Category: USA

Author, Book review, Jonathan Cape, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Salman Rushdie, Setting, true crime, USA

‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’ by Salman Rushdie

kimbofo

Non-fiction – paperback; Jonathan Cape; 224 pages; 2024.

When Sir Salman Rushdie, an Indian-born British-American novelist, was recovering from the violent knife attack that almost ended his life (aged 75) in 2022, he told his agent and friend Andrew Wylie he wasn’t sure he’d ever write again.

“You shouldn’t think about doing anything for a year,” Andrew told him, “except getting better.”

“That’s good advice,” I said.
“But eventually you’ll write about this, of course.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m not sure that I want to.”
“You’ll write about it,” he said. [page 86]

And so it proved. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is a first-person account of Rushdie’s experience surviving an attempt on his life 30 years after a fatwa was ordered against him.

It is deeply personal and told in such a compelling, forthright style that I read the entire book in one sitting.

(At this point, I confess that I have never read any of Rushdie’s fiction but am very much aware of his history because I was a part-time bookseller when The Satanic Verses was released. At the discount book store where I was employed — the now-defunct Libro Books at 191 Bourke Street, Melbourne — we kept the book under the counter and exercised much caution whenever anyone enquired if we had it in stock. I suspect I was far too young and naive to understand the implications of this.)

Attempted murder

In Knife, Rushdie recounts events leading up to the attack — on stage just as he was about to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York — and what happened in the aftermath during his long recovery.

“A gunshot is action at a distance,” he writes, “but a knife attack is a kind of intimacy, a knife’s a close-up weapon, and the crimes it commits are intimate encounters” (page 15).

The actual attack took just 27 seconds but left life-changing injuries.

I never saw the knife, or at least I have no memory of it. I don’t know if it was long or short, a broad bowie blade or narrow like a stiletto, bread-knife-serrated or crescent-curved or a street kid’s flick knife, or even a common carving knife stolen from his mother’s kitchen. I don’t care. It was serviceable enough, that invisible weapon, and it did its work. [page 7]

The most striking thing about Rushdie’s story is not that he survived (which, by all accounts, is miraculous) but that he is not bitter or angry about what happened and bears no malice toward his attacker. Despite losing the sight in one eye and the full use of his left hand and suffering numerous wounds to his neck, face and upper body, he is extraordinarily sanguine about it all. His pragmatism, I suspect, comes from living most of his adult life under threat of assassination.

A premonition

Funnily enough, Rushdie, who is an avowed atheist and does not believe in premonitions or fate, claims that two nights before the actual attempt on his life he had a dream “about being attacked by a man with a spear, a gladiator in a Roman amphitheatre”.

There was an audience, roaring for blood. I was rolling about on the ground trying to elude the gladiator’s downward thrusts, and screaming. It was not the first time I had had such a dream. On two earlier occasions, as my dream-self rolled frantically around, my actual, sleeping self, also screaming, threw its body — my body — out of bed, and I awoke as I crashed painfully to the bedroom floor. [page 7]

He told his wife — the American poet, novelist and photographer Rachel “Eliza” Griffiths — he did not want to go to Chautauqua. Still, he did because he knew tickets had been sold and that his “generous” speaker’s fee would “be very handy”. (Ironically, he was speaking about “the importance of keeping writers safe from harm”.)

The book charts his hospitalisation and long recovery and details the ongoing security concerns he faced when he was finally discharged. This is antithetical to his way of living in America — highly visible and “normal”, achieving  “freedom by living like a free man” — after decades of high-security detail and vigilance in the UK. It’s a difficult pill to swallow because he feels guilty subjecting Eliza to this kind of life.

Love letter to his wife

It is Eliza who is the central focus of Rushdie’s narrative. The book is not merely a memoir; it is a beautiful love letter to her — they had been married for less than a year when the attack occurred. (This is his fifth marriage; the previous four all ended in divorce.) The story is imbued with love, gratitude and kindness for Eliza, but also for his two adult sons, his sister and her children, all of whom live in the UK.

There’s also much affection for the literary community which rallied around him, including his good friends, Paul Auster and the late Martin Amis, who were experiencing their own health issues at the time of Rushdie’s attack.

Perhaps the only aspect of the book I was unsure about is the chapter titled “The A”  in which Rushdie imagines what he would say to his would-be assassin if he was given the chance. In his attempt to “consider the cast of mind of the man who was willing to murder me”, he interviews him in his prison cell. The conversation, which is probing but empathetic, says more about Rusdhie than his assailant…

Knife is an extraordinary book. It’s frank and warm and incisive — no pun intended.

Further reading/viewing

If you wish to know more about the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death issued in 1988 by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, and how it came about, I recommend this excellent 2009 BBC documentary, Salman Rushdie & the Satanic Verses Scandal, which you can view in full on YouTube.

