Annie's 2022 Reading Diary - Part 3

With October and Q4 starting and my old thread getting long, it is a good time to start a new thread.

As usual, I read whatever catches my eye so you never know what you will find here :) So enter at your own risk.

PS: I also plan to cut on images - they make the threads slow to load and jumpy (once they load) so... we shall see.

Books read in 2022:

January-February List : https://www.librarything.com/topic/338036#7697569
March-September List: https://www.librarything.com/topic/340675#7793553

=== OCTOBER ===
147. Threshold by Caitlín R. Kiernan
148. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
149. Voices of the Lost by Hoda Barakat, translated from Arabic (Lebanon) by Marilyn Booth
150. Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry
151. Alabaster (second edition) by Caitlín R. Kiernan
152. Difficult Light by Tomás González, translated from Spanish (Colombia) by Andrea Rosenberg
153. Favours by Benedict Jacka -- Alex Verus (6.1)
154. Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses by Georges Simenon, translated from French by William Hobson -- Maigret (53)
155. Endangered by C. J. Box -- Joe Pickett (15)
156. Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim
157. Fleeing Xinhe Street by Zhe Gui, translated from Chinese by Ana Padilla Fornieles
158. This World Does Not Belong to Us by Natalia García Freire, translated from the Spanish (Ecuador) by Victor Meadowcroft
159. Brooklyn Heights by Miral Al-Tahawy, translated from Arabic (Egypt) by Samah Selim
160. City of Incurable Women by Maud Casey
161. Plays: 1: Boss Grady's Boys / Prayers of Sherkin / White Woman Street / The Only True History of Lizzie Finn / The Steward of Christendom by Sebastian Barry
162. Wild Swims: Stories by Dorthe Nors, translated from Danish by Misha Hoekstra
163. The Domestic Crusaders by Wajahat Ali
164. The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia
165. The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
166. These Prisoning Hills by Christopher Rowe
167. The Lying Ladies / The Bandaged Nude / Many a Monster by Robert Finnegan
168. The Pentagonal Dream Under Snow by Sebastian Barry (audio)
169. The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke by Tina Makereti

=== NOVEMBER ===

170. In a Time of Distance: and Other Poems by Alexander McCall Smith
171. Robert B. Parker's Revenge Tour by Mike Lupica -- Sunny Randall (10)
172. McSweeney's 67, edited by Claire Boyle
173. Robert B. Parker's Fallout by Mike Lupica -- Jesse Stone (21)
174. Country of Origin by Dalia Azim
175. Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead
176. Ask the Brindled: Poems by No'u Revilla
177. Lost Light by Michael Connelly -- Harry Bosch (9)
178. The Last Days of Terranova by Manuel Rivas, translated from Galician by Jacob Rogers
179. The Next Time I Die by Jason Starr
180. The Tijuana Book of the Dead by Luis Alberto Urrea
181. Desperation in Death by J. D. Robb -- In Death (55)
182. Uniform Justice by Donna Leon -- Commissario Brunetti (12)
183. Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, translated from Norwegian by Anne Born
184. The Late Monsieur Gallet by Georges Simenon, translated from French by Anthea Bell -- Maigret (3)
185. Silver Pebbles by Hansjörg Schneider, translated from German by Mike Mitchell -- Peter Hunkeler (1)
186. The Narrows by Michael Connelly -- Harry Bosch (10), Cassie Black (2), Rachel Walling (2), Terry McCaleb (3)
187. The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang (multiple translators)

=== DECEMBER ===

188. Next in Line by Jeffrey Archer -- William Warwick (5)
189. The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien by Georges Simenon, translated from French by Linda Coverdale -- Maigret (4)
190. Even the Darkest Night by Javier Cercas, translated from Spanish by Anne McLean -- Terra Alta (1)
191. Little Siberia by Antti Tuomainen, translated from Finnish by David Hackston
192. A Clue to the Exit by Edward St. Aubyn
193. The Night Shift by Natalka Burian
194. Dark Stars: New Tales of Darkest Horror, edited by John F. D. Taff
195. Pilgrims Way by Abdulrazak Gurnah
196. Kalmann by Joachim B. Schmidt, translated from German by Jamie Lee Searle
197. The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays by Oscar Wilde
198. Off the Grid by C. J. Box -- Joe Pickett (16)
199. The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry -- McNulty Family (2)
200. Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn
201. Robert B. Parker's Blackjack by Robert Knott -- Cole and Hitch (8)

Just reserving for whatever I come up with.

147. Threshold by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Ace, mass market paperback, 113k words, Cover
Original publication: 2001; dark fantasy, horror
Read: 2022-09-28 - 2022-10-04; 3 and a half stars

In case you wonder, the cover image is just a link by design. Trying something new :)

While making another attempt to get my books sorted at home (not very successful), I realized I have both of Caitlín R. Kiernan's collections about Dancy Flammarion. In the first one, the author's introduction talks about the first time Dancy was introduced so instead of reading the book further, I set it aside and got the novel where it all started.

It is a very hard novel to get into. Between the present tense and the constant jumping in time (you are never sure if you are in the past, in the present or in someone's dreams until you get to something that gives you a clue), the story seems almost jumbled. And yet, once you get used to the constant change and get used to the style, it actually somehow works.

Chance Matthews had just lost her grandfather - the last family member she had left - and all she wants it to be left alone to grieve. What she definitely does not want is an albino girl, who claims to be able to see monsters, and Chance's old boyfriend (and his new paramour) to show up at her door talking about secrets, monsters and evil. But of course the universe does not work on her schedule so she needs to deal with all of them. She is a paleontologist, she believes in science and sanity. All that talk about monsters sounds like someone's mental breakdown and not like something she needs to pay attention to. Although there is this incident in the past and the girl knows things which supposedly only Chance knew.

That's how this story starts. And then it gets weird. Kiernan is a trained paleontologist and she blends her science with some Lovecraftian horror to create something almost unexpected. Add a connection to some old literature and a few deaths and you really want to know where this whole story is going.

It is not a perfect novel - it is an early novel and it shows. It could have used some tightening, especially in the middle parts. The constant jumping around and revelations from the past can get a bit tiring (in a few places I wondered if I missed something or if it really feels as if she needed something in the past for the story to work so it just got thrown into the mix) and more than once I wish she had left some of the characters' self-pity out of the story - by the end it got tiresome.

And yet at the end I liked the book quite a lot. The slow storytelling works well with the time jumps so it almost blends together.

Kiernan wrote quite a lot of stories about Dancy Flammarion, the albino girl who kickstarted the whole story here. She also wrote at least one more novel about Chance. The novel may be flawed but it made me want to read more about its characters. And what more can a writer ask for?

148. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Europe Editions, Hardcover, 20k words, Cover
Original publication: 2021 (in Italian as "I margini e il dettato); 2022 (English, this translation);
A collection of essays
Read: 2022-10-04 - 2022-10-05; 3 stars

In 2020, Elena Ferrante was supposed to give the Eco Lectures at the University of Bologna. Unfortunately the world closed so she did not get a chance at presenting them (or sending someone else to read them anyway). But she wrote the 3 lectures and they make the bulk of this collection (the 4th essay was also a commission - for the "Dante and Other Classics" conference in 2021. At the end all 4 essays had been read to audience (by an actor for the first 3 and by a Dante scholar for the 4th) and here we have them printed in a book form.

In some ways the first 3 essays are a real series - the later ones refer to and continue the ideas of the earlier ones. Ferrante starts with the physical process of learning to write (including a tidbit about how paper looked like in Italy - while the different sized lines was also present when I was learning to write in Bulgaria, our notebooks had only one margin - on the left side. Apparently the Italian ones also had a margin on the right side. I don't know if it was her idea to include the images or her publisher proposed it but it was a good idea - especially because these margins become very important in the essays). Then she moves to learning how to create stories and finding her voice. She cites numerous books, she shares a personal anecdote or two. But her main thread remains the same - for years she believed that in order to be a writer, she needs to write like a man and the walk through her prose shows not only her finding her voice as a novelist but also as a woman.

The 4th essay, the one dealing with Dante is really more about Beatrice than about Dante and it a lot of ways continues the thread from the previous 3 essays. Empowering and empowered women emerge even more strongly as the main point of the whole collection.

I expected to like the essays a lot more than I did. I expected them to be scholarly (considering the expected original audience) but even then the prose was too dense, too... MFA-y. In places it felt like she is using 2 pages to expand on a sentence which was clear to start with - and these 2 pages lead us back where we started. There are some things which made me think but as a whole, it was a somewhat disappointing book.

I'm looking forward to following along with your Q4 reading. All the best!

>5 AnnieMod: well bummer, but still very interesting.

And happy new thread. I fell behind in your part 2. Hopefully I can stay caught up here.

>6 rocketjk: Welcome. Grab a beverage, find a comfortable chair... :)

>7 dchaikin: It was interesting and some things did click but... it was too pretentious (in places it felt like she was showing off - which I had seen before in literary academic essays so there is that). I like some literary essays but I seem to have a limit somewhere. I probably should get around to reading some of her fiction at some point... :)

>8 AnnieMod: I’m an overzealous fan of the Neapolitan Quartet, so I’ll certainly encourage you to try it. I haven’t read anything else by her.

Happy new thread, Annie. I just picked up In the Margins and will give it a try soonish.

>9 dchaikin: They are on my list - but then there are so many books there that who knows when I will get around to them :) Maybe tomorrow, maybe in 10 years.

>10 BLBera: I will be interested to hear what you think about it when you get around to it.

149. Voices of the Lost by Hoda Barakat, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth
Yale University Press, paperback with flaps, 45k words, Cover
Original publication: 2018 (in Arabic as بريد الليل (roughly translated as "The Night Mail"); 2021 in English (this translation)
Read: October 6, 2022 - October 8, 2022 - 4 stars.

Awards: International Prize for Arabic Fiction (2019)

A man writes a letter to his lover. But it is not a love letter - it is a letter about the man's feelings and past; about his hopes and his inner demons. And the further you read into this letter, the less you like the man - he is possessive and controlling; he seems to have expectations of his lover which would not apply to him. The letter is never finished and a lot of the passages in the letter remain unfinished. It reads more like a diary than like a letter and yet, it has a recipient and the recipient is often talked to in the text.

That's how this novel opens. But the novel is not the story of this man and the woman who he writes to. The letter never reaches her - instead we read a letter by the person who found and read that first letter. The second writer comments on the letter they found, explains how they found it and then tells a story of their own. And then 3 more people find the letter of the previous writer and write their own.

The 5 writers are all different. They write to different people - an old crush, a father, a mother, a brother. The stories they tell are different but they all are stories of longing to belong and of exile or immigration; they all talk about lost connections and the loss of their families and homes. I am not sure if it was a byproduct of the lack of gender in English but it takes awhile to figure out the gender of the writer in some of the letters. The author tries to keep the voices different but they all merge a bit, becoming an almost unified voice of the people who got lost in the world. And yet, there is some difference under it all - because the crimes and stories people confess to are different; the hardship they lived through had marked them. One of the writers was tortured and then became what he hated the most; one of them escaped a forced marriage; one of them was thrown out for what he was. The letters tell their stories the way they see them - how their own consciousness allows them to see the story. We only see the end of the story for one of those writers; the others remain open for now.

