Book Review: Weather by Jenny Offill

 

Maybe the Millennials books are not my thing? Maybe my passion for books made up of paragraphs made of nicely - or even beautifully - written sentences with the above mentioned paragraphs looking like decks of cards randomly threw up in the page, is just a thing of the past? I have not the single idea and I wish there is a therapist, or even two, which can properly deal with book delusions and heartbreak...Yeah, I am heartbroken, again, but this time because of a book. 

Weather by Jenny Offill broke my heart. It is not the first book in the last months, and I bet not the last. Like in a relationship not meant to be things sounded good after a couple of pages, irony was philosophically great - I mean, how not to hahaha in waves when Ben, the husband of Lizzie, the librarian with no proper biblioeconomy educationt reads Stoics before breakfast - therefore a bit of chemistry was in the air too, but before reaching the half of the book I gave up of finding any sense. Of course life has no sense and is not going anywhere and we, humans, we are creature of boring habit and of course the American politics and newsreel turn the same humans into senseless creatures with no coordination between the right and the left sides of the brain. 

The insertions of environmentalist issues were a relatively new and interesting add on as a literary subject, and I feel the need to mention it because I haven´t read too many books with such a repertoire of topics. But, again, it was not enough to like Weather. I couldn´t do anything and my (reading) experience thought me that some books - as relationships - are not meant to be. 

Rating: 2 stars

Tunisian Book Review: Du Pain et Du Jasmin by Monia Mazigh

I am so grateful for my French Institute library card, as it allows me to discover authors from the French-speaking realm that are not easily available or made known outside the French area. It has a touch of colonialism, I know, but for the avid reader in me, keen to know other literatures from around the Globe, this access is a tremendous source of inspiration and of books that I can happily review on my modest blog.

Two diaries, a mother´s and a daughters´s. Two events with a revolutionary potential. One country: Tunisia. 

I am always curious about Tunisia - its history, culture and politics - and one of my very close friends is Tunisian-French therefore until being able to visit the country, I wanted to know more about its literature. 

Monia Mazigh was born in Tunisia but emigrated to Canada where she writes novels mostly based in her home country. Mazigh believes in fiction as a political art and is well known for her political activism, mostly on behalf of his husband deported by the American immigration authorities to Syria on suspicion of terrorist links. I may not agree with all the causes an author supports nevertheless I will be curious to read his or her books because I believe in the power of words, even they do oppose mines.

Du pain et du jasmin builds a bridge between two revolutionary events in Tunisia´s history: the so-called Bread riots between 1983 and 1984 and the ´Jasmin revolution´ in 2010. First, it´s the account of Nadia followed by her daughter´s, Lila, who is visiting, trying to improve her Arabic and reconnect to her roots. The diaries are intertwined, as short everyday accounts of people, events and the overall situation in the country. For Lila, it´s a moment when she is growing up, learning about life and values, in the same vein Nadia did when she was almost the same age. Out of her pampered life in Canada she is able to experience the difference between good and bad and how in some parts of the world, there is a different emphasis on values. Freedom, including freedom of speech, may turn sometimes into life-threatening situations, and being rebel in those countries do have a completely different meaning which may lead to years long of emprisonment. 

Although the book is more focused on the message than on the literary skills and composition, it was a good reading. As someone who loves politics - maybe too much - it was an interesting experience and I am looking forward to enrich my journey through the Northern African literature, one French book at a time (as for now, as my Arabic is hilarious on all possible accounts).

Rating: 3 stars

Movie Review: Caotica Ana

 

Hypnosis may turn into a traumatic experience, no matter how well prepare for the encounter with your inner soul and deeply burried memories. I did it once completely by curiosity and even I prepared the event for long months and also was in best hands, it took me almost one year to get rid of the uncomfortable feeling of brokeness. Entering your psychic underground does leave traces into one´s daily life in the way in which one may feel when being unwillingly shared a terrible secret. You want to - at least I did want it to - forget it, but somehow it remains sticked on your mind no matter what. It´s like the experience does have its own availability and will get out of your mind only after its expiration date, even if you struggle with all your might to forget it. The demons are out in the free and out of your control.

Caotica Ana by the Spanish film director Julio Medem is chaotically dark. An induced exploration of the mind of a young artist living a bohemian, non-conformist life in a hole in the mountains in Ibiza, it is set as a sequency of various episodes in a descrescendo counting typical for the hypnosis sessions. The movie was made following the tragical death of his younger sister, Ana, also an artist.

Meeting her thousand of year-old selves, in a journey through mostly native cultures and tongues, once returned back to her everyday life, she is asking: ´Who I am when I am not dreaming?´ Her encounters with the subconscious are progressively turning from political stories of militantism to dark comedy kitsch. It was not the sheer brutality that bothered me, but the effort to bring on too many symbols and meanings from Freud to Jung, which complicated and overloads the visual story. Which is a pity because there were some good premises for a more relaxed narrative, especially when it comes to the hidden connections between subsconscious layers and the artist self. 

