Category Archives: Book Reviews

Staff Pick: Long Live the Post Horn!

Posted on by

Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund 

I was first drawn to this slim, unassuming novel by its title—what on earth is a post horn, I wondered, and why should we rejoice in its longevity? The source of the title is given in the epigraph—it’s a quote from Constantin Constantius, the narrator in Kierkegaard’s Repetition: A Venture in Experimental Psychology:

Long live the post horn! It’s my instrument for many reasons, principally because you can never be sure to coax the same tone from it twice; a post horn is capable of producing an infinite number of possibilities, and he who puts his lips to it and invests his wisdom in it will never be guilty of repetition…

A little googling reveals that a “post horn” is “a valveless horn used originally to signal the arrival or departure of a mounted courier or mail coach,” and all becomes clear when we realize that the plot of this novel centers on an obscure piece of postal-political history: in 2011, the European Union issued a directive that the Norwegian postal service must open up competition for the delivery of letters that weigh less than 50 grams. Fearing that this move would cost many postal workers their jobs, Postkom, the Norwegian Post and Communications Union, set out to fight the directive—and in Long Live the Post Horn!, this spirited fight against free-market mail is fictionalized, and conducted with the help of our narrator, Ellinor, an apathetic 35-year-old media consultant. Ellinor has a boyfriend she seldom thinks about and a mother and sister whose troubles don’t seem to trouble her; she takes no interest in what she calls their “tiny lives.” Ellinor is depressed, and her depression has left her affectless, lethargic. Looking out over the Oslo Fjord, gloomy inspiration for Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” Ellinor can barely muster a whimper: “It wasn’t nature screaming, nature was cool and numb, remote and inaccessible, it was me screaming a non-scream.”

Adventures in postal union politics might sound too prosaic a topic for a page-turner, but renowned Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth raises the stakes from the very beginning, introducing us to Ellinor’s existential crisis in the book’s first paragraph:

As I was putting away in my basement lock-up some saucepans that couldn’t be used with my new induction hob, I came across an old diary from 2000. The diary had been a Christmas present and I had written in it for a few months before I got bored…. I opened it and began reading; I had made entries almost every day from 1 January to 16 May. When I had finished, I felt so sickened I couldn’t sleep. I got up and opened a window to let in some air. I drank some water and paced up and down the living room before I went back to bed and opened the diary again as if hoping something had changed. January’s entries were about the winter sales and some guy named Per I thought might be interested in me. In February it was a guy called Tor and a Mulberry bag I’d managed to get half-price and a pair of shoes I should have bought half a size bigger…. The names were interchangeable, as were the dates, there was no sense of progression, no coherence, no joy, only frustration; shopping, sunbathing, gossiping, eating—I might as well have written ‘she’ instead of ‘I.’ And had anything changed, had growing older made any difference?

Days later, with the unchanging pointlessness of existence still spinning in her head, Ellinor receives some startling news: her colleague and mentor at their three-person publicity firm has disappeared (and is later discovered to have taken his own life), and Ellinor and her remaining colleague Rolf must take over the postal union’s publicity account.

Rolf is convinced the project is doomed from the start—they’ll never succeed in persuading Norway’s ruling party to oppose the EU’s directive—but Ellinor finds herself ever so slowly starting to care about the fate of the postal workers. She commits to listening to and understanding their concerns. She even goes so far as to visit the distant home of Rudolf Karena Hansen, a devoted mailman who delivers to isolated homes beyond the Arctic Circle. He explains to her the importance of delivering “dead letters,” letters without a clear name or address, and offers her life advice:

“If you want an easy life,” he said, “all you have to do is make yourself insignificant. Believe in one thing today, another tomorrow and something completely different by the end of the week, turn yourself into several people and parcel yourself out, have one anonymous opinion and another in your own name, one spoken, one written, one on the Internet, another in the shop and a third as a lover, yet another as a PR consultant, or as a private individual and another with Postkom, and then all your trouble will go away, you’ll see.” I closed my eyes, but to no avail, I started to cry.

