Some good stuff so far in March--and poetry month is coming! Woot, woot!!
Fiction
I thought the premise of Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart had promise: a group of friends--plus "The Actor" (never named) who is working on a project with the host--gather at a country place in the early days of the pandemic, planning to ride out the pandemic there (remember: we didn't think it would still be going two years later). Of course, there are numerous complications: One old friend, dying of lung cancer, harbors a long-burning love for another. He is also searching for the manuscript for a novel he wrote (and was advised not to try to publish) by the host, not coincidentally a writer as well. Two of the women, one married to the host, have designs on The Actor. Meanwhile, the host's daughter, who appears to be on the spectrum, takes a liking to another of the women, making her mother jealous. At first it's an interesting and sometimes funny look at relationships and what might happen if stuck together in the country. But then the book devolves into the surreal--the author recounts too many of the characters' dreams--sleeping and fever--and I lost interest. Not recommended.
The "sticker" on the front of The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier says it was a NYT "best thriller of the year." I wouldn't call it a thriller exactly--closer to science fiction in my book. But regardless of how you classify it, it's worth reading. The premise reminded me a bit of the TV show Manifest: a plane goes through a terrible storm and something weird happens. The book does get off to a somewhat slow start, as we are introduced to a large number of characters without knowing exactly what is happening. When the "something weird" is revealed, the book really picks up, as we learn how the government responded, the various hypotheses developed to explain what happened, and how the people affected cope. Don't want to ruin the read by saying too much more, but I really enjoyed The Anomaly (even though I didn't understand every single thing!).
The Idiot by Elif Batuman is essentially a fictional diary of a young Turkish American woman's freshman year at Harvard, followed by a summer teaching English in Hungary (prompted by a crush on a senior, Ivan, who happens to be from Hungary). Some of Selin's experiences (which seem likely to be Batuman's experiences, since much about the author and character is similar) are amusing, but I may be too old to truly enjoy this book. Batuman has written a sequel but I won't be picking it up.
The Wrong End of the Telescope, by Rabih Alameddine, is a complex book that occasionally feels like it's about too many things. The narrator is Mina, a transgender doctor who is originally from Lebanon but has lived in the United States since college. She travels to Lesbos, Greece, when her friend, a nurse named Emma, asks her to come and help provide medical services to Syrian refugees arriving on boats. When she gets there, there are at first no new arrivals because of the weather. Eventually, however, Mina becomes involved with a critically ill Syrian mother, who is afraid her family will be sent back if the dire situation with her health is revealed. Sumaiya's story is probably the most engaging, but Mina also narrates the stories of other migrants--and also describes disturbing behavior on the part of journalists and volunteers who ostensibly come to help the refugees but have less pure/more selfish motives. That may not sound like too much--but Mina also tells two other stories. The first is her own--her estrangement from her family (except for one brother who joins her in Lesbos) and her life in Chicago with her wife Francine. The second is the story of the writer to whom she is addressing the entire book (who resembles Alameddine himself), who freaked out in his own attempt to help refugees, holing up in a hotel room; his attempts to write about the experience have failed, so he has urged Mina to tell the story. Occasionally I felt like Alameddine was doing too much, but I'm still glad I read the book.
I'm not one of the people who greets every Jonathan Franzen novel with cries of "This is the great American novel." So I almost feel weird saying I loved Crossroads. Crossroads (which I learned from an author interview at the end of the audiobook is the first volume in a trilogy) is set in the early 1970s, and the Vietnam War, the folk music scene, the penetration of illicit drugs to the suburbs, and a church youth group more like an encounter group are all important elements of the story. The book has multiple narrators, all members of the Hildebrandt family. Russ, the father, is a frustrated assistant pastor at a suburban Chicago church, eager to cheat on his wife with a recently widowed parishioner. Russ believes himself to be an enlightened helper of the less fortunate but in reality he's a selfish sad sack. Marion, the mother, is keeping a lot of secrets, most notably that in her twenties she was hospitalized for a mental illness, which she now fears she has passed along to her son Perry. Their three older children--Clem, Becky, and Perry, all grappling with who they are and how they want to live--are the other narrators. (Hopefully, the youngest child will get his due in the next volume.) The book is an extended character study within the context of the times, the family, and each member's evolving religious or ethical beliefs. There's humor but there's also despair--it adds up to a potent mix. Highly recommended.
