Olivia Zheng

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Review: Smaller and Smaller Circles

August 8, 2015 Reviews

Book by F.H. BATACAN
Reviewed by KRISTABELLE MUNSON

Smaller and Small Circles

The last time I visited Manila, in April 2013, I tripped over a body in the street. It was 1 a.m. It was a boy sleeping on a piece of cardboard. He rubbed his eyes, picked up the cardboard, and walked into the night. Reading Smaller and Smaller Circles by F.H. Batacan took me into the hot, dark nights of Manila during the rainy season. It’s 1997, a decade after the People Power Revolution that toppled the Marcos regime. And still, boys turn up dead every month in the communities around the massive Payatas garbage dump near Quezon City. The bodies all show signs of ritualistic killings, in which the faces of the boys have been obliterated by the killer. But Filipino culture denies the existence of serial killers. Filipinos are too warm and friendly for such monsters to emerge in their midst. And with the generations living together, no one is ever alone.

Moussa v. Meursault: Algerian Grudge Match Over “The Stranger”

August 1, 2015 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

mersault book

The gruesome Algerian War ended in 1962 with France walking away empty-handed from a territory that it had held for 130 years and considered not just a colony but an integral part of itself. The refusal of the pieds-noirs, the French colonists in Algeria, to concede meaningful rights to Arab citizens had made a peaceful independence impossible. The war, which featured ideological and tactical use of terrorism and torture on both sides, now a hallmark of intractable conflicts between the West and the Islamic world, brought down multiple French governments and the Fourth Republic before Charles de Gaulle accepted the inevitable. It also brought a flood of immigrants, harkis, Algerians who had fought on the French side; and many more who hadn’t, as France entered les trente glorieuses, its 30-year period of post-war prosperity. During this same period, Algeria’s economy, weighed down by state dominance, corruption, and dependence on hydrocarbons, failed to produce opportunity for its youthful, fast-growing population. Some five million people of Algerian descent live in France today, many in the crime-ridden housing projects of French suburbs, where integration is almost impossible.

Review: Go Set a Watchman

July 25, 2015 Reviews

Book by HARPER LEE
Reviewed by REBECCA CHACE

Go Set a Watchman

Isn’t it wonderful that so many people are upset about Go Set A Watchman? I am not being sarcastic. Think about it: one of the most talked about events in the summer of 2015 is the publication of a book. Harper Lee’s old friend, Truman Capote (the model for Dill in To Kill A Mockingbird), would probably have had something snarky to say about it. The author herself remains silent, as she largely has since her first book—the only one until now—was published in 1960.

Go Set A Watchman is not a great book. We see Harper Lee, who was in her early 30s when she wrote it, before she fully found her voice and getting in her own way more times than not as she struggled to write her first novel. I agree with her original editor at Lippincott (now HarperCollins) who judged that this one wasn’t ready, but saw enough potential in Lee’s writing to think that it could form the scaffolding for a stronger book. But in some ways Go Set a Watchman is the more ambitious novel. Lee reached far in this first attempt to come to terms with her childhood in racist, segregated Alabama of the 1950s.

The Bodhisattva of Route 128

July 24, 2015 Essays

By SUE REPKO

bridge

Once upon a time I fell in love with Jack Kerouac, the words of Jack, the ghost of Jack, the idea of Jack. It started with On the Road, and then it wasn’t long before I set out to read everything he’d ever written, nearly fifty years after he’d written it. I was married, middle-aged with kids, living in the suburbs. My 20s had been spent working, getting married, going to grad school, and having my first child. My 30s were spent raising two children and piecing together part-time work as a writer, urban planner, and volunteer. Then, one month before my 40th birthday, further infatuated with Jack’s Visions of Cody and The Dharma Bums, I latched onto the idea that I myself had never driven across the country before, had never experienced the typically American rite of passage known as “the road trip.” This was something Ineeded to do. Now. Alone. At least that’s the story I told myself and my family and friends as I planned and made my escape.

Closed for Good

July 18, 2015 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

House

Lobster in the Rough is over. On a given summer day we can no longer pull off the highway on the Maine side of the border into the parking lot alongside dusty motorcycles, cars, and trucks, and take a seat at the bar or a table beside the bocce courts, inhale lobster rolls in the sun and have a drink among locals and interlopers. This was a place of tribute bands, ladies nights, and horseshoe pits. A place we visited any chance we had heading north or south, a place we returned to, the origin of memories and oft-repeated phrases overheard in the midst of one fantastic day or another. Its closing confirms or reaffirms that these sorts of things—the places we’ve come to depend on to be there as some small but increasingly significant facet of our lives—are going away.This link—to the past we have lived and a past that is hinted at by the place itself—is gone. It’s not a loss of food (certainly there are other shacks within a mile radius that could sufficiently do the job), but a loss of sustenance nonetheless—a shift in atmosphere. Sometime this past winter it transitioned from closed for the season to closed permanently. It’s for sale.

