Aaron's Leap

(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site. The publisher very generously provided me with a copy of this novel.)

Aaron's Leap, Magdaléna Platzová
Read: 11 to 18 May 2014
5 / 5 stars

Magdaléna Platzová's Aaron's Leap is a powerful, sobering meditation on both the human condition and the nurturing of the artistic soul that closes the distance between far-flung eras, absent friends, and seemingly unrelated histories of people and places alike--all of which demonstrate a unifying power akin to a ripple effect in time.

The narrative bounds across decades to explore a modern-day Israeli film crew's efforts to produce a documentary about the early- to mid-1900s life and art of Berta Altmann. Berta gets her own voice and story throughout the book, revealing intimate details about her that no retrospective examination of the conflicted woman could ever hope to replicate--a limitation that Berta's friend and fellow artist, Krystýna Hládková, is keenly aware of, coaxing her toward filmed interviews in the hopes of adding crucial dimension to what she sees as a detachedly historical film. Krystýna's granddaughter Milena tags along as a translator and soon finds herself romantically though confusingly entangled with the crew's cameraman, the titular Aaron, and the two add their own interconnected threads to the book's tapestry of inevitable connections.

Aaron's Leap is not just one character's story but it is bound by one idea: the necessity of art. The crucial role art plays in society and the artists' need to create form the backbone of the novel, with the characters' stories serving the central thesis to varying degrees. Aaron throws himself into his work, almost talking himself out of his feelings for Milena by convincing himself that she would be a distraction from the career to which he's devoted himself; Berta practically tortures herself to produce art that satisfies her, railing against her own impulses to fit a mold that isn't true to her own avenue of expression; Krystýna, primarily appearing as an elderly woman whose final days are upon her, destroys some of the uglier vestiges of her past and throws most of her efforts into detailing the Berta she knew in the hopes of leaving behind images both of herself that her son can peacefully live with after she's gone and of the Berta she knew and loved that would otherwise die with her.

The conflict between artists' utterly devoted, almost childlike tunnel-visioned regard for the work driving them and the cold imperatives of adult responsibility emerges as a recurring theme, emphasizing the frustrations that arise from trying to strike a realistic balance between the two. Berta is the best encapsulation of this, from witnessing a professor's descent into seeming madness in order to live in unbridled servitude to his art to trying to find her own harmonious allocations of energy. She responds to an interrogation regarding the openly communist ideals she has cultivated by explaining "We don't want to destroy... We want everyone to have enough food and heat, so they don't have to choose between working for money and working for the soul" and crying out in her diary entries with existential crises like "Must one really work and scrape by only for oneself to be able to create something? Must one be self-centered?"

The seemingly self-serving nature of the artist is a frequent concern for Berta, who is routinely described as a warm, magnetic and wholly selfless woman. A therapist suggests that growing up without a mother and with a father who couldn't give her the attention she needs left the adult Berta craving love and unwilling to impose upon others, which ultimately reconciles her artistic confidence with the ostensibly incompatible self-doubt plaguing her personal life. Berta is so worried that she doesn't give enough of herself to others and saves her best parts for her art that it's not until two days before she and her husband are sent to the Terezín concentration camp that she finally realizes she has sabotaged herself, confessing that "the balance of almost forty-two years" is that she has "accomplished nothing as an artist." Neither Berta nor anyone else directly pose the question, but it is this slap of clarity that asks whether it is more selfish to live for one's art or to be so devoted to others in the finite present that it compromises one's intended legacy as a canonical powerhouse, inadvertently diminishing the enjoyment of others in the far more expansive future. When Krystýna correctly observes that Berta was only able to give herself to others through her talents in Terezín by offering art lessons to the children imprisoned with her--and, therefore, giving them some shred of normalcy during a hellish obliteration of the childlike innocence she understood so well--it is one of the book's most piercing, tragic revelations about an otherwise strong woman whose unearned sense of guilty obligation to others was her undoing.

Platzová expertly illustrates the connectivity of the past, present and future, as well as the influences such chains of events impose on the widening spiral of time. It is not only Berta's living past and current memory that unite strangers and places but also the shifting times that she witnessed that drive this point home with a poignancy. The artists comprising the company she kept as a young woman regard themselves as midwives ushering in a new era on the ashes of the old in an "attempt to remold human life and its industrially produced elements into an artistic work." There can be no new worlds created without nurturing a dissatisfaction with the old, and a willingness to sit by dispassionately in uncertain times of flux between the two is to suffer a living death.

Likewise, stagnation arises from sidestepping opportunity one too many times, as the chances to become the person that one's talent mandate they should be are not a limitless resource. While it took Berta nearly her entire life to keep her short-term needs from obscuring her long-term goals, there is a chance that Aaron will not make the same mistake and, in fact, take the leap that will lead him to the sublime fulfillment that life is waiting for him to embrace.

Wasteland Blues

(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site. The publisher generously provided me with a copy of this novel.)

Wasteland Blues, Scott Christian Carr and Andrew Conry-Murray
Read: 14 to 21 April 2014
4 / 5 stars    

For me to find a post-apocalyptic yarn to be a successfully executed one, there are just a few requirements that I need to be satisfied, namely a uniquely fabricated world of end-times horrors; conversely, there are numerous mainstays of the genre that I take great delight in seeing turned on their heads, disregarded altogether or swapped for new takes on a literary genus of seemingly infinite permutations.

Wasteland Blues is another answer lobbed at the question of how exactly society would fall apart in the wake of mass devastation and how its survivors would forge ahead with limited assets and mounting adversity. It begins with a band of four men--Derek, the hotheaded, self-proclaimed leader; his mostly genial brick wall of a brother, Teddy; John, their pious friend; and Derek's captive, a grizzled old man, Leggy, whose moniker mocks his halved gams and whose town-drunk persona hides lifetimes of experience in battling the elements in this wasted world that keeps trudging on decades after the ruinous, toxic final war that dismantled civilization as we know it--who set out for whatever remains of New York City from San Muyamo, their blasted West Coast refuge cobbled together from the broken relics of a time none of them ever knew.

The basic need to carve out a habitable place in a poisoned world is no longer an immediate struggle. The story begins in the refugee village where the four men have been living for years, and it's clear that there are outposts dotting an otherwise ravaged country where nascent societies offer glimmers of hope about rebuilding the world and establishing cohesive communities. It is, however, that fledgling sense of safety in numbers that force Derek and Teddy to flee their home in the first place: One of Teddy's lapses into a blind, destructive rage resulted in the accidental death of their father, and Derek knows all too well that their fellow residents would never tolerate a murderer living among them. The cross-country trek that ensues allows for the true point of this story--self-realization in times that test an individual's breaking point and determination--to slowly emerge against a landscape comprising the very stuff of which nightmares are made.

There's the standard menu of life-after-the-end-of-life-as-we-know-it fare, like the ongoing struggles against both an unforgiving environment and all the other living things that could prove inimical for any number of reasons, never knowing who can be trusted, and conjuring up and clinging to a vision of the future that's worth fighting for. To prove that it's something looking to enrich the genre rather than listlessly regurgitate its hallmarks, Wasteland Blues has to serve as more than just another story told from the other side of a world-changing catastrophe, which, gratefully, it does with aplomb. The novel focuses not on what greets this growing band of misfits when it reaches the city Derek sees in his dreams (and conflates into a heavenly vision to coax the reluctant John along) by following the group as it makes its way across the Wasteland of post-nuclear fallout America. This is a story about a journey and the lessons it imparts about not just surviving but thriving to those who are receptive to a perspective-widening education.

