October Books
Wormwood (Poppy Z. Brite)
This collection of horror stories was originally titled Swamp Foetus. Brite now identifies as male and goes by Billy Martin. The naming can be a bit confusing. These stories were written by someone who has spent a lot of time in North Carolina but has since fallen in love with New Orleans, and also thoroughly enjoys modern witchcraft. As ever, some selections are better than others, but in general I don’t much care for this collection. It revealed to me why I like some horror stories and not others. Barker’s stories celebrate life because it is fragile and precious; Brite’s stories celebrate death because it is strong and inexorable. While there is a lot of homosexual male love, it’s generally sidelined by the overwhelming fascination with death. Hooray for the representation for gay goths, but maybe there are some guys in the world who like wearing black and listening to heavy metal who don’t want to kill themselves or anyone else. In this book, if there are, they are likely to fall for a murderer or someone with a terminal illness. I had a professor once who told us that you can tell the implicit values of an author by seeing who the murderers and the victims are – they are the ones the author is punishing. If all your gay men kill or are killed, is that really positive representation?
The Longest Journey (E. M. Forster)
Really? A Forster novel that doesn’t go to Italy? Yup. We do still have the critique of mainstream British middle class, but they stay in Britain this time. A young man has a lot of revolutionary friends in college, but then he graduates and gets a job at a boys’ school and his ideas change. It’s about the confrontation of ideals with real life, particularly as it regards the educational system. I have a lot of experience with this conflict myself, which is why I am no longer a teacher. I also wanted Protagonist to admit his love for his former classmate, but Forster’s explicitly gay stories weren’t published during his lifetime. The longest journey of the title is the one that we all take, through life into death. It’s one that we all ultimately take alone because of the difficulties in communicating our ideas and experiences. This is a book of isolation.
The Golem and the Jinni (Helene Wecker)
This was a fantastic story. In the late nineteenth century, there were several communities of immigrants living in New York, and the European Jews and the Syrians didn’t really have much communication between them. The golem was built to be someone’s perfect wife, but he dies on the crossing and she has to figure out what to do with herself now that she’s freed from building her life around this one man. She develops skills, gets a job, and ultimately builds a community of friends. The jinni was trapped in a bottle for twelve centuries until a metalsmith accidentally frees him. He also works on getting a job and developing skills, adapting to the new culture and nourishing his memories so that he can figure out how he got stuck. They both distrust humans and feel confined because they can’t share their true identities with the world at large. Of course, the woman made of earth and the man made of fire meet each other. I was very pleased to see, though, that they don’t fall in love with each other. I’m pretty sure the golem is asexual, though that word is never brought up, and the jinni is very sexual, which gets him into trouble. It is possible to have a book about two people who don’t get all romantic. Despite the setting, the writing is of our own time, the firm, focused prose that we favor in both popular and literary novels. Recommended for most adult audiences of readers.
November Books
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Yukio Mishima)
There’s a thirteen-year-old boy trying to navigate early adolescence. His friends are sort of terrifying, identifying themselves by numbers instead of names (Chief, One, Two, Three . . .); it’s more of an intellectual, anti-sentimental cult than a group of friends. He learns about sexuality by watching his mother through a knothole in the wall between their bedrooms: first he spies on her masturbating, then continues when she meets a man to bring home. The romance between the sailor and the business owner is sweet and a little Hallmark-ish: they meet when he’s on shore for a few days; they fuck immediately, fall in love, and write each other letters while he’s gone for six months; and then they marry. Moderately wealthy career woman, lower-class hunk with a connection to nature – it’s the stuff American movies are made of. For the first half of the book. After the marriage, the sailor tries to learn business and stepfatherhood and life on land in general, and loses the kid’s respect in the attempt. But as it turns out, the Japanese law at the time determined that no one younger than fourteen could be tried for any crime, so the Chief reminds them that they can do anything they want in these short remaining months before their birthdays. Even murder.
