The Pearl and The Red Pony by John Steinbeck are two novellas focusing on the lives of people in California. The Pearl is about an indigenous couple whose child is stung by a scorpion, so they request the aid of a doctor. However, the doctor only treats patients who can pay, and the family, Kino and Juana, are poor. To see if they can find money to pay, they go out into the bay and dive for pearls where Kino discovers one the size of an egg. From then on, people of their village and the town try to steal the pearl or kill them. The doctor returns to help the sick baby, but is really out to get the pearl. Kino first tries to sell it to the pearl buyers in the town, but they give him a terribly low price, so he decides to go to a city in the north to sell it. Before they go, their home is burned down, and they must evade trackers until they reach a cliff. Kino understands they will soon find him and Juana, so Kino decides to kill the trackers at night. Kino crawls down from the cliff, and attacks the men, but a rifle goes off in the direction of the cliff. Once Kino kills the three trackers, he returns to Juana and their hidden child, but find that the child has been shot in the head. Kino and Juana return to their village where they lost their home, boat, and now child. They arrive to the shore and, knowing that the pearl has only brought with it evil, throw it back into the water.
The Red Pony is about a boy, Jody, who lives with his family on a ranch. One day, his father gets him a pony for him to take care of. However, when it rains, the pony comes down with an illness it can never recover from. All the while, the ranch hand, Billy, reassures Jody the pony will survive. Following this, an old man arrives to their ranch claiming he lived there before and plans to stay there. Jody’s father, Carl, is reluctant to house the man and tells him he can only stay the night. The next morning, one of their oldest horses is gone with the man. After seeing how well Jody treated the pony in its illness, Carl decides to breed one of their horses and give the colt to Jody to care for. Jody takes a female horse to another ranch where it’s breed, and Jody impatiently waits for the colt to be born. One morning, Billy wakes up Jody telling him the horse is about to give birth. Though, as Billy is prepping, he realizes the colt is turned the wrong way around, and must kill the mother horse and cut open its belly to allow the colt to survive. Finally, later on at the ranch, Jody’s mother gets a letter saying their grandfather plans to arrive. Jody is excited while Carl dislikes the grandfather’s stories because he’s told them many times before. Thus, Carl believes the old man is living in the past. In the end, the grandfather explains that the stories weren’t exactly what he wanted to convey, but rather the feeling of being a leader of a strong team. These two stories were striking in the way they rendered setting, dialogue, and people with precision. I was drawn into the tragedies of both stories, and liked the way The Pearl zoomed out in time in the end to frame the story as a legend. The Red Pony also does something interesting in that each section felt like its own small story, and I wasn’t sure if some of the characters/ideas would come back. What happened to the old man who stole the horse and rode into the ridge above the ranch? Does the colt survive after its birth, and why doesn’t it pop up later on? There are a lot of things left unresolved, but I felt that it worked. I really enjoyed this read although both stories described loss after loss without much reprieve. Final Rating: 4/5
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A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf is an essay focusing on the implications and history of women in fiction. It details the types of struggles women have had to exist within in the literature landscape, imagining the lengths with which Jane Austen had to hide her manuscripts, the views of men on women writing, and the difficulties of the past and present. Though, there are also other calls to actions and reassurances for writers, in which she writes, “For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.” Or, “Perhaps a mind that us purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought.” And finally, “Therefore, I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast.” It’s an encouraging read seeing as Woolf mentions that women, given a hundred years would come into themselves in fiction. Seeing the landscape now, this seems to have become realized (though, not fully so). The thesis of Woolf’s argument is that if a person has the material means (i.e. a stable income, a private space) as well as drawing from both their feminine and masculine sides, then a writer can effectively become renowned. And while Woolf does mention many writers (including herself), come from wealth, it’s hard to reckon with the fact that other writers do not have those resources. How does one simply afford five hundred dollars a year (about nine thousand dollars today), without spending most of their time working and less of their time writing?
Final Rating: 4/5 Story Spring 1991 is a collection of short stories which I found to be intriguing and heartbreaking. I particularly liked ‘Floor Show’ by Julia Alverez, ‘Cash Machine’ by Madison Smartt Bell, ‘It’s Come to This’ by Annick Smith, ‘Porpoises and Romance’ by Lewis Nordan, and ‘’The Control Group’ by Antonya Nelson. ‘Floor Show’ is about an immigrant family trying to impress a wealthy family at a Mexican restaurant while one of the daughters sees the wealthy wife kiss her dad. ‘Cash Machine’ is about a pair of men trying to rob a young couple of money in New York. ‘It’s Come to This’ is about a widow who lost her husband while living in Montana, and trying to deal with the grief by befriending a neighbor. And ‘Porpoises and Romance’ is about a boy who questions his sexuality while his parents celebrate a second honeymoon at a beach. This collection was a powerful read.
