THE SURGE is Author Adam Kovac's second release of this deeply felt story of men in combat mode

THE SURGE
ADAM KOVAC
Tortoise Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Larry Chandler knows what his fellow soldiers don’t—that war scars you and haunts you, leaving you with memories you’d prefer not to face. They’re all National Guardsmen serving together in Iraq, but he’s already done a stint in Afghanistan, whereas they’re fresh-faced youngsters on their first tour. The new soldiers are eager for something more interesting than life on a firebase, or boring guard duty at isolated outposts—and they’re about to get their wish.

Adam Kovac has written one of the great novels of The Forever Wars—one that captures both the dust and grit and sweat of soldiers on patrol, and the surrealism of their lives back on base. (Where they might be checking Facebook and ordering lattes one minute, and dodging mortars the next.) In its first edition, it earned comparisons to the likes of Hemingway, Mailer, and O’Brien; this revised second edition promises to find it the audience it so richly deserves.

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

My Review: I'm connected with Author Kovac across social platforms for ages now, because we support and repost stuff that falls into a leftier, less manosphere-friendly vibe. I got a copy of the DRC from his publisher without mentioning it to him, when one fine day he slid into my DMs asking if I wanted to read it.

Thus proving the old adage "you know your own."

Another old adage proved in this read is "be careful what you ask the gods for lest their answer be 'yes.'" Larry Chandler muses at one point that he doesn't know what to do with the genuine, but not civilian-life-friendly, love he feels for fallen comrades. It's real, this unnamed grief, but it's so very not part of the life your friends, family, spouse at home are leading that you can't see what you can do with it.

For me, that was the emotional heart of this read. In The Yellow Birds, Bartle has a job of work to explain how he survived and another man didn't. In Matterhorn, one of my annual 6*-of-five reads, Waino Mellas had the same gigantic realization in Vietnam. If you're sensing a theme, you're on my signal pretty tightly.

Why I read these war-experience novels by veterans is easy to explain. They are always real and honest; they carry some burden the veteran wants to put down; and they are almost always so polished in the author's writerly imagination that some genuinely lovely turn of phrase leaps out at me:

"People, man, they won’t shut up. Watch. They’ll keep asking what you’re going to do now that you’re back home. Compared to life downrange, I think it might be impossible to find anything as interesting."
–and–
"Civilian world. It’s a dead end. Man knows where he stands here. Where he belongs."

Terse, not flowery, not fancy, but impactful like the sound of an IED just out of sight is.

Why I like reading these stories is also easy to explain. I will never have an experience like this. Even if, as I suspect is the case, this inner conflict ripping up the US does not end without bloodshed, it will not be like this. War has moved on since the Aughties Iraq War. Drones do more killing than people do. I think that will lead to less empathy than even The Surge's men learn to experience. Now you'll simply see the aftermath of killing not commit or participate in it as a group.

I have the luxury of knowing I'll be dead before all that long, so might...probably will...miss most of it. Poor Author Kovac, having lived it, written about it, and now seen it coming again on home soil, just has to gut it out. I'm sorry, my dude. If it's any consolation to you, this story is excellent, and you're a dab hand at bringing your readers along with you as you make a narrative happen for us.

If you're in the modern world and wondering why the right-wing-nuts are whining about men being "too empathetic," read Adam Kovac's novel. Empathy is what war pounds into your skull. If you start out with it, with what it takes to learn it out in the killing fields, maybe...just maybe...you won't do it on command.

That makes this very good story a public mitzvah as well as a pleasure to read.

PLANET OF CLAY, tale of the toll living exacts on the different

PLANET OF CLAY
SAMAR YAZBEK (tr. Leri Price)
World Editions
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An ode to fantasy and beauty in the midst of war-torn Damascus

Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. She finds refuge in a fantasy world full of colored crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur’an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits. Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she’s crazy, but she is no fool—the madness is in the battered city around her.

One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed. Rima, wounded, is taken to a military hospital before her brother leads her to the besieged area of Ghouta—where, between bombings, she writes her story.

In Planet of Clay, Samar Yazbek offers a surreal depiction of the horrors taking place in Syria, in vivid and poetic language and with a sharp eye for detail and beauty.

