Quick Reads, Quick Reviews

Even when I'm not reading as much as normal, it's hard to resist the pull of a short book. They're the perfect thing to jump start your reading. Here are three that I recently read.

Vertigo by Joanna Walsh
Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project. 2015.
Genre: Short Stories
Source: Independent Bookstore
Pages: 120


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My daughter has made her first sacrifice to fashion. She has bought a short pink skirt with lace, which does not suit her and for which there is no suitable season or occasion. It will remain unworn, but beautiful. When she wears it, it stops being beautiful. When she takes it off, there it is, beautiful again. For this, she has given up her money.

This book engaged me like no other book could one day when I was up in the middle of nowhere with a stack of books to keep my company. I was slumping hard, but once I started this collection of vignettes, I couldn't stop. The packaging itself is stunning, the book almost square, and the words inside are also beautiful. It was one of those reads where I could tell that what I was reading was beautiful and fascinating, but I also felt not completely smart enough to get all of it. Each story takes you deep into the head of a woman (sometimes different, sometimes the same as an earlier story as far as I could tell). For the most part, we get to observe small moments but overall are given powerful insight into things like love, loss, being a person, etc. Walsh's minimalism was so elegant, I could hardly handle it. I was greatly moved by a number of these stories.

One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun, Jung Yewon (translator)
Publisher: Tilted Axis Press. Oct. 3, 2016.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Friend



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Yeah, like me, I said, and then it hit me. I looked down at my feet, and sensed something odd about the way they were outlined, against the pine cones and white oak leaves splayed over soft soil. My shadow, spread out thin, very thin, stretched out from the little toe of my right foot all the way into the thickets.

Even though I give both this and Vertigo four stars, I liked this book better. If you like your novellas in translation with a hint of creepy magical realism, this is the one for you. Set in a slum electronics market in South Korea, a girl starts to notice that her shadow is rising. Other people gradually notice the same thing, their shadows becoming their own quiet, autonomous entities. But what does it mean?? All of the relationships between the characters are so interesting. Hwang Jungeun's writing is very subtle and the strange tale was completely riveting. Jung Yewon did a fantastic job translating this novella into stark, atmospheric English. Han Kang (author of The Vegetarian) is giving this book publicity, and I have to say that I liked it more than The Vegetarian. Not that it's a contest. This is a strange, gently unsettling novella that gave me all sorts of feelings.

The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón
Publisher: Melville House. August 2016.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Friend
Pages: 208



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It is impossible to tell apart the animals.

I wanted to like this novella a lot more than I did. Despite being over 200 pages, The Subsidiary took around 20 minutes to read max. That's because each page is no more than a sentence. We've got an experimental format on our hands!! Our main character is an office worker trapped in his building when there's a mysterious power outage. The gimmick? He's writing the book using stamps. So, visually, this book is quite stunning. The story gets a little bit dark, a little bit absurdist. Some weird shit goes down in this Latin American subsidiary office. A lot is unexplained: all of the workers seem to be disabled, there's a child there (??), there's some weird sex stuff. So it seems as if none of us, the readers nor the characters, know fully what's going on. And that's totally fine with me. There just wasn't enough substance to carry the gimmick, in my opinion.

Would you check out any of these quick reads? Have one to suggest?

The Invoice by Jonas Karlsson: Review

The Invoice by Jonas Karlsson
Publisher: Hogarth. July 12, 2016.
Pages: 208
Genre: Literary
Source: Publisher



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A passionate film buff, our hero’s life revolves around his part-time job at a video store, the company of a few precious friends, and a daily routine that more often than not concludes with pizza and movie in his treasured small space in Stockholm. When he receives an astronomical invoice from a random national bureaucratic agency, everything will tumble into madness as he calls the hotline night and day to find out why he is the recipient of the largest bill in the entire country.-Goodreads

This tiny book is so sweet and charming, and that's coming from somebody who thinks horror movies pussyfoot around opportunities to kill off child characters. So it's not cheesy, dopey, or annoying in any way. It was just a very nice time to read. Jonas Karlsson wrote one of my favorite funny books, The Room, and while The Invoice isn't hilarious, it is equally quirky. And equally focused on the ridiculousness of bureaucracy. Karlsson knows what he likes. Or, I guess, hates in this case.

Our unnamed protagonist is confronted with a 5,700,000 Swedish kronor (~658,000 USD) invoice, which he soon learns is the cost of all the happiness he's experienced in his life. Despite being a guy with very little going on in his life -- a part time video store job, no financial responsibilities, little family, one friend -- he has one of the largest bills in the country. We follow him as he tries to find out why his invoice is so enormous. He calls up the agency and speaks with a representative on the phone to try to figure out what happened, and he finds himself getting closer and closer to the woman on the other end.

With some reluctance, I had to admit that I was pretty happy with my life.

