Author:

2013, Archipelago Books

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

The good people at Archipelago Books are out with a new Antonio Tabucchi title in English this spring, and while I can’t gush about it the way I did about The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, I think you might still find The Woman of Porto Pim worth your while.

The title short story is a classic, old-fashioned tale of love, betrayal, and murder set in a small whaling village. The voice of the narrator, an aged tavern singer, is full of longing and mystery. It’s one of the finest short stories I’ve read anywhere in a long time.

The book, on the other hand, is something more curious. It’s a tourist’s love letter to the Azores, a set of remote Atlantic islands considered an autonomous region of Portugal. Fueled by a hybrid of research, personal experience, and imagination, The Woman of Porto Pim offers a brief overview on the whaling regulations governing the islands, a first-person account of a whale hunt, and a few observations on human beings from the point of view of the hunted whales.

The best pieces in here are as good as anything in Flying Creatures. In addition to the title story, there’s “Antero de Quental. A Life,” the brief biography of a famous Portuguese poet told as if it were fiction and “Hesperides. A Dream in Letter Form,” which describes a set of mythical islands and the gods worshipped there.

It wouldn’t be fair to judge the rest of the book’s material as stories. They are fragments or collections of fragments, some surprising or interesting in their own right, while others  only serve to set up other fragments or stories. Sometimes these feel like pure wandering, like even Tabucchi himself is wondering what to make of them, something he can be disarmingly upfront about in the prologue.

“The pages entitled ‘High Seas,’” he says, in reference to one of two extended collections of fragments “aspire to no more than a factual account, the only merit they can claim being their trustworthiness.”

Which is also a way of saying that much of the book, even when it takes on every appearance of standard travel reporting, should not be regarded as “trustworthy” in the same sense, something else Tabucchi tries to be upfront about with his reader in the prologue:

I am very fond of honest travel books and have always read plenty of them. They have the virtue of bringing an elsewhere, at once theoretical and plausible, to our inescapable, unyielding here. Yet an elementary sense of loyalty obliges me to put any reader who imagines that this little book contains a travel diary on his or her guard. The travel diary requires either a flair for on-the-spot writing or a memory untainted by the imagination that memory itself generates–qualities which out of a paradoxical sense of realism, I have given up any hope of acquiring.

The book’s hybrid fictional/non-fictional nature might be both its biggest drawback for an American audience and its most important recommendation. Is it fiction? Is it non-fiction? If you get too hung up on that question, you’ll miss the islands as they pass by on the port side. Try to relax and watch the whale carcasses bobbing gently on the surface of the ocean.

So if you’re into dreamy travel literature, and you’re ready for a little genre bending, you might just like this for its own sake. If that doesn’t sound like your particular day at the beach, try Flying Creatures first. If you like that as much as I think you will, then come back to Porto Pim for the glimpse it offers into the singular geographical obsession of a great 20th century author. True or false, the book will make you more curious about the Azores, if only to prove to yourself that Tabucchi didn’t invent them.

Similar reads: The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico by Antonio Tabucchi, A Winter in the Azores and a Summer at the Furnas by John van Voorst, and The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

Author: Jane Shore

2012, Houghton-Mifflin

Filed Under: Poetry

Jane Shore is a poet of memory, sometimes sharp, sometimes sweet.  She is a poet of moments with family and friends, also sharp and sweet.  Spanning childhood above a New Jersey dress shop, fleets of Jewish mothers and aunts, mourning her own mother, and raising her own daughter: her poems are usually both in simultaneity, and always to her soft and playful music.  Not near the end of her already long career, her new book collects her best and brings with them some fresh quirks she has remembered.  So That Said repeats what she has already said, but says also, this style has already been said by me.  She is moving on.  High stakes she has at least one more statement to make―if not in mind―a the Tempest of her own, her own Geography III, perhaps two or three of them.

That Said starts with the new, then works through her five previous volumes, in order.  Most major poets are best known by their selected or collected works―a mistake, I feel, as most including Shore’s leave out cover artworks and internal subdivisions, not to mention the all-too-revealing worse poems, poems the authors consider irrelevant.  This distinction, between still relevant and not, validates a selected poems collection beyond publicity, beyond best-of.  Which poems did these authors at one time considered worthy of publication, but years later not?  I have a suspicion that most worse poems are originally included only because the authors so badly want them there, work of so many months or years making them less worse.  Shore’s books are slim, so she need not leave many out, but some she does.

