Displacement: A Travelogue by Lucy Knisley

I’m a Virgin.

Yes, it’s my first time.

I’m reading my first “graphic novel” or memoir in this case.  She (the author) calls it a travelogue but I still reserve that term for those 3-minute “News-of-the-World” films shown in between double features at the cinemas of my younger days [40’s & 50’s].

Speaking from the POV of the grandparent, I had to face up to some realities of perception from a grand-daughter’s point of view.  These were not flattering.  Nonetheless, I want to keep in vogue, and graphic novels are today’s reality, so I bit the bullet, and, I loved it.  It’s not what I think of as novel writing, but it’s entertaining and the graphics make the story shorter and get the point across immediately.  I’ve only used eleven trite phrases so far and the last one will be SAS, Short Attention Span writing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you who still remain virginal, this type of writing combines some graphics along with the writing of a tale, an episode, or whatever.  I still think of it as what my daughter [now 48] still calls a blog.  That’s a sprinkling of photographs along with a narrative description of a scene or adventure.  My daughter’s adventures, and blogs, have always been what every grandparent wishes for, a notch more adventuress than those of her parents. 

The author, Lucy Knisley in this case, thinks of herself as a cartoonist.  So she has moved the line forward to communicate the story almost equally between words and pictures: in her case the pictures are cartoon cels that, as they say, contain a thousand words.

Obviously this is hard to communicate with just words, so I will add in a picture from the middle of the book.

 

 

No one in the greater family wants to deal with Grandma & Grandpa who wished, in their 90’s, to go on a cruise.  Their grand-daughter said, “I’ll take them,” and thus the short story.

It will make you cry, young or old.  And it’s only 150 small pages, mostly pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

Sacrifice & Perfect Witness by JCO & Iris Johansen

It’s always interesting for me to compare two books that have some sort of over-arching common theme.  I just finished two books with which I was alternating chapters to pace my reading.  Last year when I was on vacation, I did that with five books – reading one chapter in each, every night.

This time the thread was mother-daughter relationships -- gone awry.  Why is it, so often, that stories are written about evil mothers [or step-mothers to protect the innocent].  I don’t know of any father-child relationships discussed in novels, where the father is evil ! – perhaps addicted to liquor or drugs and thus inflicting abuse on the child.  Mean, nasty people abound, irrespective of gender, but there is no ambivalence when it’s a father.  And that’s the interesting point for novelists to dig into with mother-daughter relationships.

The two books I read this past month were:

n  “The Sacrifice” by Joyce Carol Oates published now because of all the Ferguson uproar over white police issues in African-American communities.  In this book, Mama, a half a gray-notch above her neighborhood’s crack ho’s, is afraid of the ramifications of revealing the truth about the beating of her 15-year-old daughter by mama’s live-in, scum-bag [but I love him] druggie boyfriend.  So she and daughter blame things on “white cops”, which in the end, gets everyone killed.  Welcome to JCO.

 

n  “The Perfect Witness” by Iris Johansen, is almost in the fantasy genre: its theme is people with psychic abilities.  Our protagonist’s mother has trained her 15-year-old heroine to obey her over all others in all matters, always! through mama’s psychic ability to sway people. But our heroine is kidnapped by the good guys at the last minute and proceeds down a path of psychic righteousness leading to her mother being eaten alive by a tiger.

JCO’s blatant exploitation of the current turmoil between black and white disappoints me, but the writing is rock solid even if the theme is sordid.  Nothing was a surprise as this morbid tale slowly proceeded as if following a trashy newspaper story.

Johansen also exploits all the themes that sell books: sex, money, beauty and power.  These things actually have nothing to do with the main plotline, but are provided in ample doses throughout the very predictable book.

In the end it wasn’t just the bad mothers that tied these two books together.  As books, they both exploited the seamiest crap to boost book sales and movie rights.

