middleagedmiddlechild.

I write.

I read.

  • more lit in translation.

    August 26th, 2022

    For four years, I tracked my reading pretty carefully. It was a worthwhile project for four years, but the user interface there got unwieldy. Now I post readings here. I’m proud that these four most recent books are all literature in translation. Four years ago, that kind of flurry of translated lit would have been planned, would have been a choice. Now, it’s a habit.

    Since I teach a lot of students of Indian heritage, I had my antennae up for Indian authors. Two short story anthologies really hit the spot.

    Dallas’s own Deep Vellum Publishing published The Shehnai Virtuoso, a collection stories by Dhumketu, translated from Gujarati and compiled by Jenny Bhatt. Compiled from his twenty-four collections, this anthology offers a great variety — but for me a kind of single authorial ethos emerged. There is real affection for the characters, even those that make lousy choices, especially those that are in dire straits. There is an adeptness at setting and tone (realistic or fantastic, mythical then or megaurban now), and there is a satisfying wrap up to each. Generally, good things happen to good people, and Dhumketu lets us know why.

    Archipelago Books published The Dog of Tithwal, a collection of stories by Manto, translated from Urdu. These are darker and starker than Dhumketu’s. I’m not saying that it’s a fair or necessary comparison–I just happened to read these collections back to back, so forgive the apples to oranges comparisons. Manto’s cities are a little more unforgiving than Dhumketu’s, the relations between characters a little more selfish and amoral. The prose, as rendered in translations by Khalid Hasan and Muhammad Umar Memon, is direct. It reminded me often of the kind of mindset & prose that Sherwood Anderson called grotesque, that is, a set of stories about people who stick to their own truth and live with it during all their lives, but their truth turns to be faulty or even downright false.

    New Directions recently published Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, a novel I purchased because the cover looked really cool. It’s translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani, and in many ways it’s a novel about translation, about trying to connect, about moving beyond who we are to who we hope to become. There’s a fact of the world of the novel that was very compelling that isn’t explained much: Sea levels have risen so much that Japan no longer exists. It’s been so long that Japan hasn’t existed that Japanese speaking people, like one protagonist of the novel, cannot find their language fellows. The hook is for this character to speak her own language with someone who knows it. There are other translators and global wanderers, people looking for a language of love & family, gender & food, friendship & home. It’s the first in a planned trilogy, and it feels like it–the wrap up leaves you in true suspense.

    Open Letters published Katixa Agirre’s Mothers Don’t this year, translated from Spanish by Katie Whittemore. The title is the beginning of a sentence: Mothers don’t kill. This novel is about a mother that does, who kills her two infant children. The narrator of the novel is a recently-successful novelist (of a political thriller about ETA) and a new mother (of a fourteen-month-old son) who follows the trial of the mother, a woman she had a passing acquaintance with in college. Like another book I read recently, Agirre’s book draws upon religion, mythology, anatomy, forensics, personal experience, family upbringing, socioeconomic mores, cultural norms, and more to bring this tragedy (crime? temporary insanity?) to life. Agirre is unflinchingly honest about what makes for a bad mother, and how difficult it is to be good in what one does and in what one fights against doing, in what one thinks and in what one tries to banish from thought.

  • the summer of women authors, continued.

    July 7th, 2022

    I’m not sure I can convey the charms of Such a Fun Age better than Trevor Noah did when he interviewed author Kiley Reed. It’s a smart readable suspenseful and morally complex story about race and class, and the American dream of reinventing oneself, if not climbing financially and socially. Reid choreographs a tense & sometimes beautiful pas de deux between her two protagonists—Emira, Temple alumna uncertain of what her future should hold, months away from aging off her parents’ health care plan, and Alix Chamberlain, the Instagram-sorta famous girl boss who hires Emira to babysit her child. Black women have been caregivers for white families for years, end this relationship is front at times with a deep strain of racial history and mistrust. Especially when friends get involved, love triangles form, and things go viral.

    Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me is getting some well-deserved raves & attention. Like a couple of books I’ve enjoyed recently, Also a Poet blends cultural history, literary criticism, and personal memoir. Calhoun begins by trying to complete the unfinished project of her father–a biography of Frank O’Hara, a writer known primarily today as a poet but who was referred to famously in his NYT obituary as an art critic and “also a poet”. Through the course of the project, Calhoun battles her frustrations with her father, his friends, his past, and the executor of O’Hara’s estate. For all the insight that daughter & father gain into O’Hara’s life & times, it’s no spoiler to say that the book ends up being more about Calhoun & her father (an art critic and also a poet) than about the original subject, namely, Frank O’Hara. What the reader gets, however, is a complex & painfully true account of the process of writing, as well as the process of acceptance–of our families, ourselves, our pasts.

