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Wednesday, June 29, 2022

MY VOLCANO, strange nonbinary Canadian-authored surreal SF & THE GEOGRAPHY OF PLUTO, meditative gay Canadian-authored bildungsroman


THE GEOGRAPHY OF PLUTO
CHRISTOPHER DiRADDO

Esplanade Books (I like the original edition's cover better, so I've used it in place of the current one)
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Twenty-eight-year-old Will, a teacher living in Montreal's gay village, has spent the last few months recovering from a breakup with his first serious boyfriend, Max. He has resumed his search for companionship, but has he truly moved on?

Will's mother Katherine - one of the few people, perhaps the only one, who loves him unconditionally - is also in recovery, from a bout with colon cancer that haunts her body and mind with the possibility of relapse.

Having experienced heartbreak, and fearful of tragedy, Will must come to terms with the rule of impermanence: to see past lost treasures and unwanted returns, to find hope and solace in the absolute certainty of change.

In The Geography of Pluto, Christopher DiRaddo perfectly captures the ebb and flow of life through the insightful, exciting, and often playful story of a young man's day-to-day struggle with uncertainty.

I RECEIVED THIS AS A GIFT FROM A CANADIAN FRIEND. THANKS!

My Review
: What I can tell you is that this is a reading experience to savor, because it's got the meditative quality of all the best bildungsromans. It's not precisely The Sorrows of Young Werther (thank goodness) but it's as deeply felt and its hero is very much a hero.

What I can't tell you is what the heck made me pick it for a Canadian friend to send to me in 2015. (He's no longer my friend, so naming no names.) I guess I wanted a Canadian gay man's perspective...? I don't know but thank goodness he chose to gift me this book, and I got to meet Will and his loved ones. I don't think I'll forget Angie, the lesbian bestie, any time soon..."you {gays} have it so good, there's always a party or something, lesbians are boring!" as Will's trying to process heartbreak...and while I don't want to remember Max, I know I will. *guilty memories*

Into every ordinary life...Will's mother, close to him, doesn't know he's gay (or so he thinks). She's now, after a long motherhood without a coparent, facing the worst sort of news: Terminal cancer. This is, as anyone who's lived through it knows, a death sentence for whoever the person you were before your loved one was diagnosed as well as for them. It's a long and bitter war, Will learns, to be there for someone you love as they die. He is up to the challenge, though, and does his mother proud: He comes out to her. And, before she dies, the "...unspoken truth that would weigh upon her until she was ready to confront it: that she was the mother of a gay man," is spoken and it (predictably) isn't anything that awful in their lives.

It is with Max, Will's first serious love, that I got squirmy. He is Mr. Right! He's so {insert laundry list of delightful things}! He and I will grow old together. And Max is thinking, "this is great, I like this guy and the sex really works, but I need something else," and doesn't share that with the passionately in-love Will because, well, the sex really works. So when the inevitable happens and he breaks up with Will, only one of them is devastated and it's not Max. Who, need I mention, recrudesces like a malign growth in Will's world...he simply can't just Be Done, get over it, without Max wanting...something.

I guess it's a no-brainer to realize that Will, a geography teacher by profession, living in Montreal, a city whose geography is ever-present, unignorable, and quite beautiful, will describe same to reader. It's a pleasure to read. The descriptions are embedded, and frequently at spoiler-sensitive times, or I'd quote one or two. The reason I bring it up is that it's one of my favorite things about the read. I had a firm sense of place, I was oriented in Will's world, and I've been to Montreal only twice. That's a good job of world-building, Author DiRaddo. The wonderful ending of the book takes us, in Will's musings, out to Pluto the ex-planet, the cold world beyond anything Humankind's ever known. Will says about its 2006 demotion from planethood:
Is anything truly permanent? Can anything ever be when your own universe can surprise you with something new about itself—correcting a fact you were taught to believe your entire life? The teacher in me wonders what they will do now with the old textbooks, the ones that count the planets in our solar system as nine. The little boy in me feels betrayed by the astronomers, the curtain pulled further back on the limits of science. But the lover in me is optimistic, content that something so cold and distant is perhaps more understandable.

So that's it. Will's ordinary life is just...ordinary. He lives, loves, hurts, laughs in Montreal. He questions his choices and his sanity, his luck and his lovers. He does it all at the turn of the millennium, which honestly feels like History now. And I was in my forties! So there's a lot to learn about younger people, their ways and their means; but there's really so much more that simply feels like the best kind of homecoming to me. I remember these passages, including his coping with a parent's loss and a lost parent. Will felt like a man I'd gladly have to a dinner party and expect he'd be a great asset to my circle of friends.