The Sparrow by Mary Dora Russell

Sorry, this is a Sic-Fi book that doesn’t stand the test of time: twenty years, and it’s laughable.  It might have been a reasonable guess 25 years ago, that religion was going to be a major future factor in world history.  Things didn’t turn out that way though; secularism won the war.  This was for a strange and unpredicted reason: global warming.  Granted, major world –isms were conflicted around the turn of the millennium.  But they had no believable answer for global warming, which continued into the 21^st century for year after year, forcing people to accept scientific survival theory.

Unfortunately for Russell, having bought into the Western, Christian, Catholic doctrine, hook, line and sinker, she was locked into supporting an unrealistic, unpopular dictum about celibacy and sex in general [centuries away from any female issues with these topics].

This was a first novel. As such, it is uniquely open to both praise and criticism. The topic and plotline were relevant at the time because of the coming 3^rd millennial celebration. This was a generational thing: Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles”, Clark’s “2001”, & Sagan’s “Contact” each stirred huge new audiences to consider what it would be like to confront an alien people. All thoughtful people including writers want to take a stab at this topic.

Science Fiction allows an author to re-invent society in their own image, God-like.  “The Sparrow” looks twenty years ahead, enough to disavow any prognosticating ability.  This allows the author, Russell in this case, to proclaim her position on politics, religion, sex, and relationships; all taboo subjects normally, but she’s working under the guise of genre-writing; she has carte-blanc to create her own world.

As a novice, Mary Doria fell prey to the temptation to use omniscient narrator at the extreme in this first book of a series.  Personally, I feel that novels benefit from multiple points of view.  “The Sparrow,” having a great focus on spirituality, foregoes the atheistic POV, with God-adoring characters, combined with an omniscient God analyzing the human interactions.  

Besides the Sci-Fi imperative about an author defining the ingredients of a better-designed world, which Mary Doria does nicely, there is a need to define the inter-personal relationships between people and peoples who must co-relate in an alien environment.

Since Russell’s themes are captivity and sex, eventually rape, I can’t help but draw the conclusion that things went wildly in a different direction from when she conceived this novel.

We’ve now in the last 20 years had long-running [read popular] series about: Pelican Bay, a men’s prison, and more recently “Orange is the new Black” about women’s prisons.  The majority of people here in the US understand that sex is a dominant factor in prison life.  Send a healthy, young man or woman to prison and besides incarceration, you’re probably sentencing them to be raped, by inmates, guards or both.  We, the people, know this and continue to do this.

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

Wow.!.!.!  This is the first time in a number of years that I would agree with whatever committee gave this book a National Book Award prize [actually the author was only awarded a “finalist” designation; God only knows what book beat him out in the finals. 

In my opinion, this is the best book club read I’ve ever encountered {albeit not a Sonoma County Library selection}.  Being second tier is something I got used to while living in Europe.  The concept is anathema to most Americans, but we have AAA baseball.  Those sub-strata of teams relegated to second-tier are like our Library book groups: not as much funding, and not the all-star players.  And yet, the Library Foundation has its conservative rules – no new books, established acclaim, literary east-coast prizes – within which this book might eventually fit, as a contender, albeit in three years.  The problem we at Guerneville Library have experienced is that in 2017, this book may not have the same topicality as now.

So, this is the style of writing that violates all the rules, and thus is brilliant because of that violation.  I’m now finished my first read of this book – there weren’t any chapters to help set a pace, but it’s one of those reads that’s hard to put down, so I used toilet paper as marker stop-points.  The book uses a declarative first person protagonist (which I just complained about in another recent book commentary), and yet the author has captured me, my thoughts, and my actions in detail, so how can I complain.  I love this style – because the protagonist is me.  She’s a woman, with full feminine attributes and capabilities – and a woman I could love – and yet she easily fits within the minds of men, in all their disgusting habits: farting, swearing, disrespecting women, killing other people with guns, and in all sorts of ways, being stupid.

To our reading group, the heroine is “of an age”, our age.  Done with a gazillion and one things, that have bothered us between birth and 65.  What she’s left with, as we might agree, is a love of the written word, specifically literature.  Our protagonist, probably unlike us, has devoted her life to translating “the great works of literature”, in her opinion, into Arabic.  Was this book like “The Housekeeper and the Professor” or other stories, which place a heroine in harm’s way and then tie up the loose ends.  Quite often, these books develop their stories in the Middle or Far East.

