The Diamond Queen of Singapore (Ava Lee #13) by Ian Hamilton

Paperback, 428 pgs, pub Aug 2020 (ePub May 26, 2020) Spiderline, ISBN13: 9781487002060 (ebook ISBN 9781487002084), Series: Ava Lee #13

The e-edition of Hamilton’s latest in the Ava Lee series is out and you will want to take this trip with Ava as she hits several continents: Amsterdam and Antwerp in Europe, Singapore and mainland China in Asia, and back to Toronto in North America.

Ava’s collecting debts but for a friend, as she had in her early career. It brings back memories. This time it is not debts Ava is following but cold, hard investment theft wrapped up in a not-so-generous evangelical megachurch on the outskirts of Toronto. Hamilton creates the cruelest, most unambiguously unforgivable villains to walk the earth, and places them in a world we recognize. From there, the scandal just gets bigger…

Has anyone read the 14th-century Chinese novel called, variously, The Water Margin, Outlaws of the Marsh, and All Men Are Brothers? It is a rip-roaring 4-volume Song Dynasty yarn, a masterpiece of storytelling, packed with colorful characters whose names tell it all: Little Whirlwind, Blue-Faced Beast, Impatient Vanguard, etc. The epic story tells of 108 bandits who live by the margin of Liang Shan Marsh and pursue justice by unconventional means.

Hamilton’s story this time has elements of this ancient tale. He named his thieving church leaders Cunningham, Rogers, and Randy. Ava’s triad connection in Chengdu, Han, is blustery and loud, his crass manner and crude-but-effective methods modeled on characters in the ancient tale. Han uses his fists when words are not enough. He carries a large weapon to focus the attention of his opponents on their limited options.

I adored this tale for these elements, and for outlining and pointing to the real and acutely painful problem that Ava uncovers in the course of her investigations, something that has been plaguing the West, particularly the United States and Canada, for some years now. The problem has its source in China and concerned North Americans have wondered how on earth this is happening without and/or despite Chinese government oversight.

The answer to that question echoes what we hear when contemplating the indescribably painful political atmosphere in the United States: it is completely within the realm of the country’s leadership to stop the trouble. For some reason beyond our understanding, the leadership prefers chaos. God help us all.

Another fantastic addition to Hamilton’s box of jewels.

P.S. If you are going to pick up Outlaws of the Marsh, please choose Sidney Shapiro’s translation, the language of which made me fall in deeply love with Chinese culture, habits and humor. Shapiro’s word choices make the ancient book immediately relevant, laugh-out-loud funny, and the long read tireless.



The Chow Tung Series
Fate (Uncle Chow Tung #1)
Foresight (Uncle Chow Tung #2)
The Ava Lee Series
The Water Rat of Wanchai (Ava Lee #1)
The Disciple of Las Vegas (Ava Lee #2)
The Wild Beasts of Wuhan (Ava Lee #3)
The Red Pole of Macau (Ava Lee #4)
The Scottish Banker of Surabaya (Ava Lee #5)
The Two Sisters of Borneo (Ava Lee #6)
The King of Shanghai (Ava Lee #7)
The Princeling of Nanjing (Ava Lee #8)
The Couturier of Milan (Ava Lee #9)
The Imam of Tawi-Tawi (Ava Lee #10)
The Goddess of Yantai (Ava Lee #11)
The Mountain Master of Sha Tin (Ava Lee #12)





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The Mountain Master of Sha Tin (Ava Lee #12) by Ian Hamilton

Paperback, 360 pgs, Pub July 2nd 2019 by Spiderline, ISBN13: 9781487002039, Series: Ava Lee #12

Reading several Ava Lee books in a row is intense but this series can sustain close reading and I needed to catch up on all that has been happening. I want to be ready to contemplate the TV film series, whenever it manages to present itself.

Hamilton has managed, in the last three books of the Ava Lee series, to create a parallel trilogy detailing the life of Uncle Chow Tung, Ava’s mentor for the first years of her career as a forensic accountant and debt collector. That trilogy includes Fate, Foresight and Fortune: The Lost Decades of Uncle Chow Tung.

In this installment of the Triad Years, Ava goes to Hong Kong to handle a defection among the collection of allied triads working under the aegis of the Shanghai organization of Ava’s friend, Xu. It has gotten personal for Ava, too: someone Ava has relied on to help her since Uncle’s death, Lop, has been shot and is near death.

During the course of the novel, we see Ava unusually decisive about life-and-death decisions: she plots the ambush of the defecting HK triad under the leadership of a figurehead who had once tried to kill her. At the same time she seeks to rehabilitate a drug- and alcohol- addicted film director on the mainland. It may seem she is a bundle of contradictions.

All this gang payback deepens her relationship with those that survive the fighting, and destruction is avoided. But Ava’s relationship with the Shanghai triad is more expansive even than before. The action takes place entirely in Hong Kong.

I haven’t a clue whether or not the relationships exposed herein exemplify real triad behaviors. I can only guess that if other books Hamilton has written cut close to the bone, this one may as well. If you ever wondered what hit teams are thinking while involved in shootouts, this may provide some clarity. Spoiler: there is always collateral damage.

The Chow Tung Series
Fate (Uncle Chow Tung #1)
Foresight (Uncle Chow Tung #2)
The Ava Lee Series
The Water Rat of Wanchai (Ava Lee #1)
The Disciple of Las Vegas (Ava Lee #2)
The Wild Beasts of Wuhan (Ava Lee #3)
The Red Pole of Macau (Ava Lee #4)
The Scottish Banker of Surabaya (Ava Lee #5)
The Two Sisters of Borneo (Ava Lee #6)
The King of Shanghai (Ava Lee #7)
The Princeling of Nanjing (Ava Lee #8)
The Couturier of Milan (Ava Lee #9)
The Imam of Tawi-Tawi (Ava Lee #10)
The Goddess of Yantai (Ava Lee #11)
The Mountain Master of Sha Tin (Ava Lee #12)
The Diamond Queen of Singapore (Ava Lee #13)





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The Goddess of Yantai (Ava Lee #11) by Ian Hamilton

Paperback, 405 pgs, Pub Dec 4th 2018 by Spiderline, Orig Title: The Goddess of Yantai, ISBN13: 9781770899506, Series: Ava Lee #11

It is tempting to point to the many truths this series of books tell about contemporary society in China/Asia and suggest that events described are real, that just the names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent.

This particular story takes on the film industry in China, notorious for its propagandist control over messaging. We imagine what it must be like for contemporary artists and actors to thrive in such conditions. Or perhaps not so much.

A great deal is happening at once in this installment and Ava, now enamored of a beautiful movie actress, has toned down her jet-setting lifestyle to a Beijing hutong apartment and zhajiang noodles and sweet and sour soup at a streetside canteen. Plots and revenge dominate the lives of movie industry players, and illicit sex tapes of young and now-famous actors and directors threaten to take down storied careers.

Author Hamilton is working with a new editor after a successful run of eleven books in his series of Ava Lee, forensic accountant, investor and practitioner of bak mei, an ancient and deadly martial art. Things do seem a little different, just like Ava curbing her propensity to fly to several continents over the course of two days. She gets hurt in this one, too. She’s been hurt before, but it seems like she might have been a little slow in reacting to a thrust by a thug: “he was faster than he looked.”