If the novel contained only these 5 letters, it would still be an interesting read - albeit an incomplete one. The author seemed to agree so these letters are just the first part of the novel. The second part revisits the same stories but from the other side - in some cases we see the recipient and their thoughts about the writer; in some cases we see someone who the writer talked about and way the writer influenced their life. Almost all of the stories get their resolutions - combine the respective sections of the two parts of the novel and you get an almost complete story. As is usually the case, the complete story is very different from the one side you see when you read the letters in the first part and it makes you wonder what the actual truth is - after all the second part is the viewpoint of another participant and not of a narrator who can see all sides.

And then there is the 5th letter, the last one in this chain of letters, the one which noone finds. Its story continuation in the second part does not resolve its story, neither we really learn a lot of new things because of how that part is structured. So how do we learn about it then? That's what the third part of the novel ties together - with a sixth letter - the only one to be written without a real recipient (or is the reader the recipient?) and by a man who is not away from home (or not too far away anyway). It ties the novel together and works almost as a summary of the whole novel - even though it does not really mention the fifth letter, the end of the story of that letter is there.

The country where everyone comes from and the countries they are in when they write their letters are never named. One of the letter-writers believes that the previous one in the chain was from Lebanon and some of the clues point in that direction as well - the author is also from Lebanon so even if invented, the country was probably based on Lebanon. But the country is never really named; neither is any of the character named. As much as the characters are individuals and come alive at the page of the novel, they are also "the lost" - the nameless and the country-less. And at the end it does not matter - their stories work without names and without locations - all you need to know that it is an Arab country which was at least partially taken over by Daesh - being invented or a real one is irrelevant for the stories.

Some of the letters contain very graphic description of torture - some of it named with its proper name, some if it not. It makes these section hard to read and while at the start the novel mostly hints at these, the later letters openly discusses them. They made sense - the writers were writing their own stories and having lived through the horrors, they had become somewhat used to thinking about them (and it is not surprising that the person who was the most graphic was also the one who had inflicted enough horrors on other people).

It is a novel about losing everything - family, country, yourself. And while its structure can be a bit scattered and the novel may be losing its coherence as a whole in places, it still works. Its original name translates as "Night mail" and I suspect that it carries connotations which I am not aware of and cannot recognize. Its English title is apt and tells you exactly what you get in the short novel. So even if I usually do not like creative translations of titles, I think that here it works better than the original one.

I don't think that the novel will work for everyone and the narrative style takes awhile to get used to (plus a lot of the letter writers are not people you would want to hang out with) but if you can get immersed into the story and you are not too bothered by the graphic language, it is a gem of a novel - an imperfect one but still worth reading.

===
This is the third winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (aka the Arabian Booker) I had read and all three are very different (the other two are the 2015 winner The Italian and the 2014 one Frankenstein in Baghdad). All 3 of them are very Arabian and yet very different.

Hoda Barakat is just the second woman to win the award (in 2019, the 12th year of the award existence - the first woman to win was Raja Alem in 2011 although it was also the only time when the award was split between two novels).

More details about the award here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/344814#7946608 (if someone wants to learn more).

150. Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry
Viking, hardcover, 75k words, Cover
Original publication: 2002;
Read: October 8, 2022 - October 9, 2022 - 4 stars.

Set in the summer of 1959 in Kelsha, Wicklow, Ireland (although there is a later reference which sends it into 1960, all other references are pointing to 1959), "Annie Dunne" is a novel about a place and a time and about a way of life that is already almost lost in the late 50s.

Annie Dunne was born in 1900 in Dublin and spent most of her life in the city - as the daughter of the police chief (in all but name). She never married - having been born with a hump (we know she was born with it because she is afraid of passing it to any children she may have), she spent most of her womanhood helping one of her sisters in the rearing of her 3 sons. Until her brother-in-law decided to remarry (only 2 years after poor Maud's death) and Annie was cast aside - alone in the world, without money or land, 57 years old and with nothing to show for her life. A cousin finally takes her in, Sarah Cullen, and Annie moves to the small farm in Kelsha, Wicklow, Ireland. The novel opens 2 years after all that happens, with the two women living together, having found their rhythm of daily tasks and shared life. But that summer of 1959 threatens to change everything again for Annie - in more than one way.

The novel is narrated by Annie - we never hear anyone else's voice and reading it a reader comes to realize that she is not the most reliable of narrators. Not because she is outright lying but her preconceptions and ideas color her narration and her way of looking at things. She knows that she is occasionally wicked and she tries not to be but it does not always work. But she also seems to fall into self-disparagement way too often.

So what changes her life? First one of the boys she helped rear up leaves his own children with her and Sarah for the summer while he and his wife try to build a new life in London. And then Billy Kerr, the handyman who occasionally helps them, seems to have decided to woo Sarah, the 61 years old Sarah who may not be beautiful or quite right in the head sometimes but who owns a 13 acres farm.

And while Annie tells us about the summer and what happens with the kids and with Billy Kerr, she often goes into her memories and tells us about her life and the people in it, about her biggest regrets and fears. Kelsha at the time is still closer to old Ireland, the one before cars and before bread you can buy in a store but even in this remote place, civilization is slowly changing things. Annie can sometimes be a snob and a busybody but she also sometimes can sound like someone you want to be your friend - she is never perfect, she never pretends not to think bad things - and that makes her sound real.

But as much as Annie Dunne is the main character of the novel, she is sharing that spotlight with the way of life she lives - a disappearing one which she is not ready to let go. It is a novel about the simple lives of people in the countryside. Towards the end of the novel, Annie has to face her own prejudices and to admit that she had been wrong and that a lot of what she had considered missing and lost is really there - changes don't always bring ruin and devastation.

It is a slow moving and lyrical novel which tells a simple story of a simple woman (not a simple-minded one), living her life in a time when the world around her seems to change in ways she cannot understand. At the same time it touches on a lot of dark topics because people will be people and darkness is part of daily life after all. It has a few disturbing passages, made even more sinister sounding because of the idyllic setting. And then there is Annie Dunne, a woman who tries to be honest to herself and who finds a way to finally see friendship and community where she used to see only people.

This is the first novel by Barry which I read but it won't be the last. It starts a cycle of novels about different members of the Dunne family through the years (there is also a play that introduced Annie to the world for the first time). A curious tidbit - Barry has another family saga as well, about the McNulty Family and once upon a time Sarah had a crush on a McNulty man. But then Ireland is a small country and it is possible that the name was just a coincidence. Or is it?

Both of these sound very interesting, and very different. Great reviews

>14 labfs39: Thanks! I did warn everyone that you never know what you will find here. :) I was not kidding.

After I closed Annie Dunne for the last time, I was thinking that if I had tried, I probably would not have managed to find two novels which are so different in style and setting and pretty much anything else... but then this is the fun in reading.

>15 AnnieMod: It is fun when two very different books call you at the same time. I was reading The Blue Sky (childhood in Mongolia) but also Curse of The Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917. But Curse fell by the wayside when I picked up Novel Without a Name (North Vietnamese war novel). More often, however, I tend to read down the rabbit hole, and the books lead one to the other in some way. Not so much this year because I am trying to read for various challenges, and so I feel more constrained in my choices. Are you currently doing any courses?

>16 labfs39: Right? :) I dropped most challenges because they were sending me in directions I did not care for at the time (although these last 2 are for the Reading Globally Quarterly and the Author of the Month challenges respectively). I still have running threads in a few places that I really need to update but these days I try to fit a book for the Author of the Month (because trying new things is fun), the Victorian threads (although I did skip a few) and occasionally look for books for other challenges but mostly read whatever catches my eye (and trying to read my own books now and again).

Courses: Kinda although I am way behind on it (because I do not want to listen to the recordings until I do the required reading - and not just the chapters/poems it asks for but the complete works because why not?). The course is "The Ancient Greek Hero" (https://www.edx.org/course/the-ancient-greek-hero-2) aka "The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours" (hour here does not mean 60 minutes in any way or form ;) ). The companion book is available for free (https://chs.harvard.edu/book/nagy-gregory-the-ancient-greek-hero-in-24-hours/) and my library has it as well if I decide not to read online so even though I am planning to try to work through all the modules before I lose access in mid December, I am not going to push myself too much if my reading is just not working.

It got caught a bit in my weird mood in the last months... Maybe now that my reading mojo is back, I can get back on track. We shall see. Rereading the Iliad was fun enough.

>17 AnnieMod: Interesting. It reminds me of a course I took as a freshman in college: Odysseus through the Ages with James Tatum. We read Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Metamorphoses, Sappho, and Apuleius' The Golden Ass the first semester. Divine Comedy, Pilgrim's Progress, Ulysses, and a couple of other things the second. It would be interesting to reread some of these things now, decades later. Which translation of Iliad did you read? I read the Lattimore.

>18 labfs39: Fagles for the language and the story; I also read parts of the translation provided in the source book for the class (which is an updated version of Butler’s public domain translation - all required texts are included and the translations are updated where needed and where they had to use public domain (and sometimes translated from scratch) - and as the class relies sometimes on the way the text reads, I was kinda double reading).

This one had been a staple of Harvard for decades apparently with slightly different names. Strictly Greeks only but it goes through all genres and most major authors - Homer, Hesiod, the epic cycle, Herodotus, the Homeric hymns, Sappho, Pindar, 7 plays, Socrates, Aristotle and a few more. It is not a guided reading through the greatest Greek Works per se but it kinda ends up being one, concentrating on the hero (in the Greek sense of the word). The companion book can get a bit too literary (it is a lit college class after all) but it is an interesting class. And as I had not revisited most of the Greeks since high school, I figured it was a good idea to go for it.

Fabulous reviews of Voices of the Lost and Annie Dunne, Annie!

I'll probably post several prominent Iberian awards (Camões Prize, José Saramago Prize, Miguel de Cervantes Prize, Princess of Asturias Award for Literature) for the current Reading Globally theme sometime this week.

>19 AnnieMod: If I reread it, I would use the Fagles too, which was published a few years after my class. Yes, I'm dating myself a bit there!

>5 AnnieMod: Fab review on the Ferrante... sounds like something I would like (if only I had seven lives...but isn't this one of the reasons we all hang out together?).

>20 kidzdoc: Thanks! :) That will be interesting - I like lists of books (as much as awards can be political and subjective, they often contain hidden gems).

>21 labfs39: All the modern translations work well (even Pope and Butler are readable despite their old language). All of them miss something, all of them add their own spin and understanding. Welcome to poetry translation :) Fagles was almost a happy coincidence - I was looking for a matching translation and just then Amazon had a big discount on the slipcased boxset edition of his translations of The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid (the Penguin deluxe paperback editions). Awhile back I actually looked at the first pages of at least 10 different translations and while some work better than other to my ear, I could have enjoyed either. Plus... I am coming from a language that usually has 1 translation of major works (maybe some get a second one at some point but that is rare). English readers can be spoiled by the available choices :)

>22 avaland: It is short - 20K words is short even for a collection of essays. It can be dense at places so it reads as a longer text but even subjectively, it felt short. I also suspect that you may appreciate it more than I did :)

151. Alabaster (second edition) by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Subterranean Press, hardcover, 6 stories, Cover
dark fantasy, horror
Read: October 9, 2022 - October 11, 2022 - 3 and a half stars.

