Tag: genre-history

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.

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.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

I learned so much from this book. I knew that there was a migration of black people northward from the Jim Crow south but I had no idea of the vast scale of the migration, and only a vague sense of the challenges the migrants faced along the way. Wilkerson follows three real-life people, who made the journey at different times and to different places; she illustrates the challenges that they face and show evidence of how others faced similar trials. I particularly liked her assertion that these migrants were similar to first-generation immigrants to the country from other countries, in their drive to sacrifice and succeed despite all odds, in marked contrast to how they were depicted in society at the time. 

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson posits that the race-based unspoken social rules in America are analogous to a caste system like the one in India, and also pitilessly demonstrates how Nazi Germany formed their own systems of categorizing people based on what they learned of the US. There are oh so many details in this book (and it’s another one which I intend to buy later, so I can mark it up and drink it in properly) but my best takeaway from this book is that if you look at racism in the US from the viewpoint of a caste system, then it makes total sense that people doing racist things don’t see themselves as racist; the word “racist” implies a person who is acting outside the bounds of civil behavior, whereas since the entire foundation of American civil society is bounded and defined by racism, those steeped in that culture will justify any actions taken in upholding that system. With patient, inexorable detail, Wilkerson uncovers the pillars supporting the caste system, and provides many examples of how it hurts all Americans, not just the ones at the bottom.

Chicken with Plums, by Marjane Satrapi

Graphic novel about the last few days of the life of Nasser Ali Khan in 1958 Tehran. It begins when he decides to give up on life, and through memories, dreams, and hallucinations, the reader slowly finds out why. The art is simple but the story unspools in a heartbreaking way.

Four Hundred Souls, by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

When I picked up this book of four hundred years of Black history in America, I mentally braced for impact, because it’s so painful to even think about: slavery to segregation, Jim Crow to BLM, and still so far from real equality after all this time. And yet this book was a gift. Eighty amazing writers (and ten wonderful poets) came together, each taking on a span of history, to share so many stories of resilience and courage and determination. At every point in history, a racist America was consciously constructed and reinforced to keep Black people contained, and yet at every one of those points, Black people fought stubbornly for their right to exist. This book could have been a litany of sorrow, but instead celebrates how Black resistance grew and strengthened with every obstacle. If it weren’t a library copy I would have left sticky notes on every other page. When we finally settle down where we don’t need to worry about moving weight, I’m buying a copy.