And this weekend, Rushdie’s wife has written a piece about the attack, published in The Guardian, which presents her version of events. It is deeply moving.

Author, Book review, Colm Tóibín, Fiction, Germany, historical fiction, literary fiction, Picador, Publisher, Setting, Switzerland, USA

‘The Magician’ by Colm Tóibín

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Picador; 436 pages; 2021.

Colm Tóibín is one of my favourite writers, but The Magician didn’t quite work for me.

It’s an account of the life and times of Nobel Prize-winning German author Thomas Mann (1875-1955), whose work — Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain et al — I’ve never read, so part of me wonders whether I might have enjoyed the experience more if I was familiar with his writing.

Yet, on the face of it, Mann is the perfect subject for a fictionalised biography because his life was so intriguing on so many levels — economically, socially, politically, sexually. He was born into a rich mercantile family, but his father left them high and dry when he died, and it was up to Mann to find his calling as a writer.

A closeted homosexual with a (supposed) interest in young boys, he went on to marry the devoted and independently minded Katia, who was from a wealthy industrialist family, with whom he had six children. Three of their children went on to become famous writers.

But Mann’s life was marred by the times in which he lived, particularly the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of World War II, during which he fled to Switzerland and later the US. Despite his wealth, he and Katia never seemed to settle in one place, moving constantly between Europe and America, and spending time in Sweden.

His fame meant he was often called upon to criticise Hitler and the Nazi Party, but he was reluctant to use his platform, frightened that it would put other family members at risk, but perhaps, also, because he was more interested in his own self-preservation, of living a quiet life in which he could continue his writing uninterrupted.

Tóibín chooses to tell Mann’s story in a distant third voice so that we don’t really get much of an insight into Mann’s motivations. The closest we get to a seemingly non-existent interior voice is when he frets that his diaries, which detail his sexual fantasies, may fall into the wrong hands.

And despite the great cast of characters that surround him — in particular, his transgressive, sexually outrageous-for-the-times offspring Erika and Klaus — we never really discover what others think of him. The only hint is toward the end, when his youngest son Michael sends him quite a scathing letter, claiming that he has neglected his children in favour of his creative life.

‘I am sure the world is grateful to you for the undivided attention you have given to your books, but we, your children, do not feel any gratitude to you, or indeed to our mother, who sat by your side. It is hard to credit that you both stayed in your luxury hotel while my brother was being buried. I told no one in Cannes that you were in Europe. They would not have believed me.

‘You are a great man. Your humanity is widely appreciated and applauded. I am sure you are enjoying loud praise in Scandinavia. It hardly bothers you, most likely, that these feelings of adulation are not shared by any of your children. As I walked away from my brother’s grave, I wished you to know how deeply sad I felt for him.’ (page 394)

Perhaps the reason I struggled to fully engage with this novel was the complete lack of emotion in it. Both Mann and his wife come across as rather cold fish. Was it a protective coping device? A way of saving face?

It’s hard to know, because despite the many deaths in the family which are detailed here — including the deaths by suicide of Mann’s sisters in separate incidents, and the loss of a son-in-law when the Transatlantic passenger ship he was travelling on was torpedoed during the war  — Mann does not appear to shed a tear. He chooses to bury himself in his work.

Even the rivalry that Mann has with his older brother, Heinrich, who was also a writer, does not seem to trouble him and yet they had been close, living together in Italy when they were both young men. United by their desire to escape their bourgeois roots and the long shadow of their late father — a senator and grain merchant of some repute — they appear to have chosen completely different paths; Heinrich takes the radical, outspoken path, Thomas chooses the one of least resistance.

This is reflected much later in the circumstances in which they live in America: Heinrich and his ditzy second wife Nelly live in a squalid apartment; Thomas and Katia reside in a large, flashy house with an enormous garden.

Of course, the problem with a fictionalised biography of this nature is the lack of distinction between fact and fiction. I do not know enough about Mann’s life to recognise what is an act of Tóibín’s imagination and what is real.

I had hoped to take The Magician as I found it, to enjoy a story about a fascinating writer who was beset by deeply personal challenges throughout his life, but what I got was a rather plodding account of a seemingly unknowable man. Perhaps, in the end, that was Tóibín’s point?

For other takes on this novel, please see Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers and Brona’s at This Reading Life.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth24. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Tonim Morrison, USA, Vintage

‘Sula’ by Toni Morrison

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Vintage Classics; 208 pages; 2022.

“Begging you to read Sula by Toni Morrison,” my niece Monet said in a WhatsApp message in mid-January. “Finishing that book felt like a break-up… it’s my new favourite book.”

With such high praise, I put in a reservation request at my local library and a few weeks later the book was available for me to read.

