I recommended this book for our book club, and imagine my surprise to find out it's 17 years old. I have no idea how it showed up on my recommended boI recommended this book for our book club, and imagine my surprise to find out it's 17 years old. I have no idea how it showed up on my recommended books list this year.
That fact is significant, because my problems with this novel revolve around the fact that it was only Revoyr's second novel, and I think it shows an amateurishness that I hope she has since resolved. Like most of her novels, this involves the intersection of Japanese and American culture, and in this case, African American culture in Los Angeles.
The murder mystery embedded in the book -- how four young black men and boys were killed by being left in a store freezer during the Watts riots in the 1960s -- creates the spine of the book and is fairly well told. Equally arresting are Revoyr's depictions of the personal histories of the older characters in the book, including the protagonist's grandfather Frank, whose death starts his granddaughter on a journey to find out why he left money for the store he used to own in the Crenshaw neighborhood to one of his former employees, Curtis Martindale. The granddaughter, Jackie Ishida, is a bright young law student who is aided in her sleuthing by Jim Lanier, who was a relative of Martindale.
The other piece of this book -- and its weakest link -- is Jackie's faltering relationship with her girlfriend Laura. I don't read a lot of gay fiction, but I would say that if this had been a heterosexual relationship crumbling, I would have been just as bored. The relationship drama was not only not very dramatic but really slowed down the rest of the novel.
At this stage in her career, I would describe Revoyr as a good storyteller who needed to become a better writer. I hope that occurred....more
This slim novel tells the quietly powerful story of Jozef Vinich, born in America to an immigrant family but raised mainly in the mountains of HungaryThis slim novel tells the quietly powerful story of Jozef Vinich, born in America to an immigrant family but raised mainly in the mountains of Hungary.
The dramatic opening tells the story of how baby Jozef barely survived a horrible accident, and how his dispirited father then took him back with him to his native land, hoping to live a quiet life as a sheepherder. Before he leaves America, Ondrej Vinich arranges a marriage with a local woman in what turns out to be a spectacularly bad match. As a result, Ondrej and Jozef spend as much of the year as possible in the mountains herding sheep, and that is where Jozef learns to shoot a rifle with skill and patience. Soon, the little family is joined by Jozef's cousin Zlee, a taciturn young man abandoned by his mother.
When World War I arrives, much to Ondrej's dismay, both Jozef and Zlee decide to join the Austro-Hungarian army. Once their shooting skills are recognized, they are assigned as a sharphooting team, silently killing enemy targets from hundreds of yards away.
Although the pair avoid the horrors of trench warfare, their lonely soldiering carries other costs, and for Jozef, he becomes increasingly aware of how the people he kills are completely unaware in the seconds before their deaths that a projectile from 500 yards away is about to end their existence.
Because of one horrific assignment, Jozef's sharpshooting days come to an end and by the final year of the war, he is forced to survive as a ground infantryman in the brutal clashes along the Italian frontier.
When he makes it through the war, Jozef spends time in a POW jail in Sardinia and then heads for home, and that journey will bring one other major change to his life when he encounters a young Gypsy woman along the way. Finally, Jozef makes it to his house, where he discovers the final gift his father has left him, bringing the story full circle.
Krivak's prose is simple and straightforward, which makes the miseries of the war and the dramatic moments of his encounter with the Gypsy woman all the more moving. This was well worth its nomination as a National Book Award finalist....more
Where to start? Imagine a combination of a pitch perfect memoir, a standup comedy routine, a political essay and enough awkward or infuriating white mWhere to start? Imagine a combination of a pitch perfect memoir, a standup comedy routine, a political essay and enough awkward or infuriating white male encounters to make your blood boil, and you'll have some idea of what Good Talk is.
Oh, yes, and on top of that, the whole thing is done as a graphic memoir.
Mira Jacob is hilarious, moving and full of insight, on everything from arranged marriages to dating as a woman of color to marrying a Jewish man whose parents like Trump, to wrestling with how to answer the constant questions from her precocious son Z.
The exchange of emails over what intro would be used on a Boston public radio program to discuss her first novel is practically worth the price of admission by itself.
This short memoir depicts writer Valeria Luiselli's year spent translating for children from Central America who had been detained at the U.S. border This short memoir depicts writer Valeria Luiselli's year spent translating for children from Central America who had been detained at the U.S. border and were seeking asylum.
The power of this work is that it doesn't try to do too much, and yet it conveys just enough context and particular stories that you come away feeling deeply saddened, but somehow also hopeful.
