Walter Mosley, The Tempest Tales

[firecat]

I just gobbled up another Walter Mosley audiobook, The Tempest Tales. This book is a tightly woven collection of short stories (not quite a novel, but not really independent stories either).

( general spoilers )

On the surface the conversations seem to be about religion, and you’ll probably get more out of the book if you are glancingly familiar with Christian religious tropes such as St Peter, Heaven, Hell, judgement, Lucifer, and so on. (However, for reasons that are unclear to me, although I'm quite sure it's deliberate, Mosley never mentions Jesus.) But I don’t think the book or the conversations are really about religion when you get right down to it. Religion, and the bureaucratic, rule-bound heaven that Mosley makes up, is standing in for the system that glorifies government and corporations at the expense of people, that oppresses poor people and people of color, and that tries to brainwash people into believing that they have to mindlessly follow rules that don’t make sense in the real world.

I’m afraid I’m making the book sound really dour and boring. There really are a lot of conversations about ethics and they get a little repetitive toward the end, but the book is playful and moving with lots of really funny moments.

The audiobook is produced by Griot Audio, a division of Recorded Books that specializes in books by African-American writers, narrated by African-American performers. This book is really well narrated by Ty Jones. As a white person, I don’t know much about African-American speech patterns, and I don’t get as much out of reading books that rely on those speech patterns as some people might, because I can’t reproduce them accurately in my head. So it helps my appreciation a lot to listen rather than read.

#5, American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang

[b-writes.livejournal.com]

American Born Chinese is a graphic novel that has three interwoven stories; one, a fairly straightforward telling of Chinese-American boy Jin Wang's childhood and teen years; the legendary story of The Monkey King; and last, a sitcom-style parody of a teenage boy's attempt to escape his overbearing Chinese cousin, a bucktoothed stereotype named Chin-kee.

Overall, this is a great, solid book, and I enjoyed it a lot. The three storylines are explicitly tied together at the end of the book, and the story becomes a bit less effective for me; I think I would have liked it more if the parallels were less explicit. Yang has a great, wry sense of humor, and portrays Jin Wang's attempts to navigate high school in a way that can make almost everyone cringe with recognition-- which makes the racism and stereotyping he encounters all the more difficult and frustrating for the reader to experience.

The artwork is lovely, simple and clean for all three storylines, and Yang has a wonderful gift with expressions. (I also would have happily read an entire story featuring Monkey, but that's mostly my love of the Journey to the West in all its incarnations.)

RaceFail has brought up a lot of discussion on avenues non-white creators use to get 'in' to the mainstream, so I thought it was notable that this book said that Yang received a Xeric Foundation grant in 1997, which encourages self-publishing. Korean-American Derek Kirk Kim and Ellen Forney, who illustrated The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, are also Xeric winners.

Alex Sanchez, Doreen Baingana, Octavia Butler, Alice Randall

[mizchalmers.livejournal.com]

13. Alex Sanchez, The God Box

I'm starting to think that my issue with YA is not the specific books I am reading but the genre itself. Rather like Sea, Swallow Me and My Life As A Rhombus and indeed Little Brother and Uglies, The God Box kept reminding me of one of those English or drama teachers whose heart is in exactly the right place, who really, really wants to connect with the kids but who is a little too obviously trying too hard. The lesson material (unimpeachable, by the way) was just a bit too close to the surface. Manuel turns up in Paul's life, unashamedly gay and wholly adorable. Paul's girlfriend and, as it transpires, beard, is so supportive and all-around wonderful that her name is Angie and she wants to be a vet. Hugs all round! I think we learned something very important.

I am being unfair for comic effect, and there's a nice surprise near the end where one character turns out to be less one-dimensional than he has been painted thus far. The God Box is a sweet book. As an ex-fundamentalist-Christian turned San-Francisco-living, blue-hair-having-PFLAG-marcher, I could not be more squarely in this book's demographic, so maybe the effect I am describing is the effect of being in the choir and preached-to. If this book can be a lifeline to any queer kid in a rural town, Sanchez deserves all the Nobel prizes for literature, peace and awesomeness that there are. And lots more Lambdas, too.

14. Doreen Baingana, Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe

This book was among the most powerful and moving of the challenge so far, for me. Christine's childhood in Uganda was both like mine in its moments of happiness lost in the pages of CS Lewis, and violently unlike; her exile to California is a funhouse mirror reflection of my own. And while the book deals with exceedingly dark themes, it is also tender and gentle and at times exceedingly funny. There is a scene at a poetry jam in LA that made me cry with joy. The most memorable passage for me was one in which Christine, at a BBQ with the Ugandan expat community outside Los Angeles, reflects that she never felt even slightly patriotic until she got on the plane to America. I could have written that. But Baingana wrote it much more beautifully, and first :) I can't seriously have been the first one here to read it, can I? Everyone rush out and borrow it from your library. You'll love it. I insist.

