THREE TENSES: A Transmission from the Nineties, do a vibe check...should it be 1998 outside? here's you a book

THREE TENSES: A Transmission from the Nineties
ED PARK
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 11 August 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An elegant, iridescent mosaic of autobiographical fragments, both real and invented, forming a portrait of a creative life, from the life of the Pulitzer Prize finalist for Same Bed Different Dreams

In 1998, Ed Park wrote a memoir and saved it to the vanishing technology of the floppy disk, losing it for more than twenty years. Until one day, emptying out an old, unmarked box in his family’s cramped New York City home, he came across a hefty manila folder. Out slid the only remaining copy of Three Tenses.

The piece of writing that Park found—“a voice lesson, a language experiment, an autobiography with lies, a document of sustained artistic bliss of a sort that I have never found again”—was an assemblage of beguiling anecdotes, sly observations, and collected esoterica, produced within the confines of the shoebox apartment of his twenties and only now allowed to see the light of day. Two Ed Parks emerge on the within the prose of the young, struggling writer arises the voice of the artist he would become.

Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, Three Tenses is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action.

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My Review: I've always felt oddly indifferent to memoirs, assuming they're pretty much always a load of fantasies piled up in a kind of rough shape sort of evoking a person's past. Trust them? Trust them to what? No one's memory is perfect, often it's at complete cross purposes with others who were (probably, allegedly) there, and in any case is the purpose of a memoir to be a record, settle scores—or to tell people how the writer sees the past that made them, from the ground they stand on in the present?

Ed Park takes bits and fragments of observations, memories, dreams, flat-out stuff he wishes was true, shakes 'em out of a shoebox, makes a beautiful mosaic of prose that thinks it's poetry, and says "here, read this," with a bashful smile.

I believe that woman on the subway wished people a terrible day, but not that she had black teeth. Or she had black teeth and wouldn't speak, only how then would he know she had the black teeth? Why did his parents emigrate from Korea to the US? What the hell brought them to, of all places...Buffalo?!

All the stops on the tour of his life led to his present. That's enough to tell me-the-reader that these fragments, too small to be more than thoughts that don't have deep enough edges to interconnect, exist for themselves. We already know Ed Park's work. His life is in it already, his world-view is in it already, his memoir has no heavy lifting to do that an autobiography, or later a biography, couldn't, won't, do better.

Except tell you how he felt. That's what kicked my indifference aside as I sat in the middle of the piles of thoughts and ideas wondering how I should piece them together. I shouldn't. I should respect that he didn't do it for me, so maybe the point was not to follow a narrative on its arc. That surprised me because this was Ed Park's life.

Comes the dawn....

What's more important to know about someone you care about, care for...what happened, or how they're feeling...feeling about what happened/didn't happen/could happen/might have happened? Why do so many of us have therapists if not to have someone to tell the truth about how we're feeling and maybe why we think we're feeling that way?

It's probably as coherent in this book as it is in Ed Park's mind. I don't think the framing device, discovering the floppy disk (!!) in a box during the pandemic, is really anything to get humg up on but many Goodreaders seem to have beef with it. Beats me why. Gotta start somewhere and the mass-death event only a couple years ago seems like a pretty significant road sign.

At all events I'm glad I got to know Ed Park a little, curated bit. I think I'll read his next published fiction with some added fellow-feeling.

QUEEN MAB, debut surreal mother-fiction

QUEEN MAB
EMILY McBRIDE
FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this debut novel, a new mother—a scholar steeped in fairy lore—wrestles with the legacies and madness of motherhood.

There is a changeling in this story—but who is it?

Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.

Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light, with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?

Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother’s house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don’t just kidnap babies—they’re also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?

Emily McBride’s Queen Mab is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered.

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My Review: I speak from experience when I say psychosis is terrifying to experience. I do not wish it on the very lowest, worst human beings on the planet.

Not even MAGAts. Besides, most of 'em are already there.

Queen Mab is probably the best fictional evocation I've ever read as to *why* psychosis is utterly terrifying. Something Madeleine lnows cannot be true...is true. Everything she is, has learned, made her own mental world with, tells her this hideous impossibility: her child is a faery changeling. It is simply the truth.

