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Category Archives: Buzzed Books

Buzzed Books #96: Topics of Conversation

05 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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 Buzzed Books #96 by Samantha Nickerson

Miranda Popkey’s Topics of Conversation

In March 2020, I was in New York City for vacation. I found myself in a bookstore on 34th Street. After looking at every shelf (because I’m compulsive), I found Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, Topics of Conversation, on display at the storefront. I devoured it in several subway rides and a few hours in my hotel, and discovered that the pocket-sized, pastel cover is deceptive; this story is huge. Spanning seventeen years and several cities, Topics of Conversation chronicles the unnamed narrator’s journey from the time she’s a twenty-one year old English grad/nanny through her thirties, insistently creating opportunities to ruin her life. Most opportunities were erotic, and as a twenty-three-year-old recent English grad myself, the narrator fascinated me. I recommended Topics of Conversation to everyone I knew.

Topics of Conversation derives its title from its structure; most chapters are conversations between the narrator and other people, usually women. Not everything is dialogue—the narrator also spends much time in her own imagination, admitting that “I am often thinking of the better story because the actual story is so often boring” (57). Often the narrator zones in and out of her own conversations. Something her conversation partner says sparks a thought, and the partner fades into the background as the narrator explores her own memory. The combination of conversation and reflection is how the narrative unfolds. If the narrator’s wandering interiority seems rude, rest assured that she is aware and practices self-hatred as often as self-sabotage. Both involve a refusal of intimacy, which is the narrator’s main struggle as it contradicts the core truth of this novel: conversations are inherently intimate, but to be intimate is to be vulnerable, and replacing intimacy with eroticism masks vulnerabilities while providing the illusion of meaningful companionship without the satisfaction.

Popkey writes her narrator in a pessimistic, self-argumentative voice. The narrator often starts a sentence one way, redacts, admits to an exaggeration or an outright lie, then verbally decides to tell the truth and follows up with a continuation of the narrative. And yet, she writes the physical world in such detail that it seems impossible for her memory to be anything but perfect. For example, on a long walk to the hotel, she plans to find a man to have an affair with: “I don’t remember the hotel I decided on, honestly I don’t, but this next part I do, this next part is true. I remember walking the square, putting one foot in front of the other. My shoes were tight and the skin they exposed was swelling, red and plump, the soles of my feet slick with sweat” (77-78). Later, at the hotel bar she writes, “Inside my heels my feet were cooling but where the edges of the shoe leather cut into my flesh I could feel not blood but that clear, slick, sticky substance that precedes it” (79).

The way the narrator speaks to the reader is stylistically identical to how she speaks to other characters. The other characters all seem to have the same voice as the narrator, slight differences here and there, but the same speaking style and cadence. The effect is that all characters and conversations could be a figment of the narrator’s imagination, that details can always be exaggerated or false. It adds to the doubts about the reliability of the narrator’s memory, as does all of the alcohol she drinks.

While stylistically the voice is literate and flawless, Popkey makes a different decision regarding grammar. The narrator trusts the audience to understand that she knows the rules of grammar, but disregards them in favor of indulging her stream-of-consciousness. Often, the narrator is drunk. Popkey made sure to explicitly state that the narrator is drunk in these instances, but put in the effort to change the narrator’s clarity of thought so that the prose reflects her slurry state of mind. The effect truly feels like trying to sift through one’s own drunken thoughts..

At the start, the narrator seems to obsess over the bodies of the women she speaks with. In grad school, she admires a woman two years ahead who she identifies only as “the tenant.” At a gathering at the tenant’s apartment, the narrator sits on the floor while the tenant paces and speaks, clearly establishing the tenant as superior and herself as the inferior party within their relationship, although not unkindly. The dynamic feels like a student-teacher relationship, or like your friend’s hot older sister is telling you a story. The narrator likes to feel less powerful than others, enjoys wiser people bestowing confidence in her. To the narrator, such experiences seem validating and rewarding—but she mostly focuses on the fact that it’s erotic:

as I stared up at the smooth slope of [her] throat, at the declivity above her collarbone, a further thought entered my mind, not a thought but a wish, specifically the wish that she not get on with it, get it over with, stop talking. The wish was that she would go on talking so that I could go on staring. . . I didn’t know her that well, this tenant, this not-girl, this woman, but she was slightly older and v very beautiful and she carried herself like she was one body, a whole, not a collection o disjointed limbs, and for this reason I believed her to be very intelligent and I was in awe of her and a little bit in love with her and also I loathed her, not furiously or passionately but attentively, careful to keep the flame of—it wasn’t quite hatred; something closer to envy, something tinged with lust—anyway, whatever flame I was nurturing I was nurturing it with care, so that, on this night as on all nights, it was burning fierce. (36-37)

The narrator loves when people, especially women, confide in her. While nannying in exchange for a free vacation to Italy, she becomes close with the mother who employs her, Artemisia. She notices Artemisia’s nipples more than once and remembers the way Artemisia’s hand felt on her neck. The narrator states at the end of the first chapter:

Artemisia was, at the time of our conversation, no older than forty-four. In other words she was young and yet, because of my age, she seemed to me old, even quote-unquote wise, and therefore untouchable, metaphorically but also literally, and so even as I was coveting her [clothing]. . . it did not then occur to me that I might also be coveting the body beneath and below. Now I know that I am never more covetous than when someone tells me a story, a secret, the sharing of a confidence stoking in me the hunger for intimacy of a more proximate kind. (27-28)

The narrator is open to the intimacy these conversations bring, and makes no effort to repress sexual thoughts, although oddly enough she never engages in any sexual act with another woman. Perhaps Popkey’s intention was to distinguish between different types of intimacy and prove that conversations are intimate without necessarily becoming physically sexual. But, as stories must in order for a character to—I don’t want to say grow, but in order for a character to change, for story to happen, the characters must—challenge the truth that the story proposes.

As the narrator spirals through her affair, the resulting pregnancy, her divorce, single motherhood, alcoholism, and loneliness, she closes herself off to conversation; her responses become shorter. She shares less about herself and listens to others for longer. She loses either her desire or ability (maybe both) to be intimate. During this time, the language is simultaneously overly-descriptive of insignificant scenic details and not descriptive enough of the narrator’s conversation partners. Popkey succeeds in illustrating how the narrator’s self-inflicted trauma removes her from any kind of intimacy—even platonic. Her son’s babysitter shares details of her life, and instead of reciprocating like one is expected to do in conversation, the narrator denies that invitation of intimacy: “Sometimes I say nothing. Silence: the great conversation killer” (194).

