A smorgasbord of engaging thoughts and ideas

Zadie Smith writes in the Forward to Dead and Alive, her third collection of essays, that you "might start from the first page and just plough through. Or look for a subject that interests you in the Contents, and begin there . . .   Whichever route you choose, you are welcome. Feel free."

I do. And did. Smith doesn't give the option skipping essays entirely (what writer is going to suggest that?) but you can and I did and still found the book stimulating and valuable.

She is a marvelous writer (i.e., filled with marvels) who has published eight novels and a play. She was was born in October 1975 in Willesden, north-west London, to a Jamaican mother and an English father. She attended the University of Cambridge where she studied English literature as an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge. She published her first novel, White Teeth, in 2000. She taught fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts and joined New York University as a tenured professor of fiction in 2010.

Smith regularly publishes essays and commentary. The essays in Dead and Alive appeared mostly in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and she has published in Kenyon Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere and several appear in the book for the first time.

I am afraid I skipped the book's first five essays which are about art which doubtless reflects my limitation. On the other hand, I was held and fascinated by her comments on five dead writers: Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Hilary Mantel.

I didn't expect to enjoy her review of a book that I'd never head of and is not a topic that affects me directly: Black England. But it's a world and a history I know little about and was pleased to learn more.

And her essays on fiction and writing are worth the price of the book if you write or if you are interested in the craft. Indeed, one of the works is called "Consciousness and Consciousness: A Craft Talk for the People and the Person." She has an informative essay "On Writing The Fraud," her most recent novel which I have added to my "To Read" list.

Zadie Smith is an interesting writer with interesting things to say on a variety of topics and she says them clearly and entertainingly. I'm delighted I read as much as I read of Dead and Alive. 

A useful word—but not in English

In the Japanese short story I'm currently translating, one of the sentences contained a word that I don't believe English contains, for all the words it does have—腐れ縁, pronounced kusare-en.

The first characters by themselves, 腐 れ / kusare, can be a derogatory term meaning rotting, spoiling, decaying, corroding and it can be a verb: to rot, to spoil, etc.

The second character, 縁 / en, can mean (as one of its six meanings} relationship between two people, bond, link connection.

Put them together as a single word and my dictionary says it means "an undesirable but inseparable relationship/" Who'd a guessed?​

Can this seed fall on good ground and bear fruit?

Now that I've read Octavia Butler's biography it was time to read one of her books and I chose Parable of the Sower.

I've been aware of Butler's name for years, which is why I read her biography. I have not been a science fiction fan since my twenties, however, which is why I'd never read one of her novels. The science fiction I once read tended to feature space and science: The Man Who Sold the Moon, The Martian Chronicles, The Andromeda Strain. Butler, based on this title, is up to something else.

The first person narrator, 15-year old Lauren Olamina, begins telling her story on July 20, 2024. (The book was published in 1993 and the entries are dated.) She lives in a walled community north of Los Angeles with her father, who is a minister and the community's leader, her step-mother, and brothers. Lauren is hyperempathetic; if someone nearby is injured she literally feels the pain.

Civil society is collapsing. A new drug has blighted the country. People who take it, "burners," shave their hair, paint themselves garish colors, and start fires. Fire for these addicts is better than sex. The police are indifferent or corrupt or, like the firemen, want to be paid before they'll help. Rival gangs war one each other and anyone foolish enough to cross them. Stores and businesses that can afford armed security guards survive; those that can't don't. America is becoming a country of all against all.

Halfway through the book as Lauren's life becomes grimmer and grimmer the compound's walls are breached and burners pour through burning and slaughtering indiscriminately followed by scavengers who steal whatever they can. Lauren and two neighbors escape. The second half of the novel is the story of their perilous trek north.

A number of things struck me about the book. Butler is black and Lauren is black; she has to be careful traveling with a white companion and in fact passes as a man. Butler wrote when crack cocaine was plaguing the country. Lauren does not like or trust the police (with good reason). Although society is collapsing, radio stations still broadcast and ammunition for weapons is still available (and a good thing).

Also, a major thread in the book is Lauren's thoughts about God and development of a religion. "God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But there's hope in understanding the nature of God—not punishing or jealous, but infinitely malleable. There's comfort in realizing that everyone and everything yields to God, There's power in knowing that God can be focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. But there's no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for yo or take revenge for you."

I don't know what I expected when I opened the book. I was impressed by Butler's imagination and inventiveness and I'm delighted I finally read it.

