Yesterday, in the wake of the librarians’ shushing, some might have taken advantage of the ensuing silence for a nap. Now, yawning ourselves awake, we can resume our chat about the overlap between fiction and non-fiction, in sprawling and slightly chaotic stacks and shelves.
In the opening story of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s Songs for the Flames (2018; Trans. Anne McLean, 2021) a woman takes advantage of a quiet moment—against another, unexpectedly violent, landscape—to steal some shuteye. A second woman, looking for her, is surprised to find her asleep, but reacts quickly: “She found her taking a siesta in a hammock and, without warning, took a photograph of her.” Yolanda is reluctant, but she eventually agrees that Jay can take several more pictures, trying to capture just the right look.
This reminded me of a scene in which a sleeping woman was awakened by another woman taking her photograph, also without permission initially, but this time in Catherine McKinley’s The African Lookbook. For decades, McKinley has collected images of women from Africa; they cover a vast swath of time and place. It’s simultaneously the kind of book you can imagine being on a course syllabus, but also the kind that is a true pleasure to leaf through—with occasional text summaries that are informative and inspiring.
There are several photos from 19th-century Senegal, which reminds me of another favourite for this year: Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed. There’s a lot to admire and appreciate in this volume, but I’m thinking here about how he travels to Dakar, Senegal; there he sees the Door of No Return on Gorée Island, and reads what Angela Davis and President Obama wrote in the guest book, when they made similar journeys:
“Seagulls traced the shoreline with their shadows, their bodies hovering just above the water. I watched as dozens of them lifted their beaks, rose, tucked their wings, and plunged their bodies into the ocean….the centuries-long kiss of salt water.”
The seagulls in Alistair MacLeod’s short stories are often on the scene too, in “The Lost Salt Gift of Blood” more than usual. There, the birds represent what can be broken and what can be restored, how we take on the responsibility for caring for other creatures, and what happens when we cannot adequately protect them any longer.
Many of MacLeod’s stories revolve around the idea of home and belonging. Which is also true of a favourite essay collection I “discovered” this year: Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick. There, she writes: “No matter why you leave, home is still home. And nothing is better than home.”
Which I read while enjoying a debut novel by Elias Rodriques: All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running. It opens with a young man’s consideration of a friendship that dates to his teen years. “Audrey asked what The Odyssey was about. I said it was about a man trying to get home. She said that was a silly thing to write a book about. Everyone goes home every day. I said it’s different after years on the road.” For both Daniel and Aubrey, Florida is home: “Three-eight-six till I die.”
This code reminded me of the Lauren Groff short story “Above and Below” in Florida: “Goodbye to the mountain of debt she was slithering out from underneath. Goodbye to the hunter-orange eviction notice. Goodbye to longing. She would be empty now, having chosen to lose.”
And that, in turn, pulled me to Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won a Pulitzer, but was an unexpected joy to read, for its attention to evocative detail and the compassion and dedication required to complete a project like this.
Rooted in Milwaukee, a stand-in for the iconic American urban experience, Desmond moves between trailer park and courtroom, to include Jane Jacobs’ ideas about community alongside individuals’ narratives, where a gesture or vinyl siding “the brownish-white of leftover milk in a cereal bowl” brings experiences of inequity off the page for readers.
Marlon Peterson’s Bird Uncaged challenges readers’ assumptions about justice. His account of childhood, raised by two Trinidadian immigrants, whose options were limited by their undocumented status, sparks readers interest.
The studies he pursued during his ten-year incarceration and “the routinization of guilty, loneliness, and rapid self-deprecation” secure it. He describes the authors and books that freed his creative expression, but afterwards thanks Darnell L. Moore and Kiese Laymon, “who write to live”.
As does Da’Shaun L. Harrison, author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness; he references Kiese Laymon’s work as having complicated “understandings of sex, sexual violence, and Desire”.
Kiese Laymon’s Long Division was originally published in 2013 but the author made concessions in the craft of his work that he later regretted; this 2021 edition is true to his original concept. It’s a flip book, so you know it’s going to reflect on matters of perspective and how we create our own narratives, the capacity we have within ourselves to imagine different futures (and re-vision our past). But it opens with such solid coming-of-age characterization that even readers who aren’t committed to experimental forms will be hooked into this network of stories. My favourite part was how he named his characters, which I won’t spoil, other than to say it’s a very bookish book.
Just as Laymon has revised his narrative, Elissa Washuta’s White Magic considers the ongoing evolution of selfhood in this memoir of searching. She is constantly revising her own self, questioning her boundaries in the context of colonization, and I had more to say about her memoir here but, for these purposes, this passage caught my eye immediately: “I have no need—nobody wants me and I want nobody—but I take a condom with an image of a playing card Jack and the words One Eyed Jack.”
Because there was a copy of Heidi von Palleske’s Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack on my TBR via Dundurn Press. I knew nothing about this new novel when I began reading. (They sent it, I believe, based on my review of Lauren Davis’ previous book, because she’s blurbed this one and also has a new novel herself from Dundurn this year, called Even So.)