This month will be my first, in a long while, at a non-library-based book club.  In the past, my experience with most reading and writing groups has been that they are predominately feminine.  This new “Meet-Up” group limits itself, wisely, to sixteen people per event, but allocates 2 hours instead of only one.  I hope this means that each participant will have 4-5 minutes to put forward their ideas on the book.  I can only hope that, over time, there will be a gender balance in these Meet-Up groups.

My library book this month was a memoir that cited 300 book titles.  I hated that book and loved this one, and had to ask myself, why?.  Was I being inconsistent?  The difference I found was that whereas the Beiruti author’s protagonist was a hermit-style, solitary reader and writer, the Will Schwalbe memoir was a gregarious journalist/publisher for whom books were his career bread and butter.  He didn’t really like them, reading or writing.  Books were Aaliya’s Life.  They were her only and true friends.  I compiled a list of Aaliya’s 37 best friends, which is documented on the next four pages.

I normally resist the temptation to quote passages from the current book, but with a supposed few extra minutes I will cite page 54 after a self-proclaimed bucolic passage

“I sway a little, lean on the wine-red and urine yellow abomination of a breakfast table that my husband brought with him when we were married and left when he left.  I shake the loose folds of my robe de chamber.  Dust motes hang thick in the air.  The kitchen has two windows on adjacent walls.  A spider with shockingly long front legs busies herself with prey caught in her web.  All that remains is a wisp of gossamer with striated veins..  The spider chose the wrong window; her home will be washed away with the first rains.”

 

 

The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

Will is the ideal son of a Jewish mother, gosh, any mother would love this guy who is loving and devoted, respectful and caring; what’s not to love?  Well, becoming a doctor or a lawyer might be nice too, but as his mother reminded him, he’s independently wealthy and doesn’t need to work.  This may be why he’s flirted with journalism, publishing, book editing, and hey, why not, a gourmet food website.

This book is primarily a monster homage to his mother who comes off as Mother Teresa, Maggie Thatcher, and Hillary Clinton all rolled into one.  Now he is self-admittedly not a writer.  Nonetheless, his ego has seeped into the text of this book.  Although it’s not clear to me what is his “memoir”, and what belongs to his Mother’s continued child-rearing.  Right at the end [and keep in mind that 90% of all readers skip to the end, at the beginning], he owns to receiving, from his mother, the appendix, most of the philosophical insights, and copious notes to be included into this book, including the Blog entries.  What are left are some editorial fill, details research, and a few anecdotal diary thoughts.

Yes, what I’m saying is that Mom is still running Will’s life.

Will is a small scope kind of guy; his mother is world-scope.  Will doesn’t want to be President of … or Board Chairman of … ; he likes the comforts of life, especially this life; not particularly interested in an afterlife.  That’s why he daubs his fingers in all these great books, but draws no over-arching conclusions from this entire 18-month period.  Will is not a big thinker and it is a shame that in penning his Mom’s self-eulogy, he couldn’t balance it with some thoughts of his own.

But at least … !     we’ve finally pinned him down. 

Yeah.!   Yes, the white-wine swilling imbecile who keeps putting books on the New York Times bestseller list, et al.  The guy who has a pile of “must-read” books by his bedside [that admittedly never get read] that are nonetheless advanced along the path towards Sonoma County Library selection. 

The guy who brags endlessly about this and that event where he co-hosts his “publishing pals”;  who also lets drop, humbly, all his charitable and volunteer time spent on numerous worthwhile causes in Africa and the Middle East.  I won’t mention name-dropping.

It is interesting to note that “our guy” says he doesn’t like to read about or discuss subjects like sex, defecation, and many other taboo subjects.  On the other hand, he documents his Mom’s list of 150 [famous] books that are all referenced in this {lengthy, 300-page} expansion of a New York Times article.  These guys loved fornication and shitting.

Now I am trying to keep an open mind but obviously failing.  We all have people in our lives, and/or families that are like this.  Generally, they live back in Ohio, and we’re out here in California.  Mammals like to stay with their own.