    Even though I can’t remember reading a book like Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid, I feel like I’ve confronted this story before. And I mean that in the best way. It’s got magic & love, sisters quarreling & dads exerting unreasonable control. Marlinchen is the youngest of the X family—Undine, the eldest sister, can read the future in water reflections, Rosenrot, the middle daughter, can create just about any potion or cure from herbs. And they’ve all been kept to their home (the mother deceased long ago, naturally) for years. Reid opens the novel with a rare, and fateful, journey outside the family’s grounds, a trip to the opera, which introduces a love interest in the main dancer, and which summons the father’s deepest rage that they have gone out into the city, full of temptations & modern conveniences (electricity, for example) that is making their magic obsolete. 

  • i read (mostly) female authors.

    June 17th, 2022

    I’ve been trying to read nothing but female authors for the late spring & early summer. I only had one slip-up, but I’m glad I read that one too : )

    After Suite Francaise, I was looking for accounts of the daily realities of the Holocaust. Not camp memoirs or novels, not survival stories, but more stories like Nemirovsky’s that showed the way that towns & villages made possible the suffering of six million and more and their families. In that search I came across A Scrap of Time and Other Stories by Ida Fink. Originally written in Polish about Poland, A Scrap of Time is unforgiving in its … I was going to say in its slices of life, but it’s a collection that shows how cruelty and necessity slices through lives. The cast of characters is vast and believable, both those captured and those collaborating to liberate those hunted. Children, young women, the elderly, people alone, married couples, etc. There are moments of relief, but those are recounted in such a way that really had me reeling—was survival about luck? About personal bravery? Some cosmic tragic mix of both?

    The blurb at the top of Gayl Jones’ Corregidora had me sold. Toni Morrison, Jones’ editor at one point, proclaims, “No novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this.” The bar is certainly set high by this novel. It’s an unflinching look at the legacy of slavery & sexual violence, complete with wisdom of the ancients in Corregidora’s memory of her grandmother’s stories of enslavement. It’s a bold novel sexually, complete with frank and explicit depictions of loving intimacy and noncoerced submission. It’s written in a smoothly varied style that readers of Morrison & Hurston will appreciate, shifting effortlessly & powerfully between Black urban vernacular and modern stream of conscious prose and back again, often within the same paragraph. Finally, it’s driven by and complicated by Corregidora’s terrific freedom, in terms of her art, her friends, her family, and her career. A real stunner with a dizzying resolution.

    Since I’ve read Dana Stevens’ criticism at Slate for years, I was really excited for her book Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. It’s a biography as broad as the title. Stevens reconstructs every stage of Keaton’s career and the context surrounding it. The vaudeville stage and the advent of film that transforms / undoes vaudeville; the early days of film and the corporate consolidation of cinematic distribution and talent; the rollicking energy of Keaton in front of & behind the camera and the business errors he makes that compromise his financial stability; the cocktail parties of early Hollywood and the birth of AA; the meritocracy of the performing arts and the female directors, the Black artists that never got their due; Keaton’s struggles with alcohol and his success in his last marriage and as a gag writer for television stars. Like Elvis Costello’s memoir or Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, this book is gonna be one that you’ll want to read with a device nearby so that you can relive & re-laugh at Keaton’s timeless genius.

    I remember hearing about Richard Adams’s Watership Down as a kid. Even then, it was spoken of in reverential terms, spoken of as a book that would move you & change you. It is, and it did. Like most adult readers, I’d say that it’s not really a kids’ book. I don’t doubt that kids will enjoy the suspenseful adventure / survival story—I know that I had a really difficult time putting the book down every night. And I hope that kids and / or suburban readers like me will take the time to follow along in the novel’s map, to look up topographical terms like … y’know, down or copse and botanical terms that show the plentitude of nature, even in a little corner of a little island. When readers like me say it’s not really a kids book, we really tell on ourselves. All great books are books of ideas. In this case, citizenship & power, nature & ingenuity, the self & the Other. One of my desert island books for sure.

