Edgar's Book Round-Up, October-December '19

The weather is bad, but we have a new bookstore in town! I’m very excited about it.

It’s already shaping up to be a bitter winter, and hell on the knees: it was over 50 degrees Fahrenheit two days ago, but it’s been shitting down snow since 8am yesterday and the high was 29. But while my person is dying of exposure, my reading is, if not flourishing, at least still limping along. While I will probably finish one or two more books before the end of the year, this is as good a place as any to round ‘em up again. As always, book titles go to Goodreads.

As I mentioned in my last round-up, I was at the time reading two books at the same time that stood in marked contrast to one another. These were Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, which I read using the Libby app on my phone, and Exist Otherwise: the Life and Works of Claude Cahun by Jennifer Shaw, which I purchased from — no surprises — the museum store during one of their book sales, and is a rather substantial tome on glossy paper (for some fucking reason). And I wanted to look at these books in tandem in large part because — and I didn’t realize this when I started reading them in tandem, too — they cover a lot of overlapping territory, in very different ways.

UK paperback cover, which I somewhat prefer.

Freshwater is Emezi’s debut novel, and I want to stress first and foremost that I absolutely cannot wait to see what they do next, because this was really actually a phenomenal piece of writing on many levels. And Emezi didn’t give themself an easy road: the novel follows Ada from her girlhood in Nigeria through her tumultuous young adulthood to her eventual flourishing. But Ada was born “with one foot on the other side,” and as such is host to semi-divine alternate selves, ogbanje. These selves also provide narration, and in fact narrate more of the book than Ada herself — which isn’t honestly great for Ada the person, because the ogbanje seek extremity in all things, and Ada endures both a somewhat dysfunctional childhood in Africa and then a series of more-or-less traumatic relationships on arriving in the US for college. But the plot, while very good and very well-handled, isn’t quite the point: Freshwater is exceptionally stylish, and very beautiful, and frequently left me squirming a little because of how brilliantly observed it was.

It is relevant to note here that Emezi themself is nonbinary, as is, ultimately, Ada (there are, notably, some autobiographical details in the novel). I had first encountered them in this Guardian profile, I think, and as mentioned, I am very excited to read more of their works.

In general, I am excited to read works by and about nonbinary people. I am, after all, a nonbinary people, and it’s thrilling to feel seen, to compare notes on the experience, as it were. Which is part of what drew me to Claude Cahun, and caused me to seek out Shaw’s book, which is the first major English-language survey of Cahun and their art and life. Cahun has drawn attention recently because of their writings about their experience of gender, stating — albeit briefly — in no uncertain terms that “neuter [was] the gender for [them].”

The cover features one of Cahun’s many self-portraits — perhaps tellingly, one of the more feminine ones.

Which, basically, brings us to why I want to fight Jennifer Shaw, the author of Exist Otherwise, and a whole-ass art history professor. At almost no point in the book does Shaw touch on Cahun’s statements about their gender, instead treating Cahun exclusively as a gender nonconforming lesbian. The one time she does acknowledge that Cahun might not have identified purely as a woman is in a coy aside about a hundred pages in. And sure: Shaw is, as mentioned, a whole-ass art history professor, and has certainly spent more time with Cahun’s work than I have, but this is a book published in 2017. Cahun’s gender was no mystery, their writing on it fairly assured. I mean, I get it, I really do: Shaw wants, I assume, to see herself in Cahun. But Jennifer’s got tenure and I’ve got to wear really ugly cargo pants for work, and I was looking for a break.

That aside, Shaw’s writing is really quite good. It’s got energy and passion, and while her relative disavowal of Cahun’s gender situation made me question the reliability of her French translations (and the translated passages were almost exclusively provided in translation only, which gives me pause), she really does hit that sweet spot of academic writing that is both excited and clear. But on a fundamental level, the elision of Cahun’s statements about themself really fucking bothered me — and if a whole-ass art history professor can do that and have it go to press, then by god I’m referring Cahun with they/them pronouns.

Apparently this is the Kindle edition cover, but I quite like it in spite of all that.

In any case, Professor Shaw’s resolute non-discussion of transgender experiences left me cranky and wanting more of the kind of textual acceptance Freshwater had offered, and so, once more through the good offices of the library app, turned to Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s short story collection, The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror. Ortberg, perhaps best known as half of the late, great Toast, is a delightful writer, and since he came out, I’ve really connected with some of his writing reflecting on his transition (especially this piece about getting top surgery, which I made the mistake of reading at work and affected me so deeply that I had to go prowl around in the snow for a while to avoid coughing up a wad of feelings on an unsuspecting coworker).

Unfortunately, the nature of short story collections is such that some of them just aren’t as good as the others, and Ortberg suffers from a tendency to have his stories just kind of… end. He’s also not helped by my propensity to compare almost every retold fairy tale to Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, which isn’t fair of me at all.