The Mabinogion (Trans. Sioned Davies)
It took me quite a long time to read this book. It’s a group of fragments of Welsh epics, around a thousand years old. There was a specific story that I was looking for, the one about Cerridwen and her cauldron of inspiration, but it’s not here. It’s part of the Tale of Taliesin, because of course they treat a woman as a supporting character in a tale about a man, and the commonly known version of Taliesin has been determined to be mostly spurious, written in the nineteenth century I think. So I missed that one and got instead the authentic, traditional Welsh stories. There are eleven divisions or manuscripts, but don’t let that fool you. There are dozens of stories in this book, and they come so quickly that I could never read very much at a go. I need processing time. I care about understanding what happened, which takes a little digestion, and I also read to share in the emotional experiences of the characters, which just were not explored with the level of detail I (as a twenty-first century reader) prefer. If you’re looking for Arthurian chivalric tales, then this is the right place. Forget Lancelot and Galahad, and read up on the other knights, the ones that get left out of the modern tellings, like Geraint and Culhwch. It’s like we only care about Arthur as a cuckold, because watching Lancelot have sex with Guinevere allows us to vicariously defy authority and we like that. Here, her name is Gwenhwyfar, and women aren’t simply pawns in conflicts between men. The attitude toward sex is remarkably un-Victorian. There aren’t really any deities – maybe a little light Christianity every now and again, but these myths are about people, and sometimes giants and magic-users. My edition is heavily footnoted, maybe a little too much. The writing style is abrupt and forceful, and there’s a little too much Might Makes Right for my tastes. I do like the way that people refer to others as “the man/woman I love best”; it feels beautiful and right. It acknowledges other loves and other types of love while also recognizing the primacy of this individual, and it separates all that from titles and formally recognized relationships. It’s a weird and complex group of stories.
Dead Man’s Quill (Jordan Castillo Price)
The final novella in the series. Dixon and Yuri meet Dixon’s missing uncle who’s been causing havoc and together they resolve all the problems. I don’t think they manage a sex scene, which is a little disappointing, but it wrapped up the series perfectly. The author implied in a postscript that there will be more stories, but I’m satisfied with the closure I got here. I will probably reread all four stories again, as if they were a single book, but I don’t think I need anything more. They’re cute, yes, both the stories and the characters, but I like closure and don’t want any sequels.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino)
I liked this book a lot. There are ten first chapters of novels, tied together with a frame about you, the Reader. It is assumed that you, the Reader, are a white European heterosexual man, which I find unfortunate but inevitable in a novel written by an Italian man in the 1970s. The Reader enjoys all of these separate books, but runs into trouble finding the rest of the books, whether through printer errors, sudden interruptions, or the incompletion of manuscripts. He finds a young woman, the Other Reader, and they try to hunt down the books they’re reading, to no avail. Because they are separate human beings with different attitudes and experiences, they can never quite agree on the nature of the books they read, and we only see things through his perspective. The stories start off a little paranoid and Hitchcock-y, then around chapter seven things get very sexual indeed, and finally we drift into death and the dismantling of the story. The last few pages involve a discussion of why and how we read, which explains why we can never quite read the same book – even if the text doesn’t change, we do, so the experience is always different, from one reader to another, from one reading to the next. Great for people interested in exploring the nature of reading as they do it, but the metafictional elements both explain why critics love it and why it seems to have passed mostly out of the United States’ cultural consciousness.
The Body in the Library (Agatha Christie)
This is my first Miss Marple book, and technically it’s a December book because I read the last third on Dec 1. I was surprised at how little she actually does; the story focuses primarily on the police officers investigating the murder. She solves it, of course, but the clue-gathering is seldom in her hands. A body appears in the library of a country estate, and the owner’s wife is friends with Miss Marple, so of course they work the case together. Very little action as clues are revealed mostly through dialogue. Positive representation of the disabled, less positive representation of the working class, no representation of ethnic minorities. But she’s writing for a specific audience in a specific time and place, so these things are to be expected. I appreciate the community-based approach to solving the crimes, even though I am uncomfortable with just how narrow and homogeneous the community is.
Confessional Reviews 