Friday, August 27, 2021

THE DRAGON THE GIANT THE WOMEN by Wayétu Moore











5.5. 💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗

Greywolf Publishing

Available now

About

 In this beautiful memoir of dislocation, a young girl flees war-torn Liberia with her family to America. Moore (She Would Be King) begins with herself as a five-year-old living with her sisters, grandparents, and father in Monrovia. When the 1990 civil war erupts with terrifying massacres by rebels overthrowing president Samuel Doe (who Moore imagines as “the Hawa Undu dragon, the monster in my dreams, the sum of stories I was too young to hear”), the family heads for Sierra Leone, hoping to get to America. Moore describes this desperate trek in the lyrical voice of her younger self, a dreamy girl who filters the danger through a folktale lens. The middle section tracks her childhood after her family resettles in Texas, then her trauma-plagued young adulthood in Brooklyn (“nightmares were old friends”), and racially fraught romances (“I never feared my blackness, until the men,” referring to the black men she first dated in college). The book’s final section holds a mirror to the first, describing in her mother’s voice her mother’s journey from New York back to Africa to rescue her lost family. Building to a thrumming crescendo, the pages almost fly past. Readers will be both enraptured and heartbroken by Moore’s intimate yet epic story of love for family and home. 

I absolutely love this memoir ❤



Thursday, June 24, 2021

DEAR SENTHURAN A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi

5.5

Available now

Summary,

How does a spirit child drawn from Nigerian tribal cosmology negotiate modern life? That's the metaphysical conundrum at the heart of this highly personal and unusual memoir. Emezi grew up in Aba, Nigeria, and identifies as ogbanje, an “Igbo spirit that’s born to a human mother, a kind of trickster that dies unexpectedly only to return in the next child and do it all over again.” In order to ameliorate their feelings of “flesh dysphoria” or “metaphysical dysphoria,” the author underwent multiple surgeries, including breast reduction and a “hysterectomy with a bilateral salpingectomy.” As Emezi writes, they chose “to mutate my body into something that would fit my spiritself.” Structured as a series of far-ranging letters written to friends, lovers, exes, family members, and others, the narrative raises questions about the author’s "embodied nonhuman" existence and Igbo conceptions of reality. While Emezi’s personal and professional travels have taken them around the world—Trinidad, Berlin, Johannesburg, Vietnam, Tanzania, and homes in Brooklyn and New Orleans—this book is not a travelogue. Although conventional elements of memoir reoccur—a painful breakup, estrangement from family members, career ups and downs—the author presents them as manifestations of a deity's "deeply traumatic" embodiment as a human being. Emezi attributes much of their meteoric rise—multiple literary award wins and nominations, National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honoree, etc.—to the casting of the right spell. The author is crystal-clear in their focus on "writing for people like me, not for a white gaze,” and seen through the prism of Igbo ontology, this adventurous life story is undoubtedly compelling. For some readers, getting past Emezi’s "outrageously arrogant" demand "for attention, for glory, for worship" as a self-described "bratty deity" may require a leap of faith and a modicum of empathy, a merely human trait.
Tribal spiritual beliefs meet contemporary literary acclaim in a powerful memoir.

Thank you to Kirkus for the Summery.

A powerful author, a powerful book I immensely enjoyed.

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

LE PARFUM DES FLEURS LA NUIT by Leïla Slimani














5.5

Available now ( French language )

Summery

Comme un écrivain qui pense que « toute audace véritable vient de l’intérieur », Leïla Slimani n’aime pas sortir de chez elle, et préfère la solitude à la distraction. Pourquoi alors accepter cette proposition d’une nuit blanche à la pointe de la Douane, à Venise, dans les collections d’art de la Fondation Pinault, qui ne lui parlent guère ?


Autour de cette « impossibilité » d’un livre, avec un art subtil de digresser dans la nuit vénitienne, Leila Slimani nous parle d’elle, de l’enfermement, du mouvement, du voyage, de l’intimité, de l’identité, de l’entre-deux, entre Orient et Occident, où elle navigue et chaloupe, comme Venise à la pointe de la Douane, comme la cité sur pilotis vouée à la destruction et à la beauté, s’enrichissant et empruntant, silencieuse et raconteuse à la fois.

C’est une confession discrète, où l’auteure parle de son père jadis emprisonné, mais c’est une confession pudique, qui n’appuie jamais, légère, grave, toujours à sa juste place : « Écrire, c’est jouer avec le silence, c’est dire, de manière détournée, des secrets indicibles dans la vie réelle ». 
 
