12: Zami

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Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.

in short: In this autobiographical novel, Lorde focuses her storytelling around the relationships she's had with various women over the years, starting with her mother (of course) and progressing through her various friends, lovers, and would-be-lovers.

in which it is all about me: ♥__♥. That is all.

( more )

#10. Kindred, by Octavia Butler

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#10.  Kindred, Octavia Butler.
1979

Okay, I am about the fiftieth person to read this book in this community, and the sixth or seventh to post about it TODAY.  Which makes me feel as if an in-depth review would be... unnecessary?  Redundant?  I will, nonetheless, try to write briefly about what I myself took away from it. 

A brief summary: Dana, who is black, is a feminist and a writer.  It is 1976, and she has just moved with her husband of not-very-long, Kevin (who is white), to a their first house together in Los Angeles.  By mechanisms unknown to her, she finds herself unwillingly pulled back into the past, for the presumable purpose --  she quickly figures out -- of saving Rufus, a young white boy who will become the master of his father's Maryland plantation, and keeping him alive long enough to father the child who will become Dana's ancestor.  But that means Dana has to live -- and  try to keep her body, integrity, and sense of self intact, in a society in which blacks are property, women are treated like children, and she has no legal or personal rights at all.

Butler calls this book a "grim fantasy," which seems correct, in that it's certainly not science fiction.  The mechanism of time travel is not really important here; what matters are its consequences.  I find Butler's writing very immediate, and although she is not a particularly lyrical or elegant stylist, her calm, tough, clear prose works very well to keep the story moving, to illuminate character and to draw the reader into the questions she is most interested in addressing: those of assumptions; of ambiguous ethical questions; of painful choices which genuinely -- unlike in most fiction -- have no obvious right answer.

A couple of interesting, and illuminating, quotes from the book's Wikipedia page:

"I was trying to get people to feel slavery," Butler said in a 2004 interview. "I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people." In another interview, she said, "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you."

The book is set on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Butler said she chose the setting "because I wanted my character to have a legitimate hope of escape," and because two famous African-Americans, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, had been enslaved there.

#11. Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine

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#11.  Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine
2007, Drawn & Quarterly

I keep trying to like Adrian Tomine, and he kind of just keeps leaving me cold.  Cool, anyway.  I'm not really sure what else to say about it. 

I read Shortcomings in the space of about an hour; and thought about it; and then I reread it, trying to be sure to catch whatever I might have missed.  Tomine's work is  much more technically accomplished now than it used to be, and sometime he even gets daring or lyrical in his framing.  But his characters are kind of... they leave me untouched.  What can I say?  I know plenty of people who love his work.  But I keep comparing his spare, skillful black-and-white comics about humans in relationships to the spare, skillful black-and-white comics about humans in relationships of Jaime Hernandez, and I'm like, "Man.  One of these artists I keep going back to and his characters live in my imagination.  And the other one... I close the book and they're gone."

Which is probably just as well, because they were assholes anyway.  Nobody in Shortcomings is very likable, including the protagonist -- which is, I suppose, one of the strengths of the book.  Ben, who (like Tomine) is Japanese-American, is having a rocky time in his relationship with his girlfriend Miko.  Miko, also Japanese, suspects that Ben has a wandering eye for white women (by which both she and he appear to mean "blonde and blue-eyed," which apparently describes all the eligible Caucasian females in California).  Ben denies it... and then concedes that maybe, yeah, he's been culturally conditioned to find that sexy, but it that his fault?  Ben is intensely defensive, and never seems to give a moment's thought to Miko's well-being.  Which is why, when the relationship gets rocky, it comes as no surprise...

An interesting book about interesting issues, and certainly a protagonist and perspective we don't see much -- or enough -- of.  I just wish... I wish I could find an emotional heart in Tomine's work.  It's so cool and cynical, it stands so far away while it dissects, that it's hard for me to care.  A story about emotions that refuses to become emotionally engaged is... it's not something that can really become meaningful for me.

Trumpet and Wish I was Here, Jackie Kay, 5 and 6/50

[cyphomandra.livejournal.com]

( Jackie Kay, Trumpet. )

( Jackie Kay, Wish I was Here. )

Both these books have been reviewed here before - the reviews of Trumpet made me seek it out, and I'm glad I did. While I was trying to track it down I ran across Wish I was Here as well, which I liked - not as much as Trumpet, but I'm more of a novel person in most circumstances.