Night of the Living Rez - Morgan Talty

 

I've read numerous Native American-authored novels and short stories in the past few years, and have found most of them to be pretty somber stuff. I understand the reason for this common tone when it comes to describing both Native American history and contemporary reservation life for many people, but after a while it starts to become a little too much to read over and over again. I keep hoping for Native American stories of a lighter, more humorous tone, stories that are more confident about the future, but those have been harder for me to find.

So I expected Morgan Talty's Night of the Living Rez (especially with that title) to be more of the same old gloomy stuff - and for the most part that is exactly what is own offer here. But then just when I was very close to giving up on this collection, I figured out where Talty was heading. The twelve stories largely alternate between two distinct sets of characters living on the same Maine Penobscot Indian reservation. The first set focuses mostly on two young men who seem to desire very little out of life more than a steady supply of alcohol and drugs to help get them through their days and nights. The second group of characters is comprised of a young boy, his older (drug addicted) sister, their mother, and the medicine man their mother has taken to her bed. When the alternating stories are taken as a whole, Night of the Living Rez begins to read more like a well constructed novel than a collection of short stories, and that's why it works so well.

"I wonder if 'How'd we get here?' is the wrong question. Maybe the right question is 'How do we get out of here?' Maybe that's the only question that matters.

...

And then I figured it out. I had the...question all wrong. It had nothing to do with us. It had everything to do with me.  How did I get here, and how do I get out?'' 

The two sets of stories are equally powerful, and the way they are blended into the overall narrative of Night of the Living Rez magnifies the impact of what they have to say about life for some on a contemporary Native American reservation. I was particular taken by the coming-of-age aspect of the stories featuring young David and his family as the boy learns to deal with the peculiar ways of his mother, the new man in his mother's life, the self-destructive behavior of his sister, and a grandmother who often mistakes David for her long-dead little brother - and treats him accordingly when he goes to check on her. 

Sadly, the lives of these characters are filled with one tragic mistake after another, but even though some lives are left in ruins long before the reader turns the final page of story number twelve, I was left with at least an inkling of hope that at least one or two of them were about to figure out the answer to "How do we get out of here?"

Don't miss this one.

This Strange Eventful History - Claire Messud (2024 Booker Prize Nominee)

 

I had high hopes for Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History when I first heard of it, and had actually started reading it before the 2024 Booker Prize longlist was released a few weeks ago. Partially set in Algeria during the 1940s-1950s and centering around a pied-noir (French citizens whose families originally came to Algeria to colonize the country on behalf of France) family, it meshed perfectly with my personal experience and interest. Unfortunately, my high hopes came crashing down as soon as I realized that Messud was largely going to skip right over the periods and places I was most interested in reading about.

Instead, Messud offers the seven-decade (1940-2010) story of the Cassar family as it expands and moves around the world in the aftermath of one significant family decision or event after another. The patriarch of the family is Gaston Cassar, who when the book begins has just evacuated his family from WWII-era Greece to the homes of relatives in Algeria. Gaston is a French naval attache and knows that he is unlikely to see his wife (Lucienne), son (Gaston), and daughter (Denise) again anytime soon. This section is seen primarily through the eyes of François, Gaston's young son and it gives the first hint of Messud's approach to this family saga: it will focus on the personal lives and struggles of the small family rather than on the major historical events occurring all around them. The first jump forward in time is significant. It is suddenly 1953, the war is over, and François is now in the U.S. attending college. The remainder of the family remains in Algeria, struggling to make ends meet while keeping their financial problems a secret from François. 

The next jump forward in time, entirely ignoring the revolution that won Algeria's independence from France between segments, is to 1962 Canada (where François is in business school) and 1963 Argentina where his sister Denise is living with their parents. The segment is largely about the now 30-year-old Denise and her struggles to find her place in life. You get the idea. Each segment of the novel jumps forward about ten years in time, and each usually sees at least part of the family living in a new country. So we get 1974 Australia, 1989 Connecticut, 1998 France, and finally 2010 Rye Brook, New York. The book then circles back to 1927 Algeria for a short look back at Gaston and Lucienne's courting days.