Topics of Conversation explores intimacy, so along comes vulnerability, followed by weakness, followed by disgust. There is a new term for the feeling one gets when a partner commits such an egregious turn-off that the relationship can’t survive; perhaps it sounds juvenile, but getting the ick is an accurate description of the feeling. It’s revulsion, and it can happen because a partner refuses to trim their nose hairs or chews too loudly or doesn’t support same-sex marriage, but for the narrator it happens when men demonstrate vulnerability. It’s an idea that Artemisia plants in the narrator’s mind when she’s just twenty-one. Perhaps the narrator would have figured this aversion out on her own, but she narrator has already drawn parallels between herself and Artemisia because they both dated their professors—the difference is that Artemisia married hers. This wise, older, attractive woman who the narrator shares some commonalities with pours out her history to the impressionable narrator, and it would be naive to suggest that the conversation was not influential to her future relationships.

So Artemisia spins her story: she married Virgilio in Argentina. He was more powerful, more established, a father figure to her even though her relationship with her own father was fine. She liked the structure and she felt comforted by the constraints of their relationship. When they moved to New York—he to teach at one university and her to attend grad school at another—their roles reversed because her English was better than his. She didn’t mind taking care of him, but hated the way it affected his ego. Artemisia says:

One searches, in one’s choice of partner, for a kind of reflection. . . Often unconsciously. And often not an honest reflection. One searches for a better-than reflection. . . Virgilio had reflected well on me. . . But in New York, Artemisia continued, he shrunk. And as he shrunk, so did I. At first I remained silent. I was saying nothing. I was ashamed. But then, Artemisia shrugged, something changed. I became a little colder. A little less deferential. A little bolder. I began to treat him a bit like a child. Knowing what someone else does not: this defines the relationship between the adult and the child. (19)

He grew jealous, demanding to know her whereabouts at all times. She says,

We had not had sex in months. Not since our first weeks in New York. By choice. By my choice. It wasn’t that he was controlling—that he was trying to be controlling. In the end this is not what bothered me. It was that his desire to control, she paused. This desire, it stemmed not from his power but from its lack. It was his desperation that I despised. (22-23)

The narrator moves on with her life, presumably never sees Artemisia again, but the lesson sticks and is reinforced by other women the narrator admires. In chapter two, the Tenant tells a story about a girl who dressed nerdy and acted prudish. She says:

I didn’t drink before college, had greasy bangs, wore long skirts because I hated my calves, wouldn’t wear pants because I hated my thighs. We should have been friends. If not friends, allies. Instead I hated her. Her vulnerabilities, her weaknesses—she wasn’t hiding them and because she wasn’t hiding them I felt she was exposing me, too. (39)

The tenant confirms what Artemisia said, that weakness deserves to be met with hatred, and that people see reflections of themselves in others. Finally, we see the narrator practice this theory in her life when she calls the hotel man a dick, and he acts as though his feelings are hurt: “Either his voice was muffled because he was facing away or, annoying possibility, I’d actually wounded him. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes” (70). Later, after leaving her husband, she explicitly states that his weakness provokes “anger” and “disgust” (94). What was a seed of thought in Italy with Artemisia grows into the narrator’s entire emotional ecosystem.

Popkey’s narrator enters the bottom of sexual power dynamics in her early years. She dates her married professor who is dominant within their sex life. She traces her hatred of kindness and comfort in taking orders back to their first sexual encounter. This happens a few months before she nannies. The reader sees how uncomfortable she is in the authoritative position at first, and how she acclimates to it after realizing that the children enjoy discipline. For the first week, they take advantage of her weakness to get whatever they want, until they grow bored. Then, they want boundaries, respond only to punishment.

The second week was worse because they’d tired, already of getting what they wanted, the desire in these cases, being not merely to get what one wants but to feel as if one is getting away with getting what one wants, and so they began to create actual trouble, trouble of the damaging-the-hotel variety, which is how I found myself, on the evening of the tenth night, yelling, for the first time really shouting at Teo to stop using the serrated dinner knife to try to liberate the feathers from a pillow. He responded wonderfully, stopped right away and only cried a little, ate his frutti di mare quietly, didn’t ask after a gelato or a chocolate profiterole. And the whole time: his eyes wide, a small smile on his lips, pink and wet, hoping for a smile in return, a nod of approval. It’s true what they say, children really do crave boundaries. (6-7)

The narrator acclimates to her authority, but her brief stint in a power position only reinforces that she doesn’t enjoy it. In her personal relationships she always prefers to play the role of submissive child with one difference: where children crave boundaries, the narrator craves to be controlled. Her fixation on the fantasy of non-consensual sex is a contributing factor to her pattern of dating “controlling and cruel” men (204)—excluding her husband, who she admits was lovely, and who she left. She even says, during a scene of verbal foreplay in that hotel, actively having the affair that left her pregnant, “I hate making choices. . . I take direction.” And so she does. What follows is the only lengthy passage of male speech in the entire novel. The man, unnamed, describes to her exactly how he likes to control women during sex, and exactly how he must be violent if they become scared. The narrator never expresses fear in this scene, only fascination. She leaves her husband the next day.

Reflecting upon that decision, she realizes that her disgust for her husband stemmed from the lack of control he exercised over her. You want to almost but not actually finish your PhD? Okay. You want to work in HR? Okay. You suddenly want a baby just because our acquaintances have babies and you think having something to constantly care for will give you a sense of purpose? Okay. It’s okay, you can be mean to me; you’re going through a lot. What’s that? You had an affair? How about couple’s therapy? No, you’d rather leave? Okay. The narrator says,

What I wanted was direction and praise for following it. As a child these were easy to find. As an adult I learned that the only people who seemed inclined to give out both were my professors, married men, almost all of them. But you can’t marry your married professor. So instead I married John. John, who was so kind and so supportive and emotionally generous and a good listener, who was everything a liberated woman is supposed to want. But then there was no one to pat me on the head for making the right choice. There was only John, who was so kind. Who was so kind and who wanted me to have desires of my own. Really it was a mean trick that the only one I developed was the desire to leave him… What I’m trying to say. . . is that I have been, that I continue to be, best at being a vessel for the desire of others. (97)

So maybe the narrator was on the right track with motherhood as a goal. She raises her son alone. She responds to his needs instantly. Mothering a baby makes sense for her — but what will become of the adult she must raise him into when all she’s good at is responding? She addresses this question as a fear:

When I worry about my son of course I worry about him dying, but when I have convinced myself that he is still breathing. . . what I worry about is how he’ll end up. I mean the possibility that he’ll end up like me. Not that I’m so horrible, just that I know I can do a great, and excellent, a perfect—I mean, my parents were fine. They weren’t amazing but certainly they did not encourage me to hate myself. They did not tell me to seek out men who were controlling and cruel, they did not suggest this is what I deserved. And if there was, during my formative years, a certain cultural consensus about what women wanted and how men should go about giving it to them, well, many others of my generation were smart enough to be skeptical of it. What I’m saying is that my life, like the lives of most people, lacks an origin story. I mean one with any explanatory power. Which means that my son could turn out any way and for any reason or for no reason at all. I’m not sure if it’s irony but here it is, at last I’ve found the thing I do want to control, and of course I can’t. (203-204)

Topics of Conversation is provocative, for older women likely reflective; for younger women educational, cautionary, eye-opening. For men, it may shed light on one version of the female psyche. The experimental structure is entertaining. The novel itself might prove inspiring to other writers who might feel stuck within the writing rules they learned in school. At 205 pages, it’s a lean novel, but I would suggest letting one chapter settle before starting the next because it’s easy to get lost in the details and miss Popkey’s deft exploration of the novel’s several themes. Topics of Conversation is an examination of intimacy in all its forms: platonic, romantic, parental, violent, sheltered, and stifled. Buy this book, reader.


Samantha Nickerson earned her MFA from Full Sail University. She is a waitress writer living in Orlando, Florida.

Buzzed Books #95: The Art of Soul, The Art of Raya and the Last Dragon, and The Art of Luca

18 Tuesday Jan 2022

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in animation, Art, Buzzed Books, Disney, Film

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Chronicle Books, The Art of Luca, The Art of Raya and the Last Dragon, The Art of Soul

Buzzed Books #95 by John King

The Art of Soul,

The Art of Raya and the Last Dragon,

and The Art of Luca

As a lifelong fan of Disney films, there’s not much nostalgia in my obsession. I have never found ways to make Condorman, The Fox and the Hound, or Herbie Does a Thing important or fun or profound. The only connection I feel between my childhood and films I saw then is how the great films still loom in my imagination. In the 1970s, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Star Wars, and The Rescuers would repeat in my mind for months after seeing them in the theater. One movie ticket provided me with rich experiences that endure.

Sometimes, though, the art and music of Disney films transcend the actual overall film itself, such as Alice in Wonderland (1951). Oliver Wallace’s score, sometimes combined with Lewis Carrol’s poetry as lyrics, is a wonderful soundscape; the 1997 compact disk release interpolated dialogue and sound effects, in essence creating a sonic film for the mind that is a better experience than the film. The film itself quivers with the miraculous design work of Mary Blair. Alice in Wonderland has some colorful, very daft scenes. But the parts surpass the whole. Listen to the soundtrack in the dark instead.

Such have been my musings while considering the extraordinary Disney titles recently released by Chronicle books. Chronicle publishes Didier Ghez’s exceptional series, They Drew as They Pleased, which unveils never-before-seen artwork from the developmental stages of classic Disney films.

Separate from Didier Ghez’s series, Chronicle also publishes volumes devoted to the creation of recent offerings by Pixar and Disney, such as Soul, Raya and the Last Dragon, and Luca.

The Art of Soul is one of my favorite books in my Disney library for how well the volume allows me to appreciate the mind-bending, yet somehow familiar visual grammar of the film.

The running time of Pixar’s Soul might be too short, which is to say, the visual experience is too sublime to appreciate in real time, with the film’s half-abstract, celestial sense of realms for the creation and dissolution of souls and, in contrast, the film’s densely realistic New York City.

As an animation nerd, I am also gratified to learn more about how the designs of Soul were worked out, with digital sketches that look rather like hand-drawn sketches—with enough practice, digital work was certain to catch up to hand-drawn illustration.

And The Art of Soul also focuses on the designs within the designs, such as jazz signage. In this deeply original film’s design art, I can see elements of Modern art, along with jazzy resonances with Disney’s 101 Dalmatians and the “Rhapsody in Blue” portion of Fantasia 2000. This book is both frozen in time—allowing the reader to experience the art as slowly as the reader wants—and also bursting with the intelligence and inspiration of the film’s creation.

I liked Raya and the Last Dragon. The Chronicle book may persuade me that the film is better than I thought. On my first viewing, the narration seemed a touch glib, the setting seemed too allegorically on-the-nose, and the water dragon seemed too goofily comic. I suspect that the filmmakers aimed for a YA audience, a demographic that clearly isn’t me.

The mythic setting of Kumandra seemed like a generalization of lots of Asian tropes and imagery, and this seemed indiscriminate to me when I watched the film. The Art of Raya and the Last Dragon points out that the inspiration for the film was Southeastern Asian countries: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. So I was partly right, but in a wrong way.

In the Chronicle book, the different regions of the Dragon Lands—Heart, Spine, Talon, Fang, and Tail—are explained in terms of philosophy, architecture, and costuming. The art is transcendent, reminding me of how beautiful the film is, all while encouraging me to look deeper into its world-building.

The Art of Luca focuses on Italy, tales of merfolk, and friendship. The film is a charming meditation on childhood conflicts and life in a seaside Italian village in the 1950s. The art style is vibrant and iconic, yet original. For example, the merfolk’s design do not look like mermaids from Peter Pan or The Little Mermaid, but more humanoid, like transitioning-tadpoles, with cartoony, detailed faces.

The settings of the seaside village and the ocean are stunning (reminding me of the contrasting settings of Soul). The claustrophobic clustering of colorful dwellings in the hilly town of Portorosso makes me want to live there, in a modest, beautiful, shabby place in a time when a Vespa was the most beautiful thing in a beautiful world. The dark aquamarine of the underwater world somehow feels spooky, yet comforting, a dreamscape that makes the merfolk seem like a realistic possibility.

The character designs, even the human ones, are memorable.

I cannot assert this enough: I tend to take for granted how sublimely beautiful Disney and Pixar films are. Seeing the storyboards, character design, and concept sketches in so many styles is a gift that Chronicle brings to animation fanatics.

Enrico Casarosa, the film’s director, makes this unusual plea at the end of his introduction to this book: “I have a favor to ask … Reach out to that friend you once had from those formative days of awkward adolescence and self-discovery. It’ll give you the opportunity to tell them how important they’ve been in your life. I bet they might even remember some hilarious moments you’ve long forgotten.” This is true of friends, but also true of the great films I and my friends love, Disney and Pixar films among them.


