VENUS, VANISHING...queer love in late Weimar-era Berlin

VENUS, VANISHING
REBECCA BIRRELL
Henry Holt & Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A blisteringly passionate and page-turning story of desire, art, and the stories lost to the darkness of history—for readers of Sarah Waters, Yael van der Wouden, and Alice Winn

Berlin, 1928. Hannah is new to the pleasures and freedoms of the city. An artist, a runaway, she is building a new life, loving without boundaries and sketching with a cutting edge.

But the party is ending. Hannah begins a recklessly consuming affair with a powerful man’s wife and it soon threatens to do more than ruin both of their reputations. People are disappearing. The shadows of something unspeakable are growing darker. Her art could be the thing that secures her survival – or will deny her any chance of escape.

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

My Review: The relationship between a young striving creative and an older patron is fraught with tension. One way that plays out is the power play of status: "you need me to give you work, you pay me in humiliation," as in this story.

Hannah knows she is an artist, knows she has talent, knows she can't keep tailoring forever...knows she can't marry the older man who wants to buy her from her father with her mother's practically minded support or she will vanish to be replaced by no one she recognizes as herself. An age-old dilemma for women, exacerbated by Hannah's Jewishness thus ever-increasing vulnerability in late-Weimar Republic Germany. Elke, an Aryan to her manicured fingertips, takes Hannah under her protection with all the complexity of emotion that entails.

Hannah has a man, Saul, in similar circumstances of economic and social struggle as hers who provides guidance through Berlin's maze of modern art cliques, whose influence sets in train the developments for Elke and her circle to become famous in art circles (how titillating for older, bored wives!) in Hannah's risqué portraits of them...under an unambiguously Aryan male name. Elke sells the idea to Hannah as a way to be seen, and to be sold, in a world of increasing antisemitism as well as entrenched unchallenged misogyny.

History having already happened we know what Hannah and Saul have in store. Author Birrell is an art historian whose interests are in women and/or queer artists and their struggles to make art under the circumstances they find themselves. Hannah, Elke, Saul are all composites of artists and patrons whoes lives Author Birrell came to know in the course of her professional research. It was a surprise to me how deft the prose was for a debut, until I learned the author is not a debut writer but a debut novelist. I was deeply gruntled by Author Birrell's sumptuous and immersive evocations of Elke's world, of Hannah's art and specific paintings; it felt as though I should be able to see them on museum websites, buy a monograph about them, order a biography of her. That's a fantastic ability to have for a writer, that craft trick of making the craft feel as though it's entirely about something else. I was convinced I was reading non-fiction when art was our topic, still enjoying the story at other times. Tough to pull that off.

What I found less convincing was the ending Author Birrell crafted, as it felt to me not in keeping with the looming threats so carefully evoked. It was a niggle only; I was kind of dreading what I was sure was coming. A sentimental chunk of me was pleased she chose to do better by her characters than reality would have but it was a cheat in another sense.

I was repulsed by unworthy-of-her Elke's control of Hannah, and of her revolting freely expressed anti-semitism. Really I just disliked Elke and her ilk; the bored useless privileged "cultured elite." I grow less and less tolerant of bored people. There's a lot of work to do in the world, pick something and just go do it and make some effort to improve life for someone not you.

Ahem. My puritan ancestors speak.

Anyway, now you know why I didn't offer all five stars. On prose alone, it deserved it. Prose is not the sole axis of my own judgment. By every axis of judgment I hope this lovely artwork will land on your TBR.

THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS, exploring the alt-hist "what if Wilde hadn't played the fool for Queensberry?"

THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS
JOHN BOYNE
Henry Holt & Co (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Can one rash decision prove the difference between a life well lived and a life destroyed?

When the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite." The most celebrated playwright of his day famously sued for libel, which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution, and ultimately prison. From then on, his gilded existence spiraled into public disgrace, humiliation, and an early death.