What ensues is the other horrifying reality of psychosis: to get back to consensus reality means admitting you've left it, and that is a terrible, terrible moment in a person's life. It does not help that her career is the study of Victorian literature. Irish folklore. Made-up stuff that's now horrifyingly real in her brain, and she has to tell the people in her life that this is where she is. And she has to grapple with, not only having given birth, something her mother could not do and did not do so has no insights to offer but now Madeleine has to re-grapple with her status as an adoptee. Is this congenital? Is there something permanent wrong?

I'm well-known for not being in the Cult of Mother. Madeleine is probably burning her membership card. But a story like this one that carefully flenses the bullshit rainbows-and-lollipops stuff off the bones of the life-altering disaster-movie destruction of pregnancy, delivery, neonatal care, social rearrangement, marital instability...and all without making the process feel artificially predetermined....

It's quite a feat. It's a first novel so it can go over the top at times. It can seemingly forget where it's been to go where the author wants it to go. But it never fails to ground itself in Madeleine's world as she sees it at thee moment. It makes for a deep, unnerving reading experience. Madeleine's fear is we-the-reader's fear.

I'm very impressed. I'm intrigued by what Author McBride will create next.

STEFAN ZWEIG'S PAGE: LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN and Other Stories, & ENCOUNTERS AND DESTINIES: A Farewell to Europe

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN and Other Stories
STEFAN ZWEIG (tr. Anthea Bell)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$7.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Stefan's Zweig's Letter from an Unknown Woman and other stories contains a new translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell of one of his most celebrated novellas, Letter from an Unknown Woman, the inspiration for a classic 1948 Hollywood film by Max Ophüls, as well as three new stories, appearing in English for the first time.

A famous author receives a letter on his forty-first birthday. He doesn't know the sender, but still the letter concerns him intimately. Its story is earnest, even the story of a life lived in service to an unannounced, unnoticed love.

In the other stories in this collection, a young man mistakes the girl he loves for her sister; two erstwhile lovers meet after an age spent apart; and a married woman repays a debt of gratitude. All four tales, newly translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell, are among Zweig's most celebrated and compelling work-expertly paced, laced with empathy and an unwaveringly acute sense of psychological detail.

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My Review: It's the fate pf a popular, I mean with readers more than critics, writer to fall out of favor. Without critics in one's corner, the voice of the people who voted with their time and their treasure to engage with one's stories gets ignored.

This was the public's loved one Zweig's fate. Modern critics don't like him either, one saying he "...tastes fake...the Pepsi of Austrian writing." Ouch.

It's true to my experience of his writing that there's no deathless quality the I can discern, the sort of intense transporting intensity I experience in Thomas Mann or Kafka. At his most eloquent Zweig brings me an appreciative lightness of spirit; at his most Germanic he's pissy, irritable, and unbearably portentous. On balance he's the precise kind of writer who becomes popular because his (very real) talent does not have threatening depths. It seems a shame to me the world that loved him best, the US and Brazil, has left his memory in a drawer. Not a great, but still a good, storyteller, it feels to me like Pushkin Press Classics is doing good work to keep bringing him to our notice.

In my usual, fussy (so I'm told) fashion, the four stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method.

Letter from an Unknown Woman is unsettling, uneasy-making; a woman writes to a famous author in terms of the greatest, most appreciative intimacy...but he has absolutely not one clue who she is. It is clear from the terms she's using for him that there was a legitimate connection between them. It is chilling how deep this connection truly is, given his unawareness of her as a person. (It could have something to do with her age at their first meeting....)

It's certainly true in my own life this kind of connection has formed, so I might be a bit more in tune with the awfulness of it. It ends a damn sight more tragically than anything like I've ever been a party to, and uses what would then be a current event...the 1918 flu pandemic...as both a resolution and an intensification of how terrible his guilt truthfully is.

A 1948 film was made of Letter from an Unknown Woman starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan that did not slap a happy li'l bow on its end. It's been preserved for posterity by the National Film Registry, probably in part for that courageous act of honesty in preserving the source material's more nihilistic intent (despite much jiggery-pokery to satisfy the Hays Code). It would be a terrific adaptation to make, faithfully this time, in the 21st century. all five stars

A Story Told in Twilight explores the first-kiss mishegas of a very ordinary boy. It happens in circumstances that, if you squint, might possibly lead to the, um, inattention and subsequent mistaken identity that plague this most commonplace rite of passage.

