Month: July 2023

The Dollmaker, by Nina Allan

by

DOLLMAKER_HB_DEMY.indd

I looked forward to reading this novel because of its experimental structure. It turned out to be a labyrinth of stories within stories, dizzying reversals and reveals, counterpoints and echoes. Even more than usual, I felt that as a reader I was an active participant in creating the story as I read.

At an early age Andrew Garvie began collecting dolls. His parents eventually came around to appreciating their only child’s preoccupation, recognising that his dwarfism limited his social life and his expertise actually led to a valuable collection. Andrew also begins to make exquisite dolls, sometimes restoring antique dolls.

He comes across an ad in the personal pages of a trade magazine requesting information about a Polish writer and dollmaker named Ewa Chaplin, and begins corresponding with Bramber Winters who says that Chaplin “seemed to know that dolls are people just like us.”

As they exchange letters, Bramber reminisces about her childhood and describes people who live in the same house with her now, though she leaves us—and Andrew—to guess if it is a boarding house or an institution of some kind. After a year of this, Andrew declares that he “understood that we were destined to be together.” He sets out on a quest from London to where she lives in Bodmin in Cornwall.

The book is a mix of Bramber’s letters, Ewa Chaplin’s dark fairy tales (included in full), and Andrew’s own memories, descriptions of dolls he’s made, and his encounters as he travels from London to Cornwall.

I find dolls quite eerie myself and as a child had nightmares about them. Once I had to leave a store in Toronto because the walls were festooned with doll heads made into clocks. Yet they are a potent image, especially in this context of stories within stories of dwarves and princesses, of solitude and unlikely connections.

Their otherness—people but not quite—keeps dragging us away from the strangeness of these two people who have never quite fit in, making us question what “normal” means in a world where magic might be real and fetishes quite common.

Nothing is quite what it seems, and often I found myself lost in the funhouse—in a good way. I appreciate that much is left unsaid so that that the reader cannot avoid engaging with the story and contributing to it.

Have you read a novel that incorporates myth and fairytales?

The Violin Conspiracy, by Brendan Slocumb

by

The Violin Conspiracy

I stumbled on this 2022 novel by chance. What a treat it turned out to be!

Playing one of his high school’s loaner violins, Ray McMillan finds his life’s passion. He loves music, especially classical music. However, his mother wants him to drop out of school as soon as the law allows and get a job at Popeye’s so he can help support the family.

No one in his family understands or supports his love of music except his grandmother Nora who gives him the fiddle owned by her own grandfather, a slave, given to him by his enslaver. Dirty and in need of repair, the fiddle is Ray’s most precious possession.

As a Black teenager, Ray finds his path barred in many ways. As my own son’s first grade teacher said, “No one expects to find a genius in a neighborhood like this.” Luckily he encounters teachers who help him get a scholarship to study music and advise him during his adjustment to college.

When he finishes school and begins auditioning, he discovers that PopPop’s fiddle is actually a Stradivarius, worth $10 million. He becomes a sensation, due to his remarkable talent and amazing story, but he still encounters racism at every turn.

And he’s got other headaches: His family orders him to sell the violin and share the money with them. Not to be left out, the Marks family, descendants of PopPop’s enslaver, claim the violin is theirs.

Then, just as he’s preparing to compete in the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition, he opens his violin case to find it empty except for a white Chuck Taylor sneaker and a ransom note.

The author ratchets the suspense up even more, as the clock is ticking down to the start of the competition and to the deadline to raise the ransom money or find the thieves. Could his family have taken it? Or the Marks family? Or professional robbers?

This is simply a great read. The characters are well-drawn; many of them seemed like people I know. It’s a wonderful story with much to say about our culture here in the U.S. and in the international music world.

The author’s descriptions of performances make the music itself come alive. But you don’t have to love classical music to enjoy this story of a young man with a remarkable gift and the tenacity to make the most of it. Plot, character, theme, settings: this novel has it all.

Is there a debut novel that you enjoyed and would recommend?

If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery

by

If I Survive You

In this remarkable debut, the author gives us eight interconnected stories about a Jamaican-American family. Most of them center on Trelawny, the younger child, born after Topper and Sarah emigrated to Florida in the 1970s with Delano, their beloved first-born. Not only is Trelawny American in a way that the rest of his family is not, but he is also sensitive and bookish, earning scorn from his father and brother.

