Recent Reading Roundup 46

The first reading roundup of 2018 covers an eclectic bunch of books, some of which I really liked and others I found pretty meh.  It veers back and forth between rather experimental fare and stuff that sits squarely in the mainstream of literary fiction.  It's not the best possible start to the year, but it's a solid one, and one that reminds me that being adventurous in my reading usually pays off.

• Wonders Will Never Cease by Robert Irwin - Part literary fantasy, part historical fiction, Irwin's novel takes as its subject Anthony Woodville, a 15th century knight, courtier, and scholar whose sister Elizabeth's marriage to king Edward IV destabilized the tentative peace achieved after the initial York victory in the Wars of the Roses, and set in motion a chain of events that left both sides in the dispute decimated.  I've written in the past about the different approaches that historical novelists have taken to this period, and more generally, about the way that the choice of genre, tone, and even literary style can affect our view of history.  Irwin's approach--which is only semi-serious--is to ask what history actually is.  His characters exist in a moment where the very idea of history, and of how we narrativize it, is still being codified.  In one scene, Anthony is shocked by the thought that people in the past dressed or spoke differently than him, or had access to less sophisticated weapons or ships.  A running subplot involves an abbot who is trying to work out the age of the world through the simple expedient of working backwards through the known events of the past (he ends up concluding that there are too many centuries and eliminates the sixth through ninth from his timeline).  The difference between legend and actual events is impossible to discern, and sometimes nonexistent.  Characters talk of King Arthur and his knights as if they really existed, but at the same time, one scholar wonders whether Charlemagne could have been a real person, since surely no single man could have achieved all the feats ascribed to him.
  
  It's a slippage that is often reinforced for blatantly political reasons.  In order to obscure the roots of his reign in treason and usurpation, Edward tries to model his court on the fictional Camelot, staging tournaments and sending his courtiers on quests.  His advisers grumble that such fantasies have no place in this "modern" age, but at the same time they ignore the frequent encroachment of magic and wonder into their world.  Anthony begins the novel by dying at the Battle of Towton, only to come back to life because there are so many dead that the afterlife has overlooked him.  For the rest of his story, the supernatural dogs his steps, whether it's the ghosts of the dead, or figures out of the heroic deeds invented about him by Edward's agents in order to cement the Woodvilles' legitimacy.  The narrative of the novel is frequently interrupted by stories, told by the characters or to them.  By the end of the novel, the fiction that has been built up around Anthony--that he is a virginal, virtuous knight who has even seen the Holy Grail--is so powerful that it steps into the world as its own entity, whose first act is to chastise the real Anthony for being an ordinary, sinful human.
  
  In its handling of Anthony, Wonders Will Never Cease is reminiscent of Hillary Mantel's humanizing, deliberately modern historical novels.  Like Mantel's Cromwell, Irwin's Anthony is defined by his ambivalence, his willingness to learn about the world and consider different points of view, and his detachment from more florid, dogmatic figures like Edward, or his chief constable and avid torturer Tiptoft.  But its frequent forays into symbol-laden Arthurian pastiches (which reminded me very much of the novels of John Crowley) mean that this realism is constantly, and clearly deliberately, being undercut.  The result is a heady, dense mixture, by no means a quick or straightforward read.  It can be easy to get lost in the weeds of the novel's frequent detours into stories-within-stories, or its near-invisible transitions between realism and allegory.  But whenever one is in danger of being permanently disoriented, the force of history reappears and carries Anthony, and us, along with it.  In its final moments, as Anthony approaches a date with destiny that will transform him into a character in other people's narratives, the project of Wonders Will Never Cease becomes clear--to convince us of a thing that is almost impossible for most of us to believe, that history is real, and that we are a part of it.
  
  
• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng - I found myself, in the opening chapters of Ng's recent novel, being reminded strongly of HBO's mega-successful Big Little Lies, which I watched a few weeks before reading the book.  Like that series (itself based on a novel by Liane Moriarty), Little Fires Everywhere starts with a lower-class single mother moving to an affluent, orderly community, allegedly in order to send their child to a better school, but really because of the still-simmering secrets of their past.  Both stories start with a shocking crime, which the narrative then flashes back from in order to explain the background and events leading up to.  And both involve the community being split over a dispute in which the personalities and social class of the people on either side make as much of a difference as the facts of the case.  (Somewhat unsurprisingly, the rights to Little Fires Everywhere have been purchased by Reese Witherspoon, who produced Big Little Lies.)  It's perhaps because of this familiarity that I found Little Fires Everywhere a little underwhelming, or perhaps because consuming several stories of a similar type (see also USA's The Sinner last year) drives home the fundamental limitation of all of them--that the secrets these narratives tease are rarely as salacious or as shocking as the buildup to them always tries to promise.  "Idyllic town with dark currents running beneath the surface" is a classic for a reason, but one of the effects of its having been repeated so many times is that we've seen most of the likely variations on it, and few of them are likely to surprise us.
  
  What's left, then, is the execution, the characters, and the issues underpinning it all, and on all of these counts Ng is accomplished though, again, not terribly thrilling.  The heart of the novel is the conflict between its two mothers, well-off Shaker Heights doyenne Elena Richardson (almost always referred to as "Mrs. Richardson" by the narrative)--whose house will burn down in the novel's opening chapter, setting up the narrative's climax--and itinerant artist Mia Warren.  When Mia and her quiet teenage daughter Pearl rent the Richardsons' second house, the two families end up in constant contact with each other, with Pearl entranced by the blithe, privileged Richardson children's confidence and normalcy, while they in turn find in Mia a figure who gives them permission to be imperfect and make mistakes, as they don't feel comfortable doing around their mother.  Some of the best scenes of Little Fires Everywhere are the ones where the characters are allowed to simply be, as opposed to moving the novel more deliberately towards its promised destructive ending--when Mia works on her abstract photographs, or when the youngest Richardson child, the misfit Izzy, seethes over injustices that she can sense, but can't articulate or productively respond to.  As the novel's plot heats up, however, it becomes, somewhat predictably for this kind of story, more mechanical and more contrived.  Mia's mysterious backstory is dumped on us in two chapters that suddenly yank the narrative away from the novel's carefully naturalistic progression through time.  A laboriously set up gun-on-the-mantelpiece, one character using another's name while procuring an abortion, goes off in exactly the manner and time we expect.  It's all leading up to an ending that is a great deal less interesting than simply letting the characters continue with their ordinary lives might have been.
  
  Underlying it all is the issue of race and how it intersects with class, which Ng approaches in subtle, oblique ways.  Mia and Pearl's relative poverty colors how the rest of the community, and particularly Mrs. Richardson, perceives their behavior, particularly when it comes to sex and motherhood.  This coincides with the legal case that divides the community, in which a Chinese immigrant tries to regain custody of the baby she abandoned, who is in the process of being adopted by an affluent Shaker Heights couple.  The community--one of the US's first planned cities, where Ng herself grew up--prides itself on its progressivism and inclusiveness, but is unwilling to admit how deeply these values are rooted in affluence and the expectation of it.  When the baby's mother is accused of unfitness, the accusation always ends up hinging on her poverty, and the idea that Shaker Heights parents have options and support systems that a woman like her doesn't is always present, but rarely acknowledged by people like Mrs. Richardson.  Repeatedly challenged by the case, by Mia and Pearl's very existence, and by hints that her own family is not as perfect as she believes, Mrs. Richardson crumbles, finally using her wealth and power as a weapon against those whose "badness" is really just a lack of options.  It's a powerful moment, but once again it feels as if Ng doesn't trust it.  She ends the novel instead on several contrivances (including one with a gaping plot hole) that reinforce my impression that Little Fires Everywhere, like Big Little Lies and other stories like them, is more interesting for its parts than its whole.
  
