NewPages Blog :: Books

The novel Sarmada, by Fadi Azzam, is the story of the Druze village of Sarmada in the rugged southern mountains of Syria. The narrator, a journalist, has escaped his upbringing in this backwater for the cosmopolitanism of Paris and Dubai. In Paris he meets a woman who believes that in another life, she was a beautiful young woman of Sarmada, Hela Mansour, who in 1968 was punished for running off with a lover. The narrator goes to Sarmada to investigate this fantastic tale of transmigration. Interviewing village survivors, he learns of Hela’s five brothers and how their monomaniacal obsession to restore family honor forced the lovers to live as fugitives and pariahs. He learns how, out of exhaustion, Hela left her lover and returned to Sarmada to face the bloodlust of her family and how no one in the village intervened to stop the brutal death foretold. The narrator in his return becomes a seeker looking for “. . . clues to help me try to understand how I fit in with these people who made me who I am . . . who nursed me . . . with the waters of rage, fear, joy and gloom.” Foreshadowing the present convulsive awakening in Syria, with all the divisions and sectarianism, he portrays a place of myth and magic ultimately under siege by the forces of transformation. Continue reading “Sarmada”

Cinco Puntos Press has a great reputation, and this little book of poetry adds to its wealth of good literature in a big way. Elinor Nauen weaves a string of poems that read like a novel as we plunge into her relationship with her husband Johnny. The book, set up as a series of poems, is read like a dictionary (think The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan) with the titles of poems succeeding in alphabetical order. This book takes the dictionary idea a step further than Levithan; Nauen also includes words and phrases specific to her relationship with her husband that would not be found in a standard dictionary. It makes this book of poetry an adventure unique to their relationship. Continue reading “My Marriage A to Z”

The pendulum image, from the prologue to Catherine Taylor’s Apart, could swing neatly between “prose and verse” or between “faith and doubt, black and white, change and stasis, self and other, amnesty and retribution . . . poverty and wealth . . . alien and citizen” in a book that investigates the realities of post-apartheid South Africa. Instead, in a hybrid work that fuses the lyric, the documentary, and the memoir genres with Taylor’s scholarly inquisition, Taylor tells us that the pendulum system “doesn’t just swing back and forth . . . inscribing simple opposites” but that “it leaves a trail of ever-shifting ellipses.” Like the periodic sentence, the people of her country “move forward, want resolution, seek conclusions, note parallels, but they, of course, reach no final revelations, no concluding periods—no time with an end, no discrete clause of history, no full stop.” Continue reading “Apart”

In Paradise Misplaced: Mexican Eden Trilogy, Book I, Sylvia Montgomery Shaw invites readers to a world of Mexican upper class etiquette, power, intrigue, romance, passion, murder, and yearning for forgiveness. In the book’s opening pages, the reclusive patriarch of the Nyman family, General Lucio Nyman Berquist, is found murdered. From then on, readers will find it impossible to set the book aside, through the trial of the general’s youngest priest-son, Samuel, to the entrance of the dashing Captain Benjamin Nyman Vizcarra—Samuel’s twin—and his incarceration in the premeditated murder of their father. The pace at which the events accelerate and the way the attractive characters present themselves—the three sons of the deceased, the estranged widow, the only daughter, all impressive in their nobility and grandeur—grab readers’ attention and curiosity. When Benjamin attacks his beautiful American wife, Isabel, in his cell for cheating on him and his family, readers will be eager to learn about the relationship of the “Gringo” with the Nyman family, the wealthiest in Mexico, in the first decade of the twentieth century. Continue reading “Paradise Misplaced”

One doesn’t have to know Paolo Uccello and his paintings to appreciate the quiet, lingering poems of Molly Brodak’s chapbook The Flood, a series of poems transfixed upon Uccello’s little-known life and works. Breathing life into Uccello through a distinct voice as well as elucidating his paintings through ekphrastic and descriptive poems, The Flood provides a concentrated illumination of how the written word can interact with and respond to visual representation. Continue reading “The Flood”