When I was about a third of the way through it, I sent Monet a message: “OMG. This book. The mother burning her son. The two girls drowning that little boy.”

It was a story that was full of jaw-dropping moments, most of which I didn’t see coming. It gave the story a compelling and powerful edge.

Sula comes in at less than 200 pages, but it contains a lifetime of angst, love, joy, death, tragedy and humour. Every page contains something surprising or revelatory.

I filled it with Post-It tabs, which I use to mark passages I like or think important to the story, and writing this review now, I’m not quite sure how to summarise the book except to say it’s a powerful yet unconventional tale about friendship, identity, betrayal, systematic racism and the consequences of societal expectations in a small American town in the early to mid-20th century.

The tension between tradition and rebellion, conformity and individuality, are central themes.

It was Morrison’s second novel, first published in 1973, and is largely regarded as being integral to the formation of black feminist literary criticism.

But I didn’t read the book through that lens, nor, I’m sure did Monet.

I read it as a compelling tale about a Black community framed around the unlikely friendship between two girls, the titular Sula Peace and Nel Wright, from opposite sides of the social spectrum who become super close as children but choose different paths to follow as adults. In the end, their friendship disintegrates spectacularly but leaves both feeling lonely and misunderstood.

My thoughts

👍🏽 I loved the way Morrison paints such an evocative portrait of the town known as Bottom and then fills it with intriguing and flawed characters, including

  • Sula, a complex and rebellious figure who defies societal norms and expectations and has a birthmark on her face which might be a sign of the devil
  • her friend Nel, who represents conformity and tradition in contrast to the way Sula lives her life
  • Helene, Nel’s mother, who strives for respectability and acceptance
  • Hannah Peace, Sula’s mother, known for her beauty, promiscuity and carefree attitude
  • Eva Peace, Sula’s grandmother, a strong and resilient woman who raises her grandchildren after their mother’s abandonment.

👍🏽 I was taken aback by the shocks that come one after another, but they make the book compelling and page-turning. There’s death by burning (twice), death by drowning, adultery and personal confrontations.

Morrison sets the scene pretty early on by having Shadrack, a seriously traumatised Great War veteran, discharged from hospital far too early. Left to his own devices with just “$217 in cash, a full suit of clothes and copies of very official looking papers”, he has nowhere to go and is too weak to walk steadily along the gravel shoulder of the road he heads out west on.

Passengers in dark, square cars shuttered their eyes at what they took to be a drunken man. […] The police took him to jail, booked him for vagrancy and intoxication, and locked him in a cell. (pages 12-13)

👍🏽 I appreciated the way Morrison integrates casual and systematic racism into the narrative to show that this is the way Black people were treated but makes no commentary on the injustice of it; she just lets the examples sit there and if you weren’t looking for it or lack lived experience, it’s so subtle you might not even notice.

As an example, when Helene takes Nel on a train journey, she is shocked to discover the restrooms are reserved for white people only. When she asks a fellow passenger where the toilet is, she’s told it’s over “yonder” and is directed to a field of long grass.

And when a bargeman tells the sheriff that he’s found a young Black boy’s body in the river, the sheriff is completely disinterested because “they didn’t have no niggers in their country” and is advised to “throw it on back into the water” as if the boy was a piece of rubbish.

Monet’s thoughts

👍🏽 This is an absolutely gorgeous book. The prose is beautiful and flawless in its entirety. The twists are so unexpected; the way it’s written you have no idea what’s going to happen next. And the relationships between the characters are magnificent.

👍🏽 I was instantly hooked by the retelling of Nel on the train. The racism was shocking to read about — especially considering that this was the average life of an African-American woman in the 1920s. The fact that the train carriages were segregated, then the toilets, made me verbally say, “WTF”.

👍🏽 The fact that Morrison’s writing could make me fall in and out of love with characters throughout the book was inspiring. I loved Sula in the beginning and admired her confidence and aura, but by the end, I had accepted her fate and longed for her misfortune.

My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monet’s rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monet and I have previously written joint reviews for James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light.

Book review, Chatto & Windus, Emma Cline, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘The Guest’ by Emma Cline

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Chatto & Windus; 293 pages; 2023.

Manipulators and con artists make great fodder for novels. Think Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley or Abel Magwitch in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Even Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby could be seen to engage in various forms of deception and manipulation in his pursuit of wealth and status.

Emma Cline offers up an unlikely grifter in her novel The Guest, which tells the story of a 22-year-old woman charming her way through a summer on Long Island while on the run from a man to whom she owes a lot of money.

Alex is an escort from “the city” (presumably New York) and she’s stolen an unspecified amount of money from a client because she’s behind on her rent.

