All posts tagged: Book Review

Review: Kittentits

By HOLLY WILSON

Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

Kittentits cover.

Molly is a badass. Obvious, isnt it, from the novel’s title? Kittentits. Thats her, Molly. Shes a motherless white ten-year-old kid, living in Calumet City, Michigan. Its 1992, and shes obsessed with attending the Chicago Worlds Fair, about to open downtown.

Before she gets there, Molly comes to idolize a woman who tried to kill her conjoined twin; runs away from home to Chicagos South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville; meets an elderly polio patient living inside an iron lung who gives séances; and befriends an African-American ghost boy and artist, Demarcus. Together, Molly and Demarcus hatch a plan of necromancy to commune with the ghosts of their dead mothers. They camp out at the Fair for weeks, waiting for New Years Eve to perform the ritual.

Built around the Sea of International Waters, a man-made lake with a glass elevator that takes the visitors to the all-glass Submarine Palace beneath, the Chicago Worlds Fair also features the Autotopia, Night Town, and World and the Sea pavilions. My particular favorite is a pavilion showcasing a cross-section of a whale, entrails visible.

Elaborate fiction, all of it, from the whale to the fair itself. As Wikipedia informs me once I finish the novel and sit down to write this review, the 1992 Chicago Worlds Fair never actually occurred. Approved by the International Bureau of Expositions in 1982, plans for it immediately ran into budget difficulties and were scrapped in 1983. Count me fooled, Holly Wilson.

Duped, I go back to the first page of the book and marvel at the pace with which incredible details accumulate, and how many of them Im willing to take for granted. Molly lives in a Quaker House of Friends with her blind father and a woman named Evelyn, who homeschools Molly. Some months prior to the novels opening, a terrible fire at the House of Friends kills two people and returns vision to Mollys dad: Two people died, Evelyns forty-year-old son Bruce and Sister Regina, but Dad got back his vision when a flaming ceiling beam banged his head. Boom just like that and he saw 20/20.Oh, and Molly sees the ghost of Sister Regina, who was one of nine residents of the House of Friends before the fire. Now she floats about the house, trying to hug Molly but going through her, a nuisance.

I firmly believe that ghosts arent real, but as a reader accustomed to novels in the realist genre, Id gone along with this information, thinking, well, who knows what Quaker ten-year-olds might believe? Molly also helps Evelyn go door-to-door to pass out pamphlets advertising the House of Friends Organic Community Garden. That all sounds mundane and believable enough. As does a blind man regaining his 20/20 vision after being hit on the head by a flaming beam. Right?

Then, Jeanie shows up. Jeanie is this House of Friends’ first Resident Friendsince the fire: she has recently been released from a Juvenile Correctional Facility and still has to regularly check in with her probation officer. Jeanies crime is the attempted murder of her formerly conjoined twin sister Mombie, an extreme case of sibling rivalry. Both Jeanie and Mombie have giant scars on their sides to show where the two of them had been connected. The attempted murder happened shortly after the death of their mother, who ran a wax museum in Kansas and who, when alive, had been able to deescalate the twins’ fighting. Molly is instantly charmed by Jeanie’s dirt bike and outfit consisting of “cut-offs, a Candlemass T-shirt, and dirty ripped Keds,” as well as “tattoos going up and down all ten fingers.” Later on, Jeanie will send Molly on a quest of her own, to steal from Mombie a wax arm in which Jeanie and Mombies moms ashes are entombed.

It was the mention of the Wild West Waxworks and Autograph Gallery of Dodge City, Jeanies moms establishment, that finally clued me in to what kind of novel I was reading. This isnt realism and it isnt fantasy. While Wilson creates her own genre at the intersection of Gothic and grotesque, here I want to elaborate on the second of these terms, which has been described by Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. According to Bakhtin, before the realist novel of grand style,before Balzac, Hugo, and Dickens, there came Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, the writers of the grotesque. When divorced from that origin [in the grotesque], realism becomes static, empirical, socially typifying,wrote Bakhtin scholar Simon Dentith. Carnival-grotesque allows writers to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from cliches, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted,according to Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, translated by Helen Iswolsky. Though historians have questioned Bakhtins chronological assertions about Medieval art, carnivalesque provides an exciting interpretative lens for scholars of imaginative fiction. Its thread in English language writing has been picked up by such writers as Angela Carter in Nights at the Circus, Salman Rushdies Midnights Children, and Carmen Maria Machado in Her Body and Other Parties.

