troisoiseaux

Continued my short story kick with a new collection by Louise Erdrich, Python's Kiss; I particularly liked her unexpected* foray into sci-fi with a pair of stories set in a San Junipero-like digital afterlife, one about a woman plotting vengeance on her father (also dead, in the same afterlife) and the other about a woman whose version of heaven includes raising a construct of her daughter through (but not past) childhood, over and over, until the current version – the "8037th Caroline" – refuses to fade away and takes over her mother's (after)life instead. Two of the other stories I liked best also shared a thematic link, of women surviving abusive marriages: contemporary fiction played straight in "Wedding Dresses" – the titular dresses a story framework for a woman telling her niece about her four prior marriages – and with a magical-realism twist in "Borsalino," in which the main character's encounter with a ghostly thief in Venice decades before helps her leave her abusive husband. Snakes are another recurring theme. Cool black-and-white illustrations by Erdrich's daughter at the beginning of each story, frequently blurring line between drawing and comic strip.

* It came as a surprise to me, anyway— I'd forgotten about/haven't read her dystopian speculative fiction novel Future Home of the Living God.

Read The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich, which is not quite a short story collection but not quite a linear novel; it's sort of a matryoshka doll of stories - the direct narratives that each of novel's three main narrators "tell" to the reader, stories told diegetically to the narrators by other characters, etc. - each "layer" compelling enough in its own right that I not infrequently forgot how they nestled together until coming to the end of a given story thread. (Actually, according to the author's note, a number of chapters had previously been individually published in various magazines, so... I guess it is indeed a novel in interconnected short stories?) Basically, it's about the ways that 3-4 families in a small town in North Dakota have interacted over generations (between 1890s-1970s?), which includes murders and lynchings and rescues and cults and affairs and crushes and strange convoluted crimes and redemption arcs. It would have been helpful to have a family tree or cast of characters, and some of the subplots were... distinctly odd, but overall a top-tier Erdrich.

Read Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors by Louise Erdrich, which I picked up on my recent trip to Minneapolis* because of course I had to stop by Birchbark Books, the bookstore Erdrich owns and thinly fictionalized as the setting for her 2021 novel The Sentence. This is a 2003 memoir about a road(/boat) trip Erdrich took with her then-just shy of two-year-old youngest daughter, to visit the "painted islands" - with Anishinaabe rock paintings - of the Lake of the Woods and Mallard Island, former home of conservationist/writer Ernest Oberholtzer turned educational retreat under the Oberholtzer Foundation, which maintains - among other things - his vast book collection. Slim, lovely book with a smattering of charcoal illustrations, and interesting to notice that more than a few of Erdrich's musings/memories recounted here later made it into The Sentence: the idea of a dictionary being the book you'd want to bring to a desert island, a beloved elm tree in front of her house lost to a storm, etc.

Read And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, 2017), which is more what I had expected from Ángel Bonomini's The Novices of Lerna (also premised on a gathering of dopplegangers) than that novella had turned out to be. The Book of Love by Kelly Link has gone in some deeply creepy directions and continues to be very, very good. I've also started listening to Babel by R.F. Kuang as an audiobook, which I'm enjoying so far, although the sanctimonious footnotes are getting really annoying really fast— like, yeah, no, I can figure out for myself that imperialism is bad and many 19th century attitudes have aged badly, thanks!

* I was in town for a music festival and saw Hozier AND Motion City Soundtrack (with Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy (!) filling in for frontman Justin Pierre, who couldn't perform for health reasons) AND Fall Out Boy AND Green Day (third time total, and just under the wire for twice in one year (July 29, 2024 and July 20, 2025)) in the space of three days and I had a great time!!!

Recently read

Read The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck, a 1957 satire in which France decides to give the whole monarchy thing another shot and crowns an amateur astronomer descended from Charlemagne, who really does not want to be a king.

Read The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich's latest; it's a novel of small-town high drama, set in a farming community in North Dakota during the 2008 recession. There are teenage love triangles, ill-advised weddings, questionable career plans, local tragedies, book clubs as the court of public opinion, and a heist.

Read Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu, a very good short story collection I picked up after seeing a post describe Fu's stories as the kind "that doesn't answer any questions or provide you with any sort of guidance— just walks in and rearranges your photographs so they're slightly off-kilter, leaves you with that destabilization." [x]

Currently reading

Reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams - the new Facebook tell-all - because I love non-fiction about dysfunctional Silicon Valley companies, and HOO BOY. She opens her memoir with the time she nearly died in a childhood shark attack and it isn't even in the top five most gobsmacking moments so far.

To read next

Contemplating what to choose as my next Long Classic™ Audiobook, having finished Moby Dick; I feel like I should give Bleak House another shot, since I thoroughly stalled out on my attempt to actually read it (last... November?), but I'm open to suggestions.

Re-read The Sentence, which is definitely my favorite book by Louise Erdrich and, really, one of my favorite books, full stop. It's a book about people who love books; about ghosts, Indigenous identity, colonialism, trauma, and the hell year that was 2020 (in Minneapolis, no less); about small joys and how to live through tragedy on a macro and micro scale when you still have to go to work in the morning.

