Ten Second Reviews

Fleishman is in Trouble

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

A satiric novel about a disintegrating marriage was probably not the best choice for a post-nuptial read.  I appreciate the wit and social commentary, but the general and specific unpleasantness of the marriage and the people in it were Too Much.  I didn't find it enjoyable, more like a duty.  After getting through husband Toby's two hundred plus pages of narcissism, sex, and whining, I really wanted to read Rachel's POV, but was disappointed to find it was only like sixty pages long, and consisted mostly of her accepting shitty behavior from everyone around her until she eventually has a full on mental breakdown.  Uplifting? No. I felt like this book ends with the equivalent of a winking-face emoji, as our erstwhile semi-narrator Libby decides she'll write about the end of a marriage, but leave it on a cliffhanger, because...? I'm not actually invested in whether these characters manage to get together at all, they clearly have fault lines going all the way down.  I just, sort of like, wanted bad things to happen to Toby and just wanted Rachel to stop giving a shit, and well, there's an audience for everything, I suppose, but not me for this.

The Egg and I

By Betty MacDonald

As all the reviews make clear, for a pretty racist semi-autobiographical version of a young wife living out on a chicken ranch in the upper Northwest, this is a real entertaining book. There's definitely some things I bet MacDonald's family regrets her putting in print now (like, for example, that she thinks taking the land away from the American Indians was a good thing because they're just lazy good for nothing drunks) but when she focuses on herself and the day to day indignities of life, like neighbors visiting at 7 the one day she's still in her pyjamas, or how her tropical plants are dying while her husband's very practical garden is blooming, she's wonderfully funny and wry.  She's aslo amusing when talking about her neighbors, including Mrs. Kettle, who lives in basically a pigsty, but keeps one room locked up and pristine for visitors.  MacDonald may have a sharp pen, but she isn't shy about her own failures and shortcoming, so it doesn't come off that mean spirited - except for all the really racist bits.   I really enjoyed this although I have to say that this is one book that censorship would likely improve my experience. 

Salt to the Sea

Salt to the Sea

By Ruta Sepetys

Winter 1945. WWII. Four refugees. Four stories.

Each one born of a different homeland; each one hunted, and haunted, by tragedy, lies, war. As thousands desperately flock to the coast in the midst of a Soviet advance, four paths converge, vying for passage aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship that promises safety and freedom. But not all promises can be kept . .

I was under a mistaken impression of this book.  I thought it was going to be like All the Light We Cannot See, but it's actually marked "YA" and was very short and easy to read.  Not like, short-short, but all the chapters are like, two pages each.  There's a lot of blank space in the book.  I finished it in less than two hours.  Salt to the Sea takes the viewpoints of four characters: a fifteen year old pregnant Polish girl, a repatriating Lithuanian nurse, a Nazi forger fleeing with treasure, and a budding young sociopath.  

As children's books about WWII go, it's not really breaking much new ground in the ideas that war is hell, Nazis were awful, and crimes against humanity were committed on a massive scale.  Where it does excel is in covering a geographic area and event that doesn't get much press: the sinking (spoiler!) of the Wilhem Gustlof off the coast of what is now Poland. It also focuses more on the shrinking eastern front of the war, as the Russians approached, sowing devastation and rape indiscriminately on whichever women were in their path.  There's also no shying away from the mass rapes committed by the Russians in their march west, as it plays a vital role in Emilia's story.

We spend a lot of time with the refugees just trying to get on to the boat, and relatively little on board, which makes sense, since the ship's journey was only supposed to take two days, and they were sunk ten hours into the trip.  It's a fascinating and engrossing look at the event, but obviously a KYA book can't be all things at once: there's a lot of side plot about Florian stealing bits from the Amber Room which his Nazi mentor hid away, which adds more subplot about another WWII mystery that I don't think the book necessarily needs (especially as Sepetys' tying it in this way is complete speculation), and it cuts what is perhaps the saddest note about the sinking: because it carried some Nazi officials, the boat was not marked as a hospital ship, so under the "rules of war" (what an oxymoron) the sinking of thousands of refugees and civilians was not a war crime.  Not that I think that thousands of women and children fleeing an encroaching army should shield Nazis, but it's such an ironic and poignant detail, I'm sorry that Sepetys wasn't able to work it in somehow.

