25 April 2016

Going to Meet the Man, by James Baldwin

I am slowly working my way through James Baldwin's works (you may recall that I read Another Country in December ), and I recommend that you do the same. Even when he's not that good, he's still amazing. I was not especially impressed by the first three stories in this collection, but then the book started to pick up steam, and then it soared (culminating in an utterly devastating finale, terrifyingly vivid). How one man could have such profound emotional intelligence, and such an amazing ability to render the smallest details in utterly persuasive prose--the mind boggles. Surprisingly, I think shorter fictions may be Baldwin's strong point -- unexpected, given his ability to create a broad, diverse cast of utterly real characters. You'd think that a novel's ability to hold many different people and spend a lot of time with all of them would be perfect for him, but I think he is better with shorter, more concentrated plots. Not that they must be compressed into an abridged time period; one of the masterful things about some of these stories is the way they ramble restlessly across time, interweaving past and present. But the novella length seems to be the perfect size of story for his particular insights. 
Everyone should read more Baldwin.

20 April 2016

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

Look, I'm just not the target audience for this. If you're writing a sentimental story about Nazis and Resistance fighters, I am immediately on my guard, and not very sympathetic to your project.

But I will absolutely grant that the prose is astonishingly effective: arresting images that linger, sometimes unpleasantly so (ie, it gave me nightmares). It is a very readable, skillfully plotted adventure story. It is a crowd-pleaser. A blind French girl who loves snails and Jules Verne? Absolutely.

It is also a rather simplistic and cliché take on the Second World War. This is very obviously a made up story that is set in WWII for added thrills, and not out of a genuine engagement with the realities of that time period. And -- this will probably make me seem totally insufferable, and is maybe really weird -- but, knowing French and German, I found myself frequently bothered by the fact that all of this was clearly created and imagined in English. These are sentences that simply wouldn't happen in those languages. Which contributed to my sense of falsity - it's not a story that is genuinely rooted in the lifeworlds of the characters.

I'm not entirely surprised that it won a Pulitzer, and oddly enough, it in no way diminished by interest in reading yesterday's winner, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer!

08 April 2016

H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald

H is for Hawk got a lot of attention when it came out 2 years ago, and deservedly so. It's one of these curious hybrids -- the author guides you through a surprising constellation of intriguing things, which are all connected in some way, but mostly through her. When Helen Macdonald's father passes away, she copes with her grief by training a goshawk. In the process, she revisits T. H. White's book, The Goshawk, which then takes her down a rabbit hole of learning more about White himself (a somewhat gloomy adventure), and reflecting on his work, and his relationship to himself and his hawk, as a way of reflecting, too, on herself, and her relationship to her hawk and the process of training it, and on the art of falconry, and how humans relate to and write about animals, and all kinds of other things.

I experienced the text as an audiobook, and on the one hand, it was the best way to do so, because it's read by Macdonald, and her voice is melodious and wonderful and she reads it beautifully. Listening to her descriptions of nature as you're driving by Midwestern fields glistening after an afternoon rainstorm, or blanketed in their strange morning fogs, is pretty much perfect. On the other hand, it's the worst way to do so, because the book's intense focus on particular moments, coupled with its overall meandering structure, makes you want to pause, re-read, flip back a few pages, savor. Find some way to do both, friends!

Perhaps that would have made me love it more; if I could have basked in it a bit, and kept better track of the various threads. Or perhaps I would have come to find it slightly precious and overwritten, or gotten a bit (more) tired of the T. H. White bits. Hard to say.

In any case, it's certainly a worthwhile read: a poignant account of grief, an interesting investigation of the relationships between human and animals, and the animal as a category, plus, who would've thunk it, a surprisingly fascinating (albeit depressing) précis of T. H. White biographies.