As she works to save the postal service, Ellinor begins to emerge from the fog of apathy. She mails her boyfriend a love letter, feels herself feeling for the first time in a long time:

Spring had to be the reason. March and the light in March and a few coltsfoot shoots on the verges. Tender new trees that looked as if their keen, green leaves made them bashful, the older trees stood guard, the birds flew between them with twigs in their beaks, building nests for which they needed no planning permission … We were pensive at the office and opened the windows when the sun was high in the sky and heard the birds chirping and free. We’ve put on our thinking caps, we would say when we bumped into each other in the corridor or in the kitchen after having sat for a long time at our respective desks hunched over foreign newspapers and magazines trying to understand the EU, EFTA and neoliberalism. It’s not all bad to have to put my thinking cap on again, Rolf said, and I knew what he meant, we were on the right track. We learned and understood and tried to think new thoughts, it was a blessed relief and although we became increasingly conscious of our impotence, at least we were no longer lying to ourselves.

It seems impossible that a novel about the minutiae of postal politics could be this gripping, and yet, thanks to Hjorth’s ability to merge wry detachment with yearning idealism, I found myself caring deeply about the fate of Ellinor—and the Norwegian postal service. (Spoiler alert: the real-life fate of the EU’s postal directive can be found here, should you also find yourself invested in Scandi mail drama.) Hjorth’s spare, rhythmic prose and understated humor are perfectly suited to this droll yet life-affirming account of a woman teetering between despair and revolution.

Hjorth is a highly regarded novelist in Norway; she has written more than twenty novels, and her second English-translated novel, the putatively fictional family saga Will and Testament, won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature. Will and Testament was also highly controversial. The novel’s protagonist, Bergljot, shares many conspicuous similarities with Hjorth, and in the novel Bergljot claims that her father sexually abused her when she was a child. Hjorth’s younger sister Helga condemned the book as lies, and in 2017 she published her own novel, Free Will, in which a family is torn apart by false allegations of incest. For her part, Hjorth insists Will and Testament is not autobiographical.

Long Live the Post Horn! has avoided such controversy—the blurring of fiction and reality here deals in the postal, not the personal—and the novel has garnered much praise, with the New York Times declaring it “the best post office novel ever written.” It’s a story about mail delivery, for sure, but it’s also a story about personal growth and political awakening. As Ellinor observes, reading letters from the postal union representatives pleading their case, “It wasn’t the individual words, the individual word, the individual sentence… but the feeling that rose from the paper, it had a presence, an immediacy as if what was written wasn’t imagined but actually lived.” As Ellinor attempts to engage, to gather momentum, to preserve both the postal service and her own burgeoning sense of self, I can’t help but cheer for her newly emerging life—a life actually lived.

Staff Pick: The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop

Posted on by

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom
by Felicia Rose Chavez
by JP Poole

When Felicia Rose Chavez was a student in The University of Iowa’s nonfiction program, she sat in a workshop and listened to other students complain that they didn’t understand her work. As is common in writing workshops, she listened in silence, forced to absorb the negative comments lobbed her way. Chavez cites Beth Nguyen, who also spent a workshop session in silence, as participants talked about not knowing what dim sum was and how it made “the whole piece confusing.” Students of color are tasked with both explaining their experience to white audiences and making those experiences palatable enough for white audiences to understand.

“Silencing writers is central to the traditional writing workshop model,” Chavez writes; it dates back to 1936, when Iowa became the first degree-granting program for writing. With primarily white faculty, students, and reading list, the workshop has long been a space for “safeguarding whiteness as the essence of literary integrity.”

Hierarchy, domination, white supremacy, and evaluating work in terms of good versus bad is toxic for creativity. Writers are expected to handle critique like a punch to the gut. This is especially troubling since the average workshop participant shares work “at best twice per semester” and other students “[undergo] zero training in how to offer critique.”

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a stellar guide for how different models can be explored. In testing out a new way to workshop, Chavez asked herself: What if writers are allowed to speak? What if writers suggest what’s on the reading list? What if writers are allowed to ask for a particular type of feedback? (For example, “Please don’t edit my piece but feel free to comment on the structure.”)