But what if he had simply ignored the insult? What direction might his life have taken? This is the premise of John Boyne's extraordinary new novel, The Weight of Angels. Rather than dying in penury in Paris at age forty-six, what if Wilde had lived to bear witness to the momentous events and cataclysmic changes of the first part of the twentieth century, and even influence some of them? What if the second half of his life were as dramatic, tumultuous, and exhilarating as the first?

In imagining the life that Oscar Wilde never had, John Boyne has written one of the great what-if stories of modern literature, giving the iconic Anglo-Irish poet and playwright a fresh new voice and the opportunity to take an entirely different path.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I am not a big fan of Author Boyne. I came within an ace of deleting this widget. Because I've learned to be super-scrupulous in reading the whole text of something my urge is to ignore/delete *before* I do it, I saw the open-sesame of the offer: "what if Wilde hadn't played the fool for Queensberry?"

Sold.

You would have to go some to get me not to finish this story. The entire course of Anglophone culture would've changed without this famous sodomite...what an ugly word...being a complete idiot and suing a nasty little waster for saying a true thing in a vicious, pointed way. Wilde was fucking the man's son, a little anger and hatefulness was to be expected in that time and place. Of course it went very badly indeed for Bosie, but broken eggs∈omelette....

Author Boyne has this version of Oscar continue to be abrasive and obnoxious to the world at large (because genius y'know), continuing to flaunt...and I use this word in its strictest sense...his sexuality while continuing to produce literary genius for the enthralled masses. I know this is a hard swallow fo y'all "the way it is is the way it is and so it must only be this way" folks when the subject is history. The alternate history genre comes from the nineteenth-century thought experiment, a technique of gaming out what might happen in a multifactor scenario. War colleges in particular, giant corporations, political operatives, all use thought experiments...counterfactuals colloquially...to help with decision making. Applying the technique to fiction delights me.

Of course the hurdle he faced in bringing this scenario to life is writing a genius's words that were never spoken. I'm feeling charitable: the effort he put into the research, the absorption into Wilde and his world was so extensive, that I was able to suspend disbelief.

“Are you deliberately trying to be rude?”
“No, it comes quite naturally to me.”

It's the sort of line you or I would be proud as hell to skate off. It would not end up in The Big Book of Oscar Wilde Quotes.

Much as I absolutely loved "Oscar's Law" and, in honesty, felt it was a very reasonable conjecture on Author Boyne's part, it contributed to my growing sense of unease about the "Mary Sue"-ness of the Wilde in this story. Some of his Forrest-Gumpian meet-everybody-impress'em-all quality is just projecting his actual past into an unlived future. It does not take away one bit my unease at the way it reads.

Another qualm the Mary-Sueness of it all did not help the story is the sheer number of people who float through the six-hundredish pages. If one is not versed in the dramatis personae of the early twntieth century, this story will bore you rigid with "who was that? why should I care?" feelings that result from putting too much of one's research on the page. It clutters up the reading experience, though I'll say it delighted me personally. His take on Lady Thelma Furness versus Wallace Simpson...*chef's kiss*

It was a successful read, an enjoyable trip...for me. I suspect others won't entirely agree. The last words properly belong to Oscar Wilde hinself, summing up this imagines life succinctly and well:

“I wanted to be a writer. And I became a writer. That is how I spent my life. Sometimes loved; sometimes scolded. Sometimes celebrated. Sometimes loathed. Sometimes a force for change; sometimes my own worst enemy. But I was always read.”

As is meet and right.

MAZELTOV, gay Jewish teen's bar mitzvah mishegas

MAZELTOV
ELI ZUZOVSKY
Henry Holt & Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now (preorder a paperback for $17.99, delivered 25 August, at that link too)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In a glorious debut, a boy confronts queer lust, shame, the threat of war, and the plague of family on the day he becomes a man.

At a banquet hall, at the onset of war, Adam Weizmann’s bar mitzvah party turns into a glorious catastrophe. On the cusp of manhood—and the verge of a nervous breakdown—Adam has been bracing for his special day, mired in family neuroses and national dysfunction.