The client, Dom, keeps sending her menacing text messages and angry voicemails, and Alex, knowing she’s not able to pay anything back, grabs the first lifeline that is thrown her way: she moves into a luxurious summerhouse in the Hamptons with Simon, a wealthy man 30 years her senior, after he invites her to spend August there with him.

Simon’s house out east was near enough to the ocean. The living room ceiling was twenty feet high, cut with beams. A polished concrete floor. Big paintings that, by pure dint of their square footage, implied high value. (page 17)

The party’s over

But things don’t go according to plan. When Alex embarrasses Simon at a party, she’s escorted to the train station with a one-way ticket back to the city. She never uses the pass. Instead, she hangs about the island for the next five days, passing the time before she can attend Simon’s Labor Day party. There, in a desperate eleventh-hour attempt, she plans to rescue their “relationship” and live a happily ever after existence.

The party was only a few days away. This was just a waiting period for Simon to cool off, a pause. Then everything would go back to the way it was. (page 99)

It’s during those five tremulous days that Alex inveigles her way into other people’s lives, using deception, trickery, manipulation and a pretty smile to get what she wants (usually food and accommodation).

She attends house parties, pool parties, goes to the beach, hooks up with a teenage boy, takes drugs, breaks into other people’s homes and all the while she desperately tries to ignore her malfunctioning mobile phone which buzzes with reminders that she has a debt to pay.

The art of grifting

It’s a high-wire act that works — up to a point. When she pushes people’s generosity too far, she risks exposing her true self: a desperate young woman who uses others to satisfy her own needs.

“And who did you say you knew? ‘Cause none of us” — the girl gestured around the room — “remember you.”
“Brian,” Alex said. “He invited me.”
“Brian?” The girl on the couch shook her head. “Fine, okay, Brian. What’s Brian’s last name?” (page 84)

Her impoverishment and desperation are in stark contrast to the upper-class wealth that surrounds her: the swimming pools and spas, the flashy houses, the grand gardens and the impressive seaside views.

Her vulnerability, coupled with her audacious, calculating, living-by-her-wits behaviour, makes her an engaging character, someone to cheer on even if her morals might be dubious. But as she builds her fragile house of cards, you keep turning the pages, waiting for the inevitable collapse.

Page-turning read

The plot, which is suspenseful and heart-hammering, moves along at a clip. Will Alex slip up? Will she do or say the wrong thing? Will Dom, whose menacing messages keep coming, finally track her down and violently extract the money he’s owed?

The story is written in almost old-fashioned third-person prose reminiscent of Richard Yates, who’s known for his precise and unsparing portrayals of suburban life, and Richard Ford, who focuses on the struggles and personal failures of ordinary Americans.

Cline’s writing, filled with the complexity and nuance of human behaviour, is cut from a similar cloth. She withholds judgement of her characters and their actions, allowing the reader to empathise and come to their own conclusions.

The Guest was featured on several bloggers’ end-of-year lists in 2023, so when I saw it on the shelves of my local library I borrowed it. I’m glad I did. I loved the way it contrasted the extravagant lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy with Alex’s seedier hand-to-mouth existence.

It’s a terrific fast-paced read but offers a lot to cogitate on — including the ending, which I’m still thinking about more than a week later.

Guy at His Futile Preoccupations has also reviewed it.

Amanda Peters, Author, Book review, Canada, Fiction, Fig Tree, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading First Nations Writers, Reading Projects, Setting, USA

‘The Berry Pickers’ by Amanda Peters

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Fig Tree; 304 pages; 2023.

In Australia, state-sponsored programs forcibly removed generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities in what we now call the Stolen Generations.

This shameful separation of children severed significant cultural, spiritual and familial bonds, and caused long-lasting intergenerational trauma, which First Nations people are still dealing with today.

I was reminded of this when I read Amanda Peters’ debut novel The Berry Pickers. Even though the book is Canadian, it explores what happens when Indigenous families are torn apart and disconnected from their culture.

Missing girl

The story begins in 1962 and is framed around a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia who cross the border and decamp to Maine every summer to pick blueberries for the season.

One hot day, four-year-old Ruthie, the youngest child of five, disappears. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, was the last person to see her. He left her sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields while he went off to skip stones on a nearby lake, but when he returned, his beloved sister was nowhere to be seen.

A frantic search yields no clue as to where she might have gone. The police, when informed, are disinterested, telling Ruthie’s distraught parents: “If you were so concerned about the girl, you’d have taken better notice.”

Ruthie is never found. Instead, she’s raised by a privileged white family as one of their own under a new name — “Norma” — and knows nothing of her earlier life.

Two perspectives

The book is divided into two separate narrative threads, told in alternate chapters from Joe’s and Norma’s points of view.