Wilsons novel, too, is a carnivalesque feast. It offers a constant spectacle of death and renewal in exuberant, entirely over-the-top settings. Most characters have a tragic death story attached to them. There are deaths in car crashes, fires, several forms of cancer, and an epileptic girl who dies from an attack of epilepsy that happens when shes in prison. Jeanie dies in a hot-air balloon crash.

In the topsy-turvy world of the carnival, it is absolutely appropriate that ten-year-old Molly curses. She curses constantly, with zeal and imagination, and yet childishness. To prove that she would do anything for eighteen-year-old Jeanie, who is the first person at the House of Friends to address Molly as a peer, Molly accepts Jeanie’s offer to pull out the tampon from her vagina. “And I do, I fucking tug on [the tampon’s string], I do! Because goddamn it, I’m no pussy.” Heres Molly later on in the novel, at a séance, asking to find out if her Jeanie is dead, and if dead, quite how dead: No way shed spent her ghost life with yo-yo fuckers and cancerface kiddies, shed be somewhere way cooler riding cuss words into the sky.

The novel is attentive to the lower and inner body functions that in the culture of carnival represent the cycle of life and rebirth. In the following passage, Molly is excited at finding herself inside that exhibit of a cross-section of a dead whale at the (imaginary, I remind myself) Chicago Worlds Fair. The whale organs light up one by one at the push of a button: All neon pinks and blues, orange and greenish yellows. Meaty and fishy and circulatory, splendid to behold.Mollys necromancy ritual, the pinnacle of the plot aimed at bringing her in touch with her mothers ghost, is an invocation of the grotesque: My path is sacred and Ive made an energetic contract to honor it, so blessed be my bloody scabs, my hurt feelings, my infected toes.

And yes, Molly does pick off and eat her scabs.

One particular area of grotesque irreverence with which readers might find themselves uncomfortable is this novels treatment of race. Race is a very serious subject in our culture as are the privileges and the degrees of power that systemic, race-based discrimination entails. Wilson treats it as such, yet she upends our expectations of racial relationships established by realist fiction. There isnt room for color blindness here. Molly frequently refers to herself as a fucked up white girl,and she lets us know the racial and social status of almost everyone she meets. The carnival-grotesque genre allows Molly to be hyper-aware of race and able to narrate her white privilege in a way that would be extremely unlikely for a ten-year-old in a realist novel.

Most white and Black characters in the novel are self-aware in a similar way, yet the novel doesnt allow this self-awareness and stereotypes to curtail each characters own arc and existential quest in the book. For example, Ive been calling Demarcus a ghost in this review, but thats a simplification (also sometimes used in the novel). From his first appearance, he actually insists on being called a thought form.” “Call me post-physical abstract expressionism, but dont call me a ghost. Ghosts arent real. I dont believe in them,he tells Molly when she meets him for the first time as a see-through and chalk-colored apparition. This is, indeed, more precise, because as we learn at the end of the novel, Demarcus is a thought form that is thought up by his dead mother. His mother had once hoped for children, but never had any, and Demarcus is a thought form of an imagined child of a deceased woman. He never existed in the first place. Hes a fiction.

And so is Molly. Sooner or later, a reader of this novel is bound to ask herself a question: is Molly real, and how real is she? Is she a living character, a ghost, or a thought form? Perhaps she actually died in the fire at the House of Friends that took place before the start of the novel. Or perhaps she died when she ran away from home, like her Quaker community thinks. Or perhaps Molly died at the same time as her mom, when she was killed in a car crash. “Where was I, was I okay [during the car crash]? … Thanks for your concern but who the fuck knows? I was just some dumb fucking baby then.” There are so many opportunities for her to die. Then, of course, we have to remember that she never existed in the first place: shes a product of her authors imagination. Its only as a result of the carnivalesque details, the gory scabs and the nasty curses, that the novelist dupes us into believing her existence in the first place.

