Aug 22 2021

Red Notice by Bill Browder

“How do you rebel against a family of Communists?” asks Bill Browder in the title of the second chapter of Red Notice. Browder’s grandfather, Earl Browder, had started as a labor organizer in Kansas and rose to be the American Communist Party’s presidential candidate in 1936 and 1940. Prior to those campaigns, he spent some time in Moscow, married a Russian woman, and had a son — Felix, Bill’s father — who was born in the Soviet capital in 1927. A second son, also born in Moscow, followed in 1931 and a third was born in New York in 1934. (Bill chooses not to comment on what it meant to stay a Communist between 1936 and 1940, years that included the show trials of old Bolsheviks, the height of Stalin’s purges that meant death and the gulag for millions, and the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 that gave the Nazi war machine a free hand in Poland — and the Soviets the eastern half of interwar Poland.) By contrast, his “grandmother was a Russian Jewish intellectual and had no desire for any of her sons to go into the dirty business of politics. For her, the highest calling was academia, specifically in science or mathematics.” (p. 13)

Red Notice by Bill Browder

Felix sped through MIT and Princeton and had a PhD in math by age 20. Bill’s other two uncles likewise became mathematicians, with his uncle William serving a term as president of the American Mathematical Society. Bill saw himself as a misfit in “this strange, academic, left-wing family.” (p. 15) It probably didn’t help that his older brother Thomas went to the University of Chicago at 15 and then started a physics PhD program at 19. In his telling, Bill was an indifferent student and barely scraped into the University of Colorado. Before that, he figured out how to rebel: “I would put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist. Nothing would piss my family off more than that.” (p. 17)

Easier said than done, though, especially with a fast start majoring in partying at a major party school. When a frat brother goes to federal prison for trying to rob a bank to fund a cocaine habit, “I realized that if I kept it up, then the only person who would suffer from this particular form of rebellion would be me.” (p. 18) From there, it turns out that Bill is a Browder after all. He excels at his studies, transfers to the University of Chicago and lands a plum pre-MBA job with Bain & Company. Later, when Browder is working in finance, he casually mentions the kind of mental math he would be doing during high-pressure meetings; the family knack for the subject had clearly not deserted him. A Stanford MBA (“the normal academic competition was replaced with something that none of us expected: an air of cooperation, camaraderie, and friendship” pp. 20–21) leads to a series of depressing job interviews and a search for connection with the family history he had been working so assiduously to escape. Turned down by the steelworkers’ union, Browder starts to consider Eastern Europe. He has an offer from Boston Consulting, and the company is probably happy to have a newly minted Stanford MBA. Happy enough that when Browder says he wants to work in Eastern Europe, the Chicago office passes him along to the London office, where the sole specialist for that region works.

Browder moved to London in August of 1989. It was an auspicious time to be interested in Eastern Europe. In June, the partly-free election in Poland had seen the non-communist opposition win all the available seats in the lower house and all but one in the upper. Also in June, communist Hungary opened its border with Austria. I crossed that border in July shortly after Bastille Day. Just how auspicious would not be clear until a few months later as country after country pushed out its communist rulers and charted a course toward pluralist democracy and a market economy. Browder saw the opportunity. “My grandfather had been the biggest communist in America, and as I watched these events unfold, I decided that I wanted to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe.” (p. 27)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/22/red-notice-by-bill-browder/

Aug 21 2021

No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin

No Time to Spare collects and arranges pieces that Ursula K. Le Guin wrote for her blog from late 2010 until 2015 or so. She was initially unimpressed (not to say sniffy) about the form but one of her favorite authors from the later part of her life caused to change her mind. “I’ve been inspired by José Saramago’s extraordinary blogs, which he posted when he was eighty-five and eighty-six years old. They were published [in 2010] in English as The Notebooks. I read them with amazement and delight. … But seeing what Saramago did with the form was a revelation. Oh! I get it! I see! Can I try too?” (pp. xix–xx). And she does.

No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin

She divides the collection into four parts, with interludes concerning a cat, Pard, that she chooses as a companion for her and her husband’s old age, latest and perhaps last in a long line of cats she has had in her life. The first part, “Going Over Eighty” addresses aging directly and indirectly provides the book’s title. “The Lit Biz” covers what the title says, with some special emphasis on ambition, standing, and community. The third part, “Trying to Make Sense of It,” is the most directly political section, and to my mind also the weakest. She closes with “Rewards,” and these brief essays are very rewarding indeed: personal, closely observed, sometimes hilarious, full of unique life.

