Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart is a novel about a boy, Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, living in Glasgow whose mother is an alcoholic, while he is questioning his sexuality. Shuggie initially lives with his mother, father, grandmother, half-brother, and sister. His father, Shug, is a taxi driver who, it turns out, was sleeping with a lot of other women. Shug makes the family move from their place in Sighthill to Pithead, a run-down miner’s town. Then, Shug abandons the family to live with another woman who worked at the taxi company. Throughout all of this, Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, drinks their money away and, many times, tries to kill herself. At Pithead, Shuggie learns he is different from the other boys with the way he walks, talks, and is called terrible names (in addition to being forced to give another boy a handjob and is touched by a taxi driver). By this time, Shuggie’s older sister has moved to Africa and Leek, Shuggie’s older brither, is distancing himself from Agnes. Agnes at one point, however, decides to get sober and gest a job working the night shift at a gas station. She does well for a little while, meets a man named Eugene, and goes to AA meetings. However, after her one-year anniversary of being sober, Eugene invites her to dinner and convinces her to have a drink. From there, Agnes’s drinking worsens and causes terrible pain for Leek and Shuggie. Eventually, Agnes and Shuggie move out of Pithead to start a new life on the East End, but it doesn’t work out. One night, after much drama, Shuggie is in the middle of helping his unconscious mother, when she chokes on her vomit and dies. The final scene is with Shuggie and his new friend, Leanne, helping her alcoholic mother with changing her clothes because she is homeless. In the end, the realization on Shuggie’s sexuality seems to be the light at the end of the tunnel for him.
This novel is expertly told through its Scottish dialect, its acute descriptions of alcoholism, and the way it depicts Shuggie’s sexuality. It’s a novel about abuse, poverty, queerness, drugs, but it’s also about love. There are mentions throughout, and some scenes where Agnes’s abuse shows through, such as her blackout night in the back of a taxi, or her under a pile of coats in a bedroom. And the final scene really was intense, showing that had Agnes continued on her path, she would’ve been just like Leanne’s mother and he would’ve been just like Leanne. It’s a heartbreaking and tender novel and I enjoyed it throughout. Final Rating: 5/5
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The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis is a novel about a boy who lives in rural France, comes from a poor family, and tries to disregard the fact that he’s gay. The first half of the novel describes Eddy’s home life, his drunken and unemployed father (who once worked at a factory), his hard-love type mother, his large and trigger-hair older brother, and two boys that bully him (in addition to other family). He is seen in his village as the outcast, the effeminate boy, and so because of that he is bullied, name called, and beaten by others. The second half of the novel focuses on what happens after he has sex with his cousins in a shed. They get found out by Eddy’s mother, Eddy’s father beats him, and then rumors become more solidified about Eddy’s sexuality after one of his cousins tells their secret. Eddy is horrified and tries to bury it by dating Laura and then Sabrina, but when Sabrina tries to have sex with him, all he can think about is other men. Eventually, Eddy auditions, and then gets into a high school with a theater program, which is far away from his home and village. He thinks he’s evaded the accusations, but in the final moments of the novel, we see that Eddy isn’t seen different and is, “…as gay as ever…”, with Eddy laughing in response.
It's a deeply emotional novel that displays Eddy’s internal conflict so well. He recognizes his desires, but tries so hard to tamp them down, which makes it all the sadder to witness. The ending too makes me want to believe that Eddy has become himself, but there is also a sense that the bullying, denial, and hatred will perpetuate. When reading, I felt a particular parallel to another novel, Confessions of a Mask, by Yukio Mishima in which violence, masculinity, and sexuality are all blended up together. And I found this observation to encapsulate both novels, “I do not know if the boys from the hallway would have referred to their own behaviors as violent…For a man violence was something natural, self-evident.” Louis is a master at putting the reader into the mind of Eddy, to interpret the same feelings and moments as him, and to feel absolutely devastated by the way the world treats him. Final Rating: 5/5 Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin is a novel set in mid-century Paris, with an American, David, who falls in love with another man, Giovanni. David has a fiancée, Hella, travelling in Spain, and his father funds his expenses as he lives in France. We meet David as he is packing up and leaving the house that he lived in after he met Giovanni and Hella has left him. David then begins to remember how he met Giovanni who at the time was a bartender, with an older gentleman, Jacques, who liked Giovanni. Jacques implores David to order drinks for him and Giovanni in the hopes that Jacques would be able to have sex with Giovanni. At this moment, and throughout the novel, David struggles with his sexuality, at times in total denial of his attraction to men, other times being open to the idea, and sometimes somewhere in between.