A few loose threads were left open, but we know as the book closes what the next installment will bring and that is impelling. I noticed when I ordered the twelfth book in the series that there is a new, shorter trilogy giving the backstory of Uncle, Ava’s mentor who died in his eighties. Hamilton is looking to free himself up to imagine new lives and situations. Keep your eyes peeled for Fate, Foresight and Fortune: The Lost Decades of Uncle Chow Tung.

The Chow Tung Series
Fate (Uncle Chow Tung #1)
Foresight (Uncle Chow Tung #2)
The Ava Lee Series
The Water Rat of Wanchai (Ava Lee #1)
The Disciple of Las Vegas (Ava Lee #2)
The Wild Beasts of Wuhan (Ava Lee #3)
The Red Pole of Macau (Ava Lee #4)
The Scottish Banker of Surabaya (Ava Lee #5)
The Two Sisters of Borneo (Ava Lee #6)
The King of Shanghai (Ava Lee #7)
The Princeling of Nanjing (Ava Lee #8)
The Couturier of Milan (Ava Lee #9)
The Imam of Tawi-Tawi (Ava Lee #10)
The Goddess of Yantai (Ava Lee #11)
The Mountain Master of Sha Tin (Ava Lee #12)
The Diamond Queen of Singapore (Ava Lee #13)


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The Imam of Tawi-Tawi (Ava Lee #10) by Ian Hamilton

Paperback, 365 pgs, Pub Jan 6th 2018 by Spiderline, ISBN13: 9781487002749, Series: Ava Lee #10

Entering week eight of coronavirus, I deserve a break. And one of my favorite series of all time has to be Ian Hamilton's Ava Lee books. Canadian by nationality, Chinese by race, lesbian by choice, and accountant by vocation, Ava Lee is one special protagonist.

Now in her mid-thirties, she hasn't slowed down any. She has agreed to help out an old friend-of-a-friend and ends up collaborating with a government she hasn't worked with in the past. The whole experience looks like it will end badly, but the denouement shocks us utterly. Hamilton plot lines are unique. He doesn't copy anybody and he always talks about our culture now, highlighting personalities and events that look vaguely familiar from the headlines. This contemporaneity may be why I admire his style so much.

Author Hamilton writes in his Acknowledgements that this was a difficult book to write and indeed, was not originally part of this series. That statement raises all kinds of questions in my mind, but I can unequivocally say that this story is breathtaking in the leaps it takes in plot and character development. Remember what I say about 'familiar' figures and you will forever wonder what truth there is in this heartbreaking novel. In the very next book in the series, Ava says something about "one can never be too cynical," and one fears she learned that lesson from cases like this one.

We also learn that Hamilton had such deep disagreements with his long-time editor Janie Yoon over this book that they went their separate ways. I did notice that Ava is not quite as sure of her ability to solve every problem as she has been in earlier books. She's getting older, something I appreciate since I very much am, too.

This story takes place in the Philippines and yes, it is a departure from other efforts. During the action sections of the novel, Ava barely speaks to the folks who bring her the case. We follow her, hoping there is not an iota of truth to any of it, but suspecting a story like this doesn't get conceived in a vacuum.

A very special series. Read it.

The Chow Tung Series
Fate (Uncle Chow Tung #1)
Foresight (Uncle Chow Tung #2)
The Ava Lee Series
The Water Rat of Wanchai (Ava Lee #1)
The Disciple of Las Vegas (Ava Lee #2)
The Wild Beasts of Wuhan (Ava Lee #3)
The Red Pole of Macau (Ava Lee #4)
The Scottish Banker of Surabaya (Ava Lee #5)
The Two Sisters of Borneo (Ava Lee #6)
The King of Shanghai (Ava Lee #7)
The Princeling of Nanjing (Ava Lee #8)
The Couturier of Milan (Ava Lee #9)
The Imam of Tawi-Tawi (Ava Lee #10)
The Goddess of Yantai (Ava Lee #11)
The Mountain Master of Sha Tin (Ava Lee #12)
The Diamond Queen of Singapore (Ava Lee #13)


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Murder Casts a Shadow: A Hawai'i Mystery by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl

Paperback, 277 pgs, Pub June 6th 2008 by University of Hawaii Press, ISBN13: 9780824832179

Can I have more than one favorite author? Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl is a playwright but she put her hand to a murder mystery after writing several successful plays. This is a true gem: multi-faceted, with rich portrayals of Pacific Island peoples and their beliefs as well as believable motivations for murder. We get the native Hawaiian perspective on why America the mainland was interested to annex the islands, and all of it so light, so fragrant, so beautiful, like Kneubuhl’s descriptions of the dawn, the surf, the flora.

The time described is the 1930’s and the characters we meet are glamorous, sophisticated, smart, and sound an awful lot as though they could be speaking today. The women--in particular one woman, Mina--is fully-realized and unafraid to reveal her doubts, her passions, her intents. Others may gossip, but she is guileless. She is beautiful and suffers from the attentions of men. She sets the parameters of a working relationship right from the start with a man she doesn’t know well, suspecting he will, as they all do, eventually fall under her spell.

Native names may be a challenge for some but I relish the added authenticity and depth to the story as it unfolds. A museum director, a white man, is murdered. The police chief, also white but married to one of twin sisters descended from island royalty, hosts a Pacific Islander playwright and sometime British spy who has come to Hawai’i to return the portrait of a Hawaiian king once misappropriated from the islands. When the portrait goes missing at the time of the murder, Mina, one of the twins and a part-time journalist, works to uncover the perpetrators.

Kneubuhl doesn’t put a foot wrong while effectively throwing red-herrings into the story at every turn. While it appears several people have a motive for murder, we never see the ending coming, though it had been spotlighted a few times earlier in the drama. Kneubuhl has a theatre artist’s skill of involving our every sense, beginning on page one when someone spills a glass of brandy over their costume at a gala. Taste, scent fill the air directly and hit the bloodstream quickly.

She does the same with her descriptions of sunrises in the outer islands, the condition of the sea, the torrential rains, the lava-rock cliffs—the physical fact of the islands are as important as anything or anyone else in this story. It is a real achievement to have highlighted the natural beauty of a place while sharing its history, all the while amusing us with a plausible murder mystery.

The cast of characters is plausible, too, from Mina’s best friend, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant who likes cooking French food more than his native cuisine to a Japanese maid, we learn later, who happens to be very knowledgable about Asian antiques.

Kuebuhl has written more than two dozen plays and three of her most celebrated plays are collected in an edition called Hawai'i Nei: Island Plays. This mystery novel has become a series with two other books featuring its main characters, including the indomitable Mina. Most important, perhaps, is Kneubuhl's celebration of island customs and placing the islands in the context of America’s sometimes bloody and racist history.

“Our stories are so worth telling…you are leaving a gift for your community.”--Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl in an interview in 2015 for PBS Hawaii.

Here is Victoria Kneubuhl being interviewed by the Hawaiian talk show host, Leslie Cox, in 2015 for PBS Hawaii: Tweet

The Country Life by Rachel Cusk

Audiobook, Pub Oct 1st 2014 by Recorded Books, Inc.; Hardcover, 341 pgs, Pub Jan 1st 1999 by Picador USA (first published June 20th 1997) ISBN13: 9780312198480, Lit Awards: Somerset Maugham Award (1998)

This novel is a fantastically successful parody of a Eighteenth Century novel in which a young woman encounters all sorts of terrors in her first solo foray into the wilds of the country in Sussex. I had the advantage of listening to this novel, brilliantly read by Jenny Sterlin, produced by Recorded Books, but I like to think I would have picked up on the melodrama even if I’d read it.