  
• Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi - The early chapters of Makumbi's epic are very much what a reader might expect upon being told that the book they're about to read is "the great X novel", where X is a country in Africa--in this case Uganda.  Set in 1750, they are a richly detailed, vividly described portrait of the life of a provincial governor in the Buganda kingdom, focusing on the customs and social orders that govern his life, and on the events that overturn it despite his best efforts to follow what he sees as the correct, moral path.  The influence of Things Fall Apart is strongly felt, albeit with some notable and clearly deliberate alterations.  The hero of these chapters, Kintu Kidda (a name that has a rich significance in Ugandan folklore and tradition, signifying the first man) is, unlike the hero of Achebe's seminal work, a kind, thoughtful man, whose adherence to tradition is tempered by his nuanced understanding of human nature.  In one particularly charming scene, Kintu and the other married men of his family sit with his soon-to-be-married son to have a frank discussion of marital relations, which focuses as much on the need to be open and responsive to the needs of one's partner as it does on dirty jokes.  Nevertheless, Kintu's life is on a collision course with tragedy.  When he accidentally kills his adopted son, a member of the Tutsi minority, Kintu is too overcome by shock and guilt to admit his responsibility and give the boy proper funeral rites.  Cursed by the boy's biological father, he quickly watches his family fall apart, and dies in the knowledge that future generations will carry the curse forward.
  
  It's at this point that Kintu changes radically from the novel we might have expected it to be.  Instead of proceeding forward through time to reveal how each subsequent generation of Kintu's descendants faced the curse in their turn, it instead jumps forwards 250 years, to 2004, and visits with four members of the present-day family.  Kanani is a joyless missionary for a dying Christian sect, who spends his days trying to spread the word by pretending to have committed horrific crimes which have now been washed away by god's forgiveness, and his nights ignoring the dysfunction in his own family, his twin children's all-consuming relationship and his grandson's disaffection.  Miisi is a former academic who returned to Uganda after years of exile in Britain during Idi Amin's rule, and is now trying to make amends for his absence by raising his grandchildren, most of whose parents have been felled by war or AIDS.  Isaac is a self-made man, hardened by a loveless, impoverished childhood, who is riddled with indecision over whether to test himself and his young son for HIV.  And Suubi wafts through life as if she has no past, having suppressed the memory of her abandonment as a child and convinced herself that her adoptive parents were her real ones.  All are haunted by the recurring motifs of the curse: twins, one of whom tries to overpower the other; people of Tutsi heritage; and the presentiment of murder or suicide.
  
  As Aaron Bady writes in his introduction, one of the interesting (and, again, clearly deliberate) choices that Makumbi makes in Kintu is the decision not to discuss colonialism or European influence in Uganda.  These forces are present in the background, and their impact has clearly shaped the lives of the modern characters--most notably in the case of Kanani and Miisi, both adherents of Western systems of thought, which they regard with varying degrees of ambivalence.  But the project of Kintu--both the novel and its characters--is moving forward from an ugly past.  Isaac, for example, must come to terms with being the product of rape and with the abandonment of his mother, while Suubi must face up to the past she has suppressed, including a twin who died at birth and whose ghost haunts her.  For all of them, the project of the novel is to redefine themselves and come up with a stronger, more grounded identity, which they do by both embracing their heritage and position as part of a family, and discarding the past that weighs them down.  That duality defines Kintu, a novel that is both aware of itself as part of a tradition of "African" novels oriented at Western audiences, with particular expected tropes, and trying to reinvent those novels for a Ugandan audience.  So we get the multifaceted portrait of modern Ugandan society, the mingling of realism and folklore, the references to crushing poverty, government corruption, and AIDS.  But we also get nuances of Ugandan society--naming conventions, for example, or slippery definitions of familial relationships--that a reader from outside the culture might find difficult to parse.  Perhaps deliberately, Kintu thus ends more with a question mark than with a definitive statement, offering the chance of a different, better future, but not yet certain what that future looks like.
  
  
• Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan - It's been seven years since Egan published the magnificent, heart-rending A Visit From the Good Squad, but even after all that time, a follow-up to that novel was sure to send me running to the bookstore.  Manhattan Beach turns out to be a great deal more conventional than that earlier, time-hopping novel.  It's an absorbing read, but lacks Goon Squad's force and clear intent.  Set in early 40s New York as the American war machine begins to work in earnest, churning out materiel and soldiers for the European and Asian theaters and upending the lives of the people left back home, Manhattan Beach focuses on two such individuals.  Nineteen-year-old Anna Kerrigan is a technical worker at the Brooklyn Navy Yard who dreams of becoming a diver, repairing ships and clearing obstacles under water.  Dexter Styles is a gangster with one leg out of the life, married to a respectable banker's daughter and slowly moving his business interests towards the legal end, but still with strong ties to the families that helped him on his way up.  Tying the two together is Anna's father, Eddie, who disappeared five years ago after taking clandestine work for Dexter--a fact of which Anna and her family are unaware, assuming that Eddie abandoned them.
  
  Manhattan Beach is at its best when it explores little- or under-discussed aspects of this time and place in history: the wartime work of women in places like the Navy Yard; the rigors and challenges of diving; the life of merchant marine sailors and the dangers they faced while transporting supplies for the war through U-boat infested waters; the hierarchy of Depression-era shipyard work, and the way the mobbed-up unions controlled it; perhaps most importantly, the way that New York of the early 20th century was still primarily a port city, defined by its rivers, harbors, waterways, and the people who knew their secrets.  It's no surprise to come to Egan's acknowledgments and find several pages of personal and documentary resources she drew on during what must have been more than a decade's work on this book.  But these elements don't tie together into a particularly engaging narrative.  The overarching theme of the book is escape and reinvention.  The war allows Anna to slip out of her old life and become a completely new person several times over.  But when Dexter, inspired by the atmosphere of change and reinvention around him, tries to go completely legitimate, he finds that not just his mob connections, but his respectable ones, resist this transformation.  This is a little too grand and amorphous a concept to give the novel much of a shape, however, or at least it is in Egan's handling of it.  As a result, Manhattan Beach feels more like a bunch of things that happen than a complete novel--far less so, in fact, than the superficially more bitty and aimless Goon Squad.
  
  
• The Tiger's Daughter by K. Arsenault Rivera - Rivera's debut novel is set in an Asian-inspired fantasy world, where the Hokkaran empire rules over several disparate nations, imposing both its military rule and its cultural norms.  To the north of the empire lies the magical Wall of Flowers, beyond which the four demon generals lie in wait, periodically sending out their minions to harass humans, often infecting them with "blackblood", which turns its victims into bloodthirsty fiends and for which there is no cure.  It's a very familiar setting, and but for its cultural inspirations one might easily call it derivative.  But what sets The Tiger's Daughter apart is less its premise and more what Rivera does with it, and with what style.  Though its narrative ranges back and forth across the empire, the framing story of The Tiger's Daughter is that Shizuka, the young, troubled empress, has received a long letter from Shefali, her childhood friend--and eventually, lover--in which Shefali describes how their lives have been intertwined since birth, and even before that, as their own mothers were legendary warriors who fought side by side against the demon generals.
  
  The style Rivera uses in The Tiger's Daughter reminded me of Sofia Samatar's The Winged Histories, and even more than that, of Kai Ashante Wilson's Sorcerer of the Wildeeps.  The language is rich, emotional, focused on the small details of character interaction, even in the midst of great drama or intense action.  More importantly, the focus of Shefali's letter is on the shifting currents in the friendship between her and Shizuka, as well as their relationships with their mothers, or their growing awareness of how Hokkaran cultural hegemony has warped the empire's other nations.  Shefali's people, the Qorin, are clearly based on Mongolian steppe tribes, nomadic people with a great love of horses and the open sky, whom the Japanese-inflected Hokkarans deride as barbarians.  This frustrates Shefali, who sees her people's culture as beautiful and sophisticated (and who also keenly observes how other Hokkaran protectorates, such as the Korean-inspired Xian-Lai, have been warped by being forced to accept Hokkaran conventions, for example outlawing same-sex relationships).  Her narrative therefore becomes not just a story of her coming of age and sexual awakening, but of her growing political awareness.  In the present, meanwhile, we get to see how Shizuka's dreams of creating a better, more just world have met with only limited success.  She's wrested control of the empire from her cruel, racist uncle, but the heartbreak of having been separated from Shefali--due to a tragedy that the latter's letter builds up to--has kept her from becoming the leader and hero her people deserve.
  
