Review: "The Mere Wife" by Maria Dahvana Headley

I might be wrong in attributing this idea to him (and if I am I apologize) but one of my favorite quotes about literature and life in general come from Clive Barker when he said we should have “love for our monsters.” We should seek to understand the pathology, or even the plight of some of society’s castoffs and undesirables at the very least, to look past the label and try to see them as something more human than monster. This idea was racing through my head as I came to the end of Maria Dahvana Headley’s brilliant retelling of the Beowulf myth, The Mere Wife. What might seem like a cheap gimmick on the surface becomes something much more in the hands of Headley, using this often told and well-worn tale to play around with a myriad of themes both modern and timeless such as parenthood, rigid social hierarchies, the tendency to forget the past and the questionable nature of the hero myth. Its feet are firmly planted in both its mythological roots and the era in which it is written in, never once feeling like cheap allegory or a sloppy experiment. I will admit it is hard to get used to and I can see some readers not buying wholly into the blending of these two very different ideas, but Headley’s writing is so crisp and beautifully ambiguous, especially in its use of the royal “we” for some chapters that I was easily mesmerized and hooked early on. I will admit, my own familiarity with the Beowulf story is slim, with my experience with the story being limited to a reading of it in the 6^thGrade and watching two movie adaptions starring Christopher Lambert and Antonio Banderas (the latter is a questionable adaption), so I may have missed some references. In this story, Heorot Hall is not a mead hall but a suburban enclave in the shadow of an ancient mountain: a pillar of technology and affluence. The book opens with the supposed murder of Dana Mills on camera while she is in the midst of fighting a war. She comes home pregnant and gives birth to Gren and begins a shabby life in the complex cave system housed in the mountains, Meanwhile, in Heorot Hall, Willa Heorot, married to the son of the couple that started the enclave, is coasting through a boring marriage and raising her son Dylan, or Dilly. Soon, Gren comes down the mountain and falls in love with Dilly, which sets off a brutal chain of events that span years that pulls in Ben Woolf, a police officer and ideal masculine specimen and puts both mothers on a brutal collision course. What impressed me most was how well Headley is able to hide the actions of the book through her writing, giving revelations and shocking events an extra air of discovery. The book is always exciting, hitting all the right beats in fresh ways, leading to a beautiful final few pages that is uplifting and spellbinding. A truly wondrous and thrilling book that makes the old feel new and the new feel magnificent. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Night Hawks" by Charles Johnson

I can recall in past reviews of short story collections that a lack of cohesion in the stories or no concrete sense of uniform themes was a knock against the book as a whole. I don’t know if I was wrong or if the stories themselves were the problem, but Night Hawks, the most recent short story collection from American writer Charles Johnson just might be the most scattered and diverse short story collection I have ever read, but it also might be one of the best. Instead of hindering the reading experience, the difference found in story to story structure of this book acts not only as a breath of fresh air (never once leaving the reader reeling from the dramatic shift in locale, time period or even style) but as a summation of one writer’s love of the art of the form and of writing itself. I have read one of Johnson’s books before this, his National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage (it’s been almost a decade since I have read it and do not remember much of it), but it did not prepare me for this collection at all, which is equal parts playful and dead serious, deadpan and emotionally riveting. Like always, I will be discussing a handful of the short stories in the collection, but I can safely say that there is not a weak one in the whole book, although some I liked more than others. The collection opens up with “The Weave”, where Ieesha a recently fired beautician, with the help of her loving boyfriend, breaks into her old beauty shop to steal a large sum of hair extensions, which, as noted in the stories epigraph, are worth more money than you might think. It is a good intro to this varied collection, exhibiting Johnson’s knack for profundity that feels well earned even though the story is only a few ages long. It has a complexity that was really refreshing (such as the reason Ieesha got fired) and is ended as perfect as any short story can end. The symbolism in these stories are great, like the film projector in “Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra” (one of two stories that reflect Johnson’s Buddhist philosophy) which comes to represent the main character’s desperately sought nirvana, or the jewels stolen by the impoverished narrator of “Occupying Arthur Whitfield”, whose act of robbery reveals hidden depths and pain in a person he projected his desperation onto. What really caught me off guard were the science fiction infused stories found here, such as the amusing but clunky “Guinea Pig” or “4189” a brutal dystopian tale infused with graphic sex and uncanny robots with one of the most brutally unhappy endings I have come across in recent memory. The collection is capped off beautifully by the title story, which fictionalizes (maybe) the author’s late night dinners with late playwright August Wilson, using the quant setting and a bit of shocking violence at the end to speak candidly on life, race and the efficacy of their creative pursuits. I found this collection wholly remarkable, and for someone who has spent the past few years trying to find his way through this dwindling art form, its importance and relevance are invaluable. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Bad Man" by Dathan Auerbach