As an undergraduate reading 18thC literature, I was tasked in one demanding class to “write an paper in the style” of one of the authors we studied that term. This novel by Cusk would be a brilliant fulfillment of that requirement. One would swear one were reading a modern Gothic romance in the style of our very earliest novels like Weiland; or The Transformation by Charles Brockton Brown, written in 1798 or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein.

All the intrigue, drama, and fear of a young woman’s fancy are amply on display: creaking floorboards, the dangers of walking in the country on public footpaths, leering oversexed male acquaintances, dwarfish figures whose intent, whether good or bad, is undetermined. Stella is simply overtaken with every possible obstacle to living well in Sussex at Franchise Farm, a large, ancient, impressive farming estate owned in perpetuity by the Maddens. Stella has been engaged to be a companion to the Matthew Madden, a teenaged handicapped scion of the family.

Cusk works over our sympathies in this novel so that every couple pages we are changing allegiances with the characters. The story has a darker heart than we’re prepared for by all the ridiculous drama of Stella’s first days at Franchise Farm, but this is meant to be discovered after several hours with the characters, so i won’t reveal it here. Suffice it to say that the overblown prose and extraordinary dilemmas faced by our narrator contrast in a comic way with the utter ordinariness of the rest of the characters, all of whom find themselves watching Stella with some degree of alarm and surprise as she settles in.

I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed a novel as much, it being so completely unexpected, truly hilarious and absurd, with our heroine, through no intent of her own, ending up several days completely blotto on stolen vodka. The teenaged charge Matthew bears some responsibility for taking advantage of his much-older companion, never having seen someone with as little control or suitability for her position as the lovely Stella. As his mother says volubly, “He’s not retarded, Stella, he’s just disabled.” And very clever and interested he is, too, in all that goes on around him. For once he sees someone nearly as helpless as he is, and he rises to the challenge.

The finish is heartfelt and warm, and we discover that Stella is indeed suited to her position, and in fact we want more of her stumbling ways since she manages to bring out the best in everyone. We have been aghast at the blunt language and contentious attitudes of many of the folks we meet. But they can recognize vulnerability when they see it and do not crush those suffering from it.

I am particularly thrilled to read a novel that describes—and asks us to imagine—what life might actually be like for someone disabled. The group meetings Matthew must attend outside of his school hours are truly horrifying—all authoritarian control and insistence on talking about one’s feelings. Matthew is often overlooked and not appreciated for what he can do well.

Every novel I have read by Cusk is very different from its predecessors but equally funny. Her work is not losing its charm, no matter that I have read nearly all her oeuvre at once. I am even more convinced of my earlier assessment—certainly that Cusk is my favorite living author, but also that she is one of the greats working today. She is especially relevant in a world in which sexual relations have entered the stage of “let’s put it all on the table, dear.”

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My reviews of Cusk's other books:
Saving Agnes, 1993
The Temporary, 1995 (not reviewed yet)
The Country Life, 1997
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, 2002
The Lucky Ones, 2003
In the Fold, 2005
Arlington Park, 2006
The Bradshaw Variations, 2009
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, 2009
Aftermath: On Marriage & Separation, 2012
Outline, 2014
Medea, 2015
Transit, 2016
Kudos, 2018
Coventry: Essays, 2019






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Aftermath: On Marriage & Separation by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 147 pgs, Pub Aug 7th 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 2012), ISBN13: 9780374102135, Lit Awards: J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography Nominee (2013)

It used to be rare for me to read through a writer’s oeuvre at once. I was afraid I would show an author I admired to disadvantage. With Rachel Cusk, each book is another, deeper aspect of the same theme so one may move from one to another, gorging intemperately on the ideas there and stagger out like a bee drunk on honey.

Honesty, she says, is critical. If one is going to pay any attention to an author, honesty about the human experience, however coruscating, is key. Men write about war which tears the heart from the body. Women write about domestic issues which tear the soul from the heart. One day this may change. To date, thousands of years since the Greeks, it hasn’t yet.

Clytemnestra took over her husband’s work while he was away fighting the wars in Troy. Cusk calls her unisex, that she seeks equality, now that she’s seen men’s work and can handle it herself. But the ‘pure peace of equality’ does not engender children, or border expansion, or empires.

“It is all aftermath, predicated on the death of what was before…Clytemnestra wants no more begetting. She wants the peace of equality but to get it she will have to use violence. To reach the aftermath, first there has to be the event itself.”

Reading backwards through Cusk’s work, I realize this book is the third piece of a memoir in acts. It begs to read through in a sitting, her writing is so clear, so inescapable, so sharp, so quivering and naked. Her husband barely appears and yet we hear her silent wail, like reverberations impacting eardrums. The children are her Iphegenia, “the sacrifice that lies at the heart of all marriages.”

“Grief is not love but it is like love. This is romance’s estranged cousin, a cruel character, all sleeplessness and adrenalin unsweetened by hope.”

“I blame Christianity,” she says, lashing out. “The holy family, that pious unit…has a lot to answer for….The day feeble Joseph agreed to marry pregnant Mary the old passionate template was destroyed.” Honesty. Where was it then? Where is it now?

She doesn’t eat. In the chapter entitled “Aren’t You Having Any?” her children essentially beg their mother not to disappear, but “it is impossible to eat and stay vigilant.” Her daughter is invited to the party of a close friend, but when the time comes to pick her up, the narrator realizes the friend invited other people for a sleep-over, but not her daughter. She immediately attributes this to her divorce and considers it a calculated cruelty, but someone less involved would certainly make a different assessment. The daughter, perhaps ten years old, is the more adult in this case, urging her mother to drop it:

“They probably didn’t even think about it. That’s just how people are.”

Indeed they are. The chapter called “The Razor’s Edge” reminds us of Antigone, where sacred law meets state law. Creon is Antigone’s uncle who has ordered her not to bury her slain brother because of his alleged crimes against the state, of which Creon is in charge. Creon eventually retracts his threats, but too late. When Teiresias, the blind soothsayer, tells Creon to relent and forgive Antigone lest he perpetuate perversity, Creon first insults Teiresias, and then admits that he is frightened. This, Cusk tells us, is

“aftermath, the second harvest: life with knowledge of what has gone before…true responsibility is an act of self-destruction.”

Am I wrong in suggesting the narrator is right? We will all go through these stages in our life. Cusk is so close to it here, and so invested in her own version of it, that she does not realize this is natural, normal, perhaps even healthy. None of us was ever perfect, so perhaps a little self-destruction (read: ego-destruction) is called for. It’s the rebuilding that makes true love, true generosity possible. It happens regularly in good marriages: the breaking and restitching. Doesn’t it?

This narrator has a larger capacity for love than she ordinarily shares. This is clear in her story about the witch’s house: how she and her daughters rented a set of rooms in an old house but were kicked out by the proprietor before the agreed-upon time was up. She felt the wrong keenly and when she complained, she was deserted in a distant location by the proprietor. Cusk told her friends how she bravely got her own back, but she admits to us that a greater achievement would have been to acknowledge the lack of love and attention the place and the people needed. She sought safety for herself and her children, but sometimes safety is best found by opening up and letting go, rather than by holding on.