The translation's deft, the language felt like the entire enterprise was fun for the translator, but a more outdated premise would be tough to conjure in 2026. Not memorable, not terrible, not much of anything really. 3 stars

The Debt Paid Late looks at the running theme of missed/mistaken connections in these stories at a more mature angle. Like the old saying about "even small men cast big shadows at sunset" comes the accidental meeting of a woman with an old man who once meant everything to her. Because the story is about older people who reconnect from a genuine, if squicky by today's lights, connection it involved me more. Not a lot more, but more. 3.5 stars

Forgotten Dreams happened to me. It was as unpleasant as Zweig writes it. If you put yourself back into the path of your past self you will not come out unscathed. No man should ever expect the women from his past to spare his feelings, I'll tell you that for free. 3.5 stars

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


ENCOUNTERS AND DESTINIES: A Farewell to Europe
STEFAN ZWEIG (tr. Will Stone)
Pushkin Press
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A new selection of essays by Stefan Zweig: tributes to the great artists and thinkers of the Europe of his day

Stefan Zweig was one of the twentieth century's greatest authors and a tireless champion of freedom, tolerance and friendship across borders. Encounters and Destinies collects his most impassioned and moving tributes to his many illustrious friends and peers: literary, philosophical and artistic luminaries from across the Old Europe that Zweig loved so much, and which he grieved to see so cruelly destroyed by two world wars.

Including pieces on Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky and Arturo Toscanini, this essential collection is also Zweig's tribute to the ideal of friendship: an ideal he clung to as the world he knew was torn apart.

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My Review: "Gorky" means bitter? I'd always known Peshkov chose a pseudonym, who wouldn't with a collection of ugly spitty sounds like "Peshkov" staring you down, but "bitter?" Wow. A lot of details I'd forgotten I noticed clicked into place in my long-ago readings of Gorky...The Lower Depths, The Artamonov Business...suddenly make all the sense in the world.

Zweig knew the great and the good of the Interwar Period wherein he spent the bulk of his life. He would've been a lot of fun at a dinner party because, while it does not seem that he had a bitchy bone in his body, he had a very retentive memory and a strong desire to keep the friends he made so he heard a lot about them.

I am hard-pressed to imagine anyone who does not know who John Drinkwater was without the aid of Wikipedia will be inclined to pick up a book of musings on people like Toscanini, Arthur Schnitzler, and Emile Verhaeren. (For someone who doesn't like poetry, I sure know who a lot of poets are.)

If for no other reason than to bask in the glow of warm, appreciative writing by a friend who treasured friendship writing about his friends, this is a Zweig book to immerse yourself into. It brought me up short to realize how much the culture of that time formed my sense of aesthetics. I still revere Remarque and Joyce. I think many serious readers do. But it goes deeper, forming a bedrock sense of what is "worthy" in the art world, and that interested me to realize.

So here's Zweig, eighty-four years dead and mostly forgotten, still teaching a now-old man about himself. Published again and again after being forgotten for decades.

I hope there's an afterlife just so he can know it was, in fact, all worth it.

DANCE ON THE VOLCANO, a Haïtian Revolution epic of deep relatability

DANCE ON THE VOLCANO
MARIE VIEUX-CHAUVET (tr. Kaiama L Glover)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Dance on the Volcano tells the story of two sisters growing up during the Haitian Revolution in a culture that swings heavily between decadence and poverty, sensuality and depravity. One sister, because of her singing ability, is able to enter into the white colonial society otherwise generally off limits to people of color.

Closely examining a society sagging under the white supremacy of the French colonist rulers, Dance on the Volcano is one of only novels to closely depict the seeds and fruition of the Haitian Revolution, tracking an elaborate hierarchy of skin color and class through the experiences of two young women. It is a story about hatred and fear, love and loss, and the complex tensions between colonizer and colonized, masterfully translated by Kaiama L. Glover.

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My Review: A magisterial telling of the loud echoes of Revolution in the world of the 1790s. Saint-Domingue, as Haïti was called in colonial times, was a society primed to explode. With racial and political tensions reaching peaks guaranteed to end violently, we meet mixed-race Minette. Her singing talent is a wonder. It leads to the bending of many immutable rules. This was only possible during the ferment of the post-1789 world, but Minette really doesn't care...yet...as long as she can sing.

Evoking the colonial reality of Saint-Domingue in careful vignettes elaborated on enough to universalize the suffering they show, Author Vieux-Chauvet goes a bit overboard on description. What makes that work for me-the-reader in this story is the immersion it afforded me in a world I knew not at all. It was a revelation to me that the colonial forces wanted more huane treatment of Blacks, free or enslaved, than the on-the-ground colonist masters. It makes geopolitical sense, when one really looks at it; the government that promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 would not have thought to exclude Blacks until the colonial profiteers got hold of the reins again. It is this story that Author Vieux-Chauvet spends close-on 500pp telling through Minette's doomed love story.