And she does, quite significantly, keep the individual book dedications, each marking a new relationship or loss of one, expressing her artistic motivations lying therein.  Her book The Minute Hand, with its undercurrents of a biological clock, has no happy ending―how much promise does the final poem’s shipwreck on an island hold? (More than you think, that’s how the poem ends.)  The second to last poem is dedicated, but to her favorite poet, a woman three times her age.  But the whole book is dedicated, “For Howard,” her husband.  My favorite book, Music Minus One is inscribed, “In memory of my parents,” giving dates to show they died within three years of each other.  The new poems of That Said are undedicated.

Whenever selections or collections present poems chronologically―and as importantly, maintain the division between previously published volumes―the whole of that author’s work benefits, as does posterity.  Shore plays to her regular readers by placing the new poems front and center, a minorly troublesome secession to marketing.  When strictly chronological, the progression of the poet’s thought and emotions across his or her career are laid in line, and this line is rarely direct.

I now divide Shore’s career, and the stories of her family―and the arc of Shore’s works is the story of her family―into early Jane (her first book, Eye Level, 1977) mature Jane (The Minute Hand, 1987, and Music Minus One, 1996) and tongue-in-cheek-contented Jane (Happy Family, 1999, A Yes-or-No Answer, 2008, and the new poems in That Said).  What I find so valuable about her mature work, and my major distinction between her second and third phases, these middle book are published a full decade after the previous, a full decade for her to craft, to polish, to make more fully shine.

For a poet as emotionally invested as Shore, a fierce craftsman, does not skip casually from one book a decade for three decades, to three years between books, a breach between her mature and more recent works.  How were her poems so easily snapping into states of perfection, why so swiftly reaching cannot-be-better-than status?  With the birth of her daughter, Emma, gone from Ms. Shore’s lyrical dwellings are the lost milk-carton children of Music Minus One, replaced but three years later by a certain, specific dish of thrifty, Chinese-American cuisine.

Similar Reads: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Selected Poems; Elizabeth Bishop, Collected Poems; Marianne Moore, Collected Poems.

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Read

Saga - Aaron’s mentioned this comic a lot on the podcast and in his column. I’m not a big comic reader, but Saga is one I’ve stuck with. [NV]

Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Halfway though teacher school and finding things becoming a bit stale, I’ve started to branch out from my practical classwork and explore more pedagogical primary texts. Paulo Freire’s masterwork, written as a response to thinkers like Marx and Hegel, is not an easy read. But it’s got a lot to say, and sheds light on why, despite our best efforts, America’s schools are failing. If only the policymakers would read this sort of stuff. [SC]

Watch

Room 237 – Anyone who’s ever really loved a movie, even if it wasn’t The Shining, will get a kick out of this documentary. Director Rodney Ascher gives his subjects, all Shining obsessives, room to explain their often bizarre theories about the film’s hidden messages without judgment, and only slight traces of irony. The plausibility of the interpretations isn’t the point; Ascher is more interested in the dedication to lateral thinking, and the unique relationship between reader and text. [AB]

PBS Digital Studios – The channels especially worth checking out are Off Book, Idea Channel, and Blank on Blank, but if you only have time for one video, watch the Blank on Blank featuring Larry King (“Larry King on Getting Seduced”). [MV]

The Glades - Unassuming, surprisingly good cop show on USA. The first two seasons are out on Netflix. The new season arrives this May. Also try Life starring that dude from Homeland. [NV]

All the Cartoon Network programming recently added to Netflix – I spent a lot of time watching Dexter’s Laboratory in college, but never while high. And I’m not high while watching it now on Instant View. I don’t know what that means, except that I am obviously an adult. You can be, too, if you watch a bunch of cartoons all the time. Transformers, G.I. Joe, Jem, Voltron, He-Man, and other 80s action cartoons, also on Netflix – the thing I said above about being cool, but times ten. [AB]

Adventure Time – For some reason Aaron left this off the list of great CN shows that just came to Netflix. Adventure Time is one of my favorite shows, maybe ever–especially as you get to the later seasons–some of the references are so subtle and esoteric that even the most diehard Zelda-fan stoner would probably miss them. But, like Dexter’s Laboratory, drugs aren’t compulsory. [SC]

Use

You Need a Budget - I got this on Steam for $20 and it’s already been worth the price. It’s a simple budget program, but the accompanying iPhone app makes it easy to keep track of your expenditures, without giving it your bank info, like Mint asks for. [NV]