15. Octavia Butler, Fledgling

Speaking of funny, I found Fledgling hilarious in a completely unexpected way. I had always thought of Butler as the bleakest of writers, and there's certainly plenty in Fledgling that is dark. Yet it's the continual subversion of expectation - in a vampire story, of all things! - that kept me up late turning the pages and chuckling. This subversion happens at every scale, from the overarching theme to each well-turned line of dialogue. A naked black girl child, apparently the embodiment of vulnerability, rapidly turns into the most formidable character in the book. And every time people speak they say sensible things, they articulate their needs. The jeopardy arises not from boring mis-communication but from the genuine difficulty of reconciling diverse needs. Butler tossed this book off as an entertainment and never took it seriously, but I loved it. You could read it as a provocative and extremely effective satire on venture capitalism, if you were, say, me.

16. Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone

Again with the highly intelligent characters - THANK you, authors - it saves so much time! The greatness of this book, though, is its project of cultural RE-appropriation. It belongs in the same company as The Wide Sargasso Sea and Jack Maggs - both of which dig into the canon (Jane Eyre and Great Expectations, respectively) and retell it with all the glossed-over economic and judicial ugliness (slaves, convicts) put back in. The protagonist of The Wind Done Gone is Cynara, and in the words of Dowson's poem her Rhett Butler has been faithful to her in his fashion. But Randall's project goes much further than giving Scarlett a half-sister and Mammy a daughter; her portrait, ultimately, is of the plantation, of the South itself, and of who died, and who killed, to save it. The madwoman in the attic, the nanny who is more than a mother; they are the makers of our nations and the ancestors to us all. This is a beautiful book, as green and clear and cold as a peridot.

Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology

[sophinisba]

13. Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology, compiled by Gay American Indians; Will Roscoe, coordinating editor, 1988

I was excited to come across this book because I've read very little by Native authors and I thought this would make a neat introduction and help me find some authors I'd like to read more of. It was a little bit disappointing to me in that respect because it had less fiction than I'd expected and the more generalizing non-fiction selections felt very dated to me. Still I really liked that it was almost all written by gay and lesbian American Indians, whereas other books I've seen about Two Spirit people are by white anthropologists. (My understanding is that Roscoe is white and did a lot of the editing on this but very little of the writing, and he worked with activists from the San Francisco-based group Gay American Indians.) It has a mix of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and art by women and men from a lot of different tribes from different parts of the US and Canada. ( Read more... )

#14: "As I grew older" by Ian Abdulla

[sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com]

As I grew older: The life and times of a Nunga growing up along the River Murray, by Ian Abdulla (Omnibus, 1993)

I'm... not sure about this book. But that's not about the paintings or the text (neccessarily), just about the presentation.

Abdulla's paintings include text, but on each opposite page in this book the text is corrected (grammar and spelling) and expanded, and it's that about which I'm not sure what to think. The copyright information mentions only Abdulla: no editor is credited. There's no real way to reconcile this dilemma - if the expanded text was not there, I might feel that the mispellings etc were being highlighted. And yet I feel the same as it is.

There is no plot to this book; no story. It is, in essence, a collection of Abdulla's paintings, all around the topic of his childhood on the Murray. While the text describes a difficult life, where sources of income (whether river-rat skins or empty bottles) were of prime importance, the paintings are bright, full of life and hope and happiness. The most striking is the one reproduced on the cover, of the rodeo at Berri. It's the only one at night: the only one with a black sky dotted with stars.

I love his way of painting the riverbanks, the trees half-way between smudged and spackled.

I would want anyone reading this to go into it aware that it is not really a children's book with a plot (even though it is undoubtedly marketed as such) but the sort of book one might find at an art exhibition. At the back there is a map noting where each painting is set, and discussing Abdulla's methods.

NB: "Nunga" is the "broad" language group term for indigenous peoples from the general area of what is now the state of South Australia.

14. A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Mohammed Hanif

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Since I'm failing at making time to post about books (here and elsewhere), I figure I will pare the number of potential tasks down by only reviewing books that haven't been posted here before. I'm doing great on numbers so far this year!

I grabbed this off the library shelf, because who could resist the title? A Case of Exploding Mangoes turns out to be a depressing and hilarious military novel set in Pakistan about the 1988 death of dictator General Zia. It mixes up timelines and viewpoints with abandon, both before and after the fatal plane crash, but I always found it easy to follow.¹ The obvious novel comparison (as the NYT apparently also thought) is Heller's Catch-22, but the writer I kept thinking of was Vonnegut. Other themes include mysticism, homosexuality, parasites, hubris, and corruption.

It's not the sort of thing I'd normally read at all, but I definitely recommend it.


¹ Though I should probably mention that when I saw Ashes of Time Redux it also made sense, which is not most people's experience.