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

My Review: First, read this:

We needed to take two buses to reach {my mother's job} from our house, which was at the end of Jaramana Camp in southern Damascus. I am happy for you if you haven't heard of it.
–and–
Personally, I turn over the coffee tray and make it into a desk, then I pick up the blue pen which I found among the stacks of paper, and I begin. You must not set off before the sound has started. Don't stop unless you are faint from exhaustion, but it must be from exhaustion and not fear. If all this isn't done properly, I mean using the blue pen to play with words on a blank page, then my instructions will fail, the blank page won't like you, and the roar of the aeroplanes won't disappear.

The rational response to an irrational world, one filled with mortal danger, will always be different for a small child. When a small child is required to make the world make sense when it simply doesn't, such as in a war zone, there will arise adaptive responses that are in the long run maladaptive. And add in the probability of the person being neurodivergent from the get-go...well, what are the odds of that person reaching adulthood? Still less unscathed.

Rima's mother knows her daughter isn't the usual sort of child. She's got "her brains in her feet," meaning a mania for walking, walking, always walking if she can stay on her feet...in other words, a need to escape...and on one of her very first outings, so to speak, a group of well-meaning adults stop her and ask her all sorts of urgent questions...what's your name, where's your mother...that she simply can't process fast enough to answer. Thus is an elective mute created.

So now Rima's mother is living in a war zone with a manic, elective mute daughter. She does what any mother would do...she makes the medical rounds, seeking answers. Getting none, she does the thing mothers have done since the beginning of time: She improvises. She gets some rope and ties Rima to her wrist when she has to go out and, when the girl's too much of a woman for that to be safe, she ties her to their bed.

That sounds horrific to a Western person who's safe inside a house every night, with only police drones and cop cars to worry about. But think of this: How safe is a young woman on the streets here in your fat-and-happy country? You'll always teach her to be aware of the threat posed by Them. (You'll be filling in that space with the people you dislike the most, of course, but I assure you she's safer from Them than from the nice, entitled, self-satisfied boys in her school.) For someone with fewer resources than the poorest person in this country of ours, the solution fits the need admirably.

What it doesn't, can't do is prepare Rima for one of the personal calamities that even the mildest "police action" or "guerrilla war" engenders: The loss of a parent. In this case, an only parent...her father's never even been a presence for his absence to be felt. What this means is her world is effectively over. And yet her life goes on, in her mother's permanent absence and her brother's disappearance into the guerrillas' ranks.

What makes this such a perfect read for this moment is the Belarus-vs-Poland manufactured refugee crisis permeating the news cycle right now. It's a necessary and salutary reminder that the world's not in good shape, plague aside; the people, living breathing people, who are caught between two sets of disgusting racist piece-of-shit countries and who will continue to die of exposure as the world idly watches it happen, aren't going to get what they need any more than Rima did.

Mirabile dictu, Rima's brother shows up! He finds her! And they begin the refugee's eternal dance, the homeless and placeless and stateless state of being, of non-personhood. Of course to Rima it's not that way...she simply does. She lives. She is in touch with something utterly invaluable for a refugee: Her self. It is clear to her who she is, she is Rima and she reads, she sings the Qu'ran's sutras, she draws. It is a saving grace. What it isn't is easy for a storyteller to sell. She is simultaneously simple and sophisticated, ignorant and wise and way over her head.

Let me show you:

You will understand that I don't have enough time to explain to you about forgetting. Later, you can throw away whatever pages you want to. What matters to me is {the old caretaking woman} who wanted to understand how I knew how to use tartil in reciting the Qu'ran. Really, it was difficult to explain to her, because my tongue was stopped, and like {her} I don't understand much of what surrounds me.
–and–
I am a story, I too will disappear (or maybe I am with you now as you read my scattered words) like the Cheshire Cat did in the story of Alice.

That is some very sophisticated abstract thought for someone with the neurodivergence Rima has displayed...in the circumstances of her upbringing, I'd be impressed with that level of eloquent abstraction in a neurotypical young adult.