Six hundred seventy pages of wonderful

The thing is 670 pages. Okay, it was a 2025 Man Booker Prize finalist, but do I want to spend three weeks of my reading time on two young people "whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years"? Do you? After all, the world is filled with shorter novels waiting to be read. Nevertheless, I gave it 50 pages to see how it goes.

Three weeks and 670 pages later I closed The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai in awe of her talent and thankful I'd decided to read this, her third novel. (Her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.)

It would be nice to offer a unique, penetrating, adequate comment but I cannot improve on the words of others. Author Andrew Sean Greer wrote, "[It] achieves the ultimate of what a book should do: carry us away into other peoples’ lives, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, until it comes around and shows us to ourselves. Grand, magnificent, intimate, more than wonderful, this is a novel you will hold close to your heart. I certainly did. I cannot recommend it enough,” 

And author Lauren Groff wrote, "Literary love stories are vanishingly rare these days, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that even more precious thing: a love story that's also profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, and that teaches us how to love in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world."

The novel needs all those pages to hold all the characters: Sonia's parents, Sunny's mother, their servants (including the cook the mothers compete for), relatives, eavesdroppers Sonia's lover, Sunny's lover, Sunny's best friend. Yet even with all the characters and the unfamiliar Indian names and Indian dishes, one should have no difficulty knowing who was who and the food is clearly food.

We watch daily life in upper class Indian life, Indian customs and cuisine, and more and more. The action takes takes us Vermont, New York City, Delhi, Allahabad, Goa (what do you know about life in Goa?), Venice, Mexico. 

And in addition to conjuring up a wealth (a plethora?) of characters, Desai puts them in a recognizable historical reality. The older characters remember Partition; we watch the contemporary ones experience anti-Muslim pogroms and 9/11.

Desai is also able to weave in interesting, apt observation, almost philosophical tidbits that illustrate a character or a situation. Here for example are Sonia's thoughts about death: "It was worth believing in an impossible story of God, so when death occurred and the impossible happened, you already believed that anything could be true, and if you believed in heaven, you would be much less sad. So many reason to be religious."

I hope that by writing about the length of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny I have not discouraged potential readers. Yes, it's long. Yes, it's about Indians. Yes, it requires a commitment. And yes, it is an exceptional book.

It's not a book for claustrophobes

Nevada Barr was a Park Ranger in the National Forest Service when in the early 1990s she created Anna Pigeon, a Park Ranger in the National Forest Service who finds herself embroiled in crimes in America's national parks.The first Anna Pigeon mystery, The Track of the Cat, was published in 1993. The most recent, Boar Island, the 19th, was published in 2016.

She published her first book, Bittersweet, in 1983 when she was 31. She describes it as “a kind of ‘cowboy’ book because I'd grown up on westerns and loved those; it had a female hero and was a bit uneven," Unfortunately, “The publishing house really didn't know what to do with it. A neo-gothic lesbian western? I think it sold 1200 copies and then went out of print.” But after Bittersweet, Barr sold nothing for ten years. “I'd written a lot of stuff,  but it just wasn't selling.”

At the time she was living in Minneapolis, and says she actually made a pretty decent living there doing voice-overs. industrial training films, and an occasional play. She liked Minneapolis—“but it was just too cold!” Moreover, “I wasn't going to go any further. I was 37 years old, and you know men can kind of slide into the old silver fox thing, but women just start to lose work. I also was getting tired of it, and I became very interested in the environmental movement. The Park Service seemed like a really neat way to segue out of acting because I could do it during the summers and still make a living as an actor during the winters.” She quit acting entirely and entered the Park Service full time when she was 40. Anna Pigeon was a natural result.

Although Track of the Cat was a prize-winner and led to a contract for more books, I did not care for it, feeling that it has many flaws of a first book—although it was not one. 

On the other hand, I cannot recommend highly enough Blind Descent, the sixth book in the series by which time Barr was fully in control of the characters, the situation, and the environment, which is almost a character itself.

Anna is dispatched to Carlsbad Caverns National Park when her close friend and fellow ranger, Frieda Dierkz, is severely injured while exploring the treacherous, labyrinthine depths of Lechuguilla Cave (which is a real place). Battling her claustrophobia, Anna fights her terror and joins the rescue mission.The After hours of squeezing through narrow wormholes and crawling through inky blackness, Anna reaches her injured friend. In a fleeting moment of lucidity, Frieda whispers a warning: her fall was no accident.