At the bar, David and Giovanni hit it off, and everyone in the bar notices their chemistry. As it becomes morning, they invite Giovanni to join them for breakfast, which they take a taxi with the bar owner, Guillaume. They have oysters and wine, continue their banter, and eventually they end up at Giovanni’s room where they have sex. David and Giovanni then begin to live together because David has stopped getting payments from his father, where they desire each other, but at the back of David’s mind he knows Hella will be back. Once Hella sends a letter that she will be returning soon, things start to go wrong for both David and Giovanni. For Giovanni, he was fired from the bar because Guillaume, who had hired him only because he was attracted to Giovanni, tries to have sex with him. And for David, he goes to dinner with an old acquaintance, Sue, where neither of them really wants to have sex with each other, but once it’s done Sue has feelings for him and he is more disgusted than ever. Hella returns from her trip, David and she try to continue their engagement, but something has changed within David. David has stopped seeing Giovanni, who has begun spiraling out of control and eventually lives with Jacques for a little bit. Giovanni is so hurt by the way David abandoned him and because he got fired from his job, he returns to the bar and kills Guillaume. He is on the run but is eventually found where he is sentenced to death. By that time, David and Hella have escaped from Paris in a smaller town in France. David is still distraught, and Hella begins to suspect something is wrong. It all comes to a head when David decides to go to a bar, meets a sailor, and is caught by Hella. She breaks their engagement, and leaves David in France as she returns home. The novel ends with David in the empty house thinking about Giovanni and what it would be like for him to die. Giovanni’s Room is an insanely moving novel. Baldwin can sit in David’s mind, rationalize his actions, and find denial everywhere he looks. What impressed me about this novel was how strong the voice, descriptions, and moments were. I was able to see the tenderness in David, and still see he was shielding the world and himself from his true identity. I loved the way the novel swayed back and forth in time, where everything had already happened and David was alone in an empty house. David cut off his interactions with Giovanni, losing him, believing it would save his engagement. But in doing so, he lost Hella too. It’s a deeply lonely novel, one that sat with nostalgia and guilt. Baldwin also made a lot of interesting choices in narrative, giving large moments to the interactions with Giovanni, but fairly brief moments with Hella. I also liked how he dedicated only a short paragraph to how Giovanni and Hella met independent of David. I also thought the imagined life of Giovanni in prison and his walk to the guillotine was brilliant for a final scene. I liked how when we met Giovanni he was the perfect man, and then fell from grace in part because of David. It’s a story I will not stop thinking about, and it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. Final Rating: 5/5 Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty is a collection of stories about a single narrator, Daniel, going through his life on a Maine reservation. Each story is strange in a compelling way, showing what life for Daniel is after so much tragedy and pain. There are moments of him and his friend trying to rob a tribal museum, another of his grandmother believing him to be her brother and reprimanding him for smoking cigarettes, another of him visiting his mother in a mental hospital, another of him describing how his nephew died in his arms. These stories ache, and I was particularly drawn to ‘Food for the Common Cold’, ‘The Blessing Tobacco’, ‘Earth, Speak’, ‘Night of the Living Rez’, and ‘The Name Means Thunder’.
I loved in ‘Night of the Living Rez’, Talty introduced the idea of zombies in the beginning and expanded its meaning in the end. I also enjoyed how there were little details that weaved in and out of each story, things such as the pills and the boy’s gravestone. The last two stories in the collection really changed the meaning and context of the rest of the pieces, particularly how Frick, the mother’s boyfriend, is understood. He’s built up as a man that is generally nice to Daniel, though always drunk, but when Daniel walks in on Frick trying to sexually assault his sister, the character is shattered before our eyes. This same thing happened in the final story, where it described his sister, Paige, having a child and then child died, but it was unknown on why. It turned out Daniel was part to blame as well as his mother. These stories are heartfelt, raw, gravitating, and masterfully written. I’m excited to see what Talty does next. Final Rating: 5/5 What belongs to You by Garth Greenwell is a novel about the intimacy and friendship of an English teacher and a male prostitute, Mitko, in Bulgaria. It follows their encounter in a public bathroom, and then continued encounters in other cities, other homes, until they become more than simply strangers. However, during their encounter in a different city, they fight after Mitko brushes off sex multiple times in a hotel room. The narrator believes he’s owed something after paying for the trip while Mitko grows angry because he feels he’s seen only as an object. Mitko soon promises to never see the narrator again. For a time they go their separate ways, until one day as the narrator is teaching English, he gets a note telling him his father is about to die. This thread pulls out the narrator’s past, describing his fathers disdain for him sexuality. When he was still a child, the narrator befriended and then kissed another boy, K. Though, after the kiss, K pulls away from the narrator, starts dating a girl, and, in the final glimpse of the memory, he watches as K and the girl kiss and then is given a blowjob as a way to tell the narrator that he isn’t gay. He becomes estranged from his father, from K, and what he feels is the rest of the US. The narrator, after the memories resurface decides against seeing his father before he dies by throwing away the note. The narrative returns a few years later, where the narrator has a loose relationship with a Columbian guy, but it all comes into question when Mitko shows up at the narrator’s door. Mitko tells him he has syphilis, shows him his penis for proof, and asks for money for treatment. This later encounter shows Mitko at a much lower point, where for a few months he had to be hospitalized. The narrator decides to get tested, of which he’s told it’s positive and he soon gets pills to take. Then his mother visits him in Bulgaria and they take a train where he watches and talks to a boy who reminds him of Mitko, possibly a version of Mitko before things went wrong. Finally, one night Mitko comes knocking on the narrator's door again but this time he’s high and drunk. He confesses he’s going to die, so they lay down for a few minutes, holding each other, before the narrator soon cuts Mitko off and tells him to leave. In the last moments he watches Mitko as he walks into the night.
