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Harmony Review

This book gets 3 tasty not-green popsicles out of 5.
[Three purple popsicles are stacked on top of each other, with some tasty blackberries scattered around. In the background you see pinecones and a cross-section of a log. It’s very pastoral meets pioneer.]

Why did I pick this book up?

I picked up Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst because the last time I went to the bookstore, there was a table of 3 for $10 books and I just can’t resist a good book bargain. Plus, those piles are usually romance novels (which I have nothing against really, other than I wasn’t really in the mood for that) and this time there was a pretty crazy variety. I made a point of buying books all written by women because after The Catcher in the Rye and The Trial, I wasn’t really feeling male writers, no offense.

Anyways, I went to the bookstore to buy Heart Berries, but as mentioned didn’t want to review two memoirs back to back, and after Wasted wanted something that would be an easier read (which I don’t think Heart Berries will be). Out of the other books I bought, this one was the shortest. So that’s conducive to keeping up a good blogging pace! Long story short, Harmony fit my reading needs, and it also had an interesting cover. The cover also boasted a compliment by Jodi Picoult, and knock her all you want, but I like her.

I decided it would be fitting to take a picture of this book in front of some of my family photos.
[A book is held in front of photos of children on a sandy beach and a magical forest house on a cliff. The book’s cover is a photo of a lake surrounded by lush woods. Two girls in colourful dresses stand on a path: one is facing us, while the other is further down the path, at the edge of the lake. “harmony” stretches right above both their heads in a white font similar to Georgia.]

Would I recommend why/why not?

I would recommend Harmony if you like books about family dynamics, parenthood, or books told from the point of view of a child. Like Room, but less intense in terms of child focalization, because the primary narrator in this text is not five, but eleven. I always like to read books that show how children think differently than adults, and highlight some of adulthood’s foibles and idiosyncrasies. I would also recommend this book if you are intrigued to read about children with behavioural issues, or if you yourself know any children on ‘the spectrum’. I use this vague term because Harmony shows a spectrum of issues and how parents can become totally frantic in trying to care for and nurture their children so they can achieve happiness and independence.

Quick Synopsis **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The book moves through time-frames and alternates between the perspectives of Alexandra, the mother, and Iris, her youngest daughter. So I’ll just give a brief overview in a chronological order because otherwise I’ll get so confused.

Alexandra and Josh Hammond have two daughters: Tilly is the oldest, and then Iris is a couple years younger. Early on, Alexandra and Josh realize that while intensely bright, Tilly’s behaviour is impossible to predict, and often inappropriate at best. Over the years Alexandra sees an unending amount of doctors, behavioural specialists, and support groups, becoming more frantic, exhausted, and quickly losing grip on her marriage. Eventually, she meets Scott Bean, who promises – and actually somewhat delivers – to help her family. When their children are 13 and 11, the Hammonds and a few other families decide to follow Scott to the woods in New Hampshire to start Camp Harmony, a place where families can become stronger, and parents with difficult children can have hope. It quickly turns cultish, and it is interesting that Iris, a child, is the first one to get suspicious and doubt Scott.

It quickly becomes clear that Scott is actually sort of crazy, agressive, and a pathological liar. We get to see a lot of really interesting family interactions, and it is a very believable (I thought) portrayal of what it must be like to live with a child that is highly intelligent and sensitive, but non-normative in terms of other behaviours and developmental milestones. Drama ensues, there is a big, intense climactic moment, and eventually Camp Harmony – as it existed with Scott Bean – disintegrates. The Hammonds and another family decide to stay in the woods and it seems, having learned from the mistakes they and Scott made, there is hope and improvement in their lives.

Overall brain gushings :

This book was pretty good! I particularly liked the sections in Iris’ point of view. I did feel like there were a few too many unanswered questions when it came to Scott Bean: I would’ve liked his back-story to be explored maybe a bit more, and also I found the climactic event to be a little ‘extra’ and not super believable. I thought that there had not been enough build up to justify what happened at the end of the novel, and it seemed at times sensationalized. I also found the epilogue of the book to be a bit trying, where the author (or narrator; hard to tell at this point) discusses having two children who are so different from each other, and seems to privilege the child that has behavioural issues. I have nothing against valuing all children, but the epilogue seemed to position Tilly and children like her, above Iris and children like her. This made me uncomfortable. No child is inherently better than another. That’s my two cents.

What does it mean?

This book means having children is hard, nearly impossible! I mean, that’s not the main takeaway I think, but it seemed to me like a massive part of the narrative. The book is obviously a meditation on the lengths parents will go to to protect and nurture their children, as well as how easy it is to look towards the wrong person for answers. Harmony is also preoccupied with what unconditional love looks like, and all the ways in which frustration and love can manifest within families. It also has a lot to say about how people manage anxiety and try to maintain control in lives that are actually uncontrollable because we all live with other people, and we all experience things differently.

Favourite passages :

[This passage is from Alexandra’s (the mother) point of view].
You have the feeling, lately, that your days are made of tempered glass, the kind they use in making car windows. Safety glass, as you learned in college on a drunken December evening when one of Josh’s friends held a cigarette lighter to the frosty back window of his Toyota Camry, is not actually shatterproof. It’s “safe” because when it does break, it crazes itself into a thousand small, dull pieces… You’ll end up with glass in your hair and on the seats; you’ll find it months later in the pockets of the coat you were wearing that evening. The pieces are harmless: blunt little jigsaw fragments, not a sharp edge in sight. But inarguably broken beyond repair.
Carolyn Parkhurst, pg 68

There are actually a few weird interludes in Tilly’s point of view, and they seem to talk about the Hammond family as something that has a museum, a monument built after it. It is very interesting and strange. They are maybe the most interesting thematically. Here is an excerpt of the first one:

There’s a sculpture that stands in an imaginary square, a memorial to those whose lives were changed by the events of July 14, 2012. This is where the Hammond Living History Society holds its meetings.
The society was formed in 2017, with the goal of uniting several different existing groups of Hammond history reenactors; the society aims to provide a common network for interested hobbyists, regardless of their level of commitment to authenticity of historical detail…. Concession stands sell items from a list of family member favorites published by the American Hammond Association: cucumber spears served with a cup of ranch dressing; Dora the Explorer Popsicles in any color except green.
Parkhurst, pg 77

If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

If you like reading about people who want to escape society to fix their problems, with some cultish results, read Arcadia by Lauren Groff. This is an excellent novel, loosely based on an actual group of people who formed a commune in the 60s. The rest is fiction, but very believable, and has a lot to say about society, trying to escape your problems, and the reason why almost anyone can fall under the spell of a charismatic person offering you hope and redemption.

Another excellent book on motherhood and its impact on a woman’s life is The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich. I read this book several years ago in a Women and Literature class, and it was enlightening, beautiful, sad, and also is peppered with awesome recipes so that’s a super cool bonus! I don’t have children, and don’t even think I want any, so I’m not the best person to recommend books in that vein, but I am confident that the recommendations I made are high quality, so I count that as a win.

Stay tuned for my next review, Decorum by Kaaren Christopherson, a novel about 1890’s society, drama, and intrigue. Get ready for balls and masquerades!

