April, 2021 Readings: "April hath put a spirit of youth in everything." (Shakespeare)

New month, new stack of books to tackle.

A fat history tome documenting the relationship between Karl and Jenny Marx, a trilogy of SF books, plus some of the volumes I picked up in Saskatoon this past week.

Anything that keeps me away from the yard work that is beckoning, thanks to the arrival of spring and clement weather.

Finished Young Rembrandt: A Biography by Onno Blom. Found it very unfocused.
Intimations a collection of essays for Zadie Smith, mostly related to the pandemic. The writing is exquisite and the ideas overflow. If I'm honest I have to admit that I'm not sure what some of those essays were about. Great read though.
Angels in America by Tony Kushner, in audiobook, based on the National Theater version. The theater version is very different from the Mike Nichols' TV version. Richer in ideas but also more melodramatic. Nathan Lane as Roy Cohn is not convincing.
Just started Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Feels a little bit like Never Let Me Go. We'll see where this goes.

American Spy – Lauren Wilkinson
Digital audiobook performed by Bahni Turpin
4****

From the book jacket: It’s 1986, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a young black woman working in an old boys’ club. Her career has stalled out. So when she’ given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso, she says yes. Yes, even though she secretly admires the work Sankara is doing for his country. Yes, even though she is still grieving the mysterious death of her sister. Yes, even though a part of her suspects she’s being offered the job because of her appearance and not her talent

My reactions:
What an interesting and inventive debut. Told as a letter to her young children, Marie relates the events that led to her meeting their father and her career in counterintelligence. Wilkinson uses some events from history – particularly the assassination of Thomas Sankara – to frame this story of personal responsibility, family dynamics, and loyalty: to family, to country, to social ideals.

I loved Marie as a central character. She’s principled, self-reliant, smart, resilient, strong in mind and body, and fiercely protective of her family. Do NOT mess with this woman!

Bahni Turpin performed the audio book and she does a marvelous job. She is quickly becoming one of my favorite audio narrators.

I started reading Alex White's A BIG SHIP AT THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE, the first book of a fat, SF trilogy, but gave up after about 25 pages.

I thought the writing was juvenile and tuneless and my brain recoiled at the notion of reading further.

>4 CliffBurns: I read that in 2019. It's rubbish.

> You read the whole trilogy or just that first book?

I wrapped up Larry McMurthy's THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON last night, shivering in bed with chills that were undoubtedly a side effect off the COVID vaccine we got yesterday.

This is definitely second tier McMurthy, episodic and all too familiar, though he continues his life's work of trying to demystify the Old West and its "heroic" gunfighters et al.

>6 CliffBurns: Just the first book. Review here: https://www.librarything.com/work/21098363/reviews/170488150

I'm SO glad I didn't forge on with it--it was a turkey right from the first page.

But its average rating on LibraryThing is 3.7 stars? Jesus Christ!

What is WRONG with people, where are their critical faculties?

>7 iansales:, >8 CliffBurns: Just read the reviews on LT. Well, you can fool some of the people some of the time, I suppose. I was a bit thrown by references to "Boots" in a couple of them, because for me, "going to Boots" means heading off to the chemists with a prescription or for some cough medicine, not referring yourself to a character. Obviously only a problem for Brit readers.

Only one more reason to dislike the book, Robert. It is so ineptly, amateurishly written one wonders a) why it was so well received and b) how the author managed to stretch a weak premise into THREE Bad books.

I'm reminded of Andy Weir's THE MARTIAN, which so many people praised and I thought was dreadful, again giving up after 30 or 40 pages.

Well, I've heard it said that SF is an idea-based genre, good writing secondary.

Perfect examples.

I won't read new debut novels by US sf authors anymore. (There don't seem to be any UK ones, these days.) Those I've read have been uniformly shit, and are still highly-praised. Some have have even been shortlisted for awards, and even won them.

Finished Klara and the Sun. Many reviews written by people more learned than myself call it a masterpiece. Maybe I missed something. I thought it had some great ideas but it was undercooked.