    I am a sucker for books about books. Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book would count, I guess, as historical fiction. It is a fictionalized account of the Sarajevo Haggadah. A Haggadah is a book used during the Passover celebration to tell the story of the exodus & faith of the Jewish people; the Sarajevo Haggadah is, in history & in Brooks’s novel, a masterful work of art. The novel begins in the near-present with a manuscript conservationist hired to brave wartorn Sarajevo to work on the Haggadah. Brooks looks deep into the book—its fibers, its stains, its spine, its clasps—which take the reader back in history to see the inspiration & construction, the path & peril of this sacred text. The history is woven into the lives of the characters rather than inserted clunkily between their actions & journeys. The people of this book (in 1480s Seville, 1490s Terragona, 1600s Venice, 1940s Sarajevo) is distinct and deliberate in how they see & how they value the Haggadah. Highly recommend.

  • i read country of origin.

    May 19th, 2022

    Over these past few years, we’ve had an embarrassment of riches with respect to cross-generational cross-cultural novels. Not all are immigration novels, but many are. Not all are trauma narratives, but many are. Not all are novels in translation, but many are. I’m sure you can think of many. Each time I read one of these important works, I’m humbled by the care with which the novelist crafts a difficult & deep personal truth. Dalia Azim’s Country of Origin is just such a novel.

    Country of Origin begins and ends with women in transition, with women looking to the skies.

    In the beginning of the novel (Cairo, 1951), a young woman looks to the skies from the roof of her comparatively luxurious, comparatively safe family home. She sees a city in ruins, a country in turmoil but one that her powerful, politically-savvy father can just navigate. Despite this father’s deliberate plotting & maneuvering, the young woman imagines, seeks, and secures an escape, an independence, a vista of safety & love. Sadly, it is not a permanent one.

    By the end of the novel (Colorado, 1984), a young woman looks to the skies from the safety of a mountain preserve, part art project, part insect lab. She sees nature in its beauty & savagery, a landscape that has its hopes and its cruelties. This second young woman—the only child of the first young woman—has endured much: first-gen struggles, neurodivergence, family illnesses, and family losses. Despite all of this, the young woman sees in this mountain vista—one she will soon leave—a series of possibilities. Some of them quite firm, but many of them fleeting.

    It’s that kind of novel. Every generation with its hopes, every generation with just enough to survive & testify to the next one.

  • kyrie eleison.

    May 18th, 2022
    An image I grew up with, in my home, on funeral cards, at school, everywhere.
    I read somewhere that G-d is merciful,
    watching, judging, understanding, but still
    
    merciful. The quality of mercy, I read
    somewhere else, is not strained. It droppeth like ...
    
    well, it's freely flowing. It isn't meted out
    like some precious resource (though it is). 
    
    It is worth much more than it costs to give. 
    There is always a person to forgive
    
    and a reason to forgive, if for no other reason
    than that it gives you practice
    
    in feeling how little it takes to bless
    a person in error, in distress, deep in shame.
    
    Even when we know that they'll just mess up 
    again, in our mercy, we bring a part of heaven
    
    to earth.
    
    "kyrie eleison" means "Lord, have mercy." This was my last sprint write with my students on May 18, 2022, modeled after Clint Smith's "Meteor Shower". 
  • sew & prove.

    May 17th, 2022
    An orange shirt hangs in my closet. My second ever. 
    It's got a sheen & a stretch altogether unnatural,
    some space-age material that doesn't breathe & doesn't fade.
    
    It's a golf shirt from another era, a stiff broad collar,
    more buttons than are necessary, and a deep breast pocket.
    There's a duck on the pocket also from another era. 
    
    Summer 1988, north Austin, I'm watching my girlfriend shop
    in a fabric store. We were young enough & in love enough
    to do everything together then, even things I didn't want. 
    
    I rotated one of those product kiosks, bored & annoyed. 
    And there the duck was on a tiny card, a bright impulse
    that I knew would make her smile. She sewed it right on
    
    an orange t-shirt I wore probably once a week. Decades after 
    we broke up, the shirt lost its snap, and I lost my taste for it. 
    I threw away the shirt but kept the duck. I showed it to my wife,
    
    who sewed it right on a new orange shirt. My second ever. 
    Here in the closet, in the home we share, a bright sign of
    how to adorn a simple thing, of how to keep love near your heart. 
    
    
    
    
    
    

    Inspired by the love of two women and by this poem.