“In Flux” explores the complexity of race as Trelawny tries to find out what he is. His light-skinned parents were not considered Black in Jamaica, but he certainly is when he goes to college in the Midwest. That’s just the first layer, as he keeps peeling them back, showing both the obvious and the subtle workings of racism in the U.S.

In this, as in several other stories, the author makes extensive use of second-person point-of-view: addressing the reader directly as “you.” It’s an interesting choice. A fad for second person swept the literary world after the success of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and then quickly became tiresome.

Here it works by engaging the reader and creating a buzzing immediacy. The author avoids the doldrums with the vibrant energy of his prose, the precision of his depictions of the culture, and his irrepressible—if often dark—humor. It is also a good choice for someone who hasn’t yet figured out who he is or if he as a person actually exists.

The other characters are unforgettable: Cukie, whom Trelawny envies because he gets to spend a summer with his father learning lobstering; Jelly, whose racist family baits Trelawny in the strangest Thanksgiving dinner ever; Delano, who totally buys into his privilege as the preferred son and assumes the world will likewise deliver for him. One story, in Jamaican dialect, presents Topper as a young man deciding to emigrate to Florida.

Having just been reading the essay “Dysfunctional Narratives” by Charles Baxter, I couldn’t resist applying his thesis that too many books are about a young person identifying the trauma that damaged them when young—usually from their family—and has continued to ruin their lives. Writers sometimes refer to this as the protagonist’s wound.

But if that is all there is to the story, then readers lose interest. Most readers want to see characters who grow and “start to act like adults, with complex and worldly motivations.” I agree with Baxter that we want to see characters admit their mistakes, take responsibility for them, perhaps even justify them.

Trelawny, at least, does acknowledge his mistakes. And certainly he is a victim of so many circumstances: racial discrimination, poverty, his father’s oft-stated preference for Delano, even a hurricane that destroys their home. However, even with the humor and brilliant writing, I sometimes had to take a break from his woes as the victim also of less-than-loving girlfriends, weird jobs, his own mistakes.

If I had any doubt that men are in trouble, this book would have put them to rest. The women, once they’ve left their husbands, do well, but the men all flounder.

Still, I have to defend Trelawny’s sense of being a victim. I can’t speak to enduring racial discrimination, but I’ve been poor and Escoffery is right: when you’re poor, survival hangs by a most tenuous thread. If you have the emotional support of your family or your community or both, you can weave in some happy times, sweet moments, even a few successes. Without them, your outlook is pretty bleak.

As Trelawny says, “It occurs to you that people like you — people who burn themselves up in pursuit of survival — rarely survive anyone or anything.”

I am on the lookout for books of interconnected stories like this one, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, and Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Have you read a good book that uses that format?

Negative Space, by Luljeta Lleshanaku

by

Negative Space

The title of this collection of poems by Albanian poet Lleshanaku intrigued me. The title poem, itself long and complex, about her childhood and the Cultural Revolution of 1968, a result of Communist Prime Minister Hoxha’s anti-religious policy of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s leader from the end of WWII until his death in 1985.

But I found a different perspective in the poem “Menelaus” where she writes using as a persona the Spartan leader who fought in the Trojan War under his brother Agamemnon and eventually married Helen after the sack of Troy. In Lleshanaku’s telling, not only is his ship becalmed on the voyage home, but actually never arrives in Sparta:

I continued to wander on open seas, forgotten,
on history’s waters . . .

Patris now doesn’t exist.
Not because of a curse from the gods,
but because with revenge
everything ends. The curtain falls.
And peace is never a motif.

“Patris” is the Greek word for homeland and of course also reminds us of Paris who started the war by stealing Helen. What I see here, though, is the enduring legacy of Albania’s civil wars, dictatorships, occupations, massacres, followed by four decades of communism and the empiness left after its defeat. How do you write about the traumas that shaped your life when they are over? In “The Deal” she talks about going home and all that has changed:

“I’ve come to write,” I explain.
“Is that so? And what do you speak of in your writing?”
asks my uncle, skeptically . . .

Only my eyes haven’t aged, the eyes of witness,
useless now that peace has been dealt.