Listen

Professor Blastoff - Comedians Tig Notaro, David Huntsberger, and Kyle Dunnigan share a hobbyist’s interest in and enthusiasm for science, philosophy, and unexplained phenomena, and their podcast is ostensibly an occasion to explore such topics with guests, including fellow comics, scholars, and the occasional fan. Every episode reliably descends into silliness, and recent highlights include the game “Name That Punky”, which is based on Dunnigan’s uncanny impression of “Punky Brewster” actor George Gaynes. [AB]

The Terror – The Flaming Lips’ latest album is pretty ballsy in how out there it is. Gone are the catchy, happy tunes ripe for advertisement-background exploitation of the last 10-15 years. This album is full of complex, psychedelic sound layers that harkens back to the days of Zaireeka. (I linked to the video–NSFW–for one of the songs.) [SC]

Waiting For Something to Happen – The critical consensus seems to be that “Waiting For Something to Happen” is a lesser effort than Veronica Falls’ debut album, but I’m enjoying it just as much as the eponymous record. And I can’t stop listening to “Buried Alive”, so that’s a solid recommendation even if you don’t think the rest of the album holds up. [AB]

Planet Money - For years I avoided the Planet Money podcast because high finance sounds so damn boring. As it turns out, this podcast is closer to Radiolab than CNBC. Recent episodes touched on the economic weirdness of North Korea (e.g., they can’t get gas, so their trucks run on wood), the way the Amish do business, and the insane history of the American federal income tax. [NV]

Sklarbro Country – Randy and Jason Sklar file reports from the more absurd shadowlands for the sports world with their twice weekly podcast (“Sklarbro County”, the sister show, takes a more general “weird news” approach.) While many comedy podcasts are, for better or worse, heavily improvised and ramshackle, “Sklarbro Country” is carefully crafted, while still allowing the Sklars to riff on stories and banter with their guests. If you have no interest in sports, or aren’t already a fan of the Sklar Brothers, you will be after listening. [AB]

Play

Zombies, Run – As much an audiobook as a game, this iPhone/Android app makes going out for a jog into an interactive game. Run to complete missions, and the more you run the more supplies you get to build your township HQ. There’s not much too it, and the story is pretty cheesy, but it’s a nice alternative to music and podcasts when out for a run. [SC]

Game of Thrones (the Xbox game) - I picked this up for $20 on Amazon, expecting nothing, and it knocked my socks off. It’s like watching a long season of the HBO show, with a pretty unique RPG game in the breaks between cutscenes. One of the best videogame stories I’ve ever seen. [NV]

Papers, Please – Indie game where you act as a border checkpoint agent for a fictional country in the Soviet bloc. Poses some pretty interesting ethical and moral dilemmas. You can play it free in your browser. [SC]

Young Avengers 

Who Made It? Kieron Gillen (w), Jamie McKelvie & Mike Norton (a), Matthew Wilson (c), and Clayton Cowles (l)

What Is It?: One of the most beloved comics of the 2000s, relaunched under the Marvel Now! banner by friends/frequent collaborators Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, with the excellent Mike Norton on inks. Young Avengers follows teenaged heroes Wiccan, Hulkling, Hawkeye (Kate Bishop, the young, female Hawkeye), Noh-Varr, Miss America Chavez, and Kid Loki as they try to stop an alien parasite from using them as bio-batteries.

Why Aren’t You Reading It?:

• You hate “teen” books
• Like my personal podcast pals, you laughed at my description of Gillen and McKelvie’s excellent Phonogram and its sequel, Phonogram: the Singles Club
• You’re too cool or grown-up for superhero comics
• You’re a jerk

I can’t help you with that last one; you’ll have to work it out on your own. Probably it’s best to begin with therapy, or a support group for jerks, something like that. Your other objections, however, are much easier to address.

While Young Avengers does follow the exploits of teenaged heroes (or not-quite teenaged, in Loki’s case) who are grappling with romantic relationships, the awkward balance of fun and responsibility, and disapproving parents, it’s no more a “teen” book than Avengers is an “adult” book. In fact the first issue of Young Avengers addresses sex with a maturity and humor that many comics, mainstream or otherwise, can’t manage. Yes, Gillen is unabashedly writing about the experience of being young, but he takes that experience seriously. Which isn’t to suggest that the book is a grim trudge through “realistic” problems – far from it. Young Avengers is thick with the writer’s dry wit and obsession with pop music, and is on the whole a fun read every month. But underneath the humor is a genuine interest in the lives of young people.