In the end, I may honestly say that I was not impressed at all, although the journey through the maze and the symbols and the genuine naive enthusiasm of the Ana character did have some appeal.

Rating: 2 stars 

A Sea Prayer...

´I wish you hadn´t been so young.

You wouldn´t have forgotten the farm house,

the soot of its tone walls,

the creek where your uncles and I built

a thousand boyhood dreams´.

´But that life, that time,

seems like a dream now,

even to me,

like some long-dissolved rumour´.

Sea Prayer by Khaled Hosseini is an illustrated poem dedicated to all the father, mothers and children who tried to escape wars and famine and prosecution by taking the way of the sea towards the shores of the European freedom. The watercolour illustrations by Dan Williams are the perfect visual match, which outline the emotional environment and take the reader into a dream-like realm. This is how, mostly, our dreams appear to us, wrapped in the pastel-like unclear shapes. 

In few inspired words, Khaled Hosseini convenes the heartache of leaving one´s home, family and childhood memories, going to face the unknown where most probably their misfortune is never welcomed. Alone while craddled together in the boats taking them away be night, they pray but this is for soothing their souls. Fate has not always have been merciful to them.

This was the case of the 3yo Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, to whom and other thousands of refugees the book is dedicated to. In 2015, he drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach safety. His story, widely mediatized was for a while a topic of international discussion, but it did not change tremendously the situation as many many other unknown victims were eaten alive by the sea while trying to escape the war-torned regions of the world. The Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini, the unforgettable storyteller of the Kite Runner, is an UNCHR Goodwill Ambassador. 

Sea Prayer is a moving tribute to the fate of those people who did not make it safely to the freedom shores and a mind-opener aimed to renember humans all over the world, but particularly in charge to deciding the fate of the refugees that they should be first and foremost empathic human beings.

Rating: 5 stars

Book Review: Orhan´s Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian

´Once there was and it was not...´

´Places and things stay with us, and sometimes we stay with them...´

When Orhan´s grandfather left their house to an unknown woman living in California, he is sent to convince her to give up her rights. A photographer whose political opinions were abandoned after being arrested and having pushed into partial exile out of Turkey, Orhan will have to face the past his grandfather never shared with, but also well hidden family histories.

In writing Orhan´s Inheritance Aline Ohanesian was inspired by her own grandmother stories of the tragedy of the 1,5 million Armenians murdered by official order of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian genocide commemorated today, the 24th of April, never acknowledged by Turkey, was finally declared as such today by the Biden administration, the first American president to openly recognize it, a political gesture of acknowledgement of a documented historical fact. The trauma of the genocide is part of the Armenian collective and individual history. I remember how back in the old country, we always felt safe and at ease in the company of the children of the many Armenian friends of my parents - all refugiated there after the genocide - because we both shared the silences of our historical curse. In their company, we felt normal in our sad anormality and overwhelming weight of memory.

Orhan´s Inheritance is far from being an apologetic book and through the back and forth of historical timelines it creates an emotional story, of a forbidden love and individuals for whom race and religion are less important than saving a human life endangered by political blindness and cruelty. What unites the characters in this book is the power of words and the trauma that words can further challenge. One of my favorite idea of the book was to connect between the power of speech, or rather the refuse to use it, with the traumatic experiences. Indeed, witnessing overwhelmingly dramatic events can supress temporarily or permanently the capacity of organising that experience into words. 

Aline Ohanesian created an inspiring story with a few - unfortunatelly not all of them are created complex - powerful characters. In this case, the story is stronger than its separate parts and this is what how the book will be remembered, by the uniqueness of the narrative.

For me, this book was also a gentle reminder that I don´t have to wait for another year until I posting a blog on Armenian literature related topics. Here is a short introduction to a couple of Armenian women writers in English translation. 

I had access to the book in audiobook format, narrated by the distinct voice of Assaf Cohen, actor in movies like Fauda and When Heroes Fly. 

Rating: 4 stars

 

Book Review: Marzahn, Mon Amour

Dresden-born published author Katja Oskamp decides in her mid-40s to make a professional turn: with her husband chronically ill and her daughter out of the nest, at the end of a training course she will become a podiatrist working in a small office in the Eastern part of Berlin, a neighbourhood called Marzahn. Her everyday interaction with her clients - mostly old retired men and women whose most of their lives were spent in the German Democratic Republic - inspired her to write a collection of short stories, published in 2019 - Marzahn, Mon Amour.

Although I am living in Berlin for over a decade and I am quite acquainted with this city´ secrets, I haven´t been to Marzahn more than twice, and at least once it was completely by accident. I had not a single ounce of interest to walk the alleys bordered by 10+ storey blocks of houses which remind me strongly of urban planning whose spirit I have no interest to be part thereof. At the first sight, there can be easily qualified under the larger category of ´communism architecture´ and one can spot it all over the former Eastern block, from Lithuania to Romania, but in fact, a more educated eye will see it in the French suburbs as well, as a tribute to the urban philosophy of Le Corbusier, aiming to answer the overpopulation and the increasing social mobility.