Le Guin begins by exercising her drollery on a suitable target: Harvard University and “the lofty eminence where it can consider all sorts of things beneath its notice.” (p. 3) She received a questionnaire from the university for the sixtieth reunion of the class of 1951. “Of course my college was Radcliffe, which at that time was affiliated with but wasn’t considered to be Harvard, due to a difference in gender.” (p. 3) That change in status, and everything bound up with its former existence and making the change happen is one of the things that the institution as represented by its questionnaire loftily ignores. Harvard asks about how, given respondents’ expectations, their grandchildren have done in life. Le Guin: “The youngest of my grandchildren just turned four. How has he done in life? Well, very well, on the whole. I wonder what kind of expectations you should have for a four-year-old. That he’ll go on being a nice little boy and learn pretty soon to read and write is all that comes to my mind. I suppose I’m supposed to expect him to go to Harvard, or at least to Columbia like his father and great-grandfather. But being nice and learning to read and write seem quite enough for now.” (p. 4)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/21/no-time-to-spare-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

Aug 19 2021

Songbirds by Christy Lefteri

Exceptionally moving novel that spotlights the harms of a practice that most people don’t even like to think about. I can seriously say that in all my years of reading, I’ve encountered maybe one entire other work of fiction that’s addressed this issue with honesty and compassion, Ovidia Yu’s terrific Meddling And Murder. That said, both MaM and Songbirds are superlative novels about modern slavery under the guise of domestic work, and both deserve to be widely read and lauded.

Whereas MaM was a much more lighthearted take on the subject, however, Songbirds goes straight for the jugular, telling the tale of domestic servant Nisha Jayakody from the perspectives of both her employer Petra and her lover Theo. When Nisha abruptly disappears one Sunday night, neither Petra nor Theo knows what to think. Nine years earlier, a recently widowed and heavily pregnant Petra hired Nisha via a domestic agency. Since then, Nisha has looked after Petra and raised Petra’s daughter Aliki while virtually raising her own daughter Kumari back in Sri Lanka via Internet. Petra, though a Cypriot, is fairly typical of the kind of woman world-wide who hires domestic help from the poorer countries of Asia. She doesn’t really think about Nisha as a person, merely as a tool; she at least has the crushing grief of losing her husband right before the birth of their daughter as an excuse.

Theo is a much less conventional character. A former banker who lost his career, savings and wife in the last economic collapse, he now rents the apartment over Petra’s house and works as a forager, ostensibly, to pay the bills. What he actually does is poach migratory songbirds, an illegal if lucrative enterprise. He and Nisha have been together for almost two years, with her sneaking away to meet him upstairs while Petra and Aliki sleep. Theo wants to marry Nisha, but when she reacts badly to discovering his secret life as a poacher, he fears he may have lost her, even before she vanishes.

At first, Petra feels inconvenienced and annoyed by Nisha’s absence, but as the days go by and Aliki shows her that Nisha’s most valued items are still in their house, she begins to worry for real. The cops laugh at her when she tries to report Nisha as a missing person however, claiming that maids run away all the time and she should just find a replacement. Indignant at their callousness towards someone she’d never really thought about as an individual herself before, she’s further thrown when Theo breaks down and comes asking after Nisha. Maids aren’t supposed to have romantic relationships, and Petra recognizes that if she’d known about the two of them, she’d have automatically dismissed her servant, never mind how integral Nisha’s been to her household this past decade. To Petra’s credit, she understands that this is a shitty reaction, so she and Theo join forces to find the missing woman, even as they come up against all of society’s ugliest attitudes to the indentured.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/19/songbirds-by-christy-lefteri/

Aug 17 2021

Redemptor (Raybearer #2) by Jordan Ifueko

So much story, so little book! It seems churlish to demand more from what’s already a terrific novel, but I really do feel that the tale of Empress Redemptor Tarisai and the land of Aritsar would have been better served by more chapters and more details. 300+ pages simply wasn’t enough, and so much felt elided in Tarisai’s struggle to make the realm’s rulers love her in the process of saving Aritsar and the neighboring nation of Songland from the demons of the underworld.

