100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write, Sarah Ruhl

 I struggled a little with this book — I felt very, very jealous that I don't get to write one like it. You see, my problem is that I tend to write short, and to think in an abridged, sketched-out sort of way, quickly throwing together a few concepts, or hazarding an idea, but rarely finding the time (or patience) to actually write the complete essay. I've at least gotten to the point of starting to jot down those brief thoughts, in the hopes that I might someday write the essays, but it feels a little like amassing a graveyard of ambitious projects, tbh. So a book like this, where I could just make the biggest version of the claim and pencil in some of the ideas connected to it, without having to color it all in and carefully shade it (why is this all drawing metaphors, no idea, but probably because I'm still thinking about what Brandon Taylor wrote about Elaine de Koonig's preparatory drawings), is, like, the ultimate dream. 

(You've probably noticed that these blog posts all suffer from being half-formed ideas that would really benefit from some development and revision. I try not to think about that too much because I'd rather keep writing them, and if I make myself make them better, I'm likely to stop. I'm letting myself write these very quickly, read once for typos or egregious errors, and hit publish. It's scary.)

Anyways. So my feelings about this book are very clouded by my intense desire to be given the opportunity to write such a thing. And also by the fact that the author has a job at Yale and, I suspect, a lot more money than me. This made me especially grumpy about some of the motherhood parts, because I strongly suspect that she can afford much better childcare than I have (currently: none, until September 9th, wtf Ithaca preschools). So let me say the meanest thing I have to say about this book now, while my own biases are right at the forefront of your mind and you're likely to ignore me: it gets a bit repetitive towards the end. She circles back to the same big ideas, seemingly from different directions, but not really. And sometimes, you really do think: you know, this one, maybe it really did need more development...

But overall, it's a wonderful book, and a lot of the, I want to call them sketches but I have ground that metaphor to dust... fragments? Vignettes? Ideas? Are really fascinating, and are, actually, the perfect size — you get the idea without needing more development. As someone who enjoys theater, and has read plenty of plays, especially, I loved reading more about the perspective of someone who creates plays, and has thoughts about what makes them work, and why. 

It's a mostly charming and enjoyable book, and one that is great to read little by little, in the snatches of time you can steal from other things.

Migratory Birds, Mariana Oliver

In the early 2000s, I wrote an undergraduate thesis on exile autobiography. Theories of migration, dislocation, borders, cosmopolitanism, were pretty trendy back then, and although acknowledged as a painful experience, exile was still being romanticized as providing a privileged kind of perspective (Kader Konuk writes compellingly about this moment in theory in East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey).

Anyways, after really immersing myself in that work for ~2 years, I got…kind of sick of it. And remain a little leery, even today. So I admit that I was a little skeptical of Migratory Birds. But the description mentioned essays about Berlin and Cappadocia, two of my favorite places in the world, and I was already buying Aftermath from Transit Books, and getting another thing would mean free shipping, so...I bought it. And then it arrived and it was so beautiful looking, and invitingly slender, and I was so heartily fed up with unpacking and all the millions of other things I was supposed to be reading and writing that I thought: I’ll treat myself and dip into this.

And I was instantly hooked. The opening essay is about migratory birds, yes, but also, unexpectedly, about a man who built a flying machine, who ended up flying with birds. It’s lovely and tender and surprising, and strikes just the right balance between lyricizing sentiment and cool detachment — an increasingly tricky balancing act, these days. And the rest of the essays follow suit. Though the book covers some terrain you might expect — language, historical trauma, sense of place — it moves over it in unexpected ways, and from the vantage point of a broad collection of places (Berlin, Istanbul, Havana). It’s a real treasure of a book. I wanted to read it in one sitting, but was called to other obligations, and spent most of the time away from it yearning to return. Already, I’m looking forward to rereading it.

The Secret Place, Tana French

 I listened to the audiobook while I was packing up the house in preparation to move, and it was perfect for that — so propulsive and absorbing that it took my mind off of the dreary task I was engaged in.

  That said, it's definitely the weakest in the series, I think, and I cared a lot less about this story than I did about the others. French does something new with this book, shifting between two different perspectives, and jumping around in time, and it's interesting, but also somewhat distracting. Curiously, the technique isn't used all that much to show us each character through the other one's eyes, even though such (mis)perceptions are a central focus of the book. 

 

 A major theme in the novel is the idea of deeply close and intimate friendships, and whether or not they can persevere. We watch the powerful bond between a group of teenage girls fray in various ways, even as they fight to keep it together, and this seems to suggest that such closeness is the provenance of youth, helpless against the onslaught of the demands of the adult world. But curiously, the question resurfaces in a different way in the relationship between the two detectives on the case, as they grow increasingly close. Here, French plays with inter-personal perceptions in a different way, especially, in a key moment, by having another character attempt to play the two detectives off of each other, exploiting both of their insecurities. But they will use this same technique against against the teenagers they interrogate. So there's an interesting entanglement here, an exploration of the subtleties of detective work, and in mechanisms of transference, counter-transference, etc. 

 

 There's a really strong focus on socio-economic class, also a major theme in Broken Harbour, the previous book in the series. It's something that seems to come up a lot in contemporary Irish fiction, far more so than in American or British writing, which is interesting to me (I still want to write something about Sally Rooney and marxism...). 

 

Finally, it's a fairly searing take on the social construction of femininity in adolescence. It really cleverly shows how a choice to abstain from (hetero) sex and relationships can give young women a real jolt of power and confidence — the possibility of removing themselves from a fairly toxic social scene (more like a market) that revolves around hook-ups and impossible expectations (the slut/prude problem). But of course, this seems like a great option until you have to deal with...desire. And French reminds us that teenage desire is a hell of a drug, and that there are, after all, some really lovely things about teenage romance. 

 

As with all Tana French novels, there are just so many fascinating threads to unpack. And her prose is absolutely riveting. So though I liked this one the least of all the others in the series, it's still a pretty solid read.