All of this makes for a rather traditional family saga, the kind that covers multiple generations of a single family in order to show how they ended up who they are - and where they are - in the present day. As such, this is not at all a bad novel. But I have to look at This Strange Eventful History as a missed opportunity to write something special, a novel in which the "events" really were "strange" rather than relatively mundane and common in the long run.

My Men - Victoria Kielland (Translated by Damion Searls )

 

Victoria Kielland's My Men is a fictional account of a very real woman thought to be the first female serial killer in American history. She may have been the first, but before she could be stopped Brynhild Størset would claim some thirty victims after leaving Norway to begin her new life in America.

Størset was only seventeen years old when she informed the firstborn son of the wealthy farmer she worked for that she was pregnant with his child. Expecting that the young man would be pleased by the news, Brynhild was surprised when he kicked her in the stomach hard enough to cause her to lose her baby. Now faced with humiliation and destitution in Norway, the girl decided to take her chances in the United States - where she changed her name to Belle Gunness. 

Belle ended up in Chicago for a while, where her sister lived, but soon enough moved to a countryside farm after marrying a fellow Norwegian. That marriage lasted only until Belle, having had enough of the man, ended it by killing her husband. Now she had a stake in her new country, along with the two little girls she and the man had taken into their home. Before long, Belle was remarried, and the pattern was established. She continued to do quite well adding to her wealth via the dead-husband route, but realized that her luck could not hold out forever so she varied the pattern by placing "Lonely Heart" ads in the Chicago papers to keep the men coming.

And for a long time, lonely, desperate men kept right on coming to Belle's farm - never to be seen again.

But it is not Belle's spectacular murder spree that makes My Men so unusual a historical novel. It is unlikely that the novel would have gotten so much attention on both sides of the Atlantic if Kielland had taken a straightforward approach to presenting Belle's story. Instead, the author uses a strange hybrid third person/first person point of view in which the reader learns more about what is going on in Belle's head as she kills than about the murders themselves or Belle's victims. Almost everything revealed to the reader is limited to what Belle saw with her own eyes or what she had specific knowledge of. What we as readers experience is all the pent-up anger, frustration, and hatred that drives Belle, allowing her to kill so many men in her quest for personal revenge for the way she was treated as a young woman in Norway. 

I even had to go back to re-read a section or two to make sure that a murder had actually taken place because Belle felt so justified in committing her crimes that they sometimes hardly seemed to impact her other than with how much physical labor was involved in disposing of the bodies of her victims. Reading My Men makes for such an unusual reading experience, I think, that even those readers who would not ordinarily read this type of novel might want to take a chance on it.

Below is a picture of Belle and the two little girls she and her first husband took into their home, along with Belle's own son. Take a look at Belle's eyes and chilling expression...

What I'm Reading This Week (August 25, 2024)

 

Despite my being totally distracted all week, I did finish two books this past week, Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty and A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. Talty's collection of short stories really worked for me and I'll be putting something together on the book relatively soon. And Doyle's Sherlock Holmes opener reminded me again just how skillful a storyteller Doyle was, so I ended up having an enjoyable reading week despite myself.

My biggest time-killer turned out to be my sudden urge to sort through all the e-books I've managed to scatter all over my computer drive over the last several years. It's like they had all been sucked into some immense black hole never to be seen again even though I have around 450 of them on various Kindle readers. So far I've turned up something like another 60 e-books that never made it to a Kindle, and of course have never been read. Some of the files have been corrupted beyond use and won't open, and others have bad metadata associated with the files, so it has been a struggle to figure out if they are even still readable. 

I went down this new rabbit hole after being reminded again that the purchase of an e-book doesn't really mean that you own anything. According to Amazon and others, we are all more or less just leasing e-books for some period of time that they decide is appropriate. There's nothing to keep a company like Amazon from deciding no longer to support a particular book or author and removing all trace of them from their wondrous cloud. I'm not sure what that means if you've already downloaded the book to your device, but I've been led to believe that even if you have, you lose access to the suddenly missing book. Even it that's not the case, you certainly do lose any possibility of downloading if you haven't already done so, or if you have read and removed it earlier, of being able to re-load it. 

