notanotherbookreview

FINGERLESS, a novel by Ian Donnell Arbuckle (Pelekinesis Press, January 12). is unlike many stories about transgender protagonists in that Lita’s life, in the small town in which she grew up, is surprisingly normal. Some distance from Spokane, where family values do count, along with civic virtues, Lita has a steady job transcribing medical reports. In fact, when she takes vacation time to officially come out as a female, her boss and co-workers are mostly supportive. At the worst, there's raised eyebrows that first week she’s back but people don’t want to be obvious. Lita’s highschool sweetheart, Shasta, comes to lunch with their 3-year old daughter, Jilly, and she could not be more supportive. Still, Lita’s introduced as Aunt Lita, as per their agreement to give her a normal life. Most amazing is that Lita’s father, who’s missing some fingers, obviously loves and respects her no matter what her gender!  Lita’s world is in tumult over this normalcy, which is in contrast to t...

J.Boyce Gleason’s ANVIL OF GOD, Book One of the Carolingian Chronicles, is a desperately intense tale of the Dark Ages, where people lived by the law of the sword I grew up on Elizabeth Captive Princess but the genre of historical fiction, with the exception of Wolf Hall, has often seemed stilted to me in terms of emotional logic. ANVIL OF GOD is a happy discovery. J.Boyce Gleason creates a world of warring Christians and Pagans with great emotional sense. The motivations of the characters and the beliefs that shape their actions, are completely convincing and emotionally very intense. Boyce’s pagan world derives from Norse mythology and the rituals described are visceral, more about the aesthetics of sensual human interaction than supernatural, but he leaves that question open.   The story is based on the history of Charles “the Hammer” Martel, Mayor of the Palace to the Merovingian kings. The scant facts leave a lot of room for invention.  Martel was a warlord, who...

F*ck Art (Let's Dance): An Artist’s Memoir by Sally Eckhoff (Water Street Press) Sally Echoff spent ten years, beginning in1977, living on East10 th street in New York's Alphabet City, when this area was a no-man’s land; a mecca for drugs and crime, as well as storefront galleries and punk bands. In F*ck Art (Let’s Dance), she describes her life as an East Village artist, a young woman working to make meaningful art, pay her rent, and be noticed in the “scene,” a creative vortex of talent and desire. With humor and compassion, F*ck Art pays homage to the NewYorkers (locals, natives and transplants), who joined in this ecstatic moment in time.  For along with the improbable rise in prices for East Village art in the go-go 80’s, came inflation of real estate—and the end of the era. F*ck Art (Let’s Dance) began with Echoff's upbringing in a Long Island suburb. Her mother, whose family owned a paint manufacturing business, channeled her talents into homemaking.  Her f...

The Lowlands by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf) In Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Lowlands, Gauri, Subhash, and Udayan, form a triangle of love, politics and circumstance in an India unfamiliar to many westerners. It’s part of Lahiri's art that you warm to her fondness for a familiar place and people, an idyll of domesticity and the comfort of tradition. Of course it’s a set-up for the wrenching unthinkable change to come.  But she’s such pleasant company you are willing to go where she takes you. Her words describing a huge crowd, a bird singing, a young woman in a sari or rooftop view, are perfect miniatures of a moment in flight to the next. Yet, what seem inconsequential, passing, adds up. They are the substance of a huge generational shift that begins with two brothers growing up in the 1960’s in the outskirts of an Indian city.  Cautious Subhash, the older by 15 months, shares a small room with Udayan, his unpredictable brother. Though he's dutiful, wanting to pleases his pa...

I read through these short poems a couple times and slyly, through the layers of her forms in this varied collection, I began to get meanings. Form is something Beasley-Baker enjoys and her free-verse employs counting forms Haiku and the Elfchen, minimalist versions of John Cage’s mesostic forms, as well as poems based on colors and that borrow from traditional American songs. (According to Wikopedia an Elfchen is “an 11 word poem in a specific format” and a mesostic poem  is “ such that a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text.”)  Many of these poems have a weight of the past and its tension with a present that challenges or threatens to erase it. There are sweet children’s songs that jar with adult perceptions. In one poem a bride is left at the altar and she cries, when the groom refers to 27 cans of peaches—feeling the loss of “errant desire.”  Leonora Carrington was a singular surrealist painter and poet and Beasley is also a painter. There is some...

Wally Lamb is according to his publisher, "The #1 New York Times bestselling master whose works have touched millions." I did not read "She's Come Undone" or any of his others. WE ARE WATER (November, Harper Collins) is my first encounter with Lamb's work. The novel kept reminding me of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying." In that classic, the story was also told in alternating chapters so you get a range of  perspectives. There are also psychological mysteries--awful secrets--at the heart of that book, which propel family members to their fate. Both authors have lyrical writing styles. Though Lamb hasn't the cadences of the south, he has the same poetry of nature with man and against him. Lamb's water metaphors, throughout WE ARE WATER, begin with an unpredictable flood, which parallels the all encompassing doom in "As I Lay Dying." Both books draw you into their emotional vortex. But while Faulkner can be painful to read, Lamb...

