THE COMMITTED (The Sympathizer #2), a different, still very powerfully caustic, look at illusions and their costs

THE COMMITTED (The Sympathizer #2)
VIET THANH NGUYEN
Grove Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The long-awaited new novel from one of America’s most highly regarded contemporary writers, The Committed follows the Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris as a refugee. There he and his blood brother Bon try to escape their pasts and prepare for their futures by turning their hands to capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.

No longer in physical danger, but still inwardly tortured by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, and struggling to assimilate into a dominant culture, the Sympathizer is both charmed and disturbed by Paris. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals and politicians who frequent dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt,” he finds not just stimulation for his mind but also customers for his merchandise―but the new life he is making has dangers he has not foreseen, from the oppression of the state, to the self-torture of addiction, to the seemingly unresolvable paradox of how he can reunite his two closest friends, men whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition.

Both literary thriller and brilliant novel of ideas, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters.

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My Review: My 5* review of The Sympathizer from 2016 is here: https://tinyurl.com/2p9he4wj.

"The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don't you see that's how Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank., but through this infectious disease called the American Dream?"
–and–
But the only revolution you can commit to is the one that lets you laugh and laugh and laugh, because the downfall of every revolution is when it loses its sense of absurdity. This, too, is the dialectic, to take the revolution seriously but not to take the revolutionaries seriously, for when revolutionaries take themselves too seriously, they cock their guns at the crack of a joke. Once that happens, it’s all over, the revolutionaries have become the state, the state has become repressive, and the bullets, once used against the oppressor in the name of the people, will be used against the people in their own name. That is why the people, if they wish to survive and to dodge those bullets, must be nameless.

Home truths, not dodgeable conversational bullets, but full-on machine gun nests of home truth.

It is Author Viet Thanh's stock in trade, isn't it? Follow the link to my 2016 review if you haven't encountered him and his cleaning-vinegar acidulated prose. Powerful the takedowns, sick the burns, and no human is spared from the collateral-damage list:

Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.
–and–
......you, yourself, human and inhuman, are demented enough to believe that if the human species does not self-destruct—an IF that should be capitalized, it is so big—then one day the nobodies of the world with nothing to lose will finally have enough of not having enough and realize that they have more in common with the nobodies on the other side of the world, or just the other side of the nearest border, than they do with the somebodies of their own kind, who care nothing about them, and when these nobodies with nothing finally unite, stand up, take to the streets, and claim their voices and their power, the only thing that the somebodies with something must do is nothing, realizing that their Ideological State Apparatus cannot stop all these people, because for all of its might their Repressive State Apparatus cannot kill them all. Can it?"

It can now. It hasn't started to yet. But AI-plus-facial-recognition drones? You'll see 'em soon enough. I guarantee you they're being or have been prototyped and now can be deployed...what's a few extra dead who were "innocent" whatever that means? "God" will know her own, after all.

I have never been a chirpy optimistic sort. I fall into the Butlerian Jihadist camp these days. I do not know Author Viet Thanh, so I speak without certainty of his opinion on matters facing us today. I think, having read his exploration of revolution in these two (to date) novels about the Sympathizer, that it is likely to be the case that he does not view anything that increases the capacity of humans to oppress and exploit each other ever more efficiently in a positive light.

...what the most sympathetic Federico García Lorca, assassinated by the Spanish fascists, once said, “I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace,” an empathetic principle that, if followed with action, whether it is doing something or doing nothing, depending on the dialectical need of the situation, will never lead you in the wrong direction, even if that direction is death, since so many people are committed to the exact opposite principle, to side with those who already have something and want everything, and if you were sane you would side with them, too, but revolution is always an act of insanity, because revolution is not a revolution unless it is committed to the impossible.
–and–
There was only one solution to this alienation that was created not by the Negro or the bastard, but by the real bastards, the racists and colonizers who blamed the victim for the conditions that the victimizer created. And that solution was “to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.”

