May 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

Illustration from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
by W. W. Denslow
via Wikimedia Commons

"2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year"
The Guardian,
Saturday, January 5, 2019

May 6th will be the 100th anniversary of the death of L. Frank Baum, the American children's author who wrote the Wizard of Oz books, mentions The Guardian. We still have perhaps two-thirds of the series in our bookshelves, so I might take a look at them again.

Walt Whitman, the poet who foisted upon us (indirectly) the film Dead Poets' Society and who inspired much other art by writing Leaves of Grass, was born 200 years ago on May 31st.

As far as new books appearing this month, I feel drawn to the reprint of Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky, edited by Bryan Karetnyk, that Penguin Classics will be releasing tomorrow. Also, having enjoyed a New York-centred novel for teenagers, The Poet X, read on an audiobook by the author, Elizabeth Acevedo, I'm looking forward to With the Fire on High.

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The Poet X (2018), which I read on the recommendation of a colleague, is a series of fictional autobiographical poems written by a Dominican daughter of a Catholic family. Xiomara's passion for writing, her growing skepticism of the Catholic religion of her upbringing, and her anxiousness to break free from the rigid repression of her mother's household to venture further in both writing and in a relationship with a boy classmate, drive her away from her old life.

If I were to have read all the verse that I listened to per audiobook in a paper book, it might have felt weaker, because the print lacks the momentum and the authenticity that the author's voice gave it.

The heart of the book is slam poetry anyway, however, so it naturally lends itself best to a spoken performance.

Skimming through the Amazon preview, however, I see that even in printed form it is already pithy:

My parents probably wanted a girl who would sit in the pews
wearing pretty florals and a soft smile.
They got combat boots and a mouth silent
until it's sharp as an island machete.

In terms of other Young Adult books I've listened to these past few months, I felt that Angie Thomas's On the Come Up and The Hate U Give — because they see the fictional southern American suburban "ghetto" of Garden Heights in a more detailed and encompassing way than Acevedo's Bronx — were more ambitious than Acevedo's book. But the principal characters in The Poet X are well and ably sketched, although the marginal 'extras' are a bit of a lost opportunity. For example:

Shake my head as even the drug dealers posted up
near the building smile more in the summer, their hard scowls
softening into glue-eyed stares in the direction

of the girls in summer dresses and short shorts

via Amazon.com

In On the Come Up or The Hate U Give, we're likely to be told about what the dealers' families are like, why they're selling drugs, who has the dealers under their thumb and how likely the dealers are to escape from gang affiliations and this livelihood if they want to escape.

We'll know which hobbies and childhood plans are stored on the other side of the line that separates law from law-breaking, where the dealers' ethical boundaries lie, where the balance is between joy at a generous income and distaste at its origin, what their family, friends, and neighbours think of their dealing, and what happens to the neighbourhood.

In Acevedo's book, as far as I recall the only thing we know is that they're sleazy and physically threatening. All of this is no reflection on her writing, because she might be just faithfully writing what she knew. But it is a little sad that given a complex neighbourhood, the depiction of its humanity does not extend further, and that the world is separated into the proverbial sheep and the goats.

I like logical prose and understated self-description and careful similes, so the poetry is often wasted on me. For example,

Jesus feels like a friend
I've had my whole childhood
who has suddenly become brand-new;
who invites himself over too often, who texts me too much.

This doesn't seem like an apt comparison to me, if I'm being fastidious.

I think that Acevedo's book is also firmly anchored in a conservative world where well-inclined teachers are authorities to appeal to and imitate, and one can leave poverty by 'obeying the rules.' In Thomas's books, the teachers can be good or bad, but in both cases certainly don't know everything. Also, she's likelier to think that 'the rules' suck or don't work. On Friday, American politician Ilhan Omar Twitter-posted a quotation from Malcolm X:

I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.

via Amazon

Thomas mentions Malcolm X in The Hate U Give, and I think she'd approve of this quotation. She also seems to believe, refreshingly, that teenagers even at 16 have the right to chart their own paths and morality independently of the adults (relatives or non-relatives) in their environment. I was worried about Acevedo's book because — in contrast to my own experience, at least — the relationship with the mother seemed so toxic that I wasn't sure if it was redeemable; but Xiomara's path forward still lay closely bound with her family, although the author does not condemn her impulse to flee them for a while.

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To switch from The Poet X to On the Come Up, On the Come Up also worried me for different reasons. It seems to accept the instant celebrity that dominates the internet age; I'd have expected Angie Thomas to turn against that.

Bri, On the Come Up's protagonist, has worked to become a rapper for years, filling notebooks with her verse. I guess she has therefore earned the confidence to put her rap forward on YouTube and on the radio, and to seek a record deal. But it surprises me a great deal that the adult professionals didn't require her to do more training, or to receive more input from mentors or other professionals, so that her career would be more solidly grounded and versatile.

Besides, I suspect that instant fame — which Bri experiences — is so psychologically damaging that I can't imagine why it is still tolerated. Reality TV stars, parents of a murdered child, high school students who survived a bullet, someone who was in an internet meme — all of these people face a remorseless artillery of publicity and comment, which surely amounts to psychological torture and journalistic malpractice. Thomas might have experience with this herself, because she rose to fame meteorically once The Hate U Give was appreciated and accepted for publication; although she is not as young as her heroine, she was not yet 30 at that time. But the main criticism of fame she offers in On the Come Up is that words can be twisted against a rapper (or author), to allege horrible or at least dangerous messages that were never intended. This can lead to violence by people who see such messages where none exist, and to personal and professional reprisals against the unfortunate rapper or author.