FLAMETHROWER by Rachel Kushner (Simon & Schuster) The heroine of Rachel Kushner’s FLAMETHROWER is not unlike the young woman in Joan Didion’s Play it Like It Lays. Both are truth seekers, curious about how to find their way in capricious professional worlds, are unflinching observers with spot-on perceptions, and have more on their minds than men. But while Didion's heroine has a similar integrity, she hasn't the sense of risk and physical courage that makes Reno an epic heroine. When Reno, an art school grad from Nevada, sells her cherished Valero motorcycle for money to go to New York, she’s pushing destiny. She's ridden motorcycles since 14, is comfortable with speed and the desolate highway but has risked the familiar for a Mott Street walk up, in a city where she's completely alone. Her response is to film the neighborhood so she's got a comfort zone in alien New York. Then one night in a Chelsea Bar she allows herself to be picked up by denizens ...

Tomorrowland by Joseph Bates (Curbside Splendor/Chicago, September 10th) The highly inventive stories in this debut collection address a fantastic yet familiar world, where shiny promises of fulfillment fall flat, age disappoints and love is not exactly the answer. Yet these bizarre stories are funny in the best humanist tradition. Imagine if Tolstoy set The Death of Ivan Ilyich in The Twilight Zone and you have an idea of Tomorrowland. The narrator of the title story, who inspects an eerie Eisenhower era “home of the future”, is old enough to remember the kitsch of this future world, once thought to be so much better than today, and appreciate the irony of the contrast with his actual life--what time steals and what remains. Mirrorverse is a hilarious tale of a guy who wants desperately to make it with his ex-wife and what happens when he’s given a device that turns his TV into a parallel universe. Yankees Burn Atlanta, Boardwalk Elvis, and Future Me, all explore the Tom...

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton Disclafani (Penguin) A pleasure of  The Yonahlosee Riding Camp for Girls is the incredibly astute and almost painfully ironic perceptions of the fifteen-year-old narrator, Thea Altwell. She's entering exile, at the beginning of the novel, as her father drives her from the moist wilds of Florida to the dry mountains of North Carolina. Thea mourns her home and dreads the unknown Camp. Emotionally, she's a mess, filled with guilt and shame. All she knows is her childhood with her happy family in their beautiful home is gone and it’s her fault. She's being punished, her mother's angry and disappointed that Thea's not a "right" girl. She doesn’t believe her father will leave her, until he does. Then she's profoundly alone in a cabin with strange girls. Thea has never before left her insular world in rural Florida. She and her beloved twin brother, Sam, were even tutored at home by their father. While ...

Is GATSBY the Great American Novel or just a pretender? “Whether it’s something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday, I must start out with an emotion—one that’s close to me and that I can understand.”  F.Scott Fitzgerald       This quote is key to Fitzgerald, a source of strength and criticism as a weakness-- especially in his rivalry with Hemingway.  I felt revisiting this novel was like reading a diary about a lost love— nostalgic, bitter-sweet, and touching.  A huge success in its era, GATSBY was later reviled as trivial, politically bankrupt , a celebration of rich people and their decadent life style.  Today of course, it’s assigned reading for schools, supposedly about class and money in America. But for that, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy may be the better novel. So why is this novel a classic?        Let’s begin with Nick, the haunted narrator, struggling to come to terms with events he can’t quit...

I like Ann Patchett's novels. I loved the Magician’s Assistant and enjoyed Bel Canto. What hooks me is the grand adventure and the incredible consciousness of her heroines. These women are hyper aware of their worlds and themselves. They have irony and real humor, along with a grit that is surprising and transformative. Marina Singh in State of Wonder  is just such a creation. Honest and skeptical by nature and her training as a scientist, Marina also possesses compassion for the flaws of human kind. Painfully aware of her own, she’s glad to have repetitive work in the lab of a pharmaceutical company and the friendship of her colleague, Anders. Like her, he’s a native Minnesotan, who enjoys his safe comfortable home. Why she’s surprised he agrees, when Mr. Fox, the CEO, asks him to go to the Amazon to find the elusive Dr. Swenson.   .     The only risk in Marina’s careful life is her affair with Mr.Fox, married and old enough to be he...

SUPERZELDA by Tiziana Lo Porto and Daniele Marotta published by One Peace Books It took two Italians, journalist Tiziana Lo Porto and cartoonist Daniele Marotta, to animate that quintessential American creation, Zelda Fitzgerald. Her ecstatic pursuit of life; joy, love, pleasure, is the romance of the Flapper, immortalized by Scott Fitzgerald. Yet this telling adds the dimension of literature from Zelda's journals, letters exchanged, stories both published, his novels, as well as her vast readings from philosophy to poets. Much analysis of Zelda begins and ends with tragic beauty, brilliant and unstable. There are also questions about whether Scott exploited her, not just her archetype but her actual writings, which appear in his novels. Opposed are Fitzgerald fans,who believe she destroyed a great writer, driven to alcohol from her madness. A philosopher quoted that the search for truth often leads to its "bastard substitute" anesthesia. This may be closer than me...