What begins as a ragtag quartet with little chance of survival given three of its members' nearly lifelong isolation in San Muyamo slowly grows to include both human and animal allies, some of whom stick around for the long haul and others who tag along 'til they get to their intended destinations. As the story progresses, the caricatures that Derek, Teddy, John and Leggy began as blossom into more realized characters who possess something integral to not only their own survival but also that of their roving companions. It is that flourishing humanism that sets Wasteland Blues apart from its end-times-lit brethren, as it shows how the same set of circumstances impacts different personalities, and how each character both serves and is the product of the story and its world in their own ways.

Perhaps the most effective element within this book's 200-some pages is the present state of the world itself. While there isn't a definitely given time in which Wasteland Blues takes place, there are casual references to the last World War taking place during 2085, or nearly a century ago. In that time, any recognizable traces of the world the reader knows are lost, ruined or misremembered, and that sense of chronological discombobulation is a difficult reality to face. What we know to be astronauts have become almost mythological moon men dwelling on the lunar surface, and our satellites are now likened to angels and "tin houses floating around in the sky." Having to face not only a mass extinction by way of radioactive fire but also a dissolution of the world in which the reader is safely encountering this post-apocalyptic world makes for uncomfortable reminders of one's mortality every time those sensitive spots are cruelly but effectively poked throughout the unfolding of this story.

The lack of a neatly wrapped ending would feel like a frustrating cop-out if weren't such a fitting continuation of the harrowing disorientation permeating through these pages. As Leggy ruminates toward the end of the novel, "(w)e're all heroes of our own stories... and heroes are supposed to live happily ever after, at least in the story books. But the Wasteland keeps its own book, and writes its own ending." This story, in keeping with the uncertainty of a world ambling toward some hopeful rebirth, deserves more than a forced conclusion tacked on for the sake of a "real" ending, as if there's anything the Wasteland teaches those who dare to traverse it, it's that endings are sudden, messy things that come of their own accord and that closure is a promise no man has a right to demand.

Leningrad

(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site. I purchased this book with the intention of reviewing it.)

Leningrad, Igor Vishnevetsky
Read: 13 to 14 April 2014
4.5 / 5 stars   

Igor Vishnevetsky's Leningrad combines poetry and prose, newspaper articles and personal journals, publicized tallies and top-secret communiques to paint a complete (and completely bleak) image of Leningrad Blockage-era Russia and the full scope of horrors that can rain down on a war-pummeled city while its residents try to hold their lives together throughout an increasingly turbulent period.

As history is reduced to numbers and outcomes and notable skirmishes with the ever-widening distance separating then from now, it's easy to forget that people did their best to live through times of far-reaching upheaval and misery that encroached most disastrously on their smaller worlds. Here, Vishnevetsky presents us with Gleb Alfani, a composer, and his lover, Vera, as the intimate connection between a ravaged city and its residents' desperate attempts to preserve the humanity that they need to survive in a brutal environment. Gleb distracts himself from both a hopeless world and the barrage of ammunition disfiguring his home by drowning out the cacophony of ceaseless fire with the opera he superstitiously believes will keep him and his beloved safe as long as he's composing it. Vera's safety becomes a paramount concern when she divulges her pregnancy, already a complication in turbulent times where death far outpaces births but an even more daunting hurdle since Vera's husband is both a naval officer in the war effort and very obviously not the child's father. She flees Leningrad in the hopes of finding refuge, instructing Gleb to follow her once he receives her next letter, but his emaciated body and weakened spirit soon fall victim to a flu that leaves him delirious and split from reality. Spring eventually returns to Leningrad and health finally returns to Gleb, but the world he is reborn to is nothing like the one he once knew.

Aside from their roles as the beating heart in the political history of war, Gleb and Vera, as well as their friends and family orbiting the periphery of the plot, are witnesses who provide their own personal narratives about struggling through another day, clinging to the things that gave their life meaning before, and how those things become frivolous necessities as the life rafts keeping their rapidly deflating morale afloat. The continuation and preservation of art is a recurring theme throughout this short book: A minor character retrieves rare books from bombed-out buildings; Vera's husband writes of how he feels that the time he once spent painting now seems "absolutely ludicrous in comparison with the immense, unifying cause propelling us all forward," though the painting to which he refers is the lone item in Vera's apartment that glimmers with hope when Gleb goes looking for her and finds only a long-empty residence; Gleb slips into poesy in some of his journal entries, finding dark beauty in a devastated world and imposing metered order on a time when chaos ruled, and later mourns the books he sacrificed to the fire that kept him warm throughout the unforgiving winter. The aesthetic value of artistic pursuits aside, holding tight to one's appreciation of art is how these characters preserved elements of pre-war life, fighting impending death and coping with persistent uncertainty by remembering the things that gave beauty to the world and brought them happiness.

The importance of bearing witness to the unenviable epoch in which they lived and to which they had front-row seats is among the primary functions Vishnevetsky's characters serve. One of Gleb's first journal entries talks of how a friend confessed that being confronted with death leaves him in a state of arousal; rather than being a deviant's admission, it highlights how the triumph of living when thousands die each month is an understandably muddled, confused thing. Some characters find themselves almost gloating to the corpses they've stepped over in the streets, so giddy they are with life--hard as it is--while others try not to take in too much (if any) of their squalid environment. But no judgement is imparted to make one reaction seem more honorable than the other: Vishnevetsky merely uses each character's response to meteoric body counts to color their personalities, demonstrating how the coping mechanisms of the living are as varied as their methods of survival. While some characters need to record the loss and desolation of the times, especially once discrepancies arise between what they've seen and what official documents claim, others merely want to survive, and looking too closely at the carnage surrounding them would only deliver the final blow of emotional defeat. Self-denial looks an awful lot like self-preservation in the right circumstances and, as accounts of cannibalism rise and Gleb's instructions to himself about what does and doesn't prove to be edible betray the desperate edges of madness, it is increasingly clear that each individual must decide for themselves what desperation looks like and how they must harness it to see another day.

Since the world has a cruel way of moving on despite the sufferings of its inhabitants, the first spring of the siege finally comes and is wholly incongruent with the winter that still clutches at the hearts of those who have lost and suffered through so much. But it is proof that all things will pass and that time always shuffles onward, and the most we can do is learn from the past and remember its harsh imperatives. While time does not heal all wounds, hindsight is a stern teacher that is keen to remind its students that life goes on for those who are strong enough to forge ahead with it. It is in this truth that the crux of Leningrad's lesson dwells, the affirmation of life's ability to take root in the most hard-scrabble, inconceivably hostile elements as long as there is something to live for.

Palmerino

(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site. I paid for this book with my own hard-won dollars.)

Palmerino, Melissa Pritchard
Read: 2 to 7 April 2014
5 / 5 stars 

Of all the successes contained within Palmerino's deceptively slim form, chief among them is its sound example of why Melissa Pritchard should be everyone's factually based but fictionally rendered introduction to coarse, easily misunderstood and half-forgotten writers. WIth a sensitive touch, lush descriptions and a richly evocative narrative triptych, Pritchard's exhaustive research into Violet Paget--perhaps better known as her nome de plume and masculine alter ego, Vernon Lee, the grandiloquent feminist and penner of supernatural tales, aesthetic studies and travel essays--flawlessly blends the late-nineteenth century writer's life with that of her fictional modern-day biographer.