In a chorus of voices, a fractious cast of well-wishers narrates Adam’s coming-of-age in Israel: his newly devout father and the mystic rituals he practiced on his young son; his best friend, Abbie, who points the way to joyful transgression; Khalil, a Palestinian poet, who offers a glimpse of a different way to be; and Adam himself, filled with shame and desire as he faces the brokenness of his world.

At once tender and lustful, a work of scathing satire and piercing insight, Mazeltov is a wholly original vision of a young man’s quest to know his own heart.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Framed as a long flashback from a future not filled in (so as not to give stuff away), this coming-of-age story centered on a religious rite of passage that's recognizing the adolescent mind's shift into high (adult) gear. Unsurprisingly that's also a time many queer kids become aware they're different...and some of those become aware of just exactly how they're different.

Adam's name, shared with the first-ever man in his religion's mythology, is a clever choice. It truly does feel as though one is the very first ever to go through the self-discovery process. Then there's his surname: Weizmann. Only the greatest Zionist of them all was Weizmann. Can't unsee that call-back. It's prestigious in Israel, very much the opposite in my world.

No matter how accepting one's peers and family might be, there is anxiety around recognizing one is Other in the eyes of the world. Most of us don't feel accepted in that awful 13-15 age bracket though, so the queer identity adding complexity to the existing tsurres is seldom welcome.

The Israel setting is going to be an issue to some who read my blog. The ongoing genocide against Palestinians is not foregrounded here, so make your decisions with that information in mind. I myownself was not minded to reject the book outright for not writing the details of a war crime that long predates the PoV character's birth into his personal story. You do you, though.

The multiple PoVs and the technique used to switch among them, along with quiet, unheralded details that are not consistent in the different PoVs, is more likely to cause readers problems than procrustean political tomfoolery. I'm sure some readers put these detail differences down to a lack of novelistic craft. I'm not of that opinion myownself. I think Author Zuzovsky put those variations in the narrative because the characters are going to have those differing recalls, and we as the listeners aren't necessarily going, or even likely to know whose version is factually correct...if any version is.

Adam's unhappily divorced parents are *awful*...and this is judging them from their own PoVs not from dam's adolescent one. Dad snipes at Mom in his remarks for the occasion, Mom can't be arsed to write a speech or her son's rite of passage...ick. Send these two to Gaza to be aid workers so they'll be forced to think of others not just themselves.

It's a sort read at under 200pp. I'll say I was never bored. I'll mention that I was empathetic for this kid's relatable, familiar struggles with naming and taking on his adult identity. I can't not say that I'm squeamish about Israeli literature because the way their government is acting is appalling...and my government's bankrolling it.

It's complicated, like Adam Weizmann's bar mitzvah. It's messy, like Adam Weizmann's bar mitzvah. It needs some room to grow it didn't get, like Adam Weizmann's bar mitzvah.

But it's a debut. More and even better things are to come. Like the aftermath of Adam Weizmann's bar mitzvah.

WE PRETTY PIECES OF FLESH, they left Doncaster only in body

WE PRETTY PIECES OF FLESH
COLWILL BROWN
Henry Holt and Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of The Guardian's The best fiction of 2025 list!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant and ribald debut novel about three adolescent girls coming of age in a gritty post-industrial town in Yorkshire, England in the ‘90s who are as sweetly vulnerable and funny as they are cunning and tough

“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But it’s also the home of Rach, Kel, and Shaz, bezzies since childhood. From scheming one another’s first kisses, to sneaking vodka (or the occasional Cointreau) into school in water bottles, to accompanying one another to Family Planning for pregnancy tests, the girls come of age together, Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace—the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as the girls grow up and away from each other, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart. Is their shared past enough to keep them close?

Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh spans decades and continents as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, making one overlooked and forgotten place the very center of the world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know how much people dislike, even hate, the word "moist"? That's how I feel about the word "pungent." It's a shuddersome word, one that sounds like someone tone-deaf and with a cold is trying to hum "Born in the USA."