It’s a visceral and sense-soaked story about focus and myopia (also twins and double-vision), trauma and inheritance, artistry and changelings: Heidi von Palleske answers questions like ‘how many suitcases are necessary to pack an eye?’ but poses more questions than she answers. And, apparently, there are more volumes to come. It began slowly for me, but as I got acquainted with the characters, my pace increased.
A contrasting reading experience, for me, was Elizabeth Nyamayaro’s I Am a Girl from Africa, an exceptionally engaging memoir from the start. Presenting her story in swiftly moving scenes, with sensory detail that makes them powerfully and immediately relatable, readers will find it hard to put down the work after even a few pages presenting her experiences as a girl in Zimbabwe.
It would make a fine companion to Emmanual Mbolelo Refugee (Trans. Charlotte Collins); a narrative rooted in the DRC which is deliberately and concisely structured, but relays information as though from a few more paces away from the events unfolding; this allows for some broad-stroked patterns and systemic realities to be understood. Together these are an amazing duo.
Where Nyamayaro’s story intersects with the fiction in my stack is in her experiences having travelled to Uruguay to observe where women are aiming to transform politics. Via passing legislation to ensure that 30% of election candidates be female (it was under 13% previously). Because, meanwhile, I was reading Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay (Trans. Jennifer Croft): “That was Montevideo to me. I was in love with a woman and in love with the city where she lived. And I made up everything about it, or almost everything.” Mairal’s novella is executed cleanly and sharply, and I intended to read a couple of chapters in the first sitting but read until the end.
Another volume I read straight through—not for pleasure, but as research—was Anna Leonowens’ The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870). It’s most famous for having been the inspiration for Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam, which was, in turn, transformed into the musical The King and I. It opens with a description of the author on board the small Siamese steamer Chow Phya in the Gulf of Siam in March 1862: “I rose before the sun, and ran on deck…peered eagerly, not through mist and haze, but straight into the clear, bright, many-tinted ether, there came the first faint, tremulous blush of dawn.
A memoir that moved very slowly for me, a few pages at a time, as though I could not process the reading of it any more quickly than Kat Chow could process her grief, was Seeing Ghosts. Early on, she describes seeing her mother’s body unclothed: “I understood, as I looked at you that our bodies were similar, that I was an extension of you, that I came from you, that I could one day become like you.”
It reminded me of how Alex Haley describes Kunta Kinte’s growing awareness of the world around him and the importance of kinship. As a child, he gradually comes to understand relationships, and his role in the family. “But Kunta had never truly understood until now that this man was his father’s father, that Omoro had known him as he knew Omoro, that Grandma Yaisa was Omoro’s mother as Binta was his own. Some day, he too would find a woman such as Binta to bear him a son of his own. And that son, in turn…” Then, in the nighttime, he falls asleep.
The sun is of titular importance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel and, early on, readers learn about Klara’s ritual of observing its setting: “The Sun had become just a short line glowing through the grass. ‘There he goes,’ Josie said. ‘Hope he gets a good sleep.’”
It looks like the Sun sets in a neighbour’s barn, although Josie suggests that a palace would be a more suitable residence for the Sun and wonders if maybe the entrance to the imagined palace is hidden. Even though I was unsure whether I would enjoy Ishiguro’s novel in my current reading mood, I stayed up late to finish reading the first part and had to resist the urge to read on even then.
This kind of falling-into-a-book feeling is wonderful but, admittedly, it’s not one I experience as often as I used to, before a package of sticky-notes became my constant reading companion. Ishiguro’s novel reminded me of this kind of shine on the relationship between reader and writer.
Two other writers acknowledge the relationship from another perspective, at the end of their books. At the end of Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell, the author’s second collection, published by Graywolf this year, he writes: “Reader, thank you.” And suspense writer, Nadine Matheson, debut author of The Jigsaw Man, she concludes: “And finally, thank you, dear reader for buying my novel.”
And, so, I could end this by saying both Thank You and You’re Welcome.
It’s been an amazing reading year so far. And yours?
A mind-boggling array of books, and I love how you connect them all together so naturally. Do you plan the connections ahead of time, or do you see them after?
Out of all these wonderful books, I’ve added “I Am a Girl From Africa” to my list!
In some instances (e.g. James and Jamaica), it was a deliberate pursuit. Mostly they emerged naturally out of a monstrous reading stack. Even though I started this year determined to keep my current stack under ten, it ended up sprawling even beyond its usual dimensions, cuz apparently I just don’t listen to myself.
That one’s so readable, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. Maybe it’s even available on audio? Hey, do you know about this?
Love that cover of All The Water – and even that brief snippet makes it sound really interesting.
Maybe I’m a little predisposed to swampy stories too (I also loved Linda Hogan’s coming-of-age story, Power, set in what is now south Florida).
I read what must have been part of the Matthew Desmond in the New Yorker a while back. It was very impressive. I hadn’t realized there was now a book. Hmm…
Yes, that was my first exposure too, and it was very good–but the book is more, more, more. (I’ve returned it too!)
I love how you draw connections between books and write a paragraph or two about them – such a lovely way to do a catch-up post!
