Review - Eating the Cheshire Cat

Eating the Cheshire Cat
by Helen Ellis
280+ pages

Description via Goodreads

When the firemen sifted through the remains, they would discover Nicole, as her mother suspected. In her embrace would be Sarina and what had happened would be clear. It was murder/suicide. Death by obsession. No further questions asked (287)

::sigh:: When I got this book I was very curious about it because of the cover. Why could that poor, little goldfish be in that blender? For human consumption? Yuck--I had to read it...also on the front cover of my copy it says 'Darkly Funny Gothic Novel'. What I somehow missed is what's written directly under it -- 'Deliciously Catty'. And that's where this book makes it error, or maybe where I made my error in picking this book.While there are some dashes of morbid, gross and dark humor (all things I love) it's overwhelmed by the cattiness and superficial musings of it's characters. Now in defense of this book, I don't have that much experience with Contemporary Southern Gothic fiction...maybe this whole obsession with making Homecoming court at the State University is a big deal and I'm culturally insensitive to it. But if that's not the case, then I'm fine with saying that the best part of this book is the cover. 

The story focuses on three characters: Sarina Summers, an oversexed, disgustingly spoiled, attention whore. Nicole Hicks, girl with all the foundations of an axe-murderer and also obsessed with Sarina. And then there's Bitty Jack Carlson; summer camp outcast, and in my opinion the most normal and bearable character. The thing is, I know and enjoy the fact that these characters are supposed to be twisted and exaggerated but it's (1) their roles in the plot and (2) the climax of the plot that's the problem.We follow them from awkward middle school age to end of college age and it seems the priority for each of these characters is revenge and/or redemption through relationships with men. And this irks me...

As I mentioned earlier, there are moments of dark humor: Nicole's shock when she walks in on her brother's alone time, the fact that Bitty Jack's summer boyfriend is star-attraction in a traveling freak show, or the fact that a young Sarina is plagued by a hereditary condition like curved pinkie fingers. The good thing about this novel is it's paced well...very quick. Not too much dwelling on any particular moment of their lives for too long. I guess I should mention that the narrative is supposed to be like a page or chapter in Alice's Adventure in Wonderland. Maybe Bitty Jack is Alice, Sarina is the Red Queen, Nicole is every other cooky character, and the Alabama social scene is Wonderland...not sure because the connection is weak!

I remember at one point thinking this was a Southern Gothic version of Legally Blonde without the law school shenanigans. I still think that's an accurate summary.

Eating the Cheshire Cat

Two Stars

Review - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
300+ pages

Description via Goodreads

What did you know about diaspora? What did you know about Nueba Yol or unheated 'old law' tenements or children whose self-hate short-circuited their minds? What did you know, madame, about immigration? Don't laugh, mi negrita, for your world is about to be changed. Utterly. Yes: a terrible beauty is etc., etc. Take it from me. You laugh because you've been ransacked to the limit of your soul, because your lover betrayed you almost onto death, because your first son was neverborn. You laugh because you have no front teeth and you've sworn never to smile again (160)

I read The Feast of the Goat not too long ago (click title for review) and I remember thinking how fear, shame and paranoia could spread through the oppressed and the oppressors for individuals in the moment and through generations over time. I have similar feelings about this book; it is a fictionalized account of the generations over time I was referring to. And I mention the Vargas Llosa because of the connection to Trujillo. There are footnotes about Trujillo all over the pages of 'Oscar Wao'. Trujillo's legacy of fear and hate is unleashed upon Oscar and his family, and it has diffused into Dominican culture on the island and in the community in the States.

While I feel Trujillo and things like fuku* are unique to Dominican culture initially, I believe they easily transpose to the American experience, and  the struggle with identity many young people face at some point in their lives, or throughout their lives. Oscar is the quintessential example of this: an overweight, ghetto nerd, living and breathing science fiction and fantasy culture and wallowing in self pity and degradation...and his biggest affront--he lacks that famous/infamous Dominican swagger. Poor Oscar is not the object of female affection...well no romantic affections anyways. He's a minority within a minority, a subculture within a subculture. I realize this doesn't sound like much at first, but this preoccupation with love and affection goes deeper than what it appears at the surface. It's present in the love-hate relationship between Oscar's sister, Lola, and their mother, Belicia. Oscar and himself. Lola and her boyfriends. Belicia and her past. Belicia and her family in the DR, Belicia and her mother-figure, La Inca, La Inca and her family, the family and Trujillo, the DR and Trujillo...once again, it's the fuku and the angst of society at work. 

Many of the characters in this book have dealt with pain or abuse of some form or another, but Diaz is able to spin threads of humor and realness into the dialogue and narrative, so the read as a whole isn't bogged down with misery. It's filled with playful generalizations, semi-colloquialisms, muted violence, brief dream sequences of a golden mongoose...the 'n-word' is said a lot--on par with the level of usage in the movie Django. It is colorful melancholy and strangely personal (...for me anyways) And while the ending isn't a happy one, it was certainly appropriate. This book is wonderful.

