Category Archives: Book Reviews

Staff Picks: Fireflies in the Mist

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Celia recommends Fireflies in the Mist by Qurratulain Hyder:

Qurratulain Hyder occupies a strange place in literary history. Critics who know her work compare her with Gabriel García Márquez and Milan Kundera in the scope of her masterful imagination, and cite her as a precursor of Salman Rushdie in her fierce anti-colonialism. In 1989, she won India’s prestigious Jnanpith Award for Aakhir-e-Shab ke Hamsafar, translated in English as Fireflies in the Mist. Hyder translated her own work from Urdu—or, as she called it in reference to her magnum opus, Aag ka Darya (River of Fire, in English), she “transcreated” them, freely adding and subtracting passages, rewriting, and restructuring chapters. But, for all the praise that she received from those in the know, she hasn’t achieved the same place in the canon of world literature as many of her male contemporaries to whom she is most frequently compared. As I read Fireflies in the Mist, I wondered if there was not some bias at work here. For one thing, Urdu, despite its long and vibrant literary tradition, is not widely translated into English, and, like much Indian writing in translation, tends to be eclipsed by English-language novels from the subcontinent. For another, there’s the fact both the jacket copy and a number of English-language reviewers of Fireflies in the Mist seem to be under the truly puzzling impression that it is a love story—rather than a sprawling and incisive examination of women’s experiences in the Bengali independence movement.

A love story it is not, I am afraid—although there is love at work, romantic and familial, and marriage, and quite a bit about what happens after marriage, what makes it equal or unequal, successful or a failure. More than that, it is a story of the Quit India Movement in Bengal, its bravery and idealism, and also its disappointments and failures. Hyder’s erudite and lyrical writing draws on poetry, song, and dance from both English and Indian traditions, and her work deals with colonialism and its aftermath with both biting, clear-eyed anger and deep sadness. It is perhaps the most tragic bildungsroman I have read—the story of a generation’s attempt to make the society in which they lived anew, and of their dreams’ shortcomings.

At the novel’s beginning, the young women who will be its heroes are steeped in hope and idealism. All of them are budding communists, immersed in the Quit India movement, certain that the end of British colonial power will bring about a new era of justice, religious harmony, and social and economic equality. They make friends with each other across the lines of class and religion—Deepali Sarkar, the novel’s heroine, is a Hindu girl from an impoverished family, while her best friends, Rosie Bannerjee and Jehan Ara, are the daughter of a local Christian pastor and of a Muslim Nawab, respectively. For a while it seems like their bonds of friendship will be emblematic of the strength of the new political order. At this stage, the novel is full of exciting and slightly madcap adventures. Deepali dresses up as a veiled maidservant to spy on a British official and warn the local communist activists about upcoming police raids. She wins a scholarship to Santinekitan, the academy founded by Rabindranath Tagore, to study Indian classical music, and then fibs to her father about a student group collecting folk songs in order to travel to the Sunderbans to meet with another communist leader, the larger-than-life Rehan Ahmed, who crosses India disguised mostly as a wandering ascetic of various faiths—now “a gentle monk of Krishna,” now a Baul fakir who sings as he travels from house to house carrying secret messages.

Even at this point, however, there are clouds on the horizon. When Deepali carries a secret message to Uma Roy, a rich radical who has studied in England, Uma treats her with disdain, mocking her for her ignorance and suggesting that her political beliefs are mostly an excuse for her to chase boys. Deepali’s father, a doctor who runs a free clinic for the poor (and finds himself perpetually short of money as a result), lets her have her freedom, but Rosie and Jehan Ara’s families both disapprove of their political beliefs, and expect their daughters to be obedient, quiet, and to marry men that their families have chosen. For a while, the end of the British colonial regime looks like a path to a new kind of life for the three friends, encompassing not only racial and economic equality, but also new opportunities for women.

But even among their fellow radicals, there’s no consensus about what the place of women should be, just as there’s no real consensus about how far class equality should extend. Rehan Ahmed, the charismatic Marxist leader who falls in love with Deepali, idealizes his mother, who, having lost her fortune and married a man her uncle chose for her, spends her life serving her husband “in dutiful silence.” In his first love affair, he tries to convince his beloved to run away from her parents with him in the night, and, when she refuses, berates her: “If you do not have the guts to defy your autocratic father, how will you fight in the revolution alongside your comrade husband?” The idea that his would-be wife might simply be exchanging one type of autocracy for another does not occur to him.