It's fairly well written, all the parts with Alfred made my skin crawl (intentionally so) although I did kind of love that Hannelore's last proclamation to him was her Jewishness, a last "Fuck you" to the ultimate fuckboy.  The multiple narrators actually worked well for this, as we got both a variety of viewpoints and didn't spend too much time on any one person. 


19: A Book Told From Multiple POVs

Ten Second Reviews

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

By Harry Kemelman

Rabbi Small takes over a congregation in a modern suburb of Boston which doesn't quite know what to make of the scholarly young rabbi.  When a dead woman is discovered in his car, the rabbi is caught between temple politics and a murder mystery.

This was more of a character study than a murder mystery - the solution comes out of nowhere in the last ten pages, and we spend more time with various congregants debating whether or not Rabbi Smalls'  solution with the broken down borrowed car is fair than we do going through clues.  It's kind of a cozy, where no one is threatened, and the wrong person is arrested and everyone is basically nice to each other.  Not bad if you're in the mood for it.  Also, and this is not relevant to the review, it seems like Harry is a weirdly uncommon name for an author.  I know it's a nickname, but I feel like there's lots of Jacks out there, not that many Harrys.  Food for thought!

Descendant of the Crane

By Joan He

Princess Hesina of Yan's father is murdered and she's thrust into power, suddenly the queen of an unstable kingdom. Determined to find her father's killer, Hesina enlists the aid of a soothsayer—a treasonous act, punishable by death, because in Yan, magic was outlawed centuries ago. Hesina doesn't know who to trust as she gets to the heart of the mystery surrounding her father's death, and the political machinations which are forcing Yan into war.

I actually read this before Behind the Throne but they share a lot of similarities - unhappy maternal relationships, murdered fathers and a quest for justice, a princess taking power unexpectedly, (spoiler!) family members secretly betraying them, bodyguard/detectives who keep them from getting killed and help solve the mystery, asian-inspired settings, imminent war with neighbor, you get the picture.  But both were disappointments, and I don't know if I would have liked Behind the Throne more if I'd read it first, since, in addition to the larger issues I had with it, it also felt kinda derivative.

I was into Descendant of the Crane initially, but it falls into the same trap as Behind the Throne:  too many people, too much confusion and plots, obvious villain (at least in this case, the villain was only obvious to the reader, not the main character, so her lack of action makes more sense) and by the mid-way point I just didn't care about anyone.  This did have a weird fucking subplot about magic and immortal people and her father and mother having lived for aeons (how they transitioned power without anyone noticing this was the same fucking person all the time, and also why they only just now decided to have and adopt a bunch of kids is totally unexplained, by the way) which is when I kinda felt like the whole thing jumped the shark for me.  I was enjoying the imminent war with neighboring country plot in Descendant of the Crane, but there's too much going on, and even the parts I liked didn't make up for all of the bloated parts about her weird dad and her adopted brother taking over. I'd be interested in finding out what happens, but I don't think I'm going to read any more books in the series.

Hush

Hush, by"Eishes Chayil"

Inside the closed community of Borough Park, where Brooklyn's Chassidim live, the rules of life - everything from how to dress to whom to marry - are very clear, determined to the last detail by an ancient script written thousands of years before. Then young Gittel witnesses an unspeakable act of violence against her best friend, Devory, an act that goes against everything she's been taught as a Jew. For the first time in her life, there are no guidelines to tell her what to do, so she remains silent. But even inaction has consequences, and sometimes they are deadly.

Now a teenager, Gittel is racked with guilt over the choices she made and those that were forced upon her by the community she once trusted. She must question everything about herself - her own innocence, her memories of the past, and the beliefs of her sect - to find peace for Devory and for herself.