It is one thing for a book to be oblique in its presentation, but to pair that with an almost oppressive length makes for a less than stellar reading experience. That is not say that Dathan Auerbach’s novel Bad Man is a bad book, but it is totally not what I expected it to be. I have not read his debut, the Reddit sensation Penpal (although I have heard what it is about and it chilled me to the bone), but this book does make me at least very curious about what he puts out next if he can learn to edit and take away some, but not all of the ambiguity in his writing.  After a startling prologue where a pair of young boys finds a body in the woods, we are introduced to Ben and Eric, two half-brothers 12 years apart who are sent on a mission to the big local supermarket, where, in a split second, Eric goes missing under Ben’s watch. Five years after that, Ben, who is crippled from an automobile accident, is wracked with guilt over the incident, his home life a constant reminder of what is lost. Whether out of desperation or obsession (it is never made quite clear), he takes a job at the supermarket where Eric went missing. The horror at the center of this book is a vague, and its true nature always rests in the shadows like the work of Ramsey Campbell and Iain Reid, where character’s intentions like that of Ben’s co-worker Marty or his cruel boss Bill Palmer are never explored beyond Ben’s fractured perception. It leads to the book’s best scenes, where something innocuous like a stuffed rhino, a baler and a birthday cake become terrifying and tragic harbingers and a little piece on the idea of hope that is brilliant, but also the book’s poor qualities, like its sloppy spatial logic and its habit to leave too much unsaid, making the book’s 379 page count downright overkill. Still, this is a haunting book with a deep dark black heart that won’t be easy to forget. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Shape of the Ruins" by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Even after finishing it almost six years ago, the power of Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s breakthrough novel The Sound of Things Falling is still eerily present to me. Reading like Bolano by way of Auster, it plums the dark heart of a country that has always seemed to been in some kind of turmoil, always on the verge of an upheaval that threatens to uproot the nation and its values and swallow its citizens whole. It is a terrifying prospect and in the hands of Vasquez (and his brilliant translator Anne McLean) the terrible reality is laid bare at our feet with eloquence and grandeur. Even though his two novels before, The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana and one after, the slim Reputations failed to live up to his breakthrough’s lofty expectations (his short story collection, Lover’s on All Saints’ Day came close), he remains one of my favorite international writers. His most recent translation, The Shape of the Ruins, was a welcome surprise early in 2019, and while I’m hesitant to say it is better than The Sound of Things Falling, it comes pretty close. At his 509 pages, it is his longest to date and with its length it feels like a bit of a summation of certain themes Vasquez has wrestled with throughout his books, such as the unbearable weight history exudes on its victims, the helplessness in the face of a brutal, sometimes omnipresent oppressive power and the hidden mechanisms behind history’s more violent episodes. At the center of the novel is a fictionalized (maybe) version of Vasquez himself, a device I usually find irritating, but here, his presence is never cloying and adds to the creeping dread of the story. It begins with news story of a seemingly innocuous crime; a man has broken into a museum and used a pair of brass knuckles to break the display of a suit that was worn by famous Columbian politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan when he was assassinated. But the man is Carlos Carbello, and how Vasquez knows the man is at the book’s dark heart. Vasquez first met him at a party thrown by one of his doctor friends in the midst of dealing with his twin daughter’s premature birth, a meeting that ends with Vasquez breaking Carlos’s nose. But somehow, over the next ten years, through a strange set of coincidences involving a historical artifact related to the assassination of Gaitan, a late night conspiracy radio show and the tragic details of Carlo’s own life, Vasquez finds himself entranced by the unwritten, hidden details of two Columbian assassinations in the 20^th century. The details of the second assassination, that of General Uribe in 1914 takes up a bulk of the book’s tail end, and it is easy to find parallels between the young Azula, whose doomed quest to uncover the truth of the General assassination and that of Carlos, whose connection to the assassination of Gaitain in 1948 seemingly dooms him to be obsessed with it. Like the crimes at its center, the book has no real resolution, leaving the reader intrigued and disquieted by mystery’s destined to never be solved and those destined to search for impossible answers. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Berlin Alexanderplatz" by Alfred Doblin

My reading goal for 2019 is still a bit vague, but I knew for sure that the first book I was going to read was Alfred Doblin’s modernist classic, Berlin Alexanderplatz. With this brand new translation being put out last year and after the poorly received first one back in 1931 and the series based on the novel directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder being re-released on Criterion, this seemed like the right time to check it out. It is not an easy read: it tells its story indirectly, using multiple viewpoints in the form of character’s deities and even disembodied voices, characterized by a playful yet cynical narrator who pops in every now in then and at some points, disregards Franz’s story entirely to show Berlin’s gay underworld, or a virtuoso extended sequence in a slaughterhouse. It comes off as a book that demands to be read twice, filled with puzzles told in it sown distinct language and syntax, but even reading it once is enough to feel the full force of it’s brutal power. At the center of the story is the hulking and malleable Franz Biberkopf who is being released from prison for the accidental killing of his girlfriend and finds life on the outside in Weimar-era Germany wearing on his sanity. One interaction with a pair of Jews that provide a bit of solace and a lot of tall tales provides a good example of this book’s scattered, energized structure (as well as historical context not yet fully realized at the time of this book’s publication in 1929). The theme of the book is Franz’s attempts to lead a good life despite always being screwed over by those he trusts. It isn’t until the disturbingly rendered Reinhold enters Franz’s life that the true horror begins: first he loses a limb and then he loses much more. The last 100 pages of this book is a it’s true dark heart, where the lines between Franz’s reality and imagination bleed away, his past, present and doubtful future co-mingle and Doblin’s cinematic, snapshot approach to the story reaches it’s apex. Terrifying yet profound, this book that can now be easily read and admired in the U. S. 

Rating: 4/5