Luiselli, who is from Mexico, was waiting for her green card to arrive in 2015 when the child migration crisis hit the border. Because Trump has been so overtly hateful toward immigrants, it is easy to forget that the events Luiselli depicts were overseen by the Obama administration, which gave Mexico money to divert Central American children back toward their home countries and required a speedup in processing the cases of those who made it to the U.S., which resulted in many more deportations than would have otherwise been the case.
Luiselli particularly focuses on a teenager named Manu. He had been chased out of Honduras after the MS-13 gang had shot his friend. Later, he was joined by his sisters, who left when the same gang members tried to recruit them as girlfriends.
A startling part of the tale -- and one where Trump has not been totally wrong -- is that when Manu arrived in Hempstead, Long Island, his high school was also filled with MS-13 gang members, and he was still under threat (which he eventually managed to escape by transferring to another school). Luiselli points out that most of the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gang members in Central America once lived in the U.S. before being deported, and now had become a transnational gang involved in drug trafficking, weapons sales and other crimes.
She also grimly describes La Bestia -- the freight trains that most Central American children rode through Mexico to get to the U.S. Lying atop or in between the rail cars, the children took their lives into their own hands by riding La Bestia, and often didn't make it alive to the U.S.
Despite the frustrations of her experience and the cruelties of our immigration law, Luiselli still recognizes the great gift America is to so many outsiders. As she puts it:
"Before coming to the United States, I knew what others know: that the cruelty of its borders was only a thin crust, and that on the other side a possible life was waiting. I understood, some time after, that once you stay here long enough, you begin to remember the place where you originally came from the way a backyard might look from a high window in the deep of winter: a skeleton of the world, a tract of abandonment, objects dead and obsolete."
This well-organized history of immigration in America was an eye-opener for me as I strive to learn more about this issue.
Essentially, it tells the stThis well-organized history of immigration in America was an eye-opener for me as I strive to learn more about this issue.
Essentially, it tells the story of our inverted bell shape curve on immigration -- heavy immigration numbers in the late 1800s and early 1900s as mostly male eastern and southern Europeans streamed into America to work in its factories, followed by severe immigration restrictions from the 1920s to the 1960s, and bookended by another huge surge in immigration with a very different set of characteristics, dominated by Mexicans, Central Americans, and Asians.
Daniels is obviously pro-immigration, even though he never explicitly says so. It is clear in his focus on the injustice and racism of past immigration laws and regulations and his quick dismissal of most arguments about immigrants taking away jobs from native-born Americans or burdening the welfare system.
A couple of factoids really stood out: 1) the dominant source of immigrants is family members, and they are NOT subject to the numerical country-based quotas that exist for other immigrants. That "chain effect" of migration is what has most changed the character and statistics of America today. A smaller but also non-quota group that has helped reshape the landscape is refugees, particularly those from Southeast Asia, eastern Europe and parts of Africa. And for some reason, I was struck by the fact that Ronald Reagan presided over legislation that codified the practice of letting large numbers of Mexican and other Latino agricultural workers come into America without serious restrictions.
The book ends around 2000, with a post-9/11 epilogue, so the last decade or so of immigration experience (and Congressional gridlock) is missing. Also, at times Daniels' writing is overly laden with statistics and minutiae, but all in all, this is an important and very fine introduction to U.S. immigration history....more
As part of an immigration project I'm working on, I recently spent a lot of time interviewing members of the Hmong community in Minneapolis-St. Paul. As part of an immigration project I'm working on, I recently spent a lot of time interviewing members of the Hmong community in Minneapolis-St. Paul. For those who don't know, the Hmong are an ancient Chinese tribe that centuries ago moved mostly to Laos, where they fought for the Americans during the Vietnam War.
This of course put them in great jeopardy after the war ended, and thousands of Hmong fled to refugee camps in Thailand and then to the U.S., where the largest single concentration now lives in St. Paul.
Kao Kalia Yang tells about this journey through her own family, particularly the role of her grandmother, who by the time she died a few years ago had 300 direct descendants living in the U.S.
The memoir is fascinating and generally well done, although there were times when I felt Yang's English as a second language was evident -- small grammatical or syntactical anomalies. But she does a good job of evoking the people in her story, the deep-forested jungle of Laos, the barren crowding of the refugee camps, and the adjustment to a cold, foreign landscape in the Twin Cities.