Hush bears a lot of similarities to Fox Girl - starting with the opening narration. In Fox Girl, Hyun Jin dreams of her friend Sookie, from years past; in Hush, Gittel speaks to her best friend, Devory, whom we are told is dead. I really enjoyed Hush, and I hope that anyone reading this will not be dissuaded from picking it up when I say it resembles Fox Girl once again, as it deals with child sexual abuse, albeit in a radically different setting. Hush is set in a Jewish Orthodox community in New York in 2008, although it could easily have taken place anytime in the last fifty years, as the readers realize how little this community has changed, and indeed how they make this immutability a canon of their religious and social lives. The particular Chassidim (perhaps more commonly known as Hasidic Jews) in Hush are fictionalized (as is the author's name - Eishes Chayil is a pseudonym meaning Woman of Valor), but that a large pocket of such people live in Borough Park in Brooklyn is not. In fact, if you watch The Daily Show, you may recall an episode about the erection of an eruv in Westhampton Beach in March of this year, which is a boundary line enclosing a Chassidic community space. They also made the news last month, in much sadder circumstances, when a young Chassidic boy was found dismembered after a two-day long search after he missing on his way home from school. And now that I've made you all depressed, time to talk about Hush!

Besides being a moving book about child abuse and trauma, it's also an engrossing peek into an entirely different kind of world (at least for me, and I dunno about you all, but I doubt very much I have a large, or even existent, Hasidic readership. Feel free to lambast me about it in the comments). It is a world so divorced from my own experiences, I did doubt at times that it was even possible. How could one maintain such ignorance and such isolation in this period of over-sharing and intrusiveness? Gittel, to us, has only a child's knowledge of the world - she doesn't know facts about the human body that I learned by the time I was ten - and one of craziest (and most hilarious) scenes in the book is when she gets into an argument with her husband about the fact that she has breasts. Cause, you know, he's never seen 'em on a Chassidish woman before. At last, the bra's true purpose of destroying the very fabric of society is revealed!

Hush is actually two halves - the first is set in 2008 and flashes back to 1999, when Devory and Gittel are nine years old. The second half takes place entirely in the present, from 2008 to 2010. Hush concerns itself more with the aftereffects of the trauma than the trauma itself. We see the terrible burden that being the survivor has placed on Gittel. The problem here is not that no one cares about what is being done to their children, but that in a community which prides itself on adherence to rules they have been following for thousands of years, and a vast gulf between their world and the outside world, there is no outlet for this situation. It is a shameful secret which brings more condemnation on those who tell their stories and rock the boat than on those who commit the assault. These things are hushed up, not to protect the perpetrators, but to protect the innocent.

The results are predictably catastrophic. With no way to comprehend what she has seen, and no outlet for her questions and her story, Gittel turns all her guilt inward. Even though she was only a child, and even though she did her best to speak for Devory, she winds up blaming herself for not doing more, for not bringing the wrath of the community down on her, if it would have saved her friend. One thing I particularly liked about this book was the loving relationship Gittel had with her own family, especially her father. Her parents don't repress her out of malice, but out of love, out of the knowledge that Gittel's future will be forever stained if the truth comes out. And even though you shrink from a community which has such beliefs that they would punish the victim over the abuser, by the end of the book, you realize that this isn't because of any ill-motive, but because they see this as one more threat to their way of life, a way of life that they have all fought hard to maintain. It is the great irony of the book that such terrible actions come from a place of love. I've tagged this entry as "tragedy" but it isn't, really, because by the end of the book, Gittel has spoken, and she has opened a light into this world, and it has not destroyed them all.

The first half of the book is Gittel coming to terms herself with what happened, and finally being able to name it as rape. I liked the second half better, since it had more humor, but this part was compelling and necessary to realize the impact that it had on her, years later. Gittel was in the position of seeing Devory's cries for help, but being unable to do anything about them. You feel though her not only the trauma of having seen this horror, but having everyone pretend that it did not happen, which compounds the original horror tenfold. It is only through her goyim (non-Jewish) neighbor that she gathers the courage to speak to a social worker about it.