This book was a very quick, fun read. At first, our hero seems like a pretty miserable, lazy nobody, but he has a spectacular ability to appreciate the little things in life. As we learn more about the events that have taken place in his life, both the main character and the reader learn a lot about perspective. His capacity for contentment is both admirable and inspiring, at least to somebody like me who is all sorts of restless.

There are some really excellent moments in this book. A couple of them near the end gave me shivers. Some of it felt repetitive, however, and I feel like The Invoice could have stood to be shorter than it was. All in all, though, I had fun reading it.

So Much for That Winter by Dorthe Nors: Review

So Much for That Winter by Dorthe Nors
Publisher: Graywolf. June 21, 2016.
Pages: 147
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Publisher



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Dorthe Nors follows up her acclaimed story collection Karate Chop with a pair of novellas that playfully chart the aftermath of two very twenty-first-century romances. In "Days," a woman in her late thirties records her life in a series of lists, giving shape to the tumult of her days--one moment she is eating an apple, the next she is on the floor, howling like a dog. As the details accumulate, we experience with her the full range of emotions: anger, loneliness, regret, pain, and also joy, as the lists become a way to understand, connect to, and rebuild her life.
In "Minna Needs Rehearsal Space," a novella told in headlines, an avant-garde musician is dumped via text message. Fleeing the indignity of the breakup and friends who flaunt their achievements in life, career, and family, Minna unfriends people on Facebook, listens to Bach, and reads Ingmar Bergman, then decamps to an island near Sweden, "well suited to mental catharsis."  -Goodreads

Ever since reading her collection of stark short stories, Karate Chop, I've been looking forward to more of Danish author Dorthe Nors' work being translated to English. And So Much for That Winter is beyond exciting, because it's two longer pieces that both specifically highlight the magic that Nors can create in her terse sentence styling. She accomplishes so much while saying so little and it never ceases to stun me. So on to the two novellas that make up this collection (if two of something makes a collections, that is).

MINNA NEEDS REHEARSAL SPACE

Minna and Karin took a class together.
Karin latched onto Minna.
Minna is somewhat of a host species.

First of all, I don't think I've ever related to a sentence more than I have that last one. Anyway, that's beside the point. Minna Needs Rehearsal Space is my favorite of the two novellas -- I loved it. I loved it so much that I feel comfortable saying just read this one, you don't even need to read Days. But more on that later.

Grown-ups are kids who have lots to hide.

This story is written in a series of headlines, because the man who just broke Minna's heart is a reporter. And it's brilliant. It sounds like it would be dull to read, but it's both incredibly readable and it commits extraordinary acts of beauty. Narrator, Minna, breaks modern day life and love into small simplistic bits that will make you laugh and tear up and be amazed at how Nors has managed to capture how it feels to be a human today. Constantly clever and moving, this novella carries a strong plot with memorable (needy, horrible) characters you've most likely seen before in your life.

If you're a fan of Jenny Offill's Dept of Speculation or Edouard Leve's Suicide, seek this one out.

Jette's erotic.
Jette calls her boyfriends lovers.
Jette's boyfriends are married to other women.

DAYS

I love Nors and I want to love everything she ever does and I don't want to say anything bad about any part of So Much for That Winter, but I didn't love Days. Though similarly written, this time in the form of lists, it was the opposite in that it did not feel as compulsively readable. I mean it was easy to read, but I didn't want to read it that badly. The main character is a writer who doesn't actually seem to have a job who is going through some vague struggle and we get to see her day to day actions and thoughts. If at any point I was given a reason to care about the main character, it may have been interesting. But for the most part I was just wondering if I would figure out what was going on and then was disappointed when I didn't really.

1. Woke an hour early
2. made instant coffee, 
3. drank it, 
4. stood by my kitchen window the same way I stood by my kitchen window when I lived on the island of Fanø and went down to the beach every day and crushed razor shells underfoot: Why do I live here? I’d wondered 
5. and couldn’t have known that one day I would stand in a flat in Valby and look at the crooked tulips in the backyard and wonder the same thing.

There are definitely good moments in it. I enjoyed some of the narrator's thoughts. But I also wished the lists could have been focused and actually functioned as lists or had some sort of visible reasoning. But some of the lists, unlike the one shared above, didn't have any sort of verb so it wasn't like a list of each thing she did. I don't know. I was just unclear about the whole thing the whole way through. So much for that novella, right?

Maybe there's something I just didn't pick up on, but I personally recommend Minna Needs Rehearsal Space (luckily the longer of the two) and can give only give a shrug and an "it was ok I guess" to Days.

I think So Much for That Winter is worth getting just for Minna, I feel that strongly about the novella.

3 Things "Grief Is the Thing with Feathers" Got Right About Grief

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
Publisher: Graywolf. June 7, 2016.
Pages: 128
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Publisher



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In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.

