A collection of short stories, about people on either side of the Indian diaspora. The writing is deceptively straightforward, with occasional flashes of artistry, almost as if Lahiri couldn’t help throwing in a gorgeous moment of description, just to show she could. It works really well. Her characters don’t really talk about their feelings in any kind of depth, but their feelings suffuse the stories, emotions seething in the unsaid. Indian immigrants come to the US and deal with the differences as best they can, sometimes finding community and sometimes not; Indian-Americans visit India and the locals wonder at their strangeness. Really nice collection, superb switching of cultural viewpoints from story to story.
Category: quick reaction
In Order to Live, by Yeomi Park (with Maryanne Vollers)
Subtitled “A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom,” which about covers it. I have so many thoughts but quick summary: Park’s family had a pretty middle-class existence, thanks to her father smuggling items from China, until he was caught and sent to be reeducated, throwing her, her mother, and her older sister into poverty. Faced with malnutrition and starvation and ignorant of the world, first the sister, and then the narrator and her mother, worked with people who smuggled them into China, only to fall prey to human traffickers who “married” them to Chinese men. They eventually get the help of a religious mission and made it over the Mongolian border, and were eventually shipped to South Korea and freedom. I liked her description of the indoctrination that she got from childhood, and was particularly fascinated by how it stunted her vocabulary and emotions to the point that she didn’t know the word “love” could be applied to anyone besides the Dear Leader.
The author’s told her story several times in different ways and has been criticized for changing the details of her tale, so I’m dubious of some of the specifics. However, I don’t doubt her trauma or that she suffered; I understand why she might not want to get into some of the more painful parts, or why she might have edited her memories to cast herself in a more positive light. I’ve looked her up and she’s said some things I disagree with, but I’m glad she’s finally free to speak her mind, and has the vocabulary and education to be able to advocate for what she believes to be right.
The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
Maia, an unwanted half-goblin (dark-skinned) unwanted son of the elf (light-skinned) emperor suddenly finds himself thrown in the deep end when his father and older brothers perish suddenly. Scarred with the early loss of his mother and the abuse of the person who raised him afterwards, he carries on doing the best he can despite his ignorance of courtly elf politics and the disadvantage of his breeding. I found this sad reading at first because of just how hurt and lonely Maia was and how much he just needed someone to give him a hug, but between that and the slow-moving, patiently developing plot, it made the eventual emotional turning points that much more rewarding. Kind of unfortunate that I read this so soon after The Hands of the Emperor, which told a similar sort of story but with way more complexity and from a different point of view; I kept wishing it were more like, which diminished my enjoyment of The Goblin Emperor through no fault of its own.
You Can’t Be Serious, by Kal Penn
Kal Penn traces his journey from theater kid in New Jersey, to film/sociology major at UCLA (to his parents’ mild dismay), to Hollywood actor, and finally to Obama’s administration in DC. Lots of discussion of racism encountered in both childhood and adulthood; nothing that would be surprising to anyone who was paying attention, but still worth acknowledging. I liked how he shone a light on how his race disqualified him from most roles, except the ones where his race was specifically called for; and even after he landed a role, the racism would continue (“ok, but can you do that with a bit more of an Indian accent? I don’t care if you don’t think it adds anything to the character, we want the stereotypical accent” type of stuff). The political part of his career was less interesting reading than the acting part, but government work in general tends to be less exciting, so no surprise there.
My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell
I picked this book up because of a stray passage from The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, which quoted its description of snails mating “like two curious sailing ships roped together.” Upon learning that snails were hermaphroditic, the narrator’s brother said, “I think it’s unfair. All those damned slimy things wandering about seducing each other like mad all over the bushes, and having the pleasures of both sensations. Why couldn’t such a gift be given to the human race? That’s what I want to know.” When their teacher pointed out that in that case, humans would have to lay eggs, their mother chimed in with “The ideal way of bringing up a family. I wish I’d been able to bury you all in some damp earth and leave you.”
So obviously, I promptly put the book on hold,* and I am happy to say that the rest of it was equally delightful. When Gerald Durrell was a child, his eccentric family decided to escape the gloomy English weather and moved wholesale to the Greek island of Corfu, and this is his recollection of the years that his family (hilariously and charmingly sketched) spent in that Mediterranean paradise. Gerald, an enthusiastic young naturalist, was mostly allowed to run wild over the island and study nature to his heart’s content; he brought back to his house a collection of birds, insects, and other creatures. Durrell’s loving portraits of animals and nature are adorable but a bit long-winded; it’s when he works in stories of his family and their ridiculous antics that the book really shines. Apparently his books were made into a BBC series called The Durrells in Corfu; I would love to look that up sometime.
