My Broken Language: A Memoir
by Quiara Alegría Hudes
the years in the making (11/24/2021)
My Broken Language by Quiara Alegría Hudes is a rich and complex text. A memoir written at the age of forty to record the years of learning that went into forging her identity, an identity including the multitudes in the Perez family. These are the years that went into finding the language that would do justice to her family’s stories, to her story.
It is growing up in her mother’s Hispanic family, more and more estranged in time from her father’s white one, that immerses Qui Qui into the family’s traditions and the rich Puerto Rican culture. Observing and helping out mom with her activism for Latina women, being present for the many family get-togethers at her Abuela’s, reading English classics but also books offered by her mom about Puerto Rican culture, listening to both Western classical music and music by Latino artists, learning about her family history of health struggles due to poverty and abuse (such as the birth control methods which had affected Puerto Rican women including her Abuela in the 50’s) or prejudice and silence (the AIDS cases in her family), Quiara Alegría Hudes paints the portrait of a young age, adolescence as well as young womanhood marked by strong, loving, feisty, sometimes ailing Perez women and a few men related to them, whose battles, victories and losses in North Philly all come together and to light under the pen of the one of them who made it to Yale and then to Brown. The cultures in which she lives reveal themselves in ways that Quiara Alegría Hudes learns to understand, make her own and then unleash with toppling force into the world, including the language of music which, like any language, says more to those with background and instruction in it.
This book cannot be gulped, it needs to be chewed and ruminated.
Buses Are a Comin': Memoir of a Freedom Rider
by Charles Person, Richard Rooker
Freedom Riders (11/10/2021)
Literally and metaphorically, Charles Person describes the road to and his actual involvement in the protest action of May 1961 called Freedom Riders.
He manages to render the clear chronology and facts which led to the event while also reconstructing the lineage of people and actions which had preceded and then followed the Freedom Riders.
A group of white and black people, under the guidance of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) and CORE leader James Farmer decide to force an awakening, that of the unjust, inhumane and not lastly illegal way blacks were discriminated against in everyday life. So, on the ride from Washington DC to New Orleans, while travelling by bus, the Greyhound or the Trailways, Charles Person and his fellows test time and again the forms of segregation blacks encountered when trying to use bus services and accommodations in the South of the US. They pay severely for the risk taken and demonstrate that America was not ready then to treat its citizens equally even if mandated by law, and even more, it would put black lives and white supporters’ lives in danger. By also referring to later, current events, Charles Person points to the fact that inequality continues to plague the American society.
The vivid memories gush from a depth of feeling, not at all blunted by the passing of time or the loss of the recording tool. Adding pervasive and eloquent rhetoric enhances the intensity of feeling and we, the readers, see in vivid images the hope and desolation, the inflicted cuts and blood, the fierceness and despair but all the while the non-violent determination of the Riders and of all their supporters and helpers along the way.
The writing is an emotional piece as much as it is an accurate account of events. It is a captivating and illuminating read which is worth spending time with and reflecting upon, the more so since it challenges us all to activism for the abundant causes that arise in the present world.
Take My Hand
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Through the lens of fiction (8/31/2021)
This is an important book which uses fiction to make known and confront the world with some horrific real events. These events make us meditate on the trauma, suffering and injustice done to poor Black women in Alabama in the 1970’s and their long-term effects. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Civil Townsend has just the right name and values to make personal the fight she engages in in the name of her two abused patients used for medical experimentation and other seriously damaging procedures. Then the first-person narrative becomes the perfect structure for Civil’s voice, fraught with guilt and love as it is, doubled by the alternating temporal planes which keep the past vivid and hurtful at the present time. The book is well-written and it boasts a cast of remarkable characters whose plight and pain we come to know closely and feel deeply as they get thrown into a legal battle. Take My Hand is relevant to anyone interested in civil rights issues and in a searing look at the past.
Transcendent Kingdom
by Yaa Gyasi
Clash (8/7/2021)
When we start reading the complex, multilayered novel Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, Gifty, the main character, is introduced as the eleven-year-old girl sent over to her aunt in Ghana to wait for her mother to recover in Alabama from an illness.
So begins the subjective chronology that threads the novel together between the past of Gifty’s young years and the present of her lab research for reward-seeking behavior in mice. It is a rather confusing chronology, but appropriate for the narrator’s plunge into a messy, complicated world which she did her best to navigate across failure, pain, disappointment and temporary and ephemeral joy. While the big question is how she was able to reconcile her religious devotion with the work informed by theories of neuroscience, Gifty paints brush by brush the portrait of the family and circumstances that have marked her growing up into the person faced with that clash.