I came to the book at a time when I’m doing everything I can to avoid stories about teenagers having fun; they just end up reminding me that my own youth was underwhelming and dull, spent fearing life instead of embracing it. Much as I enjoyed it, I had a hard time reading The Singles Club for that exact reason. Young Avengers is easier to take because it feels much less plausible (the magic in the Phonogram books is all just meant to be figurative anyway, isn’t it?) but I still feel that pang of regret when I read it. No amount of vivid superhero action can cover up the consistency and clarity of the characters’ voices.

A strong, emotionally honest narrative is crucial in making a superhero comic cool. But design consciousness is in, and no superhero comic can be cool without a distinctive style. Look at Hawkeye: the striking covers, the palette heavy on purple, the minimalist title page – all provocative design decisions, and all frequently cited as reasons why readers and critics love the title. Young Avengers isn’t as overtly against the current as Hawkguy, but Jaime McKelvie’s attention to fashion and the expressiveness of his and Mike Norton’s clean lines aren’t commonly seen in superhero comics. For example, the schematic/splash page of Noh-Varr’s fight scene (complete with key to identify important moments in the choreography) is not only a novel depiction of action – maybe the only thing that comes close is Frank Quitely’s and Chris Burnham’s depictions of Damian Wayne’s acrobatics in Batman and Robin and Batman, Inc. – but also a neat bit of pop art. That’s probably not everyone’s idea of cool, but it’s aimed at the young and hip – the rest of us get to congratulate ourselves for being savvy enough to catch on.

Finally, Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley implicitly endorsed the book by providing a great alternate cover for the first issue – if nothing else convinces you to try it out, that should.

Where You Should Start: There’ve only been four issues so far, and a number of reprintings, so you should be able to pick up the entire run so far from your local comic shop. And if you don’t have a local comic shop or just prefer to read digitally, every issue is available through Comixology. There’s also a trade paperback collecting the first five issues scheduled for release this September, but why wait that long?

Author: Alicia Suskin Ostriker

2013, University of Pittsburgh Press

Filed Under: Poetry

To be a Jew means different things to different people, perhaps especially to different Jews.  Is it the religion?  The history?  The ethnicity?  If the religion, what about it?  The belief system?  The holiday calendar?  In her Preface to The Book of Life, Alicia Ostriker asks these questions a little differently:  “What is it to be a Jewish poet?  What is it to be a Jewish woman poet?”  Jewishness, she tells us, “has grown on me like a taste for herring, like a needle in a sweatshop relentlessly stitching,” evoking Jewish cultural images.  Which is to say that it’s been a process of discovery for her, and continues to be.  These poems, culled from a third of a century of writing, track that process.  Her parents and grandparents were Marxists, for whom religion was opium.  The essence of Judaism for them was social activism.  We see those concerns in Ostriker’s verse but we also find a mystical, visionary, even prophetic thread as well.

The Book of Life is divided into six parts, which roughly cover the various aspects of her Jewishness, her Jewish anxieties and interests.  The first part consists of more personal poems, growing up Jewish in America and specifically the lower east side of Manhattan, poems about parents, grandparents, grandchildren.  An elegy for Allen Ginsberg.  These poems are very “haimish”  — homey, folksy, if not really nostalgic; they contain a certain angst.

The poem “Hunger,” about her mother and grandmother, ends with the lines,

And I too had dreams of improvement and perfection.

Another crazy Jewish mother –

I too hungered to give abundant life to my children.

This suggests a potent theme we see throughout this collection:  The essence of being Jewish in America, for Ostricker, was the seeking of a better life.  “For we believed a better world was coming.” (“Born in the USA”)  And so it is for the large family of American Jews.  For her grandparents’ generation, America was the Goldench medina, the “golden land” in the Yiddish phrase (See the poem, “Old Men”).   Allen Ginsberg, the JuBu – a rabbi dreaming of a perfect world, in her eyes (“The neurotic utopian/Prophetic fairy side/Of the guy never/Surrendered really” – “Elegy for Allen”).

The poems in The Book of Life are grouped thematically rather than chronologically.  Without doing the research there’s no way of knowing when many of these poems were written (some come with dates), but the first section lays the foundation for Ostricker’s particular “Jewish” foci – making the world a better place to live, the impulse of her family, the impulse of American Diaspora Jews.

Religion itself – the opium of the masses – merits a great big Why?  What is the point of all this ritual?  (“What does the contriver have in mind/The contrivance wants to know//Because otherwise what is the point/Of all this moaning//Pretending to be sorry for everything/Groveling like a chained-up snake” – “Kol Nidre”)  What is religion for if not to improve mankind?