  The Tiger's Daughter is not a mild or soft-spoken novel.  Every emotion is pitched to the rafters, whether it's Shizuka's arrogance, or Shefali's passion, or the two women's pain at being separated.  This suits the story Rivera is telling (as well as, one imagines, her project of writing an epic, heroic romance whose lovers are both women).  But for me, at least, it's a style that outstays its welcome, and especially when one considers that this is only the first volume in a trilogy.  It finally becomes difficult not to notice the fatal flaw in its premise: if, as we eventually learn, Shefali and Shizuka have been separated for years, why is the topic of Shefali's letter the years they spent together rather than her adventures during their separation?  More importantly, it becomes difficult to accept the novel's insistence that it is depicting a romance for the ages rather than a love story between two over-dramatic teenage girls, who might not be entirely good for one another.  I found myself much more interested in the politics of the world than in the novel's two heroines, which given that their voices and personalities are what give the novel its flavor ended up feeling like a fatal disconnect.  At a shorter length--not unlike Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, or the similar chapters in The Winged Histories--I might have loved The Tiger's Daughter, but given that it is a hefty volume in its own right that only begins to tell its story, my enthusiasm for it can only be described as qualified.
  
  
• Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim - Lim's slim novel starts in a very familiar way: two teenage boys in late 20th century middle America, social outcasts for their nerdy demeanor and interests (and also, in this case, for being Asian), bond over a shared love of comics and all things geeky.  The only thing setting this iteration apart is the insistence of Lim's narrative voice, which flows from one incident to another in a rush that carries the reader irresistibly along with it.  Upon the chapter change, however, everything gets turned upside down.  Now we're in the present, and our protagonists are a group of friends, Dave, Muriel and Frank (sometimes joined by a nameless narrator who may be one of the boys from the first chapter, now grown up).  Dave is a disappointed artist, Muriel works at a hospital, and Frank is a political ghost writer, but in their down time they are a superhero team known as Team Chaos.  But this, too, is to suggest a familiar format that Dear Cyborgs immediately bucks.  The insistent narrative voice is still present, and its focus is not on superheroics but on the utterly mundane, as it follows the characters' trivial reminiscences, dreams, and the lives of the people they've met.  Even when Frank is sent in pursuit of a supervillain, Ms. Mistleto, she spends most of their time together talking to him, telling him her life story and trying to explain why she's turned to anti-social behavior.  Stories unfold within stories, fact is confused for fiction and reality for dreams.  The only thing keeping us afloat through all this is Lim's rigorous control of his narrative voice, which manages to make even the most mundane tale feel compelling, and to carry us along to the book's end.
  
  It might sound glib or pretentious to say that Dear Cyborgs is about modern living, but this is both true and a great deal more exciting than you might expect.  Running through all the nested stories in this volume is the question of how to create meaning when you're just a tiny component of a system that is, at its deepest levels, exploitative and corrosive.  The superhero premise reminds us of the fantasies of agency that pop culture is rife with, but even these heroic, powerful characters are struggling with the question of how, and whether, to resist.  Is it possible to create art, for example, that changes the world, or will it inevitably be co-opted by capitalism?  The book repeatedly features artist characters who destroy their own work rather than allow it to be taken out of their control, or sold to a market that values it as nothing more than an object.  More interestingly, it suggests that protest--the Zuccotti Park protests of 2011 are repeatedly referenced--is in itself a form of art, of performance, and just as vulnerable to commodification, and to losing its meaning through this process.  This discussion is interspersed with reminiscences of real artists, and real activists (many of them Asian-American) who tried to solve this conundrum, with varying degrees of success though never completely.
  
  The combination of exaggerated social realism, SFnal elements, and an arch, comedic tone reminded me strongly of the short stories of George Saunders, but Lim is an angrier writer, his ultimate conclusions more desperate even though they're cloaked in humor.  The conclusion that many of the characters reach is that the only ethical choice left, when all other forms of protest have been exhausted, defeated, or co-opted, is to become "parasites", participating in society only minimally.  But this is a solution that Dear Cyborgs refutes simply by existing.  It is too vivid, too loud, too exhilarating to be, ultimately, a novel preaching withdrawal from the world.  If it can't offer a solution to the problems it identifies, it is at least vitally insistent in how it defines them.
  
  
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee - This multigenerational historical melodrama touches on a corner of history that I--and, I suspect, much of its target audience--knew very little about before picking up the book, the lives of Korean immigrants in Japan before and after WWII.  When Japan annexes Korea and begins hollowing out its economy and social structures in the early 20th century, peasants like boarding-house owners Hoonie and Yangjin are left scrambling for survival.  Their daughter, Sunja, is seduced by a married Korean-Japanese mobster and left pregnant, and the only option before her is to marry a passing missionary, Baek Isak, and go with him to Osaka.  In the years and decades that follow, the Baek family--Isak's brother and sister-in-law, Sunja's sons, and various in-laws and grandchildren--struggles first with survival during the harsh times of the 30s and 40s, and then with the evolving but insistent Japanese prejudices against Koreans throughout the 20th century.  Sunja's son Noa is constantly aware of the need to embody the "good" Korean, excelling at school despite significant financial and social challenges, but constantly haunted by his heritage.  His brother Mozasu goes into the pachinko business, surrendering not only to a Korean stereotype but to relentless rumors that he is mobbed-up.  Mozasu's son Solomon is set on a trajectory to "transcend" his background, growing up in cosmopolitan luxury, isolated not just from Japanese prejudices but from the reality of life for most Korean-Japanese.
  
  It's a fascinating bit of history, and Lee finds some compelling angles on it.  A chapter in which Solomon--who despite being second generation Japanese-born isn't a Japanese citizen--has to obtain a foreigner's identification card on his fourteenth birthday, to the distress of his loving Japanese stepmother, does an excellent job of outlining the mundane challenges of his existence.  The dimly-felt influence of the post-war Korean split pops up in intriguing ways--Solomon's Korean-American girlfriend is frustrated when Japanese people ask her whether she is north or south Korean, since to her there is no difference from such a vast geographical and generational remove.  As a story, however, Pachinko is alternately stolid and overwrought.  Both the frequency with which the novel lobs tragedies at the Baek family--car accidents, HIV infections, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki--and the resignation with which they endure these hardships end up feeling calculated, even manipulative.  For some of the characters, this resignation works--most of all Sunja, whose long, tumultuous life leaves her with many unanswerable questions about guilt, suffering, and endurance.  But Sunja is off-page for much of the novel, and the other characters feel less like people trying to navigate complicated challenges and political realities, and more like mouthpieces for whatever insight the current chapter has into Korean-Japanese relations.  Pachinko ends up feeling less like a story, or even a meditation on migration and statelessness, and more like a drawn-out historical soap opera.  It's interesting, but not very engaging.

Recent Reading Roundup 45

This is a funny bunch of books: a few that I picked up on a whim; a few that I've been breathlessly waiting for since they were announced; and one that's been sitting on my shelves for years.  The result isn't as exciting--in good ways and bad--as the last roundup of books I published, but nevertheless there are some reads here that I can already tell are going to be highlights of this swiftly-concluding year.

• White Tears by Hari Kunzru - I freely admit that the main reason I picked up Kunzru's latest was its title, which made me laugh with its deliberate provocation.  The actual novel, however, starts out a lot less pugnacious than you might expect, sort of a cross between Donna Tartt and Stephen King, albeit with a much more sophisticated awareness of issues of race, class, and cultural appropriation.  Carter and Seth are music producers who specialize in an analogue, "authentic" sound that hearkens back to the early 20th century.  Carter, in particular, is obsessed with the blues and early jazz, African-American music that is often available only on rare vinyl records that he and other collectors--almost all of them white--hoard and covet.  When Seth, on one of his trips through the city to record sounds for use in their sample library, captures an anonymous black singer singing what appears to be a true blues original, Carter turns it into a rough-sounding track and puts it online.  He claims to have discovered a lost artist, Charlie Shaw, in the hopes of luring collectors from whom he can buy more albums.  But the song quickly takes on a life of its own, and as it does so does Charlie Shaw, who seems to bear a particular resentment towards Carter's wealthy and shady family.  Seth, a hanger-on who has basked in Carter's attention and reflected glory, suddenly finds himself at the center of the story, as the only person who realizes that there is something supernatural going on.
  
  The early chapters of White Tears are perhaps a little familiar in how they describe Carter and his family's privileged floating through the world, and Seth's profound hunger for them--for recognition that his friendship with Carter is real and not just a paid arrangement, or for the affections of Carter's sister Leonie.  Underlying all this, however, is the growing realization of how much of a role race plays in establishing the characters' positions.  Carter and Seth are white men marketing to white musicians an idea of authenticity rooted in treating black people, and their suffering, as exotic.  The very fact that they're obsessed with the blues is telling--it's music rooted in oppression, in suffering that the white protagonists feel free to fetishize because they have no fear of ever experiencing it.  It's therefore not a surprise that part of Kunzru's project with White Tears is to remove that veil of safety, the protective claim of "yes, bad things happened, but it's not my fault".
  