The twist at the end of "Threshold", the novel in which Kiernan introduced Dancy Flammarion, made it almost impossible for stories about the albino girl to be set after that novel. But the novel hinted of a lot of stories worth telling before we met Dancy and even if we heard some of them, a lot of them remained unexplored. So when Kiernan decided to revisit her heroine (who was supposed to be just a one-novel character), she delved into her past and went to tell stories of monsters - both supernatural and human. The first edition of this collection was published in 2006. Its limited edition was accompanied by a chapbook containing an extra story (as Subterranean Press often occasionally do). When the book was reissued in 2020, it added that extra story into the book properly so the second edition gained an extra story.

Kiernan provides an introduction (spoiler-free so safe to read before the book) and two separate tables of contents - one which orders the stories in their publication order (the book is ordered that way) and one which orders them in chronological order inside of the stories themselves (except for that extra story which should be elsewhere in that later order but I suspect that they missed that when they were adding it for the second edition...). The 6 stories are connected not just by Darcy being there but also by characters knowing what happened in earlier events. If you prefer not to get spoiled, you should probably read the book in the alternative order - the publishing order is almost the opposite of the internal chronological one. On the other hand we know that Dancy makes it to Birmingham, Alabama for "Threshold" so we know she would live through all these prequel stories. But that is a problem for any writer writing prequels. And even if you know she must survive, most of the stories manage to keep the tension high enough.

Kiernan's style is a lot more straight forward here than it was in "Threshold". While some of the stories jump around in time, the different sections are actually marked and dated - which is very different from the novel's way of story telling. But let's talk about the stories:

"Les Fleurs Empoisonnées" (originally published in 2002 as "In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers" because the publisher requested a title which sounded less French) opens the collection but is the last of the stories chronologically and it mentions the events of the rest of the stories. Dancy, having earned quite of a reputation as the monster killing albino girl by now, is sent by her angel to a house where a group of women who perform monstrous acts. So how does our teenager get to the house? She hitchhikes of course. Add a dead girl, a talking bear and an actual evil hiding in the house (and a bottle you really don't want to open) and you have a pretty solid horror story. The fact that a lot of people seem to have additional motives for their actions adds to the story quite nicely.

"The Well of Stars and Shadows" is the earliest story chronologically, set almost a decade earlier when Dancy is still a girl, living in the swamps of Florida with her mother and grandmother. She visits an old man - the same way she had done it numerous times before. But this time she is about to see her first monster. In a way, this is the origin story of Dancy although it needs to be combined with Julia's story for all in Dancy's character to make sense.

"Waycross" is set before "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées"(the earlier story in the collection even mentions the end of this one) and after all the other stories in the collection. For the first time we see something that may hint at the monsters not being real - but just as in "Threshold", the reader is almost sure to consider the mundane psychiatric clinic as the nightmare. Dancy is sent after another evil (if you see a pattern, it is because the pattern is indeed there) and ends up having to deal with her own internal demons after the bad guy opens a box (unnamed but clearly designed after Pandora's box and similar myths).

"Alabaster" takes us again back in time, before "Waycross" and just days after the Bainbridge incident and we finally learn what all references about a gas station were about. There is a real evil, there is a wicked old man and there is fire. By now, pretty standard for the stories about Dancy. According to the introduction, the original story was written in 2003 but the one published here is actually an expanded version from 2004.

"Bainbridge" finally fills the gaps in the story of that incident. Her first monster after she burns the cabin she grew up in (the story of that incident is in "Threshold"), it is told in alternating chapters with the story of the near drawing of Julia, Dancy's mother, in 1982. The story manages to complete and tie together all the dangling threads and stories which had been hinted at through the collection and the novel - adding even more to Dancy's backstory.

"Highway 97" is the original opening of "Bainbridge" which for some reason got ejected from the story and then published separately (even Kiernan does not remember why). It is a lot milder than the rest of the stories and has a talking dog which tries to convince Dancy not to go to Bainbridge.

The afterword, titled "Afterword: On the Road to Jefferson" discussed how she got the idea for "In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers". Because it was printed initially when the story was called that way, the afterword keeps referring to it this way even if it named "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées" in the collection. It was mildly interesting but ultimately skippable.

Despite the repetitiousness of the main plots, the details and the language actually make this collection work and not be as tedious as it could have become under other circumstances. Not perfect by any means but pretty readable (although some of the scenes are grotesque and can cause nightmares if one is so inclined. The illustrations by Ted Naifeh fit the tone of the book perfectly and add to atmosphere.

So where to next with Dancy Flammarion and her world? There is another collection of stories sitting on my desk (plus a chapbook with an extra story). There are 3 graphic novels. An then there are also the continuations of Chance's story (where Dancy does not play a role). I think I will read something else for awhile but I will be back.

A couple more of my missing reviews:

141. Burned by Benedict Jacka -- Alex Verus (7), urban fantasy, read September 5-9, 2022, 4 and a half stars

When you learn that you are to be executed in a week and that does not turn to be the worst thing to happen to you that week, you probably need to rethink some of your life choices. Alternatively, you can behave like Alex Verus and just continue doing things your way - trying to protect the family you somehow acquired along the way and looking for a way out of that little problem of being sentenced to death.

After the relative slowness of the previous 2 novels, all of the build-up finally pays off. Alex had been really annoying a lot of very powerful people and one of them strikes where it hurts the most - the death sentence is for Alex and everyone connected to him. Of course, all the maneuvering and shenanigans that cause people to be pissed off at him also managed to make some people to care enough for him - enough to warn him and to assist him in looking for a way out.

The obvious way - leave England and never come back does not really work - even if Alex could have done it on his own, his friends are a different matter. And while he is trying to find a solution, another mage (or three) decide that this is the perfect week to harass him for being on Richard's side and working for him (because once a dark mage apprentice, always a dark mage of course - plus the return of Richard and the rise of the dark mages, including getting into the Council for the first time, did manage to rattle everyone's cage).

A few attempts at everyone's lives later (some of them more creative than others), yet another attempt in burning Alex's shop (and home) and our rag-tag band seems to be hopelessly destined to finally run out of luck despite all their attempts to do something and prevent the executions at the end of the week.

The end of the novel made me laugh. Not because it is funny or because it would make anyone's life easier. But while attempting to stop Alex from doing things he never planned to do anyway, the white mages of Britain managed to get themselves into a bigger mess than they were trying to prevent happening. And who remains caught in the middle of it all? Alex Verus of course.

Let's see what happens next.

143. Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn, crime, read September 10-13, 2022, 3 and a half stars

How often had you picked up a book whose premise sounds absolutely fascinating just to find out that the book is essentially a dud? Nope, this is not that kind of book. I almost expected it to be - or at least I was prepared for it to be but it managed to surprise me in a positive way. Which does not make it a great book but it is a very readable story of murder and revenge.

Meet Billie. She is in her 60s, just about to retire from the Museum where she had worked for the last 40 years together with 3 other women around the same age. They had been gifted an ocean cruise as a thank-you-and-good-bye gift and when we meet them they are about to embark on it. So why does the presence of another employee of the Museum on board make the 4 women somewhat uneasy?

Well, you see the Museum is just a name used by their employer so that people who work for the organization can fill forms (and not get weird looks when they share what they do for a living). 40 years earlier the 4 women were recruited to become the first female-only assassin team in an organization which started with chasing and exterminating Nazis and moved into killing any bad person who needs killing.

I have to admit that I cheated a bit on my review - we see their very first kill, 40 years earlier before we meet the 60 years old Billie. But I am sure that she won't mind her story being told this way. The novel is told by Billie and it alternates between the past and the present. In the past, our team is going around the world, killing the bad people who deserve it and sleeping just fine after that. In the present? Well, they do know too much, don't they?

And off we go - the 4 retirees against the organization that taught them everything. This is where the novel gets a bit off track - it drags a bit in some places, it gets a bit repetitive in others and while the balance and timing of the past and present works for most of the novel, a few times the past feels like an intrusion and an artificial slowing down of the story. But the story itself holds up well enough to make that an enjoyable read. A few murders and betrayals later, things finally get to a showy ending and a finale which while not unexpected was charming enough.

If you are looking for a light-hearted novel with older protagonists and some murder thrown in, it may be the perfect read. Billie's voice carries the novel and at various times you need to decide just how reliable she is as a narrator.

PS: I almost dropped the novel after the first chapter. The author decided for the bad person to be Bulgarian. That is a popular trope lately (it is safe and there was a bit of a weird period to account for that in reality) and I do not mind it but it is about a decade too early for it to sound right for too many reasons. Not that there were no bad people in Bulgaria earlier but this type of a flashy richness just does not fit the early 80s. It could have been any country and I suspect that Raybourn chose Bulgaria just because it is a safe choice and a popular location for the birthplace of your tugs while being exotic enough but did not account for the timing. Billie's voice convinced me to stay with the book despite that and it payed off.

152. Difficult Light by Tomás González, translated from Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg
Archipelago, Paperback with flaps, 31k words, Cover
Original publication: 2011 (in Spanish as "La luz difícil); 2020 (English, this translation);
Novella.
Read: October 12, 2022 - October 13, 2022 - 4 and a half stars.

"I slept almost four hours straight, dreamlessly, until I was awakened at seven by the knot of grief in my belly at the death of my son Jacobo, which we’d scheduled for seven that night, Portland time, ten o’clock in New York."

By the time the first very short chapter (there are 33 of them and the first is the shortest) closes with this sentence, we know that the narrator, David, is in New York and not in Portland and we know that most of the family is there with him while Jacobo and his brother Pablo are making their way to Portland. So why is Jacobo scheduled to die, why is it happening away from home and why is the family not with him?

Instead of relying on alternating chapters, Tomás González uses alternating paragraphs in most of his chapters to jump around the timeline. The here and now is a small Colombian village, La Mesa de Juan Díaz, in 2018. But that time shares the spotlight with New York in 1999 on the day his son died and we get glimpses of other times in David's life.

In 2018, David is a widower, living alone and employing a local family to help him after having lost his wife Sara 2 years earlier and now slowly starting to loose his eyesight. He still gets visitors and his sons and friends call often but he is nevertheless alone. In 1999, he was a successful painter, with a loving wife, 3 sons and a circle of friends.

Unable to paint anymore due to the damage to his eyes, the old man takes to writing and starts a memoir. What we read is a mix between the memoir and his current thoughts, without separators and without indication of which part belongs to what. It feels a bit disjointed at first but when the rhythm settles, it starts feeling like the thought of a man in his later years - now he thinks about his housekeeper, now he is back in time with his dead wife.

It is a story of grief and loss - the grief of losing a child, the grief of losing a wife, the grief of losing your eyesight when you had made beauty and the visual arts your life. David's voice is melancholic and as he is telling the story of the life he lived, he is able to see and appreciate the things he could have done better. But under it all runs the inevitable - Jacobo always dies, Sara can never come back and even the doctors are surprised with the rapid loss of his eyesight. And yet, it never feels hopeless and part of it is David's attitude to life and its surprises, all the way to that last sentence which he cannot even write himself anymore and needs someone else to write and yet it summarizes his life: "Wunderful!" (creative spelling fully intended - read the novella/short novel to learn why).

