Tag Archives: literary fiction

Book Review of Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell

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I borrowed an audio-copy of Karen Russell’s Swamplandia from the local library.

Description from Goodreads:
The Bigtree alligator-wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, formerly #1 in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava’s father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified thirteen, to manage ninety-eight gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief.

Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has written an utterly singular novel about a family’s struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking. An arrestingly beautiful and inventive work from a vibrant new voice in fiction.

Review:
Oh, I am well and truly torn on how I feel about this book. For one, it took me over a year to listen to it all. I borrowed it from the library and didn’t finish it before it was due, even after renewing it. Returned it and just wasn’t in any hurry to check it out again. It was almost a year later before I did. On the positive side, I was able to pick right back up where I left off, with no confusion. So, the story is easy enough to follow. On the negative side, I wasn’t invested enough to care that I didn’t know the ending for almost a year and I spent a lot of that time cringing and dreading where Ava’s narrative was obviously going. I REALLY hoped I was going to be surprised on that plot point, but predictably I was not.

I thought the setting was vivid and interesting, but the plot was kind of lost in it and the ending was so loose and anticlimactic I felt a little let down. The writing is very pretty though. I adored Kiwi’s narrator, David Ackroyd, but honestly I didn’t much care for Ava’s, Arielle Sitrick. She felt a little too stiff to me. All in all, I’m glad to have finished it, but also very glad to actually be finished.

The Mortifications

Book Review of The Mortifications, by Derek Palacio

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I received a copy of The Mortifications, by Derek Palacio from Blogging for Books.

Description from Goodreads:
In 1980, a rural Cuban family is torn apart during the Mariel Boatlift. Uxbal Encarnación—father, husband, political insurgent—refuses to leave behind the revolutionary ideals and lush tomato farms of his sun-soaked homeland. His wife Soledad takes young Isabel and Ulises hostage and flees with them to America, leaving behind Uxbal for the promise of a better life. But instead of settling with fellow Cuban immigrants in Miami’s familiar heat, Soledad pushes further north into the stark, wintry landscape of Hartford, Connecticut. There, in the long shadow of their estranged patriarch, now just a distant memory, the exiled mother and her children begin a process of growth and transformation.

Each struggles and flourishes in their own way: Isabel, spiritually hungry and desperate for higher purpose, finds herself tethered to death and the dying in uncanny ways. Ulises is bookish and awkwardly tall, like his father, whose memory haunts and shapes the boy’s thoughts and desires. Presiding over them both is Soledad. Once consumed by her love for her husband, she begins a tempestuous new relationship with a Dutch tobacco farmer. But just as the Encarnacións begin to cultivate their strange new way of life, Cuba calls them back. Uxbal is alive, and waiting.

Review:
This is what I would classify in my own taxonomy as a Book Club Book. It’s one of those books that takes itself very seriously, is beautifully written and every single person in it is miserable from start to finish. The specifics of their misery might change in the course of the book, counting as growth for a character, but everyone’s still miserable. That is The Mortifications  for you.

Despite how it might sound, I did like the book. More so now that I’ve finished than as I crawled through it. (It’s quite slow, inhabiting the characters mental space more than anything else.) But I can’t say reading it was as enjoyable for me as having digested the story as something to contemplate. I liked Ulises and Williams and I liked their relationship to the women in the novel. But the women are the objects of the book, while Ulises and, to a lesser extent Williams and Uxbal, are the subjects, in my opinion. And I could never quite wrap my head around the decisions and personalities of Soledad and Isabel.

The writing is beautiful, though entirely told, rather than shown—to such an extent that there are no quotation marks in the book. Nothing is said directly, the reader is just told that someone said something. It took a little while to get used to the style. But I did eventually and it was very cleverly done.

If you have a book club or happen to like book club books, this is worth picking up.

The Vegetarian

Book Review of The Vegetarian, by Han Kang

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The VegetarianI received a copy of Han Kang‘s The Vegetarian through Blogging For Books.

Description from Goodreads:
Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked images start haunting her thoughts, Yeong-hye decides to purge her mind and renounce eating meat. In a country where societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye’s decision to embrace a more “plant-like” existence is a shocking act of subversion. And as her passive rebellion manifests in ever more extreme and frightening forms, scandal, abuse, and estrangement begin to send Yeong-hye spiraling deep into the spaces of her fantasy. In a complete metamorphosis of both mind and body, her now dangerous endeavor will take Yeong-hye—impossibly, ecstatically, tragically—far from her once-known self altogether.

A disturbing, yet beautifully composed narrative told in three parts, The Vegetarian is an allegorical novel about modern day South Korea, but also a story of obsession, choice, and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.

Review:
This was nothing like I expected, which isn’ a bad thing. Translated from Korean, a lot of it hinges on the culture in which it is set, but not so much that you can’t understand it. As expected, it is a book about Yeong-hye, who chooses one day to become vegetarian. Unexpectedly, however, she’s not the subject of the book. She’s the object. She is the point on which people around her revolve, for better or worse. In fact, she hardly speaks in the book and those few words she does utter are almost all, “I don’t eat meat.” But that single decision on her part has disastrous ripples. Many of which reveal weaknesses in the relationships around her, if not simply the people.

This is one of those books in which no one is happy, no one at all. Possibly Yeong-hye, but I suspect not. (Though I also think she’s changing that.) The first part of the book is from the perspective of Yeong-hye’s selfish, disinterested husband, who views Yeong-hye with disguised disgust. The second, from that of her brother-in-law, who finds in her an object of obsession. And finally from that of her sister, for whom Yeong-hye is both an instigator of guilt and envy. It’s in her I found what I thought to be the most important passage of the book, the closest thing to a theme I identified, even.

The Vegetarian, Han Kang, pg. 148

While the writing in The Vegetarian is lovely, haunting even, as the blurb asserts, it is one of those books that ends without telling you what it’s about. It requires you to figure it out on your own. To choose for yourself. I choose to believe it is a book about social constrains and personal agency. It’s the easiest choice, next to she’s just crazy, perhaps, not as deep as some others may choose but the one I like.

All in all, I certainly see why it won the Man Booker International Prize and have no problem recommending it to readers.

What I’m drinking: Beef sipping broth from Boylard’s Meat & Provisions. It’s delicious; flavored with ginger, kaffir lime & lemongrass. I gotta have it extra hot though!