This astonishing end to a trilogy of memoirs only makes Cusk's writing all the more precious, knowing it was first written in blood, by her fingernails. It always amazes me that voices of such extraordinary power are not immediately recognized, nourished, protected. We need writers with skills and sensibilities like this, without which we’d have no standard to set the bar. Many thanks to this brave woman willing to share her innermost agonies in exquisite prose for our improvement.

Below please find reviews of Cusk's other works, in order:
Saving Agnes, 1993
The Temporary, 1995 (not reviewed yet)
The Country Life, 1997
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, 2002
The Lucky Ones, 2003
In the Fold, 2005
Arlington Park, 2006
The Bradshaw Variations, 2009
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, 2009
Aftermath: On Marriage & Separation, 2012
Outline, 2014
Medea, 2015
Transit, 2016
Kudos, 2018
Coventry: Essays, 2019




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Transit by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 272 pgs, Pub Jan 17th 2017 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published January 1st 2016), ISBN13: 9780374278625, Series: Outline #2, Lit Awards: Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee (2017), Goldsmiths Prize Nominee (2016)

It is strange, I suppose, for me to describe this trilogy of books as though they were thrillers, but they acted that way upon my consciousness. I read them out of order, 3-1-2, so I will discuss the totality of them in recognition of their separateness. There was a propulsiveness to the story as told by Faye, writer and teacher, former wife and current mother, and narrator of these three slim volumes. These easily contain some of the best writing I have enjoyed for many years.

The perspective in these novels is female, but Cusk gives us a wide range of male personalities to consider. She is not cruel, though it may be true she leaves out that ‘divine spark’ that gives the male its essence, its truest expression. Her observations are deep enough to border on psychoanalysis, giving us the material with which to draw the conclusions. It is fortunate she is so funny because we recognize then that this is fiction. Real life is never so funny. Is it?

The final scene in this novel recalls the title of a memoir of hers, The Last Supper, which is definitive, even conclusive, in some way. I have no idea whether the two are related in subject matter, but somehow I am tempted to believe they are. One leaves the dinner party shattered, with only shreds of one’s understanding of what makes a good spouse, a good parent intact. Everything we understood about marriage and parenting has been challenged and we are distraught to realize the only thing left of our understanding is that love must be in the equation somewhere. Scratch that. Everywhere. In great abundance.

As a set-piece, this scene has no parallel that I know of in modern literature. The utter compulsion with which we listen to each new voice, each new revelation, gives the book its thriller aspect. What new terror is around the turn in the conversation? Parenting is something about which everyone has opinions. Even when we think we don’t, as soon as someone else acts, we realize that oh yes, we do indeed have opinions.

During the dinner party, and several times in the course of this series of novels, Faye takes calls from her own sons, who for one reason or another are on their own while she is away. We see how she reacts, and sometimes, though not always, we learn what she says. We form opinions about her in these moments. Can anyone disapprove of how she handles these intimacies? We have to ask ourselves why she includes these moments in her novels. Is she modeling how love manifests? I think it may be so.

This narrator, I should remind everyone, is practically invisible in these novels. She had a few opinions in the first novel, delivered to a man she met on an airplane and about whose life she really shouldn’t have had much to say, since he was essentially a stranger to her. Opinions like these gradually peter out over the course of the novels and when she is asked directly for her opinion on some topic, she may instead offer a memory of something that happened to her that could be construed as an answer.

She uses this technique in her writing classes as well. She is challenged when she is teaching writing sometimes that she does not actually teach, and that her novels make no sense. What we learn is that her questions in class about classmates’ experiences are meant to expose those things worth writing about, and how to get to that kernel each time. I think we can assume the author Cusk interrogates herself and her experience in this way to uncover her own heart, though that can never account for the alchemy that makes these books literature.

Struggling through her days as a single mother of two boys, Faye manages to engender rage in the residents below her second-floor flat. She determines to hire someone to soundproof the floor while updating the cabinets and finds the most expressive, articulate, introspective builder who reveals he would prefer to live “somewhere completely blank…where there’s nothing, no colors, no features, maybe not even any light…” Similarly, she finds a hairdresser who casually makes the deepest cuts: “To stay free you have to reject change.”

Later, Faye will tell an old friend, “Freedom is a home you leave once and can never go back to.” Does she mean freedom, or innocence? Are they the same? Still later yet Faye wll say to that same friend that desire and self-control are not the whole story when we speak of ourselves in the world. There is also something that happens that some call fate but others might call powerlessness. This phenomenon may be especially observable in relationships when others exhibit will, but not, perhaps, exclusively. It is existential, a reason there are gods.

Faber published this book in New Zealand and put this cover on it.

Heidi Julavits interviews Rachel Cusk for The Cut after the publication of Transit in 2017. “Silence,” she said, “is going to become a very powerful thing.”

Completely convinced of the potency and success of this trilogy, I am surprised to see how many of my fellows in literature did not share my opinion. She tried something unique in these novels that began as an answer to critics of her autobiographies. It worked. I am eager to discover all I can of her writing, and believe she should be close to the top of the list of our best for what she delivers and how she delivers it. Kudos indeed.

Below please find reviews of Cusk's other works, in order:
Saving Agnes, 1993
The Temporary, 1995 (not reviewed yet)
The Country Life, 1997
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, 2002
The Lucky Ones, 2003
In the Fold, 2005
Arlington Park, 2006
The Bradshaw Variations, 2009
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, 2009
Aftermath: On Marriage & Separation, 2012
Outline, 2014
Medea, 2015
Transit, 2016
Kudos, 2018
Coventry: Essays, 2019





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Kudos by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 224 pgs, Pub June 5th 2018 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN13: 9780374279868, Series: Outline #3

Wow. What power this author has. I’d not read anything by Cusk before this, though part of her trilogy had been noted on my to-read list. She is another thoroughly unique and powerful Canadian voice now hailing from the British Isles. What about that last scene? Is that a statement completely in tune with the state of the world today? Or not?

I cannot speak to what the book means in the larger trilogy, and can’t even speak to what this book means outside of the trilogy. It is just a fantastic read, the language so streamlined and uncluttered, and one can go back to it again and again and pick out pieces which lead to a theory. Finally, female voices to face off more well-known male authors…and I think of Americans, John Updike and Philip Roth, writers of the male experience.

The narrator in this novel, an author also, did not speak, so far as I could tell—well, only to answer questions. Her observations are internal. We just get someone who answers a question the long-way-round, with a heartfelt saga that moves the air in the room and subtly changes us.

Cusk made me laugh. What about the gaunt man at the literary soirée who looked as though he’d undergone a failed surgery? He’d only stopped eating so much and was now exercising. He was trim in fact, not gaunt at all. His hair, which had looked so windblown and as though he’d just risen from his hospital bed and rushed to the party, was in fact artfully arranged with spikes and whorls like a young man’s. His suit was the baggy style popular now, in an expensive lightweight fabric--a type of silk maybe--that looks well in a boxy cut. He was having the time of his life.

Our narrator was doing a book tour, undergoing a series of interviews, some back-to-back. One interviewer came armed with only one question: “What did you notice on your way here?” I laughed because I had done the same thing once, though I rarely interview authors. The author was Nigerian first, British second, and American third and was feted in all three countries. I’d read every interview I could find in all three continents and over a period of thirty years. I was prepared…I was over-prepared. I had nothing original to ask; I could only ask questions about what he was noticing now about his life in Chicago. He never answered. Maybe one day he will write a book in response.