  Like so many ghost stories, White Tears is about the victims of the past coming back to demand justice, but unlike other authors, Kunzru doesn't treat these ghosts as villains or monsters (or at least, he doesn't seem to feel that this should keep him off their side).  As the book approaches its end, its prose grows more fevered and hallucinatory, and the lines between past and present blur and disappear.  It's all in the service of a simple truth--that the past isn't over, and that its injustices are still continuing.  Ultimately, White Tears is about theft--of culture, of money, and of lives--and its ending, though gruesome, is arguing for a full restitution.
  
  
• The Accusation by Bandi - This is one of those books where the story of the book is, inevitably and perhaps even intentionally, more interesting than the story in the book.  The Accusation is presented as a collection of short stories about life in North Korea, published pseudonymously because the author is still living under the regime, and smuggled out of the country by human rights activists.  I have, obviously, no way of knowing whether this is true, but having read the book, I find myself believing it.  There's something earnest about the stories here, a lack of ironic distance that convinces me they were written by someone grappling with a horror that was very close to them.  A recurring theme in the stories in The Accusation is disillusionment--the realization of characters who had believed in the North Korean project that their government doesn't care about them, and of characters who had thought that they had the system of the country figured out that there is simply no way to embody the "good" citizens they've been trained to be.  The emotion underpinning it all is very real and moving, but the portrait the stories paint isn't particularly revelatory.  Perhaps because most of the stories were written in the early and mid-90s (when the North Korean economy collapsed, leading to a horrific famine that left millions dead), the details they reveal are mostly things I've read about before (for example in Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy, a collection of interviews with North Korean defectors).
  
  The Accusation thus ends up more interesting as an artifact than as a work of literature, but nevertheless there are moments of great emotion and horror here--a grandmother's guilt over having been randomly "favored" by the Great Leader even as her family were left to scramble for their survival; a young mine worker's desperation to see his mother on her deathbed, despite being denied a travel permit; in the background of all the stories, the growing desperation as food supplies dwindle and citizens resort to extreme measures to survive a famine whose existence the government won't admit.  It's a book that leaves you feeling rattled, even if that's rooted more in what's happening outside its covers than within them.
  
  
• The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara - Yanagihara's debut was one of the most talked-about literary novels a few years ago (and then slightly upstaged by her Booker-nominated follow-up, A Little Life, which I also own but haven't read), but for one reason and another it's taken me a while to get to.  Also for whatever reason, I ended up reading it at a time when its subject matter feels unpleasantly apt.  Just a few weeks after the revelations about Harvey Weinstein have kicked off a flurry of conversation about the prevalence of sexual harassment and the ways in which society orders itself to protect abusers and vilify victims is maybe not the best time to crack open a novel whose first chapter, a newspaper clipping reporting that a renowned scientist has been accused of rape and molestation by his adopted children, ends with one of the scientist's colleagues calling the situation "a great tragedy"--for the accused, of course.  The People in the Trees is presented as the memoirs of Abraham Norton Perina (the name is obviously significant, though it was never clear to me what the reference to America's one and only emperor was intended to evoke), the founder of the field of "medical anthropology", and a Nobel-prize winner for his discovery that a "lost tribe" in the Micronesian island nation of Ivu'ivu suffer from a degenerative disease that confers upon them seemingly eternal life at the cost of their mental faculties.  In the framing story, Perina's last supporter and friend Ronald Kubodera describes the aftermath of Perina's denunciation by several of his 43 adopted Ivu'ivuan children, and laments the ease with which the world turns on this "great man".
  
  The spirit of Nabokov wafts over this book.  It is, at one and the same time, the self-justifying narrative of a child abuser trying to spin his actions as rooted in love, a la Lolita, and the final work of a renowned intellectual, annotated and heavily-footnoted by a hanger-on desperate to demonstrate his importance to a man who probably doesn't even notice him, as in Pale Fire.  But Yanagihara's interests take her in directions completely different to Nabokov's, and which she handles with impressive flair.  The bulk of the book is taken up with the description of Perina's first journey to Ivu'ivu as a young doctor, recruited to assist a pair of anthropologists conducting a more traditional study of the tribe, before he makes his own discovery.  The descriptions of the jungle, its strangeness and fecundity, are almost overpowering, but through them it's easy to sense Perina's own detachment, his disgust with anything living that doesn't come from himself.  The descriptions of the Ivu'ivuan society are similarly a masterwork of both worldbuilding and character work.  Yanagihara constructs a fascinating, unusual, not always admirable social structure for her invented tribe, and through Perina's observations of them makes it clear just what a monster he is--how he sees everyone, regardless of race or culture, as inferior to him, and merely a means to his ends.  Even without the accusation of child abuse, Perina's publication of his findings has such a catastrophic effect on Ivu'ivu and its people, as pharmaceutical companies race to take the island apart in search of a workable elixir of eternal life, that it's impossible not to hate him--especially when we realize that to him, this is merely a reason for self-pity, as "his" paradise is lost to him.
  
  It's a brilliant portrait and a brilliantly constructed world, and I found myself racing through The People in the Trees, unable to put it down no matter how unpleasant its narrator and events.  But as I said, I'm not sure this was the right time for me to read this book.  As little as two years ago, I might have been able to read this kind of story with enough detachment to enjoy it, or at least appreciate it more.  But right now we're surrounded with so many examples of how abuse is excused and ignored, how exploitation is justified  and forgotten, that Yanagihara's conclusion that the accusations against Perina would cause his career to evaporate and even lead to a short prison sentence feels positively rose-tinted.  More importantly, I'm just not in the mood right now to wonder about the psychology of this particular kind of monster. As we keep seeing on the news, people who see others as subhuman are a lot less interesting and complicated than we'd like to believe.  Yanagihara never coddles Perina, and never expects us to feel anything other than disgust for him.  But she also thinks we should be interested in him, and through no fault of her own, that's something that feels wrong at this moment.
  
  
• The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden - I don't know whether Arden's debut was inspired by Naomi Novik's Uprooted, or whether (as seems more likely) the two books ended up plugging into the same hunger for new ideas in the fantasy genre, which has landed on retellings and remixings of Eastern European folklore.  Either way, Nightingale has a few too many similarities to Uprooted to stand on its own.  Both books are about a young girl in a rural, medieval community slowly becoming aware of her magical powers, just as an ancient evil arises in the nearby forest.  Both feature an ally character who is a powerful, ancient magical user, with whom the heroine develops a prickly relationship with an undertone of quasi-dangerous romance.  Both are driven by the conflict between the restrictive role the heroine's community affords women, and her own desire for purpose and adventure.  And both, as noted, take place in a lightly-fantasized medieval Eastern European setting, with strong lashings of Russian and Slavic folklore.
  
  Having read (and enjoyed) such a close variant on this story only last year, I ended up appreciating Nightingale a lot more for its realistic details than its fantastic plot--the minutiae of how the farming community at the book's center survives the long, harsh northern winters; the protocols that govern the lives and aspirations of the heroine's gentleman farmer father and his sons; the hints of political intrigue and geopolitical scheming, especially as regards the dissatisfaction of Russian nobles, at that point still paying tribute to the Tatar empire.  That's not to say that there's nothing to enjoy in Nightingale as a story.  Heroine Vasya is delightful, genuinely curious about her world and clear-eyed about the flaws and strengths of the people around her.  Her antagonist, the charismatic priest Konstantin, who tries to punish Vasya for his attraction to her, is fascinating precisely because you can see how much of his evil is rooted in his self-importance, and how easily he could have been a better person if he'd learned to set aside pride and male entitlement.  This is also a story about the tension between rigid social conventions and human flexibility.  Vasya's father and brothers, though certain that she has only one possible life path before her, also realize how easily she could be made unhappy in a life like that, and many authority figures in the novel see it as their role to balance strict rules with common sense and compassion.  As enjoyable as these human details are, when they give way to the novel's fantastical plot, the result is too familiar--not just from Uprooted, but from so many other stories like it.  I found myself wishing that Nightingale had started where it actually ends, with Vasya leaving her home to have adventures, finally shaking off the expectations that had hemmed her--and her story--in.
  
