The Lacuna / Barbara Kingsolver

A lacuna is an unfilled space, or in the case of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, a cavity separating one body of water from another.  The title of this book plays a part in the story, where its protagonist encounters such a cavity while diving in the ocean in Mexico as a young man.  Harrison Shepherd is the son of American and Mexican parents, and he spends his early adulthood in Mexico after growing up there.  By chance, he is introduced to the family of the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo.  Later he is introduced to Lev Trotsky, a Russian communist fleeing from Stalin’s takeover of rule following the Russian revolution. He becomes Trotsky’s secretary, remaining so until his assassination by an agent of Stalin shortly before World War II.  Following that, Shepherd travels to the United States where he becomes a successful author, writing two novels on Mexico’s ancient history that win him rave reviews.

But following the war, with the Red Scare’s outbreak, Harrison’s past association with known communists becomes a red flag that upends his position as a respected author.  Guilt by association condemns his literary output to the censored list.  The author, a shy homosexual, finds his life destroyed and erased when he too is labeled a communist, and the texts of his novels are used against him.

The novel is presented in the form of a diary that Shepherd has kept throughout his life.  It is a document preserved by his secretary, Mrs. Brown, who resists burning it even though Shepherd insists she do so.  The Lacuna is a story of a dual citizen who feels neither at home in the United States or Mexico.  More importantly, it presents a detailed example of how the House Un-American Activities Committee, in the years following World War II, was able target innocent citizens and destroy their lives merely because they interacted with people on the far left of the political spectrum.  It proves to be a warning of how easily an individual’s life can be destroyed on the evidence of association, no matter how flimsy.

Collecting The Silence

Crossing the roadway,
two deer bound indifferent to
my startled presence.
The third, at the brush’s edge,
locks its eyes on mine.
Then, with a tail’s flick, trusts
enough to follow.

The morning’s dew
has now been encapsulated
into a single drop.
In hesitation, courage gained
on a leaf’s precipice.
With the next step, its silence
becomes exclamation.

The wind’s drumbeat
ruffles a flower bed’s skirts into
thoughts of progeny.
Unheard, a stamen’s whisper
to an attentive pistil.
This dance of scattered pollen
potent in its invisibility.

Disoriental / Négar Djavadi

Not having any knowledge of this novel, I picked up Négar Djavadi’s book Disoriental by chance at my local public library.  It turned out to be the debut novel of an Iranian-French author, and one that has won international acclaim.  It tells the life story of Kimiâ Sadr, the story’s narrator, who was forced to flee to France with her family at age ten following the Iranian revolution and the installation of an Islamic republic.  Her parents, Darius and Sara, were revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the Shah’s regime and then opposed the rise of Khomeini and the Islamic doctrines instituted in its aftermath.

The story presents memories of Kimiâ’s childhood in Iran and her experience of realizing she was a lesbian in a culture where such a thing could result in a death sentence.  The novel is in equal parts a history of Iran, its recent politics, and a country intent on killing the dissidents that have fled the revolution, including her father who actively opposed Khomeini’s accession to power.  Growing up in Paris, Kimiâ is the family’s wild child, enamored with punk rock and a culture far removed from her own.  It is the assassination of her father that draws her back into her fold, along with the realization that she wants a child of her own.

While, at times, the unfolding events feel disjointed and difficult to puzzle together, the story nonetheless carries the impact of a punch.  It is an immigrant’s tale showing that no matter how far removed, a person still carries the weight and consequences of their family’s history.  The book proved to be a pleasant discovery for me, and one I’m sure will intrigue others as well.

Love Marriage / V.V. Ganeshanathan

Recently, I read V.V. Ganeshanathan’s second novel, Brotherless Night, a book that introduced me to a gifted author.  Naturally, I sought out her debut novel, Love Marriage.  The two books share the same theme in regard to the Tamils’ independence movement in Sri Lanka, but the settings are worlds apart.  Brotherless Night takes place for the most part in Sri Lanka itself, while Love Marriage is a story of a Sri Lankan family living in the United States and Canada.

The story’s narrator is Yalini, the daughter of immigrants who met in the United States as students, and because of the civil war in their home country, decide to become American citizens rather than return.  Born and raised in the U.S., Yalini has grown up not having close contact with her Sri Lankan relatives or the country’s customs.  But then she is summoned to Canada to care for a dying uncle, someone who spent his life fighting for the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group seeking independence from the ruling Sinhalese majority.  Interacting with him, Yalini is forced to come to terms with her family roots, the murders her uncle has committed, and the importance of racial ties that cannot be escaped despite her parents’ immigration to the west.

While her parents’ marriage was for love rather than arranged, accompanying her uncle to Canada is his daughter who has come to carry on his legacy in a traditional marriage, one agreed upon by family rather than the woman herself.  Presenting the story in vignettes, Ganeshanathan captures Sri Lanka’s complicated history, Tamil customs, and Yalini’s coming to terms with her estrangement from a place she is likely never to step foot into.  For readers looking for worthy fresh reading material, this author’s catalog is well worth checking out from their public library.