Joe’s storyline is told retrospectively, as he looks back on the formative experiences of his life: the loss of his sister; the brutal bashing of his older brother, who dies from his wounds; a serious accident that leaves him disabled; and the love of a good wife, whom he eventually commits an unforgivable act of violence on.

For much of his adult life, he has drifted from place to place and cut himself off from everyone he knows, including his daughter, and is beset by all-consuming rage and grief and guilt. He’s now dying of cancer and is being cared for by his two elder siblings, Mae and Ben, with whom he’s recently been reunited.

Norma’s storyline is told in chronological order as she grapples with an overbearing, overprotective mother and an emotionally distant father. She’s a bright child, with an enquiring mind, but something isn’t quite right.

In the early days, she’s plagued by “dreams” of another mother and a sibling — which are clearly, unbeknownst to her, memories of her Mi’kmaq family — and as she gets older she’s puzzled as to why her skin is darker than her parents. This anomaly is spirited away with explanations that she’s a “throwback” to her Italian grandfather. But even when she grows up, goes to college, becomes a teacher and gets married, there’s always a niggling feeling in the back of her mind that her past doesn’t add up.

Poignant tale

Right from the start, it’s obvious these two storylines are going to converge in some way, so this isn’t a novel that offers up a mystery in need of being solved (although exactly how Ruthie came to live with her white family **is** intriguing). Instead, the author is focused on showing us two sides of the one coin: what happens to the family left behind when a beloved child goes missing, and what happens to the missing child if they are raised with no knowledge of their biological family?

By adopting this approach, Peters, who is of Mi’kmaq heritage, is able to explore the repercussions on a First Nations family when the police fail to treat the disappearance of an Indigenous child with the seriousness it deserves, and she’s also able to show how a young person’s identity is impacted when they are uprooted from their culture.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s well-plotted, fast-paced and suspenseful. The characters are wonderfully realised (Norma’s Aunt June is a standout) and the individual voices of the two protagonists are distinct so there’s never any doubt whose perspective is being told. Peters also writes beautiful descriptions of landscapes, people and places.

This is a poignant and heartfelt story about racism, grief, guilt, betrayal, hope, curiosity, love — and the pull of family.

I read this book for my #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which focuses on literature by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but may occasionally include First Nations writers from other parts of the world. In this instance, the First Nations writer is from Nova Scotia, Canada. Amanda Peters is of mixed European and Mi’kmaq heritage and belongs to the Glooscap First Nation.

You can see all the books reviewed as part of this project on my dedicated First Nations Writers page. 

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Richard Ford, Setting, USA

‘Wildlife’ by Richard Ford

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 159 pages;  2018.

Richard Ford’s Wildlife is a beguiling novella told from the perspective of a teenage boy, Joe Brinson, whose parents are going through a little “bump” in their marriage and behave in unfathomable and self-destructive ways.

The opening paragraph sets the scene:

In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him. This was in Great Falls, Montana, at the time of the Gypsy Basin oil boom, and my father had brought us there in the spring of that year from Lewiston, Idaho, in the belief that people — small people like him — were making money in Montana or soon would be, and he wanted a piece of that good luck before all of it collapsed and was gone in the wind.

But the luck runs out quickly, when, first, Joe’s father, Jerry, is dramatically fired from his job as a golf instructor at the local country club, and two, a wildfire in the nearby Rocky Mountains casts a pall of smoke over the entire town and doesn’t look like it will be extinguished any time soon.

Instead of looking for a new job, Jerry joins a local volunteer crew fighting the fire, leaving his small family behind, almost as if he’s using the escapade to avoid confronting the reality of his own crumbling marriage and dissatisfaction with his life.

Meanwhile, Joe’s mother, Jean, who has been unable to find work as a substitute teacher or bookkeeper since moving to Montana, is angry at her husband because she thinks he is ill-equipped for firefighting and is putting his life in danger for no good reason. “This is a stupid idea,” she tells him.

Yet no sooner has her husband headed off to do his community-minded duty, than Jean’s jumping into bed with Warren Miller, an older man who is rich, influential and owns two local grain elevators. But because the story is filtered through Joe’s eyes, it’s hard to tell whether his mother is using Miller to get a job at his company, or whether she’s just looking for a romantic interlude while her husband is away.

Human drama

A lot happens in this novella, which condenses most of the action in just a few short days, using pared-back language and short, active sentences. Yet somehow the book brims with emotion. It feels like a lifetime of living, loving, pain and misunderstanding are played out in this one short period.

And Joe’s confusion, his inability to understand his parents’ behaviour and actions, bring him up short. He’s sensitive, confused and doesn’t quite know whose side to take, especially when both Jerry and Jean drag him into their dramas.

When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what’s in their hearts. This can save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again — which is a loss. But to shield yourself — as I didn’t do — seems to be an even greater error, since what’s lost is the truth of your parents’ life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.