Before the team can successfully extract her, however, a second incident results in Frieda's death and nearly kills Anna as well. She realizes a killer is underground with them, although why is just one mystery among several. Anna is, in effect, in a "closed-room" murder mystery deep beneath the earth. As the survivors return to the surface, Anna has to unravel a web of complicated relationships, shady business practices, and park politics to identify the murderer.

I think the book succeeds because Barr is able to evoke the absolute blackness, the absolute strangeness of a cave. She describes in detail the equipment cavers must use to descend 150 feet into the darkness—and climb back out. The motive for the murder makes sense to me as does the identity of the killer, which is not always the case. If Nevada Barr is a new name to you, and if you read mysteries, I recommend Blind Descent.

Another Japanese factoid

I just stumbled across (or on) an interesting Japanese word in a story I've begun translating: 買い食い.

The first character, a version of 買う, is pronounced "kai" and means "to buy."

The second, a version of 食る, can in this context be pronounced "gai" and means "to eat." (I had to look that up.)

Put them together and, according to my dictionary, you get "kaigai" which means "buying and eating sweets (esp. of children); between-meal snacking.' 

Thank goodness for the dictionary.​

A paragraph from Tana French's "The Keeper"

I am reading Tana French's new novel, The Keeper, the third book she's set in the West Ireland hamlet of Ardnakelty and featuring retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper.

Tana Fench

I do plan to talk about it in more detail when I finish, but I wanted to take a minute to point out that the quality of her writing is what puts French "in a class by herself" according to The New York Times. Here is one small snippet to give you a taste:

"These women [of the hamlet] won't tell her [what she wants to know about a dead girl]. All of them were born wearing the prime directive like a birthmark: say nothing. Talk plenty, keep the chat flowing, but when it comes to anything that has weight, saying it would only lead to trouble. Everyone here will say nothing expertly, but Lena is still fluent in her mother tongue, even if she refuses to speak it, She'll know, by whether they warn her off, if there's something they're keeping unsaid."

Does that give you a sense of the women, the community, and Lena's place in it? It sure does me. Remarkable. 

Sandra dies

So you want to know what a novel can do? How's this . . . .

Sandra tells her half of the story in the first person with barely a hiccough after she dies in a freak accident and is cremated in Nepal.

The author narrator tells the other half, the story of Trip, Sandra's 15-year-old autistic son. He does not talk much. 

Sandra and her ex-husband have dumped Trip in a therapeutic school in what sounds like the Arizona desert.  Trip wanders away from the school and is picked up by Anthony, a decent if feckless guy who is driving to Florida to  board up some Airbnbs before a hurricane hits. In other words, as best his parents know, Trip has vanished.

Sandra is in Nepal to scout out a conference, "Death and Denouement." for a PBS documentary, a conference "for people who study death." Many of the attendees assume one's consciousness—spirit, soul—lives on after the body dies or have an open an open mind. After Sandra' dies, she lives on in the bardo (we're in Buddhist country after all) or in a form a purgatory, one in which she can see what the living are doing.

Anthony with Trip in tow visits a lavish party on the coast of what sounds like South Carolina, steals a large, lavish sailing yacht, and heads to sea. Unfortunately for Trip, Anthony is (was) a recovering alcoholic and he became drunk at the party. Once the drunken adult and autistic teen are at sea, events run down hill. Will Sandra's spirit save Trip? How can it? Will Anthony sink the boat? What can Trip do—if anything?

I do not believe in a life after death, but I was willing to stay with Amie Barrodale's novel Trip to see how she writes herself out of the hole in which she put herself. Trip requires a larger than usual suspension of disbelief, but I've decided it's worth reading. With the giant exception of Sandra's death and subsequent adventures, Trip's experiences with Anthony are, for me, plausible and convincing. It's an interesting combination; almost as interesting as a story told in both the third and first person.  

A soap opera with a pedestrian mystery

Domenica de Rosa writes mysteries as Elly Griffiths, fifteen in the Ruth Galloway series. An interviewer pointed out that readers love her characters—maybe more than the mystery—and asked if that is a key to her appeal. 

Griffiths agreed. “Character—definitely. Funnily enough I’ve been writing about Wilkie Collins. He said character and humor are the most important things in writing. I think that’s right. I do think that character is plot. I mean you can have the cleverest plot but if you don’t have characters that people relate to then there’s no tension and suspense. It matters because tension and suspense come from caring about what’s going to happen to those characters. I think fiction is great at relationships between people’s chosen families, not blood family.” 