Empowered writers are generous writers, they are able to be kinder to themselves and others, which only fosters more work, truer work, work that explores that infamous thing called a writer’s “voice.” As anti-racist workshop leaders, Chavez writes, we must “relinquish our stronghold on being right, and admit we can do better.”

During the pandemic, I’ve taught many workshops via zoom. The first day, I explain to writers that the workshop space is one where we support each other. I know it can sound a little gooey but I stand firm about noticing what the writer is doing—what stands out about their approach to art. Observation, not critique. I’m firm about refraining from comments such as “I didn’t like this…” I tell writers that kindness, patience, and time are the best ways to keep writing. The secret sauce is support.

There are a few things that Chavez suggests that I probably wouldn’t do, such as making students stand when they read. She also recommends that the workshop leader remain quiet during workshop and let students guide themselves. This fly-on-the -wall approach works for her; I’m not so sure that it would work for me, but I won’t know until I give it a try. The point of the book is to call upon workshop leaders to think about how they can best support workshoppers. A student-centered approach is an approach I deeply believe in.

Kiese Laymon writes that “[e]very writing teacher on Earth needs this book.” This is so true. At the end of the book, Chavez includes her lesson plans as a road map. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is filled with ingenuity, possibility, and hope—as one of her students notes, Felicia’s approach to teaching writing is the future. And the future looks bright.

Staff Picks: The Halfway House

Posted on by

The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales, translated by Anna Kushner
by JP Poole

Guillermo Rosales’s The Halfway House is a brilliant and stark portrait of what it’s like to live in multiple rings of exile, not unlike Dante’s multiple rings of hell. When the novel’s protagonist, William Figueras, arrives in Miami, his relatives expect to embrace a young Cuban exile ready to make it big in America. Instead, they lock eyes with someone they barely recognize—a rail thin stranger who hurls insults at them through missing teeth and is suffering from paranoia. Figueras is admitted to a psychiatric ward that day. He escapes Cuba only to enter the U.S. and be exiled again to the broken mental health care system, ending up in a privately-run halfway house that’s one tier better than living on the streets.

The halfway house, where this slender novel is set, is a human rights nightmare. William’s aunt drops him off at the doorstep, after it’s clear he’s too mentally ill to make his way in the world. The owner of the house, Mr. Curbelo, collects government checks from the residents and leaves them to live in squalor. While Curbelo is away on fishing trips, a man named Arsenio is in charge. He spends his time stealing from residents, beating them up, and sexually assaulting an elderly female resident. The book is consistently unsettling to read. The descriptions of roaches, no clean towels, no toilet paper, limited food, clogged toilets, and urine-stained hallways are visceral symbols of how corruption works under capitalism. Curbelo knows that no one will stop him from fleecing people who are poor and, as William says, “nuts.”

William turns to literature to maintain his sanity. He carries around a book of English poets, and the book offers quotes from Coleridge (and others) as brief moments of beauty amidst the dirt, stink, and grime of the house. He states, “By the age of fifteen I had read the great Proust, Hesse, Joyce, Miller, Mann.” He’s also a writer, who wrote a book in Cuba that was deemed a failure for its critique of the communist party and led to William’s first psychotic breakdown. Without basic necessities, such as food, hygiene supplies, and competent medical care there’s little that a poem written by Lord Byron can do to prevent William from turning a dark corner.

Living in the halfway house causes William to change. “Fifteen years ago, I was a good-looking guy. I was a lady-killer.” He soon becomes someone who seems capable of murder. He meets a new resident, Frances, and falls in love with her. He also begins a ritual of choking her. She begs him to kill her. Like William, Frances is an artist; she makes sense of the world by drawing what she sees—portraits of the residents at the halfway house. She is William’s last chance at redemption and the hope of a normal life.

There’s no easy way of saying this: The Halfway House is one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read—disturbing because what Rosales captures about the machine of corruption is unmistakably true. This halfway house that he describes exists in America, a democracy, that claims life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. The book points to the fact that the American dream cannot exist without capitalism. There are always those who are willing to abuse the poor. The corrupt Mr. Curbelo is living a carefree life of leisure only because he’s willing to not provide residents with soap, thereby increasing his wealth. If there is a “happy” character in the book it’s him. His dream turns the residents’ lives into a waking nightmare.