However, the standouts really stand out: “Fear Not: an Incident Log” was by leagues my favorite, and gives a retelling of the biblical story of an angel wrestling Joshua. That particular story really shows Ortberg’s strength as a semi-serious writer — the tone is light and charming, but punctuated by brief but deep reflections on, for example, how unsettling it is for an immortal angel to look into the eyes of something that knows it will die. “The Rabbit,” another standout, is an absolutely brutal take on The Velveteen Rabbit, which I enjoyed in a very uncomfortable way. In all, the strengths of the collection more than make up for its failings, and if you can make it through the first story in the collection, which is a bit of a slog, it’s really all pretty good from there.

God, Vintage did such a great job in designing Murakami’s books in the early aughts, and they’ve made them so boring in recent reissues.

Around the same time, however, I was feeling like I needed some Haruki Murakami in my life, and alit on Underground: the Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. This is one of his few lengthy works of nonfiction, and largely comprises a collection of interviews Murakami did with survivors of the Tokyo sarin gas attack, with a section devoted to people who were, at the time, connected with the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which was responsible for the attack. Notably, most of the people Murakami spoke to are fairly ordinary: with the exception of an Irish jockey who lives in Japan, most were simply trying to get to work with the gas attacks were carried out, and the interviews, conducted about a year on from the attack, deal not only with the events of that particular morning, but also with the lingering effects the survivors experienced.

The interviews with the cult members are a little different: conducted after the appearance of the interviews with survivors, the later date allows for a little more distance from the event, and Murakami allowed himself a slightly more adversarial tone, probing why exactly his interview subjects became involved with Aum Shinrikyo. The book concludes with a reflection from Murakami himself on what the gas attack means as an emanation of then-contemporary Japanese culture.

I was personally very impressed with Murakami’s skill as a journalist. Underground brings to bear his general sensitivity to the personal experience and balances it with a sympathetic journalistic eye. The details are tightly observed; the editing of the interviews light almost to the point of invisibility. More than anything, it made me very interested in seeking out some of his other nonfiction, even though I fucking hate running.

Readers may recall that, in my last roundup, I expressed excitement about rekindling my affection for audio books. I come from a family that reads aloud, and enjoys being read aloud to; I vividly remember reading and rereading Good Omens in the kitchen with my mom, frequently interrupted by bouts of cackling, and of long drives narrated by Jim Dale’s rendition of the Harry Potter novels. And, since I spend a lot of time at work — and in general, as an inveterate pedestrian — wandering around outside, and since I can now get audio books from the library without having to actually go anywhere, Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller made an excellent re-entrance to the form.

This edit comes from a review on Medium by Kelley Mitchell. Thanks, Kelley!

I had initially heard about the book from Cameron, who read it earlier this year, and he had praised it highly; I was by no means disappointed. The novel, which is set on Qaanaaq, a floating city in the arctic circle, constructed as a refuge from the disrupted and climate-change-ravaged rest of the world, follows a delightful cast of characters, their narrations intercut by “broadcasts” from “City without a Map,” a podcast of sorts with a cult following that both poetically interprets the plot and, ultimately, provides the key to its conclusion. Said plot, incidentally, is kicked off by the arrival in Qaanaaq of a mysterious woman accompanied by an orca and a polar bear, and it just gets more fun from there.

While Miller’s world-building is both compelling and distressingly prescient — it reminded me of nothing so much as Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery — the characters were what really held me. Especially dear to me were Kaev, a beamfighter staring down the end of his career, his life rendered exceptionally difficult by what initially seem to be some kind of developmental issues but are revealed to be… kind of that, and Soq, a snarky, stylish messenger who’s also nonbinary. And when a nonbinary character is basically introduced by one person being attracted to them as the onlooker’s preferred gender, and then confusion when that may not be the case, followed immediately by someone else trying to cuss them out and being unable to gender the insults — I mean, come on. That’s #goals right there. And the fact that housing inequality is a major plot point makes it kind of a keyboard smash of stuff-I-was-going-to-like-anyway.

The next book I finished was Tamora Pierce’s Magic Steps, the first book in The Circle Opens tetralogy. But, as with the Magicians before it, I’ll hold off on discussion of this book until I’ve finished the other three. That said: magic-using friends, please read Pierce’s earlier series, Circle of Magic. The woman can build a magic system, damnit, and Magic Steps only re-confirms that ability.

This is a piss-quality image, which varies slightly from my copy for some reason, but still.

However, after finishing Underground, I needed something else to read on the physical plane, so I turned to a book I picked up on a whim: Mikhail Elizarov’s The Librarian. It had, when I was looking at it in the used book store, a lot going for it. I love books about books and the people who love them, and that cover! Jesus! Look at that design! And, I mean, in casting about the apartment for something to read, it seemed like a good time for it. You know how it is.

