Sep. 4th, 2019 03:27 pm
Coming on fall
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muckefuckI've been treading water in my reading since I finished Beloved a week ago. I didn't have another novel I was jonesing to start so I tackled some short stories from Ajay Navaria,
Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Chanelle Benz. Of these, Özdamar is the only one I've read before. Benz was an impulse purchase at the discount bookstore and Navaria I picked up a while ago when I was looking for some South Asian literature not originally written in English.
If I was looking for a different experience than I would get reading a book more aimed at audiences in the Anglosphere, I sure got it. It's not often in a US novel that you'll find, for instance, a detailed breakdown of the skin complexions of drivers outside a health club. I don't mind having to google characters' surnames or ethnic origins to get some feel for the politics of each scene but I do mind the fact that everything seems to come back to caste. His protagonists are all either tragic characters discriminated against on account of their caste origins or successful ones who are nonetheless neurotic about owing their position to affirmative action. After four or more stories, it gets tedious, so I'm shelving him for a while.
The Benz is considerably more varied. There's a slave narrative, a Western, a future archaeology story, a historical noir, and more. None of them feels 100% successful but I appreciate the effort. The Özdamar barely feels like stories at all, more like fragments of an autobiography. The various tales all seem to have the same protagonist whose Laufbahn mirrors that of the author herself. Like her novel, it's full of odd occurrences and memorable observations. Again, not exactly the stuff of genius but I like how she writes German and she's certainly lived through some interesting times.
I did make another stab at Ffawd, cywilydd a chelwyddau but I'm just not sure I have the fortitude to persist. I've got too look up a lot of vocabulary and I just don't get the feeling it's sticking. Perhaps in a month or so when it's colder and my social calendar begins to die down. In the meantime, I'm lining up some Native American lit for Indian summer: Erdrich's Round house, Orange's There, there (a gift of my mother's), and Howe's Shell shaker--plus, of course, that ethnography of the Pawnee that I left off during the summer bison hunt. It's an ambitious list, but I'm feeling up to it.
Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Chanelle Benz. Of these, Özdamar is the only one I've read before. Benz was an impulse purchase at the discount bookstore and Navaria I picked up a while ago when I was looking for some South Asian literature not originally written in English.
If I was looking for a different experience than I would get reading a book more aimed at audiences in the Anglosphere, I sure got it. It's not often in a US novel that you'll find, for instance, a detailed breakdown of the skin complexions of drivers outside a health club. I don't mind having to google characters' surnames or ethnic origins to get some feel for the politics of each scene but I do mind the fact that everything seems to come back to caste. His protagonists are all either tragic characters discriminated against on account of their caste origins or successful ones who are nonetheless neurotic about owing their position to affirmative action. After four or more stories, it gets tedious, so I'm shelving him for a while.
The Benz is considerably more varied. There's a slave narrative, a Western, a future archaeology story, a historical noir, and more. None of them feels 100% successful but I appreciate the effort. The Özdamar barely feels like stories at all, more like fragments of an autobiography. The various tales all seem to have the same protagonist whose Laufbahn mirrors that of the author herself. Like her novel, it's full of odd occurrences and memorable observations. Again, not exactly the stuff of genius but I like how she writes German and she's certainly lived through some interesting times.
I did make another stab at Ffawd, cywilydd a chelwyddau but I'm just not sure I have the fortitude to persist. I've got too look up a lot of vocabulary and I just don't get the feeling it's sticking. Perhaps in a month or so when it's colder and my social calendar begins to die down. In the meantime, I'm lining up some Native American lit for Indian summer: Erdrich's Round house, Orange's There, there (a gift of my mother's), and Howe's Shell shaker--plus, of course, that ethnography of the Pawnee that I left off during the summer bison hunt. It's an ambitious list, but I'm feeling up to it.
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