I found myself underlining quotes, this time, which I am very rarely moved to do:

( Read more... )

Reading Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen, a 1931 social history of 1919-1929 in the U.S., which is obviously fascinating. I've read the first four chapters: "Back to Normalcy", on the end of WWI and Wilson's failures vis-a-vis the League of Nations; "The Big Red Scare," on the anti-Bolshevik hysteria of 1919-20 and rise of the KKK; "America Convalescent," on the invention and popularity of radio, tabloids, and sports fandom; and "The Revolution in Manners and Morals," about changes in women's rights, women's fashion, and sexual mores. Oh, and the prologue, which charmingly describes a day in the life of Mr. and Mrs. Smith of "Cleveland or Boston or Seattle or Baltimore—it hardly matters which—" in May 1919, as a way of illustrating the changes that a decade had brought. Next up: the scandals of the Harding administration!

Recently picked back up on The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett, which I started back in May and then accidentally abandoned halfway through. The thing about this book is that absolutely every single character has their own personal agenda and Dunnett is only now tipping her hand about the details of most of them, which contributed to a level of narrative ambiguity that I initially found kind of frustrating but it's ultimately paying off very well.

Read Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley, a YA novel about an 18-year-old girl in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, trying to find her place in the different worlds she inherited from her Ojibwe father and French-American mother, that takes a sharp left turn a few chapters in when ( spoilers. ) Even with this wild twist, and subsequent crime-thriller and fake-dating-with-real-feelings plot, it's a deeply heartfelt, and heartbreaking, novel about grief and belonging and injustice, and a love letter to Ojibwe culture and also hockey.

Read Louise Erdrich's LaRose, which is also a novel about grief set in an Ojibwe community, although in North Dakota rather than Michigan. It's a story with a lot of moving parts - two families are torn apart and brought together by the accidental death of one young boy and the decision to share custody of another, a long-festering grudge coalesces into a plan of revenge, a priest pines for a married woman, and the U.S. moves towards war in Iraq; all of this is interwoven with the history of several generations of Ojibwe women named LaRose - but it all fits together as neatly as the gears in a watch, no detail without narrative pay-off.

The plot of Louise Erdrich's new book, The Sentence - about a Native American-owned bookstore in Minneapolis haunted by the ghost of a particularly annoying customer - spans one year, from November 2019 to November 2020; I devoured it in less than 36 hours. The bookstore at its heart is a thinly fictionalized version of Erdrich's own Birchbark Books (down to being owned by an author named Louise who spends the beginning of March 2020 doing a book tour for a novel about her grandfather) which feels like a microcosm of the love that obviously went into writing it.

There is a mystery that unfolds throughout, about why the main character (Tookie, a formerly incarcerated Ojibwe woman who works at the bookstore) is being haunted by this particular ghost (Flora, a white woman who elbowed her way into the local Native community with a vague and inconsistent story about her great-grandmother) but overall, it's more of a slice-of-life story about Tookie and her family and bookstore colleagues making it through the flaming dumpster fire of a year that was 2020. Like, it's very much about the pandemic and the protests following George Floyd's murder, which is something that (understandably!) you may or may not be ready to read about, but if you are, I would recommend this one.

Current Music: All Is Well (Goodbye, Goodbye) - Radical Face

This week's theme is apparently ensemble novels that involve ghosts and/or fighting The Man.

Finished Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift, which has a sprawling but well-crafted plot spanning four generations of three families across five countries* and some 120 years. It shifts from historical fiction with elements of magical realism to speculative fiction with sci-fi elements.

* Although primarily set in - and first and foremost a story about - Zambia, some parts of the novel take place in England, Italy, India, and Zimbabwe.

Read The Ghost Hotel, a new novel by Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel. It's about a Bernie Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme, a disappearance aboard a freight ship, and ghosts, both in a literal "I see dead people" sense and a more metaphorical one: ghosts of the person one used to be, paths not taken, etc. It's set in the same world as Station Eleven, or rather, a version of that world in which the apocalyptic pandemic never happened— at one point, a character idly imagining alternate universes based on the headlines she reads is literally like, wow, imagine if the Georgian flu wasn't quickly contained and became a pandemic of apocalyptic, society-collapsing proportions?? Which feels like the literary version of Staring Into The Camera Like On The Office. One character from Station Eleven even has a slightly-larger-than-cameo role in The Ghost Hotel. This was... a choice? I'd say it was ultimately a neutral choice rather than a particularly good or bad one, but having a character explicitly state that this book was set in an alternate universe of another book by the same author was slightly jarring.

Read The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. Set on a reservation in North Dakota in the 1950s, one of the two main characters, Thomas Wazhaskh, is based off of Erdrich's own grandfather, a night watchman at a local factory and a tribal chairman who fought against a 1953 Congressional resolution that would disband and relocate his tribe, selling off their land for federal profit. (It was very depressing to finish this book and then immediately see headlines about the current administration's move to "deestablish" the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts and revoke their reservation status.) The other is Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau, a young woman who lives on the reservation and works at the factory. The two primary plot threads are the tribe's fight against the termination bill, led by Thomas, and Pixie's search for her missing sister, but the overall story is told through the voices of many different characters, both in and outside of the community, who get their own individual arcs.

Read Those Who Knew by Idra Novey. Set on an unnamed, fictional, vaguely Latin American island ten years after the collapse of an oppressive regime backed by the U.S., a university professor suspects that the "accidental" death of a young activist romantically linked to an up-and-coming politician is anything but. Less grim than it sounds.