Excerpts available here: https://lithub.com/difficult-light/

>26 AnnieMod: Ouch. Both of these last two are book bullets. Thanks, I think!

>28 labfs39: It could have been worse - it could have been all 4 since the last time you were around. :)

I am a big fan of the show "Burn Notice" and the Raybourn novel has the same vibe - somewhere between the funny and the serious with a narrator who can sound both jaded and optimistic at the same time but without ever slipping into parody. Except that Billie is a lot older than Michael is on the show (she kinda reminded me of Sharon Gless's character on the show in some places). Neither the book, nor the show is perfect but both are entertaining - and as I had mentioned before, I really do not need all my books to be high literature or inventive - I need a bit of fun sometimes. And that worked well enough.

>29 AnnieMod: The Raybourn sounds like a cross between Mrs. Pollifax and Baba Dunja. I'm starting to get to the age where crotchety old women are fun.

As you say, you never know what you will find here, so it follows that different people in LT will pick up on different books here. Two for me from your recent postings would be Voices of the Lost (>12 AnnieMod:) and Difficult Light (>27 AnnieMod:). Great reviews.

>30 labfs39: Possibly. Had not read either - although the Pollifax series had been on my radar for a long time. :) Less on the pure humorous side and more on the “I got old and now I get this” cranky one. And when the narrator is an assassin, well, you can expect some hilarious moments - especially when everyone pretty much considers them harmless and an easy target. Not that 60 is old of course. :)

>31 SassyLassy: Thanks. :) Both manage to use their somewhat unusual structure to their advantage and as sad and haunting as both can be, I actually enjoyed them. I’ll be curious to see what you think if you get to them.

>29 AnnieMod: You know, I read your review of Killers of a Certain Age and kind of liked the concept, but wasn't entirely sure if it was something I wanted to rush over and put on my wishlist or not. But the Burn Notice comparison has sold me. That's exactly the kind of fun spy stuff I like! (And I loved Maddie, too.)

>33 bragan: I was hoping that the comparison will make sense to someone even though the novel is about assassins and not spies technically but that is a bit like arguing about the pronunciation of potato. At some point somewhere in the middle of the novel I was wondering if the author had watched the series - while the actions were not repeating an episode, it could have been one in some parts. I miss that series :(

153. Favours by Benedict Jacka
self-published ebook, 2021, Alex Verus (6.5), urban fantasy, Cover
novella, 54 pages, ?? words
read October 14, 2022, 4 stars

One of the strengths of the Verus series is that he is the only narrator - we know what he knows and we are never in a position to know more than he does. Which can be annoying sometimes but makes a much more coherent storytelling than trying to juggle (and drop occasionally) the facts and which narrator knows what and when. So it was not much of a surprise that when Jacka wrote the first novella in his series, he went for a different narrator.

Set a month after the end of the 6th book ("Veiled") and 8 months before the start of "Burned", the series finds Alex as an auxiliary of the Light Council, the Council in a bit of disarray after a dark mage (Morden) had secured a place in its Junior side for the first time in the history of the Council and everyone pushing around for position and space in the aftermath of the White Rose collapse. But Alex does not even appear in this novella - he is mentioned but he is never seen. Instead we get to hang out with Sonder.

Just back from his Washington assignment, Sonder is awaken one morning and asked to assist with his timesight. Of course that means working with Caldera who still holds a grudge from the last time he decided not to share the information he had. And yet, they need to work together to find out what happened in a supposed burglary that is anything but. The novella ties to the previous novel in an almost expected way but at the end, it is not the crime that matters but the choices made by Sonder and Caldera. They are true to their selves here - Caldera is by the book, letter of the law no matter what; Sonder is opportunistic as usual and he finally learns what people really think about him (being able to see in the past sounds good on paper until you get to hear things you really wish you had not). By the end of the novella Sonder is even more jaded than he was when it started and it will be interesting to see where that leads.

The novella is set between the 6th and the 7th novel of the series but was published between the 11th and 12th. I read it after the 7th and there is some foreshadowing for that 7th novel and I suspect there is more for the future books. That can occasionally backfire in series when the author uses a novella to explain something in the past that does not make sense in the main series but the novella here is what you would expect from Sonder (and Caldera) so I don't expect that it will end up being that kind of an annoying clutch.

Overall a nice addition to the series, despite Sonder becoming even less likeable after it :) Not mandatory to read if one reads the novels but it adds a bit of flavor and a different viewpoint to the series.

Back in 2013 Penguin started publishing the Maigret books in a uniform series with newly commissioned translations (https://www.penguin.co.uk/series/INSMAI/inspector-maigret). They finished the series towards the end of 2020 with the 75th book and I had been collecting them ever since I discovered one in the library in 2016. But as is often the case with books I know I will like (at least to some extent), I never got around to them. I read the 24th in 2016 (the first one I bought after the one from the library), the very first one in 2017 (only 4 years after it got published) but never went back for more. So this fall, I was looking for something short and light and figured that the series is a good idea. Of course, they are not housed together (why would they be?) so I am reading them in somewhat weird order (plus Penguin's order differs from the order used usually for the novels in the same year so it gets a bit more confusing sometimes).

I've read 3 in the last month or so: the 41st (Maigret and the Man on the Bench), the 2nd (published as #4 from Penguin: The Carter of 'La Providence') and the 53rd (Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses). This jumping around in the series may have been useful actually because it highlighted just how different Maigret gets as the years progress (and yet, you can see the same bright-eyed investigator even under the old curmudgeon's disguise). So I will review them хere in the same order I read them in but I will see if I can find where I stashed the earlier novels first and continue with the series in some semblance of order .

144. Maigret and the Man on the Bench by Georges Simenon, translated from French by David Watson
Maigret(41), Penguin Maigret (41), 2017, 46k words, Maigret et l'homme du banc (1953), read September 20 - September 23, 2022, 3 and a half stars

Murders usually do not happen on a Monday. And yet, on this Monday, October 19, a man is found dead in an alley. It looks almost like a regular mugging gone wrong and yet when Maigret and his team start investigating, they realize that things do not add up - the dead man's wife claims that the shoes he is wearing don't belong to her husband and the job he supposedly worked at had not existed for the last few years. So in order to find out who killed him, Maigret first need to find out what happened to that man in the years before he died - because it looks like the man lived a double life - one in the suburbs during the nights and weekends with the wife and one somewhere else during the working days.

The mystery of why the man had the double life is a lot more interesting than the murder itself. As with a lot of these novels, it is as much a novel of murder and crime as it is of France at the time of writing - maybe some characters are exaggerated but the background feels real. As for the murderer - I'd usually consider the way they were introduced a cheat by a crime novelist but here it works - we may meet them for the first time when they are revealed as the killer but there are enough hints before that to know that this person exists and is a possibility.

Overall an enjoyable entry in the series. And Maigret's sparring with the examining magistrate Judge Coméliau is as amusing as usual (although this is one part of the novel that probably reads better if you read the novels in order - there is a lot of back history there).

145. The Carter of 'La Providence' by Georges Simenon, translated from French by David Coward
Maigret (2), Penguin Maigret (4), 2014, 39k words, Le Charretier de la Providence (1931), read September 13 - September 15, 2022, 3 and a half stars

In the very early morning of Monday, April 5, the body of a young woman is found in the stables next to Lock 14, the lock marking the junction of the canal and the river Marne. Detective Chief Inspector Maigret from the Flying Squad is dispatched to investigate the death and ends up spending the next few days wet and miserable, cycling between locks and chasing different vessels which slowly make their path through the locks of the canal and trying to find out what really happened. Figuring out who the woman was seems to be the easy part initially. Then it turns out that while it is clear who she had been for the last few years, her past is a different story so the team needs to untangle that mystery before they can figure out the death. A second dead body does not help matters much.

This is a very early novel in the series and it shows - it is rougher than some of the later ones and it can feel repetitive in places (but then isn't detective work repetitive?). But it shows a way of life in France that may have been familiar to a reader in 1931 but appears as ancient history in 2021. And that is the main strength of this novel - not just the story of the canal and its locks but all the back histories of the various characters which emerge through the short novel. Of course, it is from 1931 and the novel's depiction of some people (and especially the way some characters refer to others) sounds offensive to a modern ear but expecting something else from a 90-years old novel and applying our understanding of the world to it is unrealistic.

154. Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses by Georges Simenon, translated from French by William Hobson
Maigret (53), Penguin Maigret (53), 2018, 42k words, Maigret et les témoins récalcitrants (1959), read October 15 - October 16, 2022, 3 stars

Maigret is feeling old - he has only 2 years until his retirement and even though initially he was very enthusiastic about the future, these days he would rather stay and work longer. The novel gets its main feeling from that mood - it is melancholic and steeped into the past. The murder victim adds to that mood - the oldest brother in once affluent family, with a family trying to keep their business and their good name afloat with any means necessary. These days all they have is the business, which makes no money and requires additional funds to be added monthly, a house which is about to fall down around them and their name - which appears to be their only read currency.

When a family member dies, you would expect that the family will do all they can to assist the investigation. And yet, the Lachaumes refuse to answer any question they do not deem strictly necessary and even call a lawyer to assist them. The surviving brother, the elderly parents, the sister-in-law and even the very old maid - they all seem to be hiding something. And then there is the son of the murdered man - a 12 years old boy which get spirited away to school and turned into a boarder there thus making it very hard for the police to even see him, let alone talk to him.

To add to the frustrations of the case the old examining magistrate Judge Coméliau had retired and Maigret's is stuck with a new one, Angelot, who wants to do things his own way and throws our detective out of his game. The new way is supposedly by the book and yet, Angelot somehow decides not to disclose a personal connection in the case. Simenon never comments on it, neither does Maigret - but it is left there for the reader to ponder at and evaluate the "new" and "old" ways.

As usual, to figure out the murder, Maigret needs to figure out everyone's history and with noone willing to talk, he has to rely on other means and other people's ideas about the family. The story that starts to emerge is tragic and shows not only the moral corruption of the once powerful family but also the ability of people to ignore what they are seeing for the sake of proprietary and the past. By the end, when we finally learn who the killer is and why Léonard dies, one wonders who they should reserve the sympathy for - the dead man or the killer. Mine went to the latter.

It is a slow and calm novel, dealing with the past as much as it deals with the present and Maigret's issues with the new magistrate and with the impeding retirement (both indicating change - the thing he really is afraid of - in case one does not pick on that earlier, his reminiscence about his old heater which was taken away from him should really make you realize it) take as much of a central role as the murder mystery. It is probably not a good novel to start with if you never read the series before but it is a decent entry in the series.

PS: Older reviews of the series if someone is interested (apparently I never reviewed #24 - probably should reread it when the book shows up from somewhere...):
#25: Inspector Cadaver aka "Maigret's Rival", original title: L'inspecteur Cadavre: review
#1: Pietr the Latvian original title: Pietr-le-Letton: review

>30 labfs39: I'm starting to get to the age where crotchety old women are fun.
This, totally.

I have a NYRB reissue non-Maigret Simenon that I've never gotten to, but I'm also interested in dipping a toe in Maigret. There are so many... where would one start?