Wasted: A Memoir Review

This book gets 2 stars out of 5. Using anything other than stars to rate this book felt like a distasteful joke, too irreverent even for me. Plus, this picture manages to radiate warmth and comfort even though it is mostly dark, and I think this is what teenaged Marya Hornbacher would’ve needed most.
[Most of the photo is darkness. The left half of the photo has two star ornaments set up on poles, lit up with twinkly lights. Someones feet are silhouetted against the light as they recline on a couch.]

Serious trigger warning! This book is a memoir about living with eating disorders. Do not read if reading about disordered eating or body dysmorphia gives you anxiety or triggers bad eating and thinking habits in you. If you or someone you know needs help, contact the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) online or at (800) 931-2237.

Why did I pick this book up?

As mentioned in my Catcher in the Rye review, I picked a few books up at my partner’s parents’ home. I picked Wasted up because I had heard of it before, as a groundbreaking text when it came to representations of eating disorders. I also knew that it was more than a little controversial, as it includes a lot of gruesome details about eating disorders, and has raised concerns about talking about eating disorders without giving “tips and tricks” to those suffering. So this is why I picked Wasted up. I am also a bit of a masochist; although I have never exactly had an eating disorder, disordered eating, and in particular intense body dysmorphia, did play a large role in my young adult life, causing me intense anxiety and pain. I thought to myself, “Well, I have never actually been anorexic or bulimic, and am intellectually interested in reading about it. I am tough enough, I love myself enough, to be unaffected by this”. Boy was I wrong.

Would I recommend why/why not?

Honestly, I would not recommend this book. It is very interesting, and I do not want to take away from Marya Hornbacher’s narrative and experiences. In fact, I applaud her for being so frank and sharing her painful journey with people at a time when eating disorders were intensely taboo.

However, I think that the potential it has to cause distress and influence a person’s (particularly women’s) eating habits and view of themselves. I found myself falling back into patterns of dysmorphic thinking. Thinking about society’s need for women to disappear also led me to feel at times like I was taking too much space, being too present, too overt in my self. Not a great thing for a book to do tbh.

Also, although her narrative is interesting, Hornbacher spends a huge portion of the text theorizing about the cause of her eating disorder, and it gets quite repetitious. In addition, this book was written before Hornbacher was diagnosed as bipolar, and it is evident reading this now – more than twenty years after the text was published – that this is the large missing piece to Hornbacher’s attempts to explain her disorders.

So I would not recommend this book because of the intensity of the subject matter, as well as the way in which it is written: too much exposition and psychological investigation.

I guess I would recommend this book if you specialize in disordered eating in a professional setting, and were looking for some insight.

I gave this book the star rating that I did because of its bravery in addressing eating disorders, as well as its cultural role in launching a conversation about eating disorders and Western culture’s obsession with thinness.

Quick Synopsis **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

As a memoir, this book takes us from Hornbacher’s earliest memories as a child to her third hospitalization at the age of 19 for a variety of eating disorders and behavioural issues. I won’t get into too much detail to avoid falling into my own criticisms of the text.

Hornbacher has a somewhat unhappy childhood: trapped in the battlefield of her parents’ disastrous marriage, her anxiety and need to control her fear lead to her becoming bulimic at the insanely tender and young age of 9. Hornbacher then sinks further and further into a spiral of bulimia, anorexia, drugs, anonymous sex with older men, and just generally risky and self-destructive behaviour. It is jarring, and disturbing to read how easily Hornbacher was able to hide what she was going through. It was distressing to read how many times she was hospitalized, and all the ridiculous mistakes that were made when giving her care; the most troubling anecdote being the amount of times that doctors told her “Well you don’t even look anorexic”.

Hornbacher provides a lot of different explanations for her disordered eating, none of which I can go into too much detail, but involves Western culture’s obsession with women taking up as little space as possible, and the ways in which anxious and underdeveloped people (aka vulnerable children) can sublimate and displace their fear and anxiety. Eventually, at the age of 19, Hornbacher is hospitalized for a third time, near death and in denial.

The book was written when Hornbacher was 23, and goes on to say that although her disordered eating has become more manageable and healthy, her anxiety and body dysmorphia, as well as severe psychological pain and trauma, still remain. Hornbacher has since written another memoir about the years following publication of Wasted that deals with being diagnosed bipolar and her persistent addiction issues.

I chose to take a picture in front of my partner’s tenacious plant Gerbie who has managed to live through several winters, even though she doesn’t flower anymore; she’s still gorgeous. Thought this would be a good message to go with this book.
[A hand holds a book in front of a plant that has a few leaves and two flags in it: a gay pride flag, and a bisexual pride flag. The cover of the book is white, and there is a black and white photo of a young woman in jeans and a long sweater. WASTED sprawls at an angle on the bottom half of the book.]

Overall brain gushings :

I’m not even going to do more brain gushings. I’ve honestly said almost everything I wanted to say about this text.

What does it mean?

This book means that eating disorders and society sucks. It means the mind is a crazy thing that can facilitate all sorts of self-torture and that nothing and no one is worth making yourself smaller for. Taking up space is political. Accepting the body, and a simultaneous hatred of the body, is political.

Favourite passages :

Favourite passages in a book about eating disorders is a toughie. However, I’ve chosen some passages that I think are particularly insightful or thought-provoking.

[This book is] the story of one woman’s travels to a darker side of reality, and her decision to make her way back. On her own terms.
My terms amount to cultural heresy. I had to say: I will eat what I want and look as I please and laugh as loud as I like and use the wrong fork and lick my knife. I had to learn strange and delicious lessons, lessons too few women learn: to love the thump of my steps, the implication of weight and presence and taking of space, to love my body’s rebellious hungers, responses to touch, to understand myself as more than a brain attached to a bundle of bones. I have to ignore the cultural cacophony that singsongs all day long, Too much, too much, too much.
Marya Hornbacher, pg 5

At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be ‘about’ any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically. And it becomes a crusade… You are also doing it for yourself. It is a shortcut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny.
Hornbacher, pg 64

[About avoiding physical contact]: the night after Duane and I played cards, he caught me. He ran me down in the hall, blocked my door with his wee body, and said, staring at the floor, ‘I know you don’t usually give hugs but I was wondering maybe if I could give you a hug, you don’t have to hug back or anything, but I thought maybe since you’ve been here a while and you haven’t had any hugs at all in like weeks maybe you need a hug.’
I leaned down and stiffly hugged him. He held on to my neck so tightly, the contact was so startling, and his small self so warm, that I took a sharp breath inward and started to cry, and he said, patting my back, ‘Hugs are very good for you. I’ll give you another one tomorrow if you want.’
And I just held on for dear life… One might, in fact, over a few years, begin to avoid [physical contact] like the plague, begin to claim such absolute ownership over one’s own body that contact itself… begins to seem a threat.
Hornbacher, pg 201-202

I have not enjoyed writing this book… This project was not, as so many people have suggested, ‘therapeutic’ for me – I pay my therapist a lot of money for that… Trying to explain rather than excuse, to balance rather than blame…
You expect an ending. This is a book; it ought to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I cannot give you an end. I would very much like to. I would like to wrap up all loose ends in a bow and say, See? All better now. But the loose ends stare back at me in the mirror. The loose ends are my body, which neither forgives nor forgets: the random half-hearted kicking of my heart, wrinkled and shrunken as an apple… They are the constant trips to the mirror, the anxious fingers reading the body like Braille, as if an arrangement of bones might give words and sense to my life…
It does not hit you until later. The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive. Frostbite does not hurt until it starts to thaw.
Hornbacher, pg 275-276

Things that made me go “ugh” :

What made me go “ugh” was every time society or someone reinforced Hornbacher’s idea that thinness equates greatness and value, and every time someone found it necessary to praise a woman’s weight loss.

