Reviews

What We’re Reading: September 2024

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

To kick off the autumn column, our contributors bring you three novels that invite unexpected encounters with time. A recommendation from former TC submissions reader SAMUEL JENSEN trains our sights on the future of the American dream; with LILY LUCAS HODGES, we unearth an artifact of historical erasure; and with HILDEGARD HANSEN, we finally transcend history through prose that gropes at the primordial core of life.

cover of "Last Acts": a desert street corner with a cactus, convenience store, streetlight, and blazing blue sky.

Alexander Sammartino’s Last Acts; recommended by Reader-Emeritus Samuel Jensen.

I picked up Alexander Sammartino’s debut novel, Last Acts, because of the cover. Seeing it at the book store, it was as if someone had walked up the road from my childhood home, aimed their camera across the arroyo, and snapped a picture. I’m from El Paso, Texas and Sammartino’s novel is set in Phoenix, Arizona—two very different places—but still: a sunbleached strip mall with a gun shop in it, burning under a merciless blue sky? It was like running into someone you’re not sure you wanted to see again.

Last Acts is a bowl-you-over kind of book. In the first few pages, gun store owner David Rizzo drives to pick up his son who has nearly died from an overdose. On the way, he is waylaid. Rizzo is always, somehow, waylaid. His truck breaks down. He gets back from his mile-long walk for coolant just in time to watch it be towed away. At the hospital, he’s stonewalled by busy nurses, told by a patient to tell Charlie Miniscus (whoever that is) to rot in hell, and conversationally stunlocked by an overeager medical supplies salesman before a janitor tells him his son is no longer in the building.

While reading, I found myself thinking about Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2019 film Uncut Gems, a film without a single truly quiet scene. People constantly scream over each other, tinny music blaring without cease, as we watch the characters make the worst possible decisions again and again. Last Acts is a similar cacophonic rush with a similarly tragic hero, all this driven by Rizzo’s voice, the novel’s most wonderful accomplishment. His endless, internal self-narrative has a striking poetry, one of a man trying desperately to convince himself that everything is going to be okay, that his son and failing business will be. And Last Acts too is a book of schemes. Rizzo and his son Nick quite literally have hope in their sights. In Sammartino’s world the American dream is played out in gun shops and the religious overtones of Nick’s near-death the father and son attempt to exploit for profit. Last Act’s commentary on American gun violence lifts the floorboards: we see how the tentacles are tangled down there, from national want, to symbol, to myth, to blood.

Still, what got into my heart most was the setting. The beauty of the desert is here, but I kept thinking about how often characters are simply smote by the heat. For hours they lounge on their couches, AC blasting. It is as though the Rizzos’ one-track ambitions are borne of heat, their brains cooked into one tragic idea, one lasting, stifling silence. I almost couldn’t help but read Last Acts as a climate change novel—when the whole country is as hot as a Phoenix summer, how will America think?

cover of "Blackouts": gold serif text on a black background.

Justin Torres’ Blackouts; recommended by TC Online Contributor Lily Lucas Hodges

Blackouts starts from nothingness. The narrator, known only and affectionately as nene, journeys to reunite with Juan Gay, who he finds dying of old age. Nene wants to learn from Juan. Learn what? He doesn’t quite know, though Juan seems to. It’s an inheritance of sorts that Juan’s ready to pass down, if nene doesn’t mind telling Juan about his mother first. “Make it terrible,” Juan says, a playful demand that defines their desire to learn from each other. The back and forth that ensues is tender, at times campy, always seeped in flirtatious generosity, yet evasive and incomplete. This opening sets the tone well for the rest of the book: Justin Torres strings readers through Blackouts in a state of unresolved pleasure.

At the same time, Blackouts is about the effects of oppression. Both nene and Juan are queer and Puerto Rican. Their dialogue deconstructs these identities, exposing the ways medicine and empire made them into pathologies. And though Blackouts is a work of fiction, the subject of nene and Juan’s time together is a real-life document—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, an infamous 1941 study by Dr. George W. Henry. This study started with the work of the real-life Jan Gay, who interviewed people in her queer community, before Dr. Henry erased the positive nature of Gay’s work and published it as a study of sexual “maladjustment.”  In Blackouts, the reader only sees a redacted version, with black lines crossing out much of Dr. Henry’s version to create short erasure poems. This double silencing queers the old saying two wrongs don’t make a right: can two erasures make a truth? Can they reclaim authenticity, and can pathology be undone?

Blackouts is playful, it’s easy to read, and you enjoy the intergenerational compassion between Juan and nene. In the end, though, Blackouts is about our relationship to history: it insists that we cannot live without confronting the people who came before us or the institutions that defined us. It places you next to an elder on their death bed, confronting the choice between keeping this or that after they die, and evokes all of the moments where you’ve confronted yourself in similar ways. These moments are difficult and full of grief, but they’re also the moments where we’re dialectically the most alive.

cover of "The Passion According to G.H.": A yellow-tinted close-up of a young woman's neck and chin.

Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H., trans. Idra Novey; recommended by TC Online Contributor Hildegard Hansen

After re-reading The Passion According to G. H., its atmosphere persists for weeks. G. H., a sculptor in Brazil, decides to deep clean the bedroom of her former maid. Inside the room, she crushes a cockroach in the door of a wardrobe and has a mystical experience. Now, reality forms in accordance. The person I formerly lived with moves out, and I inhabit this house alone for the first time, cleaning spaces I never considered mine. Insects visit me. One reason for this resonance, I think, is that this time I read the book aloud—first with the now-departed person, and thereafter, alone.

Reading aloud allows my mouth and my body to experience the intense physicality of this metaphysical book. It prevents me from unconsciously smoothing over the hard edges of the language, rendered from the Portuguese into English by Idra Novey: its recursivity, its cycling, its strained syntax. A mystical experience is exceedingly difficult to apprehend or communicate using language in its usual modes – impossible, even – and so Lispector and G. H. rely on unusual construction. As G. H. says (reflective also of my state writing this), “I only get eloquent when I err.” 

These observations and unravelling understandings ground themselves in concrete and vast dilations of time and space. G. H.’s form has been drawn on the wall of a cave for three hundred thousand years. “Three thousand years ago,” she says, “I went astray, and what was left were phonetic fragments of me.” She sees, out the window, Rio’s cityscape, then the Strait of the Dardanelles, and beyond that the desert, the salt lakes, the first Assyrian merchants fighting for control of Asia Minor: the empire of the present, a dug-up future, remote ancient depths. “I was seeing, like someone who will never have to understand what she saw. As a lizard’s nature sees: without even having to remember afterward.” She sees that love is neutral, fierce neutrality. That the root of life has no human meaning: “a life so much greater that it does not even have beauty.”

For me, to read is often to go in search of something extremely specific but inarticulable, and to be dissatisfied if it is not there. In G. H., Lispector articulates it for me: “a kind of quaking happiness all over my body, a horrible happy unease in which my legs seemed to vanish, as always when the roots of my unknown identity were touched.” Or: “More than a star, today I want the thick and black root of the stars, I want the source that always seems dirty, and is dirty, and that is always incomprehensible.”

What We’re Reading: September 2024
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What We’re Reading: July 2024

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

July in Western Massachusetts is a month of heightened sensation. Perceptions are focused by the burning and buzzing heat, until it bursts in its own excess, dripping or pouring from the sky. It is an excess that ferments rather than rots, and it is what makes July so intoxicating. The onset of climate change, bringing merciless humidity and monsoon weather patterns, has deepened and darkened this character. Amid this, our Editorial Assistants AIDAN COOPER, CIGAN VALENTINE, and SIANI AMMONS have been reading books that match the month’s potency: storytelling that dazzles, prose that floods and sweeps away the sane, and historical truths delivered in lightning-bolt cracks. 

What We’re Reading: July 2024
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Friday Reads: June 2024

Yesterday, June 20th, marked the official first day of summer! Though the longest day of 2024 has come and gone, the season still promises a plethora of long afternoons and lazy nights. Many of us at The Common cherish this time as an opportunity to comb through our bookshelves and catch up on our neglected To Be Read lists. In this edition of Friday Reads, our editors and contributors share what they’re reading this summer, with recommendations in an array of genres and topics fit for the park, a road trip, a cool refuge from the heat, or whatever other adventures the season may have in store. Keep reading to hear from John Hennessy, Emily Everett, and Matthew Lippman

Friday Reads: June 2024
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Review: The Extinction of Irena Rey

By JENNIFER CROFT
Review by CHRIS JOHN POOLE 

cover of Jennifer croft's the extinction of Irena rey


At first, the autobiographical roots of
The Extinction of Irena Rey seem simple to trace. This is a novel by writer-translator Jennifer Croft, who works in Spanish and Polish; its protagonist is a Spanish writer-translator. This is a novel from the acclaimed translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights; the eponymous Irena Rey is a Polish literary megastar. This is a novel from a staunch advocate for translators’ visibility; its eight main characters are all translators who seek—and perhaps supplant–their elusive muse.

Yet it is the very abundance of extratextual parallels that makes it so difficult to situate Croft within her text. Unlike Croft’s debut Homesick, a hybrid novel-memoir, The Extinction of Irena Rey provides no single stand-in for its author; instead, a network of interlinked characters echo Croft’s own life. From the novel’s tantalising biographical parallels, countless questions arise: is Irena Rey modelled on Tokarczuk or Croft? Is protagonist Emilia a self-insert, or a novel creation? Ultimately, it seems, these characters are hybridisations of Croft and her influences, as within this novel the lines between self and other, like those between truth and fiction, begin to blur.