Sylvia Casey, also a writer who has fallen on hard times (namely her marriage's demise as signaled by her husband absconding with another man, not to mention the faltering critical and commercial reception of her two most recent books placing her career in precarious uncertainty), has retreated to Palmerino, an Italian villa not far from Florence where Violet had spent much of her life, to slip away and throw herself into writing a novel inspired by Violet's life. Through research and walking the same grounds Violet once did, Sylvia immerses herself in the life of her spirited muse, mostly unaware that her subject has become her possessor in an unintended bit of method biographing.

The triumvirate of narration is an effective collision of past and present: Sylvia's quest to alternately lose herself in and hide from Italian life as she learns about the tempestuous Violet and writes of her discoveries; snapshots of Violet's life ranging from girlhood to brief mentions of her parents' and beloved Clementina's deaths; and ethereal interjections from Violet herself, as not even death could silence such an indomitable spirit, watching (and becoming gradually besotted with) her biographer, guiding the still-corporeal writer to clarify the truths about a life that has grown tarnished by assumptions: Violet is not a figure to be pigeonholed into easy descriptions, and she is irritated by history's posthumous efforts to reduce her to flat absolutes.

Though Violet is the linchpin holding the trio of perspectives together, the commingling of biographer and subject is present in each section to increasing degrees as Violet breathes her own essence into Sylvia by gradual possession. Sylvia's own writings are the most obvious interplay between the two, with Violet's resurrection flowing from her fingers onto pages both typed and intimately scribbled. Violet herself has been observing her biographer since the latter's arrival, a benign watchfulness yielding to a ghostly seduction that becomes ever more apparent in the chapters that follow Sylvia's pursuits. As the present-day writer encounters relics and writings from Violet's life, Sylvia withdraws more into herself and her work, at first wondering almost wryly if Violet is guiding her and eventually shirking her own rigid writing methods to scrawl pages in a hand nearly as illegible as Violet's, certain that a female presence draws ever closer until "hearing her name, she understands who is calling her" and finally flees to Violet's secret garden in the book's final pages.

It is Pritchard's sympathetic but honest rendering of a woman some found tyrannical, some found charming and almost all found terrifyingly learned that urge her ghostly heroine into genial illumination. By preserving Violet's intellectual intensity as well as capturing the softness of her romantic pursuits, the hard-edged scribe becomes a fully realized figure rather than the wanly uneven caricature such a divisive female figure can so easily be written off as. It is this careful balance that lends so much female empowerment to the novel, as Violet publicly shuns all the social niceties that she believes exist "principally to defang" a woman but extends the compassionate sensitivity stereotypically attributed to the so-called fairer to those she feels most deserving of her affections, selectively embracing her femininity when she finds it necessary. It is easy to reduce a strong woman from a repressed era to the limited and scandalously taboo "lesbian" label but Violet was volumes more than her attraction to other women. She recognized the disadvantages of her gender the moment she was pitted for her ugliness and turned an unfair liability into an asset, which led her to adopt the mannerisms, dress and persona of a man, denying the world a chance to thwart her ascent, both as an intellectual and a human being, by seizing an opportunity to turn biology's lousy hand into something she could take control of and claim as her own.

If Violet's off-putting bravado and ferocity are pleasingly mitigated by inclusion of both her past and her first-person chapters, then her actions are justified by the more submissive Sylvia, who can't catch a break and shrinks from people in direct opposition to the way Violet sought to dominate them. Sylvia has merely inherited the equality for which her female predecessors have won and quietly moves through life, never questioning the path she has chosen until she begins to wonder what would have happened if she ever sought the pleasure of another woman's company, while Violet has struggled to assert herself in a male-dominated world, wrestling her way into commanding respect where she could get it and striking fear where she could not. The opposing trajectories of their writing lives--Sylvia chronicling the rise of Violet's career while her own is in rapid decline--and the sense of novelty with which each regards her near-perfect foil is a subtle affirmation that expression of one's sexuality can be a thing constricted by the absence of that perfect half, lying in wait for its cue to finally rise from dormancy.

The achingly gorgeous prose in which Palmerino is written strikes pitch-perfect harmony with its equally strong expression of humanity, promising that the hidden beauty within is always worth the time it takes to discover it.

And the Dark Sacred Night

(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site. The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book.)

And the Dark Sacred Night, Julia Glass
Read: 19 to 30 March 2014   
3.75 / 5 stars

I don't remember many details from Julia Glass's first novel, Three Junes, other than stumbling upon it that summer between high school and college when I only read books with award medallions emblazoned on their covers, finding justification for such a pretentious pursuit in my enjoyment of that novel. That same ease of getting lost in a story packed with likably intriguing personalities came screaming back after a couple dozen pages into Glass's fifth and most recent offering, And the Dark Sacred Night--a novel that, like the Louis Armstrong song from which it borrows a lyric to refurbish into a title, is unconventionally beautiful and just the right amount of earnest.

Glass returns to a handful of events and characters introduced in her debut novel, dipping into its material for a splash of background color in some places and smaller but crucial supporting detail in others, to spin a new yarn about the connectedness of people and the familial ties that alternately bind and throw out that last viable lifeline. Kit, an out-of-work husband and father, is not only in the throes of a mid-life crisis of crippling proportions but also pushing his wife, however unintentionally, to the limits of her patience. The only solution to Kit's inactivity, he and his wife, Sandra, agree, is to finally seek out the identity of and story behind the father he never knew, as Kit's mother, Daphne, has remained doggedly silent about her teenage lover who died in his 30s, more than 20 years removed from the book's present. Kit's efforts reconnect him with his first stepfather, the man who formally adopted Kit as a boy and with whom a teenage Kit lived well after his mother left, who puts him in contact with the paternal family he never knew existed.

Here, the rich backgrounds and layered stories that give each character dimension have also made each character palpable and engaging. These are everyday people with the kind of problems people face every day--making ends meet with dwindling resources, the slowly realized crisis of a faith that was once unshakable, the dawning of an augmented understanding of the self, aging parents and spouses, chronically underestimating the decency of which most people are capable--and who are forced to yield their secrets as others' unanswered questions become too much to bear. What's more, Glass's characters actually behave like adults, aware as they are that no two people want the same things or see the world the same way because every individual is a composite of their unique experiences and places, as well as the private details that add further duality to their personalities. The maturity with which Glass graces her characters allows for their adult dilemmas to be addressed in an adult manner, fostering an effective contrast between the teenage urgency and freedom that emanates from the flashbacks to Daphne's fateful summer at the music camp where Kit was conceived.

As Glass demonstrates her knack for believably and effectively linking people and events across time and connections, she twines them together to revelatory but largely positive effect: A book with a less optimistic regard for human nature wouldn't have allowed Kit to be so warmly welcomed by the grandparents and extended family he meets for the first time in his 40s, nor would his mother be so understanding (but forgivably reluctant) of Kit's need and right to discover his genealogical past for himself. But this isn't a novel that seeks external conflict to move its plot along so much as it demands that the personal growth of its characters develop the story. The recurring element of underestimating people only to be pleasantly surprised is evidence enough that this is a warm-hearted book, as is the way it embraces tragedy as one of the greatest unifiers among those touched by it.

