This was a good month for reading a mixture of books from the International Booker, the Women’s Prize, the NBA International, and a couple that flow into my purview here and there.
1. Silver Nitrate, Silvia Moreno-Garcia 🔥
Current read and oh my it’s encyclopedic take on early 20th C Mexican horror movies makes me want to list them all and watch. It’s almost as though the story is secondary to the novel’s construction of a horror filmography and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. This is a fun horror novel that I enjoyed.
2. Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver 🔥
Just finished this multiple prize winner after waiting since May to get it from the library. In true Victorian form it went on too long I think — wringing devastation dry over and over and over again. But its vision of the opioid crisis, as blended with coming of age in rural Virgina blends wit and feeling that had me rooting for its protagonist, Demon/Damon, the whole time. Also, its rendering of the rural Virgina landscape as sublime, with the capacity for vengeance and healing, is breathtaking at times — see Devil’s Bathtub in a storm scene — and I enjoyed that too.
3. The Devil of the Provinces, Juan Cárdenas
This one was short and I can’t promise you I know everything that happens in it. It’s about a biologist who returns to Columbia to live with his mother and teach at a boarding school where the girls give birth to strange creatures. It has all the bewildering strangeness I like in fiction, but with this one I have more questions than answers, like am I just unfamiliar with the settings and contexts or is it all the narrator’s fault because he was high off his ass for the whole book?
4. Study for Obedience, Sarah Bernstein 🔥
#8 from the Booker Prize longlist and it’s giving Book of Goose an even In Ascension vibes with how contemplative it is, but better at introspection than both. It also giving The Wicker Man in its picture of a small town reacting to an incomer in its midst. It’s also super interesting in how it layers the protagonist’s experiences of gender discrimination in her work as transcriber for a law firm — firm defends the interests of corporate entities that wreak environmental havoc — over or maybe alongside her time spent essentially being a maid for her older brother and being held in deep suspicion by the community where he resides.
5. How to Build a Boat, Elaine Feeney 🔥
#9 from the Booker longlist and I’m not crying, you are! It is heartwarming and lovely in its depiction of teachers doing the good work for their students and each other. Such a gorgeous story of collaboration and how an accepting community can mend what ails us.
6. Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck
I hate this book so much and all the more so because I can understand how and why it layers an extra marital affair over a classical music score and the lead up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Maybe I don’t so much hate the book but rather how disgusted reading it makes me feel. There is no pleasure in any of it and I suspect that’s the point of the predictably violent progress of the relationship between a painfully young woman and a much much older married man. This one would have been a much better story about the collapse of the GDR without the extramarital affair between two East Germans. Yes. I know it’s the center of the thing, but I stand by this point.
7. Still Born, Guadalupe, Nettel 🔥
Love. Love. Love this book. The title leads you into it in one way, but how it takes you through varying iterations of maternity, motherhood, and mothering — across a plethora of themes like disability, domestic and gendered violence, and bodily autonomy — pushes the imagination to think of family, childcare and love afresh in ways that center care and community. Still thinking about how precisely Nettel presents maternal ambivalence. This might be among my favorite books of the entire year so far.
8. Beyond the Door of No Return, David Diop 🔥
Loved this one. French botanist spends time in Senegal as a young man and falls in love with a Senegalese woman, whose story he later tells in his unpublished papers. Adanson tells us a lot about his beloved Maram and what happens to her, but he also tells us why his account isn’t/can’t be entirely truthful. Much like in At Night All Blood is Black, Diop’s prose here is also deceptively straightforward, all the while belying the violence of silence and absence in 18th C colonial encounters.
9. Nightbloom, Peace Adzo Medie
A story of how two cousins who grew up as best friends in Ghana become estranged as teenagers. It gives Americanah at times & I wish it didn’t work so hard to prove that there are wealthy cosomipilitan people with nice things in Africa. Could have done without the clubbing over the head that was the last few pages on corruption in Ghana too. Nonetheless, it is masterful in its study of how perceptions about the same events can vary vastly depending on who’s experiencing/witnessing them.
