election thoughts to share by the end of the week.
I read seven books over the last two months, and they are presented here in mostly no order, except the book I want to talk about most is last. Here goes.
1. Larry McMurty, Lonesome Dove
I’m not usually a Western reader, and I was 5 or 6 when the acclaimed miniseries aired on TV. I may have heard this over the years, but I only read it after Christian Wallace mentioned it on Boomtown, a podcast I talked about here. Something in the way he evoked the geography of West Texas, which he said was reflected in Lonesome Dove, made me want to try the book.
Without a true western background – I probably read some stuff as a kid, including O. Henry stories – I didn’t have much in the field to compare Lonesome Dove to, so instead it really reminded me of Lord of the Rings. An epic journey with a motley, mostly male crew, moving through hardships, with bit and then key characters suffering tragedy, and a sweeping landscape behind it all. The biggest contrast is that the ambiguity here is sharper, with no character really better off than they were when the journey started, or at least without suffering meaningful damage; my memory of Lord of the Rings is a slightly more pat finish, at least for Pippin and Merry.
The story was hard to put down – I read it over vacation and kept postponing when I turned out the lights to read another chapter. McMurty wrote the characters well, and their personality comes out on the page quickly. They also react to events in realistic ways throughout, even if it can be surprising or frustrating at times. I liked it more than the miniseries – Amy and I watched it afterwards – and the length of the book gave it space to stretch out. At the same time, when I learned that there were three more books in the series and other TV productions, I had no interest in reading more. One book was enough with these characters, in this world.
The one note I have beyond that is the treatment of women and minority characters. I’m willing to extend some consideration to, say, Moby Dick for being well behind modern perspectives. Lonesome Dove was written in the 80s, and it’s ok about some things – the women are fairly round characters, even if they are confined to very few roles in the frontier society, which I can buy. I should acknowledge my own latent bias, perhaps; I thought Pea Eye was Black along with Deets, and I probably just mis-read the beginning and then lumped him in with Deets. In any case, the Mexican and Black characters were a bit of the ‘magic minority’ type or else cranks. Not a terrible job, but noticeable. I found the Native American characters to be the flattest, though a) one was the villain of the book, and b) perhaps that was coming from the perspective of the main characters, former Texas Rangers who fought the Native Americans.
2. Samantha Schwieblin, Distancia de Rescate
Samantha Schwieblin has gotten some coverage in English-language press. Amy ordered this book – called Fever Dream in English – and I gave it a try. It’s a weird book but worth reading.
This is a horror story. Amanda, a mother from the city, is on her deathbed in a small Argentinean town, talking to David, the son of a woman she met in that town. That effect – the story is told in a conversation between the two, with Amanda trying to find the link back to where her problems started and to find out what happened to her daughter – is very disorienting, and propulsive.
It’s one of those books where I read in Spanish and feel like I missed something as far as the nuts and bolts of what happened, but not because of the language, but rather the way the book was written. I think this is one of those inscrutable books that doesn’t get wound up in the full explanation. It was good, nevertheless.
3. Nina Simone, I Put A Spell On You (Memoir)
I’ve been thinking about Nina Simone a lot for the past few years, and read two biographies about her along with watching the Netflix documentary. I overlooked her memoir, purposefully, because I guess I had heard that it wasn’t accurate. Which is a strange reason to skip a memoir – the biographies and documentary already provide enough context, so reading the memoir isn’t about the accuracy, it’s about the feelings from the author. That’s how I overcame that initial hesitation.
The book is a weird one all the same. It is accurate, I believe, in conveying Nina’s mindset – her frustrations, her excitement, the slights she suffered, and so on. But there’s a disjointedness and a distance to the writing. She has a co-writer, Stephen Cleary, and at times perhaps that layers on the disconnect. The book also races towards its finish, more or less overlooking the 80s, which wasn’t her best decade but was the most recent as of the writing.
It’s still a firsthand story of the civil rights period, of her artistic career, of growing up in the segregated south, and it’s still Nina Simone. It’s worth the read. And I think anyone who has followed Nina Simone’s work and story before will understand that disjointed, weird feeling. It’s a part of her story, too.
4. Dasa Drndic, Trieste
Trieste is an Italian city close to the border with Slovenia, and a stone’s throw from Croatia. I’ve never been, but the city has been in my mind for a long time. It’s one of those European cities that has traded hands and passed between empires and countries for centuries, with many overlapping identities and stories contained therein, like a Thessaloniki or an Istanbul or a Dubrovnik. Jessa Crispin wrote about it in the Dead Ladies’ Project, for example. We thought about squeezing in a trip there when we visited Venice in 2013, but it wasn’t practical. I spent a few years writing an (unpublished) novel set in Rijeka, some 75 kilometers away.
Dasa Drndic has also been on my mind for some time, though a shorter period. She is a Croatian novelist and spent much of her life in Rijeka, dying in 2017. Trieste is one of her three books which have been translated to English, and it’s a thumper. The story is about Haya Tedeschi, an old women in Gorizia, on the Italian side of the border with Slovenia. She is Jewish – the last name means ‘German’ in Italian – and she was born in between the world wars. Her father assimilated to the point where he was a fascist, and somehow from moving around – to Naples, perhaps further from the Nazis, and then to occupied Albania – the family escaped persecution. Except that when they moved back to Italy before the end of the war, she fell in love with a Nazi, had a child with him, and that child was abducted before the war ended.