As is ever the case, a woman must suffer for falling in love...always with the wrong man, usually with an abusive one, frequently enough a man who belittles her. Jean-Baptiste Lapointe, a free slave-holding Black man, rejects Minette with a lie about being disabled when she asks him to dance with her. I don't know about you but if someone did such a thing to me I'd avoid 'em forever after. Which is, I suppose, why no one will ever write a novel about me....

Minette is not a real person. She is a composite of free mulatto women Author Vieux-Chauvet encountered in her extensive research into the subject of Haïti's past as Saint-Domingue. Minette felt pretty real to me...though my goddesses does she cry a lot. If Kleenex had been in business then, Minette would've filled several landfills with tear-soaked wads of it. She's got plenty of excellent reasons, though. Her own precarious, rule-breaking career as a singer who entertains the white-dominated elite is stressful, her privileged access bringing her into their awful attitudes towards their slaves (who share half Minette's ancestry) means she sees firsthand the horrors of the enslaved's lives. It does not help that Lapointe, though Black, treats his slaves as vilely as the white colonizers do. The Parisians who now politically control Haïti/Saint-Domingue want to curb the brutality in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité, those most Revolutionary of concepts (though that formulation, the French national motto, is an artifact of the late nineteenth century), leading to internal conflict in Minette's world. She develops as a human being and a political actor in her world over the course of the story. It is good to see this development in her, and in the world; but as we all know it's going to come to a tragic end.

Even in novels there comes Reality's ugly face.

A book written in 1957 and first translated into English in 2017, and since then largely ignored, and here's me guiltily writing up my reading notes for it almost exactly ten years after my own read of the DRC. I was not fired up by the story of a country given hope, then betrayed, in 2017. It's happening to me now. Faithful to the human adage "what's in it for me?" here I am recommending to all y'all you take off the blinders and read about the injustices the untrammelled ruling class always, always perpetrates. Learn how "They" perpetuate systems of exploitation and destruction solely for "Their" benefit. Don't look away. It's too costly to do.

SOLSTICE, yet another straight-people-unhappy tale with lovely bits about dance

SOLSTICE
CAROL GILLIGAN
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant but restless dancer discovers the true meaning of love and intimacy through the ebbs and flows of her marriage in this exquisitely written novel—from the bestselling author and psychologist whose feminist classic, In a Different Voice, revolutionized our understanding of women’s lives

Boston, 1969. Eve, a dancer whose feelings are expressed through the body and movement, senses an inexplicable distance growing between herself and her husband, Gabe, a journalist and father of her two children. Feeling lost and alone, she begins an affair; Gabe detects it immediately and begins one himself. Yet somehow they find their way back to each other, and when Eve gives birth to a daughter, their marriage becomes vital again.

Years later, when Gabe returns from a reporting trip to the Middle East and Berlin, Eve again perceives something is wrong in her marriage. Gabe no longer seems like the man she once knew. He has always had a darkness she could not fathom—deep psychological scars from his childhood, when Gabe escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport.

Amsterdam, 1991. Newly separated from Gabe, Eve has accepted a fellowship to choreograph a dance inspired by the story of Adam and Eve. When a colleague introduces her to a new translation of the ancient text, Eve begins to redefine the way she thinks about women, men, and relationships—and, perhaps, to see another path back to her marriage.

In this emotionally riveting novel, Carol Gilligan draws on her unsurpassed psychological understanding of women's lives to explore a new vision of love and intimacy. Sweeping across decades and continents, attuned to the rhythms of life and time, Solstice is a provocative and profound portrait of what it takes to truly love another.

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My Review: Plenty of buzz around this tale of a Holocaust survivor haunted by his myriad ghosts, the burgeoning dancer/life force he marries, the challenging marriage they undertake, and lots of Jewish history relevant to the present day.

My interest in straight peoples' intimacy is not large enough to support this latter aspect of the story as my focus. I was a great deal more interested in Eve's story of how dance could explain the myth of Adam and Eve. It was *wonderful* to read Author Gilligan's evocations of dance as an art form. Eve's learning of the deeper meanings, the cultural resonances, the eternal quality of myths with a rabbi's learnèd guidance after she splits from Gabe in 1991 was as involving as anything I've read this year.