That is exceedingly well-put and inarguably accurate; it's also the next thing to impossible to achieve. In reality, no one escapes reaching out for the universal's darkest spot:

Organized religion was the first and greatest protection racket, an economy of perpetual profit built on voluntary fear and coerced guilt. Donating money to churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, cults, et cetera, to help ensure a spot for one’s soul in the express elevator to that penthouse in the sky known as the afterlife was marketing genius!
–and–
This was the silence my father encountered every day during his prayers, the silence that hundreds of millions heard every day as they beseeched God to say something, anything. He always said nothing, which hardly disabused His legions of fans. For someone who never said anything, God certainly spoke to a lot of people.

Religion has become the Way and the Life for those too scared to rebel, too lazy to think, too smug to see past their own privilege.

No, of course I'm not bitter and rage-filled, why ever would you ask?

There remains the matter of my missing half-star. I've quoted the book at you to show how deeply I liked the read, to give the percentage of you who won't read it a taster of the treasures you're disinclined to see for yourselves. I was not as utterly swept up in this part of the Sympathizer's tale for several reasons. One was, I'm not coming to it fresh; I've been in his head before, so the impact is lessened as the flint cores of meaning flake into eye-surgery-grade blades. Another is deeper: howinahell did these men get into this awful, messy business? "Why not" is the only answer I can find in the story. It allows Author Viet Thanh to ladle on the Perils-of-Pauline hairsbreadth rescues and other coincidences. I'm not a massive fan of that kind of storytelling. It shows the author, unlike in The Sympathizer, already knows the ending, so we're along for the (entertaining) ride.

I forgive it all, almost unreservedly, for this moment where I felt so Seen: "You are upset because I made you see yourself. You like to think of yourself as just a man, not a white man, unless you call yourself white, with a certain kind of self-aware irony. But for me to call you a white man is unacceptable, downright racist, even if you yourself and all white people routinely say of someone “an Asiatic woman” or “a black man,” as if a black man were not just a man as you are just a man. So what if I noticed your whiteness—how unforgivable!"
Ouch...yes.

THE IMAGINED LIFE, a very apt title about the illusions Life makes up for us

THE IMAGINED LIFE
ANDREW PORTER
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed writer, a taut, elegiac novel about a man trying to uncover the truth about the father who left him behind

Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy.

As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father’s friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve’s childhood—his parents’ legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend. Each conversation in the present reveals another layer of his father’s past, another insight into his disappearance. Yet with every revelation, his father becomes more difficult to recognize. And, with every insight, Steve must confront truths about his own life.

Rich in atmosphere, and with a stunningly sure-footed emotional compass, The Imagined Life is a probing, nostalgic novel about the impossibility of understanding one’s parents, about first loves and failures, about lost innocence, about the unbreakable bonds between a father and a son.

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My Review: When your life in the present collapses, you look to the past. It's natural to make the trip back over any life, no matter how deeply quotidian it was. To know who you are you need a vantage point to look at the whole of it from and kidhood's the natural one to choose.

There's a reason this plot's an evergreen; for a reason as basic as growing old, that much-resented thing no one guaranteed the privilege of doing. Among male writers, anyway...Falconer by John Cheever, Montana 1948 by Larry Watson are two favorites of mine. I hope you're all at least passingly familiar with them so the next bit will make sense.

Looking for your father is probably the most commonly human thing a man does in his life. Fathers are often gone, voluntarily or not...wars, jobs, or simple absence of love for the mother are all ordinary reasons for Dad to book it out the door. Does it pay to know why? I can only say it's so uniquely difficult to accomplish this feat of vanishing now that maybe it did then, but not now.

Which is at the heart of my issue with this book: It evokes a day I lived in, and does it well; but it took the narrator decades to decide to search for his father with today's incredible web of tech? Then when he decides to do it in the ashes of his own family, it's to find out who's to blame for his brokenness? Therapy first, my dude, then when you have a framework to cope with the damage done to you, find the perp. It isn't like he didn't have literal decades of living in the modern world to figure out he was wounded. It's a realistic thing, taking your time to find out the wounds inflicted on you. It's not like there's a timetable. The reason it didn't sit all the way right with me is down to my having lived through those years where awakening followed awakening. The narrator's way too smart and too savvy not to have seen them, too.