In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This self-described sentimental bird is attracted to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and physical pain of loss gives way to memories, this little unit of three begin to heal. -Goodreads

Without thinking about it, I read Max Porter's debut Grief Is the Thing with Feathers really, really close to Father's Day. For the past 12 years I've been coping with the loss of my father. It's been a long journey of trying to acknowledge it, then trying desperately not to acknowledge it, and eventually trying to find my way back to the experience through writing about it. It's always been something with me, constantly changing me, whether I was willing to accept it or not.

Through its fable-tones, strange format, and fragmented stream-of-consciousness writing (think Dept. of Speculation), this book is the closest I've ever read to capturing the feelings of grief. We get to be in the head of the father, the kids, and the magical Crow who inhabits their home. The death of the mother in this family shifts them into an entirely new world that nobody else can touch.

1. // You're constantly trying to rationalize the loss.

After the advent of laser surgery but before puberty, before self-consciousness, before secondary school, before money, time or gender got their teeth in. Before language was a trap, when it was a maze. Before Dad was a man in the last thirty years of his life. Really, on reflection, the best possible time to lose a mom. - Boys

No, there's no good reason why my dad died when he did. No, not everything happens for a reason. Will that stop me from having pretty much the identical thoughts as Max Porter captured above? Definitely not. So much of the boys behavior parallels that of me and my brother. 

2. // You support your family without even realizing it.

They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me. - Dad talking about Boys

I was eleven when my dad died. I was too young for a lot of things. Only now can I look back and try to form an image in my mind of how others were affected by the event. I didn't then see my dad as a person or my mom as a person, really. They were dad and mom. I know now that my mom was going through an incredible hardship. And while she had to be completely overwhelmed with everything going on, including worrying about us, I can only hope that we helped her find joy every once in a while like she did for us during that time. Max Porter does an impeccable job capturing all of the intricacies of being a parent while being a person who just lost the love of their life and their best friend.

3. // It's not something you ever really get over. 

Grief isn't something that ever truly ends. It evolves. And that's ok.



There are so many more things that Porter got right about grief, but those are three that I can articulate.There are things about this book that I only sort of felt like I understood. I feel like I need to go back and critically read basically all of Crow's parts. It would probably help if I had read Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. I'm sure there's a ton of stuff I'm missing. But I also enjoyed just letting Porter's beautiful writing flow over me for about an hour and then sobbing like a baby when it was over.

One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place Left to Hide by Christian Kiefer: Review

One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place Left to Hide by Christian Kiefer
Publisher: Nouvella. March 22, 2016.
Pages: 193
Genre: Literary fiction
Source: Publisher



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Renowned installation artist Frank Poole has embarked on his most ambitious project to date: an entire housing subdivision in the desert of Nevada, with every element painted stark white. By his side is his young wife Caitlin, his manager and confidante who keeps the volatile artist functioning from day to day. But as Frank grows increasingly anxious about his undertaking, Caitlin learns she is pregnant and begins to wonder what the future might hold for them both. -Goodreads

Let us be clear.
The time you spend reading these words
will not be returned.

Can we give a shout out to the best opening lines ever written? Luckily, the rest of this novella is about as bold as those first two sentences that confront you before the story begins. I was at first startled by the format of this delightfully sized little book, but soon came to fall in love with it. The whole thing is like a transcript of a documentary. Sort of. It's a transcript of a documentary, and yet it doesn't feel dry. It's lyrical, though sparsely written. Kiefer's writing first impressed me in The Animals and it didn't fail to impress me here. Every once in a while, the book references you as the viewer, or one of the characters looks at you/the camera. I wholly felt as if I were watching humans the entire time, so this experimental format was a success.

The story was at once intriguing. An artist, Frank Poole, who creates huge installations (like a replica of a Starbucks in a strip mall that is forever locked) begins work on his largest-scale project yet. In this project, he attempts to capture perfect moments in time through creating an entire,  completely and perpetually sealed off neighborhood in the middle of the desert; all painted white.

As his project gets more difficult and unwieldy, we learn more about Frank and his dysfunctional childhood through interview. We also learn more about his young wife and manager, Caitlin, who gave up her own artistic dreams and is now pregnant. The experimental format and Kiefer's beautiful writing lend to some really visual scenes that show us important things about their relationship and Frank's worsening struggle with his project and life.

The novella is chock-full of poignant vignettes and bits of dialogue, but I'm still unsure about the ending. I actually ended up rereading most of the book to see if I was missing something. I liked it, but it felt a little too easy. I would love to hear what anybody else thought of it.

Overall, this is a good pick for the Weirdathon if you're looking for an experimental format. It's easily a book you can finish in one sitting. 

P. S. The book cover is beautiful and you can only see the title at very specific angles, making it frustrating to photograph, but a delight to hold and look at.