The Halfway House tells the story of the many political systems that can break the human spirit to the point of no return. The book does not have a happy ending, just as it does not have a happy beginning. Nevertheless, I was entranced by the raw, honest beauty of Rosales’s prose. The first sentence reads: “The House said ‘Boarding Home’ on the outside, but I knew it would be my tomb.” The novel springs from the truth of Rosales’s life. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died by suicide at the age of forty-seven. His characters, he says, “are Cubans affected by Castro’s totalitarianism, human wrecks.” The city of Miami is a place where some find refuge and others find only hell.

Staff Picks: How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Authors

Posted on by

How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Authors by Wisława Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh
by JP Poole

When it comes to crushing a writer’s literary aspirations, Wisława Szymborska is a skilled practitioner; when she brings the hammer down it lands with a clang and stylistic flair.

In 1968, Szymborska and another novelist started the Literary Mailbox, an advice column published in the Krakow-based journal Literary Life. Letters from novice writers poured in. Not wanting to reveal her gender, Szymborska responded in the first person plural. How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Authors, translated by Clare Cavanagh, is a wicked, laugh-out-loud read. The slender book also includes Szymborska’s collages, which add another layer of insight into the Nobel Laureate’s keen imagination.

Readers are left to fill-in-the-blank as to the sort of letters and submissions piled on Szymborska’s desk. The book is composed of only her replies. Her comments are so pointed and brilliant that it is entirely possible that some people wrote in just to receive a delicious sting.

In response to one writer, R.S., from Olsztyn:

You dream of getting a typewriter; you think it would make your writing better. This is not essential. Your plan for typing out poems en masse troubles us.

In another response she writes:

To Roland, from the Lublin Province

The problem of life’s absurdity is not addressed by rhyming “bottomless” and “sarcophagus.”

Even her “encouraging words” are evidence of a poet who has read everything and will not be tricked by imitators.

To Zegota, from Bialystok

If we take this, please pass along Oscar Wilde’s current address so we can send him the lion’s share of the honorarium.

Szymborska tells a few budding young writers that perhaps they should concentrate their efforts on living life until their brains mature; it might seem a bitter dose of medicine, but I found it sound—probably advice I should have taken as a pimple-faced goth, noodling with end rhyme.

She tells people not to torture themselves to become creative geniuses; poetry is a calling, and those who are called won’t stop at the first sign of rejection. She admits her first poems and stories were absolute rot, but she has little patience for those who expect to be showered with praise after penning their first batch of poems. Her advice to one writer is to keep his pages in a drawer and don’t let them out again.

What Szymborska reminds us is that there are no short cuts. (Or if there are they’re called ghost writers.) And she believes wholeheartedly in talent and isn’t afraid to say that some have it, some don’t. That’s not the end of the world either. The next tech genius might be wasting her time forcing her lump of novel into a saleable rectangle when her time would be better spent revolutionizing the web. “Curiosity is the key to existence,” she writes. That applies to poets as much as it does to those better suited to pastry making, engineering, or animal husbandry.

Staff Picks: Shirley Chisholm, The Last Interview

Posted on by

Shirley Chisholm: The Last Interview
by JP Poole

Before I talk about how inspiring Shirley Chisholm is, how her impact can be felt today (at this very moment), I should tell you that once a man called her “a little schoolteacher.” Now, during her political career she had been called a lot of things, much worse, but “little” she was not. In fact, even when she was little, growing up in Barbados, she was a leader amongst her peers and watchful of her younger sisters. Her mother recounted that at age three, Chisholm gathered the six- and seven-year-olds in the neighborhood, and shouted “Listen to me.” She would not be ignored.

Born in Brooklyn in 1924, Chisholm moved back to the U.S. at age eleven to live with her parents, who had been working hard to build a solid foundation for their children to thrive.