The ending of Deepali’s love story, however, is comparatively bright. Her friends, Jehan Ara and Rosie, meet more chilling fates. Jehan Ara’s marriage is arranged by her parents, to a man they both know is a bad match for her. Rosie, in prison for her activism against the British government and abandoned by her family, meets a handsome lawyer with radical sympathies, who takes on her case and pays her bail. “I am going to take you home as my wife,” he tells her, the second time they meet. It’s not a question. She marries him. So each character must make her peace with a world that, in the end, is less revolutionary than she had hoped, and choose either to accommodate herself to society, or to rebel, and face the price: loss of stability, of a family, a home, a nation.

Towards the end of Fireflies in the Mist, there’s an image that begins to appear over and over: “Mother [Kali] sits in the marketplace of the world, flying her kites. She cuts off one of the millions of her strings and when the unattached kite flies, it reaches cosmic space. Mother claps her hands and laughs…” Is it an image of dissolution, or of freedom? There’s not much justice or resolution on display in Hyder’s novel, and what happiness there is, is as fleeting and fragile as those kites sailing into the void. There is, however, a new generation, who will carry on their parents’ and grandparents’ struggle—perhaps successfully, perhaps in vain. The novel’s original Urdu title, Aakhir-e-Shab ke Hamsafar, translates literally as “Fellow Travelers into the Night”—and, like fireflies, they seem to be so, groping out the shape of things in a world full of enclosing darkness and mystery.

Staff Picks: Lone Star Noir

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Rebekah recommends Lone Star Noir, a collection edited by Bobby Byrd and Johnny Byrd:

As editor Bobby Byrd so aptly states in his introduction to Lone Star Noir, “Texas, in all its many places, bleeds noir fiction.” From its hot and humid Gulf Coast to its isolated backroads country and its sprawling metropolises, Texas, with all its diversity, harbors endless possibilities for mystery. Published by New York-based Akashic Books as part of their successful Noir series, the Lone Star edition features a range of Texas-native or Texas-enthusiast authors who capture the multiple facets of this state that make it the ideal setting for crime, violence, and intrigue.

The first installation in the collection, “Phelan’s First Case” by Lisa Sandlin is a perfect example of quintessential detective fiction. This story follows Detective Joe Phelan as he grapples with his first case, which eventually leads him to a rundown barn in the overgrown wilderness surrounding Beaumont. Sandlin’s evocative imagery is disturbing (she describes the missing child, the subject of Phelan’s search, as a “naked gargoyle” with “blinking eyes protrud[ing] from sunken holes”), which exudes major True Detective Season 1 vibes. Couple descriptions like that, which can make your skin crawl, with snappy dialogue that could belong in a hardboiled crime novel, and you’re in for a classic noir treat.

Moving south from Beaumont to Galveston, Claudia Smith gives us “Catgirl,” which may or may not detail the lives of a coven of witches (it’s never actually confirmed if they are witches though). Living in a shabby beachfront bungalow, this family of girls dances unnervingly around bonfires, recites creepy children’s rhymes, and sings Stevie Nicks songs. It’s demonic, it’s spooky, it’s weirdly beautiful, it’s totally matriarchal. And since it’s almost October, it’s the perfect way to start getting into the Halloween spirit.

But Lone Star Noir is not all serious. Tim Tingle’s sardonic voice shines in his story “Six Dead Cabbies,” which is told from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old narrator who falls into bad company with a grizzled, slightly threatening, grown man named Denny. The fact that a middle-aged man would want to hang out with a bunch of teenagers seems like a bit of a red flag, and Tingle’s narrator humorously notes this as he reflects on his choice of companion, saying, “None of us ever questioned the logic of a forty-five-year-old man running around with teenagers. Bobby, Charles, Eddie, and me, we were cool teenagers, cool enough to be Denny’s buds, that was our reasoning.” Naturally, of course, the tale takes a darker twist once the narrator learns that Denny is, in fact, a serial killer, and not just his mentor in petty crime.