With a title such as The Funny Man, I was expecting John Warner’s novel to be about the dark side of comedy. I sensed some sort of irony. Having known a few local comics while living in NYC, I was surprised by the flip side of their comedic faces. Many of them were depressed, bi-polar, damaged by childhood abuse or simply born unstable. All, it seemed, were self-medicating with humor. Continue reading “The Funny Man”

“I was the first child ever allowed to visit a patient at the private mental hospital where my mother was being treated. Before our first trip there, Dad said, ‘The doctors think your mother will get better if she can keep seeing you.’” The opening lines of Chana Wilson’s book illuminate the intimate, complex and soul-sucking relationship that she and her mother have throughout their lives, meanwhile plunging the reader into a sparse, transparent glimpse into the lives of women treated in 1950s psych wards. Wilson grows up with her parents as an only child, but at the age of seven, her mother is put into a mental hospital for her severe depression. She attempts to commit suicide numerous times, and the memoir jarringly opens up with the scene of Gloria holding a rifle to her head in the bathroom. Continue reading “Riding Fury Home”

First published in Beirut in the mid-90s, Thani Al-Suwaidi’s The Diesel was labeled a “shock-novel” by early critics; this novella’s protagonist shifts gender identity and moves in a world of desire that spans not only the range of hetero- and homosexual yearnings, but stretches to encompass the sea and the sun. The book has since gained acceptance, and, according to translator William M. Hutchins, Al-Suwaidi has become an important Emirati author. As the United States continues to awaken from cultural isolationism and its political activists are inspired by uprisings in the Gulf region, this important translation is more relevant to English-speaking audiences now than when the book was first written. Continue reading “The Diesel”

Christopher DeWeese’s The Black Forest is a book that falls into a family of highly imaginative, surreal, dream-like poetry collections that seem to be especially trendy lately. I’m certainly not complaining. Many of my favorite books of poetry fall into this family, like James Tate’s Return to the city of white donkeys and Zachary Schomburg’s The Man Suit. Continue reading “The Black Forest”

Never judge a book by its title. The Russian Writer’s Daughter sounds like one of the far-too-many tragic family histories of life and creativity during the Soviet Union. And while Lydia Rosner is the daughter of Russian writer Abraham Sokolovsky (changed to Sokol upon immigrating to America in 1917), her accessible, thoughtful memoir is an American one, specifically a New York City one. She focuses on her own life and that of other Russians in the United States, at one point taking aim at another famous Russian writer’s daughter, Alexandra Tolstoy. Rosner and her father deride the charity Tolstoy founded and the White Russians (anti-Communist Russian immigrants) who take advantage of it as “fake.” Continue reading “The Russian Writer’s Daughter”

Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra’s first novel, Bonsai, for all its short length (83 pages), is easy to read, dense with events if not with explanations, and intriguing. The chapters are short, the prose clear but remote from the “characters,” who the author claims are not characters but only given names for convenience’s sake. He also tells us which characters are not important even though he gives information about them. Of necessity, the reader slides over these bewildering directives to get two main themes—lying and love. Overriding all is a love story between Emilia and Julio, who meet at age fifteen in a Spanish class. Continue reading “Bonsai”

A Map of the Lost World is literary blending of history and poetry through lyricism, realism, and, it would seem, an almost empathetic touch of irony that leaves the reader caught between literary landscape planes. The book is comprised of five parts (each of the parts and each of the poems, by the way, with utterly fantastic titles) that do not necessarily work to frame a specific narrative whole, yet they nevertheless contribute to A Map of the Lost World in specific ways. What author Rick Hilles does, then, is weave together the particular commonalities between these parts: unexpected geographies, small moments, specific people, connected anecdotes, stories, transliterated language. The real literary strength of Hilles’s writing comes from his broad familiarity with historical themes and his ability to connect individuals—and his readers—to those themes. Continue reading “A Map of the Lost World”

