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
0 Comments
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburō Ōe follows the lives of fifteen reformatory boys as they are transported to a village to bury animals and then abandoned. They arrive at the moment where a soldier has defected and the remaining soldiers are sent out to look for him. The soldiers aren’t able to find the defector, but a larger more pressing matter occurs when a woman and loads of animals show up dead with bloated stomachs. The villagers see this as a plague that they must escape, so one night when the boys are left in an unlocked shack, the villagers leave. The next day, the boys find the village empty and learn that the exit out of the village is blocked off by a guard, so they are stuck there. While in the village, the boys gather food from the houses and try to survive in the cold winter. They go ice skating in the center square, they kill birds and have a feast, and the main character meets and then has sex with a girl that was also abandoned. The defected soldier is shown to them by one of the village boys, Li, who had stayed behind. The main character’s brother then finds and adopts a dog, but when it bites the girl, she comes down with the plague and eventually dies with the defector caring for her. The boys believe the dog had the plague, which causes one of the boys, Minami, to kill it. Then the main character’s brother runs away and never be seen again. The next day, the villagers return to berate and throw the boys into a shack, while the men search and find the defector. The villagers stab the defector and then send him with the military police, while the rest of the boys are beaten into submission and told to never mention the plague or their abandonment. The main character retaliates, which causes the villagers to send him away where they try to kill him. The novel ends with the main character on the ground in the forest ready to take on the villagers searching for him.
Ōe never seems to disappoint, and even with such a heavy and depressing book, there are beautiful moments and relationships that blossom. I was also intrigued with the way Ōe approaches the characters’ sexualities. One of the main characters, Minami, is shown as explicitly gay, discussing having sex with soldiers, doing his “morning make-up” which involves his butt, and his blunt lewd comments. There are other moments of sexual ambiguity among the boys watching their erections in a group together and displaying their penises to villagers. And it also occurs when the main character and the defector “…tasted a small miserable pleasure in each other. Silently we bared our poor goose-pimpled buttocks, losing ourselves in the motion of cunning fingers.” The main character’s sexuality is even more ambiguous when it’s shown he also thinks about and has sex with the girl. This openness to sexuality, particularly in the fifties when this was published in Japan, does seem quite out of the ordinary, but not an outlier (as one only has to look at Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask). It’s a dark book that gets worse as it goes, in displaying the villager’s brutality and the way life affects each character. However, it’s one that will stick with me. Final Rating: 5/5 The Company of Strangers by Jen Michalski is a collection of short stories about frayed relationships, queerness, and the ways in which love inhibit and enhance life. I particularly enjoyed ‘The Loneliest Creature on Earth’, ‘The Long Haul’, ‘The Company of Strangers’, ‘The Goodbye Party’, and Scheherazade’. I loved the way ‘Goodbye Party’ provides an outlet for Sam’s grief through the dogs that will be put down and how he contemplates how his wife’s passing will affect his son.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 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 The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima is a novel about a thirteen-year-old boy, Noboru, who is in a gang while his mother is a widow. One day, his mother is invited onto a vessel to help out an actress where they meet Ryuji, a sailor. Ryuji is in port for a few days, and begins to take a liking to Noboru’s mother, Fusako. Over the course of those few days, they sleep together while Noboru watches through a peephole from his room. Due to the gang’s hatred for fathers and the adult world, Noboru is conflicted because he adores Ryuji’s profession and idolizes him, while also disliking the fact that he doesn’t fit the standards of the gang. On one of the days Ryuji is still there, Noboru and the gang capture a stray cat, kill it, skin it, and crush its organs in their hands. Upon returning from their killing, Ryuji sees them, but doesn’t suspect anything. Once Ryuji’s leave is over, he returns to his ship, the Rakuyo, and sails away. Ryuji returns in the winter, where he intends to stay on land due to his love for Fusako by proposing to her. However, Ryuji is still heartbroken about leaving his sailing life and likes to tell stories of his tales whenever he can. Everything comes to a head when one night Fusako and Ryuji are making love in the dark when they spy the light of the peep hole and find Noboru sleeping there. Once he’s found out, Noboru believes Ryuji will give him a beating (one Fusako even directed), but is likely even more shamed when it results in a comforting talk from Ryuji. Betrayed by his idol, Noboru goes to his gang with all the wrongs that Ryuji committed, and the gang concocts a plan to drug and kill Ryuji. The day of the wedding, Noboru lures Ryuji out to meet the gang by the docks, where they get on a train, hike through a tunnel, and arrive on a desolate hill overlooking the sea. Ryuji is somewhat suspicious, but enjoys the fact that they were interested in his sailor tales, so he begins discussing all of his adventures. While he is speaking, Ryuji begins to second guess his decision to stay on land. Then, Noboru offers him tea laced with sleeping pills, which he drinks, and the gang’s plans are set in motion.