If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

I haven’t read it yet (because I am too cheap to buy any more books and also this book is very recent so get ready for a hot off the presses recommendation!) but I think that Lara William’s Supper Club would be a good antidote or response to Wasted. Supper Club is described as; ‘about a secret society of hungry young women who meet after dark and feast to reclaim their appetites – and their physical spaces – that posits the question: if you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into?’

Holy hell how could you not want to read that?! I may in fact have to break my no-more-book-buying-until-you-read-what-you-own pledge to get this book as there is nothing I want to read as much (other than Heart Berries which I want to read like crazy but didn’t want to read two memoirs back to back for review purposes) as this book right now.

I would also recommend (again things I haven’t read ha) Hornbacher’s Madness: A Bipolar Life which is the sequel to Wasted. Her critically acclaimed novel The Centre of Winter, about a family dealing with a suicide, would also be a good read!

Stay tuned for my next review Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst; a novel on raising non-normative children in the woods and the ties that bind us.

The Catcher in the Rye Review

This book gets 2 fancy drinks out of 5; which is infinitesimally fewer drinks than Holden Caulfield consumes in the novel. I think the drinking is making me generous when it comes to scoring.
[The same picture is repeated in a sort of diptych; a fancy stemmed glass, covered in condensation, sits on a table. There is a tantalizing slice of orange (or is it grapefruit, who knows?) in the glass and the word “Tanqueray” scrolls across the glass. Yummy.]

Why did I pick this book up?

Now, unlike most people, I did not read The Catcher in the Rye in school. So why, you may ask, did I choose to read it now? Much like a high school student, I did not have much of a choice.

A few weeks ago I was in Toronto visiting my partner’s family. I had neglected to bring a book with me for some reason. My partner suggested I raid her parents’ library for a nice poolside read. This proved to be more challenging than I had anticipated. Apparently when my partner was a teen, she only liked to read depressing things. So the library consisted of the following; it is 1945, and a woman accused of taking a Nazi as a lover is humiliated and punished, she marries, and conflict continues; a collection of narratives by Nigerian child-soldiers; a memoir on eating disorders; the best-selling, but heavy and intense, Book of Negroes; and this classic, the John Lennon murdering (my favourite joke to make about this book) Catcher in the Rye.

I figured that out of all these choices, The Catcher in the Rye would be the most enjoyable and pool-side appropriate. I think I may have been wrong.

Would I recommend why/why not?

Well, this book killed John Lennon – I will never stop saying this – so make of that what you will. I mean, John Lennon is himself a controversial figure, so maybe for you this is a bonus? So if it is, I recommend this book because it killed him! Otherwise, I don’t recommend this book because it killed him!

No but honestly, I don’t think I would recommend this book. If you have not caught on by this review (what, #5?), the score of the book is a direct reflection of whether or not I would recommend it. It barely gets a passing grade. And this is only due to the latter half of the book, where Holden Caulfield grows a bit less insufferable, and a bit more sympathetic. Heads up: this doesn’t last very long.

Quick Synopsis **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The Catcher in the Rye manages to be a book where almost nothing happens, and yet when you try and describe it, it sounds like a lot of stuff has gone down. The novel opens with Holden Caulfield being kicked out of yet another prep school. Because this is back when people communicated via letter, Holden knows that his parents are in the dark about his expulsion. He decides that he is too cowardly to tell them himself, so he decides to go bum around New York for a couple days until he is ready to go home.

What happens? He fights his roommate, he cries, he calls everyone a phony maybe a million times, tells us about his dead brother who is so smart, tells us he hates Hollywood, most writing, and most people. He lies a lot, compulsively it seems, about stuff that is unimportant and bizarre for someone who seems to think everyone else is a fake. Seriously: I’d be intrigued to see how many times he uses a variation of that term. One thing is for sure and it’s that Holden doesn’t seem to own a thesaurus or a metaphorical mirror for his personality.

He drinks, tries to get with various women in a bar, has bad luck, drinks some more. Eventually he hires a prostitute because he is depressed, but finds that too depressing (no shit Sherlock), so he pays her without having sex with her. Then her pimp shows up and they mug him for more money. Basically a bunch of other random stuff happens; he goes on a date with a girl he knows: it goes poorly; Holden has a weird but cute interaction with his little sister; he goes to see an old teacher in the middle of the night for somewhere to stay, the teacher gives him a stern talking to about his life and work ethic, and then proceeds to try and molest him (maybe. This is up for debate, as Holden wakes up to him caressing his hair, which is creepy but not necessarily sexual? Who knows); Holden gets really drunk and catches hypothermia wandering around Central Park wondering where the ducks have gone, and then the story ends, with him seemingly in some sort of convalescent home trying to recover from his illness (there was definitely some hints that it is not just a physical illness he is suffering from). Ya that’s about it. Also, he talks a lot about committing suicide or killing other people (mostly in jest maybe?) so I can see how it might make you a little weird and murderous.

I wanted to get a picture of this book in front of some rye, but I live in the city, so too bad. Here are some pretty flowers to make up for this book’s murderous infamy.
[A hand holds a book in front of some yellow flowers: a leaf caresses the upper right corner of the book. The bottom half of the cover is white, and the top half is reddish: the red creates an intense drawing of a horse, and the white half has a crude outline of a city skyline. “the CATCHER in the RYE” is scrawled across the top in yellow lettering.]

Overall brain gushings :

The book annoyed me. But then, interestingly, towards the end of the book, Holden seems less of an annoying young man, and more of a depressed lost soul worthy of sympathy. There was a moment where I thought, “Ok, Holden is annoying, but he’s just a depressed teenager who is having a hard time fitting in, and who hasn’t felt like that?”

Then Holden continues to be his annoying self, and instead of a meaningful and inspiring bildungsroman we get just a weird narrative about an immature guy who doesn’t change or grow at all in the course of the novel, or it seems in the year that follows it.

Holden also treats women like garbage, and gives me the vibes of what we might call an incel today. So that’s nice. I seriously am having a hard time understanding A) How this book came to be considered a classic and B) What kind of teachers think this is a good/interesting book for teens to read and study. I probably would not like literature as much if I’d had to read this in high school instead of 1984.

What does it mean?

Wikipedia tells me that this book is about teenage rebellion, superficiality, and themes of belonging and identity. I would agree, but I do not think that Catcher says anything particularly interesting or revolutionary about these things, and it also doesn’t say these things well or in a manner that I found enjoyable to read. I’m not holding my punches with this damn book. Wikipedia says that Catcher demonstrates Holden losing his innocence, and yet I find that we begin the narrative with a cynical and apathetic Holden, and I wonder at what point it is that he really lost his childlike wonder and likeability. Maybe when his younger brother dies – this is the only time where Holden’s emotional reactions seem to make any sense. And yet, it happens before the events of the novel, and does not seem as central as the banal and pedestrian events that get covered in the narrative.

To me, this book represents the ways in which white men are just allowed to write anything. Like, this book doesn’t have anything exciting happen in it. And it’s not written particularly well. And yet, it is popular and hailed a classic. Like Kafka and The Trial, I see this as an example of books that get too much credit. Besides, can anybody even name another of Salinger’s works? No! You can’t! This I firmly believe. Sure, maybe that’s because he wrote a lot of short stories and short story writers get screwed by the hierarchy of literature, but I can name a ton of famous short stories and Salinger’s is not one of them! I’m so over this book, honestly.

