Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Dina Nayeri on Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Sanjena Sathian on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, Katie Kitamura on Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, David L. Ulin on Fernando A. Flores’ Brother Brontë, and Gracie Hadland on Heather Lewis’ Notice.
“It is a deft, broken-hearted, rhetorical savaging of comfortable people who say nothing (or pay lip service) but care only about preserving normality, convincing themselves that these things only happen ‘to certain places, to certain people.’
Organized as a series of linked essays, One Day is powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. I devoured it in two quick sittings, and by the end my heart was drumming. The ugliness El Akkad describes is real and seems inescapable, too. Much of it is the unspeakable stuff nobody admits to but is clear to anyone who reads or observes: that once we’re safe, our empathy is often performative; that it’s more expedient to be against evil after it’s over; that western countries preach justice and democracy, but act to protect wealth and power. He balks at the morality of both the right, who with ‘deranged honesty’ sign missiles, and the left, whose ‘progressivism often ends at the lawn sign.’ And he reckons, at times, with his own part in all this.
As an Iranian who spent my first eight years dodging Saddam Hussein’s American bombs, then arrived in America to be treated like a savage, this book speaks to me. I’ve heard these arguments before, but never so articulately expressed.
…
“One Day is passionate, poetic and sickening. It is full of well-earned rage, frustration with those who need this morality to be spelled out. For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual, to have these ugly truths articulated. It stoked and tempered the fires of my own rage. It is an important book, a must-read, if only for the reminder that history always comes down to one simple question: ‘When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?'”
–Dina Nayeri on Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (The Guardian)
“In the 12 years since releasing her best-selling novel Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has published prolifically but not primarily as a writer of literary fiction. Instead, she has ventured into other forms: memoir, children’s literature, feminist manifesto, a public lecture on free speech. When Beyoncé sampled Adichie’s TedX Talk ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ Adichie transformed from an acclaimed postcolonial novelist into a pop-public intellectual. Few artists’ work can survive such notoriety—see F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Salman Rushdie, and Haruki Murakami, to name a few famous writers whose later work suffered; celebrity is good for sales and frequently bad for art. Adichie’s fourth novel, Dream Count, proves that she is still a gifted storyteller, yet her fame has indeed affected her work.
…
“That immersive storytelling allows Dream Count to nearly pass for a successful work of psychological realism about love, friendship, immigration, and making a life of one’s own—a pretty good story. But Adichie’s oeuvre has always been about both individual people and the social contexts that shape them, and, similarly, this book is not just a tale of four women’s lives; it’s also about the social worlds those women inhabit. And as a broader social novel—Dream Count falls short. At best, the book presents a Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus picture of gender relations; at worst, it is a blandly regressive take on progressive Americans, who, in these pages, are two-dimensional caricatures sketched from conservative talking points rather than the fully formed characters one expects to encounter in literary fiction.
…
“Adichie…once excelled at the fundamental novelistic task of parceling out her sympathies and critiques between subjects, never allowing any one character to be wholly in the right or wholly in the wrong. In turn, her fiction felt lively and polyphonic. By contrast, though Adichie writes from four POVs in Dream Count, she maintains only a superficial interest in different perspectives, and she abandons the novelist’s task of placing those perspectives in narrative conflict. In doing so, she neglects the moral and thematic intricacies innate to a good social novel.”
–Sanjena Sathian on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count (Vulture)
“Always present in Rivera Garza’s body of work is an interest in close interpretation—often, the interpretation of texts, be they poems, journal entries, letters or newspaper articles. In Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Rivera Garza herself guides the reader through the eponymous Liliana’s journals and via interviews with her friends, as she painstakingly pieces together a portrait of her murdered sister.
Death Takes Me riffs on these same ideas and motifs. We again have a Cristina Rivera Garza, working to interpret a text in the high-stakes arena of life and death — only this time she is a fictional narrator, and the story is a detective story instead of a somber personal reckoning. But this detective novel radically scrambles what we think of, and how we relate to, the genre.
…
Rivera Garza once described writing as ‘greeting herself as another for the first time.’ It is ‘the opposite of knowing oneself,’ she continued. ‘Unknowing, that would be an appropriate term to describe … what I thought writing was for.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rivera Garza does not follow the conventions of the mystery narrative, the narrowing of a multitude of names to one. Instead, the novel growing increasingly expansive as the strictures around identity grow looser and looser, encompassing more and more.