The second half deals with Gittel's marriage, and her publication of the truth. I will admit, I cried a bit when Gittel wrote her public letter to Devory. Which is the greater crime, the rape of a nine-year old child, or the systematic repression of the truth? I can only hope that a similar sea change is sweeping the Orthodox community, as it is only with knowledge and openness that such crimes can be combated.

I was incredibly fascinated with all the details of Gittel's life - the ban on pets and televisions, the one-track future for the girls, the ritualized cleaning, the expensive hats, the arranged marriages, and the pressure to bear children. Gittel and her husband are two perfectly reasonable, nice people, and yet the rigid guidelines of their lives put them so much at odds. The only thing keeping them together is this common faith, and yet that same faith prohibits even a comforting touch, or a frank discussion. It's a wonder to think that more people don't go round the twist.

Hush is certainly eye-opening, and it's an incredible account simply of what it means to be a Hasidic girl in New York. It also manages to make the Chassidim sympthetic, which is harder than it sounds, given that they have allowed child sexual abuse to flourish under their watch, out of fear. Gittel is also a charming narrator, and you get a feel for her character - stubborn and just as difficult as any adolescent going through puberty, and yet godly and strong in her faith. I was exceptionally pleased for her when her husband turned out to be such a stand up fellow. There is such a danger of abuse, given that this faith and community rests on the fragile pact each member has made to abide by the rules, which are obviously not designed for slackers.

The author has the ability to find the humor in the odd situations her characters' background puts them in, like when Gittel and her parents get so excited about a possible match they forget to ask his name or even if he speaks English, or when Gittel gets into a debate with her cousin about which sect is holier, the litvish or the Chassidish, and it devolves into an argument about whether a husband ought to help his wife with the dishes. As it turns out, nine year-olds are nine year-olds and teenagers are teenagers no matter if they grow up to get married at eighteen, or go on to a co-ed dormitory in college. Everyone has had that experience of accidentally turning out the lights on Shabbos, and everyone has sulked about the resultant scolding.

At last, we end on a message of forgiveness and hope, and of a bright future for Gittel, in which the memory of Devory has finally been sapped of its bitterness. Gittel says that the day of marriage is when a Jew is reborn, but it seems to me that Gittel gets reborn the day she's finally able to say goodbye to Devory.





And a final note to apologize if I screwed up any of them tenses of terms - I'm not sure about the endings on some of the words, so I sort of went with what made sense at the time.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon

Joe Kavalier, a young Jewish artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed himself in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America - the comic book. Drawing on their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapist, the Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men.

I hope everyone is ready for another nonsensical post in which I ruthlessly try to extract meaning using only my unaided brain. You bring the popcorn, I'll bring the metaphors. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I am only typing out once, and will now abbreviate to K&C which sounds like a baking powder manufacturer,¹ is a thick, pulitzer-winning book on comics, golems, jews, homosexuality, WWII, magic, and, most important of all, escapism. I actually read this book because of my overweening curiousity about my family's copy of the book, which was given to my brother many years ago by a young man who was hitting on him. My brother was, at the time, both seventeen and a clerk at the bookstore where it was bought. Customers take note: Don't be gross and hit on the hardworking members of the service industry when they are just doing their jobs to serve you, especially when they're still in high school, you creepoid. Anyway, so this guy gives my brother K&C, which has an inscription that says:

"Apparently this one's a good one for some such as we who are headed to 'The City'. Drop me a line."²

And ever since then, I have been dying to know what the fuck he meant by that. What is "The City"? Who is going there? Why is it capitalized? What does it all mean?!?!?!? and it's only taken me ten years to find out!