With increasing frequency, well-meaning friends have been sending me articles that encourage me to stop worrying about the next generation and just have fun. It’s not that they think everything will turn out OK, but rather, that we’re so far gone, there’s nothing to be done. It seems that groups of climate scientists are predicting our demise with a specificity and immediacy that would make an old-timey cult leader blush. The Water Wars are coming: look busy. Continue reading “The Time of Quarantine”

Paisley Rekdal’s artistic book Intimate may be, at first glance, part of an indefinable genre. Flipping through its pages, one finds snippets of poetry, family stories, photos, and biographies. As the subtitle indicates, this is a textual and visual photo album of American family history. In her book, Rekdal challenges the definition of “American” family by examining race, lineage, and gender through the fictional biographies of Edward Curtis (a photographer of American Indians) and his translator, Alexander Upshaw, as well as scenes from Rekdal’s own life and the lives of her white father and Chinese mother. These biographies are interspersed with Curtis’s photographs and Rekdal’s poetry. She urges us to take accountability—not only for our dysfunctional family histories, but for the bloodied and prejudiced histories that belong to the American identity. Rekdal’s language is both delicate, and sharp—like a thin slice of glass cutting through our histories, our masquerades, our deceits. Continue reading “Intimate”

Jack Driscoll’s short story collection The World of a Few Minutes Ago reflects Michigan’s weather, concentrates on mostly blue-collar workers and trailer inhabitants, and offers a mostly masculine voice but also a beautiful lyrical style, describing the beauty of stars as well as perfectly capturing the lives of his characters and their personality clashes. His story structure is meticulous and convoluted as we twist from the characters’ sad hard lives toward a resolution of acceptance and sometimes release. Continue reading “The World of a Few Minutes Ago”

This book is ostensibly an essay collection, but poet and creative writing teacher John Morgan has also filled the pages with poems, biographical information, journal entries, book reviews, interviews, and reading and writing instruction. These various elements within the same volume combine to create an intimate portrait of the poet and his spirituality, teaching methods, family life, writing practice, and interactions with nature and place. Continue reading “Forms of Feeling”

In the morning as I walk to work down the streets of San Francisco and the endless movement of fog and wind brings the crisp salt air in from off the bay water, setting it to swirling about the buildings and sidewalk, I’m oftentimes reminded of how much this really is a beach town. Etel Adnan’s Sea and Fog is an extended series of lyric meditations contemplating human desire, loss, war, art, and much more through the lens of writing towards this landscape, though Adnan’s own daily observations take place from her home in Sausalito across the bay. In these definitely ordered, yet infinitely variable, short prose-blocks, consciousness is fully immersed in the act of writing as motifs and concerns overlap and reoccur. There’s guiding awareness that “here,” wherever we may find ourselves, remains a definitive spot in observable time: “There’s a moment to the moment. We’re in the world.” Continue reading “Sea and Fog”

Egyptian prize-winning novelist Ibrahim Abdel Meguid’s The House of Jasmine, though set in the ‘70s during Anwar Sadat’s presidency, has a lot of resonance for Egypt’s current Arab Spring. Shagara, a low level employee of Alexandria’s shipyard, reflects in his own petty thievery the corruption not only of his shipyard administration, but that of the Sadat regime. As the translator Noha Radwan explains, this novella is “a story of deception and fraudulence, planned by a scheming administration and carried out by a disenchanted and dejected population.” Shagara redeems himself in the reader’s eye because of his love of beauty, his simple desires, and his own self-criticism. Continue reading “The House of Jasmine”