Favourite passages :

I did not have many favourite passages, but there were a few that either made me laugh, or that somehow humanized Holden and allowed me to make it to the end of the book, unlike The Trial.

The Navy guy and I told each other we were glad to’ve met each other. Which always kills me. I’m always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though… People are always ruining things for you.
Salinger, pg 114

He was a very nice kid, and I liked him, but I could never see eye to eye with him on a lot of stuff in the Bible, especially the Disciples. He kept telling me if I didn’t like the Disciples, then I didn’t like Jesus and all. He said that because Jesus picked the Disciples, you were supposed to like them. I said I knew He picked them, but that He picked them at random. I said He didn’t have time to go around analyzing everybody. I said I wasn’t blaming Jesus or anything.
Salinger, pg 130-131

“I think that one of these days,” he said, “you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there.”
Salinger, pg 245

Things that made me go “ugh” :

Most of the book made my face twist up all ugly-like. Holden is insufferable and I did not find Salinger to be a good writer. Also there is a lot of creepy misogynistic shit in the novel, and Holden is a huge hypocrite.

Also, there is a passage that addresses the title of the book. I thought maybe it would be exciting. Or insightful or something. This is where the title comes from:

“You know what I’d like to be? … I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy”.
Salinger, pg 224-225

What the hell is this?! So yeah. Not super rewarding in my opinion. I’m sure some people would analyze this passage for symbolism or whatever, arguing that Holden’s dream is about saving people when he can’t even save himself, or something like that. But I found this lame.

If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

If you want to read a good and satisfying bildungsroman read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson! Didn’t think that would come up when talking about The Catcher in the Rye eh? But seriously. Wikipedia tells me that Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (which I’ve read and is damn excellent and definitely a coming of age story) is a bildungsroman and you should read that because it is written by a Canadian women! Yass!

If you want to read a classic that is actually good and from a similar era, read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Yes, I know, controversial suggestion, but it happens to be one of my favourite books because of how beautifully written it is, and how ethically challenging the narrative and unreliable narration of Humbert Humbert are. You could also read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room which is a wonderful novel about jazz, homosexuality, and Paris in the post-WWII era.

If you want to read a book that made a splash in the 50s, read D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover which is super sexy, which Holden Caulfield decidedly is not.

Stay tuned for my next review, Wasted: A Memoir by Marya Hornbacher. *MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING* : This is a memoir about eating disorders. Because of the subject matter, the review will be notably short.

Alias Grace Review

This books gets four apples out of five. Apple peels to be specific, but I found no image of those, so four whole apples is what you get!
[A woman holds four red apples in her hands: the apples are the focus while the woman is blurry.]

Trigger warning: this is a book about murder that also discusses (although to my recollection it does not describe it in vivid detail) sexual assault. The review will touch upon these issues. Do not read the book or the review if these topics cause you distress.

Why did I pick this book up?

To tell the story of how I came to read this book, we need to go back in time, to January 2018. It was winter in Ottawa. It was bitter cold. I had run out of things to watch on Netflix, as one is bound to do in the dead of winter. In my recommendations popped up something tagged “Historical Drama” and “Canadian”. It was the miniseries Alias Grace, helmed by Sarah Polley (she is an awesome Canadian actor/director *watch Away From Her*).

Anyways, I watched this six-part show and discovered moments into the first episode that this was based on a Margaret Atwood novel. I love Margaret Atwood! Obviously it’s super trendy to love Atwood now because of the whole Handmaid’s Tale thing, but I’ve loved Atwood for a long time, particularly her more early work. Awesome, Alias Grace ticks those boxes for me.

I proceeded to thoroughly enjoy the show and then thought, maybe I should read the book. Yes, I realize this is an odd order to do things in, as people love to read the book and then complain about the screen adaptation. I saw that the book was something like 600 pages so I thought, “well this is not going to every be on my radar again when will I have to read so much?”

Cut to July 2018. My partner and I have decided to drive from Ottawa to Vancouver and back. In a car with no AC. And we had only been dating for five months. I thought this would be as good a time as any to try and read a 600 page book. Ha. Anyways, from the outset, I loved it. The show lifts most of its narration from the book, so I was pleasantly surprised. I got about 60 pages in. Then, tragedy struck. I forgot the book at my parents’ in BC, only noticing when I was in Kelowna and hundreds of kilometres away. Plus, a 600 page book is hella expensive to ship. So that was that.

Fast forward to August 2019. Ya that’s right, this is a wild ride you signed up for. I am back at my parents in BC, just coming off of reading There, There. I still have two weeks left of vacation. I decide to find the copy of Alias Grace I had left behind. Sidebar: the copy is my partner’s, maybe this was all manipulation to ensure she’d have to come back to BC? I swear it’s not, I’m just a forgetful idiot.

I think to myself: this book will last my whole vacation how awesome. I proceed to read the book in four days.

Would I recommend why/why not?

Well, as I just mentioned, I managed to read a 600 page book in four days, while also you know having a life that involved a decent amount of beach going. So the book is good. Also I gave it 4 apples. That’s like a meal worth of apples.

I would recommend this book if you like historical fiction. I would recommend it if you are Canadian (Susanna Moodie of Roughing It in the Bush fame makes a very interesting appearance), and if you like anything to do with crime. Also, read this book if you are interested in history and gender in particular, as Atwood is clearly preoccupied with women’s shifting roles and rights throughout history.

Although it is a super long book, it is eloquently written, and somehow the sentences just flow into one another that you don’t even notice you have made it through an entire page of text. It’s engaging and pulls you in.

Read this book if you like unreliable narrators, quilting, and reading about Spiritualism.

Quick Synopsis **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

Well, a lot of this is also a matter of history so I’ll try and give purely plot spoilers as opposed to talking about how Atwood presents things.

In 1843, two people – Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery – are murdered, allegedly by their servants James McDermott and Grace Marks. McDermott is hanged, and Grace is imprisoned in the Kingston penitentiary.

Alias Grace begins when Grace has already been imprisoned for 15 years. Dr. Simon Jordan (who is a figment of Atwood’s imagination) is tasked with evaluating Grace to secure her release by reason of insanity at the time of the murders. Most of the novel is told from Grace’s point of view, although at times we are privy to Dr. Jordan’s thoughts.

Grace takes Dr. Jordan through her life of poverty and servitude leading up to the murders. Grace is an exceptional storyteller and Dr. Jordan keeps hoping that eventually she will give him the grand reveal he craves, the truth beneath the sordid narrative told by tabloids and those hungry for true crime.

This is not my copy of *Alias Grace*. I left that in Vancouver, so here is a picture of a poster advertising Atwood’s latest book. Maybe one day I will review *The Testaments* and then I will have to use a photo of *Alias Grace*. Huh.
[This is a photo of a big poster on a street. The cover is black. On it there is a pop-art style drawing of a handmaid, only she is in green, not red. The Testaments is written in all caps white letters across the handmaids chest.]

Overall brain gushings :

The more the story progresses, the more we become unsure of anything Grace has been saying, and the more personally invested – and therefore untrustworthy and unreliable – Dr. Jordan becomes. Eventually, Grace recounts her version of the murders. The whole slow-burning lead up is incredible to read, a mastery of unreliable narration, manipulation, and a meditation on the nature of truth, memory, and reputation.