But, to end the carping criticism, Thomas's and Acevedo's books spotlight a part of the American experience I rarely see described with such a ring of truth and of affectionate, firsthand knowledge. That is why I'm pleased about Acevedo's new book, mentioned above, which is about teenage pregnancy and will appear on May 7th; and pleased about Thomas's remarks on Twitter that she is working on a new novel.

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Since the last 'What We'll Be Reading Next' post in February, I have also listened to an author-read audiobook of Toni Morrison's 1987 classic about American slavery post-Civil War, Beloved. There were two motives: the prompting of a Penguin women's book club, also the release in Britain of Mouth Full of Blood, as mentioned in February. I regretted listening to Beloved, for the pure unliterary reason that it is incredibly grim, and that it also has the imprecise poetic language that drives me batty. It has a purposeful misleading and vague quality that makes a bit of a supernatural detective story out of a rather sordid tale of Hardyesque misery in a rural remoteness where people act 'on instinct.'

It's cheeky to say this, but... Like with Hardy, I wasn't sure about whether it was ethical that an educated, financially well-established author takes it upon themselves to set forth for the world the inner lives and pains of poor, illiterate characters, who begin to be more abstractions of authorial initiatives than faithful embodiments of rural tragedies and triumphs. — As, for example, Thomas Gray so touchingly sketched in outline in his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
The applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes,
Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd;

etc.

[Wikipedia: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"]

Gray's viewpoint seems more respectful than that of a novel that describes humans as bundles of instinct, running their heads into the walls as their instincts bump against the realities of the world, quite undeterred by logic, wisdom, or observation.

Still, I always had the feeling when reading Beloved that there were virtues here that I was missing. The Pulitzer Prize that Morrison received for this book, as well as her Nobel Prize six years later, show that at least other and better critics saw them.

But I think that this is unarguable, at least: Paul D is, to me, a female wish-fulfillment character. He disappears when he isn't wanted, supports quietly, and steers clear of interfering with the women folk's impulses. He has experienced his own grief and turmoil, but he does not ask the heroine's help to work through them. The fact that he does not seem to think of doing so is quite convenient, too; she never offers any help anyway, as I recall. If Toni Morrison were Tony and Paul D were Pauline, I think that this interpretation of the role of the opposite sex might be more flagrantly unfair, but at any rate it I will still staunchly state that one-sided emotional labour, whether of women or men, is at least not everyone's fantasy.

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Besides I began reading about Alexander von Humboldt's Russian expedition, thanks to the generosity of one of my uncles, who has also lent me James Baldwin's Another Country.

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WHAT I WILL ACTUALLY READ:


Einstein: The Life and Times (1971), by Ronald W. Clark, has unexpectedly become a page-turner for me.

Its 800 pages still cause me to figuratively topple over backward whenever I consider their length. But the book is tremendously interesting to me — also because of parochial reasons, since Albert Einstein lived in Berlin for so many years at such a historically significant time, i.e. the Weimar Republic, and because of personal reasons as my great-aunt was a massive fan of the scientist. I am impatient until I can set foot in the U-Bahn again and start reading more.

It is such a challenge to portray Einstein well. Many anecdotes about his life are nebulous myths and his character is full of contradictions. It is hard to reconcile the sometimes-emotionally bankrupt man who was not the coziest father, with the benevolent patron saint of pacifists and impecunious young scientists. It is hard to see the world traveller and League of Nations enthusiast in the person who was prejudiced against every Chinese person who existed. The young iconoclast who smashed Newtonian physics to bits was the same man, apparently, as the professor who lagged 'behind' his quantum-physics-loving contemporaries when he refused to believe that statistics and randomness were the real way to understand the universe, and when he insisted that there must be some kind of ordered and rational 'determinacy.'

And, of course, there are contradictions that have nothing to do with Einstein's character directly: his Special and General Theories on Relativity became internationally famous when many scientists didn't even understand them. Which places the biographer in front of the challenge of not only getting the science right, which is enough of a challenge in the best of circumstances; but also of grasping pretty much the most difficult theoretical science there is.

I am currently half-way through the book, as in the late 1920s the optimism and violence of the shaky Weimar Republic give way to fascism and even worse anti-Semitism in Germany. To descend to a happier and more domestic level, Einstein has just hired his future secretary/housekeeper Helen Dukas.

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I am still reading Cavafis's poems, Humboldt's Russland-Expedition of course, too; but admittedly haven't touched Aristotle's Politics in a while. After Humboldt is finished, James Baldwin will enter my U-Bahn reading bag. I hate Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings with a fiery passion whenever I pinch my nose, gather strength and try again; at any rate his Discours sur les spectacles is waiting for me, too.

Lastly, a Greek colleague returned from a recent holiday to Athens with a kind gift — the children's classic Petros's War (Ο μεγάλος περίπατος του Πέτρου, or the long journey of Peter, to try an impromptu literal translation) by Alki Zei, written in the 1970s. I already know that the young hero tries to tend a pet grasshopper, because I sought aid from Google Translate.

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Referred to earlier:
—
Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky
Bryan Karetnyk
Penguin UK
(First published 2017)

"Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
"Engraving, with facsimile signature and four line quote from Leaves of grass,
from the frontispice of a 1883 edition of Leaves of grass."
via Wikimedia Commons