Review: "The Polyglot Lovers" by Lina Wolff

It is the coincidence of the year that the book I read in place of the translation of the new Michel Houellbecq novel so thoroughly eviscerates his character within its pages. I knew nothing of The Polyglot Lovers, the second novel of Swedish writer Lina Wolff to be published in English, but according to my rigid reading standards (which I will relax once the new decade rolls around) it filled the void and I’m really glad it did, because as much as I appreciate Houellbecq and his heterodox views, I’ve never liked his books as much as I liked this one, which is thought-provoking without being preachy, intriguing and funny at the same time and leaves no sacred cow of literature intact. On the back it is described as a “contribution to feminism” and not to sound like a broken record held over my previous review, it was hard for me to identify with any of that within this pages, which does not seem to take a side, even in its extremes cases. Funnily enough, much like the French literary bad boy it eloquently skewers, its ambivalence toward its subject matter, whether that be modern relationships, high art versus low art and lack of responsibility that usually comes with the onset of recognition, it is easy it mistake this book for taking a side. Its 244 pages are divided into three section which we learn only later one are working backwards. In the first section, and the best part of the book, we are introduced to Ellinor, slowly creaking toward middle age and desperately lonely, so desperate, she thinks, that she has sunk so low as to try online dating. On the site she meets Ruben, a meek literary critic who woos the chilly Ellinor with his apparent kindness only to turn into something else during a brutal sex scene that verges on becoming a rape. Unusually though, she begins a courtship with him, even after she finds out about his blind psychic wife Mildred. She finds the manuscript belonging to Max Lamas, a writer Ruben is obsessed with and written extensively on and as a sort of petty revenge, she burns the manuscript, of which there is only one copy of, in the fireplace (not the worst thing that happens to it). We then meet Max himself, a character straight out of a Houellbecq novel: smart enough to justify his overactive libido as something more profound, such as his search for the book’s namesake, which he thinks he finds in a put upon receptionist whose boss feels like the funhouse mirror image of Max. The third section focuses on Lucrezia, whose noble family is slowly crumbling and whom Max finds callous inspiration in. Despite a really cool ending section, told epistolary style, the sections do not fit that well together, but on their own they are still a lightning rod, a brutal takedown of elitism, a certain kind of chauvinism and the lies we tell ourselves when we knowingly pursue wrong. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Topeka School" by Ben Lerner

Don’t listen to most reviews of Ben Lerner’s third novel The Topeka School. They will most likely describe it as it pertains to its political merits and make it something it is clearly not. This last-minute addition to my reading year of 2019 had me worried before I even opened it, even though I really enjoyed Lerner’s previous two novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04. It seemed from a distance like the kind of book I have been trying to avoid since you know what happened at the end of 2016, but thankfully it is much more than that. It is by far Lerner’s weakest outing especially from a stylistic standpoint, but I found this book’s approach to its subject matter (multi-faceted and almost politically ambiguous to an aggravating degree) to be refreshing, although I might not suspect that was the intent Lerner had in mind when he wrote it. Taking place at the tail end of the 20^th century a time not as simple as we’d like to believe in 2019, we find Adam, the star debater on a Topeka, Kansas high school debate team, at an odd point in his life as he tries to navigate the masculine roles thrust upon him in his proximal male hierarchy. This is complicated as we learn about the past of his mother Jane, a famous feminist author on the hitlist of the nearby Westboro Baptist Church and his father Jonathan, a psychiatrist with long list of infidelities but with a special knack for getting young boys to open up, one of which is Darren, the loner at Adam’s school whom he has brought into his group of friends. It’s many shifts in time period bring about the book’s most memorable scenes, such as an incident Adam had as a toddler with chewing gum, but they create a dense fog over the proceedings of the book, and by its confusing end, I was still left wanting for more concrete resolutions or enough intrigue to nullify them. A book more interesting than it is actually good. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "King of Joy" by Richard Chiem

It is a strange feeling when a book feels both too long and too short, but Richard Chiem’s first official novel, King of Joy, feel exactly like that. With a hypnotic and strange beginning, a thoroughly dull middle and a captivating end, this physically short (at 174 pages) novel never really gains its feet and becomes something more than an off-kilter writing experiment, but there is enough here for a profoundly moving portrait of the whirlpool of grief one can find themselves in after the sudden death of someone close to them. Chiem’s prose feels like it is swimming at times: through events, conversations and even dreams and it’s never quite clear what is what. I can see some people finding this an aggravating part of the book, but I found it quite mesmerizing and not nearly the book’s biggest problem. The book opens with Corvus; the main character in the throes of what we later learn is a deep, deep depression. She is working for Tim, a creepy pornographer with a strange approach to his craft (evidenced by a disturbing scene where he filmed his mom’s death). After a confrontation, she and Amber escape his grasp and find themselves guest at a mansion filled with zoo animals reclaimed from Pablo Escobar’s estate. It is only after a startling reveal that we learn what broke Corvus. She fell in love with a playwright named Perry and something happened to take that away. This and other parts of the book could be argued to be presented as pure fantasy, as Corvus has a habit of disappearing into cinematic delusion. It both works, in the context of Perry not being real as well as the book’s great ending (although it is too quick), but it overstays its welcome and becomes tired and repetitive very quickly. Still, I don’t think you’ll find another book like this in 2019.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Goulash" by Brian Kimberling