Every good story needs some friction, though, and that which punctuates And the Dark Sacred Night is the novel-long query of conscious that weighs the benefits of lifting the veil of ignorance to gain a fuller understanding of one's self against its consequences, namely the risk that an escalating ripple effect could throw another's life in complete upheaval. But since there is no way to accurately compare what is with what could have been on account of the myriad unpredictable, unforeseeable variables of the roads not travelled, the limbo that comes from a lack of closure is deemed to be a far worse fate than the fleeting hell of slicing open old wounds and setting oneself for new ones. All anyone can do in an unpredictable world is take responsibility for their own happiness and find peace in knowing that any chance is taken with the best intentions.

And the Dark Sacred Night's many successes, unfortunately, do make its faltering missteps jarringly obvious. There is some heavy-handed drawing of parallels (a blizzard forces Kit to prolong the visit to his stepfather; later, when a hurricane similarly traps a house full of newly acquainted connections that share Kit's father as their common bond, it's a bit obvious that storms signal momentous occasions, diminishing the shock of the tragedy the latter sets up) and somewhat laboriously emphasized meanings, as if Glass doesn't always trust her audience to follow her implications. But such things are mostly innocuous grievances, as Glass deftly navigates her way through the most important instances of foreshadowing and symbols.

As a whole, Glass's newest novel is a largely successful one that, like its characters, is a bit uneven and imperfect but is buoyed by hopeful optimism that certainly deserves kudos for avoiding the kind of pat sentiment that is all too tempting to deploy when matters of the heart float so close to the surface.

"Something Wrong With Her" virtual book tour

Welcome to the second stop on Cris Mazza's blog tour for her newest book, Something Wrong With Her. Yesterday, Lori over at the TNBBC blog offered an audio clip of Cris reading her own words in her own voice; today, I bring you a review of Cris's groundbreaking real-time memoir. Cris is the author of more than 17 books, including Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, Waterbaby, Trickle-Down Timeline, and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? Her first novel, How to Leave a Country, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction. Mazza has co-edited three anthologies, including Men Undressed: Women Writers on the Male Sexual Experience. In addition to fiction, Mazza has authored a collection of personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Currently living 50 miles west of Chicago, she is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 


Somewhere in the nebulous ether between a memoir and a duet performed by two banged-up soulmates across decades and flurries of letters lies Cris Mazza's Something Wrong With Her, a real-time introspective retrospective of the author's turbulent sexual and romantic past that chronicles the damages incurred along the way.

Something Wrong With Her is an appropriately messy meditation on how the past is never really gone and how the present has no meaning without the foundation of previous experience giving it support and contextual relevance. While Mazza focuses most intently on both her post-secondary-education and adult selves, the fact that the younger version of her was never sexualized in a healthy way is among the many refrains to which she returns, both as a pure concept and as a variation on the theme that has cast its predatory pall over too many aspects of her life. She explores how she never felt that unabashed sex drive that held so many of her teenage peers in hormonal thrall, how the very idea of boys wanting the whole of her--especially the "dirty" parts of her body she could barely acknowledge as hers--never even dawned on her as a possibility, how being her male friends' neutral zone of safe experimentation before doing the deeds with their girlfriends left her with a sense of always being the stand-in for prettier and more desirable girls, how rape games and harassment comprise the bulk of her earliest sexual experiences, and how all these and so many more stomach-churning thoughts and milestones have all compounded to leave Mazza with a sense that there is, indeed, something wrong with her.

Please understand that “messy" carries not a hint of criticism here: There are an awful lot of crucial but incongruent pieces jammed together so that some of their seams are showing, but it adds an authenticity to Mazza's journey of self-discovery, showing just how long and how hard she has been fighting the false starts and full stops that added to the interior hurdles she faced while making peace with and learning about herself. Reading Something Wrong With Her is like watching Mazza revisit diary entries, letters, doodles, photographs, factual life experiences reimagined as the fictionalized components of previously published works, and dusty personal relics to create both a life-sized puzzle of her development and a roadmap of the paths she took to arrive at the state she's in now. As Mazza compares the patterns of her past and examines their long-range influence on her present, delving deeper into Something Wrong With Her becomes less like reading and more like cheering on a long-suffering soul as she finally breaks through all the negative perceptions she held of herself and her sexuality in a therapy session that's chock-full of AHA! moments.

The writer and musician personae that are roiling within Mazza (the former being the dominant force of her current identity, the latter but a vestigial flicker of the crucial role it played in her earlier years) provide an unexpectedly harmonic call-and-answer element in these pages: Mazza employs music as a metaphor for life, proving that improvisation requires a better ear and more complete sense of the bigger piece than the untrained ear realizes by letting her story carry its narrative in the direction it naturally flows as old memories resurface and new voices chime in with their own unplanned contributions. Old mentors, old friends, old lovers and old nemeses come and go, introducing and underscoring their myriad influences and impacts, each being reexamined as the same pieces of old exchanges are called back to the stage for further scrutiny. Far from being repetitive, they add a poignant recurring theme to a story that is so familiar to its writer but to which she is still a servant, helpless to resist the unplanned direction writing tends to lead its master's hand. While the events Mazza discusses and revisits are all in the past, her reclamation of her sexuality and her self-understanding are still works in progress, leaving some questions unanswered, some elements unexplored  and some threads untied. Unlike a memoir that covers a definitive, complete period of its writer's life, Mazza's memoir in real time addresses what it is to be her as a writer, a woman, a still-developing individual and maybe, just maybe, a secure romantic partner as she continues to forge ahead on those previously uncharted paths.

Much of Mazza's odyssey sings of the things familiar to any woman who was once (or perhaps still is) an awkward, insecure girl on the cusp of womanhood with no clue as to how her peers seem to be making the adjustment with minor mishaps (as opposed to paralyzing confusion and a sense of being either passed over or a consolation prize) and in full possession of themselves. Her self-pummeling mantras of "I should enjoy this" in the face of teenage and college boys' clumsy advances and hormone-soaked attempts to fumble their way into her pants betray an inability to see herself as a physically adept or desirable entity of femininity, how her own gender roles and expectations are awash in shameful discomfort reinforced and exacerbated by a parade of ruinous men and boys alike. She marvels at more sexually adventurous and confident girls who navigate the murky depths of sexual awakening as if they belonged to a different species entirely, free of the crippling fixations Mazza finds herself haunted by.

While much of the story pertains to how Mazza grapples to reconcile her physically adverse reactions to sex--namely the pain of a weak pelvic floor compounded by anorgasmia, the inability to experience an orgasm--with her psychological aversion to it, the beating heart of this book, for me, was the lifelong (though far from smoothly unfolding) friendship between Mazza and Mark. It's impossible to exist in such a void that outside factors hold no sway over the development of an individual, and those external forces can serve as some of the most objective vantage points to witness the progression of a personality: Mazza relies heavily upon Mark's input, drawing directly from their volumes of interactions and allowing their emailed exchanges to speak of a love that has patiently waited decades to be revealed. The progression of their relationship, from stumbling teenagers to adults whose hindsight is awash in the wisdom of experience and uncertainty of facing long-ago mistakes neither realized they were making, is a heartening affirmation that finding the absolutely right person at the absolute worst time is not always a tragic sentence of irreparable proportions. The love (both easily platonic and desperately romantic) and dawning awareness that transpire between the two are the book's best evidence in proving Mazza wrong for thinking herself frigid.