John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Buzzed Books #94: Nana Nketwi’s Walking on Cowrie Shells

06 Tuesday Jul 2021

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Buzzed Books #94 by Jan Elizabeth Watson

Walking on Cowrie Shells by Nana Nketwi

As any writer knows, the quality of voice is sometimes elusive. It is something that you either have and can develop further or do not have until you begin to locate it within yourself. Nana Nkweta’s debut collection, Walking on Cowrie Shells (Graywolf Press), has a voice as pointed and well-aimed as a dart in the center of a bullseye.  While the ten stories in this collection often reflect the immigrant experience or the second-generation American experience, these are not the stories of struggles and assimilation and identity crises that one might expect from the subgenre. Rather, these are stories of characters who know who they are (or are on the verge of knowing) and are not afraid to convey this with force.

At turns fiercely intelligent, caustic, and lyrical, the language of Walking on Cowrie Shells shifts between Cameroonian idioms to American jargon to high-minded pontifications on race and class. Nkweta’s use of voice and characterization is perhaps most finely showcased in the collection’s first story, “It Takes a Village They Say.” The first half of the story is presented through the point of view of Mr. and Mrs. Saliki, who have adopted a young girl from Cameroon and brought them to live with them in suburban New Jersey: “For weeks Our Girl roamed our house merely touching things, eyes saucered, while we followed her hopefully with our own,” the narrators say (“we” and “our” are used to give them a joint identity; husband and wife are comically not individuated here). And, later: “In retrospect, it strikes us as hideous, our bottomless need for validation when we should have striven for her love. Back then, we needed a win, we habitual gold star scholars, six-figure earners, C-suite careerists.”

The setup of “It Takes a Village They Say” is a classic story of manners—a modern-day equivalent of parlors and sitting rooms— until “Our Girl,” Zora, commands the second half of the narrative and cuts through the niceties. Observant, contemptuous, and far cleverer than her conventionally aspirational parents, Zora is a self-described “hustler” who is not afraid to exploit the Salikis and use men for financial gain. Of one male prospect, Zora has this to say: “I looked at him and saw plenty: fattened calves, amber waves of grain. He looked at me and saw exotica… spears, teats… everything jutting.”

While Nkweti has much to show us about the inner lives of Black protagonists, she also dips into surrealism and plays against expectations of genre, inserting a story about a mermaid, a story about zombies, and a would-be whodunit into this collection—each with their own footing in our current cultural landscape. But there are earthier stories, too, and these are where the author’s voice brings her crashing to the forefront of new literary fiction. In “Rain Check at MomoCon,” adolescent Cameroonian girls at a comic book convention unexpectedly find themselves at the height of their powers. In “Schoolyard Cannibal,” the gifted, overachieving young narrator tries to understand her heritage and her place in the world amidst the din of what the world tells her it means to be African.

In “Night Becomes Us,” Zeinab, a restroom attendant at a nightclub, remembers her life in the war-torn homeland, where she survived a suicide bombing. Shattered, displaced, and distrustful of the American Dream, she is still quite capable of self-sufficiency and bold expression. The story ends where many others might begin, suggesting a greater life waiting beyond the page. Similarly, in “The Statitician’s Wife,” the closing line could just as easily be its incipit: “Elliot Coffin, Jr., maintained that he did not kill his wife, but he would be the first to admit that, statistically speaking, he could have.” Whether Coffin killed his Nigerian wife or was even charged with the crime is an almost incidental fact in a story that exposes the horrifying reality of how many Nigerian women are murdered by their spouses… a yearly total that often goes unreported.

Walking on Cowrie Shells closes with “Kinks.” The title alludes to a sexual liaison and the “free and unfettered” hair of Jennifer Tchandep, a young editor having an affair with the esteemed scholar and “Black blogosphere sensation” Kwame B. Johnson. Johnson is quick to dictate how she, as an American Cameroonian woman, should think and feel; he convinces her to endure twelve hours in a hairstylist’s chair to get tightly coiled Senegalese braids, warns her against the trappings of cultural imperialism, and even renames her “Jamila” to replace her less ethnic name. When Jennifer rebels and comes into her own, it is a triumphant and fitting end to a story collection that reverberates with themes of complicity, rebellion, and freedom.

“We are not what we once were but we are getting there,” notes a Cameroonian-American character in an earlier, epistolary story. At their most devastating and effective, Nkweta’s stories are peopled with characters like Jennifer who show us where there is and suggest where we go from here.


Jan Elizabeth Watson is the author of two novels: Asta in the Wings (Tin House Books, 2009) and What Has Become of You (Penguin Random House, 2014). She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was also a Teaching Fellow. Originally from Maine, she now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is at work on a third novel.

Buzzed Books #93: Love and Errors

06 Tuesday Apr 2021

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Buzzed Books #93 by Wanda Fuentes

Kimberly Dark’s Love and Errors

Kimberly Dark’s Love and Errors is an extremely compelling read that is enjoyable despite its heavy themes. Emotions rage on each page as victims, survivors, abusers, and bystanders perceive abuse differently, speaking to each other and themselves in the midst of being. Dark creates a world where breathing is an occupation and each new turn is another battle that must be won to live freely the next day.

Dark’s tone alternates between comic despair (“I’ll drown myself in that toilet”) and frank insight (“She is young / She is alive”). Trauma’s clinging offspring express themselves at different timelines of survivor’s journeys. Women frozen within trauma’s grip (“could’ve thrust / the stick into his belly / but for what? / More men in the next room.”) without any exit. Others after escaping its physical hold, remain vigilant to protect themselves and others from trauma’s snare (“I will not end up in a Mexican jail today / because she is a threat to maleness / and I need to be shown the error of my ways.”). Family members battle pain’s all-consuming dependency (“to be cast / as the cause of pain, and watch it become all / she was.”) seeking ways to extend life and love. All throughout, Love and Errors boldly penetrates straight into the war within the soul-seeking out the truths and myths of life beyond pain.

Love and Errors contains 38 poems that unravel the traumas of sexual violence, damaged families, cultural injustice, and caregiver burdens. From childhood rape to struggles of married life, Dark illuminates the various paths of survivors through girls, women, lovers, and siblings—independent and dependent. All throughout, Dark expresses an underlying message that even the worst relationships and violating memories can become a source of new strength and hope.