Probably most winning for me, though, were the stories told by various Hmong family members, both traditional ones and the way they expressed their own journeys through life. Captured in this book is the common aspiration of many immigrants, to find a new home, to do better for their children, and in the Hmong's case, to escape a history full of death and fear. The Hmong traditionally believe that when someone dies, a spirit guide leads her back to her homeland, and the three day funeral has a ceremony in which her path is traced backwards through all the places she lived, as she journeys back to the bamboo platform on which she was born, where she "fell from the clouds" as a baby, as the Hmong believe, before reuniting with those who preceded her in death.
This was the most moving and powerful part of the book, but as a whole, The Late Homecomer gives voice and heart to a people still little known to many Americans....more
I picked this up as part of a project I'm doing on immigration, but it's going back in the maybe someday pile. While it has provocative arguments, I a I picked this up as part of a project I'm doing on immigration, but it's going back in the maybe someday pile. While it has provocative arguments, I already by the third chapter could feel it becoming repetitive, and its views on immigration are much more geared to the British and European situation than the American one.
My other qualm: While Collier purports to stake out a middle ground on the immigration debate, the tone and weight definitely skewed anti-immigration, as he raised concerns about how well immigrants were assimilating into host societies and whether the presence of a large immigrant diaspora in a country breaks down the general bonds of public trust. Much of his speculation is theoretical, too. He relies heavily on on a graph he developed showing forces of diaspora and assimilation, but none of his examples using the graph were based on actual data (very sloppy, I thought)....more
First things first. Tania James is just a terrific writer. In a few short sentences, she can capture a relationship, make you care about a character, First things first. Tania James is just a terrific writer. In a few short sentences, she can capture a relationship, make you care about a character, or present a weighty idea.
In this set of short stories, I would say the dominant theme is "melancholy sweetness," if there is such a thing. Almost all the stories deal with issues of loss -- of status, or memory, or relationships, or physical ability -- but that is not to say that these short stories leave you depressed or unhopeful.
For making full use of the short story form, I give the highest plaudits to "The Scriptological Review," in which a young man with some kind of emotional disorder is consumed by his self-published handwriting analysis journal, which in its final issue he wants to devote to the scraps of handwriting left behind by a father who died; "Ethnic Ken," in which a young girl struggles with acceptance by other students and shares a special relationship with her demented grandfather, who believes she is the child version of his dead wife; and "Girl Marries Ghost," a brilliant piece that takes the ancient Asian practice of women "marrying" men who had already died and thus becoming part of the dead man's family, and modernizes it with a woman who signs a contract to marry the ghost of one of the richest men in town. This last story of the book shows off James' creative brilliance, because the characters are so real and the lessons of loss and jealousy so poignant that the bizarre construct of the story seems perfectly natural.
There were also a couple of stories that deeply engaged me in the characters, but left me frustrated when the endings dangled me in midair with no resolution.
Tania James is very talented, but I have to confess I'm a novel lover, so I'm happy to know that she intends to return to that form for her next book....more
I so wish I could have given this five stars for the richness of its imagination and the grace of its writing, but I just couldn't.
In this novel, Lee I so wish I could have given this five stars for the richness of its imagination and the grace of its writing, but I just couldn't.
In this novel, Lee creates a post-apocalyptic world (it's not clear if there was a war or simply a global environmental disaster) in which privileged elites live in Charter Cities around the globe, other former cities are remade into food production facilities, and the rest of humanity struggles in the largely lawless Counties territories.
The novel centers on Fan, a young woman who one day simply walks out of her production facility city, B-mor (formerly Baltimore) to search for her missing boyfriend, Reg. B-mor has been repopulated by Chinese immigrants taken from an environmentally poisoned village, and they live a sort of Asian hive existence, producing the fish and vegetables sold to the Charter cities. Fan is a fish tank diver, able to hold her breath underwater for long periods, and her largely innocent love story with gangly Reg is broken when he disappears. Rumors abound that he is somehow genetically cancer-free, a rare attribute in a world where nearly everyone seems to die of the disease, and that may have played a role in his disappearance.
In telling this story, Lee has two goals. One is to create a narrative of what happened to Fan after she left, and that part of the novel is gripping, poignant, and at times downright creepy. The strength of Fan's character is that even though she is used by most people she encounters, she never loses her sense of autonomy and freedom.
The other part of the narrative is Lee trying, through an unknown B-more narrators' voice, to talk about why Fan's story became for a time a mythical rallying cry in the city, and in the process philosophizes about conformity and freedom, status and aspiration, assimilation and separateness. These are themes that obviously matter to Lee, but I found these sections of the book, while sometimes brilliant, overly long, and after a while, I just wanted to snip them out so I could get back to Fan's journey.