Scratch that, I still don't know what it means. There is not, as far as I can tell, a "City" in K&C. There is a city, New York City, in fact, but not a "City". And it's not like my brother going to a real city at the time, he was actually going to be moving out of a city. So I can only assume it was a metaphorical city. Maybe we can take a hint from Captain Hammer of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, who seems like a man who knows his way around a metaphor:

"The hammer is my penis."

Oh, well, okay then. I'm not even sure what I'm talking about anymore, but I think I should get back to the book, which is ostensibly the reason we're all here today.

I think that Kavalier&Clay is a well-written, thoroughly exhaustive book. That's not to say it didn't have problems. But the problems that crop up in a book of Kavalier&Clay's caliber are not the same kind of fun-destroying problems that crop up in, say, "The Sheik's Pregnant Heiress Secretary". I mean, even if you're not swept along in it, at least you won't hate yourself afterwards.

Let's get the story out of the way first: It begins, well, not quite at the beginning, when Josef Kavalier and Samuel Klayman meet for the first time. Then we back track to Josef's daring escape from Prague during the crackdown on Jewish citizens, and moves forward into Kavalier & Clay's partnership, their comic hero the Escapist, and jogging swiftly through the build-up to and entry in WWII, with Josef's struggle to free the rest of his family and their first romantic relationships, before jumping abruptly twelve years later, and the final act.

One of the things I didn't find particularly great about Kavalier&Clay was that I felt that it was one-sidedly plot-driven, rather than character driven. It seemed sometimes like Joe and Sam were blown always by things happening to them, and never by making things happen themselves. It's as though they were little pinballs, wound up and let loose, buffeted by outside forces into changing directions but never themselves making a choice. In the final part, there is a story about Harry Houdini and his wife, no more than a few pages long, and I felt like I got to know the wife better than I knew Joe or Sam. They had quirks, yes, but put them in an unfamiliar situation, and I could not have said which way they would jump. My standards might have been a tad high, since I was also catching up on episodes of Friday Night Lights when I was reading Kavalier&Clay, and that show does character like nobody's business. It does character so well that you actually forget that half of the show is made up of absolutely asinine and/or ridiculous plots like the time they made a sidekick geek high schooler character murder a rapist/stalker who then covers it up and lies to the police about it. Like, this show is about a high school football team, what the shit is that? And yet! That is the beauty of character.


The flipside to this equation though, is that the plot is absolutely stunning. (It'd have to be or else the book would have been mulched). It's very in the spirit of comic book heroism, and Chabon exploits that by setting his characters up, often at the beginning of a chapter or a section, in a weird or wonderful situation, and then later going back to the origins and working up to why, for example, Joe is suddenly threatening to jump off the Empire State Building after a 12 year absence. Haha, SPOILER! It's hard for me to explain if you don't know anything about comics, but it's very !comic book cover! wait, wait, actual story line, things that give the cover context and make it less absurd. Chabon really brings the events to life, and they're also very comic book in that they're larger than life, everything, all the time. Joe doesn't just enlist in the navy - he gets sent to Antarctica, and lives in a snow tunnel and everyone around him dies of carbon monoxide poisoning and then he and his crazy bunker mate make a pact to kill the last person on the continent who is a Nazi, only his pilot gets a burst appendix, so he crashes the plane, and then Joe tries to make conciliatory overtures to the German, but the German gets shot anyhow, and Joe winds up dragging this dead body along the ice for miles, and meanwhile you're like, what the...? How is nothing in that previous sentence made up?! I swear to you, it's true.

My other beef with Chabon is how he thinks I (and you too) am a Special Slow student.³ Yes, it may take awhile for things to sink it, but you don't need to shout, Michael. I am referring, in particular, to the scene in which Sam and Joe dream up the Escapist, and Chabon does this:

Page 119:

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat — was, literally, talked into life. Kavalier and Clay - whose golem was to be formed of black lines and the four colour dots of the lithographer - lay down, lit the first of five dozen cigarettes they were to consume that afternoon, and started to talk.

(And side note, how fucking awesome is that? Blew my mind. Chabon can write, no doubt about it. But he doesn't think much of his readers).