Legally, Gifty is an American, as she is born in Huntsville, Alabama, but socially she still feels bullied and marginalized as a black second-generation immigrant whose family emigrated from Ghana years before.
An inquisitive and creative child, Gifty struggles to integrate socially at school, inventing legendary characters and an exotic past in Ghana and to make sense of events in her family life which change the feeling of stability and protection so much needed when growing up. Her family bear memorable names anchored in their ethnicity and traditions: her father is the Chin Chin Man, but he will fail to adjust to their life in Alabama and return to Ghana, her brother Nana grows a talented athlete with his father away and their mother, the Black Mamba struggles to balance her job, an athlete’s mom’s responsibilities and taking care of a younger daughter. When Nana has an accident, the medication and a circle of friends drag him into addiction and the Black Mamba into a mental illness of her own.
Gravitating between the devotion to God both practiced by her mother every moment of her life and independently pursued by Gifty herself on her own terms, and the questions of a scientifically-inclined mind who, as the grad student she becomes, experiments on mice with the tools and theories of neuroscience, Gifty carves a unique, out-of-the-ordinary path for herself in her quest for acceptance, understanding, belonging and closure.
It is the rawness of feeling and the depth of thought that were most moving to me as a reader of Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom. Also, interweaving organically the rich beliefs, traditions, misconceptions of the Ghanaian culture with Gifty’s personal quest gave enormous depth and uniqueness to this story of transcendence. An extremely complex and inciting book, worth reading.
Daughters of Smoke and Fire: A Novel
by Ava Homa
A razor-sharp voice (8/7/2021)
With a razor-sharp voice and incisiveness, Ava Homa tells the story of Leila, a Kurdish girl who grows up in and then flees Mariwan, a small, impoverished place in Kurdish Iran. Her world is constrained to gravitate around her family and especially around her younger brother, Chia, whose dreams blend with hers. He is supposed to bring justice to people after attending law school while she is supposed to make movies and attend university. These childhood dreams transform into the nightmare of a youth of oppression in prison and one of fighting to liberate and preserve the memory of the brother brutally extricated from Leila’s life. While trying to keep alive the legacy of her activist brother, Leila finds herself fighting for her own life and identity.
The filial understanding and love she cannot find in her family, marred as her father is by his brutal encounters with police and with a narcissistic mother who looks for solace in work and a risky relationship outside her marriage, Leila finds in another family, also terribly bruised by injustice, without a father and with a rebellious mother tending for her one rebellious daughter, Shiler, whom Leila befriends. It is not an ordinary friendship though, as Shiler’s pathway diverges away with the Peshmerga women fighters in the Zagros mountains.
What makes an impact while reading Leila’s story is certainly her agonizing, mortally wounded yet shrill and unsubdued voice, while struggling to find a way out of the vicious cycle of injustice, threats, restrictions and laws applied to Kurds and to Kurdish women in particular. Leila’s truth is so shocking it is often hard to believe and gulp down, but Homa tells her story with relentless anguish, focused on the cinematic intensity of the characters’ experiences, intent on stirring the same gut-wrenching feelings that her character has. It sends shockwaves to learn about the plight of women, treated as second-class citizens and human beings at various levels: women always sitting at the back of the bus, having access to local libraries only three days a week, not wearing make-up or not allowed to bike, etc., etc. so that they often choose as the ultimate option self-immolation.
This on top of learning about other atrocities presented by Ava Homa as factual. Daughters of Smoke and Fire is a book which deserves to be read and talked about by anybody who believes in and wants to raise their voice in defense of human rights first and foremost.
New York, My Village: A Novel
by Uwem Akpan
A tour de force (8/5/2021)
From the moment we read the opening sentence of the book, in which our hero, Ekong Udousoro, expresses his enthusiasm at his seemingly impending visit to New York, we, the readers, know we have ahead a whole course of adventures and possibly, misadventures, and indeed the book does not disappoint.
New York, My Village by Uwem Akpan is a tour de force which aims to give a clear if not comprehensive picture of the Biafran War in Nigeria through some individual stories. This happens to coincide with the purpose of Ekong's visit to America, that of editing a collection of stories about the war of 1967-1970. Ekong ends up telling us how many stories may remain untold, rather unwritten without being any less valuable or heart-breaking. A tour de force because it adds the dimension of the life of a small publishing company in the US and that of all the possible variants of discriminatory racial and cultural attitudes coming from the most unexpected places and people, many in the US, proving that our coworkers, relatives, old friends, neighbors or ourselves can harbor deep biases, guilt, shame or trauma which are difficult to acknowledge and handle day by day. A tour de force of soccer World Cups, too, the best way to untie tongues, find common ground and warm up an Italian landlord to you.