Final Rating: 4/5 Instructions between Takeoff and Landing by Charles Jensen is a collection of poems that delve into the loss of a mother and contemplations on queerness. The poems are broken up into sections, with the ones under the ‘Story Problems’ sections adapting essay questions/discussions. I was fond of the poems discussing space and the Voyager satellite, ‘The Space Race’, ‘Instructions between Takeoff and Landing’, and ‘The Space Race, Cont.’. I also liked the poems ‘Hospice’ for its form and how it handled its subject matter and ‘Mortality’ for how strongly it worked the speaker’s life into the piece. The collection talks to itself, sometimes questions itself, and in that reflection, it creates intensity in its layers.
Final Rating: 4/5 Maw Appears in the Following Forms by Kiley McLaughlin is a collection of sections all discussing the ways in which three mothers interact and treat both each other and their daughters. There are elements of surrealism, weird dreams, moments at the beach, which all are written poetically and with care. I particularly liked the section, ‘Another Way to Tell It [Ear Tagging]’, with its use of ear tagging of calves and applying it to these characters in an instructional way.
Final Rating: 4/5 When Your Sky Runs Into Mine by Rooja Mohassessy is a collection of poems describing the impacts and reverberations of the war in Iran, both as a child and in reflection. There are many moments of depth from ‘They Were Blind and Mad, Some of Them Were Laughing. There Was Nobody to Lead the Blind People.’ to ‘Interview for Asylum’. The collection exposes and ruminates on the loss of childhood, of friends and family, of hearing, and of joy. It’s a gut-wrenching but needed collection.
Final Rating: 4/5 Bad Mexican, Bad American by Jose Hernandez Diaz is a collection of prose surrealist poems that discuss the experiences of a Mexican American living in LA. There are poems about having a conversation on Jupiter, a man riding his bike on the ocean, a lizard man teaching a class, and so many more weird and entertaining situations. The poems I enjoyed the most were ‘Ballad of the West Coast Mexican American/Chicanx’, ‘Bad Mexican, Bad American’, ‘Insomniac Moon’, ‘The Stranger’, and ‘Bones’. And I really enjoyed the line, “I put ketchup in my breakfast burrito;” which encapsulates the two cultures meshing into one. It’s a fun and surprising read.
Final Rating: 4/5 Incest by Christine Angot is a novel about a woman who had an incestuous relationship with her father as a teenager and is in the throes of breaking up with another woman. The speaker, Christine, is married to Claude and has a daughter, Léonore, though has an affair with another woman, Marie-Christine. Christine then recounts the encounters and trips with Marie-Christine, while also describing the rockiness of their relationship. It leads into Christmas where Marie-Christine is supposed to go to Rome with Christine, but they decide to not go the first day. They eventually do go, but it displays the fervor and intense emotions of them, paradoxically, wanting to be together and be separate. Near the latter half of the novel, Christine begins to hint and describe her encounters with her father when she was a teenager. They hadn’t known each other until she was fourteen, where her father has another life with another family. There are encounters at a theater, on her vacation, at a church, in her father’s car, and on walks. The character sees herself as feeling both debased and also an intense desire to continue the relationship with her father.
Angot provides a deeply personal look into the narrator’s head, in which it reads more like a stream-of-consciousness account rather than one that is thoroughly recounted. However, I think it works to show the character’s frazzled and disorganized nature. It’s also interesting how the character continually brings up the fact that she had a relationship with a woman, but she is not gay. It’s brought up in mantras, in the repeated phone calls, and in the way plans are created then cancelled and then replanned. The novel’s subject matter and discussion provides insight into taboo things, though not only is Christine, the character, is aware of this fact, but decides to defy it. I also found it interesting in how the lines blur between the author, Christine Angot, and the character, Christine Angot. Both are writers, though not necessarily autobiographical, it provides a mystery to the reader as to what is truly fact and what is fiction. Final Rating: 4/5 Temporal Anomalies by Matt Broaddus is a collection of poems split into three parts tackling the past, present, and future. It approaches the experience of being black, as well as providing a surrealist approach to its final section. I particularly enjoyed the poems, ‘Lalibela’, ‘Aboretum’, and the whole final section, ‘Space Station’.
Final Rating: 4/5 Love Poems by Anne Sexton is a collection of poems centered on the subjects of desire, love, pain, and departure. The majority of the poems work to provide a context of the desire for the final poem, ‘Eighteen Days Without You’. The poems provide imagery with lines such as, “The small animals of the woods/are carrying their deathmasks/into a narrow winter cave.” from ‘It is a Spring Afternoon’ to “I have walked through a door in my dreams/and she was standing there in my mother’s apron.” in ‘The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts’. Other poems I found powerful were ‘In Celebration of my Uterus’, ‘The Nude Swim’, ‘Us’, and ‘December 9th’ of ‘Eighteen Days Without You’. There’s an intensity these poems possess in their frankness with sex or in the way desire leaks out in the final poem.
Final Rating: 4/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
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