CURIOUS MEN: Lost in the Congo, memoir without closure is more interesting!

CURIOUS MEN: Lost in the Congo
BOB KUNZINGER
Madville Publishing LLC (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An experienced adventurer partners with an innocent nineteen-year-old to plan a journey on the most dangerous river in the world.

What starts as one man's dream ends up as another man's nightmare. It was a time when pushing our limits knew no boundaries and being nineteen had no restrictions.

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My Review: Nightmares are, after all, dreams by definition.

When Bob, the author and Joe, the traveler, are dreaming up then planning this extreme journey...testing boundaries in that absurd male way, finding limits by crossing them seldom ends happily...they're consciously planning a story. Its plot is set in their minds, the story-logic will unfold as they intend because stories can be controlled.

Anyone who's ever written any fiction will now be laughing hollowly, their chest devoid of air or the ability to draw it in. They believe the world will obey the rules says the inner terrified parent who knows with bitter certainty that is not the case. Their plans leave room for that, the young ones blithely assure themselves and others. And my inner parent says "you can't plan for the unforseeable" while sweating anxiously, absolutely certain tragedy impends.

And befalls.

This novelistic memoir is the survivor's attempt to discover closure in disaster's aftermath. Bob Kunzinger now needs to make this all make sense, when it does not. He does not fall into the trap of excusing himself, or dismissing his vanished friend's responsibility for undertaking this journey. It's an old man's look back at the event that can not do other than bend his own survivor's life into a weird shape. It feels like therapy on the page, starting with several fantasies of how it should have or might have unfolded differently.

No one now an adult hasn't done that same memory dance. "If only..." is a poison when used indiscriminately, a medicine to poultice hurts if used to direct healing onto a survivor's guilt. I'm not Author Kunzinger, I don't know which this story is for him. For me it was the kind of read I look for in a memoir. It presents no fancy-work of "closure." It is, instead, the account of the testosterone-poisoned late (or arrested, in Joe's case) adolescent exceptionalism of male hubris.

Thinking one can plan for, control, the randomness of the world is the source of much grief. Ask Joe's parents. Testing boundaries and exceeding limits is a function of being a person in growth mode. Failure to cross some of these safely and successfully is called "growth." In coping with the aftermath of the fatal failure of Joe to solo-canoe down the Congo, Bob utterly and irrevocably changes the course of his life. No one, not Bob and certainly not the reader, can say what might have been would've been better or preferable or even possible...was this outcome inevitable, merely inescapable for any one of a myriad of reasons, or an unhappy accident?

Yes. Only without the conditional "or."

That's the source of my high rating for this compact, unresolved story, told by a man whose entire life was altered by his participation in a crazy dream of fame for a feat of endurance accomplished. Only when it wasn't accomplished someone was dead, and Bob Kunzinger has had to live on with his own participation in the fatal event unresolved in the absence of a body, a certainty of that death. In many ways it is more painful not to know how, what, when; imagination fills in the gaps as luridly as possible. Author Kunzinger's written multiple stories in his life after Joe vanished. I'd be amazed if any of them end the way this one does, open-ended and unresolved. It's bad storytelling to leave the ending unresolved.

Life couldn't give a fig about storytelling's rules. Author Kunzinger tells this open-ended story with compassion for the young men who did this stunningly stupid thing without excusing them, or exonerating himself, or blaming Joe or any of the other mental gymnastics I'm morally certain he went through over the years since Joe vanished. It's a really adult reckoning with an adolescent's questionable choices. I found it involving, and infuriating about them then, as well as compassionate for the over-sixty man who can never exonerate the youth who was complicit in this, expiate the harm his actions set in motion, or expunge the act itself from Life's unredactable records.

MY NAME MEANS FIRE: A Memoir, unflinching examination of the selves who saved the author

MY NAME MEANS FIRE: A Memoir
ATASH YAGHMAIAN
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An unflinching and stunning debut memoir of an Iranian girl’s coming-of-age experiencing abuse, war, and superstition—and her survival through dissociative identity disorder, which offered her an inner world into which she could escape

When she was a child, Atash Yaghmaian’s home life was unpredictable: a confusing mix of love and terror. Outside of her home, Iran was also on fire. Her reality of abuse, war, gender oppression, and religious superstition left her feeling unsafe everywhere. So, she left reality and disassociated into a place she called the House of Stone: a building in a magical forest full of peaceful creatures, kind talking trees, and volcanoes. Inhabiting this world are 9 beings, each different parts of Atash, who would be her salvation from the external horrors of her outer world.

