The Weight of Ink (Kadish)

A kind of academic mystery. Papers are found. A soon-to-be-retiring History Professor is contacted. She is allowed to borrow the services of a rogue-ish graduate student. As we delve into their lives, we are also thrown, directly, into the lives of those responsible for the papers that have been discovered. So Kadish manages to move us back and forth between 17th century and 21st century London and slowly reveals that everyone, in both centuries, has secrets. And, not surprisingly for this National Jewish Book Awards Winner, all roads -both past and future – lead to and from Israel.

The book is a remarkable accomplishment. At times, maybe I was too aware of Kadish’s research and balancing act, but the tension in both centuries kept the pages turning. Her writing is vivid. We get plague-ridden London and a 21st century rare manuscripts room in clear terms. And I appreciated that even after 560 pages, Kadish was willing to leave some questions open. That made for a much more credible and well-paced ending.

The Vagina Analogues (Smith)

I think we’ve all had the experience of wanting to talk back to / yell at / write to an author. Some of us launch books across the room. I tend to scribble in the margins. Michelle R. Smith has us all beat. When she encounters a poem “that is masculine in its original form,” she creates “a deliberately feminized – or femmenized – reimagination of [that] poem [to challenge] “the cultural insistences that the only women that matter are white and the only black people that matter are cis males.”

In this all-too-brief collection, she responds to poets both local (RA Washington, Quartez Harris) and international (Amiri Baraka, Julius Lester, Terrance Hayes). Her analogues are, when you read them independently, sharp and insightful. When I read them as responses, they made see things that I, a white, male reader, completely missed in the originals. These poems prompt conversations because they shine spotlights into the gaps, oversights and assumptions of the originals. Smith’s “Preface to a Twenty Volume Feminist Treatise” (Analogue to Baraka’s “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”) is my favorite example. “Girls,” a response to Quartez Harris’ “Boys,” is also great.

https://blackgirlpoet.wixsite.com/michellesmith/the-vagina-analogues

And a hat tip to Clarence D. Meriweather’s great cover.

The Damned Don’t Cry (Hervey)

When I travel, I like to go to the local section of independent bookstores and ask for a recommendation for a local classic. This is the one I got on a trip to Savannah, Georgia. The overwrought title notwithstanding, this is a pretty good book. Unevenly paced, Dickensian in ambition, it tells the story of Zelda, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, who tries to make good. I can’t say that there is a great deal that’s surprising about the plot, but I don’t think that’s what Hervey set out to do. That Zelda’s fate is predictable is the implicit criticism of the rigidity of Savannah’s society. Still, just because you know the car crash is coming, it doesn’t mean that the tension isn’t still quite heightened and the range of wreckage still unknown. The characters (and I include the houses that are so central to the story) are memorable and the social commentary is, if not subtle, at least quite clear.

So if you’re ever Savannah-bound, I highly recommend this.

Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Garza, trans. by Booker)

It is amazing, as Garza notes at one point, how little I know about the country directly south of my own. I’ve even been there now as a protected tourist. They were not the travel circumstances I would have chosen, but they were the circumstances offered and it seemed right to accept. I’m glad we did. I learned a great deal about Mexico’s past but despite the election that took place while we were there, I learned little of its current events. After reading Garza’s book, I know more about their so-called war on drugs and absolutely horrifying epidemic of femicides.

Garza, bravely it seems to me, does not shy away from traveling to dangerous parts of the country to speak with those left behind by the killings, those for whom being confined to their homes was not new when the pandemic arose. There is no safety anywhere else.

I have my standard complaints about the kind of greatest hits essay collection Garza presents here. There’s a lot of overlap. I’m not sure where she generally publishes, but these essays are pretty short. Could several of them been combined into one larger piece? Could they at least have been organized by topic?

Still, Garza’s diagnosis that Mexico is a country constantly in the process of grieving seems accurate to me and she sees hope in the way the public mourning has been turned outward into art, into protest and especially into writing. Her final piece, “Keep Writing,” more manifesto than essay, is especially inspiring. If she can write that after what she’s witnessed, how can I object?

The Silence (DeLillo)

It’s Super Bowl Sunday 2022 and just before the game is to begin, everything from TV stations to WiFi to the electronics that allow a plane to fly – all of it powers down with no remedy in sight. How will people react, in particular 3 people waiting to watch the game, and two friends of theirs who are flying into Newark with plans to join the other 3 for the game?

Look, if you know and like DeLillo, you’ll like it. If you don’t know DeLillo’s work, start with White Noise and see what you think.

This one will make you wonder, though. What will we do if the silence comes?