Relationships between trauma’s complex emotions and the body’s normal healing process are suggested (“I am made to be torn down / my pride to be shredded / I heal / get new skin / become new / beauty / is in the living”). These familiar comparisons bring forth hope as, with time, all things heal. Dark opens the door out of isolation, as one realizes they belong to a unique community, (“The way we hold our love / and errors, expectations / rooted into common ground; that’s how / we find each other and become capable / of doing what we feel we must do”) that struggles with fear and pain. By the end, readers are presented with new skills, viewpoints, and knowledge of a community which needs them—and they it.


Wanda Fuentes is a poet and social worker who lives in Orlando, Florida.

Buzzed Books #92: Red Comet: Heather Clark’s The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

30 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Biography, Buzzed Books, Poetry

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 Buzzed Books #92 by Jan Elizabeth Watson

Heather Clark’s Red Comet:

The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath at nineteen, smiling broadly, her face scrunched into what Ted Hughes once described as a “tight ball of joy.” It was the photo on The Bell Jar’s back cover that hooked me first. Below that, a paragraph-long bio that ended with a terse, jarring mention of her suicide at age 30.  I needed no further enticement to check this book out from the library; I was fifteen years old, prone to despondency, and certainly on the lookout for a kindred spirit.

The reading of Plath’s poems came next. Then the journals. Then the letters home, carefully edited by her mother. Then the onslaught of biographies, each with its own agenda. Then the longer, unexpurgated journals and still more biographies. Somehow, the more I read about Sylvia Plath, the more I wanted to know. And in my blue-collar, small-town innocence, I had no idea that there were millions of other people out there who felt exactly as I did: those with an insatiable desire to have more of Plath, without being able to pinpoint exactly why.

What about Plath inspires such fierce, if misguided, identification? Is it, for some of us, a particularly female or particularly American desire for recognition and accomplishment?  Is it the incongruity of her public face, so exuberantly wholesome and beaming, measured against Plath’s writing voice: seething, theatrical, lethal? Is it the Grand Guignol nature of her late poetry, making the audience complicit in the inevitable course of her last days? Perhaps it is simply the question of looking at her life and her body of work and wondering where everything went wrong.

To satisfy this collective curiosity and appetite for Plath comes the biography that may at last be enough: Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, by Heather Clark. A decorated and tireless scholar herself, Clark wrote this 1,154-page colossus with cooperation from the Hughes and Plath estates and aided by documents that no prior biographer was privy to. The result is as complete an account as one could dream of. And Clark’s agenda is refreshingly pure. Rather than attempting to hold Plath up as a feminist icon or as a victim, Clark’s intention (made plain in her preface) is to make the “peanut-crunching crowd” disperse at last, ending the mythology of Plath as a highly performative femme fatale and inviting closer inspection of her legitimacy as a writer.  And to some extent, this approach works. I say “to some extent” because Plath’s most famous poems may always be viewed as predictive of her death… a blueprint for her suicide replete with knowing winks to the audience. (Clark does her best to debunk this idea, showing that the real story of Plath’s final weeks, which were not self-destructive and defiant but hope-filled in some regards, which in many ways is makes for a sadder story than the myth.) This is not a book of what went wrong so much as it is a great celebration of the many things that went right in Plath’s life, particularly her complete dedication to her writing.

Like many women who came of age in the 1950s and early 60s, the real Sylvia Plath had a tidy exterior and an inner life that was anything but tidy. She was, as many might say nowadays, problematic. She was a woman who wanted to be a rule-follower who was also highly sexualized and impatient with sexual mores of her time. She wanted to be a good wife and mother and a recognized force in the fast and loose literary world of London in the early 60s. She wanted to be a fresh-faced all-American collegiate girl and a serious English lady of letters both. She drew people in with her vivacity, but had a sharp, judgmental eye that often resulted in tartly written depictions of the people she was closest to. With a remarkable lack of bias, Red Comet contextualizes the many faces of Plath and gives fair treatment to many of the key figures whom Plath eviscerated in her writings… including the much-pilloried Ted Hughes, guilty of infidelity but also in possession of great sensitivity and a complete paternal allegiance to his children that was unusual for an Englishman of his time. This biography respects Plath’s perceptions and feelings, but it also gives us a great deal else to consider.

Despite the push-pull of Plath’s deeply human contradictions, her writing ambitions remained a constant, and her efforts to strengthen her writing voice had a heroic single-mindedness. The child of two academics, her talent for language manifested itself at a young age, and Red Comet chronicles Plath’s evolution from teenage writer of magazine fiction to the poet whom Al Alvarez described as one of the finest who ever lived. Her fiction, too, was taking off toward the end of her life. One of Clark’s most fascinating revelations is her discussion of Plath’s destroyed, unpublished second novel—a sequel to The Bell Jar entitled Falcon Yard—and the possible existence of a third manuscript (long thought lost) called Doubletake, a “funny” and “wicked” tale about an American expatriate wife and her philandering British husband. The thought that this novel could yet see the light of day is almost too much to hope for, but if it does, one can only imagine that readers might gain a greater appreciation of Plath’s humor and view her infamous, doomed marriage in a different light.

Ultimately, we all have our own ideas of who Plath was. Plath had her own ideas, too, and it is these ideas that Red Comet attempts to honor at every turn.  Though lumped in with the “confessional” poets, Clark reveals that Plath saw herself as a surrealist, and perhaps we would be wise to begin to view her work the same way: premised upon wild, representational fantasies as opposed to a literal depiction of the life she lived. Had Plath lived to old age and enjoyed a long career, her surrealist leanings may have taken her to poems to even more ferociously imagined heights and left a different legacy for us all. Lacking that, we must be grateful for the prolificacy of her poems, the feverishness with which she documented her life, and the arrival of a biography like Red Comet that celebrates and observes in equal measure.


Jan Elizabeth Watson is the author of two novels: Asta in the Wings (Tin House Books, 2009) and What Has Become of You (Penguin Random House, 2014). She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was also a Teaching Fellow. Originally from Maine, she now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is at work on a third novel.

Buzzed Books #91: Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird

29 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Theater

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Buzzed Books #91 by Chuck Cannini

Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway

A friend of mine paced in his living room one evening. Bill O’Reilly spoke to him from a television screen; something about a man named George Zimmerman, who had fatally shot African-American teenager Trayvon Martin. What mattered was how this friend of mine fumed, how his nostrils flared, how his face contorted, how he ranted and raved, then turned to me and somehow concluded, “I fucking hate Obama. I hope they lynch him from a tree.”