As Austinites, the location I’m sure we all want to hear most about is Austin, and Jesse Sublett’s “Moral Hazard” does not disappoint. It is clear from the start that this story is an ode to Cormac McCarthy, one of the most famous and stylistically unique authors within the Western genre. Sublett even goes as far as to name his Robin Hood-esque criminal with a heart of gold “the Kid” (likely a gesture to the character of the same name in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian). Additionally, his main villain is obsessed with McCarthy’s gritty novel No Country for Old Men, which features a truly terrifying, ruthless hitman, if any of y’all have ever read the book or seen the film adaptation that came out a few years back. It goes without saying that if you’re a fan of McCarthy, you’ll appreciate the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) nods to the author set against a backdrop of familiar Austin scenery.

Those are just a few examples of the stories included in this collection, and there’s so much more, ranging from tales about bounty hunters and gambling to kidnapping and prostitution. In each, the things that make Texas Texas, things like the famous pecan trees, the expansive landscapes that seem to extend for miles and miles, the laidback molasses-like pace of life, are all vividly painted. In each, Texas becomes a character in itself. And just like the Lone Star state, Lone Star Noir has something that will satisfy everyone’s craving for a good mystery.

Staff Picks: The Hospital

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Celia recommends The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani:

“Would it surprise you if I said that one day I transformed myself into a spider, a weeping willow, and a cyclamen flower?” Ahmed Bouanani asks somewhere in the middle of his novel The Hospital, translated this year by Lara Vergnaud and published by New Directions. “On the whole,” he continues, “we’re talking about a stolen life.” Like a prisoner who, shut inside four walls, invents his own world.

There are books that you’ve never heard of before that, nevertheless, cast a spell of mystery over you once you’ve picked them up, and The Hospital was one of these for me. As soon as I’d finished reading, I wanted to know who Ahmed Bouanani was and why I hadn’t heard of him before. While The Hospital itself is a slim book, it feels as if it reaches out to the hidden network of a life’s work, as vivid and arresting as a long still shot at the beginning of a film. In 1991, Bouanani, known in Morocco as a director, author, and artist, would be called “the memorialist of a cinema without memory,” but by his death in 2011 most of his work was out of print or unfindable, in danger of being forgotten—if it had ever been published at all.

While Bouanani published only rarely during his life—one novel and three books of poetry—his daughter Touda and his friends describe a dozen unpublished works and claim that the published one had to be nearly pried out of his hands. Part of his reticence about publishing may have been political, for after a promising early career as a filmmaker, during which he won international acclaim for The Mirage, he was blacklisted by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain, which suspected him of being a communist. Shortly before his death, he confided to a young journalist for the Moroccan weekly magazine TelQuel that he had sometimes given his pieces to others to sign, in order to evade censorship.

Bouanani spent the last years of his life in seclusion, in the remote Moroccan town of Aït Oumghar. A few years earlier, one of his daughters had died. When he moved to Aït Oumghar after her death, a fire caught in the papers stacked in his apartment, and destroyed or damaged a collection of his unpublished manuscripts. In Aït Oumghar, he rarely went outside, and rumors circulated that he was drunk, or ill, or traveling in secret, or already dead.

Based on Bouanani’s own experience of being treated for tuberculosis, The Hospital unfolds in the closed cell of an inpatient ward, where the sick drop in and out of treatment, always tumbling back into the hospital’s enforced stillness, its dreams and frustrations, as the outside world spits them out over and over again. As I was reading, I’d find myself murmuring lines over to myself. Of a dream: “I was able to recognize the different butterflies my naked body attracted like a light: Urania, Vanessa, Bombyx, Argon, Machaon, and Phalene specimens, countless teeming larva and caterpillars.” Of waking: “Light the color of incurable sadness filters through the room’s broken windowpanes.” Of a long-ago memory of killing flies: “I lived like this for a long time, on the margins of a strange childhood, my monstrosity protecting me with its extraordinary warmth.”

