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50books_poc18. Angela Johnson, Heaven
This is a sequel, of sorts, to Johnson's exquisite The First Part Last, and I was very happy to see Bobby and his daughter Feather again. Heaven lacks the urgency and immediacy of First, partly because the setting has changed from a pitch-perfect Brooklyn to a small Ohio town, and partly because our protagonist Marley's crisis, while earth-shattering, lacks the physical weight of, you know, a baby.
I read Heaven hard on the heels of The Girls Who Went Away, a remarkable and masterly study of the effects of adoption and relinquishment upon a generation of mothers. That helped me see Heaven in the context of a decades-long seismic shift in attitudes towards adoption. One remarkable outcome of participating in this challenge is that I read the reference book with a certain amount of surprise and disapproval at its overwhelming concentration on the experiences of white women. Six months ago I probably wouldn't have noticed.
19. Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother
Oh, this was a devastating book, in so many ways. It is devastatingly honest. Kincaid does not spare the characters of her mother or her brother. The portrait she paints of Devon Drew is in many ways the portrait of a wasted life. Yet the writer is never petty; she is equally unsparing of her own follies, her own betrayals. How like a knife to the heart it is to read of the expatriate coming home from America, wielding her credit cards and her talents as an informed consumer as if they could do any good. How familiar her shame in the safe space, the warm life she has created for herself elsewhere; at the people she had to jettison in order to do it. It is this pitilessness that raises My Brother above the level of mere memoir. It is the plain grandeur of the language that accords it the status of myth.
20. Osamu Tezuka, Buddha, Vol 1: Kapilavastu
You have to understand that I grew up on Kimba the White Lion and wept over his parents' murder and his captivity; that I boycotted Disney's The Lion King because it plagiarised my childhood. I came late to Astro Boy and it never quite clicked for me; and by the time I had children of my own I was enthralled, body and soul, in the spell of Hayao Miyazaki. And then there is my deeply uncomfortable relationship with Disney himself. When I was small I found the anthropomorphic animals misshapen and frightening, and their jokes and gestures, drawn from completely alien American traditions of slapstick and vaudeville, impossible to interpret or comprehend.
As I grew older Disney princesses embodied the kind of woman I am not and can never be; Disneyland was a holiday only well-to-do Australian families could even contemplate, and my family was not well-to-do. There was a slight thawing of relations around the period of Beauty and the Beast and Mulan, when I would see practically any film just to satisfy my hunger for cinema, and then I found out about Disney's testimony before HUAC and decided to write him off altogether and that his notion of "the happiest place on earth" was a fatuous and corporatist nightmare. Which is where I stand today.
Encountering those Disneyesque grotesques - for Osamu Tezuka was inspired and deeply influenced by Disney - in a book about Siddhartha is, then, a very complicated and weird experience for me. I have to fight through layers and layers of loathing for Disney shot through with long-ago childish worship of Kimba, magnified by unfamiliarity with the source material and uncertainty about the tone. Kapilavastu is, clearly, a magnificent achievement, full of energy and remarkable human insight, and yet I am unquestionably not its target audience. Will I go on with the series? I am not sure.
This is a sequel, of sorts, to Johnson's exquisite The First Part Last, and I was very happy to see Bobby and his daughter Feather again. Heaven lacks the urgency and immediacy of First, partly because the setting has changed from a pitch-perfect Brooklyn to a small Ohio town, and partly because our protagonist Marley's crisis, while earth-shattering, lacks the physical weight of, you know, a baby.
Sometimes Pops just doesn't get it. He even said a while ago that because I was fourteen I didn't understand about life, but I wasn't about to hear that.
I read Heaven hard on the heels of The Girls Who Went Away, a remarkable and masterly study of the effects of adoption and relinquishment upon a generation of mothers. That helped me see Heaven in the context of a decades-long seismic shift in attitudes towards adoption. One remarkable outcome of participating in this challenge is that I read the reference book with a certain amount of surprise and disapproval at its overwhelming concentration on the experiences of white women. Six months ago I probably wouldn't have noticed.
19. Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother
That Thursday night when I heard about my brother through the telephone, from a friend of my mother's because my mother and I were in a period of not speaking to each other (and this not speaking to each other has a life of its own, it is like a strange organism, the rules by which it survives no one can yet decipher; my mother and I never know when we will stop speaking to each other and we never know when we will begin again), I was in my house in Vermont, absorbed with the well-being of my children, absorbed with the well-being of my husband, absorbed with the well-being of myself. When I spoke to this friend of my mother's, she said that there was something wrong with my brother and that I should call my mother to find out what it was. I said, What is wrong? She said, Call your mother. I asked her, using those exact words, three times, and three times she replied the same way. And then I said, He has AIDS, and she said, Yes.
Oh, this was a devastating book, in so many ways. It is devastatingly honest. Kincaid does not spare the characters of her mother or her brother. The portrait she paints of Devon Drew is in many ways the portrait of a wasted life. Yet the writer is never petty; she is equally unsparing of her own follies, her own betrayals. How like a knife to the heart it is to read of the expatriate coming home from America, wielding her credit cards and her talents as an informed consumer as if they could do any good. How familiar her shame in the safe space, the warm life she has created for herself elsewhere; at the people she had to jettison in order to do it. It is this pitilessness that raises My Brother above the level of mere memoir. It is the plain grandeur of the language that accords it the status of myth.
20. Osamu Tezuka, Buddha, Vol 1: Kapilavastu
You have to understand that I grew up on Kimba the White Lion and wept over his parents' murder and his captivity; that I boycotted Disney's The Lion King because it plagiarised my childhood. I came late to Astro Boy and it never quite clicked for me; and by the time I had children of my own I was enthralled, body and soul, in the spell of Hayao Miyazaki. And then there is my deeply uncomfortable relationship with Disney himself. When I was small I found the anthropomorphic animals misshapen and frightening, and their jokes and gestures, drawn from completely alien American traditions of slapstick and vaudeville, impossible to interpret or comprehend.
As I grew older Disney princesses embodied the kind of woman I am not and can never be; Disneyland was a holiday only well-to-do Australian families could even contemplate, and my family was not well-to-do. There was a slight thawing of relations around the period of Beauty and the Beast and Mulan, when I would see practically any film just to satisfy my hunger for cinema, and then I found out about Disney's testimony before HUAC and decided to write him off altogether and that his notion of "the happiest place on earth" was a fatuous and corporatist nightmare. Which is where I stand today.
Encountering those Disneyesque grotesques - for Osamu Tezuka was inspired and deeply influenced by Disney - in a book about Siddhartha is, then, a very complicated and weird experience for me. I have to fight through layers and layers of loathing for Disney shot through with long-ago childish worship of Kimba, magnified by unfamiliarity with the source material and uncertainty about the tone. Kapilavastu is, clearly, a magnificent achievement, full of energy and remarkable human insight, and yet I am unquestionably not its target audience. Will I go on with the series? I am not sure.
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