Review: Happiness, Like Water

Book by CHINELO OKPARANTA
Reviewed by NICOLE TRESKA

Happiness, Like WaterHappiness, Like Water is both an apt and a paradoxical title for Chinelo Okparanta’s debut collection. In these ten stories which deal primarily in the domestic, happiness is indeed essential and elusive, but it is neither clear nor cleansing. Many of the characters can only be happy at someone else’s expense: mothers who pressure their daughters to marry rich men or barren women who prey on pregnant ones, for example.

Okparanta dedicates the book to home. Home is the center of these stories, and whether in Nigeria or the U.S., it has the power to haunt. The protagonists are Nigerian women who find themselves on the edge of some great rift. Okparanta explores their descents, surrenders, and occasional elation using quiet language and unadorned structures. Her interior focus makes the high drama of midnight robberies, murderous “old maids,” and a virgin turned escort feel commonplace in comparison with the unyielding pressure, internal and external, facing these characters.

Review: Happiness, Like Water
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Where I Don’t Write

By MELODY NIXON

In his autobiographical novel on D.H. Lawrence Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer laments his inability to write the book he wanted because he couldn’t figure out where to live. “One of the reasons, in fact, that it was impossible to get started on [the Lawrence book] was because I was so preoccupied with where to live. I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose—but it was impossible to choose because I could live anywhere.”

House in black and white

I have the same problem. I’m a migrant and a wanderer, and I’m never really sure where my home is located – in the environment, or inside me? I’ve come to an unsteady way of dealing with this uncertainty, mostly by rolling with it. I’ve also learned that direct, personal experience in the world is essential to my writing. Last summer I wrote my way through a Trans-Siberian train ride from Moscow to Novosibirsk while hanging on to the side of a swaying second-class bunk bed, trying to explain to my babushka compartment-mates that I was working on an historical novel. Last fall I finished off several stories and articles for publication amid showers of asbestos at Art Farm, Nebraska, a cooperative, self-sustaining artists’ colony that is about as close to nature and rusticity as one can get without actually becoming a wild animal. Every day from my desktop I was obliged to sweep away the powder of synthetic insulation and possibly cancerous substances that had rained from the homemade ceiling during the night. As winter approached, we practically burned floorboards for warmth. We wrote and wrote as we huddled around the fireplace.

Where I Don’t Write
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Privé, All Over Again

By KEANE SHUM
There used to be an actual line.  That we had to actually wait in.  We used to line up from the elevator bank in the Harbour View Hotel across the bridge and over to the Great Eagle Centre, or double-backed towards Central Plaza, and we used to wait.We waited in the balmy near-summer heat if it was the prom after-party, or in the wincing wet cold when we were back from college for the holidays.  We waited, we paid cover, we had tickets.  We were young.

Privé, All Over Again
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Who’s Writing Real Brooklyn Stories?

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

Apple-crisp air, periwinkle sky. A world-class day in the Borough of Storytellers. As it does each third Sunday in September, on September 22, the Brooklyn Book Festival took over the esplanade in front of Borough Hall and adjacent buildings in Brooklyn Heights.

Writers are the latest Brooklyn demographic to become a national punch line. Like Jackie Gleason, only skinny. Last year, the festival claimed 40,000 visitors. —They haven’t released this year’s figures, but the joint was packed.

The list of presenters was a mix of Bold-Face Names (Colum McCann, Lois Lowry, Jules Feiffer) and serious up-and-comers. The panels covered a judicious mix of topics, weighted toward the international and multicultural.

Who’s Writing Real Brooklyn Stories?
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On Burning Your Own Books and Bashing Off the Track: An Interview with Carrie Tiffany

MELODY NIXON interviews CARRIE TIFFANY

Carrie Tiffany headshot

Carrie Tiffany is an Australian writer and author of the novels Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (2005, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction), and Mateship with Birds (2012, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction, winner of the Stella Prize), as well as several short stories. Born in England, Tiffany’s work draws on the complexities of the British migrant experience in the antipodes. Tiffany talked with fellow antipodean Melody Nixon last week, on a call from Canada where Tiffany is currently teaching creative writing at The Banff Center.

On Burning Your Own Books and Bashing Off the Track: An Interview with Carrie Tiffany
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Boys with a Synth

By BENJAMIN ANASTAS

I went to buy the Roland Juno-6 with my best friend Michael the summer I was sixteen, before either one of us had a driver’s license. Other boys saved their house-painting money and bought an electric guitar with a starter amp. Or a five-piece drum kit, if they had the kind of parents who tolerated an unholy racket in the basement. Michael and I had earned eight dollars an hour for two weeks to stain a cottage on the Cape, a mythic payday that had sent us whooping and hollering into the waves, and I wanted to buy a synthesizer with my share of the windfall. 

Boys with a Synth
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Lab of Literary Architecture

By SCOTT GEIGER 

Last month I enjoyed following media coverage of an unusual writing workshop and design studio held at Columbia University. Italian architect and writer Matteo Pericoli originated his “Laboratory of Literary Architecture” course in Turin, and brought it to New York this spring as a joint course for students of the School of Writing and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Lab of Literary Architecture
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