The Last Remains is reportedly the last in the Ruth Galloway series. (Griffiths has another mystery series set in Brighton, plus three stand-alone books and four children's books.) It is, I think, more family drama than mystery although there is a body and Ruth and her young daughter are put in danger by the villain, so that makes it a mystery.

Ruth, in addition to being an archeology professor, helps the police as forensic archeologist. She's called when a builder discovers a twenty-year-old skeleton behind a wall in a shop he is renovating (the skeleton has a modern metal plate in an ankle). The police are able to identify the skeleton fairy quickly as a young archeology student who vanished twenty years earlier. What happened to her and who hid her inside the wall? One twist: had her body been hidden immediately after her death the decaying stench would have given her away; the skeleton had been moved from somewhere else.

Complications on top of complications. Ruth's university is eliminating the archeology department and her job. The estranged wife of Ruth's long-time lover, Nelson, wants to return to the couples' home with their 5-year-old-son. Nelson is father of Ruth's 15-year-old daughter and is head of the local police,  A good friend of theirs, Michael Malone aka Cathbad, was somehow involved with the dead student. Late in the book Cathbad disappears and although he's been helpful in earlier books and lives with a police officer the circumstances are suspicious.

While I found the mystery thin and the personal stories pedestrian, I admire Griffiths's ability to keep in motion all the plates she's set spinning without dropping one. She gives us access to the internal states and thoughts of different characters without drawing attention to what she's doing. I'm not so sure about referring to earlier books (cases), although it may give series readers a shock of pleasure, but it is clever to have a child character show up in The Last Remains as an exceptionally helpful adult. Griffiths fans will enjoy The Last Remains. Newbies should start earlier in the series.

A ripping good international spy adventure from 1903

The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of the Secret Service Recently Achieved by Erskine Childers is a classic. Ken Follett, the author of The Eye of the Needle and other thrillers and historical fiction, calls it "The first modern thriller." 

First published in 1903, the novel is in some ways a boy's adventure story as two friends from Cambridge work to uncover German plans to invade England from its North Sea islands, a coastal string that stretches from Holland to Denmark.

What raises the book from the routine and helped it become a classic—aside from being a ripping good story—is the author's belief at the beginning of the 20th century that in fact England did face the danger of a German invasion from across the North Sea, a danger for which the country was entirely unprepared. The Riddle of the Sands makes Childers's case for the danger using  fiction set in real places.

"Immensely popular in the years leading up to World War 1," writes the publisher of the 2018 reprint I read, "The Riddle of the Sands is a precisely drawn and geographically accurate adventure that . . . was perceived as so accurate, in fact, that it actually influenced the placement of multiple naval bases by Winston Churchill after its publication."

The novel follows Carruthers, a bored British Foreign Office clerk, who accepts an invitation to join his old friend Davies on a sailing trip through the treacherous waters of the Frisian Islands off the German coast. But what begins as a leisurely holiday quickly transforms into a tense investigation. Davies believes that German forces are secretly preparing for an invasion of England—and he needs Carruthers’ help to uncover the truth. Both are Cambridge graduates in their mid-20s. Carruthers speaks fluent German; Davies is a brilliant small boat sailor. As the two navigate shoals, fog, and suspicious naval activity, they stumble into a geopolitical conspiracy that would later echo the real fears and rivalries of pre-World War I Europe.

Childers writes from the inside. He had extensively sailed the waters he writes about and was himself a veteran of British intelligence. If you buy it, make sure the edition includes the five charts charts that support the story. Some readers may be put off by the 1903 British sentences, but they are no more complex than Conan Doyle's or Wilkie Collins's.

According to Wikipedia, Childers was a firm believer in the British Empire and served as a volunteer in the army expeditionary force in the Second Boer War in South Africa. His experiences there began a gradual process of disillusionment with British imperialism. He was adopted as a candidate in British parliamentary elections, standing for the Liberal Party at a time when the party supported a treaty to establish Irish home rule, but he later became an advocate of Irish republicanism and the severance of all ties with Britain.

On behalf of the Irish Volunteers, he smuggled guns into Ireland on his own sailboat that were later used against British soldiers in the Easter Rebellion. He had a significant role in the negotiations between Ireland and Britain that culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, but was elected as an anti-Treaty member of the first Irish parliament. He sought an active role in the Irish Civil War (over the acceptance of the terms of the treaty) that followed, was arrested as a rebel, and was executed in 1922 by the Irish Free State.