Wednesday, May 31, 2017

THE PHOENIX YEAR, novel that feels more like an intelligence dossier



THE PHOENIX YEAR
DAVID L. BLOND

Wattle Publishing
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: “… from out of the fire, would rise a new order, like the legend of the phoenix. There would emerge a new world, a new super economy…”

So starts a sequence of events destined to rock world economies to their very core. On the 50th anniversary of their induction into the Society of the Phoenix, a group of billionaires is about to change the world dramatically, with devastating effect.

Overseen by the reclusive Heinrich Von Kleise, the Society has hatched an audacious plan to subvert world economies, by using and abusing some of the world’s wealthiest businessmen and their families; in some cases, holding them literally to ransom, or worse.

Michael Ross, an economic advisor to the US President, Ben Masters, a disgraced property tycoon, Natalya Avramowitz, a Russian economist and spy, and “Kim” a CIA Agent, find themselves at the center of this plot, involving inside trading, sex slavery, and political corruption.

As the world careens towards financial Armageddon, can Michael, Natalya and Kim prevent global disintegration, or are the world’s financial institutions fated to implode?

The Phoenix Year by David L. Blond is a gripping novel, encompassing many of the financial crises that have hit the headlines in the past decade. The author has skillfully woven these together to create an action-packed conspiracy thriller.

My Review:





Wednesday, May 10, 2017

THE COURAGE CONSORT, novellas in spare and lyrical prose



THE COURAGE CONSORT: Three Novellas
MICHEL FABER

Harvest Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: With his elegant prose, distinctive imagination, and deep empathy, the bestselling author of The Crimson Petal and the White once again dazzles us in three novellas. "The Courage Consort" tells of an a capella vocal ensemble sequestered in a Belgian chateau to rehearse a monstrously complicated new piece. But competing artistic temperaments and sexual needs create as much discordance as the avant garde music. In "The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps," a lonely woman joins an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey and unearths a mystery involving a long-hidden murder. In "The Fahrenheit Twins," strange children, identical in all but gender and left alone at the icy zenith of the world by their anthropologist parents, create their own ritual civilization.

In each of these novellas, Michel Faber creates a unique, self-contained world, where the perennial human drama plays out in all its passion and ambiguity.

My Review: Inspired by my recent remembering of reading Faber's stonking novel THE BOOK OF STRANGE NEW THINGS, which has been adapted into an Amazon Prime episodic series, I fished this collection of novellas from my boxes to give it an overdue review. Actually, I suspect my 2005-2006 review is on the hard drive of my boxed-up PC but I can't be arsed to get it out, hook it up, etc etc. I quite like Faber's unlabored elegance of prose. I'm a little shakier on some of his storytelling choices. I get more wobbly when we get into the nuts and bolts of an individual story's constituent bits, as there seem to me to be, unfailingly, expectations raised that are never satisfied, threads that are left to dangle like the annoying loose tag at the back of your neck rubbing you when you put on your expensive new shirt. Still looks good, yet there's that damned itchy thing.... We'll use the Bryce Method as usual, story-by-story thoughts and ratings:

The Courage Consort brings us the disintegration of people, relationships, and institutions over the course of a heavy, humid summer trip made by the five members of the titular consort to a country château in Belgium. They are there to prepare for the world premiere of an avant-garde composition by an enfant terrible composer. The piece is terrible, they all know it, but they are "serious" musicians and they sing a capella, so it's either whatever the vulture drops in front of them no matter how malodious or endless iterations of melodious but, well, shop-worn stuff like Sumer is icumen in. A person could go bonkers doing that one for a living.

Catherine Courage, our PoV character, is battling her way out of the gray, annihilating purposelessness of a serious depression, one senses not her first. She is married to the founder of the consort, she is one of the women whose experience of life is being controlled by men, and she is pretty well done with everything. We're given to understand that even her attempts at suicide are half-hearted. She's a gorgeous soprano, though, and an a capella group sans soprano is dire listening. As the Courage Consort is an avant-garde a capella group, I suspect I (and thousands like me) would find them dire listening at any time. Catherine is getting to that point herself:
Other people might think it was terribly exciting when two females singing in thirds made the airwaves buzz weirdly, but Catherine was finding that her nerves were no longer up to it. Even the way a sustained A-flat tended to make an auditorium's air-conditioning hum gave her the creeps lately. It was as if her face was being rubbed in the fact that music was all sound-waves and atoms when you stripped the Baroque wrapping paper off it.
But dig we must in this vale of tears, Catherine being an obedient consort hauls herself to Belgium for the rare luxury of two weeks' paid rehearsal time smack in the middle of nowhere much. No distractions. No shops, either. But oodles of nothingness is wonderful when rehearsing complicated music.