With the easy payoff that comes with writing about sex making the erotica that was once taboo a wildly popular genre these days, a story about its deliberate absence is a welcome change, and Mazza’s honesty and willingness to put her own hang-ups and mistakes under the microscope of public examination exemplifies the equally matched interplay between bravery and vulnerability that is the hallmark of a compelling memoir.

Report from the Interior

(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site. The book was a present from my in-laws, who clearly did not give it to me in exchange for a review.)

Report from the Interior, Paul Auster
Read: 12 to 16 March 2014   
4 / 5 stars  

I've not read anything by Paul Auster before, including his Winter Journal that's both a companion piece of sorts and predecessor to Report from the Interior. While the earlier work is an account of Auster's physical state, the title of this unconventional memoir is absolutely indicative of its inward focus, with the author examining himself through memories of childhood (the lens of recollection is, thankfully, not slathered with Vaseline), the movies of his adolescence that have left the deepest impressions, letters to the woman who would become his first wife written during their college years, and a photo album highlighting points of interest from the book's first quarter. While I imagine Auster's fans would derive the most enjoyment from observing this particular author's inner formation, Report from the Interior made for a warm (if not charmingly self-indulgent) introduction to the writer's style and personality.

One of the things that makes a memoir compelling enough to read about someone's else's life is the universality it brings to each memory, how a writer translates a personal experience into the language of ubiquitous milestones. Using the weirdly compelling second-person as his narrative vehicle for most of the book, Auster leads his readers through the awe of one's early years, winding his way from idyllic youth to adulthood's harsh realities, each childlike expectation derailed by adult-sized disappointment becoming a foothold in the uphill battle of dawning awareness. But as he learns that not all people are as trusting as he is or that even heroes are imperfect men, young Paul also inches closer to the person he'll become as the world of literature reveals its secrets with an ever-increasing generosity and as life itself becomes a richer place as he discovers things like dancing with girls, unsupervised days at the cinema and the nonstop rush of New York City.

While each mile marker between youth and maturity is Auster's alone, he zeroes in on the heart of the memory, locating the reason why that particular moment sticks out more vividly than others and addresses the relatable humanity of the moment. He recalls his boyhood idolization of Thomas Edison, the heady rush as degrees of separation dwindle between the two when he finds out his barber also cut Edison's hair and how his own father once worked in Edison's lab, and the acute despair of discovering that Edison himself fired his father for being Jewish: The players and details comprise Auster's own drama but the slap of cold realization that comes with a hero's irrevocable fall is familiar to all who've passed through that checkpoint on their ways to becoming jaded adults.

Auster shares a number of life lessons gleaned through firsthand experience, particularly those that impinge on his developing sense of justice, and the movies that have left the most striking impact on his formative years' memories were his first tastes of life being unfair on a grander scale. Two films (The Incredible Shrinking Man and I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) receive special attention for how viscerally Auster's younger self responded to them: Both forced their young viewer to accept that sometimes the hits just keep coming, especially if, like the films' protagonists, one just happens to be an unfortunate victim of circumstance. In a book that relies largely on firsthand experiences, examining the effects movies can have on their audience and hinting at how entertainment like books and film can be an excellent supplement to one's emotional education, as illustrated by the palpable horror Auster felt on behalf of the characters he observed. Letting an observer live vicariously through a fictitiously upended life without suffering through actual consequences cultivates the kind of empathy that comes with living vicariously through a tormented character for the duration of their story.

The letters Auster wrote to his college sweetheart and first wife, writer and translator Lydia Davis, offered a glimpse of the writer as a young man in the cusp between collegiate freedom and adult responsibility, even if they are awash in a young writer's inability to resist the showiness of burgeoning talent and a wordsmith's experimentation with a medium he is on the brink of mastering, even mentioning how his parents won't address a pressing issue in letters because Auster has the advantage over them. But they're an honest time capsule that screams of uncertainty and potential colliding in that desire to experience everything with the exuberance only a university student can sustain.

I've found that one of the biggest appeals that memoirs hold for me is the assurance that other people--successful, decidedly functional people, no less--have experienced and felt things I always wondered if other people went through. Far beyond the general coming-of-age embarrassments and skin-thickening hurdles are those little moments that could either be personal quirks or things no one talks about for one reason or another. This is where writing in the second person best serves the readability of Auster's autobiographical tale, as it's almost comforting to realize that statements like "you would walk around in a state of stunned disassociation" (and a page later, "you have never completely outgrown this tendency to vanish from your own consciousness") and "once you were old enough to compare your situation to that of the other children you knew, you understood that your family was a broken family, that your parents had no idea what they were doing" offer a sense of comfort and belonging, knowing that this is a categorization of things that happened to someone else but feeling like that someone else is acknowledging that they happened to you, too.

Report from the Interior is a quite beautifully written attempt at reclaiming youth's lost relics through vivid recollections, a tribute to the fact that you can't predict what memories will stick around decades later or what details will define them, but that you can make sense of what they say about the individual by wrangling them into a written work.

Not for Everyday Use

(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site. I received this book from its publisher.)  

Not for Everyday Use, Elizabeth Nunez
Read: 5 to 10 March 2014   
4 / 5 stars  

Writing about the death of a parent presents the tempting trap of invoking cheap sentimentality to tug at readers' heartstrings; sidestepping those easy clichés is the mark of a mature writer who knows how to craft a powerful tale with the arsenal of unique details that makes a person irreplaceably dear to their loved ones, illustrating the extent of the void that their passing has created. Elizabeth Nunez's memoir, Not for Everyday Use, takes the four days between the frantic phone call that has her rushing to her native Trinidad from her adopted home in New York to the burial of her mother and couches that surreal blur of emotions and necessary tasks in a past that goes far beyond her own lifespan in a testament to the immortality of personal history and the vivacity of one's heritage.

The third-oldest in a family of 11 children, Nunez grows up with a vantage point perhaps a bit too mired in adult responsibilities at too young an age. While this has imbued her with a strong sense of familial responsibility that remains with her through the present day, she ponders that perhaps a little less preparation for the real world and a little more parental affection might have made her a little more well-rounded in terms of the balance between her emotional needs and passionate determination to succeed. The forced retrospection that comes with death, however, shows that Nunez has long ago reached the point where she can observe her mother and father as flawed but well-meaning individuals separate from their parental roles, appreciating all the good they've done for her and accepting that their lesser moments embody the dueling forces alive in every person.

Indeed, Nunez cannot call forward the myriad roles she plays--daughter, sister, mother, woman, educator, writer, storyteller--without acknowledging that everyone else is a collection of components that are constantly fighting for prominence as different situations call for different personas. As her memoir progresses, the reader gets a glimpse of her vastness of character through all the identities roiling within; the implication is that if she wears so many hats and is pulled in so many directions, her parents and siblings must be, too. As a natural spinner of fictions, Nunez confesses early in Not for Everyday Use that she has a tendency to conflate facts for the sake of bettering the story: This admission makes Nunez immediately believable and even more likable, ready as she is to lay bare her inability to resist polishing reality to fit her narrative standards. But it also hints at her self-awareness and her own flaws while simultaneously underscoring the fact that she recognizes when a story needs no embellishments because of its inherent significance and emotional weight.