*fuku = curse, doom, superstitious powers, The Curse and Doom of the New World. 

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Five stars.

Continuing the 'Quest' with Junot Diaz

Last year I told myself I was going to read more African-American fiction because I had knowingly avoided it for reasons mentioned here. In sum, I was annoyed that 1) Most books in the A.A. section of the bookstore looked like low-grade smut with brown people on the cover and 2) As a brown person I'm expected to read or have a connection to these books...I realize now and have realized for some time that I shouldn't generalize about things that I haven't investigated. So what did I do/try to do?--well, investigate of course. I started Quest Alpha to explore contemporary African-American fiction. 

The first book I read for Quest Alpha was Man Gone Down (click title for review). And it was amazing. I nominated it as one of the best 'Morose' reads of 2012 for it's gloomy depiction of a broken man in a broken family, trying to make the American Dream. Noting that the utter hopelessness in the stream-of-conscious narrative was raw, poetic and intellectual. I initially chose it because I thought it would address two of my favorite themes: (de)composition of the American family and failure to realize the American Dream. It did not disappoint. 

The second book I was supposed to read was Erasure by Percival Everett, but to this day I haven't been able to get my hands on a copy...so I redirected to another book--Who Fears Death (click title for review) It was like nothing I had ever read before, a weird composite of sci-fi/fantasy/dystopian with a non-eurocentric flair.

I read Who Fears Death months ago. In October I think. I haven't read anything else for the quest since then...but interestingly enough I started reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz a few days ago. And I feel I've inadvertently stumbled upon another book for the quest. However, there might be a problem...but wait, before I go into that potential problem I want to say why I think it works for the quest. There's a theme that connects Man Gone Down, Who Fears Death and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: the struggle with identity. It is overwhelmingly present in all three books. But now the problem: Junot Diaz. No that's not right, the real problem is I don't know enough about Junot Diaz--enough about Junot Diaz's color identity. Is he one of those brown people who doesn't identify with his brownness? This of course doesn't matter in the storytelling. A good story is a good story. But I also don't want to slap a label containing any form of modifier that doesn't apply to someone, i.e African-American. There are some people who might take issue with this...not myself--but some. Diaz is Dominican point blank. I'm not certified, qualified, or justified to grade his level of blackness or African-American-ness (?) Besides I don't think Junot Diaz is one of those authors who tries to define anyone's blackness per se, he's just illustrating his reality. A reality, a genuine experience. An experience that this young woman can identify with...so anyways, I found this video of Junot Diaz speaking last December. Please watch if you have a minute or two.

So I watched the video and knew I didn't want to pull a 'passport check' AND I really like this book so I'm going to use it as reading material for Quest Alpha. But I still feel a little weird including him in the mix...I'm  going to learn all I can about Diaz...he intrigues the hell out of me.  

Review - 1Q84

1Q84
by Haruki Murakami
900+ pages

Description via Goodreads

"Blood shed in this world is real blood. This is no imitation world, no imaginary world, no metaphysical world. I guarantee you that. But this is not the 1984 you know."

"Like a parallel world?"

 The man's shoulder trembled with laughter. "You've been reading too much science fiction. No, this is no parallel world. You don't have 1984 over there and 1Q84 branching off over here and the two worlds running along parallel tracks. The year 1Q84 no longer exists anywhere. For you and for me, the only time that exists anymore is this year of 1Q84." (462)

That's about as clear of an explanation the readers will get on the world of 1Q84. It's weird, I blew through the first 500 pages, and then put it down for a few days to reflect. It was during this time of reflection when I realized I had no idea what the hell this book was about. And even now after having finished reading it, I still have no idea what the hell this book is about...Is it a story about true love? star-crossed lovers? or in this case moon-crossed? In the end, I can only sum it up as a peculiar piece of magical-realistic, meta-fiction, and I still can't be sure that's right.

I think what propelled me through the first half of the book was Murakami's writing style. It's new to me. But then after 600 pages or so, I began to pick out annoying details that were ruining an already weak storyline. For example, a lot of the descriptions are redundant. I mean really overkill repetitive. Some things just seemed out of place (frequent mention of breasts, their size and shape) or negatively awkward (sex scenes and phone conversations) or just unnecessary...like when Aomame uses a pregnancy test. Read this:

The test itself was simple. Just urinate into a clean container and then dip the indicator stick into it. Or, alternately, urinate directly onto the stick. Then wait a few minutes. If the color changes to blue you're pregnant, if it doesn't change color, you're not. In one version, if two vertical lines appear in the little window, you're pregnant. One line, and you're not. The details might vary but the principle was the same (709)

I mean, we all know how those work. Why write that? ...Maybe it serves a purpose I'm not aware of. But things like that happen a lot.