The thing about nothingness, as defined by city people, is that it's not nothingness but the absence of city. The country's a noisy place, usually; Catherine herself is unnerved by the silence of the country birds, where in London she's accustomed to birds shouting their fool heads off in the occasional city tree. More trees, fewer birds per tree; fewer roads, fewer pedestrians, fewer cars:
Nature meant the absence of people. It was a system set up to run without human beings, concentrating instead on the insensate and the eternal. Which was very relaxing now and then. But dangerous in the long run: darkness would fall, and there would be no door to close,
no roof over one's head, no blankets to pull up. One wasn't an animal, after all.
One is an animal, in point of fact, one is simply very bad at being a country animal. Like dogs and cats brought to the country are wildly curious and dash about sniffing before coming home for supper from the old familiar dish, Catherine begins to explore the Belgian forest. She's scared witless by a weird cry that she believes could be human; like a city cat, she's not equipped to figure out what it is in all likelihood. She and the city cat are having a lark. They're not gonna make it left to themselves, or at least most won't. Catherine wouldn't be among the survivalists starting civilization from scratch post-apocalyptically any more than Fluffy or Mittens would be in the barn hunting the rats.

But the rats can come indoors when it's human rats we're talking about. The can drive Porsches, wear tacky ostentatious clothes, and write terrible a capella music after stabbing their wife with a stiletto heel in the Milan airport. Their musical patron coming to the château to hear their rendition of his deathless opus leaves the entire consort enveloped in the choking fog of falseness. One of them, responding to the literal stink of the figurative stinker, takes action:
[He] was padding around the house like a bear, going from window to window, opening them all wide. It wasn't until he was opening the biggest, nearest window that his fellow Consort members noticed the whole château stank of the sort of perfume probably derived from scraping the scrotums of extremely rare vermin.
And that's Faber at his most Faberly. That kind of surface wit rumpled by barely concealed metaphor riding on a deeper structure of meaning is easy to read and pass by; but wait: The lumbering bear of a character, trapped inside the château to be forcibly trained to perform against his natural inclination attempts to make the miasma left by a pretentious macaque-faced poseur stop bothering him are obvious enough. Then look again. The big, fat bear-man quiet. He sings bass. His part in the composition being sung is compared often to the throaty chanting of Tibetan monks. He never does anything for himself, not cooking nor cleaning nor walking; yet he is always ready to work, always prepared in his admittedly uncomplicated part of the performance, always the one least riled by foolishness and most focused on the job. The quote above, in two sentences, is his purpose in the story's world wrapped in the Baroque paper referenced above. Faber likes doing that, giving his reader play-pretties that some will dismiss as brummagem, others will judge heavy handed, and some will see as pointers to the action to come and significators of the reason the story came to be in the first place.

The consort's process of atomizing in the wake of the scrotal scent-marking of the château accelerates; Catherine processes her depression more and more by living for her time feeding the bear-man and moving about in the woods that she still doesn't understand or trust but can't resist. She leaves her husband to his accustomed role of fixer, explainer, creator of images and maestro of the consort's musical identity. It's a desperate job of papering over cracks and slapping paint on plasterless brick walls. His contralto, previously Catherine's cicerone in the mysteries of flat paved roads leading through featureless obscure woods, focuses more and more on the primal job of feeding and tending her infant. His tenor, a raging horndog, furtles about the place seeking any distraction from his sexless state:
This morning, although she couldn't hear any identifiable television sounds filtering down into the kitchen, Catherine had a feeling it was probably still chattering away to Julian in his room, because the purity seemed to have been taken out of the silence somehow.
There was an inaudible fuzz, like the sonic equivalent of the haze from burning toast, obscuring Catherine's access to the acoustic immensity of the forest.
Julian's tenor is transmuted into the cosmic microwave background, both inescapable and inaudible, omnipresent and irrelevant to the foreground action...until he makes a discovery among the books there that is a major source of my mild disgruntlement with most of the Faber books I've read: A book of Massenet songs, pages uncut, that he finds and suggests they'd do better to sing from than the terrible piece they've been hired to premiere, is glancingly mentioned as probably containing forgotten works and never heard from again. The macaque-faced composeur (oo, I like that one), confronted at last by a technical flaw in his composition, makes what is apparently a token defense of himself and then the consort is allowed to do "whatever [they] like" for no apparent reason and without significant fireworks despite his brief appearance being a perfect set-up for a hissy-fit-throwing set piece...a few other let-downs, herrings painted reddish then allowed to swim back to the school, and we arrive at the tragedy inevitable from the moment our bear-man bass aired the place out. It's a nice piece of writing, a good story modest in scale and told with economy that would have benefited from just a bit more, or a minor bonsai shaping. Solid and attractive, like all good furniture.