It’s a fascinating book, weaving in testimonials from Holocaust victims and from Nazi trials. Drndic lists the names of 9000 or so Jews who were deported from Italy during the war. The spotlight on Trieste, not to my mind one of the principal settings of the war or the Holocaust, She weaves in Borges and Eliot quotes into the book. And this delivers heft – it’s true that the 50 pages of names aren’t meant to be read straight through, perhaps, but it adds to the punch of the book. Like when reading Angelika Schrobsdorff’s book, I’m reminded of the ease with which we adapt to the reality around us, or even more the ease with which we deny that reality, find a way to think ourselves different.
The way she ties the plot back together towards the end for some reason doesn’t move me as much, but that doesn’t reduce the impact. Reading history and historically oriented fiction is a great way to regain context for our times, and this is a good one.
5. Jay Fingers, Orange Mound
One of the last of my Memphis-inspired book purchases for now. This is a novel about Ant, an aspiring chef who is trying to leave the drug trade behind, and all the struggles that ensue. It’s a lighter read, comic though with dark twists (including the ending), and enjoyable. The characters are well drawn, and it’s a very digestible book. Another angle on Memphis. I don’t have a lot to say about the book, but was glad to have read it.
6. Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House (Memoir)
I’m not sure if any book is really hyped these days, but I have been hearing about or coming across Sarah Broom’s memoir for a while. Or maybe Amazon knew to recommend it to me after I read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing the Bones. Or both. Anyway, it’s an acclaimed book and it’s set in New Orleans and so I read it.
Broom is a precise writer, and her family story – starting from her grandmother and moving through generations in New Orleans, including a generation and a half or so worth of siblings before she is born – is epic. Not because they go on to change the world, or even because the family is full of strife or drama, but because any family story on a long enough timeline and told well enough becomes epic.
The yellow house is the shotgun house she grew up in, that her parents owned (her father dying when she was six months old) in New Orleans East, an almost cordoned off part of New Orleans, on the other side of the canals from the main parts of the city. I loved her calling her block the short side of Wilson Avenue, and her adding of the history of New Orleans East as a promising development gone neglected to her own story.
As with just about any modern New Orleans story, there is a Katrina section; the book is broken into ‘Movements’, and this one is titled Water. It’s the turning point in the book, moving from her family’s past and her childhood through young adulthood to an extended continuous present tense. The family members still in New Orleans – she has 11 siblings, and six of them and her mother and ailing grandmother are in the city – flee to various corners of the south and west of the United States while she tries to connect with everyone from New York, where she lives. And that exodus proves to be permanent for all but her mother and two of her brothers, and beyond permanent for her grandmother, who dies a month after Katrina hits.
And yet, it pushes her to try to live in New Orleans again. Well, first it sends her to Burundi, a chapter I found really interesting, both because there are echoes of the life abroad I’ve led and of what I saw in Rwanda on a two-week visit, and because it was such a different experience for her in countless ways. Then it sends her to New Orleans for a first try, where she works as Mayor Ray Nagin’s speechwriter, though that doesn’t last long.
She tries again a few years later, renting out an apartment in the French Quarter, rediscovering New Orleans from the inside out, posting up in the heart of the glamorized, touristified New Orleans, the only part most people know. She talked about the frustration she faced when locals asked her where she was from, said she didn’t sound like she was from New Orleans. She talked about trying to find archival footage of her father marching in parades, the father she never knew, and how her mother corrected her when she thought she had spotted him.
There are sad moments throughout the memoir, and it’s a melancholy story overall. There is also a lot of beautiful notes on her relationships with her family, especially her older brothers Carl and Michael. I don’t have such a large family, but I can imagine that when you’re the youngest of 12, your relationships with the other 11 develop in irregular fashion, closer to some than others. I don’t know what makes me underline that, but it seems to me to exemplify the success of Broom’s writing, a success that builds momentum over the course of the book. Worth the hype, in the end.
7. Walter Johnson, Broken Heart of America (History)
There’s a meme that went around Twitter earlier this year, about what radicalized you. Like most things, some of the comments were serious, some were surprising but cutting, and a lot were jokes.
The phrase, the idea came back to me when reading Broken Heart of America. I’ve read a decent amount of history this year; Rising Tide, Common Ground, Beale Street Dynasty; and politically infused non-fiction or fiction, like Bluest Eye or Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and even the memoirs I mentioned above. And of course there’s been a ton of writing ranging from Adam Serwer’s work to what Anna Lind-Guzik has done, and podcasts from Fiasco to Latino USA to Nice White Parents that has exposed more and more of our historical challenges to me, that has made it clear how constant those challenges have been.
Broken Heart of America takes a specific lens – St. Louis’ history – to tie together Native American removal, Black oppression, white supremacy, activism, and the struggle that emerges from that. It shows how the 1848 revolutions led to a burgeoning socialist community in St. Louis (via Germans, which is also how I imagine Milwaukee came to elect three different socialist mayors, at least in part). It shows how Abraham Lincoln was afraid to free Blacks prematurely in the Civil War. And it pulls us through to Ferguson and the police brutality and subsequent protest movement.
I found it very well written, a fluid narrative that was not impinged but aided by how well footnoted and documented it was. You could argue that Johnson writes a touch polemically, but I think he backs it up time and again. Specifically, he makes the argument that capitalism underpins much of this brutality and violence, that the logic of property ownership above all perpetuates our nation’s problems. That was the argument that was most challenging and eye-opening to me; I’ve long felt capitalism to be one of the answers to the ‘best system after you’ve tried everything else’ riddles, and I suppose I still do, but Johnson demonstrates again and again how its driving logic often reinforces or even causes some of our fundamental societal ills.
To return to my earlier list, I’ve read a lot of great history books as well. I thought Rising Tide was fantastic, and Common Ground right behind it. Broken Heart of America is up on that tier as well, and very much worth reading.
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