Yet the self-destructive behaviour and the deliberate wilfulness of both parties doesn’t seem entirely believable. It’s almost as if both Joe’s mother and his father lose their minds momentarily and live out their individual fantasies — his of macho “escape”, hers of sexual wantonness — with no regard for the consequences.

Gripping narrative

Despite these misgivings, the story is a gripping one. It’s fast-paced, full of narrative tension and suspense, and looming over it all is the threat of a natural disaster that puts the Brinson’s drama into perspective.

Ford paints an evocative picture of Montana Falls — “you could see mountains on clear days from the streets of town” — and the wildfire threat that rumbles on for months at a time, casting a haze so you could “sometimes not see the mountains or where the land met the sky”.

Wildlife is essentially a coming-of-age tale, one that uses the metaphor of an uncontrollable fire to explain how some people live their lives. It’s both bittersweet and explosive.

The book was first published in 1990, and it was adapted for the screen in 2018.

I read this for Novellas in November (#NovNov23) hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. This annual celebration of novella reading runs all month. Click the links above to find out more.

Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Norway, Publisher, Pushkin Press, Setting, translated fiction, USA, Victoria Kielland, women in translation

‘My Men’ by Victoria Kielland (translated by Damion Searls)

kimbofo

Fiction – Kindle edition; Pushkin Press; 224 pages; 2023. Translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls. Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley.

My Men by Victoria Kielland is a fictionalised account of the life of Belle Gunness, America’s first female serial killer, who emigrated from Norway in the late 19th century and was thought to have murdered 14 men in rural Indiana.

Her story is told in the third person, but the writing has such a visceral and urgent quality that it feels like a first-person narrative.

In her head

From the first page, the reader is plunged right into Belle’s teenage head and then taken on an opaque, almost impossible-to-pin-down journey that follows her from rural Norway — where she was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth in 1859 — to Chicago, where she lived with her sister for a short time under the name Bella. She later married a farmer, Mads Sørensen, and changed her name to Belle. She became Mrs Gunness when she wed her second husband Peter Gunness in 1902.

The novel refrains from going into detail about the murders she committed — indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to even realise this is what the book is about — and there’s no exploration of her motivations or reasons for killing so many men. (If you check out her Wiki page she made a habit of luring men to her home via marriage ads, then dismembering their bodies and burying them on her property.)

But in creating a relentless portrait of Belle’s inner life — which is mainly full of shame and fear, loneliness and lusty thoughts — we get a glimpse of what’s going on in her head. And we can see that she uses her sexual agency to get what she wants. But it wasn’t always like that.

No obvious answers

The reader can see that the seeds were sown when Belle was a teenage girl working on a farm in Norway.

Here, she fell in love with the landowner’s son with whom she carried out an illicit relationship. When she reveals she has fallen pregnant to him, he brutally kicks her in the stomach. It was this unwanted pregnancy and the way in which her lover so cruelly treated her that precipitated her move to America.

The psychological damage of this traumatic event acts as a driver for all that follows. It’s clear, to this reader at least, that the murders were Belle’s way of avenging (over and over) the way her first lover had crushed her heart and spirit.

My Men isn’t an easy book to read, or like. It’s not a forensic examination of the crimes, it’s more an experimental look at what it might be like to walk in Belle’s shoes, to feel what she feels, to experience what she experiences and to live in her head for just a short while.

It was unpleasant and made me feel uncomfortable throughout, and when I came to the end I just felt grubby, like I’d been rubbernecking a fatal car accident. For a book to get under the skin like this, I think it’s fair to say it made an impact — and perhaps, in the end, that’s all the author really wanted to do…

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘See What I Have Done’ by Sarah Schmidt: the fictionalised account of the American Lizzie Borden murder case in which she was tried and acquitted of the axe murders of her father and stepmother in 1892.

‘Alias Grace’ by Margaret Atwood: the fictionalised story of a teenage maid, Grace Marks, who was found guilty of the brutal murder of her employer and his mistress in 19th century Canada.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, David Park, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA, Vietnam, war

‘Spies in Canaan’ by David Park

kimbofo

Fiction – Kindle edition; Bloomsbury; 193 pages; 2022.

David Park is an underrated writer from Northern Ireland who writes deeply contemplative stories with nuance, care and great psychological insight. I’ve read three of his novels now, and while all have been vastly different in subject matter, theme and setting, they share a quietness not often found in contemporary literature.

Spies in Canaan, published last year, is another quiet novel, which is unusual given it’s primarily set during the messy tail end of the Vietnam War. But this story is less about the physical violence on the battlefield and more about the psychological war waged by “paper shufflers” and intelligence operatives.

