Ash Lange and William O. Pate II
Seven Short Reviews by Ash Lange
Nancy Tucker, The First Day of Spring
A well-crafted debut novel that puts us inside the mind of a young single mother. Who happens to have murdered another child when she was eight. Puts the reader in mind of several famous cases, but deftly sidesteps any comparisons to exploitative, lurid, ripped-from-the-headlines pulp.
Daniel Kehlmann, Tyll
Translated fluidly from the German, Kehlmann’s novel will soon be getting its own series by the people behind Netflix’s Dark. Read it before then, and enjoy the intricately reconstructed world of Tyll Eulenspiegel, medieval German folk anti-hero.
Etgar Keret, The Girl on the Fridge
Keret doing when Keret does best. Short, stinging, and occasionally absurd. But even at his most outlandish, there is always something undeniable human and humane in each of his stories. Equally to be recommended is his collection Fly Already.
Herman Hesse, Knulp
For that friend of yours that can never quite settle down. You know the one.
Hilary Mantel, Giving Up The Ghost
Perhaps to be read in tandem with Elinor Cleghorn’s recent Unwell Women, as the most striking passages in this book deal with physical health and the mental toll caused by the disbelief in the illness and pain suffered by women.
Max Porter, The Death of Francis Bacon
Abstract, disjointed, and moving in its depiction of ultimate loneliness.
Adania Shibli, A Minor Detail
An important — and timely — book from last summer, made all the more relevant by this spring’s violence in Israel and Palestine. One foot in the past and one foot in the present.
Short Book Reviews by William O. Pate II
Kim Stanley Robinson doesn’t quite prove the famous Fredric Jameson quote used as Ministry for the Future’s epigraph incorrect but he does offer a readable speculative future centered around contemporary struggles. I fear the happy ending comes all too easily (it is science fiction) even if one were to calculate the total death toll imagined in the book from heatwaves and other climate change-induced natural catastrophes. It’s certainly a book parents should read if they need a fictionalized account of the current trajectory their offspring are on. Tip: Learn what “wet bulb” temperatures mean for human survival before you begin reading the book.
Margaret Randall has led an extraordinary life. Fortunately, she continues to chronicle it for us. A New Mexico-based (after a mid-life spent on the other side of the Iron Curtain’s Latin American fronts) poet and writer with 200+ books to her name, she’s published at least four of them since I learned of her upon the release of her latest memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary (Duke Univ. Press, 2019), last year. Her prose corpus alone provides me with a continuing source of thought-provoking, compassionate writing that provides a significant counterpoint to that produced by so many of her contemporaries, especially male writers. Smug self-satisfied certainty they’d summited the peak of human existence and knowledge (and, indeed, they may have but only because they laid the conditions for the impossibility of humanity’s continued existence and development much beyond their own deaths) is the opposite of Randall’s evolving perspective on our world. I can also recommend her My Life in 100 Objects (New Village Press, 2020), Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression (Duke Univ. Press, 2015), To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2009) and Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity.
On the Nature of Ecological Paradox (Springer, 2021) is a good pairing with the overly optimistic Ministry for the Future and a reminder of humans’ striking and continued ignorance — a lack often filled with baseless hubris rather than investigation or education.
Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora offer a reading of the later works of Michel Foucault finding agreements among his “turn to the ethical” and neoliberal political economy and values in The Last Man Takes LSD (Verso, 2021).
Dominique Eddé makes one hope he or she might think things worth someone pondering at book-length after our deaths when she writes about Edward Said (Verso, 2021).