Back in Action!
with books by Valeria Luiselli, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and Lesley Nneka Arimah
Greetings, dear readers! I am pleased to be back posting and hope you’ve had a wonderful summer wherever you are (or winter, on the chance anyone from the Southern Hemisphere is reading).
First, I’m excited to share that I have some new work out in the world: one a flash piece online at The Common and the other in Issue 58 of Salamander! I also wrote another book review on assignment from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of J. Courtney Sullivan’s The Cliffs, which has some interesting thematic crossover from Daniel Mason’s North Woods from my last post, in case you’d like to check it out.
This month, I have a particularly robust trio of recommendations I’m excited to share: two novels and a short story collection.
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
“I don’t know what my husband and I will say to each of our children one day. I’m not sure which parts of our story we might each choose to pluck and edit out for them, and which ones we’ll shuffle around and insert back in to produce a final version—even though plucking, shuffling, and editing sounds is probably the best summary of what my husband and I do for a living. But the children will ask, because ask is what children do. And we’ll need to tell them a beginning, a middle, and an end. We’ll need to give them an answer, tell them a proper story.”
This 2019 novel was hands-down my favorite read of the summer, and I’m confused that the cover is not plastered with major prize nominations. It’s one-part road trip novel, one-part autofictional account of a disintegrating marriage, and three-parts an arresting and genius exploration of how one might attempt to archive the unarchivable with the ultimate audience of the next generation. Luiselli’s protagonist, a mother and political journalist engaged in documenting soundscapes, wants to go to the southern border and try to record the stories of undocumented children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) who have been detained by the U.S. government.
This was the rare book (for me) wherein the second half was even better than what was already a very promising first half. In the early going, I loved the sinewy sentences and the precise observations of the dynamics of this particular family. I found myself reading slowly to savor it. But as the book picked up speed and became more obviously experimental in its form, I started to fly through it because of how emotionally invested I had become in the story and the characters. I was also propelled by my curiosity to see how the structure would eventually resolve.
It’s one of the most moving novels I’ve ever read about parenthood. I also admire how Luiselli tries to make sense of and record a mass-scale trauma while also imagining the damage wreaked on individual lives in intimate and haunting, albeit incomplete, detail. She also incorporates images, excerpts from other texts (real and imagined), and speculative elements in ways that reminded me of Justin Torres’ Blackouts as a project that boldly investigates what the malleable and versatile form of the novel can achieve, which cannot be easily reproduced or accomplished in other artistic forms.
The Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
“Sometimes the less you know the more you live.”
This 2018 bildungsroman has some general thematic connections with Lost Children Archive, as it involves a story of a Latin American child’s immigration to the U.S. under political duress, though the specific historical and cultural context is quite different.
Set primarily in a gated community in Bogotá, Columbia during the reign of Pablo Escobar in the 1990s, The Fruit of the Drunken Tree tells the story of a young, naïve girl named Chula who wants to befriend a teenage girl, Petrona, who works as a maid for Chula’s family and whose guerilla-affiliated boyfriend is seeking to exploit her. Alternating chapters from Chula and Petrona’s perspectives construct a complex portrayal of the social, moral, and political dynamics that lead to great danger for both girls and their families. It also offers a poignant and nuanced study of the consequences of the class differences between their families.
This is a well-paced, powerful debut, and I’m eager to check out Rojas Contreras’ memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds.
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
“The yarn baby lasted a good month, emitting dry, cotton-soft gurgles and pooping little balls of lint, before Ogechi snagged its thigh on a nail and it unraveled as she continued walking, mistaking the little huffs for the beginnings of hunger, not the cries of an infant being undone.”
This debut short story collection from 2017 is replete with strong writing and elegant story constructions. (I’m noticing now that my selections for this month were published in 2019, 2018, and 2017 during my first three years of teaching high school English. I missed a lot of books during those years and am just now starting to catch up!) This one reminds me a bit of Danielle Evans’ excellent story collections in its emphasis on grief and mother-daughter relationships, though the prose style is quite different and more compressed. An Evans story tends to unfold a bit more slowly (though no less powerfully), while Arimah will punch you in the gut far more abruptly (the opener, “The Future Looks Good,” comes to mind). Like Evans’ first collection, What It Means centers adolescent and young adult Black women protagonists, though Arimah’s protagonists often hail from Lagos, Nigeria.
The book incorporates a number of stories with striking, emphatically speculative premises (such as the title story and the one quoted above), but there are quite a few realist stories in the mix as well. Recurring themes include limitations, social pressures, and the myriad ways parents betray their children and how children in turn struggle to understand and reconcile with their parents. The stories about mothers particularly stuck with me, among them: “Second Chances,” in which a mother returns as a ghost to visit her daughter and husband; “Who Will Greet You at Home?” in which mothers make their children out of found objects, like mud, or hair, and yarn; and “Buchi’s Girls,” an emotionally devastating realist story about a mother and her two daughters.
Sharing these three remarkable books with you, I’m reminded of a sweatshirt an elementary school buddy of mine used to wear: “So many books, so little time.” Hope you can find time for at least one of these great books over the coming weeks!
Warmly,
Jules
Glad to have these reviews back!!