{"id":71194,"date":"2022-04-19T01:36:38","date_gmt":"2022-04-19T05:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=71194"},"modified":"2022-04-19T11:33:17","modified_gmt":"2022-04-19T15:33:17","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-27","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2022\/04\/19\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-27\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"
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illustration by Ester Eriksson<\/p><\/div>\n

I arrogantly recommend…by Tom Bowden <\/strong>is a monthly column of small press and books-in-translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired pavement inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, ‘This platform allows me to exponentially increase the number of people reached who have no use for such things.’<\/p>\n

Links are provided to our Bookshop.org affiliate page. If unavailable, please call, we’ll try to help. Thank you for your support! Subscribe to our newsletter for more updates. Read more small press reviews at:
\nI arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>A New Orthography<\/a><\/strong>
\nSerhiy Zhada (John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, trans.)
\nLost Horse Press<\/p>\n

What do we mean when we say joy?
\nWhat are we comparing it to?
\nDoomed by our midnight resolutions,
\nresolved against the evil of this world,
\nwe know the names of trees,
\nknow the names of birds,
\nbut we don\u2019t know what to call this mood
\nwhen a wire thread stitches
\nthrough your breath
\nbecause you see the thin
\nand shadowed line of someone\u2019s shoulder
\nin the morning light.
\n\u2014From \u201cA New Orthography\u201d<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine has been going on since 2014, when Russia took over Crimea, then Donbas, both Ukraine territories. Many of the poems in this collection, A New Orthography<\/strong> (which presents excerpts from three of Zhadan\u2019s poetry books), address the human devastation and resilience of these battles. It also includes an introduction by Zhadan written for this edition.<\/p>\n

Born in 1974, in Ukraine Serhiy Zhada came of age as the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine declared its independence from the Union. This means he has lived through Russia\u2019s\u2014specifically Putin\u2019s\u2014ongoing hostilities against his home country. What I\u2019ve noticed among the vast majority of contemporary European poets compared to their U.S. counterparts is that European poets earnestly want to be heard, understood, and argued with, while many poets in the U.S. bemoan \u201cunknowability\u201d and \u201cinability to communicate\u201d coached in terms requiring a secret decoder ring to parse out the usually trite message: life is hard, and I feel sad and lonely.<\/p>\n

The imminence of death seems to both concentrate the mind and focus it on moral imperatives. Zhadan the poet wonders, \u201cHow can poetry matter during a time of war?\u201d<\/p>\n

Poets come to die
\nin empty libraries.
\nLibraries don\u2019t become
\npopular this way.<\/p>\n

Seemingly dismissive of poets, of his vocation, Zhada notes that<\/p>\n

Poets with precise rhymes
\ncan\u2019t be mistaken.
\nThey always offer solutions.
\nThey always comfort you when you\u2019re down.<\/p>\n

One of the first missiles
\nfell right on the library.
\nBooks flew across the street
\nlike torn pillows
\nand letters hung in the June air
\nlike the dust of burnt synagogues.<\/p>\n

Poetry didn\u2019t help much.
\nThe poets kept quiet.
\nNo one chose the precise rhyme
\nfor the name of the blown-up school girl
\nwho ran there in the morning
\nto return the books she\u2019d read.<\/p>\n

During times of war, even God seems irrelevant:<\/p>\n

He recalled the city he\u2019d escaped from,
\nthe scorched terrain he searched by hand.
\nHe recalled a weeping man
\nsaved by the squad.<\/p>\n

Life will be quiet, not terrifying.
\nHe should have returned a while ago.
\nWhat could happen to him, exactly?
\nWhat could happen?<\/p>\n

The patrol will let him through,
\nand god will forgive.
\nGod\u2019s got other things to do.<\/p>\n

Anybody with a friend or family member working out PTSD after serving in war will no doubt empathize with the following lines from \u201cWe\u2019ve Been Talking about War for Three Years\u201d:<\/p>\n

A friend of mine volunteered.
\nHe came back six months later.
\nWho knows where he was.
\nHe won\u2019t say what he\u2019s afraid of.
\nBut he\u2019s afraid of something.
\nSometimes it seems
\nhe\u2019s afraid of everything.<\/p>\n

He left a normal person.
\nBut he talked too much.
\nAbout everything in this world.
\nAbout everything he came across.<\/p>\n