Still and all, I read the story with a lot of nodding along, a good bit of emotional investment, and a strong interest in seeing where the resolution to his growth spurt would lead. I was...okay with the resolution. I'm making my issues loom large only to show y'all why a full four stars is such a strong testament to Author Porter's writing talents.

FRIDA KAHLO'S LOVE LETTERS, passionate Love for others in her own words

FRIDA KAHLO'S LOVE LETTERS
SUZANNE BARBEZAT
Frances Lincoln Ltd (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$24.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: ‘I don’t know how to write love letters. But I wanted to tell you that my whole being opened for you. Since I fell in love with you everything is transformed and is full of beauty . . . love is like an aroma, like a current, like rain’

Frida Kahlo lived a passionate life and the letters shared between her and those she loved are an intimate insight into her life. Letters were sent to her first love, Alejandro Gomez Arias, and to her husband Diego Rivera. But she wrote declarations of love to many others, including Leon Trotsky, Nickolas Muray and Jose Bartoli.

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My Review: Is somebody, other than the spy agencies, archiving people's emails? I doubt a book like this will be possible to collect in thirty years. That makes me sad.

It's lovely to have this peek into Frida's life of love.

who we're talkin' about
I deliberately said it that way because "love life" carries an entirely different meaning in English. I think no one exemplifies a "life of love" better than wounded, damaged Kahlo. Her many surgeries, her intense pain after the accident that mangled her, the earliness of her death...she was FORTY-SEVEN! I mean, I knew she was too young to die, but that's barely middle age!...all conspired to keep her isolated. It was inevitable. No wonder her artwork is a riot of color, is so intensely involved in portraying volumes in space...it had to be, or she'd go mad. Madder.

Frida in 1926, pre-accident
How I wish she'd lived in the time of the internet. How grateful I am that she didn't. It's like wishing her accident never happened, or she was not so severely broken by it...she wouldn't have been herself, then. Would we know of her as the monadnock of art she is had she not been made famous for overcoming her physical disadvantages? 17 September 1925 ruined one life, opened another. From the life before, her love letters to Alejandro Gómez Arias show a callow, intense crush on this handsome guy:

hubba hubba! me likee!
...who, to be honest, is very crushwortthy on value of face. The letters are, well, those of a young, very young, woman finding out about this amazing thing called Love:

It's the sort of thing that causes some people to insist their papers be burned after their death. I'm not sure that's wrong of them. After all, outpourings of Love are utterly cringe if you're not also in love; sometimes even if you are, but in a good way then.

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of Frida's letters as an object, and as per usual give Frances Lincoln Ltd's designers big ups for their presentation. I understand this is a gift object. I would give it five of five stars if it had included some of the responses the recipients returned. I'm not al all sure that would've been the same book, of course, so that's why I got as close to the full five as I did. I'm quite sure I'd gift this to my lesbian pal (she's still iconic among us, despite the careful heteronormativity of this selection), or my Frida freak cousin, or just pretend I'll give it to someone and end up keeping it on my coffee table for people to flip through.

It's two hours well-spent learning about the close relationship between a gifted artist's openness to Love, and her creative intensity. This was a spirit not to be trapped, not to be bound, not to be trammelled; this was a woman who Loved where she would, who she would.

THE BOY FROM THE SEA, Irish fable-making for this century's needs

THE BOY FROM THE SEA
GARRETT CARR
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 'Compulsive reading. Compassionate, lyrical and full of devilment' Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

1973. In a close-knit community on Ireland’s west coast, a baby is found abandoned on the beach. Named Brendan Bonnar by Ambrose, the fisherman who adopts him, Brendan will become a source of fascination and hope for a town caught in the storm of a rapidly changing world.