And, y’know, given the demands of YA publishing, I don’t fault Jordan Ifueko at all for what feels less like a novel than a concise, if still lively, history. Besides the historical milestones, Ms Ifueko keeps in all the most important parts: Tarisai’s guilt and anxiety, and how that contrasts with the methods of others, particularly Zuri, in seeking redemption, with an ending that is straight up brilliant. The writing packs so much information and adventure and emotion into so little space. But while I can admire the literary equivalent of a beautifully composed planter’s box, I can’t help being baffled by what feels like an artificial constraint, particularly when there’s so much metaphorical space around for it to expand. And, again, I don’t think this is Ms Ifueko’s fault at all: if anything, she should be applauded for writing something so brilliant in so few pages and so little time (it’s only been a year since its excellent predecessor Raybearer came out, after all!) Nevertheless, this feels like an accomplishment that denies its potential in favor of encapsulation instead.

Anyway, this book picks up from Raybearer as Tarisai must scramble to complete the pact she’s just made with the denizens of the Underworld, anointing the rulers of the realms as her council while trying to figure out how exactly she’s going to survive her own descent as the final Redemptor. While she’s trying to figure all this out, she’s haunted by visitations? hallucinations? of past children sacrificed to maintain Aritsar’s prosperity and peace. The guilt threatens to drive her mad, and throws her anxiety into overdrive, especially as she sees how no one else seems to care about the sins of the past as much as she does. It’s all heady, weighty stuff — with easy-to-discern and, more importantly, relevant real-world analogs — and Ms Ifueko competently addresses everything, often movingly. I cried at least twice.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/17/redemptor-raybearer-2-by-jordan-ifueko/

Aug 14 2021

The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk

One of Orhan Pamuk‘s great virtues as a storyteller is his ability to create situations in which several different versions of reality are all possible within the narrative that he has established, and it is — at least for a time — left to the reader to decide which one is the truth of the tale, or whether more than one option might in fact be happening simultaneously. In Snow, as I recall, there is a period when a revolution might be happening in an Anatolian city, or it might be that a theater troupe is staging an event meant to look like a revolution but is really just a play, or it might be that the troupe’s play spontaneously kicks off an actual revolution. There may have been more possibilities; I have not read the book in a long time. (It’s a very science-fictional mode for a mundane novelist, which may be one reason I like many of his books so much.)

The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk

In The Red-Haired Woman, he’s up to something different. Revelations later in the book will cause readers to look at earlier events in a different light. It’s not so much that there are several possibilities open about the events of the book — although there are — it’s that looking back, a reader sees what Pamuk has previously described may have a very different meaning, if indeed it happened that way at all. Pamuk has been wrestling with this sort of thing for his whole career — a different aspect shows up in The Black Book — and in The Red-Haired Woman he executes it exceptionally well.

He begins: “I had wanted to be a writer. But after the events that I am about to describe, I studied engineering geology and became a building contractor. Even so, readers shouldn’t conclude from my telling the story now that it is over, that I’ve put it all behind me. The more I remember, the deeper I fall into it. Perhaps you, too, will follow, lured by the enigma of fathers and sons.” (p. 3) It’s a fair warning, one that I completely ignored.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/14/the-red-haired-woman-by-orhan-pamuk/

Aug 13 2021

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

Humans didn’t generally turn up dead on Preservation Station. It was a low-violence society where most people’s needs were well met. As the SecUnit mostly formerly known as Murderbot puts it, “This junction, and Preservation Station in general, were also weird places for humans to get killed; the threat assessment for both transients and station residents was low anyway, and mostly involved accidents and cases of intoxication-related stupidity/aggression in the port area. In this specific junction, the threat assessment for accidental death was even lower, close to null.” (p. 2)

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

And yet, incontrovertibly, there is a dead human in that very junction. One who has been dead for approximately four hours when the body is found. Worse, the body does not carry any of the items (“subcutaneous marker or chip or anything else with ID”) that the Station Security or SecUnit could use to identify the body. Interestingly, the entire first chapter of Fugitive Telemetry passes without a physical description of the body: apparent gender, size, coloration and so forth all remain hidden from the reader. Skipping those details is one way that Wells uses SecUnit’s first-person narration and perspective to show how it perceives and understands the universe. It switches immediately from recognizing the fact of a corpse to analyzing the situation without any of the intervening horror or sympathy that a human investigator would feel. “I’ve seen a lot of dead humans (I mean, a lot) so I did an initial scan and compared the results to data sets…” (p. 1)

Preservation’s leadership reacts by, among other things, closing the station to all incoming and outgoing traffic. Fugitive Telemetry is a mystery novella, and the mounting costs of isolating the station put pressure on everyone involved to solve the crime as quickly as possible. The closure also means that suspects should be findable, if SecUnit and the humans of Station Security can figure out who they are looking for.