It's mired in a relationship novel I don't care about, one that's intended to add another resonant frequency to the myth of Adam and Eve, but that ends up not doing that. If I was supposed to care about Eve and Gabe as a couple, why is Gabe so...amorphous? Their three kids are names, when every couple I have ever known (that has kids) honestly thinks and talks more about their kids than anything else.

Author Gilligan's a psychologist so these are clearly informed choices made with intent, not lacunae of understanding. As they did not make sense to me, I can't say her information came through to me in the novel she wrote. I'll forget these characters in a week, but will carry the passages describing dance with me.

FRUIT FLY, appropriation is appropriation, and it's always wrong

FRUIT FLY
JOSH SILVER
Crooked Lane Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Go gay. Go sad. Go dark.
A washed-up author will stop at nothing to claw her way back to relevancy—even if it means appropriating a young gay man’s tragic story.

Mallory Maddox is buried under seven years of writer’s block. With her status as a literary sensation fizzling, she’ll do anything she can to resurrect her career. Inspiration needs to strike—and fast.

Enter Leo. He’s a struggling addict sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival. He’s vulnerable. He’s enigmatic. He’s exactly what Mallory has been looking for.

Mallory needs Leo if she wants another bestseller. The world needs Leo’s story right now, and Mallory believes she deserves to tell it. Really, it’s her story—she’s the one who wrote it, after all.

But as secrets threaten to unravel more than just her career, Mallory must decide how far she will go to pen the perfect story.

A razor-sharp satirical thriller, Fruit Fly will appeal to fans of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Yomi Adegoke’s The List.

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My Review: Mallory appropriates a person's life story because she needs a bestseller. His story is plangently told for sympathy tears because he's been used hard and thrown aside by an uncaring world, left to rot under bridges without housing and unable to access needed treatment for his addictions. Mallory extracts Leo's story by telling lies and faking an identity aimed at piquing Leo's interest in targeting the fake for exploitation, trading sex for cash along the way. Then the really ugly fake begins...her impersonation of a therapist who will help Leo.

Because Mallory needs a bestselling novel idea that she can turn around quickly.

It's hard to overstate the ick that gave me as I read it in the synopsis, except to say it only gets worse as the story itself unfolds. I do mean "unfolds" as the stories of Mallory and Leo are multilayered and coming to light in slow steps, complementing each others' past traumas and shared senses of betrayal.

The language of therapy can hide as easily as it can reveal; the way one uses the techniques involved in therapy do not in and of themselves lead directly to miraculous healing. In these characters' case, neither separately and never the two together are using anything to do more than temporarily and incredibly facilely cope with genuine, terrible traumas. Neither is introspective by nature. You can't fuck for a living and be doing a whole lot of drugs to get it done and still feel on top of your emotional damage; and any writer who can't overcome writers' block by looking inward to see *why* instead of outward to see *what* as a reflex action is deeply, deeply damaged and needs lots of help.

The pair are entangled in a complicated system of interlocking denial told in their own separate voices...always wise to let the perp and the victim have equal access to the reader's attention. It's a loud response to the terrible A Little Life, shifting its ripping and tearing of emotions into bleeding gobbets into clumsy and careless slicing at cancerous infected flesh. It hasn't helped but it is the action that, with guidance, will help as opposed to the lethal wrongness of that other story.

What happens, though, is that the finger-wagging title...y'all know what a fruit fly is in gay circles, right?...and the darkly judgmental tone of her engagement with Leo wears on one's nerves as it drips out in unceasing small, acidic drops. These are not kind people to themselves or others so the novel's length works against it. Yes, I know more details of how terrible each of them is, but really? Do I genuinely need to know this much?

I was also informed the story had thriller elements but I'm not sure what they were. I can get behind a mystery definition of the read because it's a mystery to me why Mallory's husband is still alive and has his balls attached (he's pushing for a kid, so they gotta be there). It's also a mystery why Leo thought he was using Mallory as she strip-mined his life for usable raw materials in several guises; that's a shocking absence of street savvy for someone who makes a living turning tricks.