I remembered that living room conversation during a crowded Saturday matinee of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The 59-year-old book by Harper Lee welcomed readers to her fictional “tired old town” of Maycomb, Alabama. Readers familiarized themselves with Scout—her summers with her brother Jem and that weird boy Dill, her school life, and the kids’ limitless fantasies about their mysterious neighbor called Boo Radley. Out of 281 pages, the first 150 established the absolutes and simplicities that occupied Maycomb and, in her own retrospect, Scout’s thoughts.

Aaron Sorkin, playwright for the Broadway adaption, skimmed those first 150 pages. He did not ignore the ideas that ran through those pages. He chose not to lingeron them. The ideas were not as fleshed out, the price of what was already a two and half-hour theatrical experience. Young Scout (41-year-old Celia Kennan-Bolger), alongside Jem (Will Pullen) and the amusing Dill (Gideon Glick), danced around the stage and narrated these details while members of Maycomb and large mobile sets (such as high sections of fencing from the townspeople’s homes) swept across like a tornado of recounted memories.

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Scout, Jem and Dill did not walk around the stage so much as they ran and skipped and pushed each other out of the way. They did not speak; they yelled. They talked over each other when something was explained to the audience. Jem and Dill wrestled. A friend who joined me noted how on the Finch family’s front porch, Scout slouchedon the rocking chair, how she hunched her shoulders and pointed her feet inward.

The fun parts about coming of age lasted half an hour.

Then came the trial.

On Broadway, Mockingbirdis a legal drama. Though best known as the creator of The West Wingtelevision series, Sorkin is no stranger to courtrooms; he wrote A Few Good Men(the 1989 play, then the 1992 film), a story about a court-martial. He is uniquely qualified to write about the fabrics of American society. Sorkin pulled audiences back into 1930s Alabama, then boomeranged everyone back to modern day, to a state of uncertainty. On Broadway, Mockingbird was not just an adaption; it is a timely harsh reflection.

It’s Bob Ewell (Frederick Weller). He’s trash, a drunk and a racist. On stage, Bob voiced a newfound hatred for Jews, not present in Harper Lee’s novel. He started with the n-word, then labeled Atticus a “Jew lover,” and all of a sudden Bob Ewell seemed more familiar. On stage, Bob testified in an Alabama court, and yet America had also witnessed Bob Ewells in 2017, marching through Charlottesville with tiki torches and shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” I saw Bob Ewell in that friend of mine. He threatened to lynch a president, a very specific way to kill a man with a specific skin color.

Atticus: “You never really understand a person until you see things from his point of view.”

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Back on Broadway, Bob had also lost his job, Atticus explained. The single parent raised eight kids. The man felt inferior and powerless. He turned to something that gave him a sense of dominance and authority; Bob turned to the Klan; he took his anger out on Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe), an African-American whom Bob falsely accused. Again, I thought of that friend of mine, a year and half deep into a dead marriage and unable to talk about it, perhaps too embarrassed of his situation; now let’s lynch Obama. Naturally.

This is not to sympathize with Bob Ewell or people like him. The character became less of a caricature. Ewell’s character evolved.

Harper Lee’s themes of racial injustice as well as our relationship with good and evil are just as relevant today, but twice as complicated. Hero Atticus Finch preached an uncompromising faith in the balance of good and evil in all people, even in Bob Ewell and his daughter Mayella (Erin Wilhelmi), but in a cynical age like today that faith prove hard to swallow, even for Atticus.

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Unique to the Broadway show, the Finch family’s long-time African-American maid, Calpernia (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), challenged Atticus’s moral high ground during private exchanges not in Harper Lee’s book:

Atticus: “I don’t want them hating people they disagree with.”

Calpernia: “‘You gotta’ give Maycomb time, Cal. This isthe Deep South. You gotta’s give Maycomb time. Well, how much timewould Maycomb like?”

Words failed Atticus again later, when his arms wound around Bob Ewell in a headlock.Harper Lee’s estate disapproved of the character’s action. Even Atticus broke. Harper Lee’s philosophy missed something 59 years ago, almost like her publication was met by complete and utter apathy. The proof is in the courtroom.

Jeff Daniels stood at the stage’s edge, his back to the court, his gaze on a new jury: the audience.

Atticus: “Can’t go on like this. We have to heal this wound or we will never stop bleeding … So, let’s hasten the change. Let’s hasten the end of the beginning. Let’s do it right now, in Maycomb. … Don’t do this! Let him go home. In the name of God, just let him go home.”

The trial ended. A bailiff handcuffed Tom Robinson, then walked him across the stage, to the electric chair. A silence hung in the theatre. It was a long, uncomfortable walk. My eyes looked away from Mr. Robinson and instead fell on the jury. The seats were empty. They had been empty for the entire play.

The curtains dropped. Applause thundered in the dark. When the lights turned on, up in our balcony seats, someone behind me noted to his colleague how it was sometimes difficult to understand Jeff Daniels’s Alabamian accent, something between a fast-talking auctioneer and a nasal congestion. It was a minor nitpick. In the two weeks that followed, the play still in my mind, Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbirdvery well may be the strongest of the story’s three mediums yet.

To Kill a Mockingbird continues its run at Shubert Theatre well into 2020. Jeff Daniels’s last bow will be on November 3rd, while Ed Harris will take on the role of Atticus Finch starting November 5th.


Chuck Cannini

Chuck Cannini read To Kill a Mockingbirdduring his sophomore year of high school. The then “wise” and “worldly” teenager was surprised that he enjoyed a “50 or whatever-year-old book.” His appreciation for the novel grew after he graduated with a B.F.A. in Creative Writing for Entertainment.

Buzzed Books #90: Enchantée

27 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Fantasy

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Gita Trelease's Enchantéé, JD Langert

Buzzed Books #90 by JD Langert

Gita Trelease’s Enchantée

Diving into the world of Gita Trelease’s Enchantée will bewitch you into wanting more, but fade over time like the magic of Camille’s dress.

Gita Trelease's Enchantéé

Set in Paris, 1789, on the brink of the French Revolution, the story follows Camille Durbonne as she tries to navigate a world of thieves, revolutionaries, and magicians. After losing her parents to smallpox, it falls upon her to care for her sickly younger sister with no resources or help. Her one blessing, as well as curse, is her magic. With it, she can transform objects for a limited time, but the cost is her very life force. Driven to desperation after her abusive brother steals the last of their money, she uses forbidden magic to sneak into the treacherous Palace of Versailles. There, she gambles to change her fate, unaware of the darker games being played.