Atwood, like Grace, is clearly concerned with how little control women have over their reputations. Over and over, women are seen as clinging to their precarious reputations as their primary identity, and yet it is one dictated and interpreted by men. There are also a lot of interesting historical details, from the political history of Canada, to the rampant racism and classicism that followed people across the ocean to the New World.

The prose is beautifully written; the novel opens with Grace discussing the word murderess and the beauty and horror attached to its gender in comparison to the word “murderer”:

Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word – musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.
Atwood, pg 4

What does it mean?

I mean, I’ve talked a bit already about what this book means. Atwood cares about the stories we tell, how we tell them, and why. But she also shows us that just as important are the stories we listen to, the stories we believe, and the stories that are told about us. The novel also has a lot to say about class divides, and how law and justice are not the same for rich and poor.

Alias Grace is also a study into the evolution of science and scientific thinking, and demonstrates how little we still understand of the mind and the self. Atwood wonders how reliable memories are, and since memories are a huge part of one’s identity, how reliable and fixed can this identity really be?

The novel is preoccupied with how gender and class affect sexuality and one’s ability to express it, and uses historical figures and writers to show how reputation and reality do not always match up. The portrayal of Susanna Moodie highlights this; in the novel she is a woman who occupies liminal spaces of respectability and reliability, veering from esteemed cultural figure to problematic writer and woman.

Favourite passages :

I’m not going to interpret or comment on any of these passages, because I think they illustrate what I’ve been talking about in a variety of ways, while also emphasizing Atwood’s deft and evocative prose.

While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me – drawing on my skin – not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.
Margaret Atwood, pg 82

[Talking about quilts]; “on mine I would make the border different. Hers is a Wild Goose Chase border, but mine would be an intertwined border, one light colour, one dark, the vine border they call it, vines twisted together like the vines on the mirror in the parlour. It would be a great deal of work and would take a long time, but if it were mine and just for me to have, I would be willing to do it.”
Atwood, 117

[Talking about quilts looking like flags]; “And since that time I have thought, why is it that women have chosen to sew such flags, and then to lay them on the tops of beds? For they make the bed the most noticeable thing in a room. And then I have thought, it’s for a warning. Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night’s sleep. But it isn’t so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. It is where we are born, and that is our first peril in life; and it is where the women give birth, which is often their last. And it is where the act takes place between men and women that I will not mention to you, sir, but I suppose you know what is is; and some call it love, and other despair, or else merely an indignity which they must suffer through. And finally beds are what we sleep in, and where we dream, and often where we die.”
Atwood, 192

Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can’t stop it from breaking in the same way it always does and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it’s the day itself.
Atwood, 355

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all , but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
Atwood, 359

Things that made me go “ugh” :

Some of the parts in Dr. Jordan’s POV made me feel a little squeamish. There are some passages where it is unclear whether the sexual encounters happening are consensual and this made me uncomfortable. Of course, it could be that that was Atwood’s point, to show how people misinterpret things, how much of what people believe is a simple projection of what they want to interpret. I only had a hard time because part of me wanted to be able to label Dr. Jordan as a rapist or not, so I could ascertain how my response to him as a character should be. Again, not being able to settle a side was difficult, and yet thematic.

It also made me frustrated to finish the book feeling like I had no clearer idea what happened, even though it seems that this should be the point! The book tells you over and over again that there are many conflicting narratives on record about the murders, and that memories are fallible by design. Also, some of the ending resolution seemed a little odd to me, but I suspect that Atwood enjoyed the thematic resonance that such events had (being purposefully vague so you will go read this book).

If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

If you liked this, read any of Atwood’s early work. Her early work in particular focuses on unreliable narrators and issues of gender, while her later work skews in a more sci-fi direction. In particular, read her poetry – The Circle Game, or The Journals of Susanna Moodie – or her book The Penelopiad. This is also a retelling of a well-known tale (The Odyssey in fact), from a woman’s point of view, with a particular concern for double standards between genders. I could be super hip and recommend The Handmaid’s Tale, so that you can then read The Testaments and tell me if it’s worth reading.

Otherwise, if you liked the Spiritualists and unreliable narrators, read Affinity by Sarah Waters. I cannot recommend that book enough. It’s spooky, it’s sensual, it’s also great historical fiction!

Oh, also watch the show Alias Grace because this is one of the only times I say the show is as good as the text!

Stay tuned for my next review, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger. Read as I take on another classic! Will I like it? Will I hate it? Will I finish it?

There, There Review

This book gets 4 and a half heart squeezes out of 5. I picked this photo for a variety of reasons; A) I own these sunglasses and they are so fun; B) A photo of a heart being squeezed would be so freaking creepy; and C) I don’t know how to do a half picture so just imagine a heart-shaped monocle next to these photos.
[There are two identical photos lined up next to each other: in them, a hand with cute pink nail polish holds a pair of heart-shaped blue-lensed sunglasses in front of an ocean shore.]

Why did I pick this book up?

I picked There, There by Tommy Orange up because my girlfriend needed a book at the airport; so technically she picked it up, based on the fact that it A) looked good, and B) looked like something I’d like (because I like good books of course). Nothing like getting a book everyone in a household will read and enjoy. Anyways, she started reading it while we were on vacation in BC, and while I was crying reading The Trial, she suggested I read There, There one day at the beach. She was probably tired of hearing me cry and whine about Kafka. So I high-jacked her book. But as mentioned, she gave me the high-jacking idea in the first place. Eventually I finished the book way before her and moved on. I even mailed the book to her so she could finish it when she got to Ottawa (and so I could write this blog post) before you start accusing me of ruining her reading experience. Anyways, she was right that this book would interest me because of all the boxes it ticks for me: it is a contemporary novel by an indigenous writer about ‘urban indians’, told from a variety of perspectives, in a tightly interwoven narrative.

Would I recommend why/why not?

Hell yeah I would recommend this book! Do you not understand what a 4.5 out of 5 rating means?!

Anyways, I would recommend this book if you like indigenous literature, if you like books that make you think, laugh, and maybe even cry. That’s a lot of things for a book to do!

You should also read this book if you like learning about powwows and Oakland. There is also a character who has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the chapters in his point of view are excellently and heart-wrenchingly good.

I guess don’t read this book if you don’t like to be confronted with what it means to live in a settler colonial nation (but honestly you’re probably the person who needs to read this book most). Or don’t read this book if you only like Heart of Darkness style musings on colonialism… But again, probably the kind of person who should read this book most…

Quick Synopsis **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

Anyways, There, There tells the story of twelve people who are all for some reason or another trying to get to the Oakland powwow. The narrative shifts between these people’s point of view, and jumps around temporally. We can go from present-day Oakland to the 1970s occupation of Alcatraz. Orange presents his ‘cast of characters’ as a cast list, like in a play, and it is through these jumps in narrative and perspective that we the readers get to see the rich past and history of each person in the text. Orange deftly weaves together twelve distinct narratives, forcing readers to flip back into the book again, to find where that name comes from, where this detail resurfaces, how all the characters and their collective yet distinctive experiences of racism and identity coalesce and collide. Without saying too much, expect a book where all the pieces fit together like a beautiful mosaic, but also the pieces make you cry, so like a mosaic where the pieces come alive and try and stab you.