C’est aussi un livre, intense, éclairé de l’intérieur, sur la disparition du beau, et donc sur l’urgence d’en jouir, la splendeur de l’éphémère. Leila Slimani cite Duras : « Écrire, c’est ça aussi, sans doute, c’est effacer. Remplacer. » Au petit matin, l’auteure, réveillée et consciente, sort de l’édifice comme d’un rêve, et il ne reste plus rien de cette nuit que le parfum des fleurs. Et un livre.


Sunday, June 13, 2021

A GHOST IN THE THROAT by Doireann Ni Ghriofa














5.5

A Ghost in the Throat
By Doireann Ni Ghriofa
326 pages. 

Creative nonfiction.

Available now

Summary:

A woman once fell in love with a poem — a keening, a roaring — for a slain beloved. The 18th-century Irish noblewoman Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill composed “Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire” after her husband was murdered by a powerful British official. Arriving at the scene, Ni Chonaill, pregnant with their third child, drank handfuls of her husband’s blood. “My bright dove,” “my pleasure,” she called him in the poem, “my thousand bewilderments” — why hadn’t she been with him? She imagined her blouse catching the bullet in its pleats.

For decades, “Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire” survived in the oral tradition. It is now recognized as one of the great poems of its age. The poet Doireann Ni Ghriofa was also pregnant with her third child when she fell under its thrall, keeping a “scruffy photocopy” under her pillow. Where are Ni Chonaill’s finger bones buried? she wondered; where can one leave flowers? The grave lies unmarked. Ni Chonaill’s letters and diaries have all vanished. Her own son omitted her name from family records.

The ardent, shape-shifting “A Ghost in the Throat” is Ni Ghriofa’s offering. It includes her translation of “Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire,” along with a hybrid of essay, biography, autofiction, scholarship — and a daily accounting of life with four children under the age of 6.

“This is a female text,” Ni Ghriofa begins the book. “This is a female text, composed while folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores. This is a female text borne of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of cartoon nursery rhymes.”

The book is all undergrowth, exuberant, tangled passage. It recalls Nathalie Léger’s brilliant and original “Suite for Barbara Loden”: a biography of the actress and director that becomes a tally of the obstacles in writing such a book, and an admission of the near-impossibility of biography itself. “To study a female life marked by silence is to attempt a cartography of fog,” Ni Ghriofa has written.

ImagNi Ghriofa is the author of several books of poetry, which she has translated herself, from the Irish. “A Ghost in the Throat” is her first book in prose. It has been read rapturously, but not always carefully. I’ve seen reviews that are grateful for how the writer evokes the tedium of domestic life and the “depredations” of pregnancy on the body.Except that’s not what Ni Ghriofa describes, not at all; not she who is a bit abashed at how much she “loves her drudge-work,” she who stares at her body in the mirror — “my breasts, lopsided and glorious; the holy door of my quadruple cesarean scar, my sag-stomach, stretch-marked with ripples like a strand at low tide” — and feels “no revulsion, only pride. This is a female text, I think. My body replies in its dialect of scars. Ta-dah! it seems to say, Ta-dah!”

The story that uncoils is stranger, more difficult to tell, than those valiant accounts of rescuing a “forgotten” woman writer from history’s erasures or of the challenges faced by the woman artist. Ni Ghriofa, who spent 10 years pregnant or breastfeeding, who almost lost her fourth child (there is a harrowing chapter set in the NICU), is immediately ready for another. Without a baby to occupy her, she wakes up shaking — “What will become of me, in the absence of this labor, all this growing and harvesting?” She cannot quit that “exquisite” pleasure of service, the purpose and physical pleasure in caring, feeding, holding a small baby. Her husband pleads with her, asks if he can get a vasectomy (she thanks him for going through with it in the acknowledgments — a first in my reading experience).

What is this ecstasy of self-abnegation, what are its costs? She documents this tendency without shame or fear but with curiosity, even amusement. She will retrain her hungers. “I could donate my days to finding hers,” she tells herself, embarking on Ni Chonaill’s story. “I could do that, and I will.” Or so she says. The real woman Ni Ghriofa summons forth is herself.


I absolutely love this novel, deserving to be named "Literature".

I also want to thank my friend Claire 

at Word by Word for bringing this book to 

my attention.



Tuesday, June 8, 2021

ON EARTH WE'RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS by Ocean Vuong














5.5

Now available

About

 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.


With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

I loved this book and look forward to reading what Ocean Vuong writes next.