  
• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado - It seems like only yesterday that I was telling everyone I could find about this amazing new author I'd discovered, whose stories were a magnificent blend of humor, horror, and an earnest handling of the myriad complications of female sexuality.  In the intervening years, I've watched Machado deservedly become a superstar, both for her stories and her essays, and now with her bestselling, National Book Award-nominated debut collection.  (Meanwhile, the Hugos managed to sleep on Machado in both the short fiction and Campbell categories.  The latter was partly the fault of the various puppy factions, but still: not a great look, guys.)
  
  It's perhaps inevitable that my reaction to Her Body would be less intense than that of readers new to Machado's unique voice and sensibilities.  I already had the top of my head taken off by "Especially Heinous", a phantasmagorical reimagining of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in which a critique of the show's attitude towards rape and rape culture gives way to multiple ghost stories and forays into alternate universes.  Or "The Husband Stitch", a queasy tale in which a seemingly happy marriage is unmade by the husband's refusal to accept his wife's one limitation on their intimacy.  Of the eight stories collected in Her Body and Other Parties, four were familiar to me, as was the general impression formed by them of an author following in the footsteps of Kelly Link and Sofia Samatar, and incorporating their use of surrealism and wry pop culture references into her own fascination with--as the title suggests--female bodies, how they're perceived, policed, used, and how they feel.  The new stories continue that fascination, for example in "Real Women Have Bodies", in which a prom dress saleswoman in a world in which some women have begun to fade into nothingness discovers a horrifying connection between the disease and her wares.  Or "Eight Bites", about a woman undergoing bariatric surgery whose choice seems to permanently sever her connection to her daughter.  Interestingly, the collection omits several of Machado's publications, such as "Descent" or "My Body, Herself", perhaps because they didn't fit with this theme, so for a lot of readers this will be more of an introduction to Machado than a summation of the first stage in her career.  Either way, it's an essential collection for anyone interested in the more slipstreamy edge of genre short fiction, and for anyone looking for an example of how genre fiction can grapple with issues of gender and sexuality.
  
  
• Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng - The only thing I knew about Ng's debut before reading it was that it was a fantasy about Victorian missionaries in fairyland.  This led me to expect something Strange & Norrell-esque, or perhaps similar to Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown--a wry puncturing of Victorian self-importance in the face of the implacable strangeness of the magical world.  Minus the tone, that's more or less what the novel delivers, but that tone makes a big difference.  Under the Pendulum Sun is a great deal stranger and darker than I was expecting.  It owes a very obvious (and acknowledged) debt to the Brontës, and particularly to Jane Eyre.  It sprinkles those references onto an edifice that is pure Gothic, a story about a young woman who arrives in a mysterious castle where she keeps stumbling across long-held secrets, whose dark past continues to send out tendrils that ensnare her.
  
  Catherine Helstone arrives in fairyland in search of her brother, Laon, a missionary whose letters home have stopped.  Deposited in the twisty castle, dubbed Gethsemane, where the fairy queen has sequestered her guests seeking to spread Christianity to the fairies, Cathy finds her search for Laon stymied by the riddling answers and deliberate obfuscations of her fellow inhabitants: the changeling Ariel; the gnome Benjamin, fairyland's sole convert; and the fire-breathing housekeeper, Salamander.  The early chapters do a little to sketch in the shape of a world in which fairyland is not only a known place, but a potential site for colonization and cultural imperialism.  We learn, for example, that changelings like Ariel, who grew up thinking she was human, are recruited as ambassadors and go-betweens by the fairies, better able to explain their masters' strangeness to literal-minded humans.  But this is not, ultimately, what Under the Pendulum Sun is about.  Some readers might find the novel a bit slow-going, but Ng is working very squarely within the Gothic tradition, in which Cathy's task is not to explore the breadth of fairyland, but to delve inward into Gethsemane's secrets.  When Laon returns, heralding a visit from the fairy queen herself, it becomes clear that the siblings' relationship is nearly as fraught and full of unspoken truths as their new home.  Faced with a world where none of the rules--of society or of reality--seem to apply, the Helstones are forced to confront the reasons for Laon's decision to flee so far from his sister, and the question of what they do now that they've been reunited.
  
  Another thing that surprised me about Under the Pendulum Sun was the importance of religion, not just to the novel's Christian characters, but to its plot.  I was expecting Ng's handling of missionaries to veer towards the political, but in fact she spends a lot more time debating theology with Cathy, Laon, and Benjamin, as they try to puzzle out how fairyland fits in with Christian cosmology.  In theory, this should have been my jam--I'm always fascinated by depictions of faith and how characters relate to it.  But I'm not very interested in the kind of nitpicky conversations that the Helstones and Benjamin get into, trying to keep afloat what is essentially a rickety, patched together bit of worldbuilding that can no longer accommodate their new understanding of the world.  To be clear, this is the sort of thing that did (and still does) happen, and Ng is very good at capturing the twisty, headache-inducing turns of argument that people can get into when they refuse to separate the core ideas of a religion from the edifice of tradition erected around it.  But as the novel progresses, it feels less and less as if these questions are important to the characters, a way of showing us how they see and relate to the world, and more as if they're just objectively important.  The question of whether changelings like Ariel have a soul ends up having a concrete significance to the plot, whereas to me the fact that Ariel is clearly a thinking, feeling person renders such discussions moot.  It's possible that this is the conclusion Ng is aiming at as well--the novel's ending sees Catherine and Laon struggling with their own, possibly damning, sins, and whether they're even interested in seeking forgiveness for them.  But if so it comes to that conclusion long past the point where I was ready for it.  Still, it's sufficiently unusual to see fantasy grapple with religion--and particularly this branch of 19th century, empire-tinged Christianity--that even a frustrating attempt is worth exploring.  Which is ultimately my conclusion about Under the Pendulum Sun as a whole.  It's a strange novel, and not entirely satisfying.  But it's so much its own thing that I don't hesitate to recommend it, and am extremely curious to see what Ng does next.
  
  
• A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge - One of the problems--or, well, "problems"--of Frances Hardinge being an exceptional writer who is also quite prolific is that you can end up developing an over-familiarity with her favorite tropes and themes.  Hardinge's perennial focus is on characters who are damaged, sometimes by abuse, but sometimes also by difficult circumstances such as poverty or racial persecution.  Her books repeatedly drum in the point that for her protagonists, the damage caused by their twisted upbringing--the isolation inflicted on Neverfell in A Face Like Glass, or the emotional manipulation to which both heroines are subjected in Cuckoo Song--can't be undone, but that they can learn to come to terms with it, and forge a good life in spite of it.  It's a powerful, important message, and especially effective coming from an author of Hardinge's skill, who never shies away from the ugliness of what her characters are capable of.  But especially for an adult reader, it can get a little wearying to encounter again and again.  But then you get a novel like A Skinful of Shadows, which reminds you that even when she's working within a familiar scheme, Hardinge is so full of ideas that she can always find ways to make her preoccupations feel new and affecting.
  
  A Skinful of Shadows is set in the 17th century, in the early years of the English Civil War.  Our heroine, Makepeace, is raised first among Puritans, and then given work as a kitchen girl in the house of an old noble family, whose illegitimate scion she is.  In both of these settings, Makepeace is forced to contend with her ability to see and manipulate the spirits of the dead.  Her strict, emotionally withholding mother taught Makepeace to fight off the ghosts who tried to possess her, but her unacknowledged family, the Fellmottes, have more sinister plans for her.  They're keeping her around as a "spare", a vessel into which to pour the spirits of long-dead ancestors in case one of the legitimate Fellmottes, raised to this task since childhood, should die.  The ghost metaphor is evocative, especially after Makepeace, seeking to escape the Fellmottes and rescue her already-possessed half-brother James, starts amassing a menagerie of spirits to help her in her task.  And Hardinge finds multiple uses for it, each of which relates in a different way to the central theme of her writing, the abuse perpetrated by individuals and systems.  Early in the novel, Makepeace takes in the spirit of a sideshow bear, whom she constantly has to calm and acclimatize to her new situations.  He becomes a representation of her anger, and of the difficulty that a mistreated child has in opening up and showing trust.  The Fellmotte ancestors, who use their descendants as receptacles, not caring that doing so usually destroys the original personality, are a predatory system that sees everyone as subservient, a means to the preservation of the elite.  Late in the novel it's revealed that the legitimate Fellmotte heirs, though raised in privilege, are subjected to routine alterations to their personality by the ghosts in order to make them more suitable receptacles.  The end result of this, as exemplified by Makepeace and James's cousin Symond, is psychopathic, a reminder of what can happen when child abuse is combined with almost limitless privilege.
  
