Review: "Rag" by Maryse Maijer

One thing is crystal clear within the first few sentences of any story author Maryse Meijer writes and that is her skill at creating a certain unique mood that infects every word of the story and, in turn, the reader. Her worlds are ones where the pathway from boredom to horror is scarily narrow and nothing is more terrifying than something not said or a feeling not acted upon no matter how grotesque. Her most recent short story collection, Rag, feels a little bit like a step down from her debut collection Heartbreaker, and falls too easily into traps these kinds of stories usually fall into: a structure that feels like an outline for something much greater than the finished product and vague prose too often mistaken for a sense of mystery, but even the flattest of these stories have the tendency to crawl up the base of your spine like a noxious insect and give you nightmares. As always, I will pull out a few of my favorites t discuss here, the first of which, “Her Blood” is easily among the best, detailing the obsession that comes over a virginal young pizza boy and the woman who has a miscarriage in his store’s bathroom. It’s the first of many in this collection that mines the perversity of attraction in a graceful way, others include “Brother” where one siblings attraction to another’s girlfriend causes a horrific outcome and “Jury” where a widower is drawn to fellow juror who happens to be a cutter. But my two favorites are the brief “At the Sea” where a man might have kidnapped his maybe daughter and “The Rainbow Baby”, that takes a ridiculous premise familiar to those who have read Thomas Tryon’s The Other and makes it work with empathy and pathos. Uneven at times, but never boring, this slim collection of off-putting yet mesmerizing fiction will delight readers drawn to the strange and weird. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Old Drift" by Namwali Serpell

The author who I thought of most while reading Namwali Serpell’s brilliant epic of a debut a debut novel The Old Drift was David Mitchell. The way she weaves a wondrous world both ancient and futuristic, informed by our distant past and our near future but still wonderfully original reminded me of his best work and even some of his lesser quality work which, like this book in very few places, is still fascinating to look at, interpret and think about. It manages to exist wholly within its two worlds, running smoothly through the bulk of the 20^thcentury and into the great unknown of the 21^st, presenting a world informed by past mistakes, present failures and hopes for a brighter future, all within the microcosm of the Republic of Zambia, a country that only gained its freedom a little over 50 years ago. It offers a wide range of characters through the years, with both victims and victimizers thoroughly fleshed out with murky motivations and hidden desires, along with very cool running themes that recur throughout the book. It begins at the start of the 20^thcentury, where a seemingly innocuous event at a luxury hotel at Victoria Falls, a scuffle between a white businessman that leaves another man knocked imbecilic, draws in the lives of three families, black, white and brown, and follows their ancestors as to the near future where the world presented at the beginning feels unrecognizable but with its same prejudices and feelings of want and desire. Like Mitchell’s work, Serpell crafts a world that is fantastical but realistic and it is easy for the reader to by into the more ridiculous aspects of the novel, such as the character of Siballa, whose hair grows at a rapid enough rate that she resembles Thing from the Addams family (hair is one of the book’s recurring themes, such as its powers in both growing it and shaving it off) or the character of Grace, a background character in most of the lives of the three families as they converge who does not see to age over the course of several decades. One of the main themes I found that appears at the turning points of each section is the somewhat pessimistic look at progress in both history as well as politics, like what happens to the sisters Matha and Nkuka, both of whom fall under the spell of the cult like Nkoloso, whose failed Zambian space program would be funny if it did not indirectly cause the death of the girl’s mother at the hands of the government. The book takes a delightful if hard left turn when it focuses on the grandkids, Jacob, Joseph and Naila, and introduces hi-tech smart devices that are implanted in people’s fingertips and near microscopic drones that might be the swarm of mosquitos that narrate small pieces in between sections, but it swings for the fences in its daring final few pages, and it is easy for me to respect that for a debut novel so thick, complex and intricate. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead

I’m always interested in the follow-up to a great success, whether that be of the cinematic variety or the literary variety, so when I heard Colson Whitehead was publishing his follow-up to his awards sweeping novel The Underground Railroad, I was immediately interested. The Underground Railroad lived up to its hype, telling an engaging story of alternate history in all its ugliness, beauty and complexity and is surely to be one of the high points of 21^stcentury literature as the years roll on. But what was he going to give us next: more of the same or something totally different? It could have been anything for a writer with varying interests like Whitehead and his new book The Nickel Boys offers something new from him, but with the same attitude, eloquence and grandiosity his fans have come to expect from him. It reminded me a lot of the trajectory of the Coen Brothers after No Country for Old Men swept the Oscars, giving us the screwball Burn After Reading and the proudly esoteric and brooding A Serious Man. Whitehead has already accomplished more than most writers can do in a handful of lifetimes, and while this books is sure to have some detractors, I am not one of them. It is up there with his best books, a notch below John Henry Days and his preceding awards collector, but it might be his angriest and most cynical book, a tale of wronged young boys, victims of a system whose carelessness bred the monsters who tried, and succeeded a depressing number of times, to destroy them. Based on a harrowing true story of a reform school that operated in Florida, gives lurid headlines a tragic human face with Elwood, a young man at the dawn of the 60’s who finds himself the victim of despicable injustice and sentenced to hell, as he likes to think. We first meet him as he haunts the hotel where his Grandma works, barred from certain sections because of the color of his skin. He has a relatively stable life: college bound and inspired by the burgeoning Civil rights movements. But an offered car ride in a stolen vehicle gets him sent to The Nickel Academy, a place meant to shape young boys into men, but, as Elwood finds out on his first trip the “White House” is a hellish prison where abuse, physical and sexual, are the norm and where boys disappear “out back” and never return. It is a familiar story, but Whitehead adds layers of intrigue and subtext in the books slim 210 pages, like how injustice seems to follow Elwood (his first trip to the White House was because he tried to stop a fight), and his ambivalence toward the hopeful future he hears Dr. King preach about, given more credence and poignancy in the book’s shocking and brilliant epilogue, which I suspect will divide audiences. At times this is a hard book to read (and it seems to know that, spending scant time with the villains and focusing wholly on their victims), but it feels like an important book for our troubled times. Plus, it is a damn good book from a damn great writer. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Triangulum" by Masande Ntshanga

I’m beginning to see a pattern with the types of books Two Dollar Radio publishes. Thankfully, that is not a knock against them because what they put out is unique, memorable and always unlike anything else being put out, as is the case with South African writer Masande Ntshanga’s second novel Triangulum, a brilliant if overstuffed book that provides little in the way of substance but is really, really cool to look at.  It might be because I read it earlier this year, but there is a striking similarity between this novel and R. J. Campbell’s debut Found Audio, also published by Two Dollar Radio, if not in themes but at least in how the novel is layered House of Leaves style where the main story is at the center of a cursory story given to the reader first hand, so we are in fact the third layer of the story being told. Here, the story is told from the perspective of an astronomer in the middle of the 21^st century who has been given a manuscript of recordings and a memoir that has accurately predicted a series of events leading up to the end of the world. The majority of the book is the manuscript itself, detailing in audio recordings and journal entries the life of an unnamed woman, from her life as an adolescent, filled with sexual discovery and dread as a series of disappearances, including that of her mother, her romance with a mysterious woman named D. and her involvement with a terrorist group, all of which is accented by her mysterious vision of a triangular machine, whose significance is revealed in the book’s best part. As I said, there is very little of substance in the story, which seems drained of emotional impact, but it is never, not once, a boring read and filled with interesting ideas, cool scenes and mysteries that are more powerful left unsolved.

Rating: 4/5