Goulash seems like a needlessly goofy title for a book but after finishing the charming and thoughtful second novel from American author Brian Kimberling, it is a pretty appropriate title. Doing for the city of Prague what he did for bird watching in his debit novel Snapper, Kimberling undertakes the unenviable task of distilling complex human emotions through painstaking specifics, charting one young ex-pat’s journey through a foreign land very much unlike his own and reaching enlightenment, or something like that. The book’s plot of gloriously loose and broken up into digestible chapters so it can be gorged in one sitting (not hard with its brisk 205 page length) or savored one chapter at a time with its themes being crystalline. Like its protagonist, an extended tourist trying to be anything but, it is not a book that is in a hurry and its playful tone makes some of the more serious aspects of its narrative feel as hearty as the beer that flows freely from the Golden Lion bar. The narrator at the center of the book is Elliot Black, a student from my home state of Indiana who has traveled to Prague to teach English. He is 23 and fresh faced, but the city itself is in a state of flux. It is the 90’s and he Czech Republic is moving (more like stumbling) from underneath the weight of communism into the three-ring circus of early capitalism. On his first night there, he gets his shoes stolen and finds them weeks later installed in an art exhibit. Thanks to a hilariously rude gallery employee, he becomes friends with the artist Mr. Cimarron, one of the book’s brightest spots among a serious of effervescent characters. Of these, at the center of Elliot’s world is Amanda, a British transplant in the same boat as Elliot. Their romance is predictable, with familiar beats, but there conversations about their uncertainty, art and rather intense subjects that come up after a neighbor of their falls to his death from his apartment balcony are like music to the ears much like Richard Linklater’s Celeste and Jessie. The loose plot allows for many interesting asides, such as Ivan, one of Elliot’s students, whose life might be different if he were not so prone to violence, Milan, another one of his students burden with the thought that he might have killed his brother as well as many historical asides, like the ghosts of totalitarianism within many of the buildings surrounding the ancient city (many of which get used in big Hollywood movies) and a giant statue of Joseph Stalin, crumbling in an abandon part of the city which has become a stomping ground for the creeping Western influence in the country. Towards the end is where this book’s spell felt strongest, with a hilarious visit from Elliot’s mother and an epilogue set years later, where the histories of both Elliot and Amanda are laid out, or at least they are in Elliot’s mind. This is charming, big hearted novel, just like Kimberling’s last book. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Phantoms" by Christian Kiefer

Phantoms, the new novel from American author Christian Kiefer, is a novel you have seen countless times before, and I got the sense throughout that it was okay with that and in turn, the reader has a chance to feel okay with that too. It hits all the right beats you’d expect from this kind of story, but does so in a very comprehensive and engaging way and never slacking off for the duration of the books 227 pages, which fly by rather quickly and effortlessly. If it has one glaring flaw it is that it feels small but wishes it were bigger, with its profound moments throughout the book going unearned at some points and feeling numb to scenes of grave importance. For a book as short as it is, there are quite a few characters and even the character that is supposed to be viewed as the main character feels more like a background character than anything else. The book begins at the end of WWII, where Ray Takahashi comes home to his small California town to find his childhood home rented out to strangers and his family long gone. We do not find out the whole story until the end, and in between we are introduced to John Frazier, a drug addicted Vietnam vet who stumbles onto the story through distant family relations and a somewhat obsessive need for literary inspiration, which he finds in the interconnected lives of Evelyn Wilson, whose husband rented the land to Ray’s family and Kimiko Takahashi, Ray’s mother. This book feels like a lesser example of Kia Corthron’s The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, right down to the big violent catalyst of the story. That book did it better, but this story of two families torn apart by a country’s simmering hate (and a half-baked love story) is an engaging and pleasurable read.

Rating: 4/4

Review: "Orange World" by Karen Russell

I feel bad saying this about a writer who was nice to me when they signed copies of their book for me, but after three short story collections, I simply do not get the hype surrounding Karen Russell. I recall enjoying her debut novel Swamplandia, but the three collections she has put out, all lauded and heaped with praise have failed to impress me. They always seem well thought out and put together competently and look good on a sentence by sentence basis, but the ideas have always seemed very shoddy to me, either not well thought out or too on the nose in its use of genre as a means of social commentary, so something that should be interesting on its own becomes a little too didactic for me, a real problem for some of the stories in this collection. While I found a lot of these stories lacking the wow factor, something not helped by their sometimes languorous running time, but I did not hate any of them and I liked a few. It opens up rather brilliantly with “The Prospectors” a story of two gold-digging young women who take the wrong ski lift up a mountain and wind up at a party of ghostly men who died in an avalanche. It dolls out the proper amount of sympathy for both the grifting duo and ghostly guests and maintains a palpable sense of dread while slyly commenting on the fraught nature of male-female interactions. Like “The Graveless doll of Eric Mutis” in her previous collection, this is the book’s lone standout, followed by the clunky yet entertaining title story. But most, like “Bog Girl: A Romance”, The Tornado Auction and especially “The Bad Graft” (where a woman becomes something like an endangered Joshua tree) have big ideas but never rein them in to create something interesting. 

Rating: 4/5