  A Skinful of Shadows follows Makepeace back and forth across the English landscape as she tries to first escape the Fellmottes, and then accrue enough leverage against them to bargain for James's freedom.  Along the way she collects a coterie of spirits--a conceited doctor, a deserting Puritan soldier, one of the Fellmotes' spies--whom she must corral and negotiate with.  In her journeys, she also gains several perspectives on the war, and while the book ultimately sides with Parliament in the conflict, its main conclusion is that both sides are prone to abuse and exploitation--there's a particular emphasis on Puritan authoritarianism and misogyny, for example when Makepeace runs afoul of a witchfinder who is certain that her possession is a sign that she's made a deal with the devil.  As in her previous books, Hardinge's interest in abuse isn't confined to a single abusive relationship or household.  She sees abuse as a product of broader social choices, in this case the belief that some people are simply worth more than others, which is taken to irrational extremes in the form of the Felmottes, whose exploitation of their lessers continues even after death.  None of the institutions Makepeace encounters in the novel--the Fellmotte estate, the court of Charles I, the Parliamentarian army, or the Puritan church--are free of this belief, and she ends up rejecting all of them.  She offers a counterpoint in the form of the community she forms with the ghosts she carries, and in making an active choice to respect their right to happiness and self-determination.  By the end of the novel, both Makepiece and James have committed to living as multiple beings, offering homes to people who weren't given a fair shake in life.  It's the kind of ending you can't imagine any author but Hardinge delivering, and certainly not with her level of assurance and skill.

Recent Reading Roundup 44

Summer is usually a dead reading time for me, the heat and dust making it difficult to concentrate on anything but the least challenging fare.  But this summer--which has anyway featured some interesting developments--has turned out to be very exciting on the reading front as well.  I didn't love all of these books--in fact one of them is easily my least favorite read in quite some time--but all of them broadened my horizons and took me places I wasn't expecting.  Here's to many more summers (and seasons) like this one.

• The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro - I'm having trouble explaining to myself why I picked up The Buried Giant.  After all, the only other Ishiguro novel I've read, Never Let Me Go, left me feeling disappointed, frustrated, and genuinely puzzled at the love and admiration that so many other readers (including genre readers) had for it.  The only justification I have for giving Ishiguro another look is that it had been ten years since Never Let Me Go put me off, and in that time the ongoing praise for it made me doubt my own recollections.  Was it possible that I was being too harsh?  Did I miss the point of the novel's tragedy, seeing nastiness in what was intended as a soulful meditation on the human condition?  Add to that the conversation that developed around The Buried Giant's genre, and the fact that its premise and setting sounded intriguing, and it seemed like a good opportunity to give Ishiguro a second try.  Turns out, I was right the first time.  Ishiguro is a nasty piece of work; The Buried Giant, like its predecessor, is a mean-spirited, taunting bit of misery-porn that seems to hold its readers in actual disdain, and pretends to profundity without having anything to say.  And what makes it all worse is that I have no one to blame but myself.
  
  The story of The Buried Giant revolves around an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, who live in a small English village some time after the collapse of the Roman Empire.  The setting is deliberately hard to fix, not just because the couple have a very limited view of their world, but because folklore and fantasy seem to exist side by side with established history--this is a world where Arthur was a historical king whom some of the novel's older characters remember, and where dragons exist.  (On the question of the novel's genre, I fall in with those who class it as a fantasy; though as a fantasy, it isn't a very interesting or original one.)  One particular dragon is breathing noxious fumes into the air, affecting the entire region and causing memory loss, passivity, and irrational behavior.  Axl and Beatrice, who leave their village to go on a visit to their son, whom they only vaguely remember, become increasingly aware of these effects as they travel, and fall in with a group of people--including an elderly Sir Gawain--who have various plans for the dragon.  As they journey, more and more pieces of their forgotten history start falling into place, as does the vicious, bloody conflict between Saxons and Britons, now curiously abated but bubbling beneath the surface.
  
  The Buried Giant is slow and meandering, and Axl and Beatrice's thought- and speech-patterns are halting, almost childlike (it's hard to tell if this is meant to be the effect of the dragon, since in flashbacks to the past they seem just as literal-minded).  That's not what put me off the novel, though--for all its blandness, The Buried Giant is an easy read, and in its own way engaging, as we watch its characters go out of their way to be kind and accommodating to one another, and slowly puzzling out their world and history.  But the simplicity of that world and that history mean that the reader will work out relatively quickly what the characters take until the novel's last pages to figure out--that the dragon's fumes, even as they suppress memory and intelligence, are also the only thing preventing ethnic strife and bloodshed from breaking out again, and that several of the novel's characters want the dragon killed so that the cycle of vengeance can start again.  So The Buried Giant is a long, terribly polite, terribly gentle trudge towards war and ethnic cleansing.  As if that were not enough, Axl and Beatrice's relationship, the only thing they have left to cling to in a world going slowly mad, is nibbled away at piece by piece as they regain their memories.
  
  Here's where a partisan of the novel might jump up to say "but that's the point!"  But the more I think about it, the more misguided that seems.  I don't think Ishiguro has written a book about the inevitability of human conflict and how remembering history can doom us to repeat it.  I think he's written a smug, sneering work whose primary purpose it to point and laugh at its readers for hoping that things might turn out better than that.  Throughout the novel, Axl and Beatrice are eager to end the dragon's influence because they fear that if they lose their memories of loving each other, they won't be allowed to go to heaven together.  But not only does regaining their memory reveal all the cracks and flaws in their relationship, as the novel's final chapter reveals, there's no amount of love they could have for each other that would ever allow them to go to the afterlife together--any expression of anger or hate, even momentary, in a decades-long marriage is enough to disqualify them.  In the hands of another writer, this might arouse compassion, the recognition that there is no such thing as a perfect love, or a perfect peace.  But underneath The Buried Giant's polite surface, there is a genuinely misanthropic heart, that sees the flaws in its characters as a reason to hate and punish them, not pity them.  The point of the novel isn't that war and conflict are inevitable, or that no love is perfect, but rather that it is foolish to hope otherwise, and that people who do--both the characters and the readers--are to be derided.  The only good thing that has come from my choice to read this novel is that I no longer have to wonder if I was wrong about Ishiguro ten years ago, and hopefully I won't make the mistake of picking him up again.
  
  
• Broken River by J. Robert Lennon - Lennon is turning out to be one of those authors who never write the same kind of book twice.  I've seen him do family dramedy (The Funnies), and metaphysical slipstream (Familiar), and now he returns with Broken River, a thriller with more than a dash of the existential.  The house in the woods outside Broken River, NY was once the site of a horrible double murder.  Twelve years later, it is purchased by a wealthy, bohemian family--sculptor Karl, novelist Eleanor, precocious tween Irina--who move to the country in a last-ditch effort to recover from Karl's serial infidelity.  All the ingredients for a fairly standard thriller plot seem to have been laid out, including a mysterious young woman who may or may not be the daughter of the murder victims, a local man whose knowledge about the murders has been eating away at him for years, and a sinister stranger who arrives in town not long after Eleanor and Irina begin investigating the history of their new home.  And yet Broken River repeatedly zigs when you expect it to zag.  It often feels more interested in Karl and Eleanor's crumbling marriage, and particularly the way that it has been both sustained, and ultimately destroyed, by his monumental self-absorption.  Long stretches of the novel are told from the point of view of an "observer", an entity who came into being shortly before the murders, and who spends the years afterwards watching the house and then following the people who move into it, slowly developing its theories about why humans behave as strangely and inconsistently as they do.  Most importantly, though Lennon takes a while to reveal what actually happened on the night of the murders (to the readers, anyway; most of the characters never work out all of the details), he makes it clear from the outset that there is no grand mystery here.  That what happened at the house all those years ago was nothing but the confluence of mundane greed, cruelty, and foolishness, with no greater meaning or purpose.
  