It is not hard to imagine what Cusk thought of the Brexit vote. An author at the literary soirée has an opinion: “It was a bit of a case of turkeys voting for Christmas,” he said. Indeed. And of the reviewer who wanted to be a writer himself? He couldn’t stand the mediocrity of successful writers. He’d never begin a work without knowing exactly where it was going, anymore than he would leave the house without his wallet and keys. Of course. People preferred his savage reviews to his fiction. I guess everyone could see where he was going.

Cusk says so much about the state of the world without saying a thing about it, just by reminding everyone of Louise Bourgeois—how she was discounted and ignored for so long and how really, the worst possible thing to be in today’s world is an average white male of average talent and intelligence. Surely they feel the pressure, and can imagine the abyss that faced so many of us in the past…the looking-past, the discounting of one’s lived experience, the so-whatness of it all. What goes around comes around.

Consider this characterization:

“She was a tiny, sinewy woman with a childlike body and a large, bony, sagacious face in which the big, heavy-lidded eyes had an almost reptilian patience, occasionally slowly blinking.”

I had to read that description several times before I could put together all the seemingly-disparate features. Which is how one feels when one enters a big city: it is confusing and unfamiliar and how does it manage to work?

This is ravishing, mature, adult, female, intelligent writing. Now suddenly I am thinking of Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, both of whom are terribly amusing while sharing truths we can all recognize. This is literature. Go there.

Below please find reviews of Cusk's other works, in order:
Saving Agnes, 1993
The Temporary, 1995 (not reviewed yet)
The Country Life, 1997
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, 2002
The Lucky Ones, 2003
In the Fold, 2005
Arlington Park, 2006
The Bradshaw Variations, 2009
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, 2009
Aftermath: On Marriage & Separation, 2012
Outline, 2014
Medea, 2015
Transit, 2016
Kudos, 2018
Coventry: Essays, 2019





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Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

Hardcover, 272 pgs, Pub Jan 30th 2007 by Harper, ISBN13: 9780060594794, Lit Awards: John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize, Internationaler Literaturpreis – Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2009), Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction (Runner-up) (2008), Alabama Author Award for Fiction (2008)

This story of Peru’s civil war (1980-2000) is startling in what it reveals about humans—how thin the skin of our civilization and how remarkably base our instincts. I would have plunked the whole story under the rubric ‘science-fiction’ except for the acknowledgements in which Alarcón cites debts from his long period of research.

After twenty years of war, teenagers are like newborns, having no institutional memory. Towns are designated by number, not name. Both sides so distrust and despise the other they no longer ruminate on guilt. Each is sloppy in their reasoning and callous in their behaviors; they treat one another like a separate species needing extermination. Terrifyingly, it shows us what can come of broken political systems. It happened. Not long ago.

It shows us what comes when intellectuals are jailed and disappeared, when the people are kept in ignorance. They know only that their family members and townspeople are disappearing, they know not where they go. This particular novel focuses on a radio show that the entire country listened to: a golden-throated newsreader sharing names sent to her by people trying to find individuals they knew and loved. If everyone listens, there is hope that some may eventually be reunited with their families.

What is so astounding about this novel is not only that it previews for anyone interested an outcome when a country follows a path of political warfare and division. Sometimes I think we can still fix our own broken system; after reading this I am sure we must, and sooner please. This novel is a debut by an author who was thirty years old at the time (2007). It doesn’t seem possible he would be capable of such depth and such understanding. But great stresses can force unusual talent.

"Manau carried with him the shame of an exposed man who had imagined his mediocrity to be a secret."

and

"….it didn’t seem at this [early] hour to be a city but a museum of a city, a place she was viewing as if from some distant future, an artist’s model built to demonstrate how human beings once lived…"

Lately I reviewed the author’s latest collection of stories The King is Always Above the People, which led me to this novel and another of his, At Night We Walk in Circles, published in 2013. Alarcón hosts a podcast for Latin American voices, among other things. He is a critically important voice for North Americans at this time of our own political upheaval, and because he is extraordinary. We need to hear him. Get something of his right now.



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To End a Presidency by Laurence Tribe & Joshua Matz

Hardcover, 304 pgs, Pub May 15th 2018 by Basic Books, ISBN13: 9781541644885

America is an advanced democracy. It is imperative we the citizenry recognize our responsibilities and make use of our rights. “Impeachment is neither a magic wand nor a doomsday device.” It won’t fix the problems that brought a failed real estate magnate and showman to power. Moreover, calling for impeachment may have deleterious consequences which serve to rally the tyrant’s support.

The best thing about this book for me is that it lowered my blood pressure. I am not going to deny I have been distressed for…more than a year now, and severely low in the past couple months. This book reminded me that there are smart, educated people thinking about how best to deal with a liar whose proclivities border on fascism. Impeachment, these authors argue, may not be the best way to address this threat.

“When our democracy is threatened from within, we must save it ourselves…We must draw together in defense of a constitutional system that binds our destinies and protects our freedoms.”

Calls for impeachment have been increasing over the past decades, but this pair of authors thinks that is a sign of the divisiveness of our politics rather than realistic means of addressing things we don’t like about the other party’s president. We reached a new low when, even before the last presidential election in 2016, promises were made by each side to impeach the winner.


The authors stress that loose talk of impeachment may become as desensitizing as crying wolf when even the public begins to mistrust the options for curbing bad behaviors in a sitting president. Our elected officials must think strategically about what they are planning to achieve especially when they do not control enough seats to initiate impeachment hearings. Hot air is not helpful in educating the public in a time of crisis because it inflames the citizenry’s baser instincts.

We must work together if we are going to govern. The authors quote Lincoln at a time our country was more divided than now:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”

Yes, exactly. We clearly have not seen the existential threats coming down the road or we would be a lot more circumspect about calling hatred down on fellow citizens. Good grief. If we can’t work together despite living in the most resource-rich and abundant country on earth, we’re gonna lose it. But the people that made us this angry will all be dead and we and our children will have to deal with the problems that come. If everybody’s happy with that, let’s prepare well.

“In our experience, one of the main obstacles to an even-keeled analysis of impeachment under Trump is the fear and fury that he inspires in many of his political opponents.”

Don’t be a part of the problem. Educate yourself. It turns out that the most reliable way to deal with a pedant ideologue is to sideline them…in our case, by voting him and his supporters out. Not easy. But neither are any of the alternatives. This state of affairs was a long time developing into toxicity. It may take some time to rid ourselves of it.

This book is worthwhile. Time to take a deep breath and think before you speak.




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Dawn of the New Everything by Jaron Lanier

Hardcover, 304 pgs, Pub Nov 28th 2017 by Henry Holt and Co., ISBN13: 9781627794091

The ideas in this book are so refreshing, thrilling, amusing, enlightening, and sad that they had me eagerly looking forward to another session with it whenever I got a chance. I found myself fearing what was to come as I read the final chapters. If I say I wish it had turned out differently, it wouldn’t make much difference. I am just so relieved & reassured that such people exist. We share a sensibility. I suppose such people forever be shunted aside by more talky types, louder but not more capable. Anyway, this kind of talent shares a bounty that accrues to all of us.

Everyone knows Lanier was exceptional for his ideas about Virtual Reality. He created, with others, an industry through the force of his imagination. What many may not recognize was that amid the multiple dimensions that made his work so special was his insistence on keeping the humanity—the imperfection, the uncertainty…the godliness, if you will—central in any technological project. It turns out that slightly less capable people could grasp the technology but not the humanity in his work, the humanity being the harder part by orders of magnitude.