Short Stories
The story of Anthony Veasna So, author of Afterparties: Stories, is a sad one--he died in 2020 from an accidental drug overdose before his first book was published. As a young gay Cambodian American, the child of refugees who fled the Khmer Rouge genocide, So brought an unusual voice to the table. And his stories clearly impressed the critics, as his book was on 12 "best of 2021" lists. Although moments in some of the stories grabbed me, generally the stories did not resonate with me--I may be too old, too cis, too white. I'm willing to grant that the stories are well-done--they just weren't for me.
Mysteries/Thrillers
Madness of Sunshine, by Nalini Singh, was sitting on my nightstand for a few years; I started it a couple of times but couldn't really get into it. This month, I finally finished it. It's a mystery set in New Zealand, and the descriptions of the landscape are lovely, but that's about the only thing I liked. Every character is incredibly damaged, and the story drags--a young woman goes missing and everyone in town looks for her and looks for her and searches some more. Then suddenly the perpetrator of an older crime is discovered. And the person who is responsible for the woman's disappearance is apprehended, though how the police officer in the town and his sidekick (a pianist recently returned to her home town because, you know, pianists are the best detectives) settled on the guilty party wasn't clear to me. And some of the writing, in an attempt to be poetic, is just bad: "Hanging up, Will began the nearly four-hour drive toward the hopeless scent of a beautiful young woman's death." What?
In Nothing to Lose, by J.A. Jance, J.P. Beaumont, the retired Seattle cop who anchors one of Jance's four series, heads to Alaska looking for his former (and dead) partner's long-missing son. He solves cold and hot cases in his visit the Last Frontier. It's fairly standard fare, but Beaumont is one of the better characters in series mysteries and Jance's work on her other series seems to keep this one fresh.
I'm not really sure where The Dilemma by B.A. Paris fits, but I guess it's supposed to be a psychological thriller. Adam and Livia are a married couple planning her 40th birthday party, over which she has been obsessing her entire adult life (ostensibly because she didn't get the big wedding she wanted--seriously??). They each have a secret about their daughter that they don't want to tell the other until after the party. If it sounds like a stupid premise, then you understand the book. Not recommended.
A Good Day for Chardonnay was my second Sunshine Vicram book by Darynda Jones--and it will be my last. Sunshine seems like an imitation Stephanie Plum in a different setting (small-town New Mexico) with more explicit sex. Also, Sunshine's love interest is part of a family of moonshiners turned whiskey entrepreneurs that could be right out of a Deborah Knott novel by Margaret Maron (and would fit better in North Carolina). Jones is trying too hard to be funny and just isn't.
Poetry
It's almost poetry month, when I go a little crazy posting poems on FB. So when I heard Kate Bowler's interview with poet Kate Baer and thought her work sounded interesting, I immediately ordered both of her books. I liked her first book, What Kind of Woman, a collection of poems about being a woman, a wife, a mother, a friend, a human. And I loved I Hope This Finds You Well: Poems. Baer started her writing life posting feminist short stories and essays on a blog. One day as she was reading an unfriendly response to one of her posts, she saw new potential in the response--she printed it and began blacking out words, ultimately creating an erasure poem. After that, she says, she saw poetry potential everywhere. The result is this book, which includes poems she has created from nasty responses on social media, fan letters, promotional emails, congressional testimony--in other words, a wide array of sources. She publishes each poem next to its source material. Some of the poems flip the original material's message, while others intensify the original message by distilling it to fewer words. Some of Baer's poems are very funny. Others pack an emotional punch. You really need to see them to appreciate them. If we're friends on FB, you'll get some samples there during April.
Favorite Passages
. . . it would take only one of his sentences being more intelligent than he is for this miracle to make a writer of him.
The direct route hates a pothole, and the obscure professes hatred of the inexplicable.
. . . freedom of thought on the internet is all the more complete now that it's clear that people have stopped thinking.
Herve Le Tellier, in The Anomaly
It's like there are these words, they're out in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power--they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them.
Jonathan Franzen, in Crossroads
. . . There are many poems
about the seasons, less about the time it takes
to bury another child. It's true--
Kate Baer, "Social Studies," in What Kind of Woman
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