Yet I'm about to use it, approvingly, about the narrative voice in this novel. It's pungent, in its "sharply affecting the mind, curt and expressive" (etymonline.com) sense prevalent by 1850 about writing. When I could grow them I used to eat two or three french breakfast radishes daily because, while I don't like the word, I do like pungent things.

I liked reading this Yorkshire dialect because it got into my mind sharply, evocatively. I enjoy that kind of reading experience. It breaks the sameness, the US-standard English that makes up most reading I do, fiction or non-fiction. It reaches different places in my emotional system by "sounding" different.

You thought about them lasses ont bus, their painted faces and their bad sex facts, trying their hardest to grow intut only version of themsens they thought they wa allowed to be. Feminism had took one look at Donny and thought, Reckon I'll gi this a miss.

It's all there, it's all in that short span, and you know already if this tale is for you. It was for me so I really hope it appeals to some of y'all.

What stories we hear when we're open to listening differently, being there in a different way for what the author wants us to know. This is a braided-stories novel, one that switches tenses and PoVs to make its points and build its world. The three friends start year seven in 1998, well into the awful social Darwinism Yorkshire got chewed up by the bad economics from the successor regimes to that slime Thatcher's hatcheting of the industrial base.

Rach, a uni-directed future teacher, and Kel, the spirited escapee who moves to the US, leave Shaz behind in Donny (-caster, get it?) not entirely on purpose. As mentioned these young women tell us their stories but without reassuring you there's only one voice per narrative...possibly narrator, either, I wasn't all the way sure about that. Shaz is...she's badly damaged, she is stuck, mired in Donny because a horrible, terrible, violent thing happened to her. Moving past it feels impossible, like shifting one of the pyramids at Giza with your mind, alone. It is worse than only the trauma she suffered. It is retraumatizing because of a secret she genuinely can't share with Rach and Kel. It felt brutal to me as I read it...strong stuff indeed...but more than anything else, I was destroyed by her bitter dregs of isolation ever after.

To feel unable to speak, even to the closest friends you'll ever have, is a curse that blights a life. I speak from experience. It's possible for Shaz to speak, to heal (again I know this from experience); but it does not happen in this story.

Meeting these three after Life has happened to them was a poignant way to leave them...the fault lines still there but likewise the gravity binding them to a shared center, as they learn what adulthood has done to each of them. And of course the terrible secret is a rock forming an unclimbable obstacle; only one of them knows why, though all know it's there. I'm deeply impressed by this book and its voices; I can't quite get to a full five star rating because the nature of braided stories means things feel...hashed over, rehashed, at times and that is not a positive.

I really hope y'all who liked Shuggie Bain as much as I did will come south to Yorkshire and meet these three Donny lasses. They're good company, despite imperfections. Which, be honest, you have as much as they or I do.

ONE OF US, solid well-crafted not-too-gory horror vibes read

ONE OF US
DAN CHAON
Henry Holt & Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A playfully macabre and utterly thrilling tale about orphaned twins on the run from their murderous uncle who find refuge in a bizarre traveling carnival, from master of literary horror Dan Chaon.

It’s 1915 and the world is transforming, but for thirteen-year-old Bolt and Eleanor—twins so close they can literally read each other’s minds—life is falling apart. When their mother dies, they are forced to leave home under the care of a vicious con man who claims to be their long-lost uncle Charlie, the only kin they have left. During a late-night poker game, when one of his rages ends in murder, they decide to flee.

Salvation arrives in the form of Mr. Jengling, founder of the Emporium of Wonders and father to its many members. He adopts Bolt and Eleanor, who travel by train across the vast, sometimes brutal American frontier with their new family, watching as the exhibitions spark amazement wherever they go. There’s Minnie, the three-legged lady, and Dr. Chui, who stands over seven feet tall; Thistle Britches, the clown with no nose, and Rosalie, who can foretell the death of anyone she meets.