It was amusing, hearing such a bright light discuss ‘the scene’ that surrounded his spectacular ideas and work in the 1980s and ‘90s, the people who contributed, the people who brought their wonder and their needs. He gives readers some concept of what VR is, how complicated it is, what it may accomplish, but he never loses sight of the beauty and amazing reality we can enjoy each and every day that is only enhanced by VR. Much will be accomplished by VR in years to come, he is sure, but whether those benefits accrue to all society or merely to a select few may be an open question.

While ethnic diversity is greater now in Silicon Valley than it was when Lanier went there in the 1980s, Lanier fears it has less cognitive diversity. And while the Valley has retained some of its lefty-progressive origins, many younger techies have swung libertarian. Lanier thinks the internet had some of those left-right choices early on its development, when he and John Perry Barlow had a parting of ways about how cyberspace should be organized. It is with some regret that we look back at those earlier arguments and admit that though Barlow “won,” Lanier may have been right.

Lanier was always on the side of a kind of limited freedom, i.e., the freedom to link to and acknowledge where one’s ideas originated and who we pass them to; the freedom not to be anonymous; or dispensing with the notion that ideas and work are “free” to anyone wishing to access it. he acknowledges that there were, even then, “a mythical dimension of masculine success…that [contains] a faint echo of military culture…” Lanier tells us of “a few young technical people, all male, who have done harm to themselves stressing about” the number of alien civilizations and the possibility of a virtual world containing within it other virtual worlds. He suggests the antidote to this kind of circular thinking is to engage in and feel the “luscious texture of actual, real reality.”

In one of his later chapters, Lanier shares Advice for VR Designers and Artists, a list containing the wisdom of years of experimenting and learning. His last point is to remind everyone not to necessarily agree with him or anyone else. “Think for yourself.” This lesson is one which requires many more steps preceding it, so that we know how to do this, and why it is so critical to trust one’s own judgment. There is room for abuse in a virtual system. “The more intense a communication technology is, the more intensely it can be used to lie.”

But what sticks with me about the virtual experience that Lanier describes is how integral the human is to it. It is the interaction with the virtual that is so exciting, not our watching of it. Our senses all come into play, not just and not necessarily ideally, our eyes. When asked if VR ought to be accomplished instead by direct brain stimulation, bypassing the senses, Lanier’s answer illuminates the nature of VR:

“Remember, the eyes aren’t USB cameras plugged into a Mr. Potato Head brain; they are portals on a spy submarine exploring an unknown universe. Exploration is perception.”

If that quote doesn’t compute by reading it in the middle of a review, pick up the book. By the time he comes to it, it may just be the light you needed to see further into the meaning of technology.

Lanier is not technical in this book. He knows he would lose most of us quickly. He talks instead about his own upbringing: you do not want to miss his personal history growing up in New Mexico and his infamous Dodge Dart. He talks also about going east (MIT, Columbia) and returning west (USC, Stanford), finding people to work with and inspiring others. He shares plenty of great stories and personal observations about some well-known figures in technology and music, and he divulges the devastating story of his first marriage and subsequent divorce. He talks about limerence, and how the horrible marriage might have been worth it simply because he understood something new about the world that otherwise he may not have known.

All I know is that this was a truly generous and spectacular sharing of the early days of VR. It was endlessly engaging, informative, and full of worldly wisdom from someone who has just about seen it all. I am so grateful. This was easily the most intellectually exciting and enjoyable read I've read this year, a perfect summer read.

Here is a link to a conversation with Jaron Lanier conducted by Ezra Klein for his podcast The Ezra Klein Show, available on iTunes or Stitcher.

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A Shout in the Ruins by Kevin Powers

Hardcover, 272 pgs, Pub May 15th 2018 by Little, Brown & Company, ISBN13: 9780316556477

At a time when our country is again in the midst of a noisy national conversation about race, Kevin Powers creates a powerful fiction to illuminate the not-so-distant terrors and strains of our Civil War. Powers touches our sensitive places and his sentences carry knowledge from which none of us can hide.

The work is a feast of imagination, packed full with exemplars of character definition, narrative structure, tone, style, language choice. Language is the first thing one notices. Each sentence conveys both a history and a future, though we won’t know that until later. Rounding back on the novel’s beginning after a time we realize how much we have already been told, by given- and place names, though we couldn’t have understood it. We grow watchful, anticipating these signposts, and read carefully.

The economy and poetry of the language gives our read a languor; we won’t rush to some conclusion because the journey is the point. We breathe in the foggy sea air, and the stench of rotting limbs. We note what the narrator chooses to notice: “Emily had been to Richmond only twice in her life. She found the endless stone and brick suffocating.” But of course. Only northerners or outsiders wouldn’t crave the breezy clapboards on tree-lined drives outside the city center in the heat of the summer.

Characters have real depth. We are introduced to the slave Rawls; at no time does this feel like appropriation of the black man’s experience. Rawls has a quiet unquenchable fury “inscrutable and vast,” but he determines to find something within himself his owners can’t touch. Levallois is Rawls’ white landowner near Richmond, Virginia in the mid-1860’s. The pathology of his character is sharp as a shard of untempered glass. He is calculating and exploitative, transactional only, sly in exploiting the human nature of others less damaged than himself.

The novel’s dreadful propulsion is because of this character Levallois: what horror he will perpetrate next, and will he get his comeuppance? How many will he infect with hatred or kill before he is stopped? The path to that answer winds through a later century that hints to some of what happened. We are introduced to a man called George Seldom, believed to be a Negro of ninety some-odd years in 1955, who carries a sharp, thin-bladed knife with a handle of elk antler with which we are already familiar. In 1863, Levallois used it to kill noiselessly, needlessly a ferry owner named Spanish Jim.

We read for voices like Rawls and his wife Nurse, strong and resistant yet vulnerable. They arouse in us a sense of justice, and give us strength in light of very poor odds, shades of the heroic classic Les Misérables. We know enough of Levallois to know his sociopathy and hollowness, his wife Emily not much better. Near the end of this small corner of Civil War history Emily begins to grasp responsibility for her role, but we can’t forgive her. She’ll have to carry her burdens alone in the many years she has to contemplate them in backward glances.

The timeline in the novel is ever-shifting, but that merely adds intrigue and mystery—the kind of the puzzlement books of history often leave us with. When George Seldom admits a kind of suspicion towards history, this reader is inclined to agree that fiction, done well, may capture more truth than some histories. We read to know why, not just how, and history doesn’t often give us that.

“The truth has not mattered for a long time…the only thing that matters here…is what people are willing to believe.”

Of the several lives recorded in this novel, there are two that don’t fit easily the genealogies revealed here. One is a woman artist and part-time mail carrier who marries a reformed alcoholic and auto mechanic. The two live well together, deeply in love. Her heritage is mixed race including Croatan, black, and white and her maiden name is Bride. He appears to be white, his surname Rivers, perhaps descended from Sheriff Patrick Rivers, a “wholly unremarkable” and dull man who appears in this history after the war in Virginia near Beauvais Plantation.

There, it happened. This fiction has become a kind of history, or this history has become a fiction. We’re not exactly sure except that the time is not that long ago—only a generation or two—and we should be able to grasp motivation if we had a few more connections. What we do know is that plenty people died before their time for reasons their children and their children’s children no longer recognize. When does memory become fiction and does what happens now matter more than what happened then?