Review: The Fishermen

July 11, 2015 Reviews

Book by CHIGOZIE OBIOMA
Reviewed by ANGELA AJAYI

The Fishermen The year I left Nigeria, 1993, was a momentous one. For the first time in about a decade, there was a presidential election—a democratic process that had eluded Nigeria after at least two military leaders had ruled the country, seizing power through coups. I was 18, old enough to vote but not inclined to do so. My parents were not politically active, though my father loved to discuss current affairs with his friends at our house in northern Nigeria. That year, their discussions were filled with excitement about Nigeria’s future, about the presidential candidate, M.K.O. Abiola, whose beaming face was plastered on flimsy poster boards along busy roads. I, too, found myself swept along by the high hopes for the country despite the increasing power outages, corruption, fuel scarcity, and religious and ethnic tensions.

When the election finally occurred, on June 12, 1993, the charade that followed left us all jaded and crestfallen: the election, which Abiola won, was annulled due to unfounded accusations of rigging. An interim president was quickly instated, after which Sani Abacha took over the country and ran it with the iron hand of a despot.

Review: Reptile House

June 29, 2015 Reviews

Book by ROBIN MCLEAN
Reviewed by CHANTAL CORCORAN

Reptile House

Robin McLean’s story collection, Reptile House, opens at an end—when a freeze of apocalyptic proportions devastates the town of Easter, (“Cold Snap”)—and ends at a beginning—when an unhappy man’s wife gives birth to another baby (the title story). This sort of upset runs rampant throughout McLean’s debut work. McLean’s surreal tales about ordinary characters deliver emotional truth in poetic language. Concrete and surreal, they spill beyond the conventional short story forms.

A book for lovers of language, Reptile House won the 2015 BOA Short Story Fiction Prize, sponsored by BOA Editions, Ltd., a publishing house committed strictly to poetry, until 2007 when it launched its American Reader Series with the goal of publishing fiction “more concerned with artfulness of writing than the twists and turns of plot.” Indeed, the nine short stories that form Reptile House seem to spring from language in an intuitive way.

Review: Washing the Dead

June 15, 2015 Reviews

Book by MICHELLE BRAFMAN
Reviewed by KAREN UHLMANN

Washing the Dead

The title of Michelle Brafman’s debut novel, Washing the Dead, is taken from the sacred washing of a traditional Jewish burial ceremony. Volunteering for a washing, or tahara, is considered one of the most selfless deeds in Orthodox Judaism because the beneficiary cannot thank the participants. The book’s three sections are named for and center around different occasions of ritual washing in the life of the narrator, Barbara Blumfield, as she tries to fathom the family secrets that bind her to her Orthodox community and repel her. The first and last are taharas and the middle is a mikveh, a purifying immersion in water.

As a novel, the book explores redemption and forgiveness in three generations of splintered mother-daughter relationships, but what’s most compelling is what it reveals about Chasidic and Orthodox world of rituals and their rules for dealing with and avoiding the secular world.

The book alternates between the Barbara of the 1970s, an Orthodox teenager (née Pupnick) and the secular 50-something Barbara of 2009, who is married to a stockbroker and the mother of a teenage girl herself. The younger Barbara’s words come from letters she wrote but never sent, which her daughter discovers years later.

Friday Reads: June 2015

June 12, 2015 Reviews

By JACQUELYN POPE, NINA MCCONIGLEY, JANE CAMPBELL, LORI OSTLUND, DIANA BABINEAU, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

Photography, science, geo-politics, instruction manuals, and a good Springsteen song—this month we’re reading works of literature with foundations in other art forms. We’re also recommending a memoir, flash fiction, linked short stories, a novel, and a poetry collection—the greatest genre spread of any Friday Reads installment since the feature’s inception. So this June, as we move into summer at last, join us at The Common in trying something new, something varied, something complex. Spice up your reading list and genre-bend your life!

Recommended:

Hold Still by Sally Mann, A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, The Spark and the Drive by Wayne Harrison, Barefoot Dogs by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, Itself by Rae Armantrout.

Baltimore Soundscape

June 8, 2015 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

baltimore street

The week of Freddie Gray’s funeral, after the rallies and the marches, after the west side ignites and the camera crews descend upon our city, the helicopters swarm in two clusters—one to the east side and one to the west, a steady thunking all-day-and-night stutter. It’s the sound of tension hovering—a sound that makes people stop on the sidewalks and stare up at the sky.

We live on a busy street of tall old houses between the two sides of the city that are being watched from the air and a couple miles north of the downtown tourist area of glass storefronts and office buildings, where a human wall of police officers and national guard troops stretch along the inner harbor, watching at eye level, men and women holding guns and shields with handfuls of coiled plastic handcuffs attached to their uniforms. We are surrounded by the noise of what’s happening, but we are removed from any sense of risk: we are not afraid of the police; we are not afraid of our neighbors; there is no merchandise being protected by force. It is an exaggerated version of how I often feel in Baltimore—safe but not far from people who do not feel safe.