Ostriker’s concerns about equality extend to the role of women in Judaism.  At times she is impatient and even downright contemptuous of the patriarchal structure that excludes or marginalizes women.  Hence, her absorption in the Shekinah, the mystical feminine side of God.  The poem, “Kol Nidre” concludes: “Please look at us and take us in your arms/Not like a master, like a mother”

A section on Jewish genocide – Russian pogroms, the Holocaust – underscores the aspiration for a better world and is followed by the visionary poems from the volcano sequence, many of which are simply entitled “psalm” and also invoke the shekinah.  The short verse entitled “Judgment” sums it up:

One of these days

oh one of these days

will be a festival and a judgment

 

and our enemies will be thrown

into the pit while we rejoice

and sing hymns

 

Some people actually think this way

The last line kicks you in the stomach.  So much for triumphalism.

And then these sections naturally give way to one about Palestine.  “Lamenting the Inevitable” acknowledges the neverending resentments of the oppressed and the oppressor, globally. “The Bride” is a poem about Jerusalem, also in this context of continual strife.  In “Tearing the Poem Up and Eating It,” a poem in memory of Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated Israeli Prime Minister who worked for peace with the Palestinians, Ostricker writes,

I watch

Zeal like a tough many-legged insect

Pestiferous, running and biting, indestructible

Ecstasy pressing the tender trigger.

 

Hope like a manhole the clown falls into,

Wind of the spirit flows toward the aperture

Like gnats pouring into throats of birds,

A man like a pink-gray worm on the sidewalk.

Compassion and justice like raped girls after a party

Of whom one asks, What were they drinking,

Why did they dress in skirts so short?

Bleak.  It’s almost despairing.  Is there any reason to hope?  Are we fools, deluding ourselves that things can ever be any different?  As she writes at the end of the “The Eighth and Thirteenth,” the Babi Yar pogrom poem (the numbers refer to the Shostakovich symphonies):  “The words never again/Clashing against the words/Again and again –/That music.”

But there are still the aspirations; there’s still the persistent hope, no matter how deluded, for a better world to come (can Israel still be a beacon unto the nations of the world, she asks herself at one point).  The poem, “What Is Needed after Food” concludes:

My friend and I, we don’t ask for much, we read Amichai.

We’re not messianic, we don’t expect utopia, which is anyway

Another name for a smiling prison.

 

But love is a good idea, we think, why on earth not.

Simple women that we are, simple mothers cleaning up

The kitchen after one meal to make it ready for the next.

It’s that mystical, feminine, healing aspect of Judaism, the shekinah, to which she aspires.

The poem that concludes this collection, a section all to itself, the eight-page verse, “The Book of Life,” is a meditation on life and human creation, artistic and natural.  “The Book of Life” is a central image of Jewish High Holy Days liturgy.  On Rosh Hashanah – New Year – our fates are written in The Book of Life and on Yom Kippur the book is sealed.  But is it all vanity?  Futility?  Does our love amount to nothing in the end?

Integrity unobscured by death

Is what we hope for, then.

But to whom should we say

Inscribe me in the Book of Life.

 

To whom if not each other

To whom if not our fine insolent children

To whom if not our piteous ancestors

To whom if not the ugly lovely forms

We have created,

The forms we wish to coax

From the clay of nonexistence –

However persistent the voice

That rasps hopeless, that claims

Your fault, your fault –

As if outside the synagogue we stood

On holier ground in a perennial garden

Jews like ourselves have just begun to plant.

Ostriker’s poems are often unpunctuated, just the words there conveying their wisdom, unadorned by complicated syntax.  And speaking of “wisdom,” she loves epigraphs, wise pronouncements to usher in her own observations, always at the start of each section, frequently to introduce individual poems, with a sense of gravity.  Sometimes, though rarely, there’s a sly sense of humor that cuts through the impatience, the irony and grief.  But then, you don’t read Ostriker for belly laughs.

Definitely

A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré (out 5/7)

John le Carré, possibly the world’s most famous spy novelist (at worst, he’s number 2 behind Ian Fleming) is still going strong at 81. His latest is about a counter-terror operation that goes wrong and gets covered up, and one man’s effort to correct it. If it’s anywhere near as good as its book trailer, I’m on board.