Ambrose, a man more comfortable at sea than on land, brings Brendan into his home out of love. But it’s a decision that will fracture his family and force him to try to understand himself and those he cares for.

Bookended by the arrival and departure of a single mesmerizing boy, Garrett Carr's The Boy From the Sea is an exploration of the ties that make us and bind us, as a family and community move irresistibly towards the future.

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My Review: Funny thing how kindness skips a generation. Declan, the titular "Boy"'s older sibling, wouldn't know kindness if it fucked him. The elder Bonnar couple love their magical gift of a child..."Parents knew you can never tell how a child will turn out, naturally yours or not. They had learned, fundamentally, every child comes in from the sea, washes up against the ankles of their parents, arms outstretched, ready to be shaped by them but with some disposition already in place, deep-set and never quite knowable"...Brendan, named for the Navigator, that famously fostered child. The boy, like mythical Brendan, never has his own place to take root...thanks, Declan...but instead becomes a source of bemusement in the community.

The narrative is from a godlike omniscient third-person PoV...the godlike, or royal, "we." It's a choice that, while conferring the reader with the advantage of being privy to things a more limited PoV would make awkward to show, removes us from the action. Observing from a distance is always going to slow one down when reading about the intimate life of a community. It did here. There are so many small, mean-souled people in Brendan's world. It doesn't relent, either, when we see his "family"...mother Christine's horrifying sister and father, and unwilling sibling Declan...being so unreservedly awful to him. As though being abandoned in a Moses-like way was somehow his fault, or merited (like any infant deserves abandonment).

So quite a melancholy read for me. As I've come to expect from Irish writers, or the ones who get published in the US anyway, the prose has real lyricism. Unexpectedly it breaks into quotidian musings on things like the EU and its fishing quotas..."He still felt guilty about his comportment with Christine later, as he sat in his car outside the fisheries office. He’d never actually apologize but he’d be extra jovial in their next few encounters; this was how we indicated we were sorry for something we’d said or done: by acting oddly the next time we met you"...and the waning control of the church on peoples' inner lives..."A note on our use of the word ‘grand’ is here required. It might sound like a relative of good or great but in our usage it was something different. ‘Grand’ was how we acknowledged that something wasn’t good or great while also saying nothing could be done and there was no point going on about it"...and eldercare..."Eunan {Christine's ghastly father} was against anything without set purpose and complete predictability and a human tended to fail on these requirements. He was against surprises, he hadn’t allowed a telephone in the house for many years as you never knew when it might ring on you. He mocked anything frivolous: placemats, dessert, having a lie-in, suffering from your nerves. ‘Get away out of that!’ he’d shout at cream cakes and people with hay fever."

What you're getting in this story is not showy, or fast, or loud. It is just like the sea that dominates this Western Irish town. It is quiet and inner-directed, with wild outbursts of damage and trouble, followed by the calmer gift-giving phase again. It is a lovely, involving visit to a lifeway long since altered by the relentlessness of change grown from within anf imposed from without.

I very much enjoyed the story's two-decade time frame. They were the last years of an Ireland now so completely vanished that one would be hard pressed to see it in modern Ireland. An elegy, albeit an emotionally honest one, to the way the country once was, with characters standing in for ways old and new. A read I expect will launch the writer into world notice because it is so plangently plucking heartstrings all the way through.

I don't mean that as a diss, only a recognition. I'm hip to your tricks, Author Carr, and I see how well you're performing them. That earns you a respectful tip-of-the-cap four stars.

METALLIC REALMS, "elegiac, sweet-talking mourning raga" for a world that dared to disappoint Himself

METALLIC REALMS
LINCOLN MICHEL
Atria Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A wildly inventive and entertaining novel about a sci-fi writing group whose fictional universe and personal dramas begin to collide and collapse from the critically acclaimed author of the “timeless and original” (The New York Times) The Body Scout.

Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln’s life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic pulp heroes of his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns—he has a greater calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written The Star Rot Chronicles. Written collectively by Michael’s best (and perhaps only) friend Taras K. Castle and his misfit sci-fi writing group, the Orb 4, the stories follow Captain Baldwin and his fearless crew on their mind-bending adventures across the Metallic Realms, from solar whales swallowing suns at the edge of spacetime to interstellar love triangles. These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished—until now.

But the most urgent story Michael must tell takes place in the more intimate (if no less dramatic) confines of literary Brooklyn. Behind the greatest multiverse ever created, there are the all-too-mortal people who wrote it. As Michael chronicles the personal melodramas of the Orb 4 as well as the funhouse reflections in their fiction, the line between real and unreal becomes dangerously thin, and the true reasons for the group’s fallout begin to emerge. As he labors away in hiding, Michael has just one to bring the Metallic Realms to the world. No matter the cost.

Metallic Realms is a genre-breaking ode to golden-age science fiction, friendship, creativity, and the power and perils of storytelling.

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My Review: Michael Lincoln is NOT Lincoln Michel. He tells you so. Orb 4, to a writer, agrees. It's about all they agree on.

Are you at all involved in geekdom, fandom, nerdery online? Are you vaguely aware of the idea roman à clef? Do you need something to make you laugh before it makes your ego say, "hey! wait a minute!", and rub its thumped nose?

Here's you a book.

Since reading Upright Beasts some years ago, then falling under the sway of what I called "{w}hat would happen if Gattaca and Moneyball had a bastard love-child" aka The Body Scout a while back, I've quite fancied my trips into Author Michel's head. He's facetious, rowdy, and disrespectful. I'd spank him if I met him in person, or maybe not since I think he'd like it, but on the page this is really fun stuff.

I'll assume you've read the synopsis. It's accurate as far as it goes. Lincoln Michel's a caustic and sarcastic soul, so it's not one bit of a surprise that Michael Lincoln is, as well. You think *I* say hurtful things? I'm the Canadian Ambassador to the Court of St. James's by comparison to this guy! No quarter is offered, no opportunity for a well-phrased dig is passed up. Think Dorothy Parker without the waspish edge, replaced by a cruel condescension.

Why, given all that, did I rate this 4.5 stars? Because he's unkind but he's not wrong. The beady eye in the scope is gonna shoot a vital part but he won't miss because he's seen the anatomy too close-up to mistake his aim by so much as a millimeter. And by Grabthar's Hammer, he really is funny.

Will you like it? Are you a Trekkie? A Tolkien/"high fantasy" fan? Then no. Are you exasperated by clever-clever satirical stuff? Avoid like it gots the cooties. A deeply-dyed AO3 lover? This way plagueships lie.

I had moments of stiffened-spine outrage (Ca'Raan? Really? That's where you're expending firepower?), but all's fair etc etc and being a whiny li'l bitch would only make the Big Bad Bully glow with satisfaction. So not gonna make some PC case with less than half my heart. Laugh at yourself, look at how your detractors portray you, because it's how they see you. No one knows they need a comb until they're told. He's telling us.

But get it from the library, no sense handing him your money to get insulted.

STORIES FROM THE EDGE OF THE SEA, an edge I can see from my home, and wonder what's over it

STORIES FROM THE EDGE OF THE SEA
ANDREW LAM
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Andrew Lam returns with a literary exploration of love, lust, and loss among Vietnamese immigrants in America.

At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart barely explored country.

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My Review: How to go on, when you honestly think your world is ending, is at the heart of any immigrant's story. Your world is ending, are you going to end with it?

Not while someone is cold and hungry, I'm not. I immigrated from my happy world to this ugly, mean-spirited one entirely against my will. But here I am. My kettle's got words, but heads need filling...feeding...too.

In accordance with the Prophecy, the fourteen stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method.


She in a Dance of Frenzy suffers. Beautiful faces and empty hearts so often go together. Why some people are gifted with looks but left, like all of us, without a single clue as to how to be truly happy.