The novel is structured in three parts, meeting Mitko the first few times and the small fall out, the walk and memories of his father and his childhood, and finally the illness and decline of Mitko. This structure evokes the idea that the narrator sees Mitko as a strong and loud figure (re: the scene in the hotel) in the beginning, but soon sees a man who has become weak and childlike (even explicitly paralleling the child on the train to Mitko). In his mind, the narrator also sees two versions of Mitko, the charismatics and simple natured friend, and the hustler simply looking for money to say alive. These two versions pop up throughout and battle, at times hating Mitko and believing he is just taking advantage of the narrator, and other times really loving him. I loved the interiority of the novel, how easily the narrative flows, and the complexity of the narrator's feelings. Overall it was a heart wrenching and deeply emotional novel that I will certainly be returning to. Final Rating: 5/5 Bestiary by K-Ming Chang is about a girl who grows a tiger tail, and has magical things occur in and around her: rabbits birthing from her Agong, a girl she likes with a caged bird shadow, an aunt with snakes in her stomach, her brother flying like a kite, and holes that spit up letters from her ama. The voice, imagery, and metaphor are powerful and distinct. The poeticism of the novel works so well in creating a language of the family, their shared legends, and their relationships. There are exquisite lines in the novel, such as, “In wartime, land is measure by the bones it can bury.”
It is an expertly, and a heartbreakingly raw story about a daughter in understanding herself, her queerness, her family, and where she fits in it all. Themes of water (oceans, rivers, blood) act as causeways and tributaries into larger ideas, threading and relating each moment. The writing, while its own distinct being, is reminiscent of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in how language is mulled over with meaning imbued into every seam of every sentence. There are striking and powerful moments with Old Guang and Ah Zheng as pirates, and her brother on the ledge of a building about to jump off. I was thoroughly impressed with Chang’s mastery of language and hope to read her other stuff in the future. Final Rating: 5/5 A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a novel that focuses on the harrowing, painful, and bittersweet moments of four friends in New York. Though, of course, the novel is so much more than the relationships of the friends because it is about their experiences, their pasts that will not leave them, and their desires to build something after they have dealt with a tremendous amount of turmoil. And while, the novel’s other characters, Willem, JB, and Malcolm inhibit and direct the narrative, at its core, the novel is about Jude. Jude’s childhood is devastating, and he has been taken advantage of at every turn of his life by Brother Luke, Dr. Traylor, the counselors, and a countless amount of other men. So devastating, that Jude cuts himself, tries to kill himself, and shuts down around the people he loves.
It is truly a difficult (due to the subject matter) and terribly sad novel to read. Though, it felt that the approach that Yanagihara took with rape, suicide, and violence was well thought out and powerful. It describes the limitless nature of love, the horrors of the world, and what it means to be imperfect. And while it is a larger piece of fiction, the passages were written so smoothly that I found some days I read over a hundred pages, but only felt like I read twenty. Yanagihara expertly crafts language, moments, feelings, prose, and time to create something undeniably life changing. It made me cry, and heart-warmed when Jude finally tells his boyfriend, Willem, about his past in the closet. They sit there, they exist, and they know that there will only be love between them in that moment. This is one of the best novels I’ve read, and I don’t think I can recommend it enough. Final Rating: 5/5 Time Is A Mother by Ocean Vuong is a poetry collection which delves into the aftermath of the speaker’s mother, his queerness, and what it means to exist in America as Asian. The sophomore poetry collection is heavy in its use of themes, lyricality, and overall metaphor, that I was astounded with Vuong’s handle of language. The poetry bleeds, and it’s hard to put into words the length the collection works to show the wounds and contemplation that Vuong has imbued in each poem.
