Sunday, February 7, 2021

Undocumented Americans

The Undocumented AmericansThe Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Portraits of the thousands of people who deliver our sustenance (waiters, delivery people, day laborers, farmworkers) and pay into the American Social Security System but realize nothing from it as they age and must keep working at bottom-rung wages. The author focused on people like her family (she's a DACA participant who graduated from Harvard), visiting key cities in the U.S. and giving voices to those who were not afraid to talk with her about their journey. The book is a well written and documented justification for her righteous anger. It is a slim, compelling volume which puts faces to headlines. Read it.

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Friday, February 5, 2021

Migration

MigrationsMigrations by Charlotte McConaghy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I stayed up all night reading Migrations by Australian Charlotte McConaghy.
An absorbing futurist tale of species extinction and the last Arctic terns chased by a hungry herring fishing boat. The crew and their boat end up scattered to Antarctica sought by authorities. Guided by a troubled but determined young woman who's tagged a couple of the birds and traces them on her laptop, we learn though flashbacks of her peripatetic background and sketchy history. The tale kept me up way too late and while not my usual fare, I was completely taken with the writing and the story.

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Thursday, February 4, 2021

The Waves

The WavesThe Waves by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This plot-less exploration of lifetime friendships and the fluidity of the characters from childhood to old age offers a deeply involving if difficult reading experience. Woolf's lyrical writing and colors, nature, animals, meals, made it worthwhile and it's best to let The Waves wash over the reader without trying too hard to parse meaning. Play-like, Woolf Virginia takes on identity, mortality, and friendship: in six characters who are perhaps one character based on the author. Bernard, the writer with his phrases, is our anchor, and Louis, is "stone-carved, sculpturesque; Neville, scissor-cutting, exact; Susan with eyes like lumps of crystal; Jinny dancing like a flame, febrile, hot, over dry earth; and Rhoda the nymph of the fountain always wet." The bonds and points of view shift in the soliloquies. There is no dialogue.
I think one of the most enjoyable reviews is Fionnuala's https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3....
I want to read more Woolf, this is said to be the most challenging of her books.

"I felt leap up that old impulse, which has moved me all my life, to be thrown up and down on the roar of other people's voices, singing the same song; to be tossed up and down on the roar of almost senseless merriment, sentiment, triumph, desire."

"Some people go to priests, others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken--I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat."
Quarantined.

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