Because, girl of great beauty, woman of the thousand broken hearts, empty vessel hollow drum moon void of course: Your value of face has no depth of learning, and only learning fills you up. 3.5*

Agape at the Guggenheim takes a solid look at how love, lust, longing, and the essentially fruitless effort of making sense of your own inner workings all walk around, sloshing and thumping into over and around one pretentious little culture queen's head.

Quit worrying about it, said old-man me to this youthful Asian version of me. Get up and find him or stay sitting and watch him go, either way chasing a fantasy won't explain you to yourself. But when your façade is as brittle and shiny as the lacquer on your umbrella handle, you won't listen, or hear when you do.

Told in a slightly annoying ever-so ever-so tone that will really rub the rust scales of some, that amused me no end. 4*

This Isle is Full of Noises provides the required amount of New Weid as vampires and werewolves crash a frat party where a Vietnamese immigrant lad, on the way to a glittering career as a doctor...he thinks...is apparently trippin' balls and working through some very, very serious PTSD.

Not my personal favorite, but it sure as hell twists its twist with absolute conviction! 3.5*

October Laments follows a woman who processes her grief in real time posts on Facebook, in a foreign language, for the hushand she shared twenty-five years of life with. As her teenaged daughter comments on some posts, the awful truth of marrying someone a lot older than you, marrying someone who becomes ill, withers and dies by choice, to end suffering, is caustically real.

The grief of being left behind, feeling greedy for wanting more, the resposibility of living on...well, social media is good for something after all. 5*

A Good Broth Takes Its Time "I insure people against tragedy, in a country built on it," says Toan, survivor and thriver on pho's magically Proustian-madeleine insubstantial waft. A solid thing, love, and it sloshes in the transparent magis of water, heat, and time that transmutes grossly physical things...nothing on Earth is more grossly physical than oxtail...into wafts of delightful odor.

Tragedy plus time equals comedy, said the long-forgotten hilarious inventor of The Tonight Show, Steve Allen. He specifically meant ha-ha comedy. I'd be amazed if Allen, and Author Lam, didn't also mean that tragedy turns its other mask to the reveling, partying eater of the divine pho. Savoring the tough bits, eating the insubstantial essence of things whose flavoring we call "herbs and spices" but whose bodies (leaves, fruits, seeds) we use up and discard. The broth that takes its time? Rich in the essences of things we can't see. Replete with the powerfully sensed, unseen, untouchable, enfolding vapor of the dead.

Heady. 5*

Bleak Houses are more than structures, they're memory palaces of lives unlived. Visiting someone you once loved deeply, were passionately entwined with, in his home now shared with a wife who knows who you were, with kids who know little enough about the world (such a kid thing) to Make Judgments, is...awkward. Seeing a ghost is the least of it. 4*

To Keep from Drowning tells us how lives end, how hard it is to live one, how much it costs in blood and treasure is only the beginning. Never tell all you know and it goes into the Void with you. And how that is okay.

Living each life is hard work, dying each death, moments you don't know what what's coming are the ones you should treasure because they are the ones that let you rest before the next bend on the hill. A family of origin takes shape on this trip to Land's End. And it is at the end your beginnings fall into focus. Rose's pain, Ben's work, Lou's seeking, all of them launch their family from the end of the land, from the muddy border of dirt and water and the air so redolent of rot. 4.5*

The Shard, The Tissue, An Affair said something deep, something profound, after smacking me in the teeth with some very self-indulgent poetry:

To fall in love is to have one's sense of geography grafted onto another's, no matter how tenuous, so as to form a new country. I saw Houston in my mind, a city of strip malls, grand old homes and gleaming glass-and-steel skyscrapers that coexist cheek by jowl. He, in turn, imagined San Francisco with its Transamerica Pyramid poking the blue sky, windblown hills the color of embers at twilight, sailboats gliding on the bay like white butterflies; he imagined—and I could tell this from his voice—that there was freedom somewhere in the next valley.

It's true. You see their world with your own. You do not know, then, what that moment of vision will cost...sometimes a lot, others it pays you. A fleeting moment or a painting on the wall of your shared home.