It’s a line that, while used to describe the narrator’s own childhood, could easily apply to the younger patients of the hospital as well. Orphans or petty criminals, abandoned by family and society, they reinvent the world outside the hospital in their conversations, which are scatological, sexual, violent—but also convulsively powerful in their vividness, full of a kind of nightmarish play. One boy, called Guzzler, makes a game out of putting the other patients off their food at mealtimes, competing to offer the most revolting descriptions of the food they’re going to eat, of the patients’ various maladies, skin conditions, and scatological complaints. Another, Rover, invents a series of deaths in his family in order to have a night of freedom in the outside world, then returns with his illness to death’s waiting room. Another young man tells a story that explains their lingering existence in the hospital ward thus: the angel of death is a bureaucrat, and they are much too poor to bribe him into doing his job. Both their food and their wine is imaginary. They live on dreams.

The Hospital’s narrator appears to be Bouanani himself. He is writing a novel about the young men on his ward, spinning out the hope that he, at least, will live. They, by turns, mock and entreat him. “Write, for the fun of it, to piss off the world of neckties and hypocrisy,” advises one, and then later, having thought about the question a little more, he clarifies, “Whatever you do, don’t mention my diarrhea, it won’t leave a good impression, and, come on, what will future generations think about a guy like me?” Meanwhile, the narrator compares himself to “those long-ago voyagers who landed on islands on the fringes of the known world; their curiosity dulled quickly when faced with the impenetrable customs of a people hastily judged at first glance to be primitive and savage.” What can you say about the dead and the dying, when you yourself are destined to recover? How can one know which dying vision may turn out to be true?

Staff Picks: Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

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Celia recommends Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor:

How should I begin talking about this book? I ask this question because sometimes it can be difficult to talk about novels that embrace happiness and laughter. If I mention that this book is hilarious, one wonders, is it going to sound, like, unserious? If I mention that I repeatedly laughed aloud and made my coworkers stare at me while reading this book in the store, will readers perhaps assume that I am just more amused than the average person by jokes about ‘90s queer theory and punk rock? Maybe, dear reader! But sometimes you find a book that moves so lightly through its changes that, although its subject may be heartbreak, failure, the AIDS crisis, and its hero’s inability to find a place to belong, it nevertheless buoys you up, makes you laugh at work, and assures you that this, too, shall pass.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is one of these books. The novel’s hero, Paul Polydoris, has an unusual talent: he can change his body at will, beefing up his arms to look like a muscle man, slimming down, making himself taller or shorter, growing a beard on command—and he can turn himself into a woman. He does so in the first scene of the novel, in which he first carefully coordinates his outfit to go to a lesbian punk show, and then, “stares at his penis until it shrinks [and] tucks itself into the tight little crawlspace of his former balls.” (NB: This is perhaps not the book for you if you don’t want to read descriptions of sex or genitalia. There are quite a few of them, explicit and haplessly funny. I’ll also say, at this point, that I’m using the pronoun “he” for Paul advisedly, for while he spends a large portion of the novel living as a woman, he always uses male pronouns in narration. Another, similarly fluid character effortlessly avoids using any pronoun at all.)

From the opening moment when Paul turns himself into a woman (his lesbian best friend, meeting him at the show, thinks he’s just doing an exceptionally good drag act), the novel circles around its central questions, teasing the reader without quite revealing any definite solutions. How did Paul become the way he is? What fuels his ability to change? Will he have to pick one form, or will he be able to stay varied and changeable, bisexual, bi-gendered, and fluid? Who will he hook up with next? Does the androgynous youth he keeps glimpsing in various gay hot spots know the secret of their shared shapeshifting? What’s up with the impossibly tough leftist lesbian he meets at Michfest, who can maybe talk to animals? Will he be able to juggle his half-dozen minimum wage jobs in order to make rent this month? What if he wants to make rent and buy the cool jacket he found at the vintage store?