I´m personally familiar with the stories shared between women at the beauty parlor or at the hairdressing salon, but in Marzahn, Mon Amour there is a whole world which unfolds - literally - at the author´s feet. All of the characters featured in the book do have a GDR common story thread, from Friedrichstadt Palast memories to work in various factory and mostly dramatic post-unification memories. There is the average Eastern experience without the expected nostalgia. The author, herself growing up in the GDR, is taking notes and later turn their stories into her written story. The combination between memoir, journalistic realism - which reproduces even the accents and special way of talking used by its subjects - and literary talent creates unique life accounts through which the portrait of a neighbourhood - Marzahn, is created. 

Oskamp herself does not live in this part of the city and it is rather a visitor on the alleys of the residential area inaugurated in the 1980s. While at work, she observes her clients that for the price of 22 euro pro treatment are a perfect source of literary inspiration. The notes are related not only to the people, but also of their environment, including their key social meeting points, such as the cemetery of the church. But there are also 11,000 dogs registered in this part of the city, maybe because old people may need a 4-foot trustworthy companion too. (Now, there is a bit of sociological approach too).

I enjoyed Marzahn, mon amour in the original German language, in one long sitting. It´s a great linguistic experience as well, besides the human traces as well. Although it did not change too much my thoughts about this part of the city, it has accomplished to reveal a way of documenting and approaching a topic therefore, I take it as a relevant writing inspiration as well as a reference for contemporary Berlin-based German literature. 

Rating: 3 stars

About American Dirt

Something happens to me this year: I am becoming a very picky reader. This means often that I either give up on books that seem to do not go anywhere - in terms of story, quality or any other high literary criteria - (and this very recently happened to me in the case of the critically praised Writers&Lovers that after over 100 pages haven´t stirred any of my many literary feelings) or in the case of those that I am stoic enough to finish, I will not award them more than two palid shining stars. This happened with the very controversial American Dirt that I´ve (finally) finished yesterday evening.

At this point, I will not enter into the contextual controversy around the book. It´s over a year old and much has been said about it. I don´t have too much to add to it anyway to what was already written. This article summs up the most important points about this book.

My curiosity is to try to see what the book has to offer from the literary point of view. At the end of the last year, somewhere in October, I´ve started to read the book. To be honest, at the very beginning of it, I was really caught in and I kept being so for a bit over hundred pages. The thriller lover in me was curious about what really happened to the main woman character Lydia and why her family was murdered by the mafia. The spooky platonic soul connection between the same Lydia, bookstore owner in Acapulco, and the narco-mafioso who ultimately killed her family sounded also worth giving a try. Overall, at the beginning, the writing was also good.

But, as I was advancing into the book and Lydia´s run out of the reach of narco-maniac, together with her geography gifted 8 year old son, towards el norte, to Estados Unitos, my interested dimished little by little. All that road across Mexico, trying to escape the mafia people tracing her, sounded so artificious and like taken out of a badly documented post about ´Things to be aware of when visiting Mexico´. Those kind of listicles that I bet no one is really taking serious any more those days.

I´ve abandoned the book for months with no clear plans to return to it, until a couple of days ago when my mental spring cleaning set as one of the top priorities trying to finish some of the books I had on my TBR for very different reasons. 

Once returned to the book, I haven´t feel that I really missed it, but tried at least to give it a try until the very last page. As the writing in itself is not that bad and there is a story, I didn´t need to convince myself to further read it.

However, this second part - I´ve left the book just in the middle - required on my behalf a steady resilience. Every couple of dialogues, I was becoming more and more annoyed with the grotesque voice given to a 8 years old which no matter how gifted he might have been, was talking with a voice of an adult. One example of his misfit wordings: ´Machismo will get you killed´. A 10 years old old joining later the group on their journey to America is talking on the same voice. Although he is assumed to have spent time with the lawless, still the voice he was assigned is largely inappropriate. I never thought this kitsch can be so annoying but now I know. It´s such a missed opportunity for the writing quality to fail finding the right child voice. Therefore, it fails to bring diversity of points of views and perspectives as, in the end, all the characters are talking on the same tone, repeating over and over again the same discourse the writer wants (you) to hear. 

There are some successes, although small, of the American Dirt, namely the portrayal of human connections, empathy and solidarity, particularly women solidarity, in moment of dramatic distress. 

On the other hand, I couldn´t place any of those encounters in a larger literary geography. I may understand the contemporary references to the anti-migration policies under president Trump and the helplessness against a very corrupt state, but this book is a very light - and largely stereotypical - try to offer a fictional approach to the topic. Gd knows that I really tried to get into the book, many months in a row, actually. Which only made things worse.

Rating: 2 stars