The narrator, Michael Miller, is an American raised by evangelical Presbyterians with Northern Irish ancestry. He spent his life working for the Foreign Service but is now retired and living by the coast. He’s a lonely widower with time on his hands when his long-forgotten past comes back to haunt him.

The book is split into two parts: the first charts Michael’s time in Vietnam during the latter stages of the war in the lead-up to the Fall of Saigon; the second follows what happens more than 40 years later when the man he once worked for is unexpectedly thrust back into his life to ask him to carry out one final mission.

New recruit

In Vietnam, Michael is young, inexperienced and shy. A graduate of an Ivy League college, he has a desk job translating French documents and “shuffling paper”. He spends his time off reading books and hanging out with a fellow American, Corley, who works in the propaganda department. Neither of them is interested in the usual military antics such as booze and women.

I spent time with Corley because there wasn’t anyone else, but I don’t think we would have been particularly close friends in any other context. I liked him well enough, and he never did me any harm, but there was something unsatisfactory in him that occasionally irritated me.

Michael is eventually recruited by a senior CIA analyst, Ignatius Donovan — who is third-generation police, “Boston-Irish” and Catholic — to help him with some under-the-radar work, which largely revolves around interrogating “suspects” and stealing documents to translate.

‘You’re going to be working for me, helping where and how you’re needed, and whatever that is doesn’t get shared with anyone else. You understand?’

The excitement of this new secret assignment soon gives way to feelings of self-doubt as Michael begins to wonder if what he is doing is moral?

I know now, of course, that it’s what war does and that being part of a collective committed to a shared predetermined aim obviates the individual, and to think otherwise is foolishness. The logical progression of this is that sometimes the voice speaking for you puts words in your mouth that you don’t believe or want to express.

It’s not until the second half of the novel that Michael finally confronts the demons of the past. Despite a long, unblemished record in his post-war career, he’s deeply scarred by what happened under Donovan’s “leadership”.

As well as a niggling sense of guilt and a need to atone for perceived wrongs carried out when he was a young man, he’s also haunted by the fate of a Vietnamese girl, made pregnant by Donovan, whom he failed to help when she needed it most.

It’s only when Donovan re-enters his life that there’s a chance he might be able to redeem himself and find out the answers he has been seeking for so long.

Gently nuanced

Spies in Canaan is a slow-moving, gently nuanced story that examines guilt, memory, living in fear and doing things for the greater good. It also explores the fine lines between right and wrong, loyalty and betrayal, love and hate.

The title comes from a Sunday School rhyme that Michael learned as a child — “Twelve spies went to spy in Canaan; ten were bad, two were good” — about the “Promised Land”, which begs the question: is Michael a good spy or a bad one?

For other reviews, see Cathy’s at 746 Books and Susan’s at A Life in Books.

This is my 9th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I bought it on Kindle in April after I heard that Park had a new book; I clearly missed it when it was first published in May 2022.

Author, Bonnie Garmus, Book review, Doubleday, Fiction, general, historical fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Lessons in Chemistry’ by Bonnie Garmus

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Doubleday; 390pp; 2022.

I tend to avoid over-hyped books, particularly if they clutter up my social media feeds, which is why I had decided, rightly or wrongly, that Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry was NOT A BOOK FOR ME. (Yes, the capital letters are important.)

And then I saw Brona’s persuasive review and borrowed the book from the library. I ate it up in a couple of days and realised I’d been wrong to cast judgement based on over-exposure to other people’s enthusiasm when I hadn’t even read the novel myself.

It’s a compelling, fast-paced story set in 1950s America about a female chemist who falls in love with another chemist but because he is famous and successful everyone assumes she’s riding on his coattails. Later, when she accidentally falls pregnant, she is sacked. After the birth of her daughter, she reinvents herself as a TV chef, who inspires women across America to find their true calling and pursue it.

Unfortunately, it wears its feminist agenda too heavily on its sleeve (it’s written with a modern mindset that would have been out of place at the time the book is set) and features some irritating quirky elements, such as an anthropomorphised dog and a precocious, super-intelligent child, but I had a fun time reading it anyway. It’s an enjoyable romp, full of comic moments, great characters and a delightful plot, the type of book to get you out of a reading slump or keep you company on a rainy day.

And yet, it deals with some dark subject matter, including the theft of women’s academic work and systematic misogyny, rape and sexual assault (in the workplace), but it never dwells on these: they are presented as fait accompli, just something that the average woman in 1950s America has to put up with if she flouts societal obligations and expectations, which are limited to running a home and raising children.

[…] she only ever seemed to bring out the worst in men. They either wanted to control her, touch her, dominate her, silence her, correct her, or tell her what to do. She didn’t understand why they couldn’t just treat her as a fellow human being, as a colleague, a friend, an equal, or even a stranger on the street, someone to whom one is automatically respectful until you find out they’ve buried a bunch of bodies in the backyard.