And he came back
\ncompletely changed, as if
\nsomeone took his old tongue
\nand didn\u2019t leave him a new one.<\/p>\n

So he sits in his bed every day
\nand listens to the demons in his head.<\/p>\n

Yet, talking about the war \u201cdoesn\u2019t have any effect on the number \/\/ of people killed anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zhadan\u2019s poetry is of the moment but for all times, places, and people who have unjustly suffered yet remained defiant.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Voices from the Radium Age<\/a><\/strong>
\nJoshua Glenn (Ed.)
\nMIT Press<\/p>\n

Is this cool, or what? Proto-science fiction from a century ago, edited by Joshua Glenn with cover illustrations by Seth, from MIT Press. Seth and Glenn have worked together three times before, to my knowledge, with a third partner, Mark Kingwell, on their books, The Wage Slave’s Glossary<\/strong>, The Idler’s Glossary<\/strong>, and The Adventurer’s Glossary<\/strong>, all of which exemplify the ideal that books should entertain and instruct. For some time now (15 years or more?), Glenn has also run the HiLoBrow.com<\/a> website, devoted to a broad range of cultural topics, practices, and materials, to which Glenn applies his semiotic analysis, including to his long standing love of adventure stories and their variations.<\/p>\n

Inaugurating the series, Voices from the Radium Age<\/strong> avoids being yet another oldies act recycling the stories any casual fan of science fiction already knows about. Instead, Glenn uses this series as an opportunity to re-assess the pre-history of science fiction, especially in terms of revisiting the notion of science fiction itself, which was, essentially, codified by the enormously influential editor, John Campbell. Thus, rather than cull examples of SF before Campbell in terms of criteria Campbell would later have applied, Glenn looks at SF in its nascent state, when the idea of speculating on future events hadn\u2019t been swept into a small corner of formulaic genre, and writers willing to speculate came from backgrounds and interests wide and far.<\/p>\n

Thus, Voices from the Radium Age<\/strong> includes stories by men and women from America, Europe, and Asia, recognized litterateurs and low-budget hacks: Arthur Conan Doyle, W.E.B. DuBois, Jack London, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, William Hope Hodgson, and Neil R. Jones. Some stories deal metaphorically with contemporary themes (such as feminism), some predict future dystopias based on current obsessions with technology, others tell unsettling campfire stories involving fungi and\/or tentacles.<\/p>\n

In addition to being fun to read, the stories also offer opportunities to assess the assumptions and prejudices of the time during which they were written (between 1900-1935, Glenn\u2019s designated \u201cRadium Age\u201d), why certain assumptions were held and the evidence that invalidated them, and what we now need to do to avoid dystopia. Other books in the series currently include A World of Women<\/strong> <\/a>by J. D. Beresford, The World Set Free<\/strong> by H. G. Wells, and The Clockwork Man<\/strong><\/a> by E. V. Odle. I just found out about the series, so I haven\u2019t yet had a chance to read them (although a Penguin edition of The World Set Free has been on my shelves for the past 40 years).<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Secrets of Cricket Karlsson<\/a><\/strong>
\nKristina Sigunsdotter (Julia Marshall, trans.), with illustrations by Ester Eriksson
\nGecko Press<\/p>\n

Our narrator and illustrator is 11-year-old Cricket Karlsson, who has three problems: a perpetually sighing mother, a depressed aunt (who is also an artist like Cricket), and a BFF, Noa (a girl), who no longer acts like her BF\u2014so much for the second F.<\/p>\n

Cricket is a likeable girl with the rising self-consciousness and -doubt that contributes to making adolescence such a miserable time of life: waiting for her period to start, monitoring the growth of her breasts, forming cliques and thus a sense of \u201cin\u201d and \u201cout\u201d among social circles, and so forth. Add to this mix Cricket\u2019s budding lesbianism, which either Cricket doesn\u2019t yet recognize, or which is so accepted in her (Swedish) society that it\u2019s a nonissue among the kids. (Late in the book at a school dance, two girls are described as kissing all night, with nary a reaction on the part of Cricket or her school mates.)<\/p>\n

Just as Cricket is missing an important part of her life when Noa avoids her, so are her mother and aunt, for different reasons. This is a sweet book about love, need, and care in friendships.
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>White Shadow<\/a><\/strong>
\nRoy Jacobsen (Don Bartlet and Don Shaw, trans.)
\nBiblioasis<\/p>\n