What this novel excels in, besides the blunt truths many still tiptoe around, is describing with dignity and compassion horrific war scenes. This amid scenes of equal dignity and consideration for the others which muster a copiously hilarious tone, the bedbug war being the epitome of hilariousness in the book. It is this intriguing juxtaposition which is one of the strong points of the novel. Another is the constant comparison between aspects of everyday New York life to those in Ikot Ituno-Ekanem, the village in Nigeria which is the Catholic community that supports and filters all of Ekong's experiences. The novel abounds in these comparisons, often in the form of proverbs, only to learn to our delight that they may be Ekong's filtering of the ancestral wisdom rather that his mere reproduction of it. This enhances the tone of playfulness that the novel excels in and endears Ekong to us as he tries to adjust and make amends for the place he visits.
The use of citations of factual information when the narrator speaks of actual historical events reminded me of the same device used by Ava Homa in Daughters of Smoke and Fire, a confirmation of the horrors described for those who do not know or need one.
The use of Annang, Ekong's native language is a source of effect and some confusion, as the meaning is not always contextually evident beyond some forms of address, greetings and food names.
The novel may become confusing at times but in its deep self-ironic stance it warns the reader about it too, when one character says: "Sorry, I'm mixing up stories!" (p. 260)
A novel worth reading and pacing yourself when doing it.
The Dutch House
by Ann Patchett
A house with character, a female character as large as they come (7/7/2021)
The novel is both the story of a family, the Conroys, and of the house which the family acquired after unexpected financial success. Originally belonging to the Dutch family of the VanHoebeeks, the house has a traditional flair and is imbued with the personality of its original owners, markedly dominated by the portraits of the master and mistress of the house. But this is mostly the story of Maeve Conroy as told by her younger brother, Danny, born a few years after the house was purchased. Symbolically, Maeve’s portrait is commissioned and painted as she becomes the dominant figure in the siblings’ lives and an indelible one in the household. More than a sister, Maeve is also the substitute for the mother who leaves them when Danny was three and Maeve ten, and then the substitute for their father, who dies after bringing to the house another wife with two daughters.
With the help of a cook and a housekeeper, Maeve sees her brother through illnesses and schools. However, the siblings choose careers that they truly love and feel drawn towards rather than those for which they study. Maeve is also a key player in Danny’s love life and then in the financial planning of his new family.
All this while, the two gravitate around the Dutch house, living in it and making their first memories without and with a step-mother, then observing it from a distance, as their paths take them away after their father’s death and then one more time returning to it under completely different circumstances.
It is Danny who tells the story of this house changing hands and influencing lives, so the story bears a tone of deep brotherly affection mixed with amazement at the ability of his sister to steer their lives, with nostalgia at the stability of family life and the melancholy of hardship. It is a splendidly told story, captivating and endearing though quite heart-wrenching.
The Vanishing Half: A Novel
by Brit Bennett
Finding oneself (7/6/2021)
I found Bennett’s The Vanishing Half to read like a classic. A solid, almost old-fashioned story of family and destiny-making away from and in the small towns and big cities of America, woven around the big theme of identity, racial identity, gender identity, in the span of a few decades.
Bennett centers the novel on a pair of identical twin sisters, characters who are hard to tell apart when growing up but whose destinies could not be more different. At sixteen, Stella and Desiree Vignes run away from a tiny black but fair-skinned community, a place so peculiar that it tempts the sisters to try their luck in New Orleans, two hours away from home. A sister, impish and romantically-inclined seems to be the instigator, the other, more calculated and secretive surprises with her plan and all the decisions she makes thereafter. While Desiree returns a decade later from D.C. with a black daughter to spend the rest of her life in her place of origin, Stella travels as far as Boston and then Los Angeles, while adopting the identity of privilege and front doors, a white wife to a white husband who does not fathom her tribulations that have to do with lying, belonging and identity.
The sisters’ stories, organized in five “parts”, go back and forth between the 1990s and the 1950s, weaving the tapestries of their lives as they split and meander independent of each other until newer people in their lives come to interact, ponder on and plod through issues stemming from their past, affecting their present and future.
