Saturday, May 25, 2019

Feast Your Eyes and The Friend

In the past couple weeks, I’ve read two interestingly structured novels about art, friendship, family, memory, and more.

 Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg is structured as an exhibit catalog written by the artist/photographer’s daughter Samantha Jane and also incorporating excerpts from her mother’s journal and interviews with people from her mother’s past. Lillian knew as a girl in Cleveland in the 1940s that she would move to New York and be a photographer, despite her parents' wish that she lead a  more traditional life. In 1951, after graduating from high school, she takes off to pursue her dream. By 1955, she has had her first show, given birth to her daughter (never telling the father that she was pregnant), and met Ken, with whom she will move to Brooklyn, free for a few years to pursue her photography without the constraints of making a living. But then Lillian becomes pregnant; she wants an abortion but Ken wants the baby, and the rift destroys their already-troubled relationship. Lillian has an abortion and a photograph of Sam and herself that she takes in the aftermath shocks viewers when it appears in an exhibition titled "The Samantha Series"; the ripples from this event permanently alter Sam and Lillian's relationship.

This brief synopsis does not do justice to the complexity of the plot; I have not even mentioned  Lillian's two significant friendships, the relationship that develops between Sam and her maternal grandparents, the court case revolving around the Samantha Series, and more. The story of these deeply realized characters--even the minor characters are three-dimensional--is moving. In addition, the descriptions of how Lillian worked and the resulting 100+ images included in a posthumous exhibition gave this non-artist a window into photography and the creative mind. 

I loved Goldberg's first novel, Bee Season, and Feast Your Eyes is similar in its originality, its complexity, its insights into art, and its spot-on portrayal of a young female character, and yet wholly different. Highly recommended.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is presented as a letter from the nameless narrator to her nameless friend, a well-known writer, her former teacher, and a recent suicide. Her friend was a womanizer who seduced and sometimes married his students. His third and final wife convinces the narrator to take in his dog, a Great Dane named Apollo. Since the narrator lives in a New York apartment, a Great Dane presents numerous challenges but also offers solace. Apollo's role in the novel provides the closest thing to a plot that the book has; most of the book is more a reflection on writing, memory, friendship, loss, and grief. I can't say I loved The Friend but it was interesting and thought-provoking, and well worth reading.

Favorite passages:

When we disagreed, Lillian's eyes stayed on my face, as if to remind me that our friendship would always have a place in the world.

Feast Your Eyes

If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told it does, it appears that writing takes some away.

The Friend, when the narrator hears another writer say about her friend, "Now he's officially a dead white male."








Thursday, May 9, 2019

Well-Read Black Girl, edited by Glory Edim

Well-Read Black Girl started as a t-shirt given to Glory Edim by her partner. Then it became an Instragam, an on-line community, a national network of face-to-face book groups, a literary festival, and now this book, subtitled Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves.

As a 68-year-old white woman, I am not exactly the book's target audience, but I totally enjoyed the essays by African American woman writers, reflecting on the books that were significant to them as young people, books in which they first felt represented or seen. The essayists include women working in a variety of genres--novels, memoir, poetry, drama; among them are recognizable names like Jesmyn Ward, Tayari Jones, Rebecca Walker, Stephanie Powell Watts, Zinzi Clemmons, Lynn Notage, and Jacquelie Woodson. The works they cite as important to them (although not always in a completely positive way) include some of the works one might expect--Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall, the poetry of Lucille Clifton and Nikki Giovanni. But there are also surprises--Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E.L. Konigsburg and Boy, by Roald Dahl to name two. One of the gifts of WRBG is the book list of every work mentioned by the essayists.

Another of its gifts is the inspirational writing about reading and writing. A few examples:

“Jamaica Kincaid taught me that the women I loved might not have been known to many people in the world but they were opera singers. They had beauty in their voices; great dramas were at the cruxes of their lives. And if I could catch their voices—the way they loved, the way they taught, the way they turned their faces away in pain, and how they stood in their own power—then their words on the page might become a song worth singing.”—Veronica Chambers

“Baldwin is a moral philosopher. His work does not merely describe and analyze oppression, but relentlessly asks the reader to examine their individual relationship to evil, to cruelty, bigotry, and white supremacy, and whether they are ready to change.” —Barbara Smith

“At the end of the day, the job of the Black woman writer is the same as the work of the well-read Black girl. We are to be curious and determined, committed to life and all of its many permutations. We are to look to the words of our sisters for knowledge and uplift, camaraderie and support. We are to seek beauty and find ourselves. We are to live and tell the story.”—Rebecca Walker

“So much depends on us remembering our past. We live in a country that likes to forget—likes to forget who was here before us, likes to forget who built the country, likes to forget who this country was stolen from.”—Jacqueline Woodson

I know that’s a lot of quoting, but perhaps one of these brief excerpts will inspire you to pick up this book—it’s well-worth your time. Meanwhile, I can’t help wondering where Glory Edim will take WRBG next.