In Journey to the Sun, the author tells of his travels at age thirteen to the “Source of All Life.” The book is difficult to categorize; no ready vessel of satire, political tract, manifesto, spoof, spoken word will corral it, but there is shouting, exuberance, spontaneity of energetic discovery in short narrative phrases: OK!, alight! alight!, Gold & Heat & Progress for all! 4x4x4!, you are not the FIRST!, you are not even the TRILLIONTH!, this is AMERICA!, Double Slash Zero! The human VOICE is heard in this writing. The book begins with an Invocation: Continue reading “Journey to the Sun”

Nostalgia, a common pitfall for many fiction writers, works purposefully in Geoffrey Clark’s Two, Two, Lily-White Boys, a risky, old-fashioned themed novel that takes aim at the usual sentimental tropes: adolescence, sex, innocence, apathy. Continue reading “Two, Two, Lily-White Boys”

“You’re reading the poems of a man,” Joel Lewis offers in Surrender When Leaving Coach, “who feels all the time / . . . like he’s rooting about / in the ruins of a cheap Pompeii.” Pompeii, for Lewis, is the familiar bus line along Staten Island’s Port Richmond Avenue that he will return to throughout the book, among the other well-worn routes he will cull for the daily strange, the repetitive, the hilarious, and the ephemeral. “Once again my obsession with / the motion of buses, trains and canal boats,” Lewis notes in the title poem of the collection, named for the instructions printed on the old bus tickets of his New Jersey youth. These poems look to the past even as the trains in them lumber to their stations on schedule. “In an absolute theater of time,” Lewis says, “everything happens at once.” Continue reading “Surrender When Leaving Coach”

If Surrealists told stories around the campfire, they might do well to bring a copy of Eric Gamalinda’s new book of short fiction, People Are Strange. Here is a collection that contains a swath of wide-ranging episodes that take the reader through a gamut of emotions, not the least of which is surprise. Continue reading “People Are Strange”

The Planets, by Argentinian-born writer Sergio Chejfec, is a go-with-the-flow novel that blends the characters walking the streets of Buenos Aires with a contemplation of several subjects like dreams, friendship, memory, and the mysteries in life. What little plot there is involves a friendship between M and the narrator. M is an innocent during the turbulent time of Argentinian political abductions and executions. Living next to the train tracks, M is abducted, disappears, and then is presumably killed by an explosion, which the narrator hears. Continue reading “The Planets”

Doll Studies: Forensics, a collection of tightly woven prose poems, investigates a series of crime scene dioramas portrayed with dolls and doll sets. A strong, questioning voice describes and comments on each diorama from various perspectives, piecing together a narrative built from individual scenes. Through engaging, fine-tuned poems, Carol Guess leads the reader through the dramas and mysteries left behind and reenacted with these dolls, creating a strange yet fascinating glimpse into two artistic mediums playing off one another and commenting on human fault and tragedy. Continue reading “Doll Studies”

Lyric Novella, by Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, was published in 1933. The novella is slim. This edition, translated by Lucy Renner Jones, adds more weight with a translator’s introduction and an afterword that examines Schwarzenbach’s life and literary influences. I wanted, first, to let this lyric of youth and obsessive love stand on its own, to be convinced by the writing rather than be influenced by all the interpretation. Continue reading “Lyric Novella”

As far as serious, professional literary translation goes, Mary Jo Bang’s Inferno tests the boundaries of acceptability. Just how far afield from the original text the translator may venture yet still be found to be arguably holding true to the original is relentlessly challenged. Bang contends that since “Dante paid homage to poets and figures who meant something to him and to his readers; he appropriated stories once told by Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and sometimes adapted them to suit his purposes,” her translation likewise will “include, through allusion, some of the poets and storytellers who have lived and left a mark in the time since Dante wrote.” Continue reading “Inferno”

The lush and tactile imagery of Chinoiserie overwhelms the senses to invigorate a poetic world full of objects, people, and places. Spanning cities and centuries, Karen Rigby’s debut collection and winner of the Ahsahta Press 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize enraptures the reader through vivid and carefully rendered description, from flowers to fabrics to street scenes. A noteworthy collection of free verse engaged in shape and line, Chinoiserie enthralls throughout each poem, always connected to the senses. Continue reading “Chinoiserie”

