This week I’m rounding up some brief thoughts on three books I read in January:
Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver, translated by Julia Sanches
Migratory Birds is part of Transit Book’s “Undelivered Lectures” series, which publishes short nonfiction books that push the boundaries of form. I read and loved the second in the series, Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell. Migratory Birds is a series of very loosely linked essays that deal with space, borders, and movement.
The pieces range from the fate of whooping cranes to underground cities in Cappadocia to the Berlin Wall to Cuban children sent to the U.S. during the Cuban Revolution to many other places and times. There are 11 essays in about 120 pages, so they are short, and each one is fragmented, bringing together two or three strands of narrative or description. Each essay works through juxtaposition. One piece begins with the invasion of Normandy and then moves to Robert Capa’s photographs of French women punished for their (alleged) collaboration with German soldiers. Their punishment was having their hair shorn. Part II of the essay discusses the biblical origins of using hair-cutting to shame women, and then Part III moves to Oliver’s fear of bald witches in Roald Dahl and finally to her family’s history of hair loss. Oliver does not use transitions between these sections, letting them sit side by side and find connections only in the reader’s mind.
The whole book works through juxtaposition; its theme is very broad, allowing each piece to range widely. Oliver offers no introduction to unite the essays or discuss her intentions. On first thought, the hair essay didn’t seem to fit in thematically, although now I see it’s about invasions understood broadly — military invasions and invasions of bodily autonomy. It’s about border crossings, both personal and political.
The essays are elegantly written and bring together a lot of information in a small space while at the same time working with ideas, or, more often, suggesting ideas, about how humans negotiate self, home, and movement. If you’re looking to be told what it all means, you might find this frustrating — although the stories Oliver tells in each section are consistently interesting — but if you like a little mystery and room to find your own meaning, this book will speak to you.
I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins
This book has a truly great title. I’m sorry to say that I struggled with the novel itself. Part of the problem was my incorrect assumption that this is a novel primarily about motherhood, similar to other recent motherhood novels, many of which I have loved (Lynn Steger Strong’s Want is a recent favorite). The protagonist — whose name is Claire Vaye Watkins — is a mother and she struggles with that role, but the story ranges much more widely than that. That the protagonist shares a name and biographical details with the author told me that this was autofiction, which I generally like, but I don’t think this novel plays around with genre in the way the best autofiction does.
I was also thrown by an extended flashback to the protagonist’s parents’ lives, and by “extended” I mean it was pages and pages. Her parents’ story is interesting — her father was a member of the Manson Family (this is the case for the author as well) — but I didn’t understand where the story was going and why we needed all this detail. Watkins (the author) includes letters written by the protagonist’s mother as a teenager, and it wasn’t always clear why they were there. Looking back on it, I can see how the structure makes sense: the parents’ histories and the protagonist’s childhood explain so much about her present state, and, more significantly, the novel is exploring the legacy of the 60s and the history of the American west. A deep dive into her family history helps bring ideas to the fore. But I didn’t like this structure; I found it too loose and aimless.
Perhaps my problem with the novel’s structure is also a matter of incorrect expectations, since I generally love loose and aimless novels. Maybe I just needed to be better prepared. In the end, however, the most serious problem was that I didn’t like the narrator’s voice. It was funny in places, and there were moments I was into it, but mostly it was too rushed, too much on the surface, too busy running away from her failings and her emotions to suit my taste. I liked how messed up and difficult of a person she is, but I didn’t like the way she captured those qualities. I think I wanted more interiority, and this just wasn’t the novel for that.
Opinions on this book seem to vary widely, so who knows, you may love it. I just couldn’t make sense of the messy structure and didn’t feel compensated by a narratorial voice I wanted to spend time with.
Girlhood by Melissa Febos
So many things in this book moved me. It’s an essay collection on being female and coming to terms with how patriarchy shaped the way Febos thinks about herself and her experiences. All the essays are personal, but most of them use research and/or criticism and literature to add to or back up the personal material. Her trajectory from a preteen and teen dissociated from her body and just trying to survive, to a woman who understands what she wants and needs and knows how to care for herself is powerful. I loved the essay about attending a cuddle party (!), “Thank You For Taking Care Of Yourself,” for the way she uses her feelings after her first cuddle party as a springboard to understand her past. She realizes she needs to attend another one to process everything she’s figured out about herself, and the results are fascinating.
I’ll admit Febos’s writing style isn’t my favorite. It’s a bit too polished, sometimes too self-consciously poetic, sometimes a little contrived in the way it moves back and forth between personal story and research or literature. It’s a carefully-crafted style that occasionally gets on my nerves. But I also found myself responding emotionally and even tearing up now and then — very unusual for me. Whatever reservations I have about it, the book still made me think and feel.
Publishing This Week
New (mostly) small-press books out recently that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below are from the publisher:
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead): I’m not sure when I’ll read this — I have an unread copy of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) that I might read first — but I’m very curious if I will enjoy this. I loved Tokarczuk’s book Flights (another Jennifer Croft translation).
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken (New Directions): A favorite of many people I know. “The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare.”
How We Are Translated by Jessica Gaitán Johannesson (Scribe US): A novel about relationships and language: “People say 'I'm sorry' all the time when it can mean both 'I'm sorry I hurt you' and 'I'm sorry someone else did something I have nothing to do with'. It's like the English language gave up on trying to find a word for sympathy which wasn't also the word for guilt.”
The Silentiary by Antonio Di Benedetto, translated by Esther Allen (NYRB): Antonio Di Benedett’s novel Zama has been on my mind to read for ages, so I’m noting this one for later: “In post-WWII South America, a struggling writer embarks on a murderous thought experiment to help kickstart his career.”
New on the TBR
New books acquired:
On Photography by Susan Sontag (Picador, 2001, originally published in 1977): I just finished Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, so I’m stocking up on other Sontag books. This is the one I’ll probably read next.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag (Picador 2001, originally published in 1966): her first essay collection.
The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag (St. Martin’s Press, 2004, originally published in 1992): Finally, some of Sontag’s fiction.
Currently Reading
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (Harper, 2021): My current audiobook. I’m loving it! I’m about 1/3 of the way through and especially loving the bookstore sections. Erdrich herself narrates the audiobook, and I’m loving her voice — she’s so funny. Her main character, Tookie, is wonderful, with a dry sense of humor. I listen to this while walking through the woods and hoping no one hears me laugh.
The Last One by Fatima Daas, translated by Lara Vergnaud (Other Press, 2021): This is a finalist for the Pen Translation Prize. It tells the story of a young French woman of Algerian descent, living outside of Paris, dealing with a complicated family and figuring out her sexuality.
A Different Distance: A Renga by Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr (Milkweed, 2021): My current poetry book. Renga is a Japanese poetic form where two people write back and forth to each other using the Tanka structure. Hacker and Naïr are writing about the early lockdown period of the pandemic, both of them living in Paris, unable to meet each other.
The Cormac Report
We had a good weekend.
That’s it for now — have a good week, everyone!
<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_You_but_I've_Chosen_Darkness>Full credit</a> for that great (borrowed) title.
So glad to know about the new Marilyn Hacker.