The climax of the narrative occurs when all twelve perspectives and experiences collide at the Oakland powwow, by which time readers have fully understood the various familial connections between characters, as well as their various motivations.

We see that all the characters have different reasons for attending the powwow – some want to engage in crime, to reap whatever financial benefit can be had from a large gathering of people, some want to reconnect to their cultural identity while some are exploring it for the first time. However, even if they do not know it explicitly, they are also all at the powwow to articulate some form of grief. There, There uses the event of the powwow to explore how colonialism, alcoholism, urban migration, racism, internalized self-loathing, and cultural genocide have affected all indigenous peoples and how this legacy of trauma lives in the present.

Yet, There, There is not just sad. It also celebrates contemporary indigenous peoples and their resilience; the powwows are shown to have an abundance of beautiful dancing and regalia, an emphasis on craft and storytelling. There, There engages with the myth of the Vanishing Indian and the Noble Savage, and we see that indigenous people are exactly that: people with a rich history that preceded colonial intervention. While colonialism has inextricably woven itself into the narrative of indigenous people, There, There shows us that this is not the whole story, and that to label identities as ‘authentic’ wholly misses the point.

Nothing says well-loved like being battered from travelling cross-Canada twice and being eaten by a cat.
[A hand holds an orange book in front of a plush pink rug and a feisty grey and white cat that is biting the corner of the book. There are two feather on the orange cover, and There There is written in yellow.]

Overall brain gushings :

Holy shit did I love this book. It took me almost an hour to read the “Prologue” (which is basically a short essay written by Orange about colonial history and indigenous identity politics) because I kept having to pause to let the magnitude and weight of the words sink in. I think I reread each paragraph at least three times before moving on, and that was when I knew that I was in for a treat of a book!

The amount of times that I had to put the book down and take a deep breath because I felt like my heart was being squeezed by hard truths were too often to count. And yet, as I said before, There, There is not just sad, and sometimes those moments of pause were not to process something heavy, but instead to revel in the joy and beauty embedded in the text.

I also always like a narrative where all the stories get braided together: sure in real life it would be unrealistic for all your characters to be somehow connected, but this isn’t real life, it’s a book, and you should use that suspension of disbelief to your advantage! Also the amount of times that life has proved to me just how small the world really is makes me say that these connections aren’t even far-fetched!

What does it mean?

There, There means a lot of things. This is the kind of book that I would have loved to write a paper on in university. The wealth of themes to be discussed, as well as the craftsmanship of the writing and storytelling make it a joy to unpack and analyze. All of the characters – particularly the older ones – deal with immense feelings of guilt. There is guilt for the past, for who they are in the present, and from young characters such as Orville and Dene, there is a feeling of guilt when it comes to identity and self-expression. Orville and Dene both feel guilty that they don’t really know how to articulate their indigeneity, and when they do articulate it, they feel guilty that they are doing it wrong, or in secret.

There, There highlights the pervasive ways in which colonialism affects indigenous people’s lives and perceptions of themselves. It also celebrates identity struggles, and demonstrates that self-exploration is made complicated when wrapped with the history of colonialism and cultural genocide. Instead of focusing only on the intergenerational effects of trauma, Orange also focuses on the ways in which connections can catch people by surprise. The novel wants us to understand the power of stories to unify, to conquer, to divide, and to heal.

The tragic ending makes it hard to feel happy, and yet it is the image of birds singing everywhere that closes the novel, demonstrating that even in the darkest night there is light.

Tony needs to be light now. Let the wind sing through the holes in him, listen to the birds singing. Tony isn’t going anywhere. And somewhere in there, inside him, where he is, where he’ll always be, even now it is morning, and the birds, the birds are singing.
Orange, pg. 290

Favourite passages :

I could probably find a passage on nearly every page that I loved, but here are some real standouts.

We stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can’t leave a war once you’ve been, you can only keep it at bay – which is easier when you can see and hear it near you, that fast metal, that constant firing around you, cars up and down the streets and freeways like bullets. The quiet of the reservation, the side-of-the-highway towns, rural communities, that kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced.
Tommy Orange, pg 9

Orange has a lot of interesting stuff to say about indigenous people and the city and the ways in which people deal with intergenerational trauma.

The Indian head in the jar, the Indian head on a spike were like flags flown, to be seen, cast broadly. Just like the Indian Head test pattern was broadcast to sleeping Americans as we set sail from our living rooms, over the ocean blue-green glowing airwaves, to the shores, the screens of the New World.
Orange, pg 5-6

I find it super neat that Orange manages to weave a story of colonialism into one of technology, charting the ways in which technological advances in society have changed the world while leaving it wholly unaltered. See, colonialism and racism.

“You know what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland?… There is no there there,” he says in a kind of whisper… Dene wants to tell his he’d looked up the quote in its original context, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, and found that she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore… The quote is important to Dene. This there there… for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.”
Orange, pg 38-39

Obviously I had to include the eponymous passage, which has a lot to say not only about gentrification, but about time and memory, and belonging. Sometimes, the way Stein describes going home is exactly how I feel going back to my hometown after a long time away.

The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would call an attempted murder victim resilient?
Orange, pg 137

Things that made me go “ugh” :

Really the only thing in this book that made me go “ugh” was that it ended! I could keep reading Orange’s prose forever, and also when it ended found myself saying “NOOOOO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?!” Also the other thing that made me sad is that this is Orange’s debut novel, which means I have to wait who knows how long to read more of his work.

Also colonialism. Colonialism makes me go “ugh”.

If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

The prologue in particular made me think of Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water, which is a book that plays with Western tropes and engages in a lot of the same themes as Orange; however it is a magic-realist novel so expect some interesting maybe ghosts, and things from books literally coming to life. I also thought of King’s Truth and Bright Water if you want a book that will probably make you cry as much as it makes you laugh.

I also thought of Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is probably one of the first books by an indigenous writer that I read as a teenager, and I recall it as being excellent, funny, and thought-provoking.

If you want to read a narrative that has a lot of braiding thematic and plot-wise, I can’t recommend Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven enough. This book is always in my Top 10 Books list, is a ‘Canadian’ text (definitely more than American, so stop trying to claim her U.S.), and is also a post-apocalyptic novel! So come on, what are you waiting for?! Read a good book! Don’t waste your time reading dead white men when so much good stuff is coming out!

Stay tuned for my next review, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (cue Law and Order theme song, murdermurdermurder).

The Trial Review

This book gets 1 out of 5 culturally significant rebels. Also this photo is terrifying.
[A Guy Fawkes Mask is hidden in some foliage. It smiles at you like it knows something you don’t. It gives you the creeps.]

This book gets 1 Archibald Tuttle out of 5. (Skip to end for Brazil reference).

Yes, I know, I’m mixing my metaphors; I’ve got Brazil, I’ve got V for Vendetta, and I even considered somehow referencing 1984 right in my opening, but it just wasn’t happening. Now, without further ado, let’s talk about Kafka.

Why did I pick this book up?

Nearly seven years ago (I know this because it somehow popped into my Facebook memories recently) I went on a used-book buying spree. As a 19 year old, I decided that my collection would be incomplete if it didn’t include any Franz Kafka. After all, he has a whole word to himself, and I knew “Metamorphosis” was hailed as a great classic. Luckily for me, the bookstore had both a collection of his short works, and The Trial.