So I have spent hours and hours using Calibre software to reformat my hundreds of e-books into the epub format from the Kindle exclusive azw3 format necessary to read them on a Kindle device - which means I have about 450 e-books in two formats now, sometimes three. Not the most efficient use of hard drive space, but this way I'm at least able to save copies of everything on my computer and backup drives - and I'm in control of who owns them, not Amazon.

Doing all of this also allowed me to buy my first Kobo reader (their color model, the Libra) and upload all the original Kindle books to the new Kobo reader. It's kind of fun to see all the covers in color again, along with whatever color was added to the book pages, too. Without having reformatted all the Amazon books that transfer would not have been possible. 

It's not only books, and it's not only Amazon, that can leave you high and dry with no access to something you believed was your property. Just in the last few days, for instance, Redbox pulled the plug on all the digital movie content it had sold over the last few years to customers who thought they owned it forever. Redbox is now gone...and so are the movies. Anyway, that's what ate up so much of my time last week...sorry to ramble on as long as I did about it. Oh, and I'm not done yet with that project.

Coming into this week, I find myself down to the last 75 pages of Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West and well into Huxley's Brave New World along with a couple of others.

Brave New World, written in 1932, is classic dystopian fiction. It's one of those stories in which the entire world has collapsed in on itself without most of its inhabitants even recognizing how bad things are for all but the chosen few. And in this case, people are definitely chosen, even before birth, for the job and societal level they will live at until they die. It's all done via unethical science, brainwashing techniques, censorship, and hiding the truth from everyone. Even those in charge, by now, don't really know how dark their "brave new world" has grown.

Wow, is this good! This is my first time reading anything by Carol O'Connell, and I probably made a poor choice by beginning with book ten of her Mallory series, but I'm really loving The Chalk Girl at almost its halfway point. Kathy Mallory (don't dare ever call her by her first name because that irritates the fire out of this young police detective) is one of the more unique series characters I've run across in a long time. She's a sociopath of sorts with very little time to worry about even faking social skills and she's always on the brink of being fired despite her obvious crime-solving prowess.

S.R. Wilsher's The Collection of Heng Souk is one of those e-books I rescued from oblivivion last week. It was published in 2016, and I have no idea why I have it, but the title of the book made me curious enough to begin reading the first few pages and now I'm hooked. It's set in Hanoi in the present day and is about a young doctor (who is married to a jerk of a police detective) who only learns that she has an elderly uncle after her father dies and leaves a package to be delivered to the man. Heng Souk, the uncle, as it turns out, was an interrogator for the North Vietnam army during the war years. 

I'm turning up so much interesting stuff as I continue my e-book cleanup that I have no idea what I'll be reading this time next week. As frustrating as it has been at times, this project is, I think, finally going to get me to look closely at each of the e-books I "own" and begin finally to read some of the ones that I've overlooked for way too long.

I hope all of you have great reading weeks as the summer months begin to come to a close. We are hoping for some relief from the heat down here, and are kind of holding our breaths as we work our way through the rest of hurricane season. Have fun!

Mrs. Plansky's Revenge - Spencer Quinn

 

Mrs. Plansky is the sun around whom the other members of her family orbit; they all know to come to her when something needs to be fixed, and Mrs. Plansky always does whatever it takes to make their lives easier. Not only is she the caretaker of her 98-year-old father, she also has to worry about her daughter and that woman's parade of husbands, ex-husbands, and live-in boyfriends while trying to be there for her college-aged grandson whenever he needs her. But let's face it, Mrs. Plansky is 70 years old now, and she could stand a break or two from all the action herself.

But that's not going to happen because Mrs. Plansky is about to get a phone call in the middle of the night that will rock her world.