In this novel, Mishima has concocted a deftly violent, intriguing, and impassioned piece of literature. There are moments that are rendered in absolutely terrifying detail (i.e. the cat scene), and his understanding of violence, love, and betrayal are striking. What interested me was the near irony of belief of some of the boys in the gang and the way they treated fathers. Fathers, in their eyes, were scum and because they were scum, nothing they could do would save them from their own being. While some of the boy’s hatred stemmed justifiably (i.e. parents beating them or absent), it was noted at least one of the boys had a loving father that prayed with them. From an outside perspective, this type of thinking is completely illogical, though when Ryuji began to step into the role of being a father, he was lumped in with the rest of them. I found it to be an interesting take on how the identity of someone can be what people hate even though they did nothing wrong. In this case, Fusako had an agency look into Ryuji’s past and found nothing but an upstanding sailor and man. Mishima thus constructs an ideal man: no debts, faithful, hard-working, doesn’t reprimand, strong, and outgoing. And yet, the ideal is still the death of him in the eyes of the gang. In some ways, the gang’s thought process is contradictory in that the boys couldn’t be alive if not for their fathers and yet the boys utterly despise them. Also, Mishima even goes out to say that the boys come from well-to-do backgrounds commenting on their large lunches, and yet Mishima demonstrates an evil inside of the boys. The structure of the novel leads itself to being masterly crafted, with not only the seasons factoring into the tone of the novel (i.e. summer = passion, winter = violence), but in the way the novel expertly cuts off once the reader knows the inevitable. After having read only a handful of Mishima’s novels, I can certainly tell I will enjoy the rest. Final Rating: 5/5 Iron Horse Literary Review 26.1 is a collection of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and interviews. The story I enjoyed the most in this issue was ‘All B’s and One C’ by Patrick Font which details the life of a flunking student trying to get by in summer school. He takes weed from his father’s stash and sells it to his classmates. I liked how the voice of Joey comes through, the way he views María, and the lengths he will go to cover for himself.
Final Rating: 3/5 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 South Dakota Review 58.1 is a collection of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Out of the pieces, I enjoyed ‘Nepenthes Northiana’ by Virgil Suárez, ‘When it Rains’ by Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Never Break Two Laws at Once’ by Adam Straus, and ‘Mascot Worship’ by William Musgrove. Particularly the story by Adam Straus was interesting in the way it handled desertion, anxiety, and dislike toward the military.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 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 (I am) A Real American by Bob Kan is a memoir about a Japanese American Air Force fighter pilot, his experiences overseas, and a few near-death crashes. Kan was witness to Pearl Harbor, joined the military, and was stationed in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. There are some interesting moments, for example one in which Kan’s aircraft loses one of its engines in Vietnam and he has to eject. However, there were some moments that didn’t quite hit the mark. While reading, I was particularly aware of the formatting/grammatical mistakes and felt that another round of edits was needed. I’m also not too fond of pro-military stories, even if told from a Japanese American.
Final Rating: 2.5/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
April 2024
Categories
All
|