These books have sat on my shelf, daring me to open them ever since. I even once brought the short works on holiday, and never made it to them. So, on my latest holiday, I decided I would read The Trial. I figured it would be as good a time as any to read about bureaucracy, especially since I was in the process of applying for government jobs. You can never have too much bureaucracy, right? Intrepid reader that I was, I carried this book to the beach all summer. I managed to make it 167 pages in. That is approximately ⅔ of the way in. I thought I could push through and finish it, but it turns out the real trial is the act of reading this goddamn book.

Would I recommend why/why not?

As you can perhaps tell by the fact that I didn’t finish this book, I personally would not recommend it. I would not recommend it because reading it seems to be as tedious an experience as being the protagonist of this book. Of course, the book is great at demonstrating the folly and sheer annoyance of bureaucracy, but there are so many better ways to satirize judicial and administrative insanity.

The foreword of my copy of The Trial had an introduction that contextualized Kafka’s writing. This is where I learned that during his life, Kafka did not publish the majority of his work. By the time of his death, he only had a few stories (Metamorphosis being one of them) published, and had apparently instructed his friend Max to destroy all his unpublished works. This guy Max, an idiot in my opinion, obviously decided that even though Kafka wasn’t a good writer he was a white man with ideas, and those ideas had to see the light of day. Max is the reason that most of Kafka’s work is published, and all I can say is that Max should’ve listened to Kafka. But I suppose a white man must always fail up, and heaven forbid he not be hailed as a genius.

This is not my copy of *The Trial* as my copy got left on the Sunshine Coast. This copy looks more interesting than mine.
[A thumb fake-holds a book; really it is just held in front of an image on a computer screen. It is a copy of *The Trial*. The cover is orange and covered with cartoon eyes looking at you. Above the book, my computer webcam also peers at you.]

Quick Synopsis **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The Trial tells the story of Mr K (K, like KAFKA, GET IT?! Wowie wow), who one morning is informed that he is under arrest, and that a trial will be underway shortly. Now, I made it to page 167 and had yet to figure out why K was under arrest/or what he stood accused of. Instead, K is given the run around, forced to talk to all sorts of low-level judges and administrators, all of which do not know any details about his case, yet always have a very logical explanation as to why no one has the authority to clarify the matter.

Apparently (I garnered this yet again from the dustjacket and introduction to the book) Mr. K is eventually told that he must prove his own existence. Unfortunately, I did not make it to this point, and from the dustjacket expected this existential conundrum to be more central to the story and to the intellectual exercises that the bureaucratic Catch-22s make your brain do.

Overall brain gushings :

This book was bad. Just a great wall of text – often a character would speak for pages on end – that had a tendency to repeat the same argument and thought experiment. It was tedious. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that all Kafka is translated, and that maybe it would sound less tedious in German? I feel doubtful. Also the main character has a super weird habit of grabbing and kissing random women, so there’s also that going on. Who knew that Kafka would be so good at predicting President Trump and his near-totalitarian regime?

What does it mean?

Well, I think The Trial is a meditation on state control and state surveillance. An interesting precursor to Fascism and the surveillance state of today, The Trial is noteworthy for its ability to predict the increase in collection of data (or knowledge in this case) and the difficulty that the everyday citizen has navigating a technological and bureaucratic society.

However, in the introduction to the text, I learned that Kafka was briefly engaged to a woman. Apparently, Kafka managed to cast doubts as to her desire for marriage, and made himself look like an unsuitable partner (he said he was boring and that life with him would be too sad. Based on his writing, I agree. Also, if a man tells you he isn’t good enough for you, can you blame the woman for believing it?). This led to an intervention of sorts, where the woman’s family ‘interrogated’ and ‘humiliated’ him. The engagement was broken off, and Kafka apparently set to writing The Trial right away. This came as no surprise to me, as the book seems very concerned with reputation, and the idea of a verbal altercation, or a battle of words. Kafka seems concerned with what makes a person’s reputation, and how to change someone’s mind once it is made up. All in all, The Trial seems like a bitter meditation on a failed love story, an attempt to justify his own role in the relationship’s end. Kafka sees himself as persecuted and powerless to stop the interrogation. Also, it definitely seemed like the rantings of a spurned lover who has decided all women are manipulative and dishonest.

*MAJOR SPOILER*

Lest you think that by not finishing the book I have robbed myself from truly experiencing and understanding The Trial, well guess what?! I committed the cardinal sin of not only not finishing a book – I also skipped to the end and read the last page, praying that maybe it would have a great and insightful ending that would convince me to keep reading. BUT NO!

The book ends with K being stabbed/executed quote ‘like a dog’. Nice. I basically scoffed when I read this. However, Wikipedia lets me know that apparently Kafka thought this book was funny. So either everyone is reading The Trial wrong, or Kafka had a fucked up sense of humour. Or actually maybe both?

Favourite passages :

Hard to pick a favourite passage in a book that made me want to stab my eyes out, but there were a couple standouts from the muck. Also full disclosure: since I no longer have my copy of The Trial on my person, I totally raided GoodReads for whatever those readers have thought are the most memorable passages. Ya. That’s bad. But so is this book.

“I had to arrange things as well as I could. That’s obviously a very bad place for the bed, in front of the door. For instance when the judge I’m painting at present comes he always comes through the door by the bed, and I’ve even given him a key to this door so that he can wait for me here in the studio when I’m not home. Although nowadays he usually comes early in the morning when I’m still asleep. And of course, it always wakes me up when I hear the door opened beside the bed, however fast asleep I am. If you could hear the way I curse him as he climbs over my bed in the morning you’d lose all respect for judges. I suppose I could take the key away from him but that’d only make things worse. It only takes a tiny effort to break any of the doors here off their hinges.”
Franz Kafka, The Trial

“They’re talking about things of which they don’t have the slightest understanding, anyway. It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.”
Kafka, The Trial

“it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.’ ‘A melancholy conclusion,’ said K. ‘It turns lying into a universal principle.”
Kafka, The Trial.

So yeah. That is basically it. Only a few noteworthy quotes, as most of the text is full of variations of the above contradictions which while at first seem interesting and insightful, quickly turn tedious and boring.

Things that made me go “ugh” :

Everything. Every thing in this book made me want to cry. So many times I wanted to throw this book into the garbage (which is a big deal because I love books almost as much as food). Eventually my partner recommended I stop torturing myself, and that was the moment when my brain stopped turning to mush, and when every cell in my body stopped going “ugh Kafka sucks”.

If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

No matter what you think of The Trial, if you want to see this concept done properly, I can’t suggest watching Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil enough. A disturbing and funny satire, Brazil does all the things that The Trial fails at: it is engaging, it accurately portrays the feeling of entrapment and heaviness tied to bureaucracy and surveillance, and it is a serious mind-fuck. So if you liked The Trial, you will love Brazil, and if you hated The Trial you will love Brazil! So do it, treat yourself to a weird movie that makes the novel version pale in comparison, something I don’t say often about literature/film pairings!

Now, as for books that I thought of when reading The Trial, a few came to mind; I would say read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller for a great satire, 1984 for ruminations on the surveillance state, and The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall for a good read on what it means to be accused, and what the judicial system does to victims, families, and the accused.

Also, don’t let my review dissuade you from reading this book! Maybe you will enjoy it! Kafka apparently loved Russian lit and I hate it, so if you like that stuff Kafka is for you! Also, if you read the Wikipedia page for it, it does give some other possible insights into the text (although it also says that critics often try to fit the text into insightful frameworks more than the text itself indicates, so HAH) so maybe you will get more out of it than I did!

