Borne, Away, Undressed, No Evil
Staff Review Round-Up, 3/13/2018
Welcome to Literati Bookstore’s round-up of recent staff favorites, and an occasional place for useful links and news from around the literary web regarding upcoming events at the store.
Recent Staff Favorites (in Hardcover)
Speak No Evil, by Uzodinma Iweala
“This is who I am.”
“This is what happened to me.”
These are the simplest of expressions, yet the ability to speak them fully is a privilege not shared by the teenaged protagonists of this novel. Nigerian immigrant and Harvard-accepted aspiring doctor Niru is not able to tell his conservative religious parents that he is gay. The daughter of D.C.’s political elite, Meredith is not able to tell the world what really happened in an alley outside a bar on a hot spring night. Speak No Evil describes how loving relationships are strained, how trust is shattered, and how bodies can be broken when the truth is silenced. This heartbreakingly beautiful story will stay with you for a long time. — Jill
Awayland: Stories, by Ramona Ausubel
This collection of stories takes you to other lands only to bring you home. Ausubel has a mesmerizing way with words. The grace & wit in the telling of these tales will get you hooked on a journey you never thought you would take.-Shannon
The Undressing: Poems, by Li-Young Lee
“The war is on/if love doesn’t prevail,/who wants to live in this world?”
Li-Young Lee is an unabashed Romantic, hungrily apprehending the divine in each fleshy moment. I’ve not read any poetry that so gorgeously telescopes the history of the universe, its fires and flights and violences and great loves, that so emphatically and gracefully and intimately speaks with the voice of the manifold beloved and the mortal beloved. That first poem, the title poem, made my head explode. But arise from your swoon, gentle reader, the party is only just beginning! — Gina
Recent Staff Picks (in Paperback)
One of the Boys, by Daniel Magariel
Very late in Daniel Magariel’s debut novel One of the Boys, in a flashback, a father is driving the titular 12-year-old narrator and his older brother away from their mother in Kansas and toward a fantasy of unencumbered single fatherhood in Albuquerque. His manipulative prowess, peaking before a descent into the depths of violent and unimaginable abuse, is in full throe. Just days ago in the flashback he has convinced his youngest to exaggerate wounds in staged Polaroids, passed along to CPS to frame his wife — he plays childlike rescuer for his sons, he is to them an almost romantic figure. During their “escape” they stop in Oklahoma City. It is the summer of 1995, “where three months ago, our dad reminds us, a Ryder truck filled with ammonium nitrate fertilizer sheared the facade of the Alfred P. Murrah building.” The dad asks his sons if they ‘can feel it.’ The older asks him what he means. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been this close to evil,” the father responds.
Someone should, and likely will, write many pages about this moment, about what it means to reference a large scale atrocity that bent the imagination within a fleet, 176-page novel about the kinds of invisible and interpersonal atrocities, existing simultaneously, and yearly, on an un-quantifiable scale. All I can say is that in the flashback, the reference to “evil” seems particularly tragic, because it signifies what the father simply doesn’t know — what he is already and will be capable of, or what any of us are capable of doing or sustaining; that permanent gap between witnessing and enacting evil. Magariel’s portrait of two sons forced into the cruel and horrific stakes of such a question is, in its own way, a miracle. It is a necessary, non-didactic, psychologically masterful, and even deeply hopeful novel that works as a tactile, unflinching reckoning with abuse and masculinity. Most of all, it is an unforgettably powerful work of American literature. — John
Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer
Borne introduces us to Rachel, a scavenger, and Wick, her partner-in-survival and a biotech engineer. Rachel and Wick scrape together a life in a ruined city suffering under the tyranny of a giant bear, a Magician hungry for power, and the shadow of the collapsed Company and its failed biotech experiments. But Rachel changes everything when she brings home Borne. Found on a scavenging trip, Borne is maybe a plant, maybe an animal, but is definitely one of the more interesting characters that I’ve ever met. As Borne grows, Rachel and Wick are forced to ask deeper questions — of each other, of their world, of power and love and agency and of their own sense of identity. I was struck by the vulnerability carried by these characters against such a bleak world. At its heart, this novel grapples with what, to me, are the most meaningful questions to be explored in fiction: What makes us human? And how do we keep hold of this humanity in a world that tries to take it from us? This book is going to stick with me for a long time. — Kelsey
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, by Yiyun Li
Here’s how YiYun Li praises a memoir by the Irish writer John McGahern: “No one’s vulnerability is more devastating than the next person’s, no one’s joy more deserving. What happens to McGahern is only life, what happens to us all.” Li recounts her own experiences — her upbringing in China, her year in the army, her arrival in America, her time in psychiatric hospitals after two suicide attempts — with a similar “only life” attitude. Weaving literary criticism and personal narrative, these essays not only interrogate painful memories with bluntness and grace, but also the role reading can play in offering respite from such pain. For Li, the pleasure of reading stems from being “with people who… do not notice one’s existence.” Reading Dear Friend, however, I felt mercifully notice on page after page. — Sam