Chisholm did become a teacher, she loved kids. She went to Brooklyn College, and then got a master’s degree in early education from Columbia University. In the late sixties, she launched a bid for Congress in her neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, running against James Farmer—the man who called her “a little schoolteacher”—and won. Then, in 1972, she announced she was running for President.

Never, in her life, did Chisholm do anything small. She fought for children, struggling mothers, students, and teachers. She fought against racism, sexism, and poverty, and opposed the Vietnam War. She stood up for immigrant rights and spoke fluent Spanish. Her motto was simple: “unbought and unbossed.” All too often, she had witnessed politicians fall prey to their own self-interests. She said, “Many people don’t understand that when you’re going to bring about change in a society, that change has to come from individuals who have a really deep commitment to what they’re doing.”

Of all The Last Interview books that I’ve read, Shirley Chisholm is one of my favorites. Her last interview in 2002 has some spot on and eerie predictions that I won’t reveal here. She did not want history to remember her as the first black woman to be elected to Congress, or the first black woman to run for President, “but as a black woman who lived in the twentieth century and who dared to be herself.” She added, “I want to be remembered as a catalyst for change.” If you pick up this book, you’ll read for yourself how the electrically-charged change that Chisholm brought about is a strong current that’s only getting stronger with each individual who learns her name.

Staff Picks: Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg

Posted on by
Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black
by JP Poole

Frida Kahlo’s likeness appears on tote bags, t-shirts, mugs, refrigerator magnets, coffee table coasters and more; she has her own action figure. One of the most recognizable artists in the world, Kahlo symbolizes feminist strength, cultural pride, and the sharp essence of pain. In her poignant and deeply felt book Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg, Emily Rapp Black interrogates the way in which Kahlo is reduced to a female artist whose muse is bodily and emotional suffering. Pain is not a muse, Rapp Black argues. “I do not believe that suffering was Frida’s main characteristic, because suffering does not create art, people do.” She adds that, yes, “[Frida] painted in bed. Create or die. That’s very different from ‘being inspired.’”

When Kahlo was six years old, polio disfigured her right foot. As a teenager, her spinal column, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, foot, and left shoulder were all broken or fractured in a streetcar accident. During her lifetime, she would undergo thirty-two operations. Due to gangrene, her leg was amputated. Rapp Black was four years old when her leg was amputated and she was fitted with a wooden leg. She writes, “Frida died on July 13, 1954; I was born twenty years later, almost to the day, on July 12, 1974. And yet our legs could have been made by the same man.” When she’s a twenty-one-year-old college student, Rapp Black discovers a translation of Kahlo’s journals and a deep cross-temporal friendship is born.

As a grown woman, Rapp Black visits Casa Azul, the home that Frida shared with Diego Rivera. She walks through the museum pregnant, “mostly belly,” remembering the questions she received, such as “Must you have a baby?” Perhaps these questioners did not know that Rapp Black had already had a baby, a little boy, who died at age three from Tay-Sachs disease. Throughout the book, the cruelty of able-bodied people is so palpable it stings. She writes, “The pregnant disabled body is one that mystifies onlookers….” Alongside other museum visitors, she views the narrow bed where Frida slept, made love, painted, convalesced, and died.

Rapp Black’s fierce protection of Frida is what makes this gorgeous book hum. In psychically protecting Frida from the ignorance of people who don’t understand disability, she is also, by extension, protecting herself, and the memory of her dead son. At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, she overhears the conversation of two women, as they look at the various legs, casts, and corsets Frida wore. “Oh, these awful … devices. But it inspired her to paint,” one woman says. “Yes, it made her an artist. All that pain,” says the other. Rapp Black wants to shout at the women for reducing Frida’s existence to a narrative of pain. “Disability makes people uncomfortable” she writes; we neglect to see that “we will all someday live with a disability of some kind.” An artist cannot be captured by gift shop flair—not socks, or aprons, or stickers—and Rapp Black does a beautiful job of reminding us that Frida Kahlo’s “life was wholly vivid, saturated with all the things that make a life a life: knowledge of suffering; love; sex; friendship; home; travel; laughter; anger; joy; the creation of art.”