The carnival-grotesque devices enable the author to do something else as well. They provide an alternative to typical trauma and grief narratives by refracting stories of loss and harm through a set of trick mirrors. As we learn in preparation for Mollys necromancy ritual, what enables Molly to see Demarcus and other deceased characters in their thought formis grief:Grief is the amplifier. Grief is the thing that transmits and receives.Molly thinks it’s unfair that she sees the ghost of Sister Regina and not her mom. She wants to see her mom and to feel anything but sorrow. And yes, her quest eventually succeeds, and she meets her mom’s ghost. “In this world you will have trouble,” the ghost mom says. “And for some troubles mothers are not the needed thing.” She then also adds, “I think you’re a twitchy fucker who bats hard,” and gives Molly a sticker of a gold star. Thanks to the grotesque amplification, the image of grief and suffering that reaches the reader is so strange that I couldnt help but laugh at it. This is why we are at the Chicago Worlds Fair, after all: to celebrate lifes devastations and its ridiculous, stupid, grotesque unfairness.

 

Olga ZilberbourgEnglish-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES explores bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,according to The Moscow Times. It also deals with bisexuality and immigrant parenthood. Zilberbourgs fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in World Literature Today, On the Seawall, Narrative Magazine, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly ReviewConfrontation, and elsewhere. Born in Leningrad, USSR, in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she makes her home in San Francisco, California where she co-facilitates the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literatures from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.

Review: Kittentits
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Holiday Reads 2024

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
 
Exploring migration from the perspective of plants; mystical historical fiction that will transport you from New England to Haiti; and one woman’s chance to do life over again.
 
We revisited our community’s favorite reads from throughout the year and compiled a list of memoirs, essay collections, novels, and creative nonfiction works to inspire a diverse holiday reading list, or kick off your reading plans for the new year. All of these titles were originally highlighted in our “What We’re Reading” and Book Reviews columns, and we think they deserve a second spotlight. Read on for recommendations from the Phoenix desert, the Indian subcontinent, the seaside, and more.
 
 
cover of you get what you pay for
 
Morgan Parker’s You Get What You Pay For
 
A poetic memoir-in-essays about Parker’s struggle to live freely amid the omnipresent legacy of enslavement in America. Beginning with her childhood as the only Black girl in a conservative, religious town, Parker moves between wide-ranging topics—including everything from cop killings, to plantation tours, to therapy and Jay-Z—but frames it all with the motif of the slave ship.
Holiday Reads 2024
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What We’re Reading: December 2024

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

If you’re in need of a deep breath amid the holiday frenzy, look no further. This month, Issue 28 poets and longtime TC contributors OLENA JENNINGS and ELIZABETH HAZEN bring you three recommendations that force you to slow down and observe. Hazen’s picks provide an intimate window into the paradoxical, tragic, and sometimes ridiculous characters that inhabit our world, while Jennings’ holds up a mirror to readers, asking them to meditate on the act of viewing itself. 

 
 

​Chantal V. Johnson’s Post-Traumatic and Kate Greathead’s The Book of George; recommended by Issue 28 Contributor Elizabeth Hazen

Typically, I have a few books going at once, and I am almost always at the very least reading one physical book and listening to another. Often, the pairings reveal interesting connections, and my most recent reads—Kate Greathead’s latest, The Book of George, and Chantal V. Johnson’s debut, Post-Traumatic—did not disappoint.

Both books are contemporary, the former out just this October, the latter in 2022, and feature protagonists who are deeply flawed but trying to figure out who they are. They hail from starkly different backgrounds, though, and this determines the starkly different difficulties they encounter as they navigate adulthood.

What We’re Reading: December 2024
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What We’re Reading: November 2024

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

With the holidays coming up, many of us turn to books for company on cold nights, or a respite from the stress of the season. If you’re craving an escape into the world of ideas, look no further! This month, our contributors DOUGLAS KOZIOL, CARSON WOLFE, and ANGIE MACRI deliver an eclectic mix of nonfiction and poetry recommendations sure to satisfy and inspire the curious reader.