I suppose it's all just the long way to say: I think Will's a good guy, and I hope you'll give him a chance on this blind date I'm urging you to go on with him.

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


MY VOLCANO
JOHN ELIZABETH STINTZI

Two Dollar Radio
$18.99 trade paper, available now

A 2022 New York Public Library Best Adult book!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: My Volcano is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a menagerie of characters, as they each undergo personal eruptions, while the Earth itself is constantly shifting. Parable, myth, science-fiction, eco-horror, My Volcano is a radical work of literary art, emerging as a subversive, intoxicating artistic statement by John Elizabeth Stintzi.

On June 2, 2016, a protrusion of rock growing from the Central Park Reservoir is spotted by a jogger. Three weeks later, when it finally stops growing, it’s nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano.

As the volcano grows and then looms over New York, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself transported 500 years into the past, where he witnesses the fall of the Aztec Empire; a Nigerian scholar in Tokyo studies a folktale about a woman of fire who descends a mountain and destroys an entire village; a white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse tends to Syrian refugees in Greece while grappling with the trauma of living through the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic farmer in Mongolia is stung by a bee, magically transforming him into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aspires to connect every living thing into its consciousness.

With its riveting and audacious vision, My Volcano is a tapestry on fire, a distorted and cinematic new work from the fiercely talented John Elizabeth Stintzi.

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

My Review
: Remember Cloud Atlas? How people fussed and fumed over its interlocking time-narratives, and complained that they were "obscurantist divagations unequaled since Pynchon took the stylus away from Gertrude Stein"? (Okay, okay, I'm quoting myself from Goodreads. Sue me.)

But really, this story is, or these stories are, a challenge for linear readers to get any information or pleasure from reading it. If you'll give Author Stintzi a lot of rope, you can lasso a meaning from all two hundred-plus chapters. (I lost track at two-hundred four, and was reading way after that.) There's something...overwhelming...about that many voices coming at you, no matter what story they're telling. I don't think for an instant that was accidental. It was a choice, a decision to make the polyphony (babble to some of us) of the modern info-saturated landscape into an experiential reality. In that aim, it feels like Author Stintzi is channeling Annihilation with the entire Earth as Area X. People become something Other, as in a spiky plant; the things they pass by casually turn into that same spiky plant; what better visualization of the radicalizing effect of social media?

One character even says, I didn't want to say anything because someone would tell me they knew, about the appearance of a freakin' VOLCANO in Manhattan! That utter break in the fabric of reality wasn't worth commenting on in case it was "old news" and you'd look like you were out of touch for saying anything about it! This also echoes the storytelling hook Author Stintzi uses of beginning each character's section (they're too short for me to call them "chapters" with a straight (!) face) with a now-commonplace personal disaster...a body transformed, a police shooting, a homeless person being violated...that simply, numbingly, takes place. Nothing is made of this. In a world where Sandy Hook didn't result in stringent gun-control laws, that's a given. Sadly.

Which, I think, nicely makes their point for them: The story's set in 2016, the year a giant metaphorical volcano appeared and took over every aspect of our lives and has shaped the vile, reprehensible political and social landscape of 2022. Too many of us live inside echo chambers, bubbles of resounding agreement with any willingness to agree to disagree. I certainly do...and I'm stayin' in here. In placing the action in that before-and-after year, Author Stintzi remodels reality to punish Humankind for its unkindness and carelessness and concupiscence.

The real question I see emerging from the immensity of Author Stintzi's imagination is not can Humankind be saved...should Humankind be saved? We can exist in a world where the weirdest, awfulest, cruelest (one section deals with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, another historical inflection point) disasters elicit nothing, not a single impulse, towards others' needs, but only our own.

One character, called only "the white trans writer", is seen writing away...feedback of the most bracing honesty (read: the truth hurts) foremost in their mind, trying to make a story about an alien planet work. (Author Stintzi's nonbinary, not trans, but the point is made.) They're in some kind of existential despair. Writing will, in fact, do that to you. And listing the forty-nine names of the victims of 2016's Pulse nightclub shooting will reinforce that despair if you're One of Us...but the character speaks for the whole world when they say:
Eventually, sitting down to write the novel felt like sitting down to watch the end of the world. As if they were simply waiting to watch the planet finally spill its fetid, destructive insides out.

That is what Author Stintzi's accomplished with My Volcano, and it's either a cathartic emesis or a wracking, heaving hurl of the toxic crap you took in to make everything okay for a few hours.

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