>37 lisapeet: Whichever catches your eye and/or is available. The early ones can be problematic in terms of attitudes and so on but... Simenon is great at describing life in France (and some subsets of people in it) so if you take the novels for what they are (artifacts of their times), they work really well. I've heard that the later ones are worse but as of #53 (of 75), I am not so sure. Yes, the mystery and investigation may be muted but these are novels of France as much as they are of crime so... :) Or stick around and see what sounds good while I am working through the series.

Plus we have at least one reader working on these (Mark/thorold) so you can check his thread as well for ideas?

155. Endangered by C. J. Box
G.P. Putnam's Sons, hardcover, 93k words
Joe Pickett (15), mystery, modern outdoors/western
Original publication: 2015;
Read: October 16, 2022 - October 18, 2022 - 3 stars.

When we last saw the Pickett family, April had just ran away with a local cowboy with a checkered past, Nate was in federal custody after the Wolfgang Templeton debacle and Missy had absconded with the very unfortunate but yet not realizing it Mr. Templeton.

Now, a few months later, April reappears in the worst possible way - beaten almost to death and thrown into a ditch, surviving the night almost by a miracle. In the meantime, Nate strikes a deal with the government to serve as bait for his old co-worker (of a type) and is released under very strict conditions. Missy is still MIA to almost everyone's relief.

And these two events become the center of the novel - Joe is trying to find who assaulted and almost killed his daughter, Marybeth spends most of the book in the hospital, looking over April and Nate and his girlfriend end up having their own problems. 15 novels into the series, a reader knows that the two story lines will need to connect somewhere. And they eventually connect but it felt as a setup for the next novel than a part of this one - not having the Nate subplot would not have changed much of the main story (except at the very end - and that could have been handled differently).

C. J. Box has a tendency to leave some of his supporting characters almost cartoonishly cardboardy. Sometimes they appear in later novels, get more definition and a few installments later, they actually feel like real people. Throwaway characters which never reappear can occasionally feel more like a type than a person. It rarely bothers me because it does not really harm the action (yes, they would be better if they are well developed but...). But even for him, some of the characters here were not even full concepts, let alone characters.

The Cates family, the main antagonists of novel, are almost the antithesis of the Pickett family - a doting Mom (in a very different way), a Dad, 3 children (3 girls for Pickett, 3 boys for Cates), the middle child being the bad apple. As the novel progresses, you get a lot more of these parallels all the way to the final moments when mother's love and trust become the key to explaining what really happened and why. And while some of the Cateses have something of a personality, it is mostly seen as the anti-personality compared to the other family. Don't get me wrong - Brenda Cates can give you nightmares but the rest of the family? They are just types, they are there to serve as plot points. And then there is Dudley who is even more cartoonish than the usual way bureaucrats are depicted in the series.

Add a few side plots (including one connected to Joe's actual job of course), yet another truck being totaled by Joe (I will be curious to see what they will give him to drive this time), some breathtaking scenery and a few people getting shot and you have the novel.

With all this being said, the novel actually managed to surprise me at its end. Through most of the novel you are absolutely sure you know what happened to April but it is not until the very end when we finally get the confirmation - and it was not exactly what I expected it to be. Or anyone else in the novel. The whole construction of the novel shows how easy it is to let preconceptions and believes guide your understanding of events. Saying that is not even a spoiler because there are so many layers of lies and beliefs in the novel that by the time you get to the end, it feels like you really cannot trust anything you think you know. And despite everything that was not really working in the novel, that makes it worth reading, especially if you had been keeping up with the series.

A decent installment into the series and I will probably pick up the next one soon - as with most of the later novels, the end of this one sets the stage for the next one (although technically here the whole Nate subplot sets the stage for the next one from what I can see in the next book's description).

One thing that is starting to be a bit annoying with the series: I wish that the author will stop throwing stuff at April's head and getting her into trouble. While most of it makes sense considering her character and past, it starts to feel a bit like a case of "The girls that were born and raised in the family are the good ones and can never do anything really bad or stupid because Marybeth is such a wonderful mother but we need some family drama so let's mess up with April again". Hopefully we are done with all that.

156. Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, paperback, 38k words
all genres, mixed in a blender?
Original publication: 2017
Read: October 18, 2022 - October 19, 2022 - 2 1/2 stars.

If this short novel (technically novella at 38K words) was any longer, I probably would not have finished it.

Two Asian-American boys in rural Ohio bond over being the only Asian boys in their class and comics. A trio of superheroes (one of which is not from Earth) go to a karaoke bar. Art is used both as a means of protest and as a psychiatrist (or almost). A female super-villain tells her story to an immobilized superhero (more than once). Random characters (mostly from the list of people already mentioned above) tell stories and then others try to upstage them with their own story. A chapter from a pulp novel (which reads more like a bad parody of a pulp novel - I am not even sure if the bad part was intentional or if the author really thinks that this is what pulp novels sound like). Political commentary and protest against the corporations, thinly disguised as philosophy and plot points.

Each of these on its own may have made a decent story. Instead Lim just put all of them in a blender, sprinkled some action and actual facts (the stories of Richard Aoki and Kiyoshi Kuromiya) and served the result to us well chilled. It is a jagged mess of half-stories and attempts at philosophy (which almost never work and often sound like word salad). The story requires patience - things that do not make sense get clearer as the novel progresses and the last chapter ties everything together and explains what we had been reading (or almost does anyway). I can see what the author was trying to achieve and maybe a different author would have pulled it off. This one did not really succeed - at the end, what remains is the jaggedness and not the cohesiveness of the story.

Maybe this will work better for someone who like nontraditional forms more than I do. I usually love structures which employ nested stories and this one makes an attempt at that (or at a broken form of it) but something is missing and just does not fit well to actually close the structure properly - for the most part the novel feels like a puzzle - except that pieces of it had been removed and pieces from 4 other puzzles had been added instead.

157. Fleeing Xinhe Street by Zhe Gui, translated from Chinese by Ana Padilla Fornieles
Penguin Books Australia, produced with Writers Association of Zhejiang Province; Penguin Specials series; Zhejiang Specials series
Small Paperback, 22k words
Original publication: 2019 in Chinese as "Pao Lu" with the Writers Association of Zhejiang Province and in "People's Literature"; 2019 in English (this translation)
Novella.
Read: October 19, 2022 - October 20, 2022 - 4 stars.

Penguin had been publishing the Penguin Specials series for awhile now - small paperback books (and e-books) - they are generally under 100 pages (but usually close to it), there are both fiction and non-fiction titles and they are usually things that are too short to get published on their own. Occasionally they have a subseries going on inside of the main series - there are quite a lot of them in the "China Specials" for example. And this novella is part of another of these subseries: "Zhejiang Specials". The 5 novellas printed in this subseries come from contemporary authors from the Zhejiang Province - authors who are not familiar to the English speaking world (I am not sure if any of them were ever translated in English before). "Fleeing Xinhe Street" is one of these 5 and if the rest are as good as this one is, Zhejiang Province seems to have some very talented authors.

The novella is deceptively simple when it starts - a 40 year old man that never fit anywhere manages a "Guarantee Company" - a loan operation which borrows money from companies and people who can afford it, paying them a reasonable interest (much bigger than the one the bank would pay on a deposit) and loans the same money to other companies who need them (at an even larger interest rate, much larger than what the bank offers). Wang Wuxian has a lot of friends, cares about animals (and always picks up strays from the street), makes fun of his own body, color-blindness and lack of a wife and is the last man you would suspect in being dishonest. And yet, one day he leaves Xinhe Street in Wenzhou City in the Zhejiang Province and runs to USA, leaving local businesses in the red. So what happened?

There is an easy explanation - bad luck. One company took a very large loan so they can pay their bank loan and get a new bank loan (by the time we meet everyone, that had become a practice - banks are a lot more likely to give short term loans and a business can take the interest for the few days/months they need the money before the bank approves a new loan). Except that this time, the bank management had decided to cut off the loans and change the rules so a glass factory owner ends up owning Wang Wuxian's company a lot of money. The factory closes, the loan defaults and our hapless usurer runs away.

If that was the whole story, it would have been a nice commentary in fiction to the changing attitude of the Chinese population and businessmen towards money. But this absconding leaves a shoe factory in a really bad situation - their capital was in Wang Wuxian's company so with him gone and their bank calling their own loans, the owner is about to lose his business - one which his father built from the grounds up. To top all the problem, the bank seems to know about the practice which everyone had been involved in and is unwilling to work with the businesses after the usurer is gone. As the details start emerging while we get to know Hu Weidong, the shoemaker who risked everything for the good interest rates, one starts to see shades of something different. Was the timing and the escape really a result of a run of bad luck and bad timing? Or was there something else happening. By the end of the novella, we learn what really happened and the only question remaining is who you should be feeling sorry for the most.

As with most Chinese stories and novels I had read, the language is somewhat simple and the prose is almost flat. I don't think it is just the translation - it seems to be the style of the Chinese authors so if you expect bright prose, you will be disappointed. The novella sounds like a story someone tells to you - starting with what happened and then slowly explaining what happened before that thus making that initial idea of what happened redundant and incorrect by the time it is done. The repetition of certain elements add that oral cadence to the story which does not grate but adds to the story in the same way it used to do it for the Ancient Greeks for example. Maybe the final resolution was a bit cliched but then cliches exist for a reason and I really enjoyed getting to that end.

PS: And if you do not plan to read it and you had not guessed yet: of course there was a femme fatale and a rejected man looking for revenge at the bottom of all that.

Enjoyed your review of Fleeing Xinhe Street, and the explanation of the series, which sounds really well done.

>42 dchaikin: It is an interesting series - a bit like the Kindle Singles but usually a bit longer and better curated (partially because they always have a paper version as well?). I have a few other lined up by these (plus a few Kindle Singles as well) so there will be a few shorter books around here in the near future.

Not that the one I finished last night was that long anyway

158. This World Does Not Belong to Us by Natalia García Freire, translated from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft
World Editions, Paperback, 32k words
Original publication: 2019 in Spanish as Nuestra piel Muerta; 2022 in English (this translation by "Oneworld Publications" in UK (beating this edition by less than a month)
Novella.
Read: October 20, 2022 - October 20, 2022 - 3 and a half stars.

A man comes back to his childhood home and confronts his own demons while talking to his dead father. That's probably the easiest way to explain what this novella (or short novel if you prefer) is all about and despite being absolutely correct, it is not adequate. So let's try a different way.

Years ago Lucas was sold in slavery. But no, this is not where the story really starts. Once upon a time Lucas was the only son of a wealthy father, growing up in a big house with 3 nursemaids and a mother who loved gardening and nature. Except that not everything was as it seemed and both the mother and the father appeared to somewhat volatile - and one day the mother was carted to the loony bin and the father, who was probably the crazier of the two - if not the only crazy one, managed to lose everything, including his own life. But before that happened, 2 strangers somehow convinced the father to move in with the family - and proceeded to wreck the previously happy family.

The novella is written as a monologue - Lucas talking to his dead father - and that makes all these early memories somewhat suspect - we are hearing the voice of a man who went through a lot of hardship, talking about his boyhood memories. So was everything as awful as described? Maybe. But it does not matter - it is the past Lucas remembers - and in his head, for his decisions, it is the only past that matters. The text switches between the past and the present in almost alternating chapters (especially later in the novella, the switching breaks up a bit) and it takes awhile to put all the elements in their correct order - the death of the father which at the start appears to be the catalyst for the return and all that follows ends up being very different from what one assumes after the first chapters.