I guess that leads me to the characters, which are interesting in the beginning, as you learn their backstory, grievances and circumstance. The two central characters are Aomame and Tengo, moon-crossed lovers navigating Tokyo in the time of 1Q84. Aomame is a personal trainer and assassin. Tengo is a teacher and writer. Tengo and Aomame have very similar backgrounds. They have little social interaction and their daily lives are routine and boring. The only way I can differentiate them is to say Tengo is passive-passive, whereas Aomame is passive-active. They both let a lot happen to them and participate the minimum one can participate. Just flat. 

They reconnect in the year 1984/1Q84 after not having seen each other after twenty years...and there's not much more than that. They shared a very strong moment of connection in adolescence (a squeezing of hands together at school) Fast forward, Aomame assassinates a leader of a cult, who also happens to be exploited in a book Tengo has rewritten. That's the point of reconnection. Yes, there are whole bunch of other side characters and elements involved, but it's just too confusing and boring to mention.

I don't know. I think it was too long, probably could have cut out 200 pages of useless description. It didn't bother me that I didn't understand how 1Q84 worked, it bothered me that nothing dynamic happened in the second half of the book. However, with all that said, I'm not completely turned off to Murakami's writing and I will read more of his stuff. This may have simply missed the mark...it happens.

1Q84

 

Three stars.

Review - Man Gone Down

Man Gone Down
Author: Michael Thomas
Pages: 400+

Description via Goodreads

This is a story about a broken man's desperate attempt to piece together his part of the puzzle, that is the American Dream. Unemployed and virtually homeless, the readers will follow his last four days in the city, as he tries to find a place to live for his family, and come up with tuition for his children's education. The pressure to provide these things is overwhelming, and the nameless narrator must succeed, or risk losing his wife and their three young children. In the concrete jungle of New York City, he has two options: fight or flight. 

It's a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment.

Ruminations on his current situation combined with flashbacks onto the past reveal how this man became broken, and arguably how this man was doomed to be broken from the start. He views himself as a social experiment, and it's clear he feels that race is a defining variable. For many who don't usually read things that offer racial discourse, his infusion of the race issue might be slightly off-putting. In this book, blackness and whiteness matter; it matters when he tries to find an apartment, when he plays golf, in his relationships, when he gets coffee. It matters. 

I found the first-person rambling/stream-of-consciousness to be poetic, raw, intellectual and true. Sometimes I felt bad for him. Sometimes I could relate. And other times I was frustrated with him. I mean, you wonder how someone so talented and with the opportunities he's had, can become so broken. Every once in awhile, he'd become too hermetic--I couldn't get into his head. For example, it was endearing to hear him talk about his kids, but sad to hear him talk about leaving them forever...You want to root for him, but there's a hopelessness. 

I did raise an eyebrow at a few things...like why couldn't his wife work too? and why couldn't his children go to public school until they were more financially stable to send them to private school? I couldn't help but think he was trying to maintain some remnant of the wasp lifestyle for his wife. When you're broke spiritually and financially, maintaining an image is usually pretty low on the priority list. And yet I know this was intentional--another challenge of marrying a blue-blood. I also thought it was interesting that he kept mentioning his Irish and Native American heritage because it didn't really help him out. It didn't make him any less black...maybe it made him more acceptable to his wife and their white friends...I don't know, it was just odd. I guess it was another struggle with identity. 

Here are a few quotes (of many) that I liked:

It's a bad idea to put on music while trying to make a plan. It may be that I need to stop listening altogether. Dylan makes me feel alienated and old; hip-hop. militant. Otis Redding is too gritty and makes me think about dying young. Robert Johnson makes me feel like catching the next thing smoking and Satan. Marley makes me feel like Jesus. (26) 

I know that drunks, madman, and corpses make for lousy dinner guests. But I also believe that there's a them and they believe that they are good, and I know that if I had what they have--privilege, money, and numbers--I'd tear this fucking place down. (124) 

There's a limited amount of space for people, any people anywhere. And on the inside of any powerful institution, especially for people of color, that space gets smaller and stranger. Most white folks believe the reason you've come in is to uplift your people. But you can't bring your people inside, except compressed into a familiar story that's already been sanctioned. And you wouldn't be there in the first place unless you were a recognizable type: the noble savage, Uncle Tom, the Afro-Centric, the Oreo, the fool. (147) 

Thomas' antihero acknowledges the subtleties of the race question in everyday life. It's a very powerful and engaging narration. If you don't like to discuss race (for whatever reason) I don't think you'll be able to appreciate this book. But I'm really glad I read this one.

Man Gone Down

Four stars.