In this harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece, Rivera Garza ultimately goes one step further, unsettlingly implicating readers themselves. Every mystery puts the reader in the position of the detective—reading for clues, guessing at possible solutions—but in Death Takes Me, Rivera Garza does more than make this parallel literal. The novel argues that reading isn’t just detective work or a form of interrogation; it’s deadly, in and of itself. Reader, writer, killer vividly collide. As the novel’s anonymous message writer says, ‘Those who analyze, murder. I’m sure you knew that, Professor. Those who read carefully, dismember. We all kill.’”
–Katie Kitamura on Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me (The New York Times Book Review)
“‘Abandoned’ is an apt description of the Three Rivers that Fernando A. Flores portrays in Brother Brontë, his second novel, which takes place there in 2038. In spite of everything, the setting continues to compel me, as does the puzzle of Flores’s fiction, which frames the South Texas border region as a territory both physical and chimerical. On the one hand, it is a floodplain encompassing not only the Rio Grande, which divides the United States from Mexico, but also more than a dozen communities on either side of that boundary. On the other hand, it represents a kind of collective set of hallucinations. According to some contemporary political rhetoric, it’s a hellscape: lawless, a threat to national security, rife with drug and migrant trafficking. But Flores, who was born on the Mexican side and raised near McAllen, just across the river, sees it differently. His novel recalls what Valeria Luiselli wrote in Tell Me How It Ends, her 2017 book about the border: ‘While the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again … because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from many different angles, by many different minds.’
This notion of the border as liminal and inchoate sits at the center of Brother Brontë. An apocalyptic adventure story teeming with rock and rollers, samizdat books, worker rebellions, and underground societies, the novel envisions this land and its future not as utopian or dystopian, necessarily, but rather as a site of branching possibilities.
…
“For all the many ways that the border is commonly represented—as a political and geographic demarcation, a projection of fear and xenophobia—it is also, most essentially, a provocation to readers to widen their lens. Borders, by their nature, are elusive, a set of shifting lines on a map that tell us nothing about who lives on either side. In that sense, what else can this border be if not a laboratory for fusion: individual, collective, national, international? Brother Brontë is a novel that seeks to refashion it all.”
–David L. Ulin on Fernando A. Flores’ Brother Brontë (The Atlantic)
“Perhaps more so than the subject matter, publishers were put off by the narrator’s voice, which reads as eerily flat, describing scenes of sexual violence with incredible precision and usually without discernible emotional affect. Throughout the novel, there are hardly any recognizable decisions made by Nina; rather she engages in a random series of dissociative movements from one situation to the next, each one more precarious and dangerous than the last. All along, there’s a sense of her doing things impulsively, finding herself acting on something and not knowing why.
Another quality that likely made the novel hard to stomach for mainstream publishers is the fact that it lacked any narrative of revenge or redemption on the part of its abused narrator. There was no justice or forgiveness, no investigation of trauma or of a lurid past that might explain the behavior of the victim or the perpetrator. In fact, the roles of victim and perpetrator are at times completely obscured or blurred, the characters slipping between participation and subjugation. Lewis’s protagonist resists the archetype of the young girl; she’s neither a vengeful victim nor a waifish innocent corrupted by the world.
…
“There’s a feeling that books with a protagonist who is a victim of her circumstances are the only ones worth publishing or reading, because they are told in a way that makes the ordeal heroic, assuring the reader that by the story’s end, all will be resolved. Lewis rejects this—refusing to give in to a kind of moralizing or preaching about the experience of being a lesbian, being a woman, or being abused. What she’s after instead is a literature of transgression, one that imagines what is possible outside the acceptable ways of talking about violence in such moralizing terms.
…
“What she had created in her work was something far more complex than just the fallout of a traumatized person. Rather than pointing out the abuse or incest or violence, Lewis goes into it—into its murky territory, the conflation of pain and pleasure and, ultimately, an ambivalence about the point of life itself.”
–Gracie Hadland on Heather Lewis’ Notice (The Nation)