A short work, a love song to the departed. 4*

Love in the Time of the Beer Bug gives me the heebiejeebies. COVID killed people still walking. It ruined so many lives. It put the stake in the heart of many a vampiric relationship, like Jan and Stan's.

It was a very annoying style to read it in but a story I thought I wouldn't see in here...the ending, and even then, a beginning as the narrator accepts a place in Yale's English department. 3.5*

Swimming from the Mekong Delta is proof that the old adage about lemons becoming lemonade only works if the lemonchucker gets a full, even overflowing, glass. And you get to watch as they have to drink it.

A standup routine I'd actually resubscribe to Netflix to see. 4*

What We Talk About When We Can't Talk About Love is dark. What talking does, in this immigrant's world, is fill the hot-air balloon that wafts him above the heads of the struggling so he won't see how hard it was for him in their sweaty. soot-streaked faces. The fire's coming, blow it out with words. Blow up into the ballon. Blow harder, blowhard.4.5*

5A, 5B, DEST: SGN gives someone ordinary a second chance. It's a beautiful dream, the second chance so deeply desired it connects your past self to a present you just...don't love, care about so little that you're ready to jump into the past without hesitation.

The "Canterbury Tales" format works well enough, but honestly it's so self-indulgent and sentimental I need insulin. 3*

Muni Diaries collects the vignettes a writer, a real dyed-in-the-wool wordhammerer, never leaves behind. The smallest moment stays in the filter like a random whole bean. It blocks the flow of coffee until you take it out and grind it just to get it out of the way.

The resulting liquid isn't quite coffee; it's not strong enough. Drop it into steamed milk? it's barely a macchiato. Slosh it into the instant oatmeal? Palatable, but after it gets cold waiting for you to finish your call, it's stodgy and there's no good way towards finishing it that won't result in gagging.

So blow the dust onto a napkin and draw faces with the dregs in the cup. 3.5*

The Tree of Life Elegy to a mother's love:

Fitst of all, when things get tough, remember to make soup. And, if you can, feed the hungry. More importantly, open your heart, stand with all your strength, with all your courage for life and living, even in the face of darkness and despair. Despite all your sadness and tears, stand steadfast under that tree and tend to it and watch its branches blossom and bear fruit. Stand until the very last light.

You can do no better than to live by these words. 5*

RESERVOIR BITCHES: Stories, outrage...rage...there's more in here than meets the eye

RESERVOIR BITCHES: Stories
DAHLIA DE LA CERDA (tr. Julia Sanches & Heather Cleary)
The Feminist Press at CUNY
$16.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: LONGLISTED for the 2025 International Booker Prize

A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival.

“Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.” In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of black humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If and/or when (honestly I'm all but certain it won't happen) the mooted TV series, via Amazon Prime and Spanish-language producers Perro Azul, arrives I will be *amazed* if even a third of rage and fury in these stories make it onto the screen. Since the Feminist Press mentioned this possibility when the book was first published in September 2024, nothing else has appeared on Amazon, The Hollywood Reporter, or even Perro Azul's Spanish-language websites. I expect it's a dead deal...given the truly hair-raising stuff in here, I'd be far more surprised if any production efforts were ever made. This is strong stuff. The *men* in charge of any budgets will not approve this one!

As is reasonable and customary in these parts, these thirteen stories will be dealt with by using the time-honored Bryce Method.

Parsley and Coca Cola details an at-home self-induced effort at aborting an unwanted child..."Yup, I got knocked up by a terrible lay," she says directly to us, recounting this latest blow from Clotho's shuttle as her life of bad luck...no visible dad, dead mom, now this...takes its own ugly pattern. A lucky break...an older woman who clearly knows the score...means a day or so of nasty pain, some passing of clots, and finally confirmed success.