Kelly Ferguson’s book chronicles the two weeks she spent retracing the pioneer journey of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The book opens in an antique clothing and costume shop in Missoula, Montana, where Ferguson buys her outfit for the trip: a floor-length bright blue flowered dress, the closest available facsimile of a prairie dress Laura would have worn. To explain her decision to make this journey, Ferguson reveals that she’s been obsessed with Laura since her mother gave her the yellow-covered Harper Trophy Edition box set of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books for her sixth birthday. Ferguson not only reads the books, she immerses herself in them; she carries the characters around in her head like imaginary friends. Continue reading “My Life as Laura”

Hornets, locusts, bees, trees, the heart: recurring images bring us into the river, the river we ride inside us in Paula Bohince’s The Children. Bohince spares children no respite due to young age in “Pussy Willow”: Continue reading “The Children”

Piotr Gwiazda’s Messages includes twenty-two poems (some of which are cycles of three to seven parts) and an interview with the author. The collection opens with a quotation from Joe Milutis’s Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, which describes “materialist interpretations” as “poor readings of rationality.” Gwiazda’s very first poem elaborates this theme further, by expanding poetry’s cognitive domain to “anything, anything”; whereas the poet’s task is “to translate the anything”—in other words, to show things’ true significance, as this excerpt demonstrates: “You think this is freedom, / but it’s a Chinese toy.” Continue reading “Messages”

Aaron McCollough’s fourth book, No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, is the most ambitious project we’ve seen released by the young author. In this book-length series, each section is titled after the songs on John Fahey’s album America—in fact, if you’ve followed McCollough’s work in recent years you would have seen some of these pieces, or versions of, published in journals as “selections from John Fahey’s America.” The book’s title recalls Johnny Cash, which along with Fahey and mentions of “Little Sadie,” “Tom Dooley,” Charley Patton, and the blues, places this collection squarely in conversation with the American songwriting tradition. Continue reading “No Grave Can Hold My Body Down”

Andreï Makine, whose Dreams of My Russian Summers won France’s highest literary award, employs his beautifully lyrical style again in The Life of an Unknown Man. Maxine, who was born in Siberia and has lived more than twenty years in France, has set this novel in both Paris and Russia during the siege of Leningrad and Stalin’s purges. In spite of some of the grim details of starvation particularly, the beauty of the prose makes these images dreamlike, almost ephemeral. The sense of humanity at the core abides in two old Russians, one living in Paris and one whom the protagonist meets in Russia, both having lived beyond their generation and thus becoming “unknown.” The span of this novel takes us from literary concerns to love during wartime to the music that kept the Russians going in spite of deprivation. At the end, the reader feels keenly the loss of an unknown but incredible life of survival and the sacrifice of love. Continue reading “The Life of an Unknown Man”

In this collection of sixteen essays, Sergio Troncoso writes about family, fatherhood, education, illness, love, politics, religion, social issues, societal responsibility, and writing. He observes that his clear, direct writing about difficult questions “has sometimes condemned [him] in academic circles” and that his writing is also “overlooked by those who never desire to think beyond the obvious and the popular.” Troncoso chronicles his transformation from “a besieged outsider needing a voice” to “an outsider by choice deploying [his] voice,” creating an intellectual borderland from where he tried to push his mind with the philosophical ideas that form the framework of his writing. Continue reading “Crossing Borders”

In my own reading experience, nothing beats the first-person account of the interview, offering as it does an essential glimpse into what’s happening in the mind of the subject. As the instigator of responses in this collection, David Baker takes a rather light hand and offers little fleshiness, certainly no blood, yet presents an easygoing introduction to both the poet-as-person as well as the work. Continue reading “Talk Poetry”

