​Paradise by Toni Morrison is a novel about a town called Ruby where a handful of Black families created to be away from white America. The families had initially broken off from another town called New Haven, but still felt unsafe so moved farther into isolation. Next to the town there was a large mansion which had been built years before their arrival, which was then turned into a school of nuns, and finally a convent of women. For years, the convent slowly collected women who’d come from hard lives (a woman who accidently killed her twins in a parked car on a hot day, a woman who grew up in the school and stayed to take care of their Reverend Mother, in addition to others). The convent and Ruby were on positive terms where the women sold hot peppers, though problems arise when the men of Ruby start believing that the convent is evil. So a group of men, go into the convent and murder most of the women in cold blood. Some of the women get away and try to make a life elsewhere. But the people and the life in Ruby has become marred by the men’s actions.
 
Morrison starts the novel off fast-paced with the men entering and slaughtering the women in the convent. Then, we get accounts of all the women who find their way to the convent, trying to make a life out of the rubble of their lives. We get to see the stirrings of Ruby, how K.D. tried to get with one of the women, how Deek had an affair with another woman in the convent, and the history of Ruby itself. I truly felt immersed in this town with all of its legends and gossip and growing disdain for the convent. It’s a novel not only about the violent ways in which America treats its Black citizens, but also in how that violence perpetuates itself through misogyny and fear.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe is a novel about a cram-school teacher, Bird, whose son is born with a brain hernia and Bird’s attempt at dealing with its ramifications. On the night of his son’s birth, Bird is not with his wife, but is instead buying maps to Africa, where he’s had a desire to go to. While waiting, he also gets in a fight with a street gang who initially thinks he’s an easy man to rob. Though, when his son is finally born, he’s told there’s something wrong. So, he rushes to the hospital where the doctor tells him of the brain hernia and that they can’t take care of the child. Instead, the child is taken to another hospital where the doctors try to stabilize it before surgery. After seeing the horror of his child, he goes to his father-in-law, who’s a professor, and tells him of the child. Knowing of Bird’s alcoholic past, his father-in-law gives him a bottle of Johnny Walker and sends him on his way. This is where Bird begins to spiral, where he goes to his old friend, Himiko, who he once raped in a lumber yard. He tries to push out the idea of the child by seeing Himiko, and they both get so drunk that the next day, Bird pukes in front of his cram-school class. Periodically, Bird checks in with his son, at times hoping the son to be dead so that he doesn’t have to tell his wife of their son’s defect. At one point, Bird lies to his recovering wife saying that he doesn’t know what’s wrong with their child. Eventually, Bird returns to Himiko wanting to have sex with her, but can’t stop thinking about getting her pregnant until she suggests anal. They get closer, and at one point they come up with the plan to take the child from the hospital and have him murdered by a shady doctor Himiko knows, and then they can flee to Africa. So, they take the child from the hospital before it’s to be operated on and drive to the shady clinic. They drop the baby off and go to a gay bar which, coincidently, is the same name Bird reluctantly gave to the child. There, he sees an old friend who he once betrayed. Upon talking with his old friend, Bird realizes he can’t have a doctor kill his child. So, he races back in a taxi to the clinic. Weeks later, it turns out that brain hernia was only a benign tumor which was successfully operated on. Bird then takes on the responsibility of being a father, ending with hope and possibility for him.
 