This irritating double story might have earned an even lower ranking from me if it were not for Lee's prodigious gifts as a writer and stylist....more
This is a wonderful novel, with tales of loves lost, loves regained, emigration, repatriation, betrayal, disappointment and reconciliation.
Anju Melvin This is a wonderful novel, with tales of loves lost, loves regained, emigration, repatriation, betrayal, disappointment and reconciliation.
Anju Melvin is a studious little girl growing up near Chennai, India. Her father is a chauffeur, and her mother died when she was too young to remember. She lives with her father, her grandmother and her older sister Linno.
As a teen, she wins a scholarship to an exclusive school in Manhattan -- but only because she falsely claims that the brilliant drawings done by Linno are hers. Once in America, she lives with a wealthy Indian-American family in which the mother is a TV host on a program like "The View," and the brash son fashions himself a documentary filmmaker. All goes well until she confesses her false pretenses to the one boy in the school who seems to like her.
When the deed is discovered, Anju is expelled, and rather than face her shame, she runs away to the one other person she has met -- a woman named Bird who works in a hair salon in Queens and who takes her in. Unbeknownst to Anju, Bird has sought her out because of a deep connection she has to Anju's family. And unbeknownst to anyone else, Linno harbors her own dark secret about her mother's death.
Anju believes her family will be shamed by her presence. They vow to find her no matter what, and it is these conflicting currents that lead to the dramatic climax of the book.
In this first novel, James raises questions about affluence, poverty, assimilation, what we give up to pursue other dreams, what we gain when we go home. Well worth the read....more
Eric Liu is a first generation Chinese American who was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton and an obvious high achiever. In this thoughtful series of ess Eric Liu is a first generation Chinese American who was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton and an obvious high achiever. In this thoughtful series of essays, he explores everything from assimilation to ethnic roots to intermarriage to Chinatowns, real and virtual.
What impressed me most about this book is that he never, ever provides easy answers or pat views. Constantly examining his own inner life, Liu shows just how complicated the issues of ethnicity, Americanism and assimilation are.
So, for instance, when he was a teenager in upstate New York, he found it very important to hang out with students who were safely rebellious pranksters, to defy the stereotype of the goodie two shoes Asian kid, and remembers with chagrin that he also made fun of an earnest, high achieving Indian American girl, and then reflects that both of them were undoubtedly seen by others as Asian nerd kids.
One of his most poignant sections is about visiting his grandmother Po Po in New York's Chinatown, where she came to live after years in Taiwan, and where he found himself with all the mixed feelings of a successful young Asian American who could barely speak the language, whose grandmother made him a huge feast every time he stopped by, and who would hug him fiercely as he left to say, "I wish I had wings so I could fly to where you live!" and yet never left the confines of Chinatown.
This is more than an analysis of being Asian American. It is a fundamental exploration of how we form our identities and our connections to our pasts....more
Henry Park is a man of secrets. Part of it is his Korean inheritance, assimilating with American culture in an almost seamless way, marrying an Americ Henry Park is a man of secrets. Part of it is his Korean inheritance, assimilating with American culture in an almost seamless way, marrying an American wife. And part of it is the fact that he is a spy.
It's a freelance operation that he is part of, doing covert jobs for any number of clients, and that work has contributed to a growing sense that Henry is losing his way. He and his wife are separated, torn apart by the accidental death of their young son. But Henry's work and his almost pathological hiding have played their part as well.
During his personal crisis, Henry has become too emotionally involved with one target, a Filipino psychiatrist, and now he is being put to the test by his enigmatic, dangerous boss, who has asked him to infiltrate the budding mayoral campaign of a New York City councilman, John Kwang.
Along the way, Henry works to get back together with his wife Lelia, to come to terms with his complicated feelings about his birth family, and to balance his admiration for Kwang with the job he has been asked to do.
While there are some dramatic plot developments along the way, as Kwang faces increasing opposition despite his charismatic rise, the real purpose of Native Speaker seems more atmospheric and philosophical.
Lee is a skilled writer and is expert at dealing with the nuances of inheritance, assimilation, difference and characterization. But for my taste, there were a few too many atmospherics in this novel, particularly in Henry's relationship with his wife. For much of the book, I was never quite sure why they were on the outs and what it would take to get them back together.
Still, Lee is such a good writer and is so erudite in the ways of life and people, this is well worth the read....more
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