I found a certain wry amusement in reading the stories because I felt in on the joke, but that was tempered by the very clear and unsparing depictions of abuse and violence and self-harming ideation. It's done plainly, in adequate metaphorical lighting that enables we-the-reader to see the actions and activities without questioning "is that what I think it is?" Yep. It is. The authorial tone is quite unemphatically reporting what is really occurring. That's a virtue, it deprives the pearl-clutchers of their favorite line of criticism: sensationalized overblown etc etc.

It just goes on that little bit too long to be my personal ideal read. Maybe it'll be yours.

BLOOD OF THE DAWN, Peru's violent past made personal

BLOOD OF THE DAWN
CLAUDIA SALAZAR JIMÉNEZ (tr. Elizabeth Bryer)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Debut novel by Peruvian author viscerally revisits Peru's recent, traumatic history through the eyes of three women

Blood of the Dawn follows three women whose lives intertwine and are ripped apart during what's known as "the time of fear" in Peruvian history, when the Shining Path militant insurgency was at its peak. The novel rewrites the conflict through the voice of women, activating memory through a mixture of politics, desire, and pain in a lucid and brutal prose.

Claudia Salazar Jiménez was born in 1975 in Lima, Peru. She is a critic, a scholar, and an author; she founded PERUFEST, the first Peruvian film festival in New York, where she lives; and she won the 2014 Americas Narrative Prize for this, her debut novel.

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My Review: A nasty proxy war was fought by the US versus the USSR as part of what we in the US are taught to call "the Cold War." How cold is a war whose victims number in the hundreds of thousands in one theater of its coldness, eg Latin America? Are people's families less fractured because no US soldiers (to speak of) were killed? Are those (mostly) men less dead because they weren't casualties of great pitched battles?

One nasty war was the struggle Peruvians fought against Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path in English), a Soviet-backed militia that committed atrocities against ordinary people with seeming success throughout the 1980s. The brutality of the US-backed military's responses to Sendero Luminoso drove some into the rebels' camp, others away from it. In any civil war there are no real winners. This was never more evident than in Peru. Author Salazar Jiménez limns that very clearly by decentering the male (mostly) combatants in favor of three women whose lives are both upended and defined by the conflict.

It's a depressing truth that this book came out in 2016, I read it in 2017, and while I made my notes on it at the time I never wrote them into a review. The biggest part of my failure to review it stems from the stream-of-consciousness narrative vignettes feeling unlinked-up. This is a debut, so it deserves generosity of treatment; however I was very, very irritated by the sense that, if there was a common thread in the background tapestry, I did not see it.

On skimming the story ten years later, I still don't. The PoV women are all enmeshed in the struggles of Peru, none on the government side but Melanie the city-born colonizer-stock photographer is probably closest as photography and its granddaughter filmmaking's very much an outgrowth of bourgeois culture more broadly; her desire to show the world what's happening to her country gets her resoundingly abused by Sendero Luminoso perpetrators. Her narrative voice wasn't distinctive, particularly in (unclear) distinction to Modesta the impoverished country-dwelling Quecha woman's.

That both were raped quite violently (there is no non-violent rape, I'm saying their experiences were even more violent than baseline horror) did not make them more distinguishable in a narrative technique used to emphasize the commonalities of sexualized assault. It served that function. a side-effect of that function is it's more difficult to build specific empathy for that character. As the story progresses, Modesta faces the challenge of carrying then birthing a daughter from her horrifying experience...a daughter she cannot easily or readily bond with. Since I'm more distant emotionally from her by not having a clear sense of her as Modesta but rather as a woman caught in war, it's harder for that horrific truth to make its most intense impact on me-the-reader.

Comrade Marta, the cadre of the Sendero Luminoso, was probably the one easiest to tell apart because she was seeing, participating in, perpetrating, but centrally seeing the violence her group committed as a necessary step to gaining meaningful freedom for the people of Peru. I got why she fell into that way of thinking, but it's always hard to see that path as justified to my bourgeois self. How does killing stop killing? I do not observe that result from those actions anywhere in my own world.

So my rating does not rest primarily on my pleasure in the prose from any angle. I would rate the book two and a half stars were it still 2016 out there. Today we have the US starting bullshit wars to protect a bunch of pedophile rapists from facing the consequences of their crimes instead of simply enriching some scumbags; we have a government so dedicated to white supremacist misogyny as policy instead of more nebulously ideology that voting rights and bodily autonomy are being dismantled as matters of law; we are, in short, more in danger from our government than from any external enemy.

In that sociopolitical milieu this book is four stars of klaxon-sounding warning. Heed these words, understand these threats viscerally by reading this story.