Ōe instills violence and sex into this narrative that felt powerful and at times terrifying. The run in with the gang, the man who he’d searched for when he was younger, the continual desire for his son to be dead. It’s an interesting way to show how Bird tries to rationalize the fact he’d prefer a dead son over one with a disability. Another thing that was interesting to me was how Bird expressed his sexuality. In one of the first scenes, he sees a trans woman (the novel is much more transphobic/homophobic than what is published today) and he, “…felt a surge of affection for the young man masquerading as a large woman.” Where he, “…would probably lie around naked, as close as brothers, and talk. I’d be naked too so he wouldn’t feel any awkwardness.” Later on in the novel, when Bird can’t seem to get hard due to Himiko saying there’s a potential for her to get pregnant, she suggests anal. And in Bird’s mind, “…he had longed for the most malefic sex, a fuck rife with ignominy.” In that same moment, Himiko also asks if Bird ever had sex with one of his male students. And what’s more interesting is at the end, after dropping off the baby at the clinic, Himiko and Bird decide on going to a gay bar. While Bird has a wife and mistress, it’s interesting to note the way Ōe approaches sexuality in tones close to Yukio Mishima’s (i.e. violence, power, shame). The novel flashes forward a few weeks at the end where we get to see Bird seemingly as a new person where even the gang doesn’t seem to recognize him. Though, because the rest of the novel is set within a span of a few days and I personally like ambiguity, I wonder what the novel would’ve looked like had the narrative stopped the moment Bird gets in the taxi to go back to the clinic. By then, we know the change that has come over Bird, and I would’ve liked to stew in the unknown the same way the rest of the novel sat in. Though, on the whole I really enjoyed the novel and, in the context of Ōe’s own personal life (his own son being born with a mental disability), it may have been too sad of an ending for Ōe to consider.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Ploughshares Vol. 50, No. 2 is a collection of stories guest edited by Rebecca Makkai spanning the lives of sperm donor children, cancer diagnoses, a video store robbery, and a child with a frog heart. The stories I particularly enjoyed—and there were many—were ‘Rooms’ by Molly Anders, ‘Frog Heart’ by Joy Deva Baglio, ‘Video Wonderland, How Can I Help You?’ by Diana Cao, ‘Goodbye, Raymond Carver’ by Jane Delury, ‘Prolific Donor’ by Peter Mountford, and ‘Gaps and Silences’ by Suzanne Roberts. Though, the story with the greatest impact was ‘Back-up Mom’ by Janice Furlong which is about a gay woman who doesn’t have a desire to have kids. However, her sister, a doctor, has recently and suddenly left her husband with their child. The sister continues to pull away from her family, and has an outburst at her son’s birthday party. Eventually, the son stays more often with the narrator until one weekend the narrator realizes her sister is about to kill herself. The narrator then finds her sister puking due to an overdose of Valium. At the end, the son stays more often with the narrator, and her ideas of parenthood slowly morph through the story. It was a powerful and heartbreaking story to read with the way the narrator at first views her nephew. Overall, I was floored with the stories in this issue, in both their range and their emotion.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Role Play by Clara Drummond is a novel about Vivian Noronha, a curator as well as daughter to a well-off family in Brazil. She sees herself as middle class, though has servants and her family owns multiple properties, putting her firmly in the wealthy class. Throughout the novel, Vivian goes to parties, does drugs, has sex, and lives a life of a Brazilian elite. Though, under the surface there are problems: Vivian grew up in a conservative household where sex was taboo, had medical problems with her eyesight, and was put on medication for her depression. There’s a moment where her cousin, Albertinho (whose father is actually the one supplying Vivian’s family with money), makes her drink until she blacks out because she doesn’t want to answer his invasive questions. Then, one night at a party, one of the usual vendors selling beer, Darlene, doesn’t appear. Vivian asks another vendor, and it turns out Darlene had died. This causes Vivian, not necessarily to feel pity for Darlene, but to think about Vivian’s life in context to Darlene’s. At the end of the novel, Vivian has rough sex with Luiz Felipe, in a way to work through her feelings both in relation to Darlene and to her family.
 
Drummond provides a really strong and nearly satirical voice to Vivian, which shows on the outside she’s a strong, rich woman. Though, on the inside has loads of insecurities that materialize in the way she approaches sex and partying. It’s a really interesting look into the lives of the elite, and the problems that they encounter.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters is a novel about a trans woman, Reese, a once trans woman, Ames (Amy), and Katrina discussing and prepping to have a child together. Reese and Ames used to date when Ames had once been Amy, a trans woman. However, when Reese begins to secretly date a married man, Stanley, and Amy finds out, their relationship turns sour. This creates a rift in their relationship, and is one of the suspicions Reese has of Amy’s detransition: that Amy was scared not of being a woman, but of how others saw her. Ames then comes back into Reese’s life after he gets his boss pregnant and isn’t up to being a parent, so decides to enlist Reese, who really wants to be a mother, in raising Katrina’s child. As they get to know each other, Katrina invites Reese to an essential oil party where Katrina reveals to her friends that she’s pregnant and Reese reveals that she’s trans. Then, at a dinner later that day, they are at a restaurant when a man Reese recognizes, her boyfriend, arrives to the dinner as the husband to one of Katrina’s friends. This causes Katrina to truly question Reese as a person, and whether she would be fit to be included in her family. Eventually, after an angry email, and a walk into the frigid ocean, Reese tries to convince Katrina to keep the child, though Katrina is already at this point apprehensive. Though, the novel ends at this moment before the abortion appointment, with the rest of what happens being implied.
 
I really liked the frankness of the novel as well as the way Peters weaves in the past and present. It feels as though I’m getting a close look at the intricacies of queer relationships, how people view them, and what it means to be a person. Peters shows her characters, not as the quintessentially perfect queers some media tends to do, but as people who make mistakes and have to owe up to their actions. It’s a beautiful rendition of what it means to desire motherhood, exist as trans, and what people will do to fight for created families.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Blackouts by Justin Torres is a novel about a young man returning to the bedside of an older gay gentleman who is dying. It’s a story framed within the context of both a conversation as well as archival images and text that is blacked out. The discussions of the men range from the author and researcher, Jan Gay, and her work in the book Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns all the way to their own lives, their sexual encounters, and loves they experienced. In the end, the old man, Juan, begins to forget everything, and then dies in the young man’s arms one night.
 