And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini (out 5/21)

The pre-eminent Afghan-American novelist has a new novel out this month. The flap copy is maddeningly vague, saying the new novel is “about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations.” I’m not sure what that means, but as the preeminent writer about an often overlooked part of the world, Hosseini gets a pass for shoddy PR work.

A Guide to Being Born: Stories, by Ramona Ausubel (out 5/2)

Ramona Ausubel’s relatively well-received debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, centered around a Jewish village in Romania in 1939, and their decision to “deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch.” I’m a fan of magical realism, but I think it works better in the short form, and that’s why I’m more intrigued by this story collection, with an abundance of weird ideas.

Maybe

The Names of Our Tears, by P.L. Gaus (out 5/28)

A mystery revolving around an Amish drug mule. I’ve never heard of Gaus, so I can’t vouch that it’ll be good, but you don’t hear that premise every day.

NOS4A2, by Joe Hill (out now)

Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son, and he seems to be following in the old man’s footsteps (minus the booze and drugs, hopefully). Hill’s new horror novel, about a supernatural killer and the escaped victim who’s trying to hunt him down, feature a nauseating title and terrible flap copy, but it’s been getting pretty decent buzz.

The Kings and Queens of Roam, by Daniel Wallace (out 5/7)

The author of Big Fish returns with a new “modern fairy tale.”

You Are One of Them, by Elliott Holt (out 5/30)

Holt’s debut novel follows a pair of American girls—Jenny and Sarah—who, at the height of the cold war, write to the Soviet premier asking for peace. The premier invites Jenny to Moscow, but ignores Sarah’s letter, which makes Sarah jealous until Jenny’s plane crashes, killing her and her family. Ten years later, Sarah gets a letter suggesting that Jenny’s death might’ve been a hoax. Sounds like a unique premise for digging into the old exploring-a-friendship trope.

The River of No Return, by Bee Ridgeway (out now)

This sci-fi debut novel follows a Napoleon-era soldier who wakes up in a modern hospital two hundred years after he should have died, the ward of a time-travel organization known as The Guild.

Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of WW II, by Mitchell Zuckoff (out now)

The author of the well-received Lost in Shangri-La returns with another true story of WWII. This time around, Zuckoff follows the crews of two planes that crash in northern Greenland, and their struggle to survive in the harsh climate until rescue arrives.

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Not a lot of reviews to get excited about this week. The May edition of Nico’s Book Radar will run tomorrow, so check back then for some additional reading ideas.

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My Beloved Brontosaurus, by Brian Switek. Reviewed by Tess Taylor (Barnes and Noble Review).

Dinosaurs are fucking awesome. I will fight anyone who says otherwise. Because of this, dinosaur books are almost always written with enthusiasm and even exhuberance, which in turn makes reading about dinosaurs more often than not also fucking awesome. Who wouldn’t want to check out a “zany, sometimes mind-blowing romp through the new science of old bones”–I’m in.

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Bunker Hill, by Nathaniel Philbrick. Reviewed by Walter Isaacson (Washington Post).

I used to live a block from the Bunker Hill monument, otherwise I might have overlooked this one. But if you’re in the mood for a history book, this actually looks pretty good. And anyone who wants to join in the post-bombing Boston love might want to dig into this and learn about the city’s revolutionary roots. I’ve already ordered a copy for a father’s day gift.

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Quickly: Franzen on spending time with a self-help book. Two US presidents co-leading the country sounds like a disaster. This novel about Mallory’s third Everest ascent has promise.

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Whack-Job Girls

ten stories, real short

Bonnie ZoBell, what a name!

worth a look and see

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He Died With His Eyes Open

mystery reprint

an A.L. Kennedy rec

deserves to be read

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The Quantum Thief

very smart sci-fi

deals in quantum abstractions

solid heist tale, too

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My Planet

the other new Roach

just old Readers’ Digest bits

not that worth your time

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What Things Are Made Of

“oil-slicked doomed penguins”

deliriously strange poems

check this collection

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The Best of All Possible Worlds

for shame i09

calling babytown frolics!

convoluted mess

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2013, Ballantine Books

Filed under: Sci-fi

Find it at Goodreads

I think my sci-fi kick is officially over. I started reading this book after seeing a gushing post about it at io9, a preeminent sci-fi website. The post was titled “If you want to see what science fiction is capable of in 2013, you ought to pick up this book.” There are other bold claims in the piece (like “it’s a quick, fun read”), but the title is heart of the matter. If this is all science fiction is capable of these days, I don’t want any part of it.

