Knife: meditations after an attempted murder

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A measured, well written assessment of Salman Rushdie's vicious assault by an assassin wielding a knife, his recovery, love of his wife and sons, and his supportive friendships and medical team. In the second part of the book, he imagines a conversation with his unrepentant attacker which is an education in itself coming from such a knowledgeable nonbeliever.
"When the faithful believe that what they believe must be forced upon others who do not believe it, or when they believe that nonbelievers should be prevented from the robust or humorous expression of their nonbelief, then there's a problem. The weaponizing of Christianity in the United States has resulted in the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the ongoing battle over abortion, and women's right to choose...the weaponizing of a kind of radical Hinduism by the current Indian leadership has led to much sectarian trouble, and even violence. And the weaponizing of Islam around the world has led directly to the terror reigns of the Taliban and the ayatollahs, to the stifling society of Saudi Arabia, to the knife attack against Naguib Mahfouz, to the assaults on free thought and the oppression of women in many Islamic states and, to be personal, to the attack against me."

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James

James by Percival Everett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After initial resistance to the dialogue in dialect, those sentences became an ironic and amusing twist along with many in this story of the slave, Jim, now James, and Huckleberry Finn and their fraught travels on the Mississippi River. The book hummed along with occasional references to his reading (John Locke, Voltaire, even Kafka) as James is a stealthy literate whose most prized possession is a pencil. Brilliant, scary and funny.

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The Prophet Song

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch


2023 Booker Prize Winner was intense, beautiful and devastating. I wish that I could unread it.

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The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I devoured this book. Despite its title, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading is not a meaty book. Divided into separate sections like Breakfast, Lunch, Shopping, Drinking, Dinner, it is larded with anecdotes, salted with literary quotations and references and peppered with humor. The index is pure gravy.

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Martyr

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Poet author has written a beautiful book about a grieving young Iranian migrant to the U.S. who lost his mother as a baby. He plans a life and work centered around the lives and attitudes of martyrs over time as he contemplates his own demise until he meets an artist who is actually dying. Bleak but the writing buoyed this reader through to its fitting finale.

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Undiscovered

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The strangest thing about being alone here in Paris, in an anthropology museum gallery more or less beneath the Eiffel Tower, is the thought that all these statuettes that look like me were wrenched from my country by a man whose last name I inherited."

Undiscovered by Journalist Gabriela Wiener is a dive into Peruvian history as she traces the lineage of her Jewish Austrian/French great great grandfather, an explorer in Peru, grieves the death of her father and tries to understand his dual life with two families, and documents the racism and colonial-tinged political slurs she's encountered as a Spanish resident. She also discusses her polyamory relationship with her husband, Jaime, and her girlfriend, Roci, plus other affairs she experiences. She's a busy narrator. Although the book is catalogued as fiction, I am thinking it is more like autofiction from the online interviews. She's a good writer but I bogged down a bit in the ancestral family tree hunts and wanted to whip back to the contemporary which yielded plenty of drama. Her exchanges with her mother toward the end were satisfying in conversation and letters, although my overall assessment is that I would rather see any one of the story lines developed, particularly the effects of her move to Spain and life there as a journalist.

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Liars

Liars by Sarah Manguso
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Manguso’s slim volume of precise prose reads like autofiction as she dispassionately describes the end of her fifteen-year marriage to John who’s cheating. “When you’re a liar, you always know something that other people don’t know. Maybe lying to me made John feel extra smart.”
But no one gets off the hook as the narrator admits: “I remember how desperately I had to cling to the story of my happy marriage. It took effort. It felt so good to stop lying,” hence the title. Her reactions are visceral and compounded by the questions her young son asks.
I welcome another Manguso.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

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