What Torres does absolutely well here is the blurring of fiction and non-fiction—of lies and truth. Jan, the book, the studies, and some of the characters are firmly from history. However, Torres plays with us when the speaker discusses Juan and if he ever met/talked with him. Though, I don’t feel that whether Juan existed or not is what’s important, rather it was the connection the speaker and Juan had and their conversations which provided an outlet for them to digest their lives. I also found some of the novel’s framing to be interesting, particularly when they start describing their lives and memories as movie scenes. The novel feels as though we are peeking into such private moments, and I appreciate the vulnerability and humor of the characters.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa is a collection of six short stories focusing on the lives of samurai, priests, and pre-war Japan. The first, ‘In a Grove’, is about a murder of a man, told through interviews with a police officer, some of them witnesses, the suspect, the wife, and finally the dead man through a medium. On three of the accounts, all of the speakers describe themselves as the killer, all with differing motives. The truth is never revealed, though provides a look at how the world can be viewed differently even if everyone witnesses the same thing. The second story, ‘Rashomon’, tells the story of a hungry samurai who would never resort to becoming a thief, but when he sees a woman pulling hair out of corpses at the top of a gate, he steals everything she owns. Another interesting story is, ‘The Martyr’, in which an orphan is raised by a church, but his duty to the church is questioned when a girl says she is having his child. The orphan is then excommunicated, becomes a beggar, and only when the town burns down does he save the daughter people think different about him. However, the fire burned him so badly he dies by the feet of the girl, where it is revealed the orphan was actually a girl. And finally, the last story, ‘The Dragon’, follows a priest who decides to play a trick on the other priests because they make fun of his nose. He decides to make up the fact that a dragon will ascend to heaven from the pond. From this rumor, everyone from the town as well as the surrounding areas gather to see the dragon, although he knows it to be a lie. However, it turns out a dragon does ascend to heaven and the priest is left wondering if it actually happened.
 
This collection of stories was fascinating, not only in the stories themselves, but how they are framed. One takes the form of interview monologues, another adds an imagined post script, and another frames the story inside of another story. It was a fun read, especially, ‘The Dragon’, in which Akutagawa displays how lies can manifest themselves into being.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro is a novel about an older Japanese man living in Lima where he feels suspicious of the world around him. Thus begins his tumble into insanity where he believes people are watching him, he hears birds but they’re not there, and he sees his father’s friend, Etsuko Untén, appear before him as a ghost. Katzuo loses his job at the university he works for because he’s become too old, and so he spends most of his time ambling around the streets, lost in thought, and trying to embody Etsuko Untén. Then one day, as he is on his walk and his condition has worsened, he sees a boy. Katzuo goes up to the boy, and exclaims the boy’s beauty while undressing. This causes Katzuo to be institutionalized, and a medium is brought in to diagnose his problems. It’s revealed that many of Katzuo’s hallucinations (the birds and Etsuko), are manifestations of the terribleness of the war and Etsuko’s continual desire for Japan to win.
 
The novel is full of descriptions, moments, and intriguing sentence structures that create a sense of Katzuo’s insanity. I enjoyed how there came to be a reason for what happened to Katzuo and it felt like I could understand the character fully.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut is a novel about a journalist who is on a search to interview and write about one of the fathers of the nuclear bomb. He finds out that one of the children is a General of an island nation called San Lorenzo. There, the narrator takes a trip to the island where a confounding religion has taken hold of the population, but the rulers try to snuff it out. The narrator then finds out that the man who created the nuclear bomb also created something called ice-nine, which is a crystalized form of water with a melting temperature of 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus, would be cataclysmic if it ever touched the ocean. The narrator then is asked to be the next ruler of San Lorenzo, the ruler dies by ice-nine, and at a ceremony celebrating the death of people that were shipped out for World War II, one of the planes in the ceremony crashes into the ruler’s palace. The dead body of the ruler falls into the sea where everything then freezes over. The narrator survives in a bunker, writes his novel about the end of the world, and finally meets the person who started the religion, Bokonon.
 
The novel is satirical in its nature, commenting both on the creation of religion and its false persecution, the cold war in which both the US and Russia have shards of ice-nine, and the absurdity of the characters. Throughout, the narrator discusses his feelings related to Bokononism and uses it to deepen his understanding of the world that exists in that final moment. It’s a quippy, dark, and funny read.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka is a novel about a group of people who are religiously committed to a swimming pool underground. One day, a crack appears on the bottom of the pool and it becomes a mysterious subject either avoided or talked about incessantly. Eventually, the crack causes some people to leave, while the pool decides to shut down due to maintenance and the crack. The novel then begins to focus on one specific character, Alice, who lived through the Japanese American Internment camps and mental state slowly deteriorates, leading her to be put in hospice. The end of the novel resides with Alice’s daughter who contemplates the memories of her mother, and the state of her mother before and after Alice’s death.
 
The novel takes interesting directions with its approach to voice, with the first part in the voice of a collective “we”, believed to be one of the swimmers at the pool. Another part is from the voice of Alice’s daughter, and another part is from the voice of the care facility. It’s an interesting route to go, making the text and narrative feel that the characters are being directed either by the pool officials or the narration of the care facility (rather than from their own free will). I was also intrigued by the seriousness (and humor) with which the swimmers approached the crack and its appearance. Overall, it was a powerful though sad novel.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5