Stay tuned for my next review, There, There by Tommy Orange.

Sexing The Cherry Review

This book gets 4 out of 5 cherries

One day, I decided I needed to start a book blog. This combines a love of reading and writing with the practical need to create some sort of portfolio to prove that I can indeed strings words together not only into sentences, but thoughtful ones at that. The whole “we won’t give you a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job” Catch-22. So, finally, here I am, typing out some musings on Jeannette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry.

It must be noted that although it is easy to read while on vacation somewhere with no internet, it is much harder to blog about it. I’m already 3 blog posts behind and hoping that my pace will improve. Ugh.

There should be fruits in this photo.
[ A hand holds a copy of Sexing the Cherry: it appears to be a collage of reddish/greens that forms a textured and gritty image of a woman. Behind the book is a fantastical treehouse on a cliff: my childhood home! ]

Sexing the Cherry has been sitting on my shelf for at least seven years — ever since I devoured her debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I have somehow managed to also read and reread her novel Written on the Body, while never cracking the pages of Sexing the Cherry.

Now, if I had, I would have seen that the book seems to be divided by small drawings; pineapples, bananas, and dancing women. This is similar to what is done in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and as someone who read Oranges I would have been super intrigued. In Oranges, fruit, and the literal meaning of the title, are meant to represent non-normative sexualities, particularly that of the author/protagonist. As soon as I opened Sexing the Cherry to see a pineapple etched at the top of the page I was curious and promptly discovered the other drawings dividing the sections in the book. What did these symbols mean in this book? There are many potential answers, some of which I will explore later on, post-spoiler warning. Technically the symbols are not a spoiler because if you look at almost any page of the book, you will see one. So that’s my rationale for ‘spoiling’ that. Plus, anything to reel you into some Jeanette Winterson!

Why did I pick this book up?

I picked this book up after it had sat on my shelf for many many years. Jeanette Winterson’s books Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Written on the Body are some of my favourite books, and I decided this was as good a time as any to delve back into some lesbian lit! I knew based on the reviews included at the front of my copy that although set in the 17th century “to suggest that the novel is set in any one period or place would give a false impression, for Winterson wants to question customary thinking about what time is” (London Review of Books).

Based on Oranges I knew that Winterson liked to play with the genre of historical fiction and I knew that it would be highly referential: of politics, history, religion, and odds are – knowing Winterson – fairy tales.

Would I recommend: why/why not ?

I would recommend this book if you like weird lesbian magical realist historical fiction, or even just one of those adjectives. Odds are you have not read much like it! If you like post-modern stuff, this is the book for you! If you like books that will philosophize on time, reality, love, and identity politics, then this book will do all those things for you! As is standard with Winterson, there is a lot of beautifully written prose that is worth the read, and many other things This is definitely not the book for you if you only want linear, realistic narratives. If you don’t like any of the things I’ve mentioned before, then this book may not be for you, but it is also not very long so I would say “why not give it a shot?”

Quick synopsis:

Cherry is a story that alternates between two primary narrators: Jordan (represented by a pineapple) and his adoptive mother, Dog-Woman (represented by a banana). From the outset, we are told by Dog-Woman that Jordan will abandon her. Through Jordan and Dog-Woman we are taken through a fantastical retelling of the events leading up to and following the execution of Charles I, as well as Jordan’s adventures sailing the world, looking for a dancing princess. What follows is a disjointed narrative that touches on colonialism and the European drive to perpetuate empire, Cromwell and Puritanism, the imprisonment – metaphorical and literal – of women, and the idea of love as destruction and essential.

Overall brain gushings:

From the moment you open Cherry you are confronted with an epigraph that unsettles any perception of reality:

“The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present, and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?
Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?
Jeanette Winterson, pg. 8.

From the get go, Winterson shows you she means business: don’t expect a book that won’t make you think, a fun summer read, or a fun story with a tight plot. No, this book is going to make you take your time with it parsing out all the historical and literary – particularly religious – references that fill its pages. Winterson uses the English Civil War and the regicide of Charles I to explore a variety of themes. At times she reflects on the hypocrisy of Christianity only to then use this historical context to ponder questions of authenticity and identity. The character of Dog-Woman is full of idiosyncrasies, which seem to serve the purpose of revealing our own idiosyncrasies, particularly in regard to religion and spiritual beliefs.

What does it mean?

So many papers could be written on all the things this book could mean, and to touch on any more than I have would be to spoil it. Of course, there is also the fact that as a post-modern text, it can be argued that to expect meaning and impose one’s view of the text would be to betray the narrative’s intent. So there. Read the book and try and figure out what it means to you.

Favourite passages:

Winterson is one of those writers that manages to turn everything into poetry, and poetry into hardcore philosophy. This means that on nearly every page I could have found something that made my heart sigh and go “wow that must be my favourite passages”. But I’ll list a couple here, just to give you a taste and get you hooked on the Winterson drug.

“When Jordan was a boy he made paper boats and floated them on the river. From this he learned how the wind affects a sail, but he never learned how love affects the heart.”
Winterson, pg 19.

“When I was a child my father swung me up on to his knees to tell a story and I broke both his legs. He never touched me again… but my mother, who lived only a while and was so light that she dared not go out in a wind, could swing me on her back and carry me for miles. There was talk of witchcraft but what is stronger than love?”
Winterson, pg 25.

Here Winterson blends magical realism with an interesting comment on women and witchcraft, the power of love, and the gendered nature of sacrificial love.

“The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I’m not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me… I have met a great many pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. Perhaps I’m missing the point – perhaps whilst looking for someone else you might come across yourself unexpectedly, in a garden somewhere or on a mountain watching the rain.”
Winterson, pg 102.

Winterson links exploration of the Earth and the nature of time to explore knowledge of self, and the ways in which our relationships and perceptions affect our identity.

Things that made me go “ugh”:

There were actually only a few things I didn’t like about this book, which when you are actively taking notes on a text, must be a pretty good sign! In fact, most of my distaste centred around the graphic and obscene sex scenes between members of the clergy. Although I could understand the function of those scenes, the crudeness really stood out next to the rest of Winterson’s eloquent and delicate prose. Again, this juxtaposition could very well have been intentional, and was of course successful, but in a text where the pleasure of reading the words and pondering the implications of them, this interruption seemed to have been given too much attention.

There were also times where the ‘postmoderness’ of the text was a little overbearing and at the expense of unity and clarity in the text. This seems like an obvious complaint about a post-modern text, and yet when compared with Oranges, Cherry lacked a balance between genre exploration and narrative storytelling. I found it harder to parse out what I thought Winterson might want me to get out of the text.

Sometimes I would be reading and go “WTF?” is happening/what does this mean?! I would get taken out of experiencing the text by trying to analyse it only to get frustrated when my brain would start feeling mushy.

Get on these books next:

If you liked Cherry, and made it this far, you should definitely consider reading any other Jeanette Winterson, in particular Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit! Some other texts that came to my mind when I was reading Sexing the Cherry were Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the graphic novel Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro. Carter’s is a collection of feminist retellings of classic fairytales. It is very sensual, erotic, and dark. Bitch Planet is a satire of exploitation genres, and includes a wealth of diverse feminist and queer representations.