  • i read trust.

    May 15th, 2022

    Look, like most people who read Trust by Hernan Diaz, I had the immediate impression that this was going to win a lot of things. It’s a shame when that is one of my first instincts, but it wasn’t the only one. I didn’t only think “this one has a high literary fiction written all over it.” I thought about how elegantly Diaz navigates paths that are difficult to make accessible and relatable.

    He writes about money in an exciting way, and in a way that doesn’t shirk moral questions. So many stories about money track the way that it can pull a person away from what they value. This novel by contrast demonstrates how money, particularly loads of money, reveals what we value.

    He writes about gender in an unsettling way, a way that reveals itself the further you get into the novel, a way that reveals your own gendered perspective the further you get into the novel.

    I guess I should say that this is a novel that plays with what a novel can be. It is in four parts, the latter two parts (and much of the second of the four parts) written in the voice of female characters. The further you get into the novel, the further Diaz moves you away from the fiction of part one, the kind of story that we have come to know of the novel at its best, at its peak.

    There are spoilers that I’m avoiding here, as you’ve probably noticed. All I can say is that each part in each voice of Trust will have you thinking and feeling, and then thinking and feeling anew.

  • the poet at fifteen.

    May 12th, 2022
    You wear a white shirt,
    grey slacks, and a plaid tie.
    A uniform of academic
    seriousness & middle class.
    
    You roll your sleeves up
    & unbutton your shirt
    at the neck. You feel there's little 
    on the surface you choose.
    
    You are freest on your paper route,
    especially Sunday mornings 
    weaving slowly from curb to curb,
    crossing the double yellow line.
    
    All four lanes yours.
    The city asleep.
    
    Inspired by Erika L. Sánchez's "The Poet at Fifteen", which was inspired by Larry Levis's "The Poet at Seventeen".  
  • i read the bear woman.

    May 10th, 2022

    I recently read a book that was part investigative journalism, part literary criticism, part feminist meditation, and part motherhood memoir. Now I’ve read another one.

    I’m glad that I was not familiar with the story of Marguerite de la Rocque, otherwise I might have been frustrated by how often the author centers herself, or how often she calls previous evidence in the question. This herky jerky style and approach turns out to be the one that mirrors the action of writing, and wondering, and drafting better than any “straight” history or memoir could have. Surprises land hard, both personal and academic; blessings abound (just the right library recommended to find just the right centuries-old map). 

    Ramqvist has several challenges in the telling. She must navigate the paths taken by three previous authors who have told their versions of the story, sometimes centuries earlier, and thus, sometimes restricted by personal connection to Marguerite, by connection to the uncle that banished her, by connection to centuries-old ideas of propriety & euphemism. She also cannot help but read her current self through the lenses of her selves — as a mother, as a Swede, as a once-young woman making risky choices with dangerous men.

    What was most pleasurable about the book turned out to be this personal reading of the self. Her travels & frustrations with her teenage daughter reveal a lot about the blessings Marguerite lost as a mother, a lot about Ramqvist’s own understandings of independence and adventure, a lot about how we read the rare stories extant of famous women from centuries ago.

    This novel was translated by Saskia Vogel, a writer whose translation of Jessica Schiefauer‘s Girls Lost is also really good.

  • live oak.

    May 6th, 2022
    Quercus virginiana, Dallas TX (May 5,2022)
    There is a tree at the heart 
    of our house. A live oak 
    reaching up in three directions, 
    waist-thick master branches 
    rough & mossy. 
    I imagined it as mine 
    the moment I saw it. 
    The house would belong to all. 
    The tree to me. 
    
    From beneath it, I can see 
    into each room. I don't look up 
    often enough. I look around,
    from window to window, 
    at my family, my house 
    alive & secure. A life-size diorama 
    I'm growing old in. 
    
    Every few years the tree gets trimmed, 
    sometimes as much as a third of it 
    gets sawn off, mulched, & driven away. 
    The dust settles bright & aromatic, 
    a sandy pattern within 
    the ridges of the roots. 
    The canopy lifted, 
    the shade dappled anew.  
    
    And my tree bounces back, 
    quickly dense again with leaves, 
    stretching up imperceptibly, 
    inch by delicate inch over 
    the chimney, over me. 
    I sit, book & wine at hand. 
    Breathing deep & waiting 
    to be called back inside, 
    back home. 
    
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