Still half asleep, Mrs. Plansky listens to a voice on the phone claiming to be her grandson Will. The boy on the line, whoever he really is, tells her that he's in trouble with the law and desperately needs ten thousand dollars to get himself released from jail. Mrs. Plansky, always eager to help her grandson, follows "Will's" instructions step-by-step - and the next morning she wakes up to learn that all of her bank accounts and investment accounts suddenly show the same balance: zero.

Mrs. Plansky does what any of us would do; she goes to the authorities for help. It doesn't take long, however, for her to realize that the authorities are not likely ever to get her money back for her, and that's really all she wants. Sure, she'd like to see the scammers brought to justice, but with so many people still depending on her, the lost money is the most important thing to her. So Mrs. Plansky does something that most 70-year-old people would never have the courage to do - she buys a ticket to Romania to confront the thieves face-to-face. She is determined to bring her money home with her. 

Mrs. Plansky's Revenge, despite its occasional violence, is a goodhearted feel-good novel, one in which readers can root for the good guys with full confidence that everything will work out in the end. Despite the plot being a tad predictable, the story is so good that I found myself turning pages just to see how the author was going to get the elderly woman out of the latest jam she had managed to wriggle herself into. Mrs. Plansky's Revenge is lots of fun, a nice diversion from the more brutal brand of crime fiction, a novel I feel good about recommending to others. 

(Thanks again to CLM and her Staircase Wit blog  for turning me on to Mrs. Plansky's Revenge.)

Bookshelf Organizing: A Challenge for Both the Mind and the Body

  

As you can probably see from this picture, I'm still in the process of cleaning up some of the mess I made on Saturday while reorganizing approximately 1,000 books that are shelved in my home office. But overall, especially now that my knees are feeling a bit better after two days of resting them, I am pretty pleased with the result. I can't believe how much easier it is now to find any specific book that I might be searching for than it was before I moved almost every single book shown here to a new spot on the shelves.

I still have some fine-tuning to do with the few books still on the floor, but I have also marked about 30 books to be given to friends in a few days and discovered more than a few hidden gems I'd forgotten all about.

Prior to this re-do, my books were mostly sorted alphabetically according to author surname. I also had that center section dedicated to older editions, classic literature, and all those Library of America books in the center of the middle section, along with another couple of shelves for signed copies and other more valuable first edition copies of some of my favorite books. But the main problem was that many of my favorite writers didn't limit themselves to novels. They also wrote short stories, novellas, essays, memoirs, literary criticism, and the like - genres that seemed to disappear into some kind of black hole when I went looking for a specific type of reading experience. 

So I decided to chuck the surname method in favor of dedicating separate sections of the shelves to:

• Short Stories
• Memoirs, Essays, and Criticism
• Westerns
• Biographies
• Historical Fiction
• Road Trips and Long Walks
• History
• Science Fiction
• Signed Copies / More Valuable Editions
• Favorite Series
• Spy Fiction
• LOA Books, Modern American Books, and Other Favorite Editions of "Literature"

Within these genres, the books are still sorted by author surname or, in the case of biographies, by surname of the subject of the biography.

This is what it looked like as I first began to shift the shelves into standalone stacks while I tried to do some shelf-cleaning at the same time. All was going well until a couple of hours later when one of the stacks tilted over into another stack and the domino-effect resulted in books all over the floor in one big heap - to be resorted all over again. 

I still have another wall and some smaller bookshelves in other rooms to sort through, so this is still very much a work-in-progress, but I'm already happy with the results. I'm particularly excited to find that I have so many short story collections, for instance. Until I saw all of them in one section, I never realized how many stories I still haven't explored or even sampled. Even a substantial portion of the LOA books are short story compilations, but those are going to be kept with the other LOA books. I think this effort is going to impact my TBR list for years to come because I only realize now what a goldmine I've been sitting next to for all these years. (I've also culled some junk from the shelves - books that are going to be donated.)

How do you guys organize your own shelves? Traditionally, randomly, by genre - or  by some combination of all of this? I'd love to hear if you have something better that works for you.