After a lifetime of having only each other, Eleanor and Bolt are finally part of something bigger. But as Bolt falls in deeper with their new clan, he finds Eleanor pulling further away from him. And when Uncle Charlie picks up their trail, the twins find themselves facing a peril as strange as it is terrifying, one which will forever alter the trajectory of their lives. An ode to the misfits and the marginalized, One of Us is a riotous and singularly creepy celebration of the strange and the spectacular and of family in its many forms.

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

My Review: The dinner-party scene of Tod Browning's super unsettling 1932 film Freaks, only literatured to a fare-thee-well. It feels a little like those Victorian table skirts meant to keep the ladies ladylike and not inflamed with lust by...no one's ever been able to explain to me why women were supposed to be inflamed by a lathe-turned leg not a well-turned calf or a muscular thigh.

What stands out to me in this read is the appalling nastiness of the carnival/family unit's audiences, gawking at people for being different. Those different, often very different, people are Author Chaon's focus to the exclusion of more than...I would say "desultory" but it's so pejorative...unhurried action for half or more of the book. What that allows for is the kind of horror I most enjoy to build. There are no Big Scary Monsters or weird, spooky Happenings...there are people, not ruled by logic, being unpredictable and unnervingly cruel; there are the twins at the heart of the tale learning about and deploying their own difference as defense against ugly human greed. The consequences of that ugly human greed are what ultimately drive them, in despairing desperation, to run from their lives.

Ironically they run into their lives, their purpose, by doing this. Their place, their home, their haven. Like all havens, though, there are shadows. These shadows menace everyone in their found family. Eleanor can't really settle in among the freaks, feels herself different even among the different; Bolt has found his place, made his home, aligned with these freakshow folk to stand against the uneasy-making shadow of...whatever. It is always hard to see someone who's been part of you since you've had memories move away from your perspective, so Eleanor's struggles felt real and immediate to me, even while Bolt's sinking-in to the seductive group embrace we call "family" made all the sense in the world. He can finally feel that someone has his six.

The ending scenes of this book resolve the tensions that need resolution, while never being unfaithful to the creeping dread, the human-driven horror (with violence as its salt and pepper) that pervades the read. "Uncle" Charlie is just not going away with all he represents in the twins' lives (and the world at large they must navigate as Others); the release from threat dissipates some tension, but the World is still there...for me this was more the strange and spooky Carnivàle than the broader, flatter American Horror Story.

I found the author's note particularly enjoyable to read. Author Chaon delves a bit into some details of the inspirations for his story. It's a pleasure to have because I was thinking as I read the tale, "is this...did he...am I seeing...?" a lot. It ended up taking me from "this is a mixtape" to "how wonderful to have a creative mind that's inspired by so much."

I can't fill out that fifth star because I felt "Uncle" Charlie was, ironically enough, underplayed. His villainy was so thoroughgoing, ham it up even more, add a po-mo touch of self-aware baroque Javert-ness. As it is, he takes a lot of emotional real estate up with rather a flat affect.

Also either make the book a little longer (my choice) or move up the twins' running away sooner. A little too unbalanced; therefore feels rushed in that last third. But folks, this pleasure of a read very much deserves a shot at your TBR for #Deathtober!

GLORIOUS EXPLOITS, and glorious they are! Humor, pathos, sharp observation...all in this compact true tale

GLORIOUS EXPLOITS
FERDIA LENNON
Henry Holt and Co.
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Longlisted for the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction! "A Shortlist will be chosen by the judges and announced on April 15th, and the winner will be announced at the Borders Book Festival and at Abbotsford between 12th and 15th June."

Ferdia Lennon: "I was tired of ancient Greek or Roman characters sounding as if they’ve stepped out of a Merchant Ivory production"

Rating: 5* SIX (6)* of five

The Publisher Says: An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Graft Irish brogue onto ancient Syracusan and Athenian combatants, set the story in the aftermath of the Athenian defeat at Syracuse with its famously weird resolution to the problem the Syracusans had with what to do with the POWs, and make a buddy comedy out of it.