In any case, I was in for a bit of a surprise. I had expected something a little more sedate, a little more literary in its pretensions. Instead I got, I am delighted to report, basically Battle Royale but book-themed and decked out, with ridiculous splendor, in Soviet kitsch. Elizarov treats Russia around the year 2000 as something very like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, in which his characters — all devotees of an almost-cult that surrounds the works of Gromov, a Soviet propagandist of only middling quality whose works, when read in the right circumstances, confer strange powers on the reader — do horrifying battle. The novel, after a brief and brutal introductory section, follows Alexei, a young man strong-armed into assuming his deceased uncle’s mantle as the librarian of a small “reading room,” a group of people who have a copy of one of Gromov’s novels.

The novel takes a decidedly satirical tone, but plays it so straight it almost feels weird. Alexei, when doing battle with other reading rooms, wears the Gromov book his reading room has in a species of engolpion, and armors himself in a long tunic made of tire treads; towards the end of the novel, the characters take refuge in a village soviet; the book owned by Alexei’s reading room is known as the Book of Memory, and it confers the “power” of memories of a happy childhood (some of the other books make readers immune to wounds, so they’re not all like that). But interspersed with all the balls-out wild shit are truly tender scenes between the characters, many of whom are some combination of badly traumatized, disenfranchised, disaffected, and chronically ill. The portrayal of the found family in the midst of this chaotic and clandestine milieu is so tender that Elizarov makes you really care when characters die (and they do, frequently), and without it, the wrenching conclusion would simply have fallen flat.

When I finished Blackfish City, of course, I needed some kind of auditory followup, and between that and The Librarian, I was very ready to embrace the madness. Again, following a recommendation from Cameron, I turned to Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker. While the stereotype of the difficult sophomore outing doesn’t necessarily apply to writers as much as it can to bands, I had some concerns; a few years ago, I read and thoroughly enjoyed The Gone-Away World, Harkaway’s gonzo debut, and I was worried that Angelmaker might not live up to the promise that novel had held.

First-edition cover, which I feel conveys the off-kilter machinations of the plot quite well.

I shouldn’t have worried.

Angelmaker follows Joe Spork, son of a notorious criminal who now works as a clockmaker, with backstory provided by Edie Bannister, a nonagenarian former super-spy, as they seek to prevent doomsday being unleashed by means of mechanical bees. The books also features, in no particular order: a tommy gun, a very old and ill-tempered bulldog with pink glass eyes, a religious order called the Ruskinites who are into exactly the sorts of things you’d expect, never really being able to escape the shadow of your family, and chemical waste-train sex. It’s fucking delightful, is what it is.

But while there’s plenty of zaniness to go around, Harkaway knows his way around building a plot and peopling it with characters you really care about. Joe Spork was, for me, extremely relatable and sympathetic: after his flamboyant youth in the shadow of his somewhat-overbearing father, he tries to “be normal” by becoming a clock-maker (and, for clarity, the story is largely set in the present day). Following Joe as he grapples with his ancestry and the collapse of the life he tried to build, and the way he emerges from that fight, is a real treat. No less a treat are Edie Bannister’s derring-do as a mid-century super-spy, adventuring in and out of drag, working on and, to an extent, with beautifully-designed and described machines. It is a romp in the most serious and exuberant sense of the word.

Gotta say, I really prefer this paperback edition to the hardback cover, which struck me as strangely saccharine for some reason.

Having finished The Librarian, and having made one of my periodic pilgrimages to Watson Library on its hill in LFK, I turned next to Anne Carson, and specifically her beautifully-titled collection, Men in the Off Hours. Unsurprisingly, given that I am an occasional poet and translator who arrived at classics after being wrung through an okay English department, Anne Carson is someone I hold in high regard. Her translations are gorgeous and artful, capturing the strange plays of the light in the texts; her original poetic works, best known of which is probably Autobiography of Red, frequently incorporate classical references in organic and surprising ways; her critical writing is as deeply felt as any love poem.

Men in the Off Hours is no exception; as an astute Goodreads reviewer pointed out, her collections are not so much gatherings of scattered pieces as constructions of disparate parts, coming together to form a harmonious whole. Her thought is translucent and overpowering; the fact that this collection contains several prose works, including a semi-scholarly reflection on dirt, corruption, and women in the ancient world, feels less like an incursion and more like a natural outgrowth of the needs of the work. She’s a little like Andy Goldsworthy that way: using very, very ancient things to create something new and strange and devastating, a metachronic construction of using language and, in using language, revealing and concealing the self.

So that’s where I’m at, in terms of books I've finished so far this year. As mentioned above, I fully anticipate finishing at least a couple more this year, but best laid plans o’ mice and men and all that. I also want to take a moment to celebrate the fact that Kansas City has a brand-new independent bookstore: Wise Blood, on Westport Road. The selection is lovely, the staff friendly, the vibe chill. I strongly recommend a visit if you’re in the area.

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