*It turned out that the snail bit was not actually from this book, but from the sequel, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, which was not available from my library. Fortunately, a preview was included at the end, so I was able to find this section after all.
Laziness Does Not Exist, by Devon Price
I came hoping for a nuanced critique of workaholic capitalism, and got positivity and compassion instead. Like most self-help books, this one can be summed up in a short paragraph, but it’s padded out with a ton of personal stories that Price hopes will resonate with you. The summary: the American workaholic culture makes you feel bad for taking time out for yourself, but don’t let that stop you! Taking breaks will stave off burnout, refresh your mind, rejuvenate your system, and make you a more productive person overall. The book is very geared towards a certain type of white-collar salaried worker with benefits, or maybe an overworked stay-at-home spouse being supported by their partner’s salary, who can afford to advocate for changes on their own behalf without fear of dismissal. There was passing acknowledgement of people working multiple jobs on the gig economy, but critique was directed more at the cultural/psychological pressure to stay busy and productive than any actual financial need, which I feel is rather dismissive of anyone who takes those jobs to make ends meet. Finally, the title is annoyingly incorrect; Price’s point is that laziness should not be a cultural negative, not that it doesn’t exist at all.
Witchmark, by C.L. Polk
This was… okay. It’s the kind of book where you get the impression that the author loves their protagonists too much to let anything really bad happen to them, which kind of takes any urgency out of the plot; also, the characters all feel like either wish-fulfillment dreamboats or cardboard cutout villains. The protag in question is Miles Singer, a morally upright doctor who works with injured veterans; he constantly fights an internal battle between hiding his illegal magic gift and the temptation of using magic to heal his patients. Into his life comes a mysterious and handsome gentleman; detective work, light romance, and mortal (but not too mortal!) danger ensue.
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, by Saad Z. Hossain
Deceptive little novella, I loved it. Starts out with a djinn waking from an unnaturally long slumber and meeting a human sitting by the road eating pistachios. (The pistachios are a running gag with this guy, kind of like Han from the Fast and Furious franchise and his bag of chips.) Turns out the djinn has woken into a far future world where everyone in Kathmandu is implanted with pollution-fighting nanites, no one starves, and good behavior is rewarded on a point system by a citywide AI named Karma. Hilarity and biting social commentary ensue as the djinn attempts to conquer the futuristic city, a local bureaucrat tries to maintain order, and everyone belatedly finds out that the pistachio eater has an agenda of his own.
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, by Neal Stephenson
This book is classic Stephenson: a firehose of ideas mixed together in a doorstopper of text, geeky theories of near-future technological advancement sharing space with lengthy ruminations on the utterly mundane. Really, I feel like this is three books, clumsily mashed together: 1) ultrarich game developer dies, inadvertently funding the R&D necessary to scan and upload brains; 2) an honestly quite fascinating road trip through an America where people have banded into groups that all embrace different realities based on the news feeds they subscribe to; 3) an actual retelling of the Bible, or at least the Paradise Lost bits, with God and the angels as amnesiac uploaded minds, that ends up positing that the future of humanity will end with souls existing eternally in a self-imposed uploaded afterlife, as long as server farms exist to maintain them. It was probably too much to cram into one book, but hey, I expect nothing less from Stephenson. Personally I think it’s the middle section that will stick with me the longest; the ideas felt the strongest and most germane to current events.
When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut
“This is a work of fiction based on real events,” says the author, and as such it’s weirdly disconcerting; you know the history, but you’re fuzzy on the details, and Labatut takes full advantage of that. The book kicks off with a mostly-factual account tracing the discovery of Prussian Blue to cyanide, poison, and its horrific use in the Holocaust; the author muses on the vibrant beauty of the color, and the stain that it left on history. The following stories go on to profile men of great brilliance, Schwarzschild and Heisenberg and Schrödinger among others, whose discoveries in math and science drive them to madness as they realize the destruction their ideas could wreak upon the world (or maybe, Labatut insinuates, they have to go mad to make these leaps of intuition at all). Their madness and visions are described with such lush prose that the feel of the text touches on gothic horror; fiction is woven so seamlessly into fact that you can’t draw a clear line between real and imaginary. The book swerves to end on a biographical, reflective tone, on which the narrator refuses to cut down a diseased tree; it is dying inside, but still tall and wide and of great sentimental value, and he does not wish to see the rot within. It functions as a kind of allegory: we can see and appreciate the outer structure of things, but if we dig too deeply, we may find ourselves revolted by what lies within, and the mere pursuit of that knowledge may bring it all crashing down around us.