With a premise like that, I expected to be served a tale fit for a queen. And, for a while, Enchantée delivered. Within a dozen pages, I’d already been introduced to numerous world conflicts (the impending revolution, apathy of the queen for her starving subjects, recent famine) as well as problems closer to Camille’s own heart (her sick and worldly-naive sister, poverty, dead parents, life-sucking magic, and a knife-wielding psychopath for a brother). This combined with a dynamic first meeting with the mixed-blood love interest, Lazare, via runaway air balloon and dark warnings from her fellow gambler/magician, Chandon, I anticipated a delicious feast of conflict and peril. Yet… like the cake, it seems that was a lie.

Or at least, another sleight of hand from Camille herself. Not to say that the story was bad at any point, but lackluster as it fumbled with its own potential. What harmed Enchantée the most was the tradeoff of concrete goals and action for leisurely thought and the contemplation of past events. After solving Camille’s initial desire of getting enough money for rent, the story feels lost as for what to do next. While there would be references to a revolution brewing, Sèguin being a dark magician, and the looming threat of her brother, Camille seems rather unaffected. Sure, she was aware and concerned, but did very little to either deal or learn more about said issues. While I cannot fault Trelease for not putting Camille at the forefront of the French Revolution (no matter how that idea is set up with her father being a former revolutionary), there is still the expectation that if a problem is introduced in the story, the main character will play a role in trying to solve it. This is possible to do even without drastically changing history.

However, Camille doesn’t seem to play much of a role in anything. As charming as gambling aristocrats out of their money and playing hide-n-seek in the gardens is for hundreds of pages, it doesn’t scream an active or suspenseful storyline. Camille reveals her heroic intentions with, “I don’t know, but something is happening, Sophie. Perhaps something great, but perhaps something terrible. If we stay in Paris, and I start a press, I can do my part in telling the truth about it” (423). However, she remains on the edge of decision long enough for it to resolve before she does anything. While danger does eventually strike, it comes from a rather uninspired source and resolves too quickly with Camille benefiting from the conflict. Me personally, I stand by Vladimir Nabokov’s theory that “the writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree and throw rocks at them” rather than the way Trelease tosses vague threats at Camille.

The writing style both helped and harmed this impression. While wonderful in terms of recreating a vivid Paris during this time period, character thought and dialogue fell short on many occasions. Particularly with the main antagonist. “You and I–together we will rise. Victorious. We will be the court’s second monarchs, the King and Queen of Magic” (383). Given that this is the apparent reveal of the villain’s plans and motivations, it felt underwhelming and lacking in depth. Given Camille’s own indecisive sentiments, the antagonist’s lack of the solid plan further decreased the impact of the story.

However, there were times the writing hit all the right notes. “What if she told him her fingernails used to be like his? Would he believe her, in her silk dress and clean hands? It seemed like another life” (321). Given the gritty depth of hopelessness Camille felt earlier in the story, the reader is able to immediately sympathize with the street urchin while also feeling the strange dissonance of Camille’s new status. Yet, even here, I would want Camille to do something to honor that person she used to be instead of just lamenting how much she’s changed.

For all it that could be improved, I would still recommend Enchantée to anyone with a love for France, history, and empathetic characters. Many novels that deal with revolution often frame it with one side being irrevocably good and the other undeniable evil. Trelease strikes a unique balance as she guides Camille to care for the aristocrats she befriends as their glass houses shatter around them while keeping her own revolutionary beliefs. While I wish Camille hadn’t permanently sat on the fence as to what to do, her open-mindedness and compassion in spite of her bitter life was as refreshing as it was enlightening.


JD Langert Author Photo

JD Langert is pursuing her MFA in Genre Fiction at Western Colorado University. With interests in both screenwriting and novels, she’s been published in John Hopkins Imagine Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and other publications. Feel free to visit her website here.

Buzzed Books 89: The World’s Desire (Ballantine 1977 edition)

26 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Fantasy

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Buzzed Books 89 by Mark Scroggins

H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang’s The World’s Desire (Ballantine 1977 edition)

The story behind this lurid paperback is fascinating, though not quite as fascinating as the book itself. In 1965, Ballantine Books issued a paperback edition of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which had been published in hardcover ten years before. The hardcover had done okay, but the paperback proved to be an outrageous bestseller. People had never read anything like it before, and were immediately clamoring for more “stuff like Tolkien.” Ballantine scrambled—in short order they published, in editions similar to LotR, early twentieth-century fantasies by E. R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, and others, and new books by folks like Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn).

The World's Desire

Eventually, Ballantine commissioned the SF/fantasy author Lin Carter to edit a full-blown series, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which between 1969 and 1974 issued around 65 volumes, most of them reprints of “classic” but forgotten fantasy works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shortly thereafter, entirely new large-scale fantasy series—Terry Brooks’s Shannara books and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books—began appearing. So a whole new genre—Fantasy Fiction—had sprung up, with folks like Donaldson, Brooks, Evangeline Walton, and Katherine Kurtz constituting its present, and the BAFS furnishing it with a past (or a “canon,” as the literary scholars say).

The World’s Desire, first published in 1890, was reprinted in the BAFS (with one of their trademark druggy, borderline surrealist covers) in 1972. This particular copy, with its lurid cover image of a naked Egyptian queen communing with a giant snake who has a miniature copy of her own head, was printed in 1977, when the BAFS had passed into history but the fantasy boom was going strong. The advertising pages at the end of the book make the cultural context crystal clear: a notice of the first printing of The Sword of Shannara; an order form for Walton’s and Kurtz’s books; an ad for the paperback novelization of Star Wars; an ad for no fewer than twelve volumes of Star Trek books; and two pages advertising Tolkien books and posters.

Let’s just say the book itself is every bit as nuts as its provocative cover (which, by the way, is a precise representation of a scene from the novel). When the book was published, H. Rider Haggard was already famous for King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887), adventures in unexplored “lost worlds” of Africa, while Andrew Lang was an all-round man of letters and classical scholar, best known for his translations of Homer (though he would later become famous for his collections of international folk tales). Haggard contributes the storytelling chops, and the themes (familiar from She) of the gorgeous and dangerous femme fataleand of reincarnation and the eternal quest for perfect love; Lang contributes a close eye to bronze-age Mediterannean cultural detail and a comprehensive knowledge of the Homeric storybook.