Ransom (Malouf)

I am one of the few I know who favors the Iliad over the Odyssey. I think it’s because I feel like I understand Achilles more than Odysseus. That’s one of the reasons why this book was so welcome to me. It is a case of an author filling in a gap of another story, in this case the ransoming of Hector’s body. As many times as I’ve read the Iliad, I never really considered what would be involved in that, especially for King Priam. (Now that I’m older, and a father, I think I understand Priam more than Achilles.) Malouf does a masterful job of turning Priam and Achilles into human beings caught in the middle of a war, indeed lives, that neither of them really seem to relish. Priam, previously and knowingly confined to a life of ceremony and convention, comes alive in this unique moment of fatherhood.

If anything, I wanted this to be longer. There are brief discussions of the role of chance that I wish Malouf had explored more, and it would have been nice to get more of an inside look at Achilles. But I’m being picky.

This is a wonderfully vivid complement to Homer’s epic and a true lesson in the meaning of fatherhood.

Indigo (Bass)

These are the poems of someone who is, like she imagines to be true of the tattooed father of the title poem, comfortable in her own skin. Whether it’s the skin of someone who is aging or that of a sensual being, Bass observes its nature, both in nature and herself. Her poems are gentle and filled with soft curves and gratitude (“Any Common Desolation”):

You may have to break / your heart, but it isn’t nothing / to know even one moment alive.

There was one poem I wanted to talk back to, “The Small Country.” In it, Bass quietly laments the lack of language we have for certain things, even when the need for communication is limited to two people. She asks:

Is there a term in any tongue for choosing to be happy?

And where is speech for the block of ice we pack in the sawdust of our hearts?

I wanted to say, ‘It’s in poetry, Ms. Bass. It’s in your poetry.’

Season of Migration to the North (Salih)

I recognized quickly that this book throws its readers into the middle of a conversation and cares little that the reader missed the beginning or struggles to catch on (or up). There was enough present for me to recognize the story as a metaphor for colonization and its children. In the end, the story, a familiar clash between the past and present is both familiar and devastating. Salih’s use of sexual violence, likely an apt comparison, was too much for me. It turned me from considering the character’s behavior as a consequence of, or even revenge for colonialism (a ‘reap what you sow’ symbol) to sheer disgust. Maybe that was the point. Nevertheless, I think ‘less is more’ may have served Salih more effectively here.

It’s a quick read and I haven’t read (to my knowledge) any other Sudanese literature, but if you’re going to try it, make sure you check any squeamishness at the door.

The Yellow House (Broom)

Initially, I was impressed. For all of the acclaim this received for being a book about a home that was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, Broom makes curiously little mention of it in the first two sections. I expected a frame story that began with Katrina and moved backwards to the construction of the house and then forwards to the fate of the house post-Katrina. Broom moves chronologically, starting before she is even alive which may account for the some of the detached quality of the first two sections, especially the first. Maybe it’s Broom’s journalism background.

I was also concerned that for too long, the camera stays too close to the details. There’s a little context in terms of the relationship between New Orleans East and New Orleans, but mostly we are looking at the details that emerge as Broom’s family and the house evolve.

There’s also little by way of commentary until the post-Katrina sections. There is plenty that could be brought forward from the story – urban geography, the American Dream, race, Broom’s own uneasy sense of belonging – but she chooses not to highlight any particular strand. I didn’t need to be told what things mean, but I wondered about the point of it all. After all, hers was far from the only home destroyed by the Hurricane. Why did she tell her story?

There’s more reflection in the post-Katrina sections as the family seeks compensation for the lost house and all that it did represent and that it came to represent (for some of them) post-Katrina. In the end, what I walked away with was the meaning of the home to Broom, who felt guilty about not staying in New Orleans and to some of her family members. There’s a poignant comment about home ownership at the end that I would choose as my anchor if I were to re-read this.

I just think the book needed a clearer line through. Because it isn’t just about the house. There are times when it’s barely a minor character. But with a topic like the meaning (including the inherent challenges) of home ownership for Broom’s family at that time, in that place, before, during, and after that experience, I think the narrative would have hung together more effectively.

The Puttermesser Papers (Ozick)

I was disappointed. Everything moved too quickly, too superficially. This series of sketches seemed more like an excuse for Ozick to show off her cleverness than anything of substance. And the shallowness of it all really hit home near the end with what seemed like such an unnecessary choice that I almost put the book down. There are ideas here. In better, more thoughtful hands, something might have emerged from them – something funny, profound, insightful even. We get glimpses, just enough to be frustrated by this wasted opportunity.