Started Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. It has an odd form combining ruminations about traveling with what seems to be the hint of a plot. Loving it so far. Some segments are really prose poetry. Like the very beginning excerpted here by the Nobel Prize website: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/prose/

Finished Lucy Hughes-Hallett's The Pike, her mammoth biography of the Italian godfather of fascism, Gabriele d'Annunzio. Claimed as Italy's greatest living poet and playwright in his day, he was lauded by Mussolini. D'Annunzio, in turn, detested Mussolini and considered him a "crude imitator". He embraced Nietzschean ideals, wrote a lot about Country, Flag and Sacrifice, evolved the visual style of much fascist spectacle but never specifically claimed he was a fascist himself. He was a massive self-promoter, narcissist and serial seducer of women (only for some of his writing to display distinct homoerotic tendencies). It's a fascinating but highly detailed book with some 640 pages of text; little seems to be omitted.

Having agitated for Italy to join World War I in 1915, he went to the front and participated in various military actions - but always those that reflected well on him and that he could write about, turning the action and attention onto himself. He was especially active in writing about the "irredeemed" territories that Italy should seize by force of arms to establish the nation's esteem amongst the other World Powers. He came to concentrate on the territories on the Dalmatian coast, now part of Yugoslavia; at the end of the war, a number of these places were about to change hands, and d'Annunzio wanted to be certain that the hands they fell into were Italy's. He concentrated on the port city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) and marched into the city at the head of a band of irregulars who would eventually become the basis of Mussolini's Blackshirts. Over the next year, he declared himself the leader of a new Utopia based on Nietzschean principles, only to find himself unable to control his followers and outmanoeuvred by politicians in Rome. Mussolini rose to power partly on d'Annunzio's coat-tails; stole his ideas, his style and his methods and made them his own.

D'Annunzio died in 1938 at the age of 74; perhaps the one area where the book falls down is that the narrative ends with his death. There is nothing about the extent to which he is remembered today in Italy. His books are all still in print (most of them written before his moves into politics, war and totalitarianism), though we are only left with contemporary accounts of the praise they attracted.

D'Annunzio's self-publicism arose at the birth of mass media; he was ever anxious to embrace, and what was more understand, new media. The propaganda of fascism was essentially his invention.

The book has a wry turn of phrase at times; it is not dry and is certainly no hagiography. And throughout, the urge to compare d'Annunzio with political figures of our time is hard to deny. Such figures - narcissists, serial liars, persons who claim the moral high ground whilst not practising their own creeds, people who use high rhetoric to whip up a following amongst the populace whilst personally despising the ordinary people for being followers, people who feel that they are too important for rules to apply to them - are unfit for public office and in a just world would be excised from public life. I do not need to supply names.

EXCELLENT commentary, Robert.

You make me want to read the book even more, the mark of a canny reviewer.

Kudos.

Beneath the Bonfire – Nickolas Butler
Digital audiobook performed by Holter Graham, Luke Daniels and Andi Arndt
4****

In this collection of short stories Butler explores relationships: men and women; male bonding; fathers and children; people and the land.

In one story a group of young couples has a “chainsaw party” … cutting firewood for the coming winter, and two long-term friends’ paths diverge. In another an aging environmentalist takes matters into his own hands after he hears news of a major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And then there is the story of a group of men who annually hunt for morels in the woods of their youth, and find despair instead. A man and his wife work to clear out his recently deceased mother’s home, and he comes to a decision about their future. Two women help one another seek revenge against a man who has hurt many. A man inherits a family and grows into fatherhood.

The ten stories are dark and mesmerizing, Butler’s characters are lonely and yet reaching out for connection. I recognize the landscape which can be brutally unforgiving for the person not experienced or equipped to survive the dangers of the north woods. I’ve been in these bars, hiked the wooded trails, fished on the pristine lakes (but NOT ice-fishing), stayed in remote cabins where you’re more likely to see deer or even a bear than another human. I could smell the wood smoke, hear the squeak as I walked across a snow-packed path, taste the butter-soaked morels, feel the sting of icy sleet and the almost uncomfortable warmth of a blazing fire.

The audiobook is marvelously narrated by a trio of skilled voice artists. I have no idea which artist reads which stories, but they are all equally good. I can hear the gravelly, whisky-soaked, cigarette fueled rasp of a lonely man, and also the quiet, despair of a woman who has been beaten down by life. They give the listener the exuberance of youth and the quite confusion of an older woman’s encroaching dementia.

THE SYMPATHIZER by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

A hybrid of a war novel and an espionage thriller--the central figure is a double agent, a Communist highly placed in the expatriate Vietnamese community after the fall of Saigon.

Divided loyalties, divided identity, the limits of friendship in a political world...a big canvas, the story moving along smartly.

A huge prize winner and much lauded...but I found it for the most part unmoving, dispassionately told.

Anyone else read this one and would care to offer an alternate take?