The novel tackles these questions irreverently, letting Paul wander around, flirting his way to free coffee, skipping out on his college classes, baffling his friends and colleagues. He goes to an employee party for a sports bar, and, bored by the frat boy atmosphere, leaves and comes back as his own sister. He lets his best friend in on his secret and convinces her to go to Michfest with him. He does a knock-down performance of machismo at a leather bar. He moves to Provincetown to live as a woman with his new girlfriend. He has an enormous amount of sex—in bathrooms at parties, in bars, public parks, alleys, woods, and the comfort of his own bed. He is endlessly hungry to be seen, admired, loved. He is continually buying new records and clothes instead of paying his utility bill, in a kind of exhausted surrender to his endless need for new experiences. His life is a kind of balancing act. There are threats under the wire: he may lose his apartment. He may drop out of school. He may face homophobic violence, or rejection by the next person who sees him change his body.

Also, the book is set in the early ‘90s, and Paul has just fled from New York, where the AIDS crisis is still devastating the queer community. When he runs—to Iowa, Chicago, Provincetown, San Francisco, to the next hook-up, boyfriend, or girlfriend—he is running, in part, from death. Somehow, he always seems to escape the worst thing.

When tragedy does strike, it feels (as often enough in life) as if this is the end, the disaster, the worst thing. Will he ever get out of bed again? Ever wake up and not want to start the day by drinking? Ever find another person he wants to kiss? Yes, dear reader, he does—eventually. This is a book in which the love of life, though it doesn’t bring about any straightforward fairy tale endings, is strong enough to overcome sorrow. I’ll leave you with the novel’s last line (one can do this, with this book, without particularly spoiling anything): “He saw the city, as good-smelling and various as himself.”

Fun Summer Book Picks

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Below, Malvernian Julie Poole (host of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club) has some splendid summer reading recommendations for y’all…

A customer came into the store and asked for a fun book that she could take with her on vacation, something “light” to read on the plane. At first, I panicked a bit, scanned the store thinking of all the heavy stuff we carry: sad poems; sadder sad poems; books with words like “death,” “dark,” “hell,” in the title, but then a few bright rays began pulsing from the shelves. Pick me, pick me, I’m fun, they said. So I thought, why not put together a grab-bag selection of fun? (Or, at least, books I consider fun.)

Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles by Taisia Kitaiskaia

You can ask Baba Yaga anything, but that doesn’t mean she’ll respond. She has no time for soulless fools. The advice-seekers that she takes under her wing are humans made of flesh and blood and heart—they are funny, sad, desperate, frustrated, complainy, and utterly relatable. The week I started reading Baba was the same week I gave up the news, which had become so unpalatable I had no appetite for my oatmeal. Instead, I read Baba; and her voice along with the anonymous voices she spoke to were such a comfort to me that I missed them all when I finished the book. Baba doesn’t give advice of the predictable Dear [fill in the blank] ilk, nor does she attempt to fix things; she sends out a glittering slug trail of hope, a psychic transmission that emerges straight out of the dark void. She says “Each forager is a question mark; tail dipped always in the River of Hunger. The river is endless and loud, and if you listen too hard you’ll drown”—which I take to mean, “hang in there, buddy.”

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

No other book in the store makes me grin like a love-struck schoolboy than Mrs. Caliban. Don’t get too excited though because there’s a fifty percent chance that we’re out because I hand-sell this book to everyone. If I’m asked the question “What’s your favorite book right now?” I hem and haw a little, then say, “well, you might not be interested in this book (reverse psychology); it’s a little strange (true); it’s about a housewife’s love affair with a giant green fish-man (also true).” This little speech is typically quite effective—as is the New Yorker blurb on the cover that reads, “A perfect novel.” Even if you’re really not into webbed hands or protruding eyes, I believe readers of all tastes will find this book delightful. Ingalls wrote for Hollywood, she knows all the right buttons to push—drama, comedy, intrigue, mystery, crime, and, my personal favorite, oddball sex with amphibious creatures. Maybe I’m gushing a bit much, but I think Ingalls’ Larry could stand shoulder to shoulder with Mr. Darcy, Rochester, and Heathcliff, and be far more loveable despite his green skin.

Eve Babitz, see all (Eve’s Hollywood; Slow Days, Fast Company; Sex and Rage)

I separate my life into two distinct parts—before Eve Babitz and after. Pre-Babitz, I don’t think I understood the meaning of fun, in any sense of the word, and now at least I have a glimmer. It’s not that she writes about sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, it’s that she writes about those things with a mixture of practical abandon and casual glee. In a story about the speaker’s cat, Rosie, buried the previous summer under a tree, she writes:

Whatever it was about Rosie, to untangle it would take me years of therapy and study of ancient scriptures and it wasn’t until I was on mescaline that I made the pilgrimage out to the back yard to think about Rosie.