But the novella is not only about cruelty and humans being humans. Lucas inherited the love for everything living so his life is full of insects and plant life and the author spends a lot of time on these elements (if you are afraid of creepy crawlies, you probably should not read this). The edition I read (the one published in USA by World Editions) has multiple insects drawn on the covers and inside of the text as well, adding to all the creepiness. Add Lucas's obsession with decay (some of it probably clouding and changing his memories as well) and it can be an upsetting read.

Neither the time, nor the place is explicitly mentioned in the text. There are enough clues to set the story in Latin America though and someone better acquainted with the local differences may even see some clues pointing to the author's native Ecuador (which I assume is the setting). Based on the actions of different people and the lack of certain elements, I'd assume it is set somewhere at the start of the 20th century and I suspect I am not far off.

Despite all that wild life and nature, it is a story about humanity and of belonging. I am not sure it really succeeded in that - even our narrator remains incomplete. But on the other hand, as it is essentially a letter (unwritten but still a letter) to a dead man, the style and the missing parts make sense. I will not call it an enjoyable read but it was a decent one anyway and if the writer writes another book (that was her debut) and it is translated, I will probably pick it up.

159. Brooklyn Heights by Miral Al-Tahawy, translated from Arabic (Egypt) by Samah Selim
The American University in Cairo Press, Hardcover, ?? words (50-60K range based on rough estimate); 192 pages
Original publication: 2010 (in Arabic as بروكلين هايتس); 2011 in English (this translation)
Read: October 21, 2022 - October 22, 2022 - 4 stars.

Hend grew up in one of the villages around Cairo as the only daughter and youngest child of a Bedouin family. When we meet her at the start of this novel, she had just immigrated to USA with her 8 years old son, sans her husband and with very little English and had rented a small apartment in a Muslim neighborhood in Brooklyn, some time in the autumn of 2008 (Obama winning the election is one of the first times we see her communicating with her son). But this is not the typical immigration story of perseverance and success against all odds. Or not entirely anyway.

Instead we walk the streets of Brooklyn with Hend and see her reactions to the city and its inhabitants. Most of the Brooklynites we meet are immigrants like her, mostly from the Muslim Arabian world but there are a few others as well - the Orthodox Jews, the dancing teacher neighbor. And while she walks the streets of this new city, she often thinks about her life before she moved - from her childhood to the end of her marriage. As the novel progresses, we start also hearing the stories of other inhabitants of her world - both in the new and in the old worlds.

And somewhere in all that jumble of stories, memories and new experiences emerges the longing for a home - the home some of the characters can never return to, the home another character is slowly forgetting, a place one can call home. Is your home where you were born? Or can you make your home elsewhere, away from the culture you are used to and belong to? Hend never figures these questions although she ends up pondering a lot of them when things happen around her. She is almost always a passive observer - it feels like she was always an observer of her own life, even in the passages about her past.

It works beautifully to a point. I appreciated that the new immigrant felt displaced and looking for her place in the new life and did not find friends even before arriving (while I know that some people are like that, my experience was closer to that of Hend when I moved). I wish the novel was longer - it is too short to support all the backstories and all the stories in the now and here - and because of that a lot of them feel incomplete. I am not sure if that was intentional - after all, all of these stories still continue after the end of the book but the novel felt incomplete.

The novel won the 2010 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature (given to an Arabic novel which had not been translated into English yet) and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (aka the Arabic Booker) in 2011. The author's personal story parallels her heroines to a certain extent - al-Tahawy is from a Bedouin family and her childhood was probably very similar to Hend's (writer's license notwithstanding). She also moved to USA around the same time as her character (although I am not sure if it is to Brooklyn initially).

This was the author's 4th novel and the other 3 are also translated into English so I plan to check them as well - despite my misgivings, it is a novel worth reading - if for nothing else, for the details of modern Bedouin lives. But the immigration part of the story also works, as banal and tired as this genre had become in recent years.

160. City of Incurable Women by Maud Casey
Bellevue Literary Press, Paperback, 28k words.
Original publication: 2022
Novella? Collection? Who knows
Read: October 22, 2022 - October 22, 2022 - 3 stars.

In the second part of the 19th century, Jean-Martin Charcot was a known figure in Paris while working and teaching in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. A lot of his methods sound barbaric and abusive today but in the days he and his colleagues practices, the knowledge of neurology, psychology and psychiatry was essentially zero. His name remains known and the current state of a lot of these sciences owes him and the men who came after him in the same hospital a great debt. Some of their patients, all of them women for certain diagnoses, were popular enough in his days because of the demonstrations they had to do; some of them remained just case studies.

So Maud Casey decided to give the voice to these women - the ones that were admitted for hysteria and were deemed incurable. I am not sure if the book is supposed to be a novella or a collection of linked stories (it can work as either) but in both cases, reading it in order helps. Casey mixes truth and invention (her notes at the end explain each of the elements) and gives us the portraits of a few of these women, interspersed with real and invented images and documents. At the start of the book, the narrator tells us the stories but then the women themselves take over. And that's where the book goes off the rails.

Most of what the women have to say had already been said in the previous stories/sections. And even if we ignore that, there is no real differentiation between the voices of the narrator and the women - if it was not for the change from the third to the first person, you would not know something changed. So what was the point of the change?

It was a nice idea and I found some parts of the text lyrical and horrifying at the same time. But it did not really deliver to its main purpose - it may have given some kind of backstories to some of these women but it never gave them back their voices (invented or not). Still - I am not sorry I read the novella - it made me look up a lot of things I had never read about before and some of the prose was beautiful. But it could have been so much more.

161. Plays: 1: Boss Grady's Boys / Prayers of Sherkin / White Woman Street / The Only True History of Lizzie Finn / The Steward of Christendom by Sebastian Barry
Methuen Drama (1997), Paperback, 5 plays, 301 pages
Original publication: see notes on each play below
Read: October 11, 2022 - October 23, 2022 - 4 and a half stars

Reading 5 of the early Barry plays allows you to see a playwright finding his feet and getting stronger with each play. Not that the first play in this book is weak per se - there is a reason why it is still being staged, 34 years after its first staging in 1988 but the complexity of the plays changes with time and the chunkiness which is obvious in places slowly disappears.

For some reason Methuen Drama decided to skip his very first play ("The Pentagonal Dream" or "The Pentagonal Dream Under Snow") which was only performed in one season in 1986 and never staged again (or so it seems). I suspect that just as with other books in their series, Methuen will publish it one day in a later or a revised volume but as far as I can find out, it is not available as text anywhere. However, a version of it is available as an audio reading from the Unseen Plays project by Abbey Theatre (https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whats-on/unseen-plays/), using the same actress who played the parts back in 1986 so I am planning to listen to it. But let's talk about the 5 plays Methuen did print in this first collection of Barry's plays.

As different as the 5 plays are, they are very Irish - even the play set in Ohio is Irish. They all deal with history but not with the big names and big events - or not directly anyway. It is all about how the life of the Irish people changed, dragging them into a new world which they don't always want and about the people who got left behind. Having read 'Annie Dunne' before I read the plays, I can see where a lot of the topics of the novel started to develop - even if just one of these plays is actually a prequel to that novel, they all had been leading the author towards the novel. According to the introduction by Fintan O'Toole (don't read it before you read the plays!), the plays were not the original media for the ideas either - most of them started as poems in "Fanny Hawke Goes to the Mainland Forever" (and probably some ideas are even coming from his earlier poetry collections - too bad that it is almost impossible to find them these days). But this evolution of ideas and moving through the different forms of storytelling shows an author who feels comfortable across all of them - and his styles shows it - his prose sounds like poetry sometimes.

Boss Grady's Boys
First Performance: Abbey Theatre, Dublin (Peacock stage), 22 August 1988

2 brothers, one in his sixties, the other in his seventies, live on a farm on the Cork/Kerry border. Modern life is slowly squeezing them out but neither of them is prepared to change. We see them trying to live their life while ghosts of the past show up in their dreams (and not just in dreams by the end of the play) reminding them of the past. This is by far my least favorite of the 5 plays - it is almost pointless (and some of the characters are confusing - why did we need the Girl at all?). I suspect that it can be extremely powerful when performed, with actors who know what they are doing but it is a nostalgic piece about old Ireland. It is the only play that is not dated explicitly but based on the textual clues, it is probably set somewhere in the mid-20th century. This is the play which made Barry's name initially and I can see it working in Ireland, with Irish actors and at the time it was staged (it made even more sense after reading the introduction of this book which discusses the changes Barry brought to Irish theatre).

Prayers of Sherkin
First Performance: Abbey Theatre, Dublin (Peacock stage), 20 November 1990

This play is semi-autobiographical for Barry: he used the story of his own great-grandmother. Except that all he knew about her was her name and that she left her family for his lithographer great-grandfather. From that, he creates a play set in the 1890s on the island of Sherkin and in the town of Baltimore, across the sea from the island. Two generations ago a 3 families sailed away from Manchester and ended up on the island - looking for a place for their own religion and promised land. 3 generations later, the only people remaining on the island are Fanny Hawke, her brother, their father and two aunts. The two young people cannot just marry anyone outside of the Faith (or they will be shunted), they need to wait for someone to come from Manchester (even if noone had heard of anyone there since they sailed away). Then a new man arrives in Baltimore from Cork City and even if you do not know how the play originated, you can see what needs to happen next - Fanny must chose between her people and the new world. It is a nice play about a past which most people don't think about when thinking of Ireland (and England) but in also serves as a bigger story about choosing immigration and leaving your island forever - being it Sherkin or Ireland. It is a very calm play but it works.

White Woman Street
First Performance: Bush Theatre, London, 23 April 1992

The only play not set in Ireland, it takes us to the small town of White Woman Street, Ohio, USA in 1916. Trooper O'Hara had left his native Sligo in his youth to fight a war (or three) and then ended up an outlaw somewhere in the States. His birthplays ties this play to the McNulty Family novels which Barry will later write but the name of the family is not mentioned in the play. In the prairies of Ohio, he and his band of friends/co-outlaws, decide to attack a train. And while everyone else in the company agrees because of what is on the train, Trooper is trying to excoriate a ghost of the past - a young woman who used to live in the town of White Woman Street.

While the play does take some liberties with its American setting (it feels more like a costume play than an actual play set there in some scenes), its story of a man who came from Ireland to escape oppression just to become part of the oppression of the Native Americans once he crossed the ocean works. Despite the end goal of holding up the train, the play is not really about it - it is about choices and stories and what a man can live with (and what happens when he decides that he cannot live with it anymore).

The Only True History of Lizzie Finn
First Performance: Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 4 October 1995

The last of the 5 to open but printed 4th in the book (written earlier maybe?), the story is set in Weston-upon-Mare, Avon and in Inch, Kerry in the early 1900s. Lizzie Finn is dancer in her late 30s, working in a dance-hall in Weston-upon-Mare and not expecting love to ever come her way. And then Robert shows up. The first act of the play deals with their romance and Lizzie's decision to leave her life. The second act makes this play though. Somehow Robert forgets to tell his new wife that he is the only surviving son of a landowner Irish family (Lizzie, who was born in Ireland, is the daughter of a man who entertained the landowners). But the biggest shock is not for Lizzie - because noone is ready to accept her. Add a few secrets about Robert's war experience (and his brothers' death) and the things get even more complicated.