I Take Back the Sponge Cake almost looks like a children’s book at first glance. But in reality, this book is a whimsical, lyrical adventure that takes you down a different path with every read. Choose-your-own-adventure books are a rare but surprising delight to come across, and this book is no exception. I especially like how abstract the poetry is; it matches the artwork perfectly. Rather than choosing a direction or making an ethical choice at the turn of each page, the reader is given the privilege of choosing a word to fill in the poems themselves. The words are homonyms (for example, weight and wait, or ring and wring), so although they are pronounced the same, the different meanings lend different import to each choice. The readers’ personal styles and lives have an effect on which word they choose, giving them a unique experience. Continue reading “I Take Back the Sponge Cake”

Age and the academy dominate John Rember’s latest collection, Sudden Death, Over Time. Master of the cynical first person male, Rember repeatedly places readers in the context of professors well past their prime, who know that their best choice left is to smirk at the absurdity surrounding their departments, their students, and their love lives and to plod along. Continue reading “Sudden Death, Over Time”

Nod House is an epic poem, a surreal migration, an eloquent, fractured elegy. Its world and lyrics are volatile, traversing multiple landscapes, realities and bodies. Characters who start off as heads bobbing in a pond later turn bird: Continue reading “Nod House”

For an allegedly silent art, ballet has inspired many good words. Essays by poet Edwin Denby and critic Arlene Croce are worthy writing workshop handouts. Choreographer Agnes de Mille’s books are histories of dance and America. Jacques d’Amboise’s memoir I Was A Dancer is not only candid; the charming, legendary dancer wrote it as if he was telling his story over coffee. Continue reading “The Cranes Dance”

A collection is an interesting thing. Traditionally, we can expect to find a collection in some sort of museum setting—a set of archaeological artifacts or art objects that allows the audience to understand another culture. A collection of writing, however, is particularly interesting as it allows a reader to examine an author’s intellectual and aesthetic commitments. In a collection of writing, the reader has more than simply the Objekt to examine or look at; the surrounding context for the author’s intended themes is available to the reader as well. These themes, in turn, become the real collection on display to the reader. In Wonderful Investigations: Essays, Meditations, Tales, author Dan Beachy-Quick amasses quite a cabinet of written curiosities that serve as the basis for his Investigations—a collection that does not seem to argue for a specifically particular point or theme, but, rather, a collection that allows the reader to examine Beachy-Quick’s intellectual and aesthetic commitments to his own treasured authors. Continue reading “Wonderful Investigations”

Poet and critic Richard Outram was for me one of those writers who occasionally popped up on the periphery of my poetry explorations. I saw him referenced and quoted until I began to wonder who he was. Outram was like one of those neighbors you never introduced yourself to. You passed him or her once or twice a week and waved without an inkling of who they were or what they did. Continue reading “Richard Outram”

After reading the title, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this book. It gave me the strange feeling I’d be reading letters, or advice, from the future. Ironically, Salier focuses tremendously on the current so-called Mayan threat of the end of the world. Since we have already lived through a few apocalyptic threats within the last decade or so, it’s refreshing to contemplate the future through the lens of someone who admits that “every friday at 2pm i feel strongly / that i should’ve been an astronaut.” Continue reading “Letters from Robots”

John Kinsella’s In the Shade of the Shady Tree: Stories of Wheatbelt Australia should entice the reader who enjoys unusual fiction in a strange place of extremes, off the tourist map. Kinsella describes his very short short stories as “stories told for the moment, out of experience more than ‘art,’”—similar to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Kinsella’s interests are how the people Continue reading “In the Shade of the Shady Tree”