  The result is that Broken River often feels more interesting for its parts than its whole.  The chapters in which we follow Karl in his relentless quests to gratify his most immediate desires--for weed, for his mistress, for artistic recognition, for some fleeting sense that he is not failing as a husband and a father (he is)--are a sort of horrifying comedy, a constant seesaw between disgust at Karl's steadfast refusal to be an adult, and amusement at the sheer audacity of it.  Eleanor's slow realization that she needs to disentangle herself from his narcissism, and Irina's childish conviction that she knows everything she needs to know about being an adult, are similarly well-sketched.  But at its core, Broken River is a novel about the folly of imposing a narrative on life, whether it's the murder mystery, or the murderers' belief that their victims' daughter is coming back for revenge, or even Karl's fantasies about masculinity.  Which inevitably means that the book refuses its own impulses towards a coherent plot.  When the story erupts into violence, it's not because the forces that exploded in the house twelve years ago were so malevolent and all-knowing that they've been lying in wait all these years, but because the limited people making limited observations of the family's actions jump to irrational, unsubstantiated conclusions.  That's not as frustrating as it sounds--a lot of the pleasure of the book comes from our ability to piece together what the rest of the characters don't realize, and to marvel over their foolishness.  But it means that Broken River ends less with a crescendo and more with an unraveling, and the feeling that as enjoyable as the components of the ride were, we weren't actually headed towards a destination.
  
  
• Human Acts by Han Kang - I didn't know quite what to make of Kang's The Vegetarian, winner of last year's Man Booker International prize and generally beloved of literary folks, when I read it earlier this year.  It was obviously successful at what it was trying to do--chart the way that mental illness and a misogynistic culture combine to drive the main character to self-destruction, to the complete incomprehension of those closest to her--but for the life of me I couldn't figure out the point of the exercise, or even admire Kang's skill at pulling it off.  Human Acts, Kang's third novel to be translated into English, has finally made me realize what everyone has been seeing in her.  It is a riveting, shattering work, at once personal, philosophical, and political, dealing with the after-effects of state violence in a way that no novel I've read has come close to.
  
  Kang's subject is the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in which students and factory workers in a Korean city staged a takeover in protest of the country's military leadership.  The uprising lasted ten days, and was finally brutally suppressed, with hundreds of citizens left dead or missing.  To Koreans, this is a defining moment in the history of their nation, but I had never heard of it before reading this book.  It was therefore fascinating to see how Kang dealt with the details of history.  None of the characters in the book infodump, and it's left to us to piece together the events of the uprising and its aftermath from their asides and observations.  To a foreign reader in particular, this has a strangely wrongfooting effect.  The first chapter, which takes place in the middle of the uprising, with the city holding its breath in anticipation of the military's return and the massacre that will be sure to follow, felt, to me, almost like a chapter out of an SFnal dystopia.  It seemed impossible that, in the real world, ordinary people could have found themselves, from one day to another, living in a war zone.  And yet the further one gets in Human Acts, the more that sense of alienation and unreality comes to feel like the point.  As the years pass, the uprising is folded into Korea's history, and into the lives of the people who survived it, a rupture in the expected order of things that is also horrifyingly mundane.
  
  What occupies most of the characters in Human Acts is the death of one specific Gwangju victim, fifteen-year-old Dong-ho.  We meet him in the book's first chapter, helping to tend to bodies that have been brought to a local gym, looking for the friend he was separated from in the protest that sparked the uprising.  Though it takes a while to learn exactly how Dong-ho died, that isn't the story's focus--it is, after all, fairly easy to guess, and the actual identity of the murderer doesn't matter with so many guilty parties to go around.  What is important, to Dong-ho's friends, his family, and the other rebels who managed to escape with their lives, is the violation that his death represents, and the greater violation that it comes to stand for.  Following these characters over the years and decades after the uprising, Kang finds them struggling with trauma, PTSD, survivor's guilt, and most of all with the knowledge that people are capable of doing such things to one another.  The violence that the state is capable of is ever-present in this book, from the uprising itself, to the torture of prisoners that followed it, to routine mistreatment at the hands of the police.  For all the novel's characters, the illusion that they are living in a civil society, that they can trust their government and fellow citizens not to hurt them, has been irrevocably shattered.  The question they keep coming back to, as they try to rebuild their lives, is: how do you participate in a society that has abused you?  How do you go on with your life in the knowledge that all of the things you've witnessed, the cruelty and the suffering, are a fundamental part of being human?  Throughout the novel, Kang's focus is on the corporeal--on dead bodies and how we care for them (or not); on abused bodies and how they heal (or not)--and through this most mundane of topics, she repeatedly drives home the point that what she is describing is ordinary, even, in some ways, normal.  It is that normalcy that gives Human Acts its horrifying force, and makes it one of the most powerful novels I've read.
  
  
• The Girl With the Golden Parasol by Uday Prakash - I first heard about this novel, which caused quite a stir when it was originally published in Hindi in 2001, from Aishwarya Subramanian.  According to the introduction by translator Jason Grunebaum, one of the things that made it controversial in India was its discussion of caste and the effects that it still has on modern Indians, and to a foreigner that's one of the aspects of Indian society that feels most opaque--the subtle cues of language, name, and geographical origin that clearly identify caste to an Indian are invisible to most of us, and certainly to me.  One might think that this would make The Girl With the Golden Parasol incomprehensible to a foreign leader, but instead my reaction to Prakash's portrait was to think that he'd managed to capture currents and trends that are universal, present in any country and society, even as he depicts the unique ways in which they express themselves in his home.
  
  Both a campus novel and a romantic comedy, The Girl With the Golden Parasol follows Rahul, a young student at a prestigious university, who falls in love with Anjali, a girl from the highest, Brahmin caste.  In order to be close to his crush, Rahul transfers into the Hindi department, which is simultaneously looked down on by the wider university community, as a hidebound discipline with little utility in the new, capitalistic Indian society, and ruled internally by a cabal that sees their mission as more cultural than academic, building a bulwark against the erosion of Brahmin superiority and control.  Being exposed to the internal politics and prejudices of the department gives Rahul (and Prakash--when the novel gets into its speech-making mode, it can get a little difficult to distinguish between the two) an opportunity to exposit on the currents affecting Indian society.  On the one hand, the influence of the West, which encourages capitalism, consumerism, and inequality.  And on the other hand, the form of Indian nationalism espoused by the Brahmins, which seeks to erase the cultural impact of less-privileged ethnic groups (Rahul is, for example, startled to discover that his syllabus in Hindi literature is composed almost entirely of Brahmin authors) and erect a philosophical model that treats Indian-ness and Brahmin superiority as interchangeable.  Despite the local details--and without downplaying Prakash's skill at conveying them, even to a foreigner like myself--these forces feel so familiar, especially right now with nationalistic movements all over the world identifying themselves with idea of cultural supremacy and the rule of the elite, that it seems impossible to believe that this novel was written almost two decades ago, in a very different world.  (One amusing and presumably unintentional touch is that the peak of the novel's action happens in the middle of September 2001, and yet 9/11 is never mentioned.)
  
  Prakash isn't shy about using Rahul as a mouthpiece, and a lot of the novel is made up of his speeches--to his friends, to his teachers, to Anjali.  But what should make the novel a bit of a slog ends up being delightful, not just because Rahul's perspective was new to me, but because of the way his imagery swoops from the mundane to the fantastical, from being rooted in the novel's narrative to a high-flying view of India as a whole, from completely naturalistic to combining elements of mythology, religion, and history to illustrate Rahul's take on India's core flaws and failings.  (If I have any problem with Rahul and his worldview, it is that, like so many campus leftists before and after him, he tends to view women as a means to an end, rather than actors and thinkers in their own right, and this also expresses itself in some of his politics.)  Even more impressive is the fact that, in such a short volume, Prakash manages to combine Rahul's philosophical and political musings with a fairly crackerjack plot, involving not only the blooming love story between Rahul and Anjali, but a student rebellion against the corrupt campus leadership, which is cahoots with local criminals.  The result is a novel that feels vibrant both for its politics and its story, and extremely funny and touching besides.  Near the end, Prakash demonstrates an obvious awareness of his genre by asking whether he can justify ending his story like any Bollywood romance between a rich girl and a poor boy, and it's a testament to the strength of his worldbuilding that he manages to find an ending that is satisfying on both the political and storytelling level.
  