Barry takes the history of the land and uses it to create flawed characters. But as you keep reading (or watching) the play, you start wondering who are the flawed characters here - Lizzie and Robert or everyone else in Inch. It is a play about being human and being allowed to make mistakes, even if the big history of Ireland keeps moving along. And just as with the previous play, it becomes a play about choices and finding a way to live with them once you make them.

The Steward of Christendom
First Performance: Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, 30 March, 1995 (apparently this one opened before Lizzie Finn).

Coming from 'Annie Dunne', this was the play I wanted to read the most. Set in 1932 in the county home (aka the asylum sans doctors) of Baltinglass, County Wicklow, it is the story of Thomas Dunne - the former chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Loosely based on Barry's own grandfather, Thomas Dunne comes alive in a tale of madness and refusal to give up even when he cannot remember who is dead. The story alternates between Thomas's past (touching on a lot of major historical events) and his present - a broken man whose family had not abandoned him yet but who had had to lock him in the county house for everyone's safely.

The details of the county house life are terrifying, even in a play that shows the slow disintegration of a man's mind, these descriptions horrify. Barry reuses a lot of this play later - some of it as is, some of slightly changed (here Annie's hump is a result of polio, in the novel she is afraid of passing it to children and is envious of a woman who got her hump from a disease thus implying that she was born with it; the present in the haystack and the hen under the bucket stories are here as part of Thomas's past and in 'Annie Dunne' as part of his great-grandson's present). That ability to take one story and change it and reuse it in another format seems to indeed be one of the trademarks of Barry. But it also tells me that I probably should read his work in the order it was written - or some of those connections will be lost.

While not perfect, the collection is interesting and worth reading. And while each play can work on its own, seeing the progression allows a reader to both see Barry's art developing but also the connections between the plays and the threads that run through all of them.

===
Note: for anyone interested in the Unseen Plays project by Abbey Theatre, here are some more details (if you do not want to click on the link):

"Featuring a collection of works that have been seldom seen (or not seen at all) on Irish stages, Unseen Plays will be presented in audio form. Distinct from radio drama, in that there is no intention to create the full auditory world of the play, with its footsteps and offstage traffic; instead, these performances are presented as readings."

The plays are (the first 2 are in the same week/recording):
1. The Image by Lady Gregory
2. The Words Upon the Window Pane by W. B. Yeats
3. Light Falling by Teresa Deevy
4. Liffey Lane by Maura Laverty
5. The Wood of the Whispering by M. J. Molloy
6. The Evidence I Shall Give by Richard Johnson
7. An Triail by Máiréad Ní Ghrada
8. Did You Hear the One About the Irishman? by Christina Reid
9. The Pentagonal Dream Under Snow by Sebastian Barry

Available via: Via: SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts (go to their page for links or search in these) :)

>44 AnnieMod: I will look for this author. Nice reviews

>44 AnnieMod: Great review. May have to out that author on my longlist....

>47 labfs39: Thanks :) I have another one of hers slowly making its way here so stay tuned

>48 avaland: Thanks :) I suspect your long list is at least as long as mine.

162. Wild Swims: Stories by Dorthe Nors, translated from Danish by Misha Hoekstra
Graywolf Press (2021), Paperback, 23K words; 124 pages
Original publication: 2018 (in Danish as "Kort Over Canada"); 2020 in English (this translation; UK; Pushkin Press)
Read: October 25, 2022 - October 25, 2022 - 4 stars.

Fitting 14 stories in about 23K words (in the English translation anyway; the Danish original may have been a few thousand words shorter or longer) does not allow much space for each story (and none of them is significantly longer than the rest). I like stories but I often find the very short ones to be unsatisfying - unless they rely on surprises in the last paragraphs, the length rarely allows for much depth. And yet, there are some types, usually the ones where a single moment in time or an emotion is highlighted, where the shortness works to the benefit of the story.

Dorthe Nors (assisted in the English version by her translator Misha Hoekstra) knows how to make the best use of the limited space here. We have a man who finally decides to stand for himself and ends up stuck outside in the middle of winter; we have people who can keep a grudge; we have a man who believes someone to spend some time after his wife's death who gets a not so nice surprise; we have a man dying from cancer and a woman who helps him - or so it seems anyway. They are all real people - flawed, sometimes borderline bad (and maybe not so borderline) - but people. None of the stories really tell a surprising story (and none of them rely on surprising reveals) but they all build their narratives slowly and carefully, giving you details slowly until the full picture emerges - the non linear storytelling, with elements from the past showing up when you think you already know what happens can be annoying sometimes but here, because of the length of the pieces, it actually helps the story work better and not fall flat at the end.

One thing that strikes you when reading the stories is that even in the most intimate of them, there is a distance - sometimes in space (in addition to the stories set in Denmark, there are stories set in USA, Canada, England and Norway and a few stories which spend at least some of their narrative during some type of travel), sometimes in feelings, sometimes both. Noone seems allowed to feel close to anyone else or to be able to connect properly (with one curious exception - in "Sun Dogs", a writer living in a cabin develops a sudden closeness with the mother of an ex-lover - although even in that, there is a different type of remoteness and lack of closeness). The whole collection feels like the author is trying to say "People are complicated and always there but you are always alone, even when other people are around". Setting a lot of the stories away from home for the characters adds more to that feeling of remoteness and isolation (even in the middle of Boston for one of the characters in "Between Offices"). And even when things are going well, even when there is human connection which seems to work, it does not last - the man in "Hygge" may be chased by most women in the seniors meeting and even allows himself to be caught once in awhile but that does not lead to closeness.

None of the stories really shined and yet, I just kept reading the slim collection. Some of the stories in this collections had been published in Harper's, New Yorker, Tin House, A Public Space. That did not surprise me - the collection is exactly what I expect when I read these magazines.

I still wished some of the stories to be a bit longer, a bit more developed - not because they were missing something to be complete but because of all of the unsaid. But then, that just added to the remoteness. And reading them all in order, in one sitting may not be the best way to read the collection - it works length- and time-wise but it gets a bit too gloomy by the end.

If you expect something to happen in every story, this collection may not be for you. While something does happen indeed, a lot of the "something" is mundane and almost banal. But so is life, isn't it?

It was my first book by Nors and I doubt it will be the last.

===
Now back to writing some skipped reviews -- the current omnibus that I am reading will take awhile to finish. Unless I get distracted and read something else instead - as happened with this book... :)

163. The Domestic Crusaders by Wajahat Ali
McSweeney's Books, Small Paperback, xvii+116 pages
Original publication: 2011 in McSweeney's Issue 36; First staging: 2004/2005 (see notes below for details)
Play - 2 acts, 8 scenes (5+3)
Read: October 26, 2022 - October 26, 2022 - 4 stars.

First public reading: 2004
First Staging: July 15-16, 2005, Berkley Repertory Theatre; September 2005, San Jose State University Theater.

Family drama is not a new territory for playwrights - the more common and unremarkable the family is, the closer they feel to a reader/a theater-goer and that adds to their charm.

Written in the aftermath of 9/11, the play introduces us to 3 generations of a Pakistani-American Muslim family - the parents, the 3 children and a grandfather. Wajahat Ali chooses to introduce the different members slowly, 1 at a time (except for the first scene where we meet two of them), allowing the viewer/reader to slowly get drawn into the family - the stay-at-home Mom who is now working part time, the hard working father, the oldest son who is in an open conflict with his own father over being too Americanized and not listening to his elders, the middle child and only daughter, a hijab wearing lawyer and, the youngest son who is studying to be a doctor and the father's father - a veteran of the Pakistani army and a dotting grandfather.

It almost looks like a perfect picture (except for that eldest son). But as with most families, the surface is not the reality - the daughter wants to marry a Black American, the youngest boy really does not want other people to make his choices for him and all that untangles while the shadow of 9/11 and the war on terrorism sweeps the nation.

Wajahat Ali sets the play in a single day - the 21st birthday of the youngest son and that allows him to bring the family together. In that regard, that family is exactly as any other - get them all together and the old clashes and wound resurface - a mother who really does not want to hear about her child marrying someone who is black, the sons who are tired of the high expectations of the family but react to them in different ways, the father who is ready to almost ignore his family for his work and yet does not get what he expects in return.

And somewhere in there emerges the story of the country in the early days of the 21st century - being Pakistani-American makes you different in some ways, being a Muslim may mark you as someone to be afraid of but part of the issues are recognizable by anyone - because families are families. And even when you are the one who people are afraid of or discriminate, you are not exempt for doing the same to other people. Add the grandfather finally deciding to tell his own history to the grandchildren - which manages to show different sides of all of them - even in the world they live in, even with all the complaints they have about America, their parents and the world in general, reality tends to shatter ideals and requires people to make decisions about where they are standing on some issues.

Noone in the family is perfect and the play showcases that - they are all flawed and yet, they are all relatable.

This edition of the play contains an introduction by Ishmael Reed, a foreword by Hasan Minhaj, a conversation between Reed, Ali and Carla Blank (the original director of the play) and a note about the writer. They all talk about the history of the play, the history of plays about families and about minority families and the influence of the play since its original staging and publishing. They get a bit repetitive in places but I suspect it was unavoidable if you want to include all of them.

164. The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia
Tachyon Publications, paperback, 42k words
Novel; Fantasy
Original publication: 2022
Read: October 27, 2022 - October 27, 2022 - 4 stars.

The Free Democratic City-State of Qilwa, sitting on an island across the sea from the continent, had become a refuge for everyone who needs to leave the nearby empire of Dilmun, including the Sassanians - the peoples of another empire that was conquered by the Dilmuni armies a long time ago and had been living in the empire under suspicion because of their traditions and magic. Not that Dilmun and Qilwa do not have magic as well but the Sassanians are the only one who practice blood magic - and as this can be powerful, it is feared and stigmatized. So a lot of the practitioners hide in plain sight, occasionally using other types of magic - environmental or structural (rune and words based).

Firuz is one of these refugees - a competent (if under-trained) adept of of blood magic who had been extensively trained as a structuralist as well who lives in a hovel with their mother and brother. When the novel starts, a plague is sweeping the island and the refugees are blamed for it. Firuz decides to look for a job at the clinic of the only doctor who works with the refugees, Kofi, and ends up being hired to assist. And while the plague slowly subsides, other weird illnesses start appearing, some of which reek of blood magic - which should not be happening, not in Qilwa anyway.

Meanwhile Firuz finds another refugee who seems to have even better abilities than they do with blood magic (but is absolutely untrained) and adopts her into their household - providing a companion for their younger brother and making sure the girl does not kill herself while attempting to use what she can do (or kill a lot of other people).

And while all of that is interesting, at the heart of the book is an investigation - what is causing that mysterious illness that so many people succumb to? The author succeeds in building enough of a backstory to allow the reader to slowly start considering the suspects, a lot faster than Firuz does, and when one starts seeing who must be responsible, it turns the novel and one's understanding on its head. By the time the confirmation finally comes, it is almost unneeded - the story led to it slowly and carefully.