Letters to Kelly Clarkson is full of short letters written from the narrator to American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, beginning with “Dear Kelly.” Although there were certainly thoughts and points that stuck out as interesting to me, the majority of the letters were ungrounded and rambling. A letter at the beginning of the book opens with: “You know, sitting here, eating my microwaved tomatoes on somewhat tough toast, I think I could give myself another chance.” And I started silently cheering, we all deserve a second chance! Good for you! But then the next lines were: “Seriously, can you tell me why I keep dreaming of a chipped white truck? Could it be the swerve of it, the handle? A rush of blood to the hand.” I was so intrigued by the second chance that I wanted to know all the details of how she messed up and with whom and how she was planning to fix it. Yet there was no resolution for me and I felt like the writer had left me high and dry, though perhaps this was her intention. Continue reading “Letters to Kelly Clarkson”

It’s not just the references to Mad Max in Quincy Troupe’s Errançities which suggest a sense of perpetual collapse. It’s also the rampant amnesia. It’s the ignorance of cultural amnesia, the acknowledgement of this amnesia but having too many of one’s “own vexing / problems, way too many”; it’s the amnesia of important thoughts you fail to record. It’s a desire to be somewhere else, somewhere otherworldly, somewhere “beyond our knowing” where “silence reigns.” It’s a desire to dissociate from the “I” for a while, and to become the “eye” instead. It’s the admission that even you are quick to discard society’s discards. It’s the never-ending cycle of forgetting and reminding. It’s smoothing over the past with a kind of politeness that doesn’t change anything in “these yet to be united states.” Continue reading “Errançities”

Not many memoirs approach the act of resisting a totalitarian regime through a child’s eyes. But then, reading Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter is an unusual experience. Continue reading “Burying the Typewriter”

A poignant ride through different phases of the protagonist’s life, Domestic Apparition is funny, sarcastic, dark, reflective, and touching. The first few stories are set in Michelle’s domestic life—her resistance to being drafted to school when she is six years old, her awe for her brilliant but eccentric brother’s courage in challenging a strict Catholic teacher in school, her admiration for her older sister’s guts, her parents’ relationship, and her mother’s unfulfilled dreams. Gradually, we move toward her life when she starts living by herself in college with roommates, her tedious job at a Holiday Inn which she is pushed into by her demanding boyfriend, and finally her job in the heart of corporate America. Continue reading “Domestic Apparition”

“Memory holds us until we are ready to see,” Deni Y. Béchard writes in his memoir, Cures for Hunger. The passage of time has given him a panorama from which to piece together the missing links of his life. Béchard’s book is his tale of the sometimes hardscrabble childhood he endured in British Columbia with a mother from Pittsburgh and a father of very vague origins. The existence was sometimes hand-to-mouth, with a father who sold fish during the summer and Christmas trees during the winter, ways of life that seemed to have as many ups and downs as the stock market. Continue reading “Cures for Hunger”

Travel literature and memoir is a jumble of familiar tropes and themes, and All the Roads Are Open: the Afghan Journey certainly contains all of those recognizable elements and more. All the Roads Are Open is Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s collection of essays, stories, notes, and thoughts about her overland travels from Geneva to Afghanistan through Afghanistan’s Northern Road with herself, fellow writer Ella Maillart, and their third companion—a Ford with a mind and temperament of its own. Continue reading “All the Roads Are Open”

Jane Gardam’s magnificent novel Crusoe’s Daughter, first published in 1985 in England and only now published in the U.S., was Gardam’s favorite of her novels: “Take it or leave it, Crusoe’s Daughter says everything I have to say.” Those familiar with the books of this largely unknown, very British novelist will recognize aspects of Gardam’s writing later echoed in Old Filth, The Man With the Wooden Hat and the more recently published God on the Rocks: the wonderfully odd characters sometimes reminiscent of Dickens; the humor; an era’s precise, tiny details of place and people; and indirectly given information, often about past forbidden romances. Continue reading “Crusoe’s Daughter”

Hollywood is an industry town that manufactures dreams. Those dreams can be nightmarish, as in Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust (whose woefully underappreciated 1975 film adaptation is as disturbing and ugly as its source), or bittersweet, like Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist. Continue reading “Hollywood Boulevard”