Chinelo Okparanta's debut, Happiness, Like Water, focuses mainly on African women navigating intimate relationships and hard choices. Raised in Nigeria and an immigrant to the U.S. (with an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, no less), Okparanta is a fresh, strong voice in fiction. These stories are simply and deftly constructed. I look forward to a novel from Okparanta!
Truman Capote is one of my favorite writers of all time, and his book The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places, demonstrates his wit, sense of humor, and incredibly astute eye for detail. He writes about many different people (Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Isak Dinesen, etc.) and places (New Orleans, Brooklyn, Russia, Japan, etc.). Some of my favorite quotes:
From New Orleans: Miss Y. does not believe in the world beyond N.O. ; at times her insularity results, as it did today, in rather chilling remarks. I had mentioned a recent trip to New York, whereupon she, arching an eyebrow, replied gently, "Oh? And how are things in country?"
From New York: Could it be that the transition from innocence to wisdom happens in that moment when we discover not all the world loves us?
From Brooklyn: I wanted to blow her up. She's a stinking pig; she and Cook have it fixed up between them never to give me any chocolate sauce so she can gobble it all her big fat self.
From A Ride Through Spain: In our compartment, the dark , dusty mother sat just as we had left her. She had not seen fit to join the party. She gave me a long, glittering look. "Bandidos," she said, with a surly, unnecessary vigor.
From Self Portrait: Not long ago my doctor suggested that I adopt a hobby other than wine-tasting and fornication. He asked if I could think of anything. "Yes, murder." He laughed, we both did, except I wasn't laughing. Poor man, little did he know what a painful and perfect demise I'd planned for him when, after eight days abed with something closely resembling black cholera, he still refused to pay me a house call.
And I truly loved Capote's account of a raven with clipped wings who he comes to care for, named Lola.
I read Wiley Cash's second novel this dark road to mercy, in two sittings. Told from three different perspectives, it is a tale with momentum and build up. Set in North Carolina, the novel centers around 12 year-old Esther Quillby and her younger sister, who both are in foster care given the death of their mother from an overdose and their absent father, Wade. Wade shows up in the middle of the night and whisks the girls away. Two other men are on his trail - the first, Brady Weller, the girls' court appointed guardian, and the second, Robert Pruitt, an acquaintance of Wade's nursing an old vendetta. This is a quick read but once I finished, the story didn't linger in my mind. I did not enjoy this nearly as much as Cash's first novel, a land more kind than home, which I found to be more memorable and atmospheric.
The Reason I Jump is written by a thirteen year old Japanese boy with autism, and includes his frank and thoughtful answers to questions about people along the autism spectrum. It was one of the most interesting accounts of autism I have read. Here are some highlights from Naoki Higashida's responses:
"Every single time I'm talked down to, I end up feeling utterly miserable - as if I'm being given zero chance of a decent future."
"The truth is, we'd love to be with other people. But because things never, ever go right, we end up getting used to being alone, without even noticing this is happening."
""We can put up with our own hardships okay, but the though that our lives are the source of other people's unhappiness, that's plain unbearable."
Naoki conveys the challenges of life with autism, but also conveys a sense for hope that with compassion, we can help people with autism and that those with autism can also help the rest of us understand how they think and move through the world.
With Young Hearts Crying, I have now read all of Yates' books, which include novels and short stories. They are all stellar and sharp, and I highly recommend Yates despite how depressing his work is. Young Hearts Crying tells the story of a failed marriage between a young couple, Michael and Lucy, who struggle to find meaningful connections to each other, their friends, and their artistic passions. My favorite Yates work is The Easter Parade, mainly because it shows off Yates' wit and humor which can often get lost in his other novels. Yates perfectly captured a particular American epoch, and I see him as very important to our literary canon.
I've heard a great deal about Anthony Marra's debut novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. The novel spans the 1990s through 2004 and takes the reader to a wintry village in Chechnya. Havaa, an eight year-old girl, is taken under the wing of a family friend named Akhmed after her father is abducted by Russian soldiers. Akhmed takes Havaa to the local hospital where a woman named Sonja is the sole surgeon. This is a very well written, heartbreaking novel that explores family and loyalty, tenderness and brutality. Most interesting for me was the fact that Marra's novel exposed me to a topic and region that I knew very little about. This was an eye opening read, and what I got most out of the novel was the eduction that it provided.
