I read recently that long COVID may take 10 points off your IQ, which made me think maybe I've had COVID without knowing it because my brain has just not been able to figure out several books I've read lately. This month started with one of those.
Fiction
The Book of Form and Emptiness is a cool title--but I didn't know what it meant when I started the book . . . or when I finished it. I think I understood Ruth Ozeki's story at a surface level--a boy named Benny Oh is struggling in the wake of his father Kenji's death. His mother Annabelle, who clips news stories for a living, is also struggling. Annabelle finds solace in stuff--their home has become jam packed with things she cannot part with. She becomes interested in a Marie Kondo-style book about tidying up written by a Buddhist monk and begins writing long emails about her situation to the monk (but she doesn't tidy up). Benny meanwhile finds refuge at the library, where he is less likely to hear the voices of inanimate objects, which plague him everywhere else. Several homeless people who hang out at the library befriend him, which leads to some "adventures" that pull him away from his mother and end up sending him back to the psychiatric hospital, where his doctor thinks his friends are imaginary. It takes Annabelle's intervention to clarify that the friends are real. The level at which I don't understand the book is that the narrator is The Book, a seemingly all-knowing entity. Why? What's Ozeki trying to say with this device? What are we supposed to understand that we wouldn't understand if it was simply a third-person omniscient narrator? It's too deep for me.
A few years ago, my literary scholar son and I traded lists of books we had enjoyed (can't remember if the lists were all-time favorites or just favorites of the recent past). Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk was on his list. I finally read it and I now have serious concerns about my son. Snuff covers a few hours among the crowd of men who are waiting to help an aging porn star set a record for screwing 600 men in one "sitting." The focus is on three of the men--a boy who thinks the porn star is his mother, one of her former costars, and an aging gay TV star--and the young woman talent-wrangler. The expectation is that the effort will end up killing the porn star, turning the film into a snuff movie. It was gross in so many ways although the names of the star's old movies were funny.
My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is an interesting collection of five short stories and a novella. Two of the stories are written in the imperative--"Confide that there's a burning cake birthday on the horizon. . . . Scroll to see how quickly the Amazon burns"--definitely an unusual style but for some reason, I found my mind wandering during these stories. Such was not the case with the story "Control Negro," in which an African American college professor, who is sometimes mistaken for the janitor, undertakes a lifelong research project in which he compares average American Caucasian males (ACMs) with his own son. He is able to observe his son from afar because the boy was the product of an affair with a married woman, and his parentage is not publicly acknowledged. The story's ending is surprising--though perhaps it shouldn't be. The title novella, set in the near future when the climate crisis has intensified, is also memorable. The protagonist, Da'Naisha Love, is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. When white supremacists attack black neighborhoods in Charlottesville, Da'Naisha, her asthmatic grandmother, her white boyfriend, her childhood friend with whom she also occasionally sleeps, and a few other neighbors escape to Monticello, where they hunker down for three weeks, hoping somehow to survive. This collection is definitely worth picking up.
In Olga Dies Dreaming, Xochitl Gonzalez writes about recovering from being abandoned by one's mother at age 12 so the mother can become a full-time revolutionary seeking Puerto Rican independence; about not being able to figure out what success means to someone who thought graduating from an Ivy League college was success only to realize it's only the beginning of life; about being a public figure who is closeted and afraid of being himself; about the exploiters of Latinx people, whether in Brooklyn or Puerto Rico. And she weaves all of these threads--and more, really--into a compelling novel that is both serious and funny. The protagonists are Olga, a high-end wedding planner who doesn't seem to believe in marriage, and her brother Prieto, a gay Congressman so deeply in the closet he doesn't realize how many people know he is gay (and don't care). Both are trying to escape from the shadow of their mother, who abandoned them yet still tries to manipulate them from afar. Lots happens--and it's all entertaining and thought-provoking..
Mysteries
I think you are either an Agatha Christie person or you aren't . . . and I'm not. Thus, my latest effort to grow my appreciation for Christie by reading Death on the Nile was unsuccessful.
Fantasy/Science Fiction
My son mentioned that Trouble the Saints, by Alaya Dawn Johnson, was the winner of a recent award in the fantasy category, so I decided to read it. It's an interesting story about African American (and mixed race) people involved with the mob in the run-up to World War II. A number of these people have "the hands"--special powers that reside in their hands. Phyllis is a mob assassin whose hands are gifted with knives; she wants to leave this work behind her, but it proves to be difficult. Dev also has the hands; his tell him when trouble is coming, a useful skill for someone who works for the mob--and is a police officer. Dev and Phyllis were lovers who have found each other after a decade, in which Dev was partnered with Tamara, who reads the future in her cards. At times, I felt like Johnson was working to hard to be mystical and deal with racial realities simultaneously; in fact, I would have preferred the book if it were simply a book about race and crime in the 1930s/1940s--but I did find the book interesting.
Favorite Passages:
He dangled subjects like fishhooks and baited them with implied interrogatives.
--Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints
. . . story is more than just a discarded by-product of your bare experience. Story is its own bare experience. Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides. Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.
--Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness
