OF LOSS AND LAVENDER: A Novel, masculinity's vast void after destruction

OF LOSS AND LAVENDER: A Novel
SINAN ANTOON
Other Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebbok, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this achingly beautiful novel of trauma, memory, and identity, two Iraqi men struggle to start a new life in the US after the Gulf War.

Sami, a retired doctor, lives with his son and grandchildren in Brooklyn. As he tries to navigate this new city, it becomes increasingly clear he is losing his memory due to dementia. Every day he sinks deeper into old memories of a life in Iraq before the war.

Omar arrived in the US with no family. He has run away from Iraq with a fake identity. As a deserter, he was punished by having an ear cut off. In Baghdad, this is an unmissable mark of shame. Omar works menial jobs, creates a new identity—comically passing as Puerto Rican—and dreams of reconstructive surgery to get his ear, and his dignity, back.

Their stories converge powerfully when it becomes clear they were connected in Iraq at a moment that was pivotal for them both. Deftly exploring the aftermath of war and relocation, Of Loss and Lavender creates a moving portrait of life in exile.

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My Review: A novel of displacement. A story of male identity that, in centering differing...often competing...cultural notions of masculinity, shines a klieg light into the endless void at men's cores left by their "failures," inabilities, unwillingness to live measured by that toxic measure.

What Author Antoon did by bringing these oddly assorted immigrants to the US was subtle, clever, and tendentious. Omar is a chancer. He's blagged his way into and out of trouble since...well, who knows, we're not vouchsafed his whole life's story but I'd bet my very own United States dollars that he's been behaving this way his whole life. Omar is running even when he stands still, never at rest because rest is the point when "They" can get you in their sights to pin you in your place, the one "They" have decided you belong.

Sami's never run in his life. Towards or away from a goal or a problem, he's been steady. His aging mind has fractured from the weight of his memories. He's not agile, he's strong. Strength, unlike agility, breaks when overextended. He tries to comprehend Brooklyn, not an easy task for the native from the US, and fails. In his failure to become a Brooklynite, Sami becomes the dependent he was always responsible for, the helpless and confused neophyte he always guided...the not-powerful responsibilty in place of a lifetime as the powerful protector. Wandering in his memories he needs to build his identity Sami has no traction thanks to dementia. We meet him before the dementia robs him of enough capacity to know he's losing his battle. It is the hardest to endure of all dementia's thieveries. Sami is still Sami. Cruel is our word for this moment of struggle, outsiders who observe it; internally, no one who knows it intimately has ever told us, because they can't.

When you use these men as each others' counterpoise you get the fulcrum of the system located at masculinity. Lost, found, rejected, but "Achilles absent was Achilles still," in Homer's distillation of verity into aperçu. In bringing these wounded-by-past-lives souls to a country that shares none of their lived experiences, Author Antoon removes all the props we use to build identity from them. They have no obvious place in the cultural map they must now use to navigate Life. Omar loves this because it means he controls his narrative, he has no further need to resist the boxes he's forced to occupy because they don't exist to threaten him. It's liberation, yes, but it comes as always at a price. Belonging, the sense of purpose that it grants, is also in those boxes that confine, shape, define Omar (including his name, fictional though it is). Freedom isn't free. Never has that truth been more stark than to Omar in Brooklyn.

Living your life in translation is never easy. It is a hidden cost of Othering those not deemed "mainstream" or those who are immigrants in similar degrees. Author Antoon is an iraqi immigrant to New York, a novelist and (it says in his biography) poet who translates from (and/or to) Arabic; It shows in this very good novel. It feels like he is translating the experience of masculinity from one culture to another, like the characters are finding ways to make sense of the world that use words no longer part of their fluency. Sami's losses are structural intrinsic; Omar's are voluntary, elective; both are costly and exact significant emotional tolls on each man's journey through the maze of Brooklyn.

As a professor at New York University, Author Antoon is no doubt drawing on his own immigrant experience in the vast, bewildering social system of New York. I hope the world here has treated him with greater kindness than either of these characters received. I offer the story an incomplete fifth star because I was immersed in the flume of the story's canal, the high-pressure constriction that roils and directs but does not deliver to an end point the narrative waters. What, in the end, did Omar and Sami do as a result of occupying the same canal? They changed; but in tandem not in response to each other.

I derived a lot of pleasure from the story. I hope y'all will give it your time and treasure. I think the way each character experienced their quest after identity was so poignantly masculine, so painfully rooted in their manhood, that many women would get significant value from this male interiority.

WELCOME TO FOREVER, lovely meditation on what makes you, you

WELCOME TO FOREVER
NATHAN TAVARES
Titan Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping, psychedelic romance of two men caught in a looping world of artificial realities, edited memories, secretive cabals and conspiracies to push humanity to the next step in its evolution.

For fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Ubik, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Evangelion.

Fox is a memory editor—one of the best—gifted with the skill to create real life in the digital world. When he wakes up in Field of Reeds Center for Memory Reconstruction with no idea how he got there, the therapists tell him he was a victim in a terrorist bombing by Khadija Banks, the pioneer of memory editing technology turned revolutionary. A bombing which shredded the memory archives of all its victims, including his husband Gabe.

Thrust into reconstructions of his memories exploded from the fragments that survived the blast, Fox tries to rebuild his life, his marriage and himself. But he quickly realises his world is changing, unreliable, and echoing around itself over and over.

As he unearths endless cycles of meeting Gabe, falling in love and breaking up, Fox digs deep into his past, his time in the refugee nation of Aaru, and the exact nature of his relationship with Khadija. Because, in a world tearing itself apart to forget all its sadness, saving the man he loves might be the key to saving us all.

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My Review: The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind only gay it up. I loved that film, and this book, for the same reasons: They show us how extremely integral to our sense of self and buying in to the social construct of reality memory is. If someone doesn't share your memory of something, is your memory wrong? If you can't find a memory in your mind, is it gone? Where'd it go?

After the strokes I had in 2023, these questions are more important than ever to me. They were never unimportant to me but have gained urgency as a result of that crisis. Reading this book with its structural similarity to my own experience of needing others...the kindness of others is literally everything, y'all, practice giving it as well as receiving it....to help me find my sense of myself in the world was satisfyingly resonant.

Questioning one's identity is a thing we're told magically stops for queer people when we come out. (Spoiler alert: It does not.) All the jostles to one's sense of self that a long-term intimate relationship brings are wildly out-of-proportion shocks to many of us. Fox meeting Gabe, meeting him again and again, and still coming up against that shocking wall of The Other as a complete and entire being not knowable to yourself, makes this a wonderful piece of relationship fiction. It's very much also a SFF exploration of overweening tech hubris. It's also a sly jab at the savior complex of the people who look at humanity as a set of problems to be solved. All of these facets are inherent in the story's conflicts, in the quest that Fox sets out on to rediscover and reintegrate himself after trauma.

I'll say that, after the success that was my read of A Fractured Infinity, I went into this sophmore effort hoping for no slump and wishing for an out-of-the-park homer. I got neither. I got the top-quality expansion on the strengths of the first novel, its relationships, and that is way more than enough to get an extra half-star from my stingy self. A full star didn't happen because the first book's film-editing style didn't thrill me this time, either. I honestly expected scene numbers and location directions. I suspect Author Tavares uses shot lists to organize the stories he tells...hoping for his sake this makes the film industry take him up and film both his stories.

This story should be of extra deep interest to readers over 35 because that group has, as a rule, experiences like Fox's and Gabe's to bring to the table. It is straight-people safe, no NSFW smexytimes to shock and/or affront you. The love story, the trajectory of a man constructing and reconstructing his life after a horrible, external trauma, ought to draw in all identities...or so I hope in this polarized world.

Very much a recommended #PrideMonth read for us and for allies all.

SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND, trauma victim’s voyage of discovery

SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND
JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET
Simon & Schuster
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Scarface meets Moby-Dick in this groundbreaking, darkly comic novel about a young man’s attempt to capitalize on his mother’s murky legacy—a story steeped in Miami’s marvelous and sinister magic.

Failed Pitbull impersonator Ismael Reyes—you can call him Izzy—might not be the Scarface type, but why should that keep him from trying? Growing up in Miami has shaped him into someone who dreams of being the King of the 305, with the money, power, and respect he assumes comes with it. After finding himself at the mercy of a cease-and-desist letter from Pitbull’s legal team and living in his aunt’s garage-turned-efficiency, Izzy embarks on an absurd quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana.

When Izzy’s efforts lead him to the tank that houses Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium, she proves just how powerful she and the water surrounding her really are—permeating everything from Miami’s sinking streets to Izzy’s memories to the very heart of the novel itself. What begins as Izzy’s story turns into a super-saturated fever dream as sprawling and surreal as the Magic City, one as sharp as an iguana’s claws, and as menacing as a killer whale’s teeth. As the truth surrounding Izzy’s boyhood escape from Cuba surfaces, the novel reckons with the forces of nature, with the limits and absence of love, and with the dangers of pursuing a tragic inheritance. Wildly narrated and expertly rendered, Say Hello to My Little Friend is Jennine Capó Crucet’s most daring, heart-breaking, and fearless book yet.

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My Review: Izzy is as average a guy as you will ever find. He has a crazy-ass inner life which suggests to him that making a living as a Pitbull impersonator:

...so we have a visual lock on Izzy from the off. Though, speaking of "off," the novel opens with Izzy getting his life rearranged by a lawyerly letter telling him to cease-and-desist with the Pitbull-y stuff. Now he has to figure out a way to make a living, and a life. Where is his family, you ask. Nowhere. He’s got none.

That central reality, that lack of mooring chains, allows Izzy to follow his inner voice’s promptings to do the absolute most batshit-crazy nonsense...remember he *was* a Pitbull impersonator until forced not to be...like, oh, let’s say, model the entire rest of his life on the character in the film Scarface.

Follow the links, notice the patterns...this is not random pop-cultural detritus the author has randomly picked up.

Then comes the plot twist Lolita the Orca. How in the name of all that is holy did an ORCA show up in a novel about a Cuban-American man’s identity crisis?!

You really need to follow those links. Do some surface-scratching into the culture not already familiar to you. The word "reggaeton" will enter your vocabulary painlessly this way, and you will need it and the ideas it fronts for to wedge into your brain. The world is changing, and unless you intend to try to stop it by joining the banners and deniers on the radical right, you had best expend some brainergy getting convesrant with Izzy and his world.

Do it painlessly by reading this novel. Moby-Dick was nowhere near this much fun to read, and Izzy beats Ishmael all hollow as a cicerone through all things whale-y. The resonances with the culture of the past make the culture of this century accessible for us midcentury moderns. The read is fun, it’s fast, it’s trenchant...it’s saying a lot more than the words mean.

Isn’t that more or less a novel’s brief? This one does make you work. It requires some effort to get the pop-cultural zeitgeist. It does not pretend to be all about you and center your experience. That novel exists in droves, elsewhere. THIS novel takes you inside the head of a man so traumatized by his past that he can not afford to go deep into anything. This novel parses the cost of cheap thrills and entertainment. The plot, the spine, is the voyage of discovery that we take with Izzy. Like any voyage of discovery, it is not a straight line from start to finish, so douse that expectation right away. Go on the trip as Author Crucet planned it and it will reward you with knowledge and information about the world of a trauma survivor. That can only be a net gain to your own world, because you are statistically likely to know a trauma survivor.

You might not know it yet, but you could easily pick up on signs you would not have seen before if you get your hooks into this story and its meanings.

"MUSLIM": A Novel, outrage, anger, and grief shouted to the Heavens

"MUSLIM": A Novel
ZAHIA RAHMANI (tr. Matthew Reeck)
Deep Vellum
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

Winner of the 2020 Albertine Prize
Selected for Asymptote's February 2019 Book Club

The Publisher Says: "Muslim": A Novel is a genre-bending, poetic reflection on what it means to be Muslim from one of France's leading writers. In this novel, the second in a trilogy, Rahmani's narrator contemplates the loss of her native language and her imprisonment and exile for being Muslim, woven together in an exploration of the political and personal relationship of language within the fraught history of Islam. Drawing inspiration from the oral histories of her native Berber language, the Koran, and French children's tales, Rahmani combines fiction and lyric essay in to tell an important story, both powerful and visionary, of identity, persecution, and violence.

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My Review: One can call a cat a dog, but that won't make the creature bark or fetch a stick. This is not a novel. It is, in my pretty well-informed opinion, a récit. And, at under 150 pages, it isn't possessed of the scope a novel needs. Here's why that's important: Expectations get set when a person reads a title, and someone expecting a deep, immersive novel experience is going to leave this read disappointed.

Sad that this is the case. I would've chosen a different title, in fact; but the book's beauties are plentiful, call it what one may, and much here is to be savored.

Born in 1962, the author and the narrator of the book, whom we understand to be the author in heightened and fictionalized form, was the child of a Harki father:

He was only the man who had impregnated my mother. I never knew what to call him. I never had a father. The war had stolen mine.

and a Berber mother:

I was old enough to walk, and yet my mother was carrying me on her back in a shawl, with a scarf tied around my head. She told me later that she used to put baby potatoes in the shawl to help my headaches. "Did I get headaches a lot when I was a child?" "I didn't have any medicine," she told me. "I had headaches a lot?" "All the time," she told me.

Her father's imprisonment until a daring escape in 1967 meant her childhood was spent as a doubly disadvantaged person: Berber language and culture was no more accepted in Algeria after independence than before, and her father's legacy of French co-operation was the cause of trouble. Her entire life, then, was delineated in hyphens...she was never Rahman, herself, and later Elohim, her invented self. She was Othered in an Algeria bent of Arabizing to belong to a larger Islamic community of "Pan-Arabism" and then in France by not being white, not looking like other little girls did.

And here, at this juncture, fiction diverges from fact as Rahman-the-character not Rahmani-the-writer is exiled by the French language...and so leaves France, the not-homeland of the body. This story having been written and published in France in 2005, it's sort of inevitable that the US invasions of Muslim lands like Iraq in Operation Desert Storm take a sort-of vague center stage. French intellectual that she is, the author sets a good deal of the, um, events (no real "action" in a récit) in a prison camp much like the camp her Harki father occupied after Algeria's independence.

They had just one Name. One Name. And no one suspected the evil inside them, no one bore witness to this evil inside them, the thing that they were referring to when they said, "we don’t want them, we don’t want others, not him, not her, not them." And this always brought to mind the scenes of trains leaving for Poland.

"Of all the excuses that intellectuals have found for executioners—and during the past ten years they have not been idle in the matter—the most pitiable of all is that the victim's thought—for which he was murdered—was fallacious."

It is at this point that quotidian reality departs the scene for good; what replaces it is Reality-Plus, the enhanced experience of poetry and fable and fairy tale. The mere fact of her existence becomes threatening to Them, the Powers That Be. She is not one thing, not that she ever was ever allowed to be only one thing (herself); she is Other, and takes the identity Elohim, that ambiguous plural Ugaritic word for the monophysite Jewish god as well as for the Children of El as well as for the Canaanite pantheon...she never shies away from complexity, Author Rahmani. And so I've never made any attempt to make it clear if any of the foregoing is fiction or autobiography.

Because it doesn't matter.

If you choose to read this book, and I hope you will, the reason to do so isn't to go from Point A to Point Q. You're not doing the Stations of the Cross, Catholics; not on Hajj, Muslims. You're making the pilgrimage through the countryside tending towards Santiago de Compostela or Mecca or Canterbury. You're there, in other words, for the voyage in, towards the destination, and not the destination itself.

Coming to France was my father's fault. He'd been banished from Algeria. Banished like so many others had been, and like so many more would be. Banished, stripped of a name, a soldier of the colonial army, a traitor to his country. They were the banished, the silent participants of the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Iraq and elsewhere, the comrades of the losers of these wars, waiting to drag their shame home.

Because, in the end, there is no destination, no Home, no place for us on this Earth, that we do not demand accept us, speak into being intentionally and unyieldingly.

I wouldn’t be just an exile, an immigrant, an Arab, a Berber, a Muslim, or a foreigner, but something more. Despite all they might do to force me back into these categories, I wouldn’t return to those places. I would strive to find in these words whatever they had of the universal, of the beautiful, of the human, of the sublime. The rest—the dark flipside of the particulars—I would leave for those starving for identity politics. I would continue to love my mother tongue, and I would see how it linked me to Arab people, to Semitic peoples, to “Muslim”, and to “Jewish.” I wanted to learn everything that had been kept from me about these people and their languages.

In just under an hour and a half, you'll make the acquaintance of one who has done precisely that.

THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF, forty-seven years old and still speaking to the essence of selfhood

THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF
DAVID GERROLD
BenBella Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: This classic work of science fiction is widely considered to be the ultimate time-travel novel. When Daniel Eakins inherits a time machine, he soon realizes that he has enormous power to shape the course of history. He can foil terrorists, prevent assassinations, or just make some fast money at the racetrack. And if he doesn't like the results of the change, he can simply go back in time and talk himself out of making it! But Dan soon finds that there are limits to his powers and forces beyond his control.

My Review: Danny's been livin' the high life, thanks to a bequest from his mysterious old uncle. One day, the gravy train ends, and Danny has to make his own way. With a belt. A very special time-travel-enabling belt.

An exploration of adolescent exceptionalism, a meditation on the establishment, building, and defense of identity, and an astonishingly rare representation of gay maleness in science fiction. The author, who penned "The Trouble with Tribbles" for the original Star Trek series, tackles all this heaviness in less than 200pp, and never makes it feel like any tackling is being done.

Deft and timely even now, Gerrold's unapologetically gay Danny is mildly surprising even in the modern SFnal world. The ewww-ick-they-do-WHAT? homophobes need fear nothing, there's no raunch in Danny's journey of self-discovery (of a sort I've never seen again).

For my teenaged self, this book blew into my life at a time when I was under emotional siege from the forces of Jesus. It was a lifeline thrown from a grown person to my too-young-to-run self. If he could write this book, there was a world that didn't loathe me, because here was something written, published, and sold with me in it! I endured many a screaming, hectoring, sermonizing hour thinking that thought.

If you suspect some youth of your acquaintance might be struggling to think positively of himself because he's probably gay, think about giving him this book. It can't hurt, and it might do him a world of good.

ETA a few musings and a quote. In going back over the 2003 edition of this book, I thought to compare it to the 1973 edition that blew my mind wide open when first read (I was not going to sleep a peaceful night until I found a room full of men having sex with each other and diving in). Gerrold has done a light but thoroughgoing job of making alterations to the book that reflect thirty years' growth in himself and the world. It was lovely to see, and BenBella Books deserves our thanks for making room in this timeline for it to happen.

I've pushed my rating to five stars because, thinking back on it, any minor quibbles I've made vanish in the arc-light of this novel's originality in a musty, stuffy, conservative genre. And world.

I've said in other reviews (see my review, then compare to Received Opinion about Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand) that re-reads of the peak experiences of bygone days are hazardous to one's ego. I've always praised Gerrold's book as a well-written, risk-taking, genre-expanding chef d'oeuvre by a writer whose fame came early. I was right then, I'm right now...this book's genre-bending continues because, despite the presence of many other QUILTBAG characters in current SF/F, the main character of this book remains unique and speaks with an evergreen honesty. The frame has been dusted and re-gilded to keep the portrait sharply focused. It takes nothing away from the central and beautiful idea of the book, the inner life of an infinity of people contained in one-many-same-different body-brain-spirit.

I worked and worked to make that sentence make sense and I think I was only marginally successful, but I don't know how to make it better. If I figure it out, I will change it.
^^^
That there's a better review of this book than any I could have dreamed up before.

And that quote:

My body has not experienced its years in sequence. But it has experienced years. And it has aged.
And my mind has been carried headlong with it—this lump of flesh travels through time its own way, in a way that no man has the power to change. ... Perhaps I'm not a mind at all. Perhaps I'm only a body pretending the vanity of being something more. Perhaps it's only the fact that language, which allows me to manipulate symbols, ideas, and concepts, also proves the awareness of self that precedes the inevitable analysis. ... I have spent a lifetime analyzing my life. Living it. And rewriting it to suit me.

THE BRICK MURDER: A Tragedy, and Other Stories earns my happy respect for quality writing that's still fun

THE BRICK MURDER: A Tragedy, and Other Stories
KURT JOSE AYAU
Livingston Press
$6.00 SALE PRICE trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: THE BRICK MURDER: A Tragedy, and Other Stories is a funnily tragic collection of stories that always borders on wondrously correct incorrectness. A manic and angered sub-sub-librarian learns about cultural differences from a manic and angered patron. A junior faculty member gets paid to befriend a senior star philandering poet. Three kids and a rabbi discover the awful truth that God really is a process God. A token black man Bob the Negro accomplishes revenge in his work place at a price. And, a brick plays a momentous part in a tragedy. This collection comes one short of a dozen, but nothing short in its style and reach.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU!

My Review: Sixth winner of the Ruby Pickens Tartt Award for First Fiction Collection Kurt Jose Ayau brings an outsider's eye (meaning he doesn't squint through the same Galileo-era telescope) to short fiction. He doesn't write plotless blobs of pretty sentences, like the Writerly Reviews publish, he writes STORIES, with beginnings, middles, and endings. Sometimes they aren't in the usual places, but they're there. Livingston Press grants this prize annually to an author who has never had a collection of short fiction published, naming it after a WPA Writers' Project worker who went all over Depression-era Alabama collecting the oral histories of former slaves. Tartt's work never appeared under her own name until after she died. The publisher honors her unsung service to literature by awarding the prize of publication to a previously unheard or ill-attended-to voice. Ayau's collection is eleven pieces strong, and there are far more hits than the few near-misses in these pages. The title story takes us to the last moments on Earth of a pompous, arrogant blowhard ex-military teacher. He's typical of most of the full professors I've ever known, completely oblivious to anything but him/herself and his/er hobbyhorse; well, this time, it costs the old fuffertut dearly. Like, everything. I took great Schadenfreude in this revenge tale. As Ayau is a professor at a military school, I wonder if it's not simply wish fulfillment....

"Official Friend", "Calling It Off", "Sand Castle", and "Culture Clash" all ring their various changes on the theme of identity and its roots; it's evergreen territory, this, and Ayau rakes through the fallen treasures to very good effect.

"At A Loss for Words", "Outsourcing", and "By the Numbers" are tales of betrayal of trust, the scales-falling-from-their-eyes moments that are physically and psychically painful; in at least two cases lethal....

"Murray and the Holy Ghost" and "Spawning" are told from the eyes of children, and are, to my mind at least, the least successful in the collection. Both revolve around those last moments of innocence before the quotidian world of adulthood crunches the child's illusions about himself, his universe, and his most treasured fantasies. Ayau's child voices are well presented. I just don't like that story's effect, no matter how well it's told, and I am also a little tired of kids carrying stories in fiction. Too many iterations of that here lately, and frankly I'm over it.

And then there's "Bob the Negro." What a story that is. I hope it's anthologized in every future work that pretends to deal with race in America. Hugely successful sales maven Bob takes a job in a regionally successful, all-white company in Podunk, New Enland. He energizes the sales single-handedly. He makes friends of one and all. He's on top of the world! So he thinks. Disturbing hints of a different reality make it through his oblivious, overachieving shell; he lays traps to discover exactly what his suspicions tell him could be going on; and then, when his worst fears are exceeded, he pulls a major bonehead maneuver and loses everything...except success, which he can't keep away with a barge-pole. This story is the chef d'ouevre and it alone is worth the $6 the book costs. Buy the book, read the story, and come tell me about it if you disagree...but I suspect you won't. It's that good.

MOTHER OF A MACHINE GUN, a mother of a wallop in under 100pp

MOTHER OF A MACHINE GUN
MICHAEL SEIDLINGER
Lazy Fascist Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.95 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: What happens when a woman gives birth to a machine gun?

"Mother has something else to say but music won’t stop music is here to stay. For ‘music’, read language. In this headlong tumble of a novella, we see not only an (unhinged/possibly murderous) Mother searching for her (autistic/possibly murderous) son, but also we see language itself, banged up and tripping, a bleeding anatomy of Biblical, crime show, tabloid, service industry phrases joined into a body, hurtling towards impact, and wondering where its human inmates are."

—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Salamandrine: 8 Gothics

My Review: McSweeney's blurb strikes the perfect tone for this novella. Perfect, and no one really can do any better in summing up a work that clearly fell out of Seidlinger's head, sharp-edged and lethally shaped, whole and entire.

I've read three of Seidlinger's books, this being the second of them and The Fun We've Had being the first. I'm getting a picture here. A young man determinedly deconstructing identity. A tyro artist making big bold gestures in small constrained spaces. A soul in search of a mate.

So that's the art.

Now the craft: Every writer needs a trope. Seidlinger's is musical brevity. He'd be called a poet if he made less sense. It's to your taste or it's not, but it's a technique that feels to me organically arrived at, a natural result of being part of the zeitgeist this youth has sucked in with his breath and taken in with his mental food.

The short and virtually unpunctuated sentences of the piece aren't visually appealing to me. It looks like poetry, not a novel, when there is so much white space on a page, when the entire novella is only 90pp, when the one-line paragraphs are dotted hither and thither. I'm an older person, schooled in an older-still tradition of reading long, windy (both pronunciations and meanings) sentences and paragraphs and pages. I don't take to, appreciate, this technique naturally.

So I read it aloud. The dog doesn't much care. She pays attention to me while it suits her and then goes to sleep. Meanwhile the human is making noise, yeah well so what else is new.

I got a lot out of that exercise. I've come to know Michael a little, and appreciate how very hard he works to make the world around him more intense and interesting than it would otherwise be. I approve of this desire on his part, and enjoy the efforts he's made as a writer, an editor, and a publisher. Speaking aloud the words in this book made it clear to me what a scouring, cleansing thing it is to make a question out of an answer. Mother. Mother? The Mother A Mother Some Mother...and to make a question out of the verb forms of this frighteningly large concept, Mother: to Mother, to Be A Mother...activities, identities, aspirations, longings...and the object of Mother is Son. Matthew. Some mother's son. The object of mothering, the subject of being a mother.

I suspect sons wonder more about mothers and mothering than daughters, potential/actual/present mothers, do; we will never know motherhood, the condition of Mother. Daughters can be mothers, even if they choose not to be. It's a mystery sons can't enter into, and many of us wish we could comprehend it better. We would be free of Mother if we could, we tell ourselves, free at last! So what does Seidlinger do with his Mother angst? What an artist does with every lump in the throat: Speaks it into being, limns it onto the air, strokes it onto pages physical or virtual.

Reading this Mother's journey around the bend, I Mothered myself. I found it good.