What We're Reading - May 17

I am reading a monograph on Lyonel Feininger, the German painter, fifty of whose early canvases were trapped behind the Iron Curtain for much of the 20th century. I am also reading Voltaire‘s fable The Princess of Babylon. As a diversion, I just began Lucia in London, by E. F. Benson.
--Kam

At lunch today at Amy and Sean’s place, the discussion ranged from real estate adventures in Snohomish County to Marcel Proust, a favorite of fellow guest, Kam.  My bookish allusion was to Philip Levine’s collection What Work Is (Knopf 1991; winner of the National Book Award), wherein may be found Levine’s “Among Children,” a new favorite poem.  Forty-four lines of unrhymed verse tending to measure out to five accented syllables per line, the poem plays on Yeats’ “Among School Children,” written when the Irish poet visited a Catholic school for girls in 1926, the one that ends with the ecstatic image of a dancing chestnut tree where “Labour is blossoming.”  Levine’s children, are “the children of Flint,” whose fathers “work at the spark plug factory or truck /bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs/ to the widows of the suburbs.”  Written at least 23 years before the water crisis in Flint, the poem seems prescient.  Unlike Yeats, the 60-yo smiling “public man” whose encounter with the students brings to life dreams of his lover as a child and thoughts about Plato, Levine’s visit to the classroom stirs up earlier memories of a visit to these children as newborns “burning with joy” as infants in a Catholic hospital.  He wants to sit with them now and read aloud the Book of Job and whisper to them “all I know, all I will never know.”
--Sue Perry


 

I just finished reading a novel called A Fairy Tale by Jonas T. Bengtsson.  The novel takes place in Copenhagen in the eighties and nineties and is told from the first person point of view of a young boy and later young man who spent the first part of his life on the run with his loving but outside-the-law father.  I really liked the first part of the book from the child's point of view.  It's told in a slow, matter-of-fact tone of the daily rhythm of a child's unconventional life by an observant boy who adores his father and, like the reader, doesn't understand why he isn't going to school or participating in other normal social relationships.   The second part of the book narrated when the boy has grown up and is working in a letter sorting office and drinking excessively lost the fairy tale charm of the first part of the book for me.

--Amy

I just got through with The Power by Naomi Alderman.  I don't often read full novels, preferring nonfiction generally, but this had been described as great by someone I trust so I thought I'd give it a shot.  Also Margaret Atwood is listed all over the covers lavishing praise upon the soul of the author, and I generally like her writing as well as her view of Sci Fi as not a genre that does not live up to be qualified as "literature." 

The premise is that a biological change takes place among women in current time but the book is being written by a fictitious author 5000 years into the future, writing a historical novel.  The change is that young women come to be able to shock with their bodies, just like an eel can at sea.  The book follows four subjects through what eventually becomes a new world war leading to an apocalypse and an eventual rebuilding of society with traditional  male and female roles reversed.  This structure seems the cleverest part. The body of the book is sort of action packed adventure to the point of the outbreak of war, involving London drug gangs, a convent full of somewhat silly gospel and ritual run by "Mother Eve" and an itinerant young male reporter studiously gallivanting around the globe reporting on the flip-flop of Saudi cultural dominance and the resulting armed men's movement battling the founding of a new state that is run by a power-mad woman.  One heroine has her "skien" -- the source of her unusually well developed power -- surgically removed against her will in a terrible betrayal by her own family. The gist being women are not fundamentally any different than men and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  The ending provides the punchline in which there are a series of letters between the fictitious author and his editor, in which the author is kowtowing and his superior finally suggests that he consider publishing under the name of a woman, considering the controversial nature of the subject matter: that men could have at some point in the distant past actually have been the dominant cultural force: such folly; sort an an inane hypothesis, really.

The book kept me reading, and was amusing enough, but the tropes of standard fiction constitute the main portion, so I'd say it was cute enough for a quick read. 

-- Sean