All in all, though, as a work of fiction, I was compelled by the story, by the character, by the narrative's timeliness and timelessness. I'm very impressed as this is the first work I've read by Author Yazbek. It is, as she has Rima say of her own storytelling, one of those "circular stories with intersecting centers which are only completed by retellings and new details."

The problem is reassembling my heart after the story ends....

This is a very special, very timely yet a timeless read...there is no realistic chance the subject matter will lose its relevance. It is a FINALIST for the 2021 Best Translated Literature category at the National Book Awards! The winner will be announced this evening.

Book-A-Day #21: A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA, a book I loved but expected to hate

A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA
ANTHONY MARRA
The Hogarth Press
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.

For Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is the twenty-first, discuss a book you expected to hate but ended up loving.

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

Yes.

Now, there is always a matter of taste when it comes to appreciating or otherwise a given writer's work. Do the writer's words ring you like a bell? Do they smack you in the chops? Do they slither into your ears emitting glassy slime like a hagfish? That's the chief factor in determining your ultimate response to a work. I think some writers are equivalent of chocolatiers, making bonbon after truffle upon caramel. Lovely taken one at a time; urpsome in bulk. I think Marra is a chocolatier of a writer in this book.

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

Mmmmm. Yum. Sing it, Brother Anthony, sing it.

Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.

Yes. I concur. A bit baroque, permabehaps, but yes.

For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

Oh gag me! A milk chocolate strawberry creme-filled emetic-level Whitman's Sampler spitback!

So here I was, alternately uplifted and revolted, and still...this story made me stop what I was thinking and attend to it, and that's no mean feat. The horror of stories about war is, for me, only partially touched by the battles and the soldiers and the wounds they inflict on themselves and each other. The people whose lives are utterly upended by wars fought in their name and on their land are so often simply disappeared in toponymic abstraction (eg, the Mexican-American War). This novel doesn't look so much at the war as at the warred-over place and its inhabitants.

Marra's gift is in making images of the place vivid:

The trees they passed repeated on and on into the woods. None was remarkable when compared to the next, but each was individual in some small regard: the number of limbs, the girth of trunk, the circumference of shed leaves encircling the base. No more than minor peculiarities, but minor particularities were what transformed two eyes, a nose, and a mouth into a face.

And the people who live in the violated, wounded place:

As someone whose days were defined by the ten thousand ways a human can hurt, she needed, now and then, to remember that the nervous system didn't exist exclusively to feel pain.

It's a very well-made book, it's got a helluva wallop of a message, and it's fun to read. I was expecting nothing more than a flashy MFA-from-Iowa-Writers'-Workshop meretricious bauble. Some parts of the book are, in fact, that very thing. One's own taste determines where the balance point lies. Are there more surprisingly good moments than there are expectedly Shiny-Brite ones?

Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.

And there I say yes. Yes, this is more beautiful than brummagem.

MATTERHORN by Karl Marlantes, a 6-star must-read novel

MATTERHORN
KARL MARLANTES
Atlantic Monthly Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five, but it deserves six

The Publisher Says: Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

My Review: Waino Mellas, newly minted Marine infantry lieutenant, arrives in the tender embrace of Bravo Company a scared, green, awkward, scared, stupid, scared kid and, after a huge amount of pain, loss, and hellish enraging waste of life and liberty, becomes a man.

No, really.

Marlantes was a Marine in Vietnam. He took thirty years...longer than most of this planet's people have been alive...to bring forth this horrifying, harrowing, agonizing artwork. I expect we will not see another book from him, or if we do, it will be so radically different from this one as to be unrecognizable as created in the same brain.

The pain and the horror are obviously not going to let him go. He's exorcised them as best a man can in writing this book. But I don't feel a sense of relief at the end of this book. I don't finish up when he stops writing. I think that's because the experience of reading this book is so shattering. OBVIOUSLY! OBVIOUSLY!! it's no smallest patch on actually living this book, but it's a rare experience to read something so complete, so clearly delineated in its scope and its purpose, and that has power...ask a demolitions person about the power of an explosion contained in a box...but more than that, it has purpose. I don't know Marlantes. I don't know that I want to. I know enough about him after reading this book to hate the idea of sending kids across oceans to kill other human beings before I think they're even ready to *love* other human beings, because so many of them won't live to become the man he has.