Monday, May 31, 2021

LES ENFANTS SONT ROIS de Delphine DE Vigan


 














5.5

GALLIMARD

Available March 4, 2021


"La première fois que Mélanie Claux et Clara Roussel se rencontrèrent, Mélanie s'étonna de l'autorité qui émanait d'une femme aussi petite et Clara remarqua les ongles de Mélanie, leur vernis rose à paillettes qui luisait dans l'obscurité. “ On dirait une enfant ”, pensa la première, “elle ressemble à une poupée”, songea la seconde.Même dans les drames les plus terribles, les apparences ont leur mot à dire."À travers l'hi "La première fois que Mélanie Claux et Clara Roussel se rencontrèrent, Mélanie s'étonna de l'autorité qui émanait d'une femme aussi petite et Clara remarqua les ongles de Mélanie, leur vernis rose à paillettes qui luisait dans l'obscurité. “ On dirait une enfant ”, pensa la première, “elle ressemble à une poupée”, songea la seconde.Même dans stoire de deux femmes aux destins contraires, Les enfants sont rois explore les dérives d'une époque où l'on ne vit que pour être vu. Des années Loft aux années 2030, marquées par le sacre des réseaux sociaux, Delphine de Vigan offre une plongée glaçante dans un monde où tout s'expose et se vend, jusqu'au bonheur familial.

A must read...excellent.

P.S. Hopefully the English translation will follow soon.


Wednesday, April 28, 2021

THE MAGICIAN by Colm Tóbín













Scribner

Available September 7, 2021

Historical Novel

About;

 In a stunning marriage of research and imagination, Tóibín explores the heart and mind of a writer whose gift is unparalleled and whose life is driven by a need to belong and the anguish of illicit desire. The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex wife Katia, and the times in which they lived—the first world war, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile. This is a man and a family fiercely engaged by the world, profoundly flawed, and unforgettable. As People magazine said about The Master, “It’s a delicate, mysterious process, this act of creation, fraught with psychological tension, and Tóibín captures it beautifully.”

My view;

So far beautifully written....

Thursday, January 28, 2021

HAMNET by Maggie O'Farrell


 












5.5

Knopf

Available now

About

In 1580’s England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this “exceptional historical novel” (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

REMOTE SYMPATHY byCatherine Chidgey

 













5.5

Europa Edition

Available April 4th 2021

Presently reading

About

Moving away from their lovely apartment in Munich isn’t nearly as wrenching an experience for Frau Greta Hahn as she had feared. Their new home is even lovelier than the one they left behind, and best of all—right on their doorstep—are some of the finest craftsmen from all over Europe. Frau Hahn and the other officers’ wives living in this small community can order anything they desire, whether new curtains made from the finest French silks, or furniture designed to the most exacting specifications. Life here in Buchenwald would appear to be idyllic.

Lying just beyond the forest that surrounds them—so close and yet so remote—is the looming presence of a work camp. Frau Hahn’s husband, SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, is to take up a powerful new position as the camp’s administrator.  As the prison population begins to rise, the job becomes ever more consuming. Corruption is rife at every level, the supplies are inadequate, and the sewerage system is under increasing strain.

When Frau Hahn is forced into an unlikely and poignant alliance with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr. Lenard Weber, her naïve ignorance about what is going on so nearby is challenged. A decade earlier, Dr. Weber had invented a machine: the Sympathetic Vitaliser. At the time he believed that its subtle resonances might cure cancer. But does it really work? One way or another, it might yet save a life.

A tour de force about the evils of obliviousness, Remote Sympathy compels us to question our continuing and willful ability to look the other way in a world that is once more in thrall to the idea that everything—even facts, truth and morals—is relative. A novel of devastating beauty that will leave readers shaken and exhilarated.

MY GRANDMOTHERS BRAID by Alina Bronsky


4.5



Europa publishing

ARC
Now available

About

Sharp and tender at once, a humourous take on family dysfunction and human weakness seen through a young boy’s eyes.

Max lives with his grandparents in a residential home for refugees in Germany. When his grandmother—a terrifying, stubborn matriarch and a former Russian primadonna—moved them from the Motherland it was in search of a better life. But she is not at all pleased with how things are run in Germany.
His grandmother has been telling Max that he is an incompetent, clueless weakling since he was a child. While he may be dolt in his grandmother's eyes, Max is bright enough to notice that his stoic and taciturn grandfather has fallen hopelessly in love with their neighbour, Nina. When a child is born to Nina that is the spitting image of Max’s grandfather, things come to a hilarious if dramatic head. Everybody will have to learn to defend themselves from Max’s all-powerful grandmother.

My take

Just finished my third novel by  Alina Bronsky, a five star read for me.
Her novels might be an acquired taste, perhaps not for everyone. Women are strong protagonists who do not shy away from expressing themselves, often without censor but always hiding a generous heart.
We meet grandmother, a refugee from Russia accompanied by her husband "Tschingis" referred as grandfather and, "Maxi" their grandson.
Soon life takes many turns more or less successfully until we meet "Nina" and, "Vera", her daughter.
Such begins life for our Russian emigrants