This is a deeply involving read; the author spans one hundred years but he left out the boring bits. The work is a kind of model for how to keep the reader understanding complicated knots in intertwined personal histories that last more than one lifetime. The language is peerless, and the capture of human nature cannot be denied. It feels a long time since I have been as enraptured by a fiction. Beautiful work.
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Postscript There is an Australian author who has Powers' similarly expansive sense of literature and the writing chops to pull it off. Rohan Wilson places his fiction in earlier-century histories of Tasmania and manages to make the work as big and heroic as those he implicitly references. My reviews here cannot capture his overwhelming talent and the skill he demonstrates in The Roving Party and To Name Those Lost.
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Links to my reviews for Powers' earlier work:
The Yellow Birds
Letter Composed During A Lull in the Fighting


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The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

Hardcover, 592 pgs, Pub Nov 7th 2017 by W. W. Norton Company (first published -795), Orig TitleὈδύσσεια, ISBN13: 9780393089059, Lit Awards: Audie Award for Audio Drama (2009), National Book Award Finalist for Translation (1968), Премія імені Максима Рильського (1979)

The first line in Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey, the first by a woman scholar, is “Tell me about a complicated man.” In an article by Wyatt Mason in the NYT late last year, Wilson tells us

“I could’ve said, ‘Tell me about a straying husband.’ And that’s a viable translation. That’s one of the things [the original language] says…[But] I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text. I want to be saying, after multiple different revisions: This is the best I can get toward the truth.”

Oh, the mind reels. This new translation by Emily Wilson reads swiftly, smoothly, and feels contemporary. This exciting new translation will surprise you, and send you to compare certain passages with earlier translations. In her Introduction, Wilson raises that issue of translation herself: How is it possible to have so many different translations, all of which could be considered “correct”?

Wilson reminds us what a ripping good yarn this story is, and removes any barriers to understanding. We can come to it with our current sensibility and find in it all kinds of foretelling and parallels with life today, and perhaps we even see the genesis of our own core morality, a morality that feels inexplicably learned. Perhaps the passed-down sense of right and wrong, of fairness and justice we read of here was learned through these early stories and lessons from the gods. Or are we interpreting the story to fit our sensibility?

These delicious questions operate in deep consciousness while we pleasure in learning more about that liar Odysseus, described again and again as wily, scheming, cunning, “his lies were like truth.” He learned how to bend the truth at his grandfather’s knee, we learn late in the telling, and the gods exploited that talent when they helped him out. It served him well, allowing him to confuse and evade captors throughout his ordeal, as well as keep his wife and father in the dark about his identity after his return until he could reveal the truth at a time of maximum impact.

There does inevitably come a time when people react cautiously to what is told them, even to the evidence their own eyes. The gods can cloud one’s understanding, and truth is suspected in every encounter. These words Penelope speaks:

"Please forgive me, do not keep
bearing a grudge because when I first saw you,
I would not welcome you immediately.
I felt a constant dread that some bad man
would fool me with his lies. There are so many
dishonest, clever men..."

Particularly easy to relate to today are descriptions of Penelope’s ungrateful suitors like Ctesippius, who "encouraged by extraordinary wealth, had come to court Odysseus’ wife." Also speaking insight for us today are the phrases "Weapons themselves can tempt a man to fight" and "Arms themselves can prompt a man to use them."

There is a conflicted view of women in this story: "Sex sways all women’s minds, even the best of them," though Penelope is a paragon of virtue, managing to avoid temptation through her own duplicitousness. She hardly seems a victim at all in this reading, merely an unwilling captor. She is strong, smart, loyal, generous, and brave, all the qualities any man would want for his wife.

We understand the slave girls that Odysseus felt he had to “test” for loyalty were at the disposal of the ungrateful suitors who, after they ate and drank at Penelope's expense, often met the house girls after hours. Some of the girls appeared to go willingly, laughing and teasing as they went, and were outspoken about their support of the men they’d taken up with. Others, we get the impression from the text, felt they had no choice.

Race is not mentioned but once in this book, very matter-of-factly, though the darker man is a servant to the lighter one:

"…[Odysseus] had a valet with him,
I do remember, named Eurybates,
a man a little older than himself,
who had black skin, round shoulders, woolly hair,
and was [Odysseus's] favorite our of all his crew
because his mind matched his."

Odysseus’ tribulations are terrible, but appear to be brought on by his own stubborn and petulant nature, like his taunting of the blinded Cyclops from his own escaping ship. Cyclops was Poseidon’s son so the behavior was especially unwise, particularly since Odysseus’s men were yelling at him to stop. Later, that betrayal of the men’s best interests for his own childish purpose will come back to haunt Odysseus when the men suspect him of thinking only of himself--greediness--and unleash terrible winds by accident, blowing them tragically off course in rugged seas.

We watch, fascinated, as the gods seriously mess Odysseus about, and then come to his aid. One really gets the sense of the gods playing, as in Athena’s willingness to give Odysseus strength and arms when fighting the suitors in his house, but being unwilling to actually step in to help with the fighting. Instead, she watched from the rafters. It’s hard not to be just a little resentful.

Wilson’s translation reads very fast and very clearly. There always seemed to be some ramp-up time reading Greek myths in the past, but now the adventures appear perfectly accessible. Granted, there are some names you’ll have to figure out, but that’s part of being “constructively lost,” as Pynchon has said.

A book-by-book reading of this new translation will begin March 1st on the Goodreads website, hosted by Kris Rabberman, Wilson’s colleague at the University of Pennsylvania. To prepare for the first online discussion later this week, Kris has suggested participants read the Introduction. If interested readers are still not entirely convinced they want this literary experience now, some excerpts have been reprinted in The Paris Review.




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Falling Awake by Alice Oswald

Hardcover, 96 pgs, Pub Aug 23rd 2016 by W. W. Norton Company (first published July 7th 2016), ISBN13: 9780393285284, Lit Awards: Costa Book Award for Poetry (2016), T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry Nominee (2016), Forward Prize Nominee for Best Collection (2016), Griffin Poetry Prize Nominee for International Shortlist (2017)

I have a new favorite poet and and I can’t stop thinking about her work. But you have to hear her speak the work to get the full impact so therefore below I have attached a video of Oswald reading the first poem in this 2016 collection, called "A Short Story on Falling."

I have learned that this appears to be Oswald's ninth book of poetry, and that her second book, Dart, won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002. According to her wiki, Oswald "is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence." It is absurd to fall in love with language again, but here I am, helpless in her hands.

Her visualizations are unforgettable. In "You Must Never Sleep Under a Magnolia," we learn of "shriek-mouthed blooms" and the first flowering like a glimpse of flesh. And what of

Old scrap-iron foxgloves
rusty rods of the broken woods

what a faded knocked-out stiffness
as if you'd sprung from the horse-hair
of a whole Victorian sofa buried in the mud down there...
--from Evening Poem

Or what about "Tithonus: 46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn" whose characterization of Tithonus reminds us of another babbling old man:

It is said the dawn fell in love with Tithonus
and asked Zeus to make him immortal, but forgot
to ask that he should not grow old. Unable to die,
he grew older and older until at last the dawn
locked him in a room where he still sits babbling
to himself and waiting night after night for her appearance.