I hate that fact so much that I hurt inside. I want to scream and cry and rage and mourn and weep with the mothers and fathers whose souls are now scarred and deformed by the pain of losing a child. It won't help, they're launched on a horrible personal journey, but GODDAM IT they're people whose lives changed forever because of some stupid slogan like "national interest."

Ahem. The book.

So, what has Marlantes wrought? A long, hard journey of a book that millions will read some of, and back away scared...be one of the few who go the distance, and you will never, ever forget the journey or the guide. Worth it.

THE YELLOW BIRDS, a poet's first novel of the Iraq War

THE YELLOW BIRDS
KEVIN POWERS
Back Bay Books
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

WINNER OF THE 2013 PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION!

The Publisher Says: "The war tried to kill us in the spring," begins this breathtaking account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger.

Bound together since basic training when their tough-as-nails Sergeant ordered Bartle to watch over Murphy, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes impossible actions.

With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, THE YELLOW BIRDS is a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic.

My Review: I do so wish publishers would stop using the phrase “destined to become a classic” because, even if I agree with them (in this case I do), it's so obviously a sales pitch that it's a turn off.

No one knows for sure what the future will consider a classic. No one in 1955 would've given The Lord of the Rings future-classic status. No one in 1851 would've known about Moby-Dick, it was such a flop! The Great Gatsby? Please! Out of print by 1940!

This book, fragmented like PTSD memories, written in deceptively simple sentences by a *shudder* poet of all things, earns my admiration for its beauty, its simplicity, its sheer raw emotional up-front-ness. It has these, and many other, things in common with books that have stood the test of time and become classics. It is a first novel; it is about a young man's journey into a unique hell of memory and the maze he travels even to imagine daylight guiding him out; it is, one strongly suspects based on the author's CV, a roman à clef. So far, so good, for the oddsmakers' guess it will become a classic; so did The Naked and the Dead, so did The Sun Also Rises, and so on. I think it will be a classic. I hope it will, and I offer this passage as support for my hope and conviction:

When we neared the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn't been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the ruddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid. I smelled copper and cheap wine. The sun was up, but a half-moon hung low on the opposite horizon, cutting through the morning sky like a figure from a child's pull-tab book.

We were lined along the ditch up to our ankles in a soupy muck. It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability. Everything was in its proper place, waiting for a pause in time, for the source of all momentum to be stilled, so that what remained would be nothing more than detritus to be tallied up. The world was paper-thin as far as I could tell. And the world was the orchard, and the orchard was what came next. But none of that was true. I was only afraid of dying.”

That, for me, is a lovely moment of mortal fear's hyperreality-inducing sensory twist. Never having been in war, I can't say it's what a soldier would feel, but having been afraid for my life from external causes, I can say that is the kind of sharp-edged seemingly odd clarity of perception that happened to me. The author was a soldier in Iraq. I suspect he saw and felt these exact things, and because he's *gag* an MFA-havin' poet, he remembered them with extreme precision.

Kevin Powers is One To Watch. This book won the 2012 Guardian First Book Award; the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (which recognizes books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures); the 2013 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction (a $5,000 award administered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters); and the 2013 Prix littéraire étranger Le Monde, given by the French newspaper Le Monde. I strongly suspect this could be the best novel we see from him unless he gets back on the authorial horse to do better than his previous best. I hope he does, and I pray it doesn't blight his ambitions to be so successful so early in his novel-writing career. I most urgently petition the Muses for his beautiful, beautiful talent to survive intact the horrors of commerce, where the agonies of war built a palace for him.

The 2017 film gets a solid 4 stars of five from me, and is available free to Amazon Prime members. Alden Ehrenreich, from that Star Wars movie that got so much hate, is Bartle; and Toni Collette plays his mom; and Jennifer Aniston plays Mrs. Murphy, the mother who entrusts her son to Bartle. All three, as well as the other actors, give very creditable performances in a script that was of decidedly less exalted quality than the novel was. Not bad, not great, better than average by a hair or two; that is not high praise. The story itself makes the experience of watching the film satisfying.