What’s left in that negative space are the small, human things of life, beautifully rendered in other poems here, with a turn that lifts them out of the ordinary. For example, in “Small-Town Stations” she pulls us in with the first line: “Trains approach them like ghosts.” Then come the details, rousing our own memories of train journeys and what we see looking out at these stations. She ends, though, with a twist that makes us rethink the entire poem and the person narrating it.

This book is Ani Gjika’s 2018 translation of Lleshanaku’s 2012 and 2015 collections. As always, I wish I could hear the poems read in the original as well, since I’m curious about the musicality of the author’s poetic voice and am never sure how well it translates.

Regardless, I’m grateful for these translations that have given me access to these poems with their images upon images. They’ve stirred me into, not only remembering my own moments and reviewing what I know of Albania’s history, but also making me think further about the long-term effects of trauma, whether it’s systemic racism or the wars and dictators who are driving the many people deciding to try the difficult journey to another country.

What do you know about Albania? Have you read Lleshanaku’s poetry?

A Fever in the Heartland, by Timothy Egan

by

Egan

I thought I knew pretty much about the Klan’s history. I knew that it was originally formed in the 1860s by Confederate veterans and tapered out a few years later. I knew that it surged back following the release of the blatantly racist film Birth of a Nation in 1915. But I had no idea how huge it became in the 1920s.

Egan tells a captivating story of D. C. Stephenson, a conman originally from Texas, who appeared in Evansville, Indiana in 1922 and, with no qualifications, set out to take over the state and eventually the White House. How? By appealing to the fears of ordinary white folks, stoking their anxiety about change and blaming their problems on Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. The solution, he told them, the way back to that mythical, golden past was to enforce white supremacy.

“These were the people who held their communities together. They were not the criminal element, they were not the psychopaths, sickos and all that.” However, “A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping.”

Stephenson was thoroughly repellent. A cheater and serial rapist who got off on beating up women, his power grew as he quickly rose to the top of the Klan. “Cops, judges, prosecutors, ministers, mayors, newspaper editors—they all answered to the Grand Dragon . . . Most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.” Egan says, “The Klan owned the state and Stephenson owned the Klan.”

He became rich by taking a cut of membership dues and other schemes. He bribed pastors to tell their parishioners they must join the Klan. He lied to everyone. “He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid.”

Within two years after his arrival in Evansville, he created a shadow government in the 1924 election. He controlled the General Assembly, the legislature, city halls, courthouses, police departments, and many protestant churches. And he had his army of 400,000 Hoosiers, loyal to the Klan and to Stephenson.

Egan is one of my favorite writers and this book does not disappoint. Vivid writing, solid research and a searing story made it a must-read for me. My only disappointment was that the subtitle—The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them—is misleading.

The woman is 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer, an employee at the Statehouse, who was raped by Stephenson in 1925. More than raped, but I won’t repeat the details here. Her “dying declaration” finally persuaded a jury of White men in a Klan-dominated town to convict Stephenson and send him to prison. Humiliated Klansmen began to quietly pack up their robes.

So, yes, she took down the Klan but not in the derring-do way implied by the subtitle. I wonder if that was the publisher’s work.

If I had read this book before 2016, I would have struggled to believe it. Surely he must be exaggerating, I’d have thought. A few people, of course, but one in three men in a state? How could that many people be so filled with hate, so blindly loyal to such a disgusting man, and so cruel to others? How could so many judges, politicians, ministers be willing to betray their oaths?

Well, Egan doesn’t explicitly draw the parallels with today, but he doesn’t need to.

Now I’ve learned how dependent we humans are on our social tribe and how hard it is to go against them or question their mores. I’ve learned that people don’t want to admit they’ve been wrong—the sunk cost fallacy—or that they’ve been the dupes of a conman. I’ve learned that some churches are out to take over the country and remake it with religious instead of civil rules, just like the Taliban. And greed can outweigh integrity.

Now, I see it happening again. The military-wanna-bes are just sad, but they are only a small part of this wave. I admire the brave journalists, rabbis, and prosecutors who stood up to Stephenson, at great cost. Today we too must stand up to protect democracy here in the U.S. I hope Egan’s book is a great awakening.

Have you read any historical nonfiction that has helped you understand today’s plots to take over the U.S.?