This Week's Carriers

Two form the Booker Prize shortlist, one sci-fi and one wild card

Dear Reader,

I just sat behind my desk, all showered and cleaned up after the last boxing class of the week. I have two days of sweet freedom ahead, as my next gym class will be a hot yoga session on Sunday evening. I enjoy my gym sessions, but I enjoy reading even more, so I’m looking forward to my weekend. I plan to visit two used bookshops in Ottawa tomorrow. There will be a lot of browsing among dusty shelves, smelling old book pages, touching book spines, and of course, shopping involved. Could I be any more thrilled?

Okay. Here’s a list of stories I lived with in the past seven days.

1- Crooked Plow, by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated from the Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz

Bookstagram was raving about this book, so I picked it up as my foray into this year's Booker Prize finalists. The story starts strongly: two sisters sneak into their grandmother's room to find a precious object that she's been hiding in her old, battered suitcase. The object is a beautiful knife with an ivory handle and silver blade. They are overcome by a strong desire to taste the blade, so they put it in their mouths—beautiful, strong symbolism of the running theme of violence throughout the book, spanning generations. One of the sisters wounds her tongue, but the other’s tongue is so severely damaged that she loses the ability to speak. The dichotomy of silence and language has been an interesting theme to me, as I have started to think more critically about the events of my own childhood. That contrast is one of the engaging themes in this book, in a world plagued by pain, poverty and injustice. The prose is poetic and strong—it falls into the breasting boobily trope occasionally, but nothing unforgivable.

However, what starts as a capturing story becomes a lecture about history and culture. I was far more interested in the sisters’ characters, but the author goes on and on to explain every little detail in their lives, so he misses the opportunity to plump up these promising characters. The dynamic between the sisters, which promised a sophisticated and nuanced relationship, flattens and kind of becomes out of focus. The book, seems to me, is written with a foreign audience in mind, so instead of focusing on the story, it falls into the trap of educating. This is fine, but, as shameful as it sounds, I also want to be motivated to turn the pages in a fiction book, which I wasn’t in the second half of Crooked Plow.

The book is narrated in three POVs: the first two are of the sisters, and the third is of another observer, which again could be very interesting and insightful but I feel like it is tasked to do many things and to bring all the open threads to a knot. As a result, it more sounds like the voice of the author himself, in a hurry to solve all the mysteries for us, so you can easily forget that the narrator is another being inside the world of the story. All in all, I’m happy to have read that book, but I expected so much more from it.

2- The Details, by Ia Genberg, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson

I've never been much of an audiobook person; I’m a paper book lover through and through. The only time I tend to listen to audiobooks is for specific purposes, such as learning the correct pronunciation of names and places. However, with so many books to read in April and May, I decided to give it a try. I selected The Details, another shortlistee from the Booker Prize, primarily because it was short and matched the time I had set aside for chores last Sunday. Never before have I enjoyed cleaning my apartment so much!

The Details is breathtaking! The premise is simple enough: the narrator, an unnamed woman, is sick with a fever, so in that state, she thinks of a book an ex has given her as a gift in the past, another time that the narrator had been sick with a fever. That simple act of remembering opens up a whole lot more remembering and the narrator starts telling us about four people in her past: Johanna, Niki, Alejandro and Birgitte.

The author's understanding of human nature and relationships is remarkably precise. What adds to the enjoyment, as the title of the novel implies, is that these insights are gleaned by observing the minutiae of everyday life. There were moments when I couldn't help but gasp at the truthfulness of her words. I know this isn't the last I'll read of this book. It's the sort of book I'll want to obtain a hard copy of, just so I can highlight, underline, tab, and annotate to my heart's content.

3- Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga

This book was kind of a slow burn. The first third of the book was kind of boring, the middle part took off and I raced through the third part, only putting the book down when I had to. Nervous Conditions is about a young girl, Tambu, in post-colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 60s. She lives in a small village in poverty and longs for education. Her wealthy uncle, Babamukuru, has a long-term plan for his family to lift them from their destitution: at least one son from each family should receive a proper education so that in the expanse of generations, they can change their status. Tambu becomes thrilled when her older brother dies, paving her way to receive the education reserved for the males since she has no other brother. She goes to his uncle’s house in the city and another life begins for her. She becomes fast friends with her cousin Nyasha, Babamukuru’s unruly daughter who has spent her childhood in England and now struggles to adjust to their traditional albeit wealthy life in Rhodesia.

Tambu’s character is interesting and easy to identify with. She’s selfish, she has ambitions, she does not want to be distracted in her path to greatness. I like her. I wished the author was even more unapologetic in building her because, in the first part of the book, she spent pages after pages to convince what wicked nasty thing Tambu’s brother was so we’ll be on Tambu’s side when he dies and she is not sorry. Personally, I did not need this. This is a story about colonialism, exploitation, gender and identity. Tambu’s aversion to her home and destitution to the extent of her rejecting her family is the brutal fact of such a world.

Nyasha’s character, on the other hand, is wild, deep and honest. I have a nagging feeling that the main character of the novel, although unintentionally, might be Nyasha. I found myself from time to time to be bored of Tambu, and only turning pages to understand what was happening to Nyasha. I was struggling with the book until Nyasha officially entered, almost halfway through the book. She wants to be independent, free of the yoke of patriarchy and inequality she sees in her home and country. And her desire is even more taboo than Tambu’s. I feel like her outwards and inwards struggle to belong and exist is parallel to how Roy Batty steals our hearts and attention in Blade Runner movie, or how Great Gatsby is the story of Gatsby and not Nick. I don’t know. I might be missing the whole point here.

3- A View from the Stars, by Cixin Liu

I preordered this book back in March with such high hopes but it turned out to be a flop. The book is a selection of short stories and essays (fiction and non-fiction patched together? weird) that Liu has written in the last three decades. The short stories were not much to my liking, with not much soul in them, except the one titled “The Messanger.” That one is by far my favourite piece in the collection. It was quite poetic and beautiful. Among the non-fiction works, I liked “The ‘Church’ of Sci-Fi” which is about the religious themes—or lack thereof— in sci-fi, and “Poetic Science Fiction,” which is a tribute to Ken Liu’s sci-fi (which I’ve not yet read) but also discusses the poeticness of sci-fi. There’s also “The World in Fifty Years,” which shows how smart Cixin Liu is, but also pictures him as a personality that has no moral qualms about humanity’s advancement, that as long as we’re progressing, nothing is too far and no restriction is needed. It might not be how he thinks, but that’s the sense I got from this essay. All in all, with the New Yorker profile in mind, I feel like Cixin Liu is the kind of author that the more I learn about him, the less I like him. It’s normally the other way around with authors whose works I enjoy and admire.

All in all, this book seems like a hurried attempt to patch up some works of Cixin Liu and present them to the market while the Three-Body Problem enjoys the spotlight. It’s a pretty book, and the price is not cheap. I think I could have spent that money on better books.

What’s in for next week:

I started reading Paradise by the 2021 Literature Noble Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah for an online book club I recently joined. I’m hoping to finish it by Sunday noon. I also have started the second book the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. This one will probably be dragged to the next week. From the Booker Prize shortlist, I plan to read Mater 2-10 which is a lengthy one and I’m not sure I can finish it by the end of next week.

After I’m done with the Booker, I plan to start reading the Hugo Award for Best Novel shortlist. That will probably be starting toward the end of May or even June. My classes start the first week of May so I’ll have less time for free readings.

Time to go.

Fatemeh