More particularly, I was drawn to ‘Dear Rose’, which is one of the last poems in the collection and begins in the same way that ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ does using the line, “Let me begin again now”. In this way, it both contributes/continues the narrative from ‘Gorgeous’, as if this loss has been eating away at the speaker the whole entire time. The poem itself has lines such as “are you reading this dear/reader are you my mom yet” that ache with the want of his mother, something us, the reader, will never be able to give. The speaker knows this, but still he asks because it is the only thing he can do. Vuong delves into masculinity and the way we use language to mimic that of war in ‘Old Glory’ and ‘American Legend’. I recall reading ‘Künstlerroman’ in Freeman’s: Change and still I gravitate to the piece, and its line “The cake on the table, air returning to the boy’s pursed lips and the seven candles, one by one, begin to light, and the wish returns to his head where it’s truer for never being touched by language.” This desire and hope and sadness are all of what the speaker has left once their mother has left them. The collection ends with the line “& I was free.” which is the one final grief-filled note that, in many ways feels like there is something after all of the pain that the speaker has endured. It is a beautiful, powerful, and tactful collection of poems that will stay with me for a long time. Final Rating: 5/5 The Immortals of Tehran by Ali Araghi is a novel that encompasses the breadth of an Iranian family and the conflicts they become involved in. It’s a novel about family, magic, relationships, politics, war, and is written in the same vein and voice that a weaving family history would be told in. The story mainly focuses on Ahmad, a son who can’t speak after he is forced to shoot his father, where he learns what it means to exist within conflict. Araghi is able to create a sweeping narrative that captures magic found within the family’s curse of living forever, the burning ability of Ahmad’s poetry, and the flowers created after a musician plays songs. The magic adds curiosity, suspension, and all felt wonderful within the world that Araghi builds.
I was especially impressed with how Araghi navigates the death of one of the immortal characters, Agha. Reading the portions where Agha observes himself to be dead and a celebration/funeral is thrown in his honor is surreal. And I felt the finality of setting Agha back in his tree, where he will reside in forever, was a fitting and bittersweet moment with both Ahmad and his grandfather, Khan. I also found the tie in with the story about the cats in the beginning added an air of legend to an already mythical story. Finally, in the last few pages of the novel, the narrator, in a way, identifies themselves which, not only adds to its parallelism with the cat story, but becomes a story about a story. This feels like a story that a grandpa tells their grandson, something passed so delicately from one mouth to another about how the family came to be. And for that, I loved it. Final Rating: 5/5 Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar is a collection of poems that questions, asserts, and plays with the speaker’s place in religion, family, and America. Akbar works to create a narrative that, in a sense, is fearful of God, but soon traces his fear, not to God, but to the Americans he is surrounded by. Akbar writes about how he immigrated to America from Iran, being Muslim, and is continuously questioned and berated by people who despise him for no reason. The starkest of this is in the repeated lines, “At his elementary school in an American suburb,/a boy’s shirt says: “We Did It to Hiroshima, We Can Do It to Tehran!””. I loved the way Akbar is able to draw upon what we believe children, and the innocence that is associated with childhood, to be and defile that thinking with complete hatred given to the boy by his parents. It speaks to a much greater and sadder reality of the positive feedback loop of xenophobia in America.
Though, I found the poem that struck a deep chord in me was in ‘How Prayers Work’ where Akbar and his brother attempt to pray but his brother trips over a doorstop and they laugh uncontrollably. The final stanza was what blew me away. “It’s not that we forgot God or the martyrs or the Prophet’s holy word—quite the opposite, in fact, we were boys built to love what was right in front of our faces: my brother and I draped across each other, laughing tears into our prayer rugs.” This, I felt was the turning point in his understanding of Islam, and thus worked to show him that religion was much more than what he was taught. I found the repeated used of the different ‘Pilgrim Bell’ poems worked to keep a rhythm, both inside the stanzas with shorter, choppier phrases, and also in the collection as a whole being interspersed periodically. I also loved the poems ‘Reza’s Restaurant, Chicago, 1997’, ‘In the Language of Mammon’, ‘There is No Such Thing as an Accident of the Spirit’, and ‘Seven Years Sober’. This collection was powerful, heartfelt, and worked to create a sense of longing for family, religion, and peace within the self. Final Rating: 5/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
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