As it happens, just when I discovered this unbeatable voice, I learn that she and another newly discovered favorite author, Kei Miller, will be speaking together, in a month, at the same venue in England, as part of the Bath Spa Poetry Series:

It is enough to bring the dead to life. What I wouldn't give to hear these two... ♬♪ If I were a rich man ♬♫

Listen to Oswald reciting her poem, "A Short Story on Falling," from memory:





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Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship by Gregory Boyle

Hardcover, 224 pgs, Pub Nov 14th 2017 by Simon Schuster, ISBN13: 9781476726151

This book radiates such loving-kindness, one wishes everyone could share in the bounty. I had not heard of Boyle’s 2009 No. 1 bestseller, called Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, before I heard Krista Tippett interview Father Boyle for her podcast On Being. This second book is a series of true stories about the gang members, former convicts, drug dealers and addicts Father Boyle knows from his ministry, Homeboy Industries, in Los Angeles. Each anecdote carries with it a reminder of the burdens people carry, a prod to do better in our lives, and something small (or big) to meditate on.

A highlight of this book are Boyle’s pointing to and holding up some of the homies’ mangling of common phrases—phrases so ordinary to many of us that we rush by them, never stopping to think them through carefully. By misunderstanding phrases only heard and never read, the homies sometimes hit upon a better, deeper meaning that speaks to their experiences, e.g., “I’m at a pitchfork in my life.”

Father Boyle is following the teaching of the Dalai Lama, Pope Francis, Dorothy Day, Mother Theresa, and every other effective practitioner of faith and loving-kindness on earth by going with the exhortation to “Stay Close to the Poor.” He discusses this in his usual discursive style near the end of this book, asking

“Is God inclusive or exclusive?…In the end, though, the measure of our compassion with what Martin Luther King calls ‘the last, the least, and the lost’ lies less in our service to those on the margins, and more in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them.”

Radical kinship. If you’ve ever experienced a blast of radical kinship—an openhearted, limitless generosity—you will know it is transformative. And that is where Father Boyle is going.

There are no bad people, only bad actions. We’re all in a stage of becoming. We all are equally able to find grace and create the kind of environment we seek, if given a place to rest and to experience love without expectation of return.

“We are charged not with obliterating our diversity and difference but instead with heightening our connection to each other.”

This is his answer to reconciling diversity and connectedness. It is often thought that the more diverse we are, the less we have in common, the less we can come together over shared goals. This book tells a different story.

Father Boyle’s book about gang members in L.A. finding a place of peace to gather their thoughts together is the antidote to a political world in which power and money are operative goals. We’d all like a little more power, to live as we like without anybody else’s say so, but sometimes the lack of power is the key to humility, and thus to a wide and deep world of loving-kindness. But as Boyle tells Terry Gross in a Fresh Air interview: “Prayer is not going to fix our healthcare system. Stop it. Don’t think that. You actually have to do something about guns, you can’t just pray.”

This is powerful stuff, folks, and will be my gift to family and friends at this year-end. When you get your own copy, look carefully at the author photo on the inside back jacket. Have you ever seen a group of people more radiant in your lives?

The Nov 13, 2017 Fresh Air interview, Terry Gross speaking with Father Greg Boyle (36 minutes):




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Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Hardcover, 259 pages Pub Jan 24th 2017 by Viking (first pub October 20th 2016) ISBN13: 9780525427360 Literary Awards Man Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017), Costa Book Award for Novel (2016), Walter Scott Prize (2017), Costa Book of the Year (2016)

Has an Irishman written the Great American Novel? The question is not theoretical; Sebastian Barry’s latest novel is the fourth time he has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It is his seventh, but it doesn't have the density of a novel. It is Barry’s long experience writing for the theatre—thirteen plays already—that lends excitement to this work. After the years of excellent effort, suddenly Thomas McNulty springs full-grown from Barry’s well-tilled field. The success of this gem of a novel set in 1850’s America is all about preparedness and inspiration.

The novel is not long but is fluent and unstrained; it makes big statements about human existence, war, love, about what we want, and what we get. It is remarkable how squarely Barry lands in the middle of the American debate so clamorous around us now, about race, diversity, sexuality, what we fight for and who fights for us—questions we’ve never satisfactorily answered.

Barry gives us humor in a horribly violent world, surprising and delighting us with his deadpan delivery. His diverse cast of characters are reliant on one another, all viewed through the eyes of an Irishman who’d suffered such terrible deprivations as a child that man’s cruelty nevermore surprised him. What did surprise him was that we could find a way to love, to happiness, despite our sorrows.

In the early pages Thomas McNulty meets John Cole under a hedge in a rainstorm. John Cole is a few years older, but both the orphaned boys are wild things, having ‘growed' in the school of hard knocks. Uncanny judges of character, they almost instantly decide they stand a better chance together in the rough-and-tumble than alone and set off on a series of adventures. The pace of the novel is swift. When I go back to find a memorable passage, I am shocked at how quickly events unfolded, and how quickly I am deeply involved.

The language is one of the novel's wonders. Barry doesn’t try to hide his brogue, but uses it: a stranger in a strange land. That distance and perspective allows Thomas to make comment upon what is commonly observed

"Everything bad gets shot in America, says John Cole, and everything good too."

and

"I know I can rely on the kindness of folk along the way. The ones that don’t try to rob me will feed me. That how it is in America."

The novel constantly surprises: when the boys answer the ad hung awry on a saloon door in a broken-down Kansas town, “Clean Boys Wanted,” we prepare for the worst. Within pages we are jolly and laughing, then agonized and pained, then back again, our emotions rocketing despite the tamped-down telling of the historical backward gaze. Our initial sense of extreme danger never really leaves us, but serves to prepare us for the Indian wars, those pitiful, personal slaughters, and the Civil War, which comes soon enough.

The most remarkable bits of this novel, the sense of a shared humanity within a wide diversity, seemed so natural and obvious and wonderful we wanted to crawl under that umbrella and shelter there. These fierce fighting men fought for each other rather than for an ideal. Their early lives were so precarious they’d formed alliances across race, religion, national origin when they were treated fair. “Don’t tell me a Irish is an example of civilised humanity…you‘re talking to two when you talk to one Irishman.”

And then there is the notion of time, if it is perceived at all by youth: “Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending…” By the end of the novel, the characters do indeed perceive time: “I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.” We have been changed, too, because we also perceive time, and sorrow and pain and those things that constitute joy. We have lived his life, and ours, too.

Barry gets so much right about the America he describes: the sun coming up earlier and earlier as one travels east, the desert-but-not-desert plains land, the generosity and occasional cooperation between the Indian tribes and the army come to dispatch them, the crazy deep thoughtless racism. But what made me catch my breath with wonder was the naturalness of the union between Thomas Thomasina McNulty and John Cole and the fierceness of the love these two army men had for an orphaned, laughing, high-spirited, bright star of an Indian girl they called Winona.

Barry understands absolutely that our diversity makes us stronger, better men. Leave the pinched and hateful exclusion of differentness to sectarian tribes, fighting for the old days. We know what the old days were like. We can do better. I haven’t read all the Man Booker longlist yet but most, and this is at the top of my list. It is a treasure.

I had access to the Viking Penguin hardcopy of this novel--I'm still surprised at how small it is, given the expansive nature of the story--but I also had the audio from Hoopla. I needed both: the pace of the novel is swift, and may cause us to read faster than we ought. Barry writes poetically, which by rights should slow us down. The Blackstone Audio production, though read quickly by Aidan Kelly, allows us to catch things we will have missed in print and vice versa. At several stages in this novel, crises impel us forward. As we rush to see what happens, we may miss the beauty. Don't miss the beauty. Books like these are so very rare.



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