Micro Book Reviews, February Edition
Five books briefly reviewed, quoted, and paired with their culinary accompaniment.
Note: my reading time is too precious at the moment for me to finish a book just for the sake of it, so all the books that made it onto this list are, in my opinion, worth the read! Each micro-review features a short blurb introducing the work, a food pairing just for the fun of it, and a quote. My hope is that the combination of these three elements will give you a sense of the book! Books are ordered from my favorite to least favorite, and the reviews don’t feature any spoilers.
Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Bard (2011)
Culinary pairing: smoked salmon on rye bread, topped with fresh dill and a squeeze of lemon juice.
This one was a heart wrencher. Enter the small world of our first person narrator, Esch, the only daughter of four children, living on the outskirts of a small town in Mississippi in August of 2005. The narrative unfolds over twelve days. Hurricane Katrina hits on day eleven.
It’s a story about the violence of motherhood. The violence of being a girl, and a women. The narrative is haunted by the children’s own mother, who died giving birth to the last boy of the family. But it’s also a story about loyally and love, and family. Every family member has their own obsession: Claude, an alcoholic and mostly absentee father, is obsessed with preparing for the upcoming storm, Esch is obsessed with Manny, her unloving lover (she is pregnant), Skeeter, the most motherly figure of the book, is obsessed with his dog China, his baby, and Randall, the oldest, is obsessed with dreams of playing basketball on a college team and escaping his world. All of these obsessions are uprooted, torn to shreds and drowned in the hurricane.
If you haven’t read this book, please, please read it. The narrative is set up it such a way that everything is always also about something else. It’s about hurricane Katrina, yes, but it’s also about living on the edges. It’s about being a girl without a mother. It’s about grief and the ways everyone cops with it.
It’s amazing.
« Why did you? » Skeetah wails.
« Why? » Daddy breathes to Randall and Big Henry standing over him, the blood sluicing down his forearms. They are gripping Daddy’s wrists, trying to stop the bleeding. Skeetah is punching the metal he meets. China is bloody-mouthed and bright-eyes as Medea. If she could speak, this is what I would ask her: Is this what motherhood is?
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)
Culinary pairing: A hearty glass of Côte du Rhône, and a slice of comté cheese
Oh, where to start… I’ve lived in the USA for almost nine years now. And I’m still trying to understand it. And, in truth, I’m not quite sure how even all of you born and raised here can understand the complexities and intricacies of American society. This book was re-read for me. And a very necessary one. I find I constantly, constantly, need to remind myself of the underpinnings of the cruelties of American society. Not that France doesn’t have a version of this too (and Coates actually addresses the specific case of France in this essay).
In move that very obviously reminded me of Simone de Beauvoir’s claim in The Second Sex that « one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, » Coates reminds us that race is a construct. One that destroys and ravishes bodies, one that allows for an obliteration of self through this process. One of the truly amazing moves Coates makes in this book is his attention to the individual within the group. He constantly reminds us that groups affected by unequal and unfair societies are made of individual people, not numbers, each with their loves and hates, their dreams and their families, their aspirations and their friends. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.
My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers- even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”- as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty. Some things were clear to me: The violence that ungirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of “Yeah nigger, what’s up now?” we’re not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design.
People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (2008)
Culinary pairing: A Burek (a deliciously flaky Balkan bake)
Follow Hannah, our main character, whose overarching narrative investigates the mysterious story of the Haggadah, a Jewish sacred text. Her first person narrative alternates with bits and pieces of historical fiction as Brooks weaves together small stories across time and space that account for the book’s travels.
I love books from which I learn, and this one did great in that respect. Between cultural knowledge of Jewish texts, historical knowledge of the Bosnian war, and linguistic excursions into Arabic, Hebrew, German and other languages still, Geraldine Brooks’s work had me googling every few pages. And it had me travel. From Australia to Sarajevo to Austria to Boston to London from the fourteen hundreds to twenty-first century, Brooks pieces together an intricate historical and cultural web of a narrative in which you encounter a variety of characters, and rapidly get attached to all of them. A masterpiece, a must read if there are any!
I wrote a more detailed review of this book last week, check it out on my publication page!
It was the cold hour, just before sunrise. I stared at the flames, thinking of blackening parchments in a medieval auto-da-fé; of youthful Nazi faces, lit by bonfires of burning books; of the shelled and gutted ruin, just a few blocks away, of Sarajevo’s library. Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the oven, the mass graves.
La Place (A Man’s Place), by Annie Ernaux (1983)
Culinary pairing: a generously buttered slice of baguette, dunked in a large bowl of café au lait.
One of Ernaux’s little masterpieces. Ernaux’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, and a well deserved win that was. For me, it’s her brilliant description of growing up in a working class family, and balancing that with her adult self, that does it. In this autobiographical piece, she explores her father’s life, tackling it piece by piece, in a semi-chronological order, building up a formidable portrait of a humble man. One of her focuses is her own distanciation with her father as she embraces a life that is so different from his: an education, some travel, a middle class life as a teacher of literature. Ernaux’s work has all been translated into English, so dive in!
Quote forthcoming, I’m working on getting the translation for it!
World of Wonders, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (2020)
Culinary pairing: A tall glass of ice cold raspberry lemonade
A little gem of a book, where you will learn, think, and of course, wonder. Aimee Nezhukumatathil shares snippets of her life as they intertwine with the natural world that she explores growing up, and as an adult. The wonders of the natural world help us rediscover our humanity, and encourage us to hold on to it. The book itself is a little wonder: Fumo Mini Nakamura’s illustrations are absolutely gorgeous and add to the pleasure of reading this book. Read this one slowly and steadily, research all the creatures and plants Nezhukumatathil introduces - and then start building your own book of wonders.
It is this way with wonder: it takes a bit of patience, and it takes putting yourself in the right place at the right time. It requires that we be curious enough to forgo our small distractions in order to find the WORLD. When I teach National Poetry Month in elementary schools, I sometimes talk about fireflies to conjure up memory and sensory details of the outdoors. Recently, however, seventeen students in a class of twenty-two told me they had never even seen a firefly- they thoughts I was kidding, simply inventing an insect. So I asked them what they did for fun in that crepuscular-pink time just before dinner. When I was growing up, I played kickball, tag, riding bikes- anything, really, until my parents flicked on the porch light. But the students’ most common answer: video games and movies. I’m other words, they were always indoors.
I hope you feel inspired to read some of these, and if you have already, I would love to hear your take on them!
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Salvage The Bones is one of my favorite novels of all time. I found that Esch leans to mother from her older brother, where the only being he 'mothers' is his fighter dog. The contrast between the dog being a fighting dog, and Skeet taking such gentle care of her, is yet another touch to motherhood, proving that even the strongest woman (China) deserves to be taken care of in the most gentle way imaginable and that doing this will never undermine her power.
Had my mouth and my mind watering!