Of COURSE I asked for this book!

The titanic tragedies unfolding in today’s world are nothing new. The sheer number of us alive on Earth compared to three thousand...heck, three hundred...years ago means there are higher head counts in the disasters, but not greater or even equal proportions of the population. The scale of Athens’s humiliation, and her losses, in the failed imperial project that included her attempt at conquering Syracuse, rivals the British losses in World War I. An entire generation gone. The scale of democracy’s failings, and this imperial expansionist war was directly down to a democratic vote in Athens, has always been epic. After all, no government is one tiny bit better than its people force it to be.

So Gelon and Lampo get the historically accurate job of dealing with the horribly immiserated prisoners chucked down into the quarry to die. The solution has not changed. We get to see it all from the viewpoints of the two men who more or less came up with the solution, though. Gelon is sort of a sad soul, a man who is aware of and burdened by awareness of, the pointlessness of existence. Does any of this really matter, on can hear Gelon wondering inside himself. He finds no joy in the deaths the Athenians are doomed to, especially since it means he...and the world, of course...won’t get to hear the latest Euripides hit The Trojan Women. Because of course Gelon is all about the tragedian Euripides.

Lampo...get it?...finds light gleaming in all darknesses, Lampo thinks the Athenians must be good for something...and entertaining the Syracusans with the latest and greatest plays from cultural hub Athens is just the ticket. The men overhear the Athenians lightening ther last hours with dialogue from the current Athenian version of the West End/Broadway season, and hey presto a solution to the awful moral conundrum of just letting human beings die in misery comes. Lampo is the instigator of the full cast revival of the play, and convinces the angry Syracusans...even the guy with the club who’s taking revenge for his lost sons by killing every Athenian he possibly can...to set aside their hatred and listen to this brand-new play from the cultural capital of the world.

Setting aside the utter weirdness of this story’s factual reality...we know it really happened...this could have been a retelling of the events that went heavy on Message, bearing down hard on whichever piece caught Author Ferdia’s fancy. Instead he lets the reader select the message they want from the many on offer. Start with an Irish voice telling, in English, a tale of a violently failed colonial enterprise. I trust I do not need to go too far on that one to bring it into focus for you. Move to the unemployed potters, those craftworkers whose job it is to take dirt and turn it into useful and often beautiful things for people to benefit from, who see the utility and the necessity for using these aggressors for some kind of benefit to those they harmed. A tale, then, of restitution, never a bad thing to bring into the modern world. But then look again: the actors are there, able and ready to do their jobs, but unnoticed until summoned into being as actors by capitalist producers, who in case this parallel to the modern world slid past you, make no effort whatever to compensate the creator of the play they are producing. And the actors making the play are, it should not go unremarked on, living below the poverty level and thus are ready to do anything to stay alive.

And, should all that be more than you want to deal with in your present mood, this short novel can simply and pleasurably entertain you with its surreal blend of fact, fiction, and Aristophanes-level multilayered comedy.

Laugh along. Think deeply. Enjoy the music. You pick, you are the one who makes this read...all Author Ferdia did was find the story for you. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

AND SO IT GOES, A Life of Vonnegut--warts and all

AND SO IT GOES: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life
CHARLES J. SHIELDS
Henry Holt & Co. (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The first authoritative biography of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a writer who changed the conversation of American literature

In 2006, Charles Shields reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in a letter, asking for his endorsement for a planned biography. The first response was no ("A most respectful demurring by me for the excellent writer Charles J. Shields, who offered to be my biographer"). Unwilling to take no for an answer, propelled by a passion for his subject, and already deep into his research, Shields wrote again and this time, to his delight, the answer came back: "O.K." For the next year—a year that ended up being Vonnegut's last—Shields had access to Vonnegut and his letters.