The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps



The Fahrenheit Twins


Monday, May 8, 2017

WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY, stories from a new Nigerian voice



WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY: Stories
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH

Riverhead Books
$26 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home.

In "Who Will Greet You at Home", a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, a woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In "Wild", a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good," three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in "Light," a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person"—with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.

Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU!

My Review: There is so much more here than the slenderness of the volume they inhabit would indicate; hence the perfection of my use of the Bryce Method to give you a quick hit of my ideas of a story, and then show individual ratings.

The Future Looks Good if you aren't paying attention, anyway. The fact is that you get yourself into places you really don't want to be because of the past:
...Ezinma, keys fumbling against the lock, doesn't see what came behind her: her mother at age twenty-two, not beautiful, but with the fresh look of a person who has never been hungry.
–and–
He blinds {Ezinma's sister} with a constellation of gifts, things she's never had before, like spending money and orgasms.

And, in the end, it's never really you that they want, Ezinma, it's not the way of the world for a kindly, accepting soul to be given the Keys to the Kingdom. There are locks and doors and living spaces that you are not made for, and going there is fatal. 4 bitter stars

War Stories remembers the tack one's parents take to Educate and Enlighten you...
"Is this about the time {your c.o.} took your gun?"

The tale, intended to impart some inscrutable lesson, was a stale one my father had trotted out at various infractions over my short life. I heard it when I stole lipstick from my aunt's dresser. I heard it when my mother discovered me gathering ants in a plastic bag to put in a schoolmate's hair. I heard it after I got into a fight with the children who said my father was strange, and again when I wanted to know why {father's best friend} couldn't come to our house anymore, and later, why he'd done what he'd done. My father never shared stories from before or after the war, as though he'd been born in the barracks and died the night of the final volley.

We're on to your tricks, Parents! Why do you use this creaky, crappy, ineffectual technique...that I still remember...oh.

The truth of stories has power. The telling of truths through stories is an act of creation and annihilation, a bright flash of the Universe's unfiltered energy come to Earth for the merest moment. And no one near leaves unchanged. 4.5 stars

Wild

Light

Second Chances

Windfalls

Who Will Greet You at Home

Buchi's Girls

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is the first of these stories I read, back when it was a finalist for the 2016 Caine Prize. My review is here.

Glory

What is a Volcano?

Redemption

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Winner winner barfed-up dinner


I believe we have a winner in the migraine mystery solution sweeps: Cleaning products. Housekeeping just came through spraying some toxic horror and the eyegraine has begun. The hurts-to-blink stage approaches fast. This sucks sweaty sweaty socks but if it's showing me how to stop triggering these hellish things, it's going down as a net plus.

SO MUCH FOR THAT WINTER, Danish author Nors's English-language debut



SO MUCH FOR THAT WINTER: Novellas
DORTHE NORS
(tr. Misha Hoekstra)
Graywolf Press
$15 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Dorthe Nors follows up her acclaimed story collection Karate Chop with a pair of novellas that playfully chart the aftermath of two very twenty-first century romances. In “Days,” a woman in her late thirties records her life in a series of lists, giving shape to the tumult of her days—one moment she is eating an apple, the next she is on the floor, howling like a dog. As the details accumulate, we experience with her the full range of emotions: anger, loneliness, regret, pain, and also joy, as the lists become a way to understand, connect to, and rebuild her life.