White Shadow<\/strong> is the second novel in a trilogy that includes The Unseen<\/a><\/strong> and the forthcoming Eyes of the Rigel<\/strong>. The first novel, The Unseen<\/strong>, concerns a family, the Barr\u00f8ys, that have inhabited since at least the 1830s one of Norway\u2019s 55,000 small islands scattered across its coastline. The first volume ended sometime after World War I, when more and more people\u2014including the Barr\u00f8ys\u2014were leaving the islands for steadier, better-paying work on land\u2014seemingly ending a century of subsistence living.<\/p>\n

At the start of White Shadow<\/strong>, one of the family descendants, Ingrid, returns to the abandoned family island. Now in her early 20s, she returns to the patterns and vocational skills she learned growing up there. And when she returns, World War II is in full swing, with Norway caught between Nazi and Soviet forces, and the town across the bay under Nazi control.<\/p>\n

One day, ragged clothing begins washing ashore and dead bodies appear scattered across the island and floating in various of the island\u2019s crevices and bays. One body is alive, skeletal, with damaged hands. Ingrid rescues him, takes him back to the house, and slowly nurses him back to life. His name is Alexander. A German troop carrier nearby had been sunk, with large loss of life.<\/p>\n

Alexander and Ingrid begin a romance. The Nazis suspect Ingrid is not alone, even though she has taken them to all the bodies that washed up on shore, those she fished from the December waters, and one in her barn loft. There are consequences for Alexander\u2019s and Ingrid\u2019s behavior, of course, some expected, some not\u2014including the months\u2019 long stay in a hospital for Ingrid, during which time she discovers a secret about her deceased father.<\/p>\n

There are twists and turns throughout this well-paced volume. But there are also some significant threads left hanging at its end that I wonder will be treated in the third volume (based on the principle related to a pistol hanging on a wall in Act One) or if they\u2019ve simply been dropped. Ingrid\u2019s sister Barbro eventually joins her on the island, and then a group of refugees the Nazis have assigned to Barr\u00f8y. Ingrid develops further into being a largely silent but shrewd thinker whom few seem to like but all respect. And just as she seems poised to become matriarch of the Barr\u00f8ys, World War II ends and her brother Lars also returns.<\/p>\n

As the book ends, the Barr\u00f8y clan is reunited, family members added to, their farming and fishing abilities enhanced, and the return of a pair of refugee boys to the island imminent. Ingrid is mother to a baby daughter, and the fate of the daughter\u2019s father, Alexander, remains uncertain.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>In the Eye of the Wild<\/a><\/strong>
\nNastassja Martin (Sophie R. Lewis, trans.)
\nNYRB<\/p>\n

A young anthropologist mauled by a bear while doing research in a remote northern area of Russia, Nastassja Martin recounts\u2014in ways combining memoir, essay, and anthropology\u2014what happened and its spiritual significance in terms of animism and a worldview that makes most sense to her.<\/p>\n

Most of the physical damage by the bear to Martin\u2019s body resulted from the bear biting her from the top of her head to the bottom of her jaw. For reasons Martin doesn\u2019t understand, the bear stopped biting (maybe because Martin had stabbed it with an ice ax) but not without tearing out part of her lower right jaw and two teeth that its teeth had lodged into.<\/p>\n

The rest of the book concerns her physical and\u2014more importantly in the context of her work\u2014psychological mending and readjustments. Accounts of multiple surgeries, infections, and months in an out of hospitals and clinics mingle with Martin internalizing the experience in much the same way as do the various remote clans and tribes she studies: Her spirit is now half-woman half-bear, which only increases the level of disdain with which she holds she holds civilizing norms, which presume to reduce human experiences to charts, numbers, and a narrow definition of what counts as rational thought and behavior.<\/p>\n

Part of understanding her transformation to herself comes from her need to return to the place she lived when the bear attacked, to be among the rhythms of the seasons, the hunting and other daily efforts required to merely get by, as well as the area\u2019s plants and animals. Living that close to the edge of alive or dead daily requires the ability to both feel deeply, first, to understand, second, the interconnectedness of everything and the awareness of that fact by all living things in their own ways. Martin spends the entire book trying to determine what she\u2014and the bear\u2014have gained from their violent encounter in which each balanced on the lines separating bear from human, life from death.<\/p>\n