And So It Goes is the culmination of five years of research and writing—the first-ever biography of the life of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut resonates with readers of all generations from the baby boomers who grew up with him to high-school and college students who are discovering his work for the first time. Vonnegut's concise collection of personal essays, Man Without a Country, published in 2006, spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 300,000 copies to date. The twenty-first century has seen interest in and scholarship about Vonnegut's works grow even stronger, and this is the first book to examine in full the life of one of the most influential iconoclasts of his time.

My Review: Shields, whose biography of Harper Lee was a New York Times bestseller, is set to do it again with this life of the ineffable Kurt Vonnegut, father to Kilgore Trout, Billy Pilgrim, and the unforgettable Montana Wildhack. If any of these names fails to ring a bell with you, please exit the room via the door marked “DUH”. Anyone sixty-five or under should recognize failed SF writer Kilgore Trout as the real hero of Breakfast of Champions (and Vonnegut’s ironic alter ego). Anyone of any age who fails to recognize Billy Pilgrim or Montana Wildhack as the forces in Slaughterhouse-Five hasn’t read the book. Shame! Shame!

Shields began this project with Vonnegut’s blessing. While he was a very short way into the project, Vonnegut suffered the fatal accident (in exactly the way he predicted he would, more than thirty years before it happened) that silenced his curmudgeonly trumpetings from the marshes of sanity, where he spent a forty-year career attempting to bring the rest of us into awareness of the fact that we’re heading the wrong damn way down the shaggy, overgrown path of conformity and unquestioning obedience to Authority. Vonnegut himself wasn’t a willing follower of much of anything, be it a rule or a custom or an order. He did what was expected of him as a husband and a father, in his day and time, but the book illuminates the unspoken reluctance of his participation in any life that wasn’t of, and in, the mind. Writing was Vonnegut’s ruling passion. It trumped all things corporeal. It gave him, as Shields brings out without beating us over the head with the knowledge, a sense of himself as an actor in the world and not just a spectator.

After Vonnegut’s death, his widow and his oldest son pulled back from full participation in the preparation of this life. I think that was not a good decision, myownself, because a more appreciative and less tendentious biography I have yet to read. I think the author’s intent was to write a real life of the man, not to grind an axe to a sharp edge in order to slice and dice the reputation of anyone. That’s rare. And it’s a delight to see it done so well.

I don’t know about you, but this Boomer cut his literary teeth on Vonnegut. No one can claim full citizenship in the USA without reading Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s in the Constitution, it just has to be. The experience of the firebombing of Dresden, firsthand, from an emotional standpoint and by a man who lived through it, is something that all of us in this self-satisfied, we’re always right, country need to experience. It’s not an anti-war novel. It’s not a screaming polemic. It’s a man’s attempt to put his life into perspective, and that life includes one experience…the firebombing…that renders perspective forever out of reach. And Vonnegut was always looking for perspective in his work. The author of this life seeks out the actors in his life, and then more or less gets out of the way while they fill him in on what it was like to know Kurt Vonnegut.

In a strange way, I think this book would have appealed to the negative, curmudgeonly, perpetual victim that was Vonnegut, because he would have at last seen his own life in perspective.

Perfect he was not. He stank as a father. He wasn’t a good husband to his first wife, insulting her, cheating on her, demanding she be his servant girl (though it’s never put this way in the book, it was really really clear to me that this was so); he was a crap friend to some very deserving people, eg Knox Burger, whose editorial support Vonnegut repaid by pusillanimously giving then withdrawing his very significant business dealings from Burger, who had founded a literary agency on the strength of Vonnegut’s being his client. But his talent was in storytelling, in distilling the life he wasn’t good at living into thought-provoking and very trenchant morality tales.

Even if you haven’t read Vonnegut before now (!), read this life. It is a great roadmap to the 20th century’s preoccupations. And, I will just bet, it will make the previously unexposed curious enough about this mordant, tendentious, ironical storyteller to pick up one of his books.