Moon of the Crusted Snow

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A humdinger! Both my partner & I each read it in two sittings. Interesting to learn about the culture and to read a snowy tale on a hot summer eve. Made us plan canning ventures for the apocalypse!

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Stubborn Archivist

Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novel took me to a Brazil I’ve never visited: from cold London winter to the yellow house on the Brazilian beach with family hugs & kisses, musical language, sandy bikinis, tropical food and icy beers. Appealing characters though the narrator’s voice, the stubborn archivist, might confuse as she shifts between you, she and the baby. Boldly for a debut author, she combines the confusion of being of dual heritage (“But where are you really from?”) with stories of coming of age as a woman. Some of the writing is poetry, fragmentary and artful in use of blank space and two languages.
Child of a Brazilian mother and British father, this suggests auto fiction and the author knows what it is to straddle two cultures. The section on Mr. Darcy at the end is hilarious. Highly recommended.

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August Blue

August Blue by Deborah Levy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is a lilting pace to Levy's books that is familiar and appealing. Favorite tropes surface: green gemstones, wooden horses, shoes, flowers, insects, weather, birds, cocktails and unique characters like her friends Marie and Rajesh. As always, she writes of swimming, often in exotic locales. And as always, she has me wrapped around her elegant finger, happy to explore the mystery of doppelgangers and her origins.

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Look at the Lights, My Love (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nobelist Ernaux has written an initially compelling study of a superstore in France called Auchan (think, Walmart) and every aspect from the standpoint of an observer on marketing strategies, product placement, pricing, sociological implications, customers, staff, departments (i.e. fish, pharmacy, bakery, bookstore, etc.) and the satellite stores such as McDonalds, a bowling alley, a news and tobacco shop along side. She kept a journal of her observations for many months and ends this eighty-page journal with
"As the months went by, I was able to measure the controlling force exerted by mass production spaces in real and imaginary ways. By provoking desires at dictated times, its violence equally present in the colorful profusion of yogurt flavors as in the gray everyday deals aisles, and by reinforcing social stigmas through the accommodation of individuals with low incomes. The items purchased whether in a little heap or a toppling mountain on the conveyor belt, are nearly always among the cheapest. Upon leaving the superstore, I was often overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness and injustice. But for all that, I have not ceased to feel the appeal of the place and the community life, subtle and specific, that exists there."
Alas, I ceased to feel the appeal of her book midway and put it down.

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The Guest Lecture

The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Guest Lecture was mildly interesting when the narrator talked about and with John Maynard Keynes or mentioned Rhetorician Aspasia, "portrayed as both a sexualised and sexually liberated woman and as a feminist role model fighting for women's rights in ancient Athens." Or even economics or philosophy, all wrapped in heavy musing, almost all musing on the narrator's part in preparing her lecture and pondering her failure to get tenure. I read half the book carefully, then skimmed wearily. Enough. Perhaps if it was the only book on my stack, but the competition is heavy. The writing, by the way, is very fine and I am impressed that the author, Martin Riker, is the publisher of feminist press Dorothy with its stunning list of titles in handsome wraps.https://dorothyproject.com/books-gallery/

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Birnham Wood

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Skilled writing in this elaborate story of an earnest guerilla gardening collective beguiled by donations from an American billionaire doing his own guerilla work in rare earth mining in New Zealand. The book is heavy with introspection and exposition and I grew weary of much of it wanting to get on with this "literary thriller". Not for me.

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Poet in Spain

Poet in Spain by Federico García Lorca
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stunning to explore Spain's explicator of poetic duende in this new translation from Sarah Arvio reviewed by Dwight Garner in The New York Times:
"Lorca’s poems from Spain are a poetry of dreams and journeys and glimpses from balconies, of sunbaked meadows and realms of erotic yearning. He went to the well often for the same elemental imagery: the sea, the wind, the moon, flowers and trees. His mind worked feverishly enough to induce hallucinations."

Having a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, I was troubled by some of Translator Sarah Arvio's decisions to drop punctuation. Garner offers samples:
Lorca has been tamped down. His poem “Cazador” (“Hunter”), for example, begins with these words: “¡Alto pinar!” Arvio translates this, with a vast diminution in energy, as “High grove of pines.”

Lorca wrote in an exclamatory style that gave his work a flamenco brashness missing from some of these translations. García Lorca uses exclamatory sequences to mimic the effect of a chorus singing and beating their palms to the music of a flamenco performance.
Look at the first stanza of “Árboles” (“Trees”) from 1919:

¡Árboles!
¿Habéis sido flechas
Caídas del azul?
¿Qué terribles guerreros os lanzaron?
¿Han sido las estrellas?

Per Garner, "Arvio renders this in telegraphic yet somewhat lobotomized fashion:"

Were you once arrows
falling from the sky
What terrible warriors shot you
Were they the stars

Lorca's fascination with 14th-century Persian poetry in The Tamarit Divan to his idealization of Andalusia’s Romani history in Gypsy Ballads may be questioned nowadays, but overall these English translations stand up and render the book invaluable to any English-speaker smitten by Lorca’s work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/bo... and https://yalereview.org/article/poetry...



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