octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Well this is desperately depressing... and yet there's a seed of resilience in here, even if it expresses itself in self-destructive and often violent ways. Lela, who has aged out of care in the residential school that caters mostly (if not solely) to the intellectually handicapped, is a survivor. Self-contained, determined, she wants two things: to murder the school's history teacher, who rapes the little girls under his care, and to ensure that a little boy she is particularly fond of is adopted into a foreign home, on the grounds that life in America is certain to be an improvement on a rundown school in post-Soviet Georgia. She doesn't count on the fact that little Irakli doesn't want to be adopted, hoping as he does that the mother who abandoned him will one day return... Irakli, it seems, has short-term memory problems, and is continually certain that "next week" his mum will come, when really she's run off to Greece to improve her own life and get away from a child who may never really be more than that.

It is a grim portrait of an awful school where the children are exploited in any number of horrifying ways, but it's also a tautly constructed novel with extremely elegant prose. There's something very sparse about The Pear Field - the name coming from the swampy, stunted orchard by the school, with its consistently inedible fruit - both in words and in effect. It's compelling and terrible and is at once both very easy to read, and very difficult. 

 

I've been meaning to read this for ages and have finally got around to it - I'm so glad I did, because it was great. The prose is just so vivid and accomplished. I'm not really familiar with the dialect Hurston used for all the characters, but it didn't take much to follow along, and I was always so engrossed that it slipped down very easily... I read the book in only two sittings because it was just so hard to put down. Apart from the prose, though, the real strength is in the characterisation, particularly of Janie. She's real and sympathetic from the moment she appears on the page, and if it's difficult to see her continually squashed down by her overbearing second husband, it's also a relief to see that, after his death, she takes her changed circumstances as an opportunity for freedom and exploration and happiness.

I'm not entirely sure that about the rabies storyline near the end, though, and the truncated self-defense trial. It seems a little melodramatic, next to the rest of the text, and I can't help feeling that it's almost tacked on as a way of getting rid of husband number three, who by this time had taken on a somewhat superfluous patina. Not that there's anything especially wrong with Tea Cake, but apparently for Janie to come home, he had to go. I'm not sure exactly why Hurston thought Janie had to return, but return she did, and at least she's happy and in control of her own destiny again, which is really all I ask for. 

"This too shall pass"... except some things don't, do they. Blanca herself admits this: she's a middle-aged woman and her mother has just died, and for the rest of her life she'll be motherless. That's hard for her to encompass, in the midst of recent and profound grief, and so Blanca packs up her family and various hangers-on and goes to spend time in a holiday town, in order to try and get over the worst of it. 

It's a lot more lighthearted than it sounds, without actually undermining that state of grief. It helps that Blanca is not always sympathetic. She has a painfully clear-eyed view of life, albeit with some blind spots where she herself is concerned, and her take-no-bullshit attitude, punctuated by bouts of indolent sex with both an ex-husband, and with someone else's current husband, is partly a coping mechanism, and partly, I think, a result of a latent self-centredness. But that's not the right word, exactly. It's enjoyment of life as a survival mechanism, I think, and there's a sunshiny gloss over all of this, like one of those find-yourself Mediterranean stories that are just this side of syrupy, the modern fairy tale for women past the age of princesses. And like those stories, it's a very easy book to swallow, with lovely evocative prose... but my lasting impression is of the gloss, rather than the grief. 

Oh, this is fun! It's basically teen soap opera, set on the Ivory Coast. Aya and her family live in a working class neighbourhood. Her dad's a manager for a beer company, her mum's a secretary, and there are two younger siblings. Aya dreams of being a doctor, and is always having to turn down invitations in order to study. Her boy-crazy best friends, Bintou and Adjoua, are far less scholarly, and are primarily interested in sneaking out for romantic encounters and dancing.

I read some of Abouet's graphic novels for kids last year, and they were fun too, so I thought I'd try this - one of her goals in writing books like this, so the introduction says, is to produce a depiction of a part of Africa that's more than the lazy stereotypes usually put forth by mainstream media. Everything here is so familiar - from the feckless teenagers to the put-upon parents to the nuisance cat-callers in the street - that Abouet's clearly been successful, I think. The setting is different, but the drama's the same.

I have to admit, there seems, in this first book in the series, far more focus on the two party girls than on Aya herself. And the girls are fun, and recognisable, but I was much more of an Aya myself as a teen, so I'd have liked to see more of an emphasis on her. Maybe in the next book, though! And hey, at least she doesn't end up knocked up, and married to a boy so limply ineffectual that even his parents think he's a loser. So, you know, she's kind of winning so far. 

I'm not entirely sure that the blurb I read on this book gave an accurate depiction of the contents. Yes, it's about a woman, Awu, who struggles with the traditions of her rural village and how they conspire to remove all agency from her life (the ceremony she undergoes as a new widow is absolutely horrific, and the stripping of all her resources so that they can be given to male family members is almost as disturbing to read). And that's done very well: the book, from what I gather from the very interesting introduction, is an invitation to critique the place of traditions (some beneficial, some not) in modern life - particularly those traditions that impact most heavily on women. As a feminist text, it's certainly effective... although I say that as someone who comes from a very different culture than Awu and Mintsa, so I can't answer for the impact it's had in Mintsa's own communities. 

Back to the blurb, though: Awu is taken as a second wife, as Bella, the beloved first wife of their shared husband Obame, cannot conceive. I rather got the impression that the book would be focused on the relationship between the three people involved in this marriage, but Bella dies before three pages are up, ostensibly of a broken heart. The focus of the book, then, is less on the marriage than it is on Awu and her navigation of matrimony and widowhood. A second storyline, following Awu's twelve year old niece Ada, sexually abused by her schoolteachers and subsequently pregnant, echoes the theme of female exploitation in rural Gabon; this can be quite a grim read in places. As I said, though, it strikes me as a particularly effective one. 