The clean, delicate touches of physical and psychological portraiture etch memorable characters in the families of the two protagonists so that we get caught in their story and enjoy it whole, including the fitting open ending.
Ariadne
by Jennifer Saint
A place in its own right (7/6/2021)
In Jennifer Saint’s novel we learn that Ariadne, the princess of Crete, grew up with a ruthless, greedy father, King Minos, with stories of vengeful gods who punish women for the sins of the men in their lives and with her half-brother, the Minotaur, the monster who roams the Labyrinth under their palace of Knossos, feeding yearly on human sacrifice from the defeated city of Athens. Her only solace is her younger sister, Phaedra, a far more rebellious and fearless nature than herself, who still needs to wait for the right moment to escape the paternal grip.
The choice Ariadne makes when the prince of Athens, Theseus, comes to Crete to kill the Minotaur will set her life on a course undoubtedly different from what her father had decided for her. Her choice will also change the life of her sister, and their destines will unwind parallel to each other until a dramatic later encounter. But while Greek mythology glorifies the accomplishments of the man hero Theseus, Saint spins the narrative from the point of view of the heroines, with Ariadne actively seeking her place in this story of heroism and refusing as much as possible to be controlled by the men around her.
Also, halfway through the novel, Saint highlights Phaedra as a mighty heroine in her own right, giving her first-person narrator privileges. Phaedra’s story re-intersects with Ariadne’s at a key moment to reflect on how momentary loss can turn into long-term gain and unforeseen success can prove to be draining and only deceptively satisfying.
Just like Miller in Circe, because of the nature of the material she works with, Saint frequently reflects through her characters on destiny, divinity and human agency, but she adds insightful reflections on the immortality of art and the heroes and values immortalized. Saint questions traditional characters, values and the patriarchal society which nurtured them, offering a subversive narrative which brings to the front alternative, sounder values and heroines. Ariadne is merciless of the way patriarchal families and societies work and in its exploration of the multifaceted women roles and relationships hints at a better world governed by matriarchal values. Unfortunately, it is crushed by the order in place, leaving us wonder at how different or not the transformations in gender roles and relationships are in today’s society, so many years later.
The book has a brilliant motto and prologue, a solid and enticing narrative structure based substantially on the interweaving of first-person narrators. Saint uses an appropriately ornate style, brimming with introspective questions and complex noun-phrases, with imagery perfectly reflective of the age it describes. It is a great novel to read and reflect upon.
The Mystery of Mrs. Christie
by Marie Benedict
A Fresh Take (10/23/2020)
It is the first novel by Marie Benedict that I read and the first time I learn about the incident inspiring this story. If you are anything like me, you go about trying to learn some of the facts behind this true event, read about other explorations of the topic, are surprised at the coverage it has had and then ask yourself what could be a new take on it. (But you don't have to, of course, the novel stands on its own as is.) Then, Marie Benedict's proves to be a commendable, valiant one which does not disappoint.
Marie Benedict chooses the intriguing event of the real-life disappearance of the Dame of detective fiction, Agatha Christie, and undertakes to recreate the circumstances, players and motivations that may explain it, putting Christie's first marriage front and center.
The novelist builds an ingenious narrative structure in which two stories with different chronologies alternate up to the point where they catch up with each other, which coincides with the climax of the story. Very much in the style of Agatha Christie's writings and well justified by the construction of her narrative and the mystery elements it incorporates, Marie Benedict's ends up with a surprising revelation.
Although the revelation seems to spell out the characters' motivations too explicitly, it is true, under the pretext that the characters they were disclosed to were not capable of connecting the dots, and although some points of characterization seem to be drilled ad nauseum, attempted as they were at underlining the source of conflict and the narrators' unreliability, Marie Benedict pulls together a convincing, enticing narrative. All the while she pens a coherent vision of the times, in this case of the British upper middle class of the 1920s with its social conventions and expectations, which is always an essential part of what any reader of historical fiction hopes for.
Once you realize you have to read through to untangle the very cryptic beginning and position the multitude of characters introduced in the first two chapters, the read becomes captivating and it is hard to put down. The characters flesh out vividly, intriguingly, and just before it is too late to save Agatha from a rather conventional, boring portrait, she emerges … well, differently, and the narrative techniques chosen by the author are instrumental in achieving that.
The Mystery of Mrs. Christie is an enjoyable, fast read, satisfying the craving for the unexpected, which anything related to the name of Agatha Christie inevitably stirs. Recommended to lovers of the genres and anyone with a few good hours to spend on an engaging read.
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