Sober now for years, I can’t party like Babitz anymore (she’s 75 and probably can’t either), but I can read her work and be reminded of what the phrase “artistic integrity” means. As my coworker F says, “Eve Babitz does what she wants.” Her enthusiasm for relishing life’s experiences—be it drugs that I can’t do, or architecture that I hope to see one day, her writing makes no concessions. She can talk about Rainier beer in one breath and Stravinsky (her godfather) in the next—the essence of her work is a full-bodied appreciation of all that life has to offer—from taquitos to Rome.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

If a novel’s worth hinged upon how well it described the sea and cats, then Fair Play would be considered a masterpiece; and it certainly is to me. There’s nothing in the world like this slender book; it somehow hovers somewhere between film and poetry. I can hear water glucking against the boat’s bottom, the sound of pencils moving across the page. What better treasure exists than a story about two art-loving, art-making ladies in their twilight years, who bicker about film, family, and love—then retreat back to their private studios for some quiet. The cat and the sea are an anchor between them; it’s both a perfect love story and a rallying cry to make art.

Staff Picks: Between Clay and Dust

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Celia recommends Between Clay and Dust by Musharraf Ali Farooqi:

Between Clay and Dust is many things—a twilight romance, a coming of age story told from a distance, an elegy for a lost world. Set in Pakistan just after the partition of India and the end of the British colonial regime, the novel follows Ustad Ramzi, the head of a renowned wrestling family, and Gohar Jan, a once celebrated courtesan who finds herself increasingly alienated from her community. The two share a quiet, unconsummated romance, for Ustad Ramzi has taken a vow of celibacy, and Gohar Jan has sworn never to devote herself to one man. While their relationship provides the story’s framework, the novel expands outwards, asking what kind of legacy this pair can leave in a society undergoing changes that may leave each of their professions unrecognizable. The effect is of watching a story unfurl through a telescope: every detail stands out clear and visible, and yet you have the feeling that the things you are seeing are already lost, and if you reach out to touch them you’ll find only air.

I love Farooqi’s simple and precise prose, which rarely flaunts its presence, but dwells lovingly on details. A wrestler training for an important fight wakes up in the morning and drinks “milk in which the flowers of blue lotus and barberries, sandalwood powder, dry endive, myrobalan, and green cardamoms had been soaked,” does a grueling exercise regimen, and then rests and eats “a kilo of rabri…one and a half kilos of roast meat…a preparation of gold foil, pearls, and green cardamom in butter,” and, in cold weather, “a soup made from five chickens.” The novel describes the emotional lives of its characters with the same precise simplicity. Gohar Jan, hurt by Ustad Ramzi’s reticence towards her, reflects that “the graciousness that allowed people to accept and grant small kindnesses had no place in Ustad Ramzi’s heart. For the first time, it also occurred to her that it gave him a certain privilege in his relationships: he could neither be dismissed as a stranger nor held to any commitment to anyone.”

While Ustad Ramzi and Gohar Jan are both childless, each has an heir, and much of the novel is devoted to exploring what their legacy will be. Ustad Ramzi has a troubled relationship with Tamami, his much-younger brother. Tamami should by rights be the heir to the wrestling clan, but his rocky relationship with Ustad Ramzi keeps him from taking up his brother’s mantle. Ustad Ramzi is strict with himself and others, while Tamami is both wildly ambitious and painfully sensitive. As much as they both want the same thing—to reconcile and preserve their family’s legacy—neither knows how to accommodate the other’s feelings. Gohar Jan, meanwhile, has an adopted daughter, named Malka, who loves her dearly—but as the courtesan’s patrons die, lose their wealth, or abandon her, Gohar Jan decides that she cannot let Malka pursue the life that she herself has led, and resolves to send her away to a different kind of future.

There is no exact answer to what the future can hold, only questions. Malka passes out of the novel and into a new life, which Farooqi’s readers do not get to see. As for the rest—it is a story of how things end.