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Friday Reads: September 2015

September 11, 2015 Reviews

By TERESE SVOBODA, STEVEN TAGLE, MACEO J. WHITAKER, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH, IAN BASSINGTHWAIGHTE

Summer ends, fall begins; back to school. And as the seasons transition, we’re reading books that combine comedy and tragedy—or, as our recommenders have it, mix “humor and horror” or “poetry with play.” These are tales of “heels and faces,” each book growing “pleasurably darker” as it’s explored. This fall, embrace a little cognitive dissonance with us and choose a book that is its own mirror image; let one of these titles reflect your own many selves as you read.

Recommended:

To Drink Boiled Snow by Caroline Knox, Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, The Sweetheart by Angelina Mirabella, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

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.

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.

Friday Reads: July 2015

July 17, 2015 Reviews

By KURT CASWELL, SARAH WHELAN, SAHIBA GILL, PAOLA PERONI, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

Are you up for a challenge? This month we’re reading books that test us as they enlighten us, seeking to explain the world on a grand scale—warts and all. We’re held rapt by catalogs of world travel, remembered across decades; the brutal pageantry of crisis erupting through daily rituals; the history of poverty and injustice; the intricacies of mental illness, personal and societal. Don’t turn to these titles for escape—we’re here to focus the lens of the human experience and find something as irascible as it is beautiful.

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.

Review: Dart

June 1, 2015 Reviews

Book by ALICE OSWALD
Reviewed by LAURA MARRIS

Dart

It’s possible to call a river an organ of speech. It has a mouth, and a source, and down the length of its body the sounds it makes go through physical transformations, changing the tones of its voice.

British poet Alice Oswald begins her book-length poem Dart by asserting this comparison between the poet’s voice and the river’s. She asserts that the people living along the Dart who lend their speech to the book’s personas function as “life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters—linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea… These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.”

This note gives just a glimpse of the complex labor of translation behind this work—one that surpasses the conventional personification of natural forms. Oswald, who spent two years recording the conversations of people who live and work on the Dart, set out to transform the voice of the river into English through the way its familiars talk.

Review: Providence Noir

May 18, 2015 Reviews

Book by ANN HOOD, ELIZABETH STROUT, PETER FARRELLY, BRUCE DESILVA, MARIE MYUNG-OK LEE, ROBERT LEUCI, DAWN RAFFEL, LUANNE RICE, THOMAS COBB, JOHN SEARLES, TAYLOR M. POLITES, PABLO RODRIGUEZ, AMITY GAIGE, LASHONDA KATRICE BARNETT, HESTER KAPLAN
Reviewed by SUSAN TACENT

Noir is not my regular genre. But I have read my fair share of Raymond Chandler, and I’ve seen The Big Sleep more than once. I’m from Brooklyn originally—Noir Central—and I’ve lived in Rhode Island for over 20 years. So I jumped at the opportunity to review Providence Noir, Brooklyn-based Akashic Books’s latest entry in its 11-year-old Noir series, atmospheric story collections set in cities all over the world.

Part of the fun of reading the series is imagining familiar landmarks in a sinister light. The appropriately mysterious cover photo of Providence Noir looks out on a deserted Dorrance Street, in the city’s old center, from an alley behind the Union Trust Company at night. The sidewalk looks wet where the streetlight falls. Might be rain, might be blood. We also see Coffee Exchange, Central High, Trinity Rep. Benefit Street, Adler’s Hardware, India Point Park. These are the places where we Providence folk overcaffeinate, or teach, or take our kids to watch A Christmas Carol. Places where we try to find parking for jury duty, pick up paint to brighten the kitchen, buy freshly made pasta, enjoy one more late summer picnic. Turned by the writers ofProvidence Noir into sites of intrigue, mayhem, and death, they make the little reptilian hairs on the back our necks rise, as if suddenly we find ourselves inside the fiction on the page.