In The Best of All Possible Worlds, there are four races of humans in the galaxy: Terrans, Ntshune, Sadiri, and Zhinuvians. The Sadiri are long-lived telepaths who have explored the universe with their “mindships”—they’re basically halfway between Vulcans and Elves. In fact, one Sadiri clan actually calls themselves Elves. It’s almost stupefyingly derivative, and the world-building is by far the best part of the novel.

The Terrans are humans as we think of them, the Zhinuvians or performers are something, and the Ntshune are… I don’t even know. Partially that’s because the utterly dry and life-devoid prose put me to sleep every time I started to read this book, and partially it’s because it doesn’t matter what the Ntshune are, because they have nothing to do with anything.

The inciting incident of the novel (I actually hesitate to call it a novel, more on that shortly), is a horrible act of genocide, committed by the Ainya against the Sadiri. Specifically, the Ainya blew up Sadira altogether. Which seems to have been a stupid decision, because the Sadiri and their semi-allies the Zhinuvians are the only ones with ships that can reach the Ain. So the Ainya are stranded wherever that planet is, and they literally don’t factor into the novel again, ever.

Instead, Lord focuses her novel on Grace Delarua, a scientist or a military officer working in a small crew of sociologists or government workers who are trying to get the remaining Sadiri on various worlds to register in some kind of marriage database to save their species. Or maybe to keep the unmarried male Sadiri from homicidal mania, which is evidently something they do despite being the smartest and wisest race in the universe. Or just the area, or whatever.

I’m sorry that I’m a little vague on the details, but I had one hell of a time paying attention. The prose and especially the dialogue is often aggressively formal and stilted, and the characters are completely flat when they’re not behaving in bizarre, unexplainable ways.

Here’s an example, when the team goes to an opera and, while waiting outside, they see the super-sexy Zhinuvian opera star, wearing a skimpy dress, duck into the backstage entrance. Delarua’s male colleagues watch the star duck into the door, and then this happens (the “I” voice is Delarua).

Heads everywhere were turning, not just the Sadiri ones. There was a small collective sigh when she disappeared from view. I stared at my colleagues in amazement.

“You—all of you—you were looking that girl up and down!” I didn’t know whether to be appalled or hugely entertained.

“First Officer Delarua,” Joral said in a tone so severe that he almost sounded like Dllenahkh in chastising mode, “while it is true that we are Sadiri and therefore not prone to mental distractions, we are more than capable of aesthetic appreciation of the feminine human form.”

I had no answer to that, so I rounded on Tarik. “Well, then, you—you’re married!”

“I am allowed to look,” he said uncertainly.

“I’d confirm that with Nasiha if I were you,” I said skeptically.

Dllenahkh’s voice was utterly composed. “There is no need to be concerned, Delarua.”

A prize to the man with the unpronounceable name! There is no need to be concerned. For my money, this is the worst rut sci-fi falls into: a carefully imagined world full of diverse species, written by an author who must awkwardly dissect every incident of normal human behavior because it’s out of character for her non-human creations.

There’s simply nothing new here, these guys are acting pretty normal. Even Delarua herself can’t articulate why she gets so worked up about it, and ultimately there’s simply no point to this scene. There’s also the trying-too-hard sci-fi cadence of the prose (“almost sounded like Dllenahkh in chastising mode”), and the problem of having too many personality-free characters to keep track of (the difference between Joral and Tarik is that one is married).

Oh, and Delarua? The woman who’s so uncomfortable with the meekest sexual urge that she flies into histrionics over glances? She’s also the subject of the novel’s love story. So you can imagine just how chaste and passionless and utterly utterly boring that is. (There’s a lot of hand-holding. That’s not a joke.) io9 called it “a giddy romance, which is so light-hearted it almost approaches being a screwball comedy at times,” which means I just can’t trust io9 recommendations anymore.

Anyway, this kind of kludginess pervades the novel, but what really dooms it is the lack of a novel’s plot. Instead of a novel-sized arc, we get a series of discrete stories. The team deals with Delarua’s semi-telepathic ex-husband for 40 pages, then a thorny diplomatic mission for 50, there’s a cave-in at one point (I know, what?), etc., etc. None of it really adds to the others, and the destruction of the Sadiri homeworld—by which the novel measures time (“Zero hour plus one year five months four days”)—ultimately never develops past a backdrop. I kept waiting for something to fall into place and it never did.

So, in summation, avoid this novel. And I, at least, will be avoiding io9, because I don’t need a site that lists all of the sci-fi in the world, I need a site with smart reviews by passionate fans that will lead me to good books. And io9 is unfortunately not that.