Being both an immigrant and a native of a former British colony that is still in touch with the dark underbelly of colonialism's prejudices have put Nunez keenly in touch with the way places leave their own individual impressions on a person just as much as living relations do. Trinidad is as alive as the people influencing Nunez's past and present, its tropical locale adding natural color to her narrative, right on down to her parents' two mango trees that serve as subtle metaphors for their decades-long marriage, having grown indistinguishable from the other save for the flavor of the fruits they yield. But it is not just the local atmosphere that Nunez captures: The class divisions, oppressive Catholicism and slowly shifting gender stereotypes of her home color Nunez's upbringing, especially by contrasting the stifling attitudes of her parents' younger days with her generation's more liberated perspective. Furthermore, it highlights the divide between the judgments cast by different cultures: Many of the Nunezes bear darker skin, the stigma of which they have mostly transcended by living in a class-based society's upper-middle class; in countries like America, their expansive educations, elite jobs and enviable salaries do little to deter strangers from assuming that their generous doses of melanin pin them as thieves, junkies and sub-par parents.

Nunez's inner conflicts are rooted in something much deeper than societies' superficial prejudices, though: She has her own family, her own gender and her religious upbringing to contend with. Reconciling her lofty ambitions, determination to leave the world in a better state than she found it, the maternal desire to be surpassed by both her son and her students in talents and achievements, and her long-held religious doubt with the old-fashioned world in which she was raised fuels Nunez's ongoing battle within herself. Ever the academic, she tackles each issue point-by-point, laying out how she came to each bump in her road via past beliefs and modern understanding, such as resenting a society where mothers were burdened with veritable litters because birth control was a one-way pass to eternal damnation, robbing otherwise strong, motivated women of a life outside the home and leaving her with a lingering sense of feminine failure when her marriage crumbles and she produces only one child.

But Not For Everyday Use is ultimately a celebration of understanding and empathy, as Nunez scrutinizes herself and her loved ones with a curious intensity that betrays her need to examine individuals as fiercely as she loves them. It is a demonstration of both the intellectual freedom her parents encouraged her to pursue and the strength they pushed her to discover---the end result more than justifying the means, well-intentioned but perhaps not always flawlessly executed as they were. It is proof that family doesn't have to be in close proximity to remain close-knit. It is confirmation that blindly extended affection is but a wan facsimile of the kind of love that grows from accepting a person for everything that they are, imperfections and all.

Basal Ganglia

(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site. I purchased the book, albeit wildly discounted during a bizarro binge.) 

Basal Ganglia, Matthew Revert
Read: 3 March 2014   
4.75 / 5 stars  

Sometimes, a quick read highlights the enduring poignancy of a book's message; sometimes it's a matter of a novel being meant as a one-sitting escape into a world that goes far beyond the distance between two covers. And sometimes a book is mercifully quick, not because it's a chore to read but because, like pulling off a practically-grafted-to-your-arm Band-aid, it hurts less just to get it over with so the reader and the tortured characters can all move on as painlessly and as quickly as possible.

Such is the case with Matthew Revert's Basal Ganglia, an ostensibly odd novella that is, at its core, a meditation on the fine line that separates the contended familiarity of marital habits from brewing hostility. Its main (and only, really) characters are Rollo and Ingrid, who began as teenage lovers and are now both consumed with and isolated by the underground pillow-and-blanket fort that Rollo had built to mirror the structure of the human brain and has been indefatigably maintaining for years. With no connection to the outside world, all external conflict has been removed; what unites them in purpose has removed any common enemies that would strengthen their roles as teammates, leaving them to foster alternately resentment and indifference between them. Ingrid soon declares that she wants a child but is reluctant to expose another life to their strange, secluded world, asking that Rollo play his part in the creation of a new life by gathering materials intended for repairing the fort so she can use them to knit their baby.

What ensues is a cautionary tale about all-consuming love: Rollo and Ingrid have reduced the entirety of their world to nothing more than the two of them and the fort, losing sight of themselves as one whole comprising two parts that possess histories and individual identities. The arrival of the baby--a thing that Ingrid protects with such a fiercely believable maternal instinct that I'd find myself worrying about the newborn's safety at certain points--brings their long-suppressed issues screaming to the surface, turning their knitted offspring into a nonliving but tangible thing that becomes the embodiment of the couple's living but intangible hostilities. Both Rollo and Ingrid fear the other will inflict some harm on the baby and damn near tear down their decades-old fort in her efforts to keep the baby from him and his need to know that the baby really exists, as the (still totally inanimate) baby quickly supplants the fort as the ultimate manifestation of their union, only to just as swiftly become the physical representation of the psychological war that has finally erupted between the couple.

One of the things that struck me most immediately about this novella is the gender roles that Rollo and Ingrid assume, not just in terms of their level playing field and strength, but also how they each assume traits of the other's gender to their benefit. Allowing the child to be the tipping point for both characters makes for some of the most overtly effective shattering of gender-dictated stereotypes I've seen in a while, which I think can be attributed to three things: Rollo and Ingrid's individual perspectives receiving equal attention; getting to see how the arrival of a child affects the father just as much as the mother on an individual basis as well as within the confines of a relationship that has shifted focus as it has expanded to include a third; and that both characters possess qualities and characteristics that are presumed to exist almost exclusively within the realm of the other's gender (some examples: Rollo has experienced the joy of creation by way of the fort both he and Ingrid tend to with almost parental obsession and Rollo, unlike Ingrid, begins lactating by the end of the book; Ingrid sprouted a beard before the novella began and assumes the masculine role of the protector in terms of their child). Such atypically balanced and implicitly empathetic regard for gender makes the emotional turmoil of wanting, having and raising children--all of which come with the knee-jerk fear of overwhelming responsibility bitterly feuding with the emotional satisfaction of being charged with the care and protection of a totally dependant being, all wrapped up in a life-changing event--rife with the potential to wreak havoc on man and woman alike.

The yarn Revert spins could be just another take on the familiar tale of a relationship on the rocks and that ill-advised, last-ditch efforts to "fix" years of unacknowledged damage with a baby, but its ability to refashion an ordinary situation into something extraordinary with its offbeat elements (a pillow fort and a knitted child, mainly) keeps things refreshingly focused. There is no fear of childhood scars bringing itself to the forefront because the child in question is made of the same materials as the fort--a fort that is its builder's very own return to the womb (if I knew more about psychology, I'd have something clever to say about the yawning chasm between the part of the body the fort actually represents and that upon which its design is based). Rollo has spent so much time and effort making sure his fort keeps the outside out that he has neglected life inside the fort and is in no way emotionally prepared for a child, either the care it needs or the issues it will inevitably drudge up. The fort is rich in symbolic purpose, demonstrating how two people can work toward a common goal in isolation, underscoring the dangers of living for one obsessive purpose and detailing what happens when a life becomes all purpose and no pleasure.

Basal Ganglia is devastating, fascinating, brutally honest and cautiously hopeful. But most of all, it offers insight and imagination in equal measures, offering both a new take on an old story and compelling characters who breathe oceans of sympathetic humanity into what often err on the side of black-and-white arguments.