It’s more than just detection. There are people, and worse, companies, out in the Corporation Rim who want to kill SecUnit and some key humans on Preservation. Is this murder part of a larger attack by GrayCris? Is the security that SecUnit works to provide good enough? “But the fact was, looking for anomalous activity is how you detect security breaches. A murder in a very non-murdery station like Preservation was definitely anomalous.” (p. 33) Are more murders likely?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/13/fugitive-telemetry-by-martha-wells/

Aug 12 2021

Like Other Girls by Britta Lundin

A coming-of-age novel with a queer country girl narrator playing sports and learning to interrogate her internalized misogyny while embracing who she is despite the opposition of certain members of her small town, including her nearest and dearest? I was wholly on-board even before I started reading Britta Lundin’s terrific, lived-in prose, and now I want everyone to read this wonderful book!

Mara Deeble has always been one of the boys. Her older brother Noah and her best friend Quinn are both big deals on the Elkhorn football team, but she’s always loved her place on the basketball team… until Coach Joyce benches her for punching a teammate. Now Coach refuses to reinstate her unless she can prove that she can go a full season on another team without getting into any fights. For girls at Elkhorn, the only other team sport is the (highly competitive) volleyball team. While it’s a good fit in terms of athletics, Mara doesn’t want to be one of those pretty volleyball girls who discusses make-up and clothes before games. So, egged on by Quinn, she decides to try out for football instead.

The Elkhorn football team is admittedly pretty dire, and while Coach Willis is initially flummoxed by the idea of a girl joining the team, he accedes to treating Mara like one of the boys when it becomes obvious that she has real talent. But when a group of other girls decides they want to play football too, and cite Mara as their inspiration, her already precarious social standing with the team goes downhill fast, especially when it becomes apparent that the other girls don’t actually know how to play. Mara certainly doesn’t want to be lumped in with them, and especially not with the deeply annoying Carly Nakata, who was the reason Mara got kicked off the basketball team in the first place. But another of the new players is the gorgeous Valentina Cortez, whom Mara has been crushing on since forever. Surely, it wouldn’t hurt her to give the girls a little coaching — especially since the male coaches seem entirely uninterested in teaching the newcomers any of the basics they need to succeed. As Mara gets closer to the other girls, she starts to question her own preconceptions and prejudices, even as she battles the same from the hostile people around her.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/12/like-other-girls-by-britta-lundin/

Aug 11 2021

The House on Marshland by Louise Glück

In her note at the start of The First Four Books of Poems, Louise Glück writes of her goals before and after The House on Marshland: “After Firstborn, I set myself the task of making poems as single sentences, having found myself trapped in fragments. After The House on Marshland, I tried to wean myself from conspicuous syntactical quirks and a recurring vocabulary—what begins as vision degenerates into mannerism.” In the thirty-five poems in this collection, divided into two sections — “All Hallows” and “The Apple Trees — there are indeed fewer fragments, though few of them are complete in a single sentence. The occasional ellipsis leaves its sentence open to further possibilities, and she remains fond of the held breath of the em dash. Fewer of these poems have scorpion’s tail that struck me about Firstborn; maybe seven more years of practicing poetry had given her more confidence in her full creations and less of a need to reverse them in a line or two at the end.

House on Marshland by Louise Glück

The poems in “All Hallows” are not all autumnal, though the title poem and “To Autumn” certainly are, while “The Magi,” “Nativity Poem,” and “Flowering Plum” bring other seasons to mind. “Gemini,” pairs with “Nativity Poem,” perhaps. “Jeanne D’Arc” and “Departure” face each other, though the former’s departure is both more permanent and more exalted than the latter’s.

The second section, “The Apple Trees” brings more places, love poems, unhappy poems, and the only work that runs more than one page, “Abishag,” which draws on the biblical story of King David and a young woman called to keep him warm in his old age.