Similar reads: Instead of listing books I also hated, here are a couple of my favorite recent sci-fi books (recent as in, the past two years): Constellation Games, by Leonard Richardson; Immobility, by Brian Evenson; Machine Man, by Max Barry

Many of these blurbs confuse C4 contributor Dave Duhr, so for the next couple of weeks he will be writing open letters to a few of these blurbers and we’ll run them in this space. Because we’re confused, too.

The first is addressed to Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones), whose Yellow Birds blurb reads, “This is a novel I’ve been waiting for. The Yellow Birds is born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence. All of us owe Kevin Powers our heartfelt gratitude.”]

Dear Alice Sebold:

Hi!

I write to you today in the hopes that you’ll clarify for me the first line of your Yellow Birds blurb. When you said, “This is a novel I’ve been waiting for,” did you mean that when you wrote the blurb, you still had not received the manuscript? How long had you been waiting? Sometimes when I order a book the shipping takes nearly two weeks! So I understand your aggravation. But I wonder if it was really necessary to take a public potshot at Mr. Powers and/or his publicist for their tardiness in getting a copy to you.

It’s strange, too, that you would then write the rest of the blurb before receiving and reading the book. Unless you wrote the second and third lines days later, after the book arrived and after (I hope, though I’m not certain) reading it in its entirety? In which case—and this is solely for future reference, of course—I would have recommended expressing the passage of time in some manner. For example: “This is a novel I’ve been waiting for. (Dum dee dum dee dum.) Mail came today, no bird book. (Dum dee dum dee dum.) No mail on Saturdays now, WTF? (Dum dee dum dee dum.) Oh wow it came today! (Dum dee dum dee dum dee dum dee dum dee dum.) I have now read a few pages of The Yellow Birds and can confidently say that so far it seems born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence,” yada.

Better yet, talk about the delay after the fact instead: “This was a novel I waited for, and then it came. As it turns out, The Yellow Birds is born from experience,” yada.

Or perhaps you’re just confused by the whole definite vs. indefinite article thing, and what you really meant to write was “This is *the* novel I’ve been waiting for.” As in, you’ve been waiting quite a long time for a novel as [glowing adjective] as The Yellow Birds to come along. (If you do struggle with definite and indefinite articles, here is the a good primer.)

If that is the case, then I am truly sorry that until Mr. Powers came along no writer had met your expectations. Many pre-Powers authors tried to write novels “born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence.” Before I read your blurb, I thought that many, many of those writers had succeeded! lol. Now I know better. Which means that I can finally justify clearing my bookshelf of all but The Yellow Birds: The five copies of the galley the publisher sent, the three copies of the hardcover the publisher sent, and the (so far only) one paperback the publisher sent. (“This is a paperback I’ve been waiting for.” lol, jk.)

Mostly, though, I am writing to thank you. To thank you heartfeltly for informing me that “All of us owe Kevin Powers our heartfelt gratitude.”

Gosh, what a load off! My whole life I’ve been building up this stockpile of gratitude, day by day by day (and almost all of it heartfelt). But! I’ve had nobody to give it to. Why? Because I’ve had nobody to tell me who to give it to! I’ve had nobody to speak on my behalf.

Until you came along. And you’ll be glad to know (unless he already told you?) that I sent Mr. Powers all all all of my heartfelt gratitude. (“This is a gratitude I’ve been waiting for,” he said, two days before it arrived, jk, lol.)

The problem I’m having is that this all happened months ago, when I first read your blurb. Since then I’ve built up some new gratitude, because as soon as you send gratitude to a person, more gratitude rushes in to fill the hole in the heart’s gratitude chamber. (Unless I’m doing it wrong?)

So I’m sure I heartfeltly owe this new gratitude to someone, but who?

Now that I’m writing this, I wonder if perhaps you are that someone? For alerting me to the massive shortcomings of pre- (and probably post-) Powers literature, and for telling me to whom I owed that first store of gratitude. But how can I send this new gratitude to you without first being told, by you, that I owe it to you?

Please advise.

Best,

David Duhr

P.S. A friend at Little, Brown just sent me a copy of your original blurb: “This is a novel I’ve been waiting over two weeks for, and I’m really getting impatient. A wait is killing me. I should take the break. Maybe I’ll reread A Lovely Bones. It’s one of a best books ever written, if not a best! You should read it, too! Bye bye.”

Now that is a blurb rendered with compassion and intelligence!