Review: The Extinction of Irena Rey
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Friday Reads: Braving the Body

Review by JENNIFER FRANKLIN 

Featuring poems by DIANE SEUSS, FRED MARCHANT, JUSTIN WYMER, and BRENDA CÁRDENAS 

Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the soul.” Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024) a new anthology edited by Nicole Callihan, Pichchenda Bao, and Jennifer Franklin is a collection of poems that are both embodied and soulful; they spring from the imaginations and lived experiences of 116 brave bodies (including one who is no longer alive after a long battle with cancer). But in Karen Friedland’s exuberant poem, “It Recurred,” the speaker is present, alive, defiant, “At this tender moment, my death is merely theoretical, and life is all I’ll ever know. In Diane Seuss’s hair “the color of a field mouse” the speaker holds space for a painful teenage memory, Jesus “writing / parables in his head” and the body as “a world / of massive disappointments.” and Justin Wymer’s “pill the color of her hair;” JP Howard’s poem mediates on the body as home and the home as sanctuary in an often inhospitable and unsafe world, “this is a safe place for black boys becoming black men” and Fred Marchant’s prescient speaker tells us “thus i announce the world is burning.” But this is also a collection of the body as conduit of pleasure, joy, love, and freedom as when Brenda Cardenas cries, “Perhaps we lick the nape of a lost lover’s / neck, just to remind them we once tangoed / In the blooming garden of their chest.” As Nicole Callihan writes in her introduction, “Absurd, sublime, anxious, and tender—these poems resonate in the very place they were born—the brave body in all its gore and glory.”   

—Jennifer Franklin 

 

Cover of the anthology braving the body

Friday Reads: Braving the Body
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Friday Reads: May 2024

Just last week, we at The Common launched our flowery spring issue! Issue 27 features a special portfolio of Arabic stories from Chad, Eritrea, and South Sudan; vibrant paintings by Eritrean artist Michael Adonai; and poetry and prose from all over the world on history and memory, queerness and desire, and the small and large rebellions that shape our lives. In conjunction with the release of the issue, we are bringing back our Friday Reads book recommendation column, so you can learn what books have been inspiring our contributors this spring. Keep reading to hear from Issue 27’s Matthew Lippman, Michelle Lewis, and Kevin Dean!

Friday Reads: May 2024
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Review: Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging

By JESSICA J. LEE
Reviewed by KATIE NOAH GIBSON

The cover of Jessica J. Lee's DISPERSALS shows pink and yellow wildflower sprigs against a black background.

“These are essays written for a world in motion,” writes Jessica J. Lee in the introduction to her exquisite, haunting third book, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, a collection of 14 essays examining the movement—voluntary, forced and accidental—of people and plants across landscapes. Writing in a time of massive global migration, and having experienced several recent upheavals in her own life (including motherhood and the COVID-19 pandemic), Lee considers terms like rooted and migration in light of economic structures, political power, and her own Welsh-Taiwanese-Canadian ancestry. She probes, researches, and even delights in the ways in which plants—seeds, trees, rhizomes—consistently defy human notions of borders and boundaries.

Review: Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging
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Through the Lens of the Littoral: A Review of Ralph Sneeden’s The Legible Element

By RALPH SNEEDEN
Reviewed By MATT W. MILLER

Cover of "The Legible Element" by Ralph Sneeden picturing a shoreline.

Narratively driven and lyrically evocative, The Legible Element by Ralph Sneeden is a collection of personal essays that threads stories of surfing, sailing, teaching, fishing, and even pond hockey through deep meditations about adolescence, fatherhood, marriage, family, aging, and the natural world. A kind of memoir-in-essays, the book uses these experiences and the vehicle of the “I” as a way to explore a life lived by and for water.

Through the Lens of the Littoral: A Review of Ralph Sneeden’s The Legible Element
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Review: American Gospel

By MIAH JEFFRA
Review by YELENA FURMAN

american gospel cover

The city as a character in its own right is a frequent device in otherwise disparate novels. In Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987), a water-shimmering, pleasure-seeking Venice forms the fabric of the female protagonist’s life. Andrei Bely’s modernist tour-de-force Petersburg (1916), following a long tradition in Russian literature, portrays this city as both the site and driver of the action. For the navel-gazing narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), Paris and other locations in France are integral sources of his copious memories. The commonality among such city-infused works is the reputation of said cities: world-renowned and possessed of their own symbolic capital and literary mythology. The associations are not always positive—writers often portray big cities as dirty, oppressive, even demonic—but the cities historically portrayed in literature are famed embodiments of grandeur and stature.

Review: American Gospel
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