Flash Fiction Funny

(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site. While I had intended to ask the editor for a review copy, I had yet to find out how easy it is to do such a thing and finally just bought a copy rather than risk embarrassing myself.)

Flash Fiction Funny, edited by Tom Hazuka
Read: 15 to 16 February 2014    
3.5 / 5 stars 


In the past few months, I've been reading more contemporary and many more small-press books than I previously had, which has delivered the unintended bonus of sampling genres and writers I would have never approached before, attached as I am to the classics both canonical and present-day. While there is much to discover still, such a change in my literary diet has already proved to be an excellent experience, and testing the long-established boundaries of my bookish tastes is something I should have forced myself to do years ago.

When a friend brought Flash Fiction Funny to my attention, I pounced on the chance to acquaint myself with a genre I know very little about: I've read exactly one collection of flash fiction once before, and this was to be my first encounter with its deliberately humorous breed delivered by dozens of different voices. With each story ranging in length from a single paragraph to no more than three pages, Flash Fiction Funny runs the gamut of humor while proving that brevity is, indeed, the soul of wit if a writer knows how to achieve maximum hilarity with a minimalist's word count.

With 82 approaches to humor on display, there is most assuredly something for everyone in this collection; if a particular flash-fiction piece doesn't tickle your fancy, it's over in... well, a flash before something entirely different takes the stage. Ranging from the absurd to the darkly comical, to the mundane daily occurrences framed humorously to proof that tragedy is just comedy that tests your resolve to find the punch line, to the refreshingly uninhibited invitations to just laugh out loud over a story's elements, narration, situation or characters, this collection most definitely traverses the broad terrain of humor's territory.

Aside from the overtly forced cohesion inherent in a collection that's based on a specific mood and structure, it's not always easy to tease out a sense of unification in an anthology that encourages its panoply of writers to offer up their very different takes on both a style and a theme; however, Flash Fiction Funny's showcase of talent quickly proves itself to be a celebration of how there's always something to laugh at in any given scenario as long as you're looking at it from the right vantage point, as well as being a wonderful reminder that humor can be presented in a nigh inexhaustible number of ways.

While most offerings herein are straight-up slices of life, some are framed differently enough to keep the flow of funny varied: there are extended double entendres (like "On Collecting Porcelain Weiner Dogs," which is only ostensibly about collectible dachshunds), too-spot-on satirical renderings of the outlandish writing prompts familiar to anyone who's taken a creative-writing class ("Thirteen Writing Prompts"), a disappointed mother's will ("Mother's Last Wishes"), one-sided dialogues that need no second party because we've all been through the grimly absurd motions at one point or another ("Interview"), the failures of our prehistoric ancestors in their early attempts at domesticating wolves presented as an academic paper ("Primitive Man Tames the Wolf"), debased demigods ranging from a weary superhero ("This City") and fairy-tale princes who clearly are not living all that happily ever after after all ("Just Outside the Closet"), and fictionalized encounters with famous literary figures ("Sunflowers of Evil" and "Poets at the Boardinghouse," which were two of my favorite pieces). Despite what may sound like jabs at either the audience or the narrator, the humor here serves to highlight the fact that life's little annoyances are the common ground we all share, that even our teachers, parents, friends and idols are all powerless against the ravages of time, are subject to all the failings of the flesh, and fall victim to the ongoing frustrations that indefatigably dapple ordinary life; we can't control what happens but we can control how we react, so why not just suss out the salvageable chuckles and move on?

To me, the most successful stories here were the ones that stuck most closely to that unspoken but implied philosophy by either refashioning the staggeringly ordinary mundanities of everyday life into something practically biblical--like "Egypt," the book's first piece, which transforms the old-as-time battle of wills between a teenage son and his oh-so-unfairly immovable father into something ripped from the Old Testament, insect infestations, bodily ailments, frogs and all--or offered up ironic commentary on easy targets, like "How to Waste Two Hours of Life," which tells of a father/daughter bonding experience where Dad is subjected to his daughter's favorite brain-rotting reality-television show and is angrily compelled to keep watching this drivel that he alternately loathes and can't tear his eyes from. What makes these stories stand out is that they're social commentaries without lobbing criticisms or resting on tired cliches: Parents and children will never see eye-to-eye when their points of view are so wildly incompatible; people will always be simultaneously disgusted by and drawn to pop culture. These societal mainstays will always be happening and each new ridiculous performance will bond each new player to the legions before and after who have gone and will go through these same motions.

The hilarity comes from the earnest immediacy we impart to these spectacles, a futile farce we won't see until someone else grants us the privilege of the observer's role: It is not the outcomes of these moments that matter but what we take away from them. Learning from these moments--and, more importantly, being able to laugh at them--is one of life's most important lessons. Life is too serious to take seriously, so have some fun at its expense whenever you can. Just don't presume to be above the cosmic absurdity.

How to Fake a Moon Landing

(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site. This book was a Christmas gift and was probably not even intended as review fodder.)

How to Fake a Moon Landing: Exposing the Myths of Science Denial, Darryl Cunningham
Read: 7 to 9 February 2014   
3.75 / 5 stars 


Before even reaching the table of contents, writer/illustrator Darryl Cunningham summarizes the spirit of How to Fake a Moon Landing with a quote from author Michael Specter: "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion; however, everyone is not entitled to their own facts." Unfortunately, ours is a world where buzzwords, emotions, money and opinion are wont to warp the integrity of cold, hard facts; fortunately, in a world where "edutainment" is a thing that proves a staggering number of people need to be tricked into learning by being entertained with knowledge, we have folks like Cunningham who present scientific proof in a digestible, accessible graphic-novel format.

Cunningham takes on a smattering of hot-button issues--including the likes of evolution, climate change, and the titular inspiration of long perpetuated moon-landing hoaxes--and sets out to dismantle the fiction surrounding them by elucidating their facts. As Cunningham presents it, most misconceptions arise from both a limited grasp on the truth of a matter and a stubborn assumption that taking the way a thing looks at face value trumps understanding what it is. He attempts to foster a better appreciation of grounded-in-reality facts by offering up several examples of them, simply and helpfully aided by his illustrations. For example, to those who hinge their arguments supporting a lunar-landing hoax upon the "fact" that the American flag on the moon's surface is unarguably waving despite the lack of atmosphere to move it, Cunningham explains that a combination of the flag's construction (a pole running along its top to keep it extended), technical malfunction (trouble getting a horizontal rod to extend all the way) and mere aesthetics (astronauts liking how the unintentional ripple effect looks) created the illusion of what seems to be a fluttering flag from a wholly stationary one; this explanation occupies a mere seven frames between two pages but effectively distinguishes fallacy from reality.

The book continues in the vein of addressing an appearance-gleaned or generally long-help misconception and offering up its fact- or science-based clarification piggy-backed on the graphic-novel format for maximum clarity. The bonus of Cunningham's drawings (which are often diagrams, examples or plays on words--like the influx of ducks he uses to emphasize his point of the mystically entrenched chiropractic's quackery) helps minimize the need for what could become a lengthy, jargon-filled lecture and keeps the focus on the sort of plainly unintimidating enlightenment that staves off any viable accusation of pomposity in his presentation. It's imperative that Cunningham not lose his audience: In the chapters about homeopathy, chiropractic, fracking, vaccination and climate change, it is clearest that Cunningham wants everyone to realize that there are actual, fatal dangers that come with listening to those who refuse to listen to rational thought, and he has no hope of counteracting such dangerous modes of fact-denying thought if he loses his readers' attention in a sea of off-putting inaccessibility.