Along with the constant commentary about how difficult it is for women — in this case lead character Elizabeth Zott — to be taken seriously outside of the home, it’s littered with witty one-liners to add a level of “sass” and impudence (which I, for one, appreciated). Here’s an example:

Like so many undesirable men, Mr Sloane truly believed other women found him attractive. Harriet [his wife] had no idea where that specific brand of self-confidence came from. Because while stupid people may not know they’re stupid because they’re stupid, surely unattractive people must know they’re unattractive because of mirrors.

The word that best springs to mind to describe Lessons in Chemistry is “hyperreal”. Everything seems slightly exaggerated – the dialogue, the tone of voice, the setting, and the ridiculous nature of the TV cooking show hosted by a woman who uses chemical names for ingredients.

It feels like something dreamed up by author Anne Tyler, the creator of the period drama series Mad Men and film-maker Wes Anderson. But it’s a winning combination. I can’t wait for the TV adaptation coming later this year…

Author, Book review, Decolonise your bookshelves, Fiction, James Baldwin, literary fiction, New York, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, USA

‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ by James Baldwin

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 192 pages; 1994.

First published in 1974, James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk is set in Harlem in the 1970s. It is essentially a love story between 19-year-old Tish and 21-year-old Fonny — but there’s a twist: Tish is pregnant and Fonny, a sculptor, is now in jail, falsely accused of raping a “Porto Rican”.

How their respective families deal with the situation — Tish’s family is positive and supportive; Fonny’s is less so — and the ways in which the couple hang onto their love forms the heart of the story.

The book is listed in ‘This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books’, which I reviewed earlier in the year. I bought a copy for Monet, my 18-year-old, Melbourne-based niece, because I thought it might be something she would like. I had already spotted If Beale Street Could Talk on her bookshelves when I visited in early March (and she kindly decamped to her sister’s room to let me stay in hers).

Together, we thought it might be fun to read some of the books from This is the Canon and write joint reviews on an ad-hoc basis following a simple format.

This is the Canon describes If Beale Street Could Talk as “one of America’s classic urban love stories”, adding:

The backdrop of institutionalized racism in a pre-Black Lives Matter world, and the mistreatment of Black men by the police and authorities makes their lives bleak; they [Tish and Fonny] often feel beaten before they have barely started living. The fact that a disproportionate number of young Black males in the West are stopped on a daily basis by the police for something as simple as walking along the street, makes this story immediately universal and painfully current.

My thoughts

👍🏽 I really loved this story. It’s quick and easy to read but leaves a lasting impression. And it feels totally modern, even though it was written almost half a century ago! I loved the sparkling and witty dialogue, the frank confessions of Tish as first-person narrator and the wonder with which she sees the world.

👍🏽 It is so joyful in places, not just in the love between the two main characters but in the love that Tish’s immediate family show her when she reveals her pregnancy. Here’s what her mother tells her when she finds out her unwed daughter is going to have a baby:

“Tish,’ she said, ‘when we was first brought here, the white man he didn’t give us no preachers to say words over us before we had our babies. And you and Fonny be together right now, married or not, wasn’t, wasn’t for that same damn white man. So, let me tell you what you got to do. You got to think about that baby. You got to hold on to that baby, don’t care what else happens or don’t happen. You got to do that. Can’t nobody else do that for you. And the rest of us, well, we going to hold on to you. And we going to get Fonny out. Don’t you worry. I know it’s hard – but don’t you worry. And that baby be the best thing that ever happened to Fonny. He needs that baby. It going to give him a whole lot of courage.’

👎🏽 The language is a bit confrontational in places. The ‘n’ word is used a lot (the context has obviously changed in the time since the novel was first published) but there’s also a bit of swearing that might feel jarring if you don’t use this kind of language yourself.

Monet’s thoughts

👍🏽  I really enjoyed how much personality and soul the book had, and how that allowed me as a reader to gain such an attachment to the protagonists Tish and Fonny. The way the book was written and the perspective it offered pushed me to care so much about the characters that I ended up sympathising and feeling their emotions, especially that of Tish.

👍🏽 The writing style was super accessible, especially for a relatively new reader of the classics. The novel dealt with themes of racism, justice and prejudice, which were really eye-opening. They are definitely themes I would like to read about more in the future, whether through Baldwin’s other works or just in general modern classics.

👎🏽 The ending was too open-ended and sort of up for interpretation, leaving the story feeling unfinished. I would’ve loved a bit more clarity to the symbolism and things mentioned towards the end (no spoilers, haha).

My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monet’s rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We chose this book to read from ‘This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books’, which focuses on fiction produced by writers of African descent, Asian descent and Indigenous Peoples. It’s written by Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay George.