Set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime, and the 8-year Iran-Iraq War, My Name Means Fire is Atash’s story of survival as she experiences tragic events including sexual abuse, a mother who subjected her to superstitious rituals, and the horrors of war. In chapters alternating with what’s happening in her outside world, her other parts—each named after a color—tell the story of her inner world, giving readers an understanding of what it’s like to be inside the consciousness of someone who is multiple.

Honest, powerful, and moving, My Name Means Fire is a bold narrative that challenges the stigma and misinformation around dissociative identity disorder (DID) and ultimately reckons with what it takes to survive.

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My Review: A story not of abuse, but the lengths a mind will go to in order to survive abuse.

Author Atash is a child of war, growing up in revolutionary Iran during its convulsive birth. She had the bad fortune to be female at a time that was becoming as awfully abuse-worthy and dangerous as it can possibly be. She was equally unlucky in having a mother sufficiently divorced from reality as to subject her daughter to bizarre-to-me religious rituals in place of protecting her or getting her proper care.

We had the same mother, Author Atash. Mine had no war to excuse her insanity, but I had the great good luck to be born male. Harms balanced; my heart goes out to you. It won't help forty years later but it is sincere sadness for the things that occurred in your life that caused splitting your mind into compartments was the best way to keep yourself safe.

In this story of peril unprotected, abuse unstopped, and damage unheeded, the one thing that ran through my mind was, "your mind is astoundingly powerful! Your ability to divide yourself into different people, each capable of more than you thought you were, is close to miraculous!"

It was hard to read, I wanted to help her escape her lunatic mother, rescue her from the war-torn horrors around her adolescent self. I hurt for the potential squandered in her awful childhood...a mind this resilient could easily have achieved much more than survival, though it is astonishing she managed to survive. I'm extremely impressed that her life has been such that she was able to conceptualize and create this account of how she came to be a multiple, and how she became a self that could function.

I wished, to be honest, we had spent more time with the multiples, not quite so much detailing their traumatic genesis. It's a quibble, too, that ending the story as she's escaping to the US felt...rushed...but it gives me hope Author Atash will write a volume two. I'm glad I got to meet Fire in her present state.

THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD, second bite of the apple for a story I neglected in 2014

THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD
BILL HILLMANN
Tortoise Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Chicago’s Far North Side, a few decades ago—a rough-and-tumble place, awash with racial tensions and petty crime.

Joey, the youngest child in a mixed-race family, is pushing his way up through the cracked pavement of a chaotic life: parish festivals and block parties on long summer nights, fistfights in back alleys on boring empty days, long walks up and down Clark Street pocketing envelopes of collection money for his older brother, Lil’ Pat. It’s easy enough to pretend it’s all normal, until he sees Pat murder a man in a neighborhood drugstore. Now he’s haunted by the memory of blood pooling on the green tiles under the flickering fluorescent lights, torn by the conflict between love of family and disgust over what they do—and desperate to survive the insanity without being swept up in it.

This revised second edition of Bill Hillmann’s modern classic features a new introduction by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. It’s a perfect primer for a great book that deserves a place alongside the likes of Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell on the top shelf of Chicago literature.

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My Review: I read the first edition of this around 2014, and wasn't very impressed. It was too fragmented, too unorganized (not disorganized...there was too little structure to call it that). So Curbside Splendor, the prior publisher, never got a review for that ARC they sent me. Naughty of me, I know, and sorry to their shade for being so thoughtless.

This time round, I'm not sure why, I felt less put off by the read eleven years on. It's still a bit more episodic for my liking, but has more a feel of purpose, of intent behind the disjunctures. I'm not going to nominate it for the awards circuit, in fiction anyway, because it feels a lot more like a roman à clef now, a memoir in a lot of makeup.

I could invest more in the story being told, the decay of a moral code and the complete surrender of decent people to evil blandishments making brummagem promises we, the readers, know for sure and certain will be broken. If it sounds like a dream come true, an answer to all your prayers, and you say "yes", prepare for the worst. The kind of people who make big promises without clear plans and transparent methods intend to use you then throw you into the machine you helped them make.

That's decidedly true here, we see it happen again and again. I wonder if under-sixty me had just not yet grown inured to the terrible cost of stupidity...? It's in your face, it's omnipresent, it is the welkin the suffering stooges cry into.

And I can't even work up schadenfreude. It's happening all over in 2025 and it makes me deeply ill; but I can't laugh at "Them" anymore.