Even if you do not know that the author is the child of Iranian immigrants, you can see the thinly disguised Persians under the Sassanians and the Arabian Muslims under the Dilmani. The author admits in the Afterword that this is where it started indeed but they added enough differences to allow for the two of them to stand on their own. You do not need to know anything about Persia and its culture and history but if you, you will see a lot of echoes in the story and the world building.

And while the story can be read as what the surface story - the fantasy world with its blend of magic and science, it is very hard not to make connections to our world - refugees fleeing for their lives from a war, refugees being blamed for sickness and everything else one can think of, people afraid of the Other. The novel also succeeds where a lot of other modern novels feel like a manifest - together with the magic/science blend, the world had developed with acceptance of one's choices on how they look and how they are called so it is a feature of the language and noone bats an eye at that. Pronouns is part of one's self and so is one's choice to go through realignment - changing one's body magically or surgically to match their perceptions of their gender. Queer protagonists are not that uncommon these days and worlds where that is not something to remark on are starting to show up but they are often a bit too heavy handed. Not here - the world just IS.

I usually like fantasy worlds based on (or borrowing from) real life cultures and this one is not an exception. The fact that on top of the good world building lies a good story as well is a bonus and pretty impressive for a first time novelist. Naseem Jamnia used to be a neuroscientist before deciding to change careers and to go for an MFA and writing. That explains this blend of medical knowledge and fantasy - and that is what makes this novel unusual. In a good way. I hope the author returns to this world with more stories (or builds a new one -- as long as they publish something soon-ish).

PS: This short novel is an expanded version of a novelette, available here: https://pridebookcafe.com/nothing-less-than-bones-naseem-jamnia

I am way behind on reviews - too much work for a while and the plan was to use this week to finally catch up. Except that I came back from a business trip late last week with a really bad cold and had been down with it till Monday, with covid tests negative on Sunday and no symptoms which really sends that in that direction. And then when I finally started feeling like a human being on Tuesday, I ended up with even worse fever and chills in the evening and then woke up with no sense of smell and a very upset stomach. That may have been just normal considering the drugs I was taking but it kinda allied with the symptoms of the damned thing and the repeated covid test lighted up like a Christmas tree. My cold apparently brought home a friend after managing not to get the bugger earlier. :(

Oh well - not that I had any plans for the week. Hopefully I will be back to almost normal by next week (because I am supposed to be back at work - working from home so that’s at least a relief). Not being able to detect any smells is weird though (I can taste the major groups so I can see if something is salty or bitter and so on) - although in a “make lemonade” spirit, I raided my tea cabinet for the teas that I don’t love as much and had been working through them (instead of wasting the ones I really enjoy smelling while drinking).

PS: I am mostly fine now - my throat does not hurt as badly as it did earlier, I cough a lot less and had not had any fever since Tuesday so I am on the mend. By my voice is hoarse (which if this is similar to my usual patterns will be true for a few weeks anyway), I am getting tired (but then I also sleep better now that I can breathe and don’t wake up coughing) and my stomach is not very happy with me. But my appetite is ok - which surprises me.

Happy Thanksgiving! :)

Ah, that sucks. Hope it passes quickly.

Here's hoping you recover completely. Losing sense of smell would be a major bummer.

I'm sorry you are under the weather. I hope it passes quickly and completely. although in a “make lemonade” spirit, I raided my tea cabinet for the teas that I don’t love as much and had been working through them I love it!

I hope you feel better soon!

Hope you keep feeling better after those piggybacking bugs are done with you.

Hoping your recuperation is brief and uneventful. I hope you're getting lots of sleep.

Thanks everyone! I am slowly getting better but it will take awhile. Oh well. :)

>55 LolaWalser: It is. You don’t realize how much you rely on it until it is lost. Cooking had been fun (not) - I cook by smell a lot apparently. Still had not set the apartment on fire though. :)

>56 labfs39: Yeah, my mom also laughed when I mentioned it to it. There is still a hope that the thing is not from the covid but from the other virus/cold so it may clear fast but we shall see.

>59 RidgewayGirl: Now that I can sleep - yes. I sleep, eat (I don’t mind bland food so it is not a problem - the lack of smell plays a lot of tricks on your taste as well) and sit in front of the TV (Food Network - I am in no condition to concentrate on a movie although it seems I can read more than 10 minutes now so we shall see).

>60 AnnieMod:

Yeah, I went through a bout of anosmia some years ago and it was the most depressing thing. I could barely eat and got no comfort from tea and coffee at all. Actually dangerous too, working in a lab... and at least an inconvenience generally.

Apparently there are exercises one can do to help it along. If you have any strong perfumes or things like vinegar, lemons, mint around, it would seem that sniffing them for a few minutes a day, may help retrain the sense.

>61 LolaWalser: Actually, it turned out that the anosmia was not from Covid (or at least it does not present as expected to be from it although who knows) but a really bad inflammation from the other virus (cold, flu - whatever got me first) - which was one of the theories anyway because of the timing of the whole mess. So my sense of smell is back (although it is weird - onions smell funny for some reason for example) and I cannot be happier - you should have seen me smelling my summer savory and smiling around the kitchen yesterday - I was cooking and wondering if I should put some in when I cannot smell it and realized I could. :) Very unsettling while all smells were gone though. It was good that it happened so I tested again for Covid (i am not sure I would have if I was just getting better) so all is good.

I am still recovering but I can read, I can think and I can smell and taste. Which also means I am back to work tomorrow. And I had seen almost nothing from the soccer world championship going on at the moment. Oh well. Plans and all that. But see what great over-achiever I am - I picked up two of the season’s nasties in tandem.

>53 AnnieMod: I hope you are continuing to get better. I see in your recent post that you are. I'm so glad you can read again (and smell and taste!).

>63 avaland: Back to being like new (well, minus some 4 decades and some change of wear and tear). My sense of smell is back to completely normal (yey) and my reading had recovered.

I sat trying to write reviews twice today and realized I just don’t feel like doing it - I’d rather read than stay in front of a computer this week. I may still write a few reviews (you never know) but I doubt it. So I wish everyone a great end of the year and see you over in Club 2023. Maybe that will be the year I manage to not drop off periodically.

I am also leaving alone the serious books and going for familiar series for the rest of the year - my brain needs the rest. So I am reading books that make me happy, cooking and trying to start organizing my books and my closet (not that seriously - only when the mood strikes me) and generally taking the last week of the year as easy as I can (off work so that is also not there to get me busy). :)

Thanks everyone for stopping by this year. :)

Yay for a healthy nose! Have fun cooking and reading and pottering around organising books (every time I try I end up reading instead)...

Take care of you, and see you over in CR23!

>64 AnnieMod: I am currently very behind on reviews, too. We'll enjoy them if and when they get done. See you in '23

>65 LolaWalser: Yeah, well... I did not do any organizing (except moving some books from one pile to another) but I did do some reading and browsing (and realized I have books I had forgotten about. Oops) :)

>66 labfs39: >67 avaland: Yep.

Talking about missing reviews, I need to do 2 before moving to the first of 2022 (because otherwise the order will bug me forever so...)

168. The Pentagonal Dream Under Snow by Sebastian Barry (Writer), Olwen Fouéré (Performer), Roger Doyle (Composer), David Heap (Director)
Listened on: 2022-10-30

When I read Plays: 1: Boss Grady's Boys / Prayers of Sherkin / White Woman Street / The Only True History of Lizzie Finn / The Steward of Christendom (see >46 AnnieMod:), I wondered why Methuen skipped the first of Barry's plays. The answer turned out to be almost predictable - the play was lost and noone seemed to have the text anymore. That is almost impossible to happen these days but for a play which had a single season in 1986? Apparently very possible. That whole thing made me wonder how many more plays we had lost - and makes me appreciate the few drama publishers out there which publish plays alongside their theatrical runs - at least for the big theaters. The smaller ones? One hopes someone is archiving somewhere.

The recording contains a very nice interview with all 4 people involved with the play: Barry, the director, composer and the sole performer (the same team which set the 1986 run as well) and it gives all the details both of the creation of the play and of it getting lost (and found again). In a way I am happy that I listened to that one instead of reading it - it is one of those experimental plays where sound and music is almost as important as the text itself. Of course, some of the original score is lost - but the composer managed to retrieve some pieces and to replace some of the missing ones with music that may have been used in 1986.

The play itself is very different from any of the later Barry plays: a single performer, using 5 different voices to represent 5 male figures: Father, Murderer, Storyteller, Fetishist and Messiah/Anti-Christ and exploring the male psyche through their interaction (and lack of interaction). The fact that the play was always supposed to have a single performer makes it clearer that the characters are both separate and the same - in weird ways. It can be unsettling in places and gets very convoluted by the end.

Not one of my favorite Barry plays but I am happy I listened to it. Especially because shades of it can be heard in his next plays ("Boss Grady's Boys" for example).

199. The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry

Type: Novel, 92k words
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 1998
Series: McNulty Family (2 or 3)
Genre: Historical
Format: hardcover
Publisher: Viking USA
Reading dates: 21 December 2022 - 23 December 2022

Published 4 years before Annie Dunne, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty first appears to be a very different novel. And yet, as you keep reading it, you slowly realize that they are not so different. The structure is different (Annie Dunne relies on flashbacks and filling in of backstories, this novel goes through time linearly) but the story and the characters are similar. It is not a coincidence - just like Annie, Eneas was born with the century in Ireland and lived through two wars, the fight for independence and all the tumult of the changing Ireland. That is the thread that connects almost all of Barry's novels and plays I had read so far - they are his way to tell the history of Ireland by showing us the lives of the people who lived it.

Eneas McNulty never meant anyone any harm. He enrolled in the British Merchant Navy because he was too young to be in the regular one during WWI and in any other time in history, that would have helped him secure his future. But it was not any other time - by the time he came home, Ireland was in the middle of its independence struggle and serving in the British Navy (Merchant or not) did not make Eneas the most popular guy in Sligo. His only choice seemed to be to join the police - and that ended up being the worst possible job for an Irish boy. When the rebels (revolutionaries, independence council - call them what you want) decided to allow him to redeem himself, Eneas refuses their offer - killing a man is not something he is willing to do even if that means a death sentence for himself. So he leaves his family, the woman he loves and Sligo to find his way away from home - from being a soldier to Africa to finding a friend and spending a lifetime alone. The end comes almost unexpectedly and when it does, you want it to be different - because hate seems to always win, even when time should have mellowed it down.

The story of a boy who just wanted to live his life and was forced to seek his luck away from home is heart-breaking. Behind it is the tragedy of a country - the separatism and hate in Ireland during most of the 20th century was not invented and imagined by Barry even if most of the characters in the novel were. Some of its early days are almost forgotten by most people - WWI overshadows these early struggles. Barry tells the story of a man but in a way it becomes a story of a country - and that makes the novel even better.

This is not the first novel by Barry but it is the first that is still in print. It ties to earlier plays and to later plays and novels and becomes a part of the Irish tapestry that Barry weaves through his work.

>69 AnnieMod: That sounds fantastic. Noting this author.

>70 labfs39: I am working through his works in publication order so there will be more from him in my thread in 2023 :)