I couldn't help but feel, however, that the major objective to address as many currently controversial issues as possible made How to Fake a Moon Landing read more like a survey of timely matters than an in-depth debunking of widely disseminated untruths; taking on specific topics demands, for me, a focused battle plan rather than an overview. For those who are coming to this book and experiencing its topics at a more-than-superficial level for the first time, it's a great primer on some of the more prickly, needlessly divisive topics of our time; however, I wish it had been a little more fleshed out.

The upshot to this, though, is one of the book's two biggest successes, which is the need it instills in a curious reader to go forth and learn more about the topics broached in its pages, both to broaden one's breadth of understanding and to nullify in one's own mind the non-scientific, emotionally driven falsities that distract from the truth of each matter. I get the feeling that one of Cunningham's primary aims, along with educating anyone who picks up his book, is to champion the benefits of critical thinking and gaining enough of a knowledgeable basis of comprehension to arrive at a fact-based perspective that allows one to become a vessel of truth for those who could use a little gentle nudging toward a less fiction-based reality.

The book's final chapter, which explores science denial in general, is its other most effective success, as the focused range necessary to devising the best way to tackle a broad topic in a few pages is what this book's design is best suited to. It opens with the oh-so-subtly encapsulating illustration of an ostrich with its head buried in the ground before shedding some light on why science denial is running rampant in society, tossing out brutally honest truths like "The human mind is notable for its ability to cling to its beliefs long past the point where any evidence exists to support those beliefs." Reaching beyond the main topics of the book, it introduces the example of Big Tobacco's pioneering efforts in the '50s to sully the good name of scientific research to discredit the link between smoking and its health risks, and how such efforts have been adopted by other corporations since then to similarly tarnish the validity of the scientific method and its results, such as the oil and gas industries' efforts to downplay and even foster doubt in climate change. It goes on to put some of the blame on the mainstream media, as good journalism presents balanced facts without editorializing but good science, unlike opinion-reliant political ideologies, has only one proven truth.

By Blood We Live

(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site. The publisher graciously provided me with a galley copy of this novel.)

By Blood We Live, Glen Duncan
Read: 17 January to 2 February 2014 
4 / 5 stars


I can't say I was delighted when I found out that Glen Duncan, one of my long-time favorite living writers, had a werewolf novel in the works, let alone a whole trilogy of 'em; I can say, however, that when The Last Werewolf came out a few years ago, it won me over in a matter of pages, as tackling the ever- (and, for me, maddeningly) popular paranormal-beastie fad did nothing to diminish the elements of Duncan's writing that have kept me a loyally, fanatically enrapt reader of his works for more than a decade. Because, really, I read Duncan for the achingly gorgeous writing, and he does have an exemplary track record of wringing poignantly universal truths of the human condition from otherwordly characters, as he proved with earlier works like I, Lucifer and Death of an Ordinary Man.

By Blood We Live, the most recent installment in Duncan's werewolf saga, doesn't pick up exactly where the series' second book, Talulla Rising left off. The werewolf pack comprising Talulla, her three-year-old twins, her lover Walker, and a few of their were-pals is hunkered down in its newest temporary haven and waiting for their monthly transformation but to get to their story, one must first encounter the 20,000-year-old vampire Remshi, who just awoke from an unplanned two-year hibernation of sorts after running into Talulla and swearing that she is the reincarnation of his long-ago werewolf lover. To complicate the already hairy issues that arise from eating people and the existential crises such gory imperatives tend to bring, the usual self-righteously obsessed group of monster-hunters (the Vatican-based Militi Christi has supplanted the now-defunct World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomena as The Enemy) is determined to take down all the paranormal monsters (and publicly bring Talulla to the light of God, whom she makes no secret of believing dead) as the human world has slowly begun to accept that it's sharing living space with supernatural apex predators who feed on them, which thoroughly mucks up the vampires' and werewolves' secrecy, plans and whatever degrees of normalcy their respective curses allow them.

What makes a genre that isn't easy (again, for me) to take seriously actually work for this novel and its two predecessors is that Duncan uses supernatural characters to expose otherwise wholly human impulses, fears, motives, and struggles to reconcile reality's ugliness with the individual's impossible wants. Myriad Big Issues--life, death, love, fate, religion--get ample air time as they're examined from all angles by all kinds of beasties. Rather than sticking with a primary point of view like the preceding two books did, By Blood We Live is a story told by its vampires and werewolves alike, allowing the fantastic elements to serve the story rather than the other way around. We get to see their shared sympathetic understanding of each other as well as how each curse affects the afflicted differently through a host of variables ranging from lifespan to mental state to current preoccupations. While this method of storytelling does betray that all of Duncan's characters are prone to similar bouts of matter-of-fact pontificating, it's hard to justify complaining about narrators' common predilection for high-minded observation and ten-dollar words: If nothing else, it turns a currently over-sexed genre into something much more intellectually and emotionally compelling.

The demonstratively reiterated humanity of monsters and monstrosity of humans is an effective somersault of expectations. The werewolves and vampires alike in Duncan's lore feel the lives they've taken swimming through their blood, allowing the until-recently unsympathetically rendered beasts to feel a morally ambiguous mix of secondhand human memories they can only enjoy vicariously, a conflicted dominance over their food source and jealousy of its comparatively uncomplicated existence, and an understanding acceptance of why their prey is eager to rid the world of the unnatural threat it fears. The supernatural cast are but slaves to the biological need for regular slaughter and each have to make their peace with it in order to go on living; the so-called army of God out to destroy Talullah, Remshi and their kin are doing so without the twinges of conscience their supposedly monstrous counterparts suffer. It's a subtle enough shift to underscore the point without beating the reader over the head with it while putting basic human turmoil on a grander stage for better observation.

Of all the recurring elements waltzing through this novel, the echos of Robert Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" was both the most unexpected and the most satisfying, especially as someone (once again, like me) who is just over the moon for Stephen King's Dark Tower series based on the same poem. It is so geekily gratifying as when literary worlds collide, and whispers of Roland's quest resurfacing in the narrative with an increasing frequency as Duncan's story hurdled forward made for recent memory's best surprise comminglings of two unrelated written works. Like Roland, who's the last of his people in both his indigenous poem and King's seven-volume series, Talullah and Remshi know a thing or two about seemingly meaningless, circuitous quests and an unfathomable life span that spreads far beyond the finite days of their natural peers.

The novel ends with confirmation that the war between the non-human factions and mortals is just beginning, and modern times make living under the low-visibility an immortal being needs to avoid becoming an obvious target a more difficult task than it was in the less tech- and surveillance-besotted past. By Blood We Live does both its readers and characters the compliments of an unresolved ending, as a book cannot wax eloquent about the cruelties of the world continuing to forge ahead in the face of death without doing so itself, as it would cheapen the elements of messy truth within to wrap them up with a convenient but wholly unrealistic tidiness. The world Duncan has created for his characters bears a striking resemblance to our real one in that it spins on the axis of life trudging onward well after individual stories end.