In “Minna Needs Rehearsal Space,” a novella told in headlines, an avant-garde musician is dumped via text message. Fleeing the indignity of the breakup, and friends who flaunt their achievements in life, career, and family, Minna unfriends people on Facebook, listens to Bach and reads Ingmar Bergman then decamps to an island near Sweden “well suited to mental catharsis.” A cheeky nod to the listicles and bulletins we scroll through on a daily basis, So Much for That Winter explores how we shape and understand experience, and the disconnection and dislocation that define our twenty-first-century lives, with Nors’s unique wit and humor.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: How a perfectly rational North American running at full tilt towards the last full decade of his life is seduced by a Danish lady of middling vintage into going all experimental and experiential with his reading. Using, as always, the Bryce Method to discuss the pieces' merits one at a time:

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space doesn't she. I think Minna's major problem is that she can't see or hear herself anymore. I think Minna needs about a year away from her surface-obsessed life to get back to what is underneath the headlines. Minna can't be arsed to try to move on from the indignity of being dumped via text message? What makes you so special, sunshine, that you're immune from the rage and outrage that accompanies any and all intermingling of XX and YX persons?

Even her career, avant-garde musician, tells you that she's been to Paradise but she's never been to me. Charlene whinged those words in 1977! I don't know Author Nors, but I'm sure that as she's a Dane she wasn't listening to US pop music in 1977. Maybe she should go back and fill in a blank in her world experience!

(In case it needs saying out loud, the above isn't meant to be serious but rather to point out how very different Author is from character...one deep and deadly, the other shallow and affectless.)

I know that A Public Space has always been deeply committed to women's writing, and I laud them for it. This translation is well inside their wheelhouse as Author Nors presents us with a tale that could only be told by a woman about a woman. Minna is a collection of headlines; Minna is without internal awareness; Minna has just been dumped via text message.

So why does Minna crash so heavily, so thoroughly massively, into a male brain.

Days gives us numbered lists of quotidian activities and thoughts, a step-by-step way to say "this is what life is: First this, then that, and don't ever stop because lists that end are thrown away."
10. Took in the bottle of wine the neighbor had placed on my mat:
11. Excuse the noise, Love, Majbritt, it said; so that's her name, I thought,
12. and set the bottle on top of the fridge,
13. moved it under the sink,
14. I'll drink it for Pentecost,
15. for Pentecost when I'm happy,
16. really happy.
The entire point of reading these lists, these discrete and atomized moments, is to understand that life, Life, isn't what we thought it was. It isn't a film. It's the filming script. It's the continuity book without the costume shots.
16. Chopped lettuce without cutting my finger
17. and decided that perhaps in time something good
would happen. I do know that something will, I know
it, like when you're riding a train across Zealand in
winter:
18. darkness darkness darkness darkness
19 and then suddenly a greenhouse crackling warm
20. in the middle of it all.
So why, you ask me, is this not poetry, what makes this prose, how arbitrary is the line, why do you insist you don't like poetry and this feels pretty much like poetry. You're telling me, I hear you thinking, you like this and you don't like poetry but WHY isn't this poetry.

All I can tell you without getting into formal discussions that I don't have the credentials for or interest in is that it's clearly the prose side of the Great Divide. I know lots of energy goes into the "debate" between poetry fans (the aggressors) and the poetry atheists (me) to establish that I am wrong and poetry is wonderful. So stipulated, your honors.

I still don't like poetry. I still like Dorthe Nors's prose.

Monday, May 1, 2017

THE BABYSITTER AT REST, Jen George's wowee-toledo! debut collection



THE BABYSITTER AT REST
JEN GEORGE

Dorothy, a publishing project
$16 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Five stories—several as long as novellas—introduce the world to Jen George, a writer whose furiously imaginative new voice calls to mind Donald Barthelme and Leonora Carrington no less than Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. In “Guidance/The Party,” an ethereal alcoholic “Guide” in robes and flowing hair appears to help a thirty-three-year-old woman prepare a party for her belated adulthood; “Take Care of Me Forever” tragically lambasts the medical profession as a ship of fools afloat in loneliness and narcissism; “Instruction” chronicles a season in an unconventional art school called The Warehouse, where students divide their time between orgies, art critiques, and burying dead racehorses. Combining slapstick, surrealism, erotica, and social criticism, Jen George’s sprawling creative energy belies the secret precision and unexpected tenderness of everything she writes.

My Review: Each story, in my accustomed manner, will be discussed individually and assinged a rating in what I call the Bryce Method after my old Goodreads friend "Seak."

Guidance/The Party

The Babysitter at Rest

Take Care of Me Forever

Futures in Child Rearing

Instruction