Sketchbook

In dawn’s blaze of orange
close enough to lasso
morning’s moon transparent

The sweep of the river
sun-dappled in
the high heat of noon
fool’s gold
encasing a numbing cold

Air tossed by a sudden
gust of wind
from shadowy canopy
that bright slash
of crayon a cardinal

Flushed zinnia maidens
accessorized
in late afternoon sunlight
as monarchs
courtly swirl and choose

In high-rise windows
mutely curtained
muddled light candling

The Gift Of Eyes

The potatoes, unearthed,
have been carted off to the cave
of our root cellar,
sealed against a furnace’s reach.
There they nest
through winter’s long quarantine,
a few at a time
judiciously retrieved for meals.
Roasted or boiled,
served with a dollop of butter,
meant to assuage
hunger’s longing for abundance.
The generosity of
a fall’s harvest acknowledged
when in late February
survivors expectantly begin to
open their eyes.
Our careful hoarding rewarded
at spring’s border,
as ready to be pruned for seed,
another recycling begins.

Show Them A Good Time / Nicole Flattery

Published in 2019, Show Them A Good Time is the debut story collection of Irish author, Nicole Flattery.  All of them center around women characters adrift in the world and trapped in restrictive roles.  Most have also suffered some form of trauma in their lives.  While the themes addressed in this collection are dark ones, the stories themselves are wickedly funny.

Its protagonists come from small towns and are now having to cope with life in larger cities (Dublin, Paris, New York).   Sticking out like sore thumbs, they struggle to fit in and conform to expectations.  In trying to describe these stories, two terms come to mind: off-kilter and surreal.  Reviewers have compared Nicole Flattery with Lorrie Moore, and that seems apropos.  Show Them A Good Time presents a cast of characters who might be perceived as losers and oddballs by society, but in these stories, even if feeling unmoored, their rebellious spirits remain intact.

The Best Stories Of Fyodor Dostoevsky / Fyodor Dostoevsky

This collection, published in 2001, features seven of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short stories, translated by David Magarshack.  They are featured in chronological order (except for one of them).  While I have read two of Dostoevsky’s novels (Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov), this was the first time I’ve delved into his shorter works.  What drew me to this particular collection is that it featured Notes From The Underground, a novella I’ve heard recommended by other reviewers over the years.

For me, the best story in this collection is The Honest Thief, a tragic story of an honest alcoholic who dies regretting a theft that he’s long denied having carried out.  Notes From The Underground is considered an early example of existential literature.  Its main character and narrator is an angry middle aged man who experiences an awakening to what he perceives is the meaning of life.  I found this story, along with several others, a slog to get through, feeling they belabored the points the author was trying to make.  

That said, for readers new to Dostoevsky, this collection of shorter works might serve as a gateway in deciding if they want to move on to his longer works of fiction.  The primary themes he tends to explore in his novels are on display here. 

Edwin Mullhouse; The Life And Death Of An American Writer (1943-1954). By Jeffrey Cartwright / Steven Millhauser.

Edwin Mullhouse, published in 1972, is a the supposed biography of Edwin Mullhouse, the author of the brilliant novel Cartoons, written when he was eleven years old.  The author of this biography is Jeffrey Cartwright, a lifetime friend of Edwin’s.  While a handful of excerpts of Cartoons are included, this “biography” in three sections focuses on the arc of Edwin’s daily childhood activities up to the point of his untimely death.  What soon becomes evident is rather than being a “boy genius,” Edwin is as normal as they come, gifted with intelligence but no wunderkind.

For the reader of a certain age, what makes this novel so interesting is the author’s ability to capture childhood perceptions of life in the late 1940s and early 1950s, evoking with numerous examples the games, books, and activities popular at the time.  He also presents the fear invoked by bullies on the school playground, the power of friendship on life’s direction, along with the passion of childhood romances that mimic what waits ahead in adolescence and adulthood.  With humor and dark insight, the travails and joys of childhood are articulated in the biographer’s focus on a single individual.

This book has a dark undercurrent, which only becomes evident in its later chapters.  While the twist presented at the end disturbs, it does not detract from the readers being able to fully identify with Edwin’s childhood.  He is a character most readers will recognize from their own lives.  Steven Millhauser later went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Martin Dressler.  While this work is not as well known, his gifts as an author are on full display here.  The innocence of childhood is shown to be a journey layered with landmines primed to explode.  Unusual as it plot is, it proves captivating.

Passwords

An ex-girlfriend’s birth date.
The distance to the moon and back.
Abracadabra, the key.
Guess me, spelled in Portuguese.
Death to the uninvited.
Middlemarch, a reminder that it is
still waiting to be read.
Prepare to be bored, as a tease.
In caps, undercase.
Remember this, rejected as weak.
A disconnected phone
number recalled from childhood.
The Silence of the Lambs
because it’s the movie that’s on.
That phrase that made
sense at the time, now forgotten.
Hack away, a defiant invite.