I can see the craft in these works, see Glück stretching her range, writing about objects near and people mythical, writing about lovers so close to her speakers and intimate figures in their lives grown distant — but the poems have not really stuck with me. Which is fine.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/11/the-house-on-marshland-by-louise-gluck/

Aug 10 2021

Magical History Tour #4: The Crusades by Fabrice Erre & Sylvain Savoia

If I’m being perfectly honest, I did not go into this book with the highest of expectations. Papercutz is not the most culturally sensitive of publishers (and not in a malicious way, just in a, perhaps, homogenous viewpoints sort of way,) so I was definitely braced for the worst as a Muslim reader and mom.

So it was a pleasant surprise to discover the even tone and dry humor of this terrific kid-friendly examination of the wars that roiled Europe and the Middle East/North Africa for three centuries. Our modern-day narrators are Annie and Nico. Annie is an excellent storyteller and guide as she explains to the younger Nico the ins and outs, dates and places, people and anecdotes of the many engagements that formed the Crusades (tho she does skip mentioning the Children’s Crusade, which is probably for the best.) I learned so much more about the Crusades than I’d known before reading this slender volume, in large part due to how Annie cleanly and simply broke it all down for Nico. The language used is very easy to follow, with definitions included for tougher words. Kudos to translator Joseph Laredo for making the text sound as if it was actually written in English instead of the original French!

Sylvain Savoia’s wonderful art complements Fabrice Erre’s thoughtful script perfectly, with clean lines and a delightful expressiveness that lends a playfulness to what could otherwise feel like heavy going. He’s the kind of artist whose drawings you can hear, even though/while the script is saying lots of other interesting things, too. It’s a combination of eloquence that really serves the material well.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/10/magical-history-tour-4-the-crusades-by-fabrice-erre-sylvain-savoia/

Aug 09 2021

The Unspoken Name by A.K. Larkwood

A.K. Larkwood delivers her readers into a deliciously pulpy setting right from the start: “In the deep wilds of the north, there is a Shrine cut into the mountainside. The forest covers these hills like a shroud. This is a quiet country, but the Shrine of the Unspoken One is quieter still. Birds and insects keep away from the place.” (p. 3) The Shrine itself is untended, but down below there is a considerable temple complex ruled by a Prioeress. The temple, known as the House of Silence, holds sway over the surrounding villages, drawing many of its acolytes from the area and every fourteen years commanding one daughter who will grow up to be the Chosen Bride of the Unspoken One. In the spring of her fourteenth year she is at the head of a procession from the House of Silence up to the Shrine. She leads a calf; behind them on the path to the Shrine are the Prioress and the other devotees of the temple. The Chosen Bride sacrifices the calf on an altar outside of the Shrine, collecting some of its blood into a ritual vessel. “She takes the bowl of blood. She climbs the steps to the Shrine. She is never seen again.” (p. 4)

One month before her appointment with the Unspoken One, Csorwe (the book’s pronunciation guide says her name is not spoken in the Hungarian fashion — the first two letters are instead sounded as “ks” — but I did it anyway) receives a visitor, a pilgrim seeking the boon of prophecy from the Chosen Bride. She grants it, as she is obliged to do, and what follows allows Larkwood to show how real and present the gods of this setting are. “The presence of the Unspoken One crept in slowly at first, like the first reaching wavelets of the tide, rising gently, prying into the burrows of sand-creeping things. And then all at once it was impossible to ignore: a vast invisible pressure, a single focused curiosity that weighed her with impersonal hunger.” (p. 6) The pilgrim wishes to know about the Reliquary of Pentravesse. Possessed by her god, Csorwe gives information that is true but not immediately useful, as happens so often with prophecies. It is not immediately apparent to readers, but that encounter, and the events leading up to it, shape much of the rest of The Unspoken Name.

Csorwe enters the Shrine a month later, in accordance with custom. Quite out of accordance with custom, however, she is not alone there. Or rather, she and the Unspoken One are not the only presences in the Shrine. The pilgrim, a man named Belthandros Sethennai, has arrived ahead of her. She is appalled. He is amused. She struggles with the blasphemous idea of living beyond fourteen. He says she does not have to die.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/09/the-unspoken-name-by-a-k-larkwood/