So yes, this is a sequel to the Odyssey—the new adventures of Odysseus, now unencumbered of Ithaca and Penelope, sailing off to Egypt on a quest for Helen of Troy, who he’s decided is his true love. (The notion of Odysseus’ further adventures appears in a number of ancient Greek texts, as does the idea of Helen being in Egypt rather than Troy during the whole Trojan war business.) In Egypt he gets tangled in a love triangle with Queen Meriamun, who’s as dark and evil as Helen is blonde and beautiful, but who’s also a powerful sorceress. Helen may be an incarnation of the goddess of love—the “world’s desire”—but Meriamun’s got her sidekick snake ornament, which enables her to do all sorts of shapeshifting and astral projection. At the same time, Egypt has to deal with a series of natural disasters brought upon them by the prophets of the enslaved Apura (Hebrews)—so Haggard and Lang are able to work in the narrative of the book of Exodus—and an invasion from the north by the seagoing Greeks.

It’s a wonderful, compulsively readable mess, told in a kind of fast-moving (Haggard) mock-Homeric (Lang) idiom, with some actually good poetry along the way. (I always skip the poems in Tolkien, but these are actually worth reading.) You can get this one for free at Project Gutenberg, but there’s lots of copies of this Ballantine edition for sale out there. You’ve gotta have that woman-headed snake, don’t you?


Mark Scroggins

Mark Scroggins lives in and  around New York City. He writes about poetry, art, and fashion. His latest book of poems is Pressure Dressing.

Buzzed Books #88: Olivia Laing’s Crudo

26 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Buzzed Books

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Crudo, Kathy Acker, Olivia Laing

Buzzed Books #88 by Drew Barth

Olivia Laing’s Crudo

Identity is nebulous. Namely in how we perceive ourselves in terms of the work we create and how it is visible to others. In terms of Olivia Laing’s Crudo, her work with identity ties directly into the work and life of another author: Kathy Acker. We can see this done straight from the beginning with “Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married. Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York. It was 19:45 on 13 May 2017.” And anyone familiar with Kathy Acker knows she died in the 1997. So from line one Laing is blending both her own narrative and that of Kathy Acker into her novel. This brings up the question of where identity in the scope of the novel begins and ends. When is it Laing or Acker or neither?

Crudo

What Laing specializes in more than anything is the constant imaginative sensory output of her prose: “When she was anorexic in the aughts like everyone she was conducting an assault on gravity, she was the apple that would go upwards, that simple. How nice to astonish the philosophers, to go off like a firecracker in all their faces.” But it isn’t just sensory overload as a means of simply overwhelming readers. Laing is working with a more contemporary rhythm. From her/Acker’s  Twitter dependency, to checking airline and hotel websites constantly, to the perpetual movement of herself all over the world, she creates this wonderful voice that captures the moment of mid-2017 in all its horrendous Trump and hate-filled splendor. Even in those moments of time screeching past like a freight train we have this slow building and composing of emotional peaks that hit perfectly every time.  The novel is visceral, yet wonderfully composed.

Laing uses the ideas of an oncoming dread or time screaming too quickly past us as a means of conveying how her/Kathy’s life works within emotional peaks and valleys. Never forget that there is a wedding taking place in this novel—accompanied by all the joy and stress that brings—but also the events of 2017. Trump and North Korea, Houston flooding, Charlottesville. All of that coupled with Kathy thinking “She missed Obama. Everyone missed Obama. She missed the sense of time as something serious and diminishing, she didn’t like living in the permanent present of the id.” But Kathy is married during this time, vacations in Italy, moves in with her husband. The volatility of the times are reflected in how the novel structures itself around them: with deft realism. We all remember many of the events of 2017 recounted, but we also remember our lives as well. But then again, it still all felt as though the time was being ripped from our hands as too much happened too often.

All of this to say that Crudo is a novel that feels like an incantation at the end of the world as a means of preserving one’s self. Getting lost in the timeline of our lives is relatively normal, but her working with identity and sensory components ensures that she is creating her own memorable impact on the world around her. For her, the act of writing and creating feels like it could be enough to fight back against a world that moves too fast and works to erase the individual.


Dharma Bums Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat. His blog, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, appears on Wednesdays on The Drunken Odyssey.

Buzzed Books #87: The Lonesome Bodybuilder

05 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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The Lonesome Bodybuilder, Yukiko Motoya

Buzzed Books #87 by Drew Barth

Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder

At times, there’s only so much a person can say about a collection of stories that moves them or a collection that so meshes with their own sense of what makes a strong story that it’s hard to not just post one of the stories on here in lieu of a review to show just how good the collection is. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is one of those collections that makes me feel that way. But I can’t just copy-paste a whole story here. There’s a lot to talk about in Motoya’s latest collection in terms of its oddity and its spotlighting of characters that radiate a certain kind of sadness. At times existential, it’s a sadness that blooms from circumstance and the particular loneliness of being both together and separate from one another.

The Lonesome Bodybuilder.png

Although the oddity and sadness of the collection are apparent throughout, the idea of transformation is one that resonates most with her work. At times it is quite literal, in the case of the titular story, and at other times it is much more subtle. Take for example the story “Typhoon,” in which an older man and a boy watch people attempting to grapple with the wind of a typhoon as it destroys umbrellas and disrupts lives. We’ve all seen people running through the wind of a storm as it reduces their umbrellas to shambles. But our understanding of what they’re doing is wrong. It isn’t that they are attempting to get through the rain with their umbrella intact—they are trying to catch the wind on their umbrellas to launch them skyward.

The transformation of understanding of what people do with themselves is a thread that resonates heavily throughout the collection and is one that can read like twists at the ends of stories. But it really isn’t. It helps readers to reconsider things that may be fundamental to how they understand the people around them. It is this fundamental misunderstanding that lies at the heart of the titular story and many others in the collection. But these misunderstandings never come from a place of ignorance or malice—rather they come from a sense of isolation. Motoya crafts these, at times, unbelievable worlds and yet they always feel completely true. These are snapshots of contemporary Japan in which people are unable to talk due to strenuous work schedules, family situations, or simple meekness. And these small things resonate so completely that they feel unique to their location and universal.

To enjoy The Lonesome Bodybuilder is to enjoy reading. It is a collection that surprises constantly. At no point do I feel as though I know what a story will entail or how it will come to an end and I absolutely love that. The unpredictability, the depth of craft, the tangibility of these characters and their world creates a collection that is so completely outré but absolutely familiar all at once. I already want to forget that I’ve ever read it so I can experience these stories again for the first time. If a collection of stories ever felt like the familiar warm blanket draped over the couch for nights in, The Lonesome Bodybuilder fits that completely.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Dharma Bums Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat. His blog, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, appears on Wednesdays on The Drunken Odyssey.

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  • Episode 529: Kathryn Harlan!
  • The Curator of Schlock #387: The House on the Edge of the Park
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