Not for the squeamish, but I can vouch for its accuracy. 4*

Yuliana brutalizes our eyes with the inner monologue of a drug capo's heiress, the toughest of his children. "We women always speak, think, and act from the memory of our pain," she says to us as she recounts her revenge on the man who killed her high-school bestie via her new, um, protegée's well-honed skills as an angel of vengeance against men who abuse women.

The female of the species, fam. 4.5*

God Forgive Us, a cri de cœur, emitted by an old mestiza spinster who's spent her whole life caring for...and about...her duty, her reputation, after she and another sister murder a girl.

The girl was a machete-wielding robber, so it was self-defense. No legal problems ensue. But how terrible her guilt, how bitter the social dregs! She killed a girl! Because she and her sister thought the violent invader of their home was a boy.

But it was a girl! Her poor mother! 4*

Constanza proves that, when you have no center, nothing is ever going to hold you back. Unsettling. I felt...outrage, anger, contempt, quietly and at myself for how easily I saw her point and how terribly easily snuffing out a life could become a routine matter. It was a wake-up call for the snotty little moralizer inside to see the emotional rightness of tit-for-tat. 4 unsettled stars, and an extra session in therapy requested

God Didn't Come Through like she ever does, mijo. This is the other side of "God Forgive Us," in case you want to practice your lip-pursing action. First mention in the collection, to my surprise, of Santa Muerte...and I now twig to the fact I haven't mentioned the untranslated Spanish yet!

Words here and there are dropped without full context but with plenty of cues, so you're never left at sea. Offshore in a sturdy dinghy, yes; but always in sight of the land that meaning provides. 4.5*

La China takes us inside "Yuliana"'s murder plans, and an account of the action that, while revolting, was not prurient or distastefully lingering.

I'm a little unnerved that it's so easy to put myself into the headspace of these outsiders, to see there's a real "why" behind the awful whats they're doing. I'll need another extra therapy session soon. 4*

The Rose of Sharon is so short it barely counts a percentage point in the read. It is every goddamned thing I despise about religion in one caustic, awful vignette. I still see its vileness in front of my eyes...

Vomit trickled from his mouth, smelling of liquor. I dropped to the floor with tears in my eyes and prayed he would choke. "Dear Lord, let the walls of Jericho fall before my eyes, throw off my shackles and drag this man to the gates of Hell. Give me victory over my enemy, knock down the walls of my prison and the fortresses that cast down my heart."

So very godly, no?

This is not the end, or the ending. Suffice to say myths enacted are always enacted for evil. 4*

Regina is the deets behind "Yuliana"'s inciting incident. Not memorable, feels...hmmm...like a makeweight, a tossed-on bread roll to get the scale where it needs to be.

Plus, it's ever-so precious. 3*

Mariposa de Barrio is what happens when life's a lemon grove, the lemonade's for the owner, all you're gonna get is the empty, fleshless rinds...boil up some sugar and candy that peel, mija! Never mind how much it costs. Bills can get paid all kinda ways, but all of 'em Later. 3.5*

The Smile makes the femicides on La Frontera deeply personal. Somehow even the appalling facts do not feel prurient, since they're not lingered over; I like to think this actually happened, the ending I mean, at least once. 4*

Sequins "Masculinity is like marzipan: fragile as hell, queen," says our transfem narrator. Let me tell you, seeing that observation in a defector from The Boys was a bitch-slap like no other. Then, the price for laughter: murder, femicide again, only this time the details are there. It's brutal to read but what human could do that, all that, to a living person?

An evil one, the evil ones are the killers not ever their victims. Blood does wash away "sins"—the victim's. 4.5*

Playing with Fire is the funniest story here, among some weirdly funny, but not nice, stuff. This one is rip-your-shorts laughing fun.

Professional courtesy is not just between lawyers. 5*

La Huesera, last in line, is more novelette than story.

Fucking brutal. Horrifying. Enraging. La Huesera adressed de profundis:

Even if only part of your ashes...are under my bed, the way I see it, your bones have been gathered. I hope someday I'll get to hear you howling in the night.

Saving the best for last, Author de la Cerda. 5*