I'm not entirely sure that I get this utterly depressing piece of Japanese literature. The blurb tells me that the narrator is dead, but the blurring of lines throughout the book between the dead and the homeless makes me wonder if that assertion is just a metaphor. The ending, too, is ambiguous: I suppose the final tragedy of Kazu's existence is the end of his time as a ghost, but it could also be read as a homeless man committing suicide, which is how I tended to read it. 

I tend to like ambiguity in my reading, but here that ambiguity is combined with pretty much endless misery and sidetracks that pulled my attention away from Kazu himself - the list of roses, for example. I'm sure that if I were cleverer I could mine some meaning from it, but I'm not and I didn't. 

I have to admit that, when reading this, I was unsure if it was fiction or memoir. It turns out it's the former, but the afterword indicates that it's based on the author's childhood memories of growing up on the island of Annobón. It's beautifully written, anyway, and if there's quite a lot of repetition here, it's clearly a conscious choice, one that's influenced very much by rhythm. There's something almost soothing about that repetition, even when the subject matter is distressing. It almost feels like wave motion, that sort of rocking back and forth, which is very suited to the tone of the book: there's something very reflective about it.

That wave-motion of the prose is particularly fitting, given that so much of this book is concerned with island life. The ocean here is one of the main sources of food, and the construction of canoes - a community endeavour, and one accompanied by song - is an ongoing event. Honestly, there are a lot more supposedly compelling moments here: the mob murder of a lone woman, the fire, the death of a child and the long struggle to transport it to a hospital, for instance. Yet when I think back on what I've just read, it's the quiet construction of the canoes that makes the strongest impression. In many ways, that considered, necessary craftsmanship is the quiet heart of this book, and I can't help but think that the pages bear some relationship to the vessels... I suppose they do, after all, consist of the same substance. 

This book is a collaboration between the Solomon Islands poet Celo Kulaghoe and his compatriot Frederick Butafa, who provides an illustration of traditional art for each poem. And I like the poems, I do, but I'm really fascinated by the art. It's black and white, highly patterned, and full of hidden detail (there's a short paragraph accompanying each piece pointing out those details and what they mean). My favourites were the pieces with fish and turtles worked into the wider image. It's really great work, and the synergy between prose and picture is just really effective.

Regarding the poems: they're gentle pieces, often focused on friends and family (especially Kulaghoe's wife and daughter) and how much the author loves them. That love often extends to place, as it does in the poem "Qalekana" (Guadalcanal), the poet's birthplace. I think that was the poem I liked best, but then I'm always fond of poetry that has a strong connection to place and environment. The other text-based piece that really interests me is the Poet's Note at the front of the book, wherein Kulaghoe talks about the importance of individuality: "The poems collected here are meant to be a monument to individuals and their thoughts. Whether culture carries us to utopian prosperity or suffers premature extinction is immaterial except for the benefits that individuals accrue while sojourning in society." Or so part of it goes. I'm all for individuality, but I will say it's nice to see it expressed in such a consistently loving way; all too often (in my culture, at least) individuality is too closely linked with competition instead of compassion. I think I like this way better. 

I don't want to give it away, but there is a genius section in this book that concerns a rhinoceros, and the delighted noise I made when I came across it probably had to be heard to be believed. A rhinoceros is perhaps not what you expect from a graphic memoir where Peeters falls in love with the single mother of a toddler, knowing that both mother and child are HIV positive. The openness and honesty with which he describes their growing relationship - both as a couple and as a family - are genuinely appealing, and the metaphor of the rhino is stunningly effective. This is subtitled A Positive Love Story, and that's accurate: it's a story primarily of optimism, and how compromised health doesn't stop love. I really did appreciate that part of it.

I was less enamoured by the art. Other than the rhino, I didn't much care for it... but that's a matter of aesthetics and no doubt others will really enjoy the visual style. The rhino made up for a lot, though, and I was going to give this four stars until the mammoth showed up. Yes, a mammoth - not so much a real mammoth, but a construct with which Peeters can have a philosophical discussion about his circumstances, and I'm sorry, but even a mammoth can't interest me in philosophy. The real life details of Peeters and Cati and the kid (always unnamed) are genuinely compelling, but that strongly abstract near-conclusion just couldn't hold my attention, I'm afraid. 

I've read one of Abirached's graphic novels before, and now - as then - I'm so impressed by her art. It's entirely black and white, and consists almost primarily of thick, strong lines and solid blocks of colour. It's detailed without being fussy, and really deceptively simple. I thoroughly enjoy it.

The storytelling, too, is excellent, and leaves the reader to fill in a lot of the gaps. Given that a lot of the conversation here is either directed at, or in the presence of, two very young children (the author and her younger brother) this is no doubt both accurate and deliberate. In the middle of the Lebanese civil war, Abirached and her sibling are left alone in the family apartment for a short time, while their parents sneak through sniper-filled streets to check on relatives. They're very late coming home, and the kids are limited to the apartment's small foyer, the safest room in the building due to its reinforced walls and lack of windows. There's shelling all around, and as they wait, they're joined by pretty much every adult in the building, as the neighbours come together to make sure the kids are alright, feeding them cake and distracting them from absence and bombardment - one of the neighbours is a teacher, and acts out passages from Cyrano de Begerac. It's all very reassuring and kind, even though as a reader it's plain that the adults fear the worst. There's a happy ending, thankfully, but that doesn't take away from the very well-drawn tension of the piece, or its essential humanity.