And then page 134:

The sound of their raised voices carries up through the complicated antique ductwork of the grand old theater, raising and echoing through the pipes where it emerges through a grate in the sidewalk, where it can be heard clearly by a couple of young men who are walking past, their collars raised against the cold October night, dreaming their elaborate dream, wishing their golem into life.

Like, okay, you were right, I needed that kick in the pants to get it the first time around. They are creating a golem, a creature enlivened by words and given a soul and sent off into the world. I was amazed, I hadn't made the connection. But your insistence on repeating yourself cheapens the effect. It's a golem! I got it! You don't need to bludgeon me with it.

And if that doesn't make you nuts like it did me (I can be tetchy, I admit it), how about their names, Kavalier and Clay? Could you get more anvil than that? Kavalier is not cavalier, exactly, but he is a cavalier, a soldier, a mounted gallant tilting madly at windmills. His whole mission: Escape from Prague: Family Edition embodies that romantic, stubborn era. Meanwhile, his buddy "Clay" over there is the embodiment of solidity, of opaqueness, and also represents the final golem of the book, clay brought to life by his own words, his fatal testimony. It's like Chabon didn't trust us to get it, so he was like, I'll put the fucking clue bus in there, that'll run em down.⁴ That, to me, is Chabon saying this:

"The hammer is my penis."

Another big theme of the book is escapes. Literal and figurative. The comics are escapism, the hero is called the Escapist, and Joe literally escapes twice: once in Prague to avoid death, once in New York City to avoid life. Sammy only manages to escape by the skin of his teeth, which is a lot more horrible than it sounds, before he escapes a final time, which is not so much an escape as it is a release.

You know what this book actually needs more of? It ain't four dollar words. I think it needs more golem! Now, I will warn you, everything I know about golems I learned from Terry Pratchett (I feel like I said that about something else in this blog, which is either sadly indicative of schools these days, or awesomely indicative of Sir Terry). However. I was more affected by the opening of the golem's coffin than I was by Tommy's death (Caveat: this may have been because I was like Han Solo in the garbage chute, all "I have a bad feeling about this," in regards to Joe's one-man crusade to rescue a boatload of children (not an exaggeration) and I am nothing if not an inveterate ahead-reader when I get anxious about inevitable tragedy). I may have also misled myself (I accept all blame for this) into believing that Kavalier&Clay would involve some sort of golem revenge-rampage, which I think would really have lightened the mood and given us all something to cheer for.

I can't remember if I wanted to talk about anything else, but I will say that it's worth a read, it's work, it won't necessarily be a delight, but I think it's worth the time, and it'll make you feel smarter. It's a unique book, that's for sure, unless there's a whole comic-book-origin-story-spirals-into-madness-and-skinned-dogs subgenre I'm missing out on. Don't expect much depth, but the pop and sparkle are enough to make you forget about it for awhile. Now I have to go breath life into this particular golem, which I hope lurches all over your doorstep, shedding mud everywhere. Get it? I made a golem. Of words. Fine, I'll spell it out for you:

The golem is my penis.

¹I pretty much know Where the Red Fern Grows by heart. I mean, how else could Billy have saved up $50 to buy his two pups if not for his trusty KC Baking Powder can?! Does this book still make me cry even though I've read it, like, seventeen times? Am I tearing up right now? YES and YES.


²Although it is not important for this anecdote, you may be interested to know that this gesture might have gone to better effect if my brother were actually gay himself. Moral of the Story? DO YOUR RESEARCH.



³Not that this is relevant at all, but why is the entire text of Up the Down Staircase on some Russian website? Complete with doodles and everything! Sometimes the internet mystifies me. And often it does so while violating copyright laws, so this is a red-letter day all around, I'm sure.




⁴What's with all this swearing? It's not the heat, it's the humidity; I should have written this yesterday, when it was abnormally cool outside. Instead I'm in here trying to keep my fingertips from sweating.