I think this has been one of my best reading years ever, in terms of quality. I’m not sure why. This deserves some pondering…
I’m glad it creates the impression of catching-up somehow. Heheh
It’s been one of my best too, for quality and–surprisingly (because I’d aimed for fewer books not more)–quantity too. But why? LMK if you have theories!
I’ve never read anything by Kazuo Ishiguro, but I’ve heard he’s absolutely amazing, although he may be a little too sci-fi for my liking?
What did you think of Lauren Groff’s Florida? My friend fell in love with it and said I had to read it…
Even though I read sci-fi myself, I think the marketing that emphasized the speculative elements of this story put me off. I don’t even want to repeat what I thought the book was about because I clearly had the wrong idea! But either way, I don’t think you’d be put off by these elements. He does spend a lot of time on character development and on crafting beautiful sentences though; I was engaged because my heart got involved early on, but the story itself moves slowly.
She’s super talented at writing short stories. What’s the last story collection you loved, though? I can’t think of one you’ve mentioned recently, to guess whether I think she’d be a good match for you.
Oh jeez I haven’t read a short story collection in so long one doesn’t come immediately to mind. I tend to like things that are completely different, rather than ‘themed’ short story collections.
Such a great selection of books, many of which are on my TBR list. Maybe this is the push I need to finally read Klara and Evicted!
I think Part One of Klara would capture your heart as it did mine. I’ve fallen off with his books recently, but this made me want to fill in all the gaps.
OhEmGee, I was not expecting to find Evicted so riveting. It read like Wilkerson’s Warmth of Suns for me; I felt so engaged in these people’s stories, in their lives.
Oh, Klara and the Sun! I really enjoyed that book. A daring perspective from which to tell the story but he pulled it off and made me cry at the end.
Oh, I knooooooow. He does devotion like few others manage. And knits a love story out of unconventional threads.
I opened one eye from my nap, or perhaps I was still dreaming, as I found myself swept away in a flood of strange books. Roots was a straw to grasp at, but soon gone. The books I’ve read are plentiful and varied enough to have made a life raft but I forget them as soon as they are read.
Getting home I get lots of practice at, though Penelope’s not always waiting. I could leave less often, but Sirens! – it’s against the rules but every now and then I slip my lashings.
Your comment made me smile. I agree, it’s very hard to capture this kind of stuff with audiobooks. It’s one of the reasons I’m so resistant to them (I listen to 2 or 3 year and sometimes those are re-listens because I do have my favourites). And I do take a tonne of notes. It’s a whole thing.
Since my earliest reading years, with Anne of Green Gables say, I’ve been obsessed about the theme of ‘home’. It’s a whole ‘other thing.
What a lovely and wide range of books!
It’s been a very busy reading year (which wasn’t at all my plan).
Seeing Ghosts is the one I’ve had my eye on for a while, but as far as I know it’s not available over here, and I missed seeing it on NetGalley or similar.
Hunh, I guess it does have a particular American slant, now that I think about it. If it’s any consolation, I think you’d prefer Crying in H-Mart (a little more medical detail and stylistically it has a little more open vulnerability).
I’ll read both if I get the chance 🙂 I did request Crying in H Mart for review when it was released over here, but my multiple e-mails were ignored.
Such a fascinating range of titles. I would love to read The English Governess at the court of Siam, I saw the King and I numerous times growing up.
It’s a long time since I read any Ishiguro, so glad you enjoyed Klara and the Sun God, I wasn’t sure about it either when I first heard about it. However, it might be one I would enjoy after all.
Me too! I revisited it to write an essay, and it had been years since I’d read/seen the story (the movie, the TV series…I loved it) and it was so interesting to revisit it and pay more attention to Leonowens’ own writing.
I’m fairly sure that you would enjoy it. I can’t explain where my hesitation resided, because I just loved The Remains of the Day and never disliked the others I’ve read, but for some reason I wasn’t at all sure it would be a match and was pleased to find I’d misjudged.
Fascinating post.
I’m impressed by the number of books you read, the breadth of the topics they cover and your ability to find an Ariadne thread between them.
In terms of quantity, this year has absolutely stood out, and so many works of quality in the mix too: eventually I had to cut the thread and just post these! heheh
What a range!
Relentlessly curious!
What a wide ranging post! I read Songs for the Flames last year and was very impressed with it. Absolutely agree with your description of The Woman from Uruguay, a book I wasn’t expecting to like quite as much as I did.
It is definitely one of those collections that reminds us how important it is to read stories slowly; he packs in so much (which I’m aware of even though I’m lacking a lot of what would be useful background for his work)!
Yes, and I know exactly what you’re thinking but not saying! Perhaps a great example of how some books are clearly novellas, and not because of their page/word count. They illustrate the form somehow.
Interesting books – you always read so widely that I’m very impressed! My reading year has been mostly wonderful, but it will be hard to pick out highlights as all of the books have been pretty much great!
Funny you would mention that, I just went through my log the other day to highlight the most remarkable books and it was hard to narrow that selection process. The more one reads, the more good stuff one reads!