  
• Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi - Saadawi's 2013 novel won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and I'm getting it slightly before English readers (who will be able to enjoy it in 2018) because the Hebrew translation was a little bit faster.  Set in 2005, at the height of the chaos following the American invasion and the fall of the Ba'athist regime, its events are punctuated by a constant litany of gang wars, reprisals for long-held grudges, financial collapses, and suicide bombings.  In the midst of all this upheaval, an old junk dealer, shellshocked by the death of his friend in a bombing and by the sight of the dismembered bodies left after it, begins a macabre project of constructing a single corpse from orphaned bits of victims.  For reasons the book never elaborates, but which are clearly linked to the psychic charge of trauma and pain that lingers over the city, the patchwork creature comes to life.  He begins taking vengeance on the people who caused his body parts' original death--criminal gangs, militias, terrorist groups.  But as his quest for vengeance proceeds--and as tales of the mysterious, inhuman avenger spread through the city--the creature's body begins to fail, and he finds himself having to take the lives of innocents in order to extend his life.
  
  It's a fairly obvious metaphor, and Saadawi is almost certainly not the first to employ it (Victor LaValle is currently telling a very similar story in his comic Destroyer, to name but one example).  What makes Frankenstein in Baghdad original is its portrait of Baghdad itself, and the way the creature's story intersects with those of so many ordinary people whose lives have been rocked, not just by the current crisis, but by a legacy of dictatorship and ethnic strife.  Saadawi sets his story in a single neighborhood, whose residents have long-simmering currents of friendship and resentment shaped by Iraq's tumultuous history--one of the novel's protagonists, an old woman, holds a grudge against the former party member who hounded her son into enlisting in the army in the 80s, leading to the boy's death in the war against Iran.  Religion and ethnicity are also discussed--on a personal note, I was intrigued by the frequent references to Baghdad's departed Jewish community, whose echoes continue to linger in the houses and artifacts they left behind.  Perhaps most importantly, there is the tension between traditional ways of life, the order imposed by the fallen regime, and the new, more strongly capitalist society emerging after the invasion, which cause tremendous upheavals in the fortunes of many of the novel's characters.  (In light of all this, it's interesting to note how little Saadawi has to say about the American occupation force.  It exists as a grey eminence, a threat that backs the power of some of the novel's more connected characters.  But hardly any American characters appear, and the Iraqi characters are more concerned with the neighbors and enemies they can see in front of them.)
  
  If there's a weakness to Frankenstein in Baghdad, it is that it can't bring this tapestry of characters and stories to a definite conclusion.  Rather, the novel ends with one final act of destruction, after which many of the characters end up surrendering their grip on a city they no longer recognize, and moving on from it, leaving it to the creature's stewardship.  This, however, may very well be Saadawi's point; that in such chaos, with the ghosts of so many past victims emerging to claim their vengeance, Baghdad becomes unfit for the life of the community, and must be abandoned to those--human and inhuman--who are dedicated solely to violence.
  
  
• Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen - A visit to Finland felt like the perfect opportunity to read this biography of Jansson, and my reading was certainly enhanced by taking place within short distance of so many of the book's most important settings: the Ateneum, where Jansson studied art and displayed many of her works; the chief branch of the furniture and design store Artek, whose fine art competitions she entered; the famed department store Stockmann's, where one of many Moomin promotions was held.  But even divorced from these concrete reminders of Jansson's life, Work and Love paints a vivid portrait of its subject.  A lot of the details of Jansson's life were already known to me--I knew that she was the daughter of artists, that she had been a left-wing political cartoonist in the 30s and 40s, that she had a decades-long relationship with another female artist, Tuuliki Pietilä, with whom she lived part of the year on a remote island, and that she had written novels and stories for adults as well as the Moomin books.  Karjalainen expands on these bare facts, charting the development of Jansson's career along the many paths she took over the course of her life, as a painter, graphic artist, cartoonist, and author.  She discusses the dominant influences in Jansson's life, including her parents, friends, and early lovers.  And she identifies echoes of Jansson's life in her writing, from her fraught relationship with her father, to her open-secret sexuality, to the specific inspirations for various Moomin characters.  Her text is interspersed with many photographs and reproductions of Jansson's art, making the book a work of art as well as a fascinating biography.
  
  But the chief pleasure of Work and Love is the portrait it paints of Jansson, as a person who was first and foremost hardworking, curious about the world, and eager for new experiences.  You get a glimpse of Jansson's personality in many of her books, including Fair Play, The Summer Book, and The True Deceiver.  But Karjalainen offers a more rounded portrait, discussing Jansson's limitations (her political naivete, her resistance to modernist movements in the art world) as well as her strengths.  And, though the book touches on this fact only lightly (and mostly in discussing the more limited prospects of Jansson's mother Signe, whose career ended up taking a backseat to that of her husband), Work and Love is a profoundly feminist work.  Its depiction of Jansson as an artist rejects so many of the terms we're used to using when discussing male artists, whose careers often seem dedicated as much to curating their public image, and to taking up as much space as possible, as to their work.  Jansson was hardly shy and retiring, but she valued her privacy and didn't like to make herself, rather than her work, the focus of attention.  Her life was dedicated to working hard, supporting her friends, and making a comfortable existence for herself and the people she cared about.  This describes so many women I know--women who hold up the world with their care and attention, but who are also passionate, exacting, and extremely proud of their accomplishments--that it's not at all a surprise to learn that Jansson was one of them.  It's a model for life--not just of the artist--that I'd like to see lauded, certainly over that of the genius creator who must be coddled and protected from the mundane details of existence.
  
  
• My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book One by Emil Ferris - Ferris's monumental, breathtaking graphic novel presents itself as the sketchbook/diary of ten-year-old Karen Reyes, who lives with her mother and older brother Deeze in a basement apartment in Chicago, 1968.  When the family's upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, dies under mysterious circumstances, Karen is moved to investigate, discovering tapes Anka made in which she narrates her life in pre-WWII Berlin, and her experiences in a concentration camp after the war breaks out.  This impulse towards investigation also branches out into Karen's own family and her other neighbors, as she becomes aware of the weight of history and secrets that so many of the adults in her life carry.
  
  My Favorite Thing is Monsters is probably weakest in its plot--it's easy to guess, for example, what dark secret Deeze is hiding about his past, and the book's use of the Holocaust in Anka's reminiscences verges on the sensationalistic, as when we learn that Anka, a former child prostitute, conceived a plan to rescue children from the gas chambers by recruiting them for her own brothel, and that her death may have been linked to this.  But Ferris's art elevates the material into something completely its own, moving effortlessly between past and present, fantasy and reality.  Karen's inspiration comes in equal parts from the schlock horror films and magazines she enjoys with her family, and the paintings she studies at her visits with Deeze to the Art Institute of Chicago.  Long segments of the book involve Karen recreating, analyzing, and in some cases entering the paintings that capture her mood or resonate with her impressions of the people she meets, but often in combination with elements from monster movies--including Karen herself, who is almost always drawn as a creature halfway into transforming from a human to a werewolf.  Alongside these fantastical elements, there is also a moving and carefully observed portrait of Karen's seedy neighborhood, populated by marginalized people, some of whom are still clinging to respectability, while others have been forced to let go of it, or have gleefully surrendered it.  Ferris's ability to combine this stark social realism with a sensibility that is part high-art, part cartoon--and do it all in the medium of cross-hatched pen-strokes and shaded pencil sketches--adds up to a stunning artistic achievement, all while maintaining the conceit that the book is a child's sketchpad.
  
  None of this, however, would work if it weren't for Karen herself, who is bold but naive, good-hearted but so determined to learn the truth about the various mysteries in her life that she ends up trampling over the feelings of people who are often already damaged and broken.  Matter-of-factly reporting on the hardships of her life--a sick mother, a troubled brother, a school where she is considered a "freak" and subjected to abuse by both the students and teachers, a growing awareness of being gay and of the social costs that will entail as she gets older--Karen's defense mechanism is the belief that she is on the verge of escaping this reality to become a full-fledged monster.  The recognition that she, as well as all of the people around her, are just humans (albeit ones who will always be marked as different and, in some ways, monstrous) is the painful cost of growing up, a process that, alongside the book's various mysteries, is only half-complete at the end of this volume.  As I've said, those mysteries are probably the least engaging aspect of Ferris's project, but between her winning characters, and her luminous, versatile artwork, there's a great deal here to marvel at, and a great deal to look forward to in the story's conclusion.