Cover of "Goodbye, Dragon Inn": the title appears in a golden serif font against a royal purple background.

Nick Pinkerton’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn; recommended by Issue 28 contributor Douglas Koziol

Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film Goodbye, Dragon Inn is, in one sense, an elegy to a type of moviegoing no longer possible. Set in a single-screen Taipei theater on its final night, as it plays the 1967 wuxia (a Chinese martial arts subgenre) classic, Dragon Inn, to a handful of people, it would be easy to read the film as overly sentimental or nostalgic. But Nick Pinkerton resists this temptation in his book on the film, which treats the concerns of Goodbye, Dragon Inn with a wonderfully discursive and prismatic critical eye.

What We’re Reading: November 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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Review: Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra

Book cover of happy

Everything about Happy Singh Soni, the titular hero of Celina Baljeet Basras stinging first novel, is unlikely. He is the son of Punjabi cabbage farmers, but he fancies himself a screenwriter and prospective movie actor in the mold of Nouvelle Vague darling Sami Frey. (Indeed, he has effectively memorized Godards Bande à part.) He imagines his future in a Europe of all the classic allures, living in an elegant stone house with a yellow door; he is all about the details, which are uniformly sensual and full of wonder to him. Even as a child on his parents’ modest farm, he begins practicing for the day when his public utterances will be sought after by the press, so he invents a series he titles The Loo Interviews,conducted by an eager reporter for the gossipy Jodhpur News . . . while he occupies the privy.

He is in exuberant love with all he experiences, especially his mothers adoringly proffered fried treats. Happy even appreciates the pests that afflict the surrounding farmland that is slowly being consumed by the amoeba of a badly managed Disneyland knockoff called Wonderland, where he takes a desultory job in which his nascent talents are ignored. He is the kind of imaginative soul who cant help but personify even the stars in the sky (Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde”).

Review: Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra
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Friday Reads: July 2023

Curated by SOFIA BELIMOVA and OLIVE AMDUR

The fireworks have finally quieted down, but July has just begun to heat up! Whether you are looking for a book to help you forget the hot weather or a book filled with just as many vivid sensations as the summer season is, keep on reading. In this month’s Friday Reads feature, three of our interns recommend dynamic stories about the nightclubs of the Midwest, a boarding school in coastal Rhode Island, and the tangled relationships of a young person’s body and spirits.

Friday Reads: July 2023
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Friday Reads: June 2023

Curated by SOFIA BELIMOVA

Welcome to the June round of Friday Reads! Are you hoping to read more this summer? Do you have a favorite shady spot in a backyard or park, but no book to share it with? Read on for exciting recommendations from our contributors. Find stories that reach beyond the scope of normative human experience, essays about writing and writers, and hybrid memoir on music and survival. 

 

Cover of Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas: a red to green gradient and the drawing of a man without a head.

Friday Reads: June 2023
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Friday Reads: January 2023

Curated by SOFIA BELIMOVA

Happy new year! If you’re hoping to read more in 2023, we’ve got just the thing for you: exciting book recommendations from our contributors. From reportage that reads like a page turner to romance against the backdrop of political turmoil, these exhilarating books are perfect for cozying up somewhere warm. 

Friday Reads: January 2023
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Present Tense Machine: A Review

By GUNNHILD ØYEHAUG (Translated from the Norwegian by KARI DICKSON)

Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

 

Book cover of Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Oyehaug

Laura is expecting a baby. A twenty-four-year-old literature instructor, she lives with her partner Karl Peter in the heart of Bergen, a city in the westernmost part of Norway. She’s suffering from a strange sort of anxiety, which she suspects has something to do with the pregnancy: everything around her seems double, not quite like what it is.

Laura has more common anxieties as well, including a problem with her apartment. The buildings in her part of town are constructed of brick on the outside and wood inside, which makes them so flammable that they’re called “chimney houses.” If their chimney house were to catch on fire, there would be little chance of escape. Then, there are the noisy students living above and below, a drug dealer across the street, hypodermic needles littering the neighborhood. She decides that she and Karl Peter have to move before the baby comes, but this decision, too, seems to bring her nothing but anxiety.

Present Tense Machine: A Review
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