{"id":72005,"date":"2023-02-04T23:03:14","date_gmt":"2023-02-05T04:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=72005"},"modified":"2023-02-19T03:53:47","modified_gmt":"2023-02-19T08:53:47","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-36","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2023\/02\/04\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-36\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>What Have You Left Behind<\/a>?<\/strong>
\nBushra al-Maqtari \/ Sawad Hussain
\nFitzcarraldo Editions<\/p>\n

Bushra al-Maqtari spent two years interviewing civilians who survived attacks during the current ongoing civil war in Yemen. The civil war has been raging since 2014, apparently upon the insistence of the various warring factions, whose leaders are looting the country (even while living in exile in other Arab nations and Europe) and profiting well, despite the murders of 350,000 Yemeni citizens to date. The survivor narratives tell of attacks in which parents, grandparents, children, or fianc\u00e9es were asleep or engaged in everyday activities when they were blown apart, shot, or abducted. Here are some opening lines:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d barely been married two months when everything came to an end.\u201d
\n\u201cTheir laughter echoes through this empty house.\u201d
\n\u201cWhen I\u2019m awake, when I\u2019m asleep, I hear their cries for help.\u201d
\n\u201cMy sister says that my children\u2019s murder turned me into someone else.\u201d
\n\u201cYou were only a step from the front door.\u201d<\/p>\n

War is good for warlords, who deplete citizens of their life\u2019s savings and produce neighbors who ransack other]
\n[ neighbors\u2019 bombed-out apartments\u2014even to the extent of pilfering goods while stepping on bodies buried under rubble. Each account ends with the full name of the person testifying, followed by the full names of each person killed or injured in the described attack, along with their ages, and relationship to the speaker.<\/p>\n

In the last 50 pages of the book, al-Maqtari lists attacks on civilians during the civil war according to date, the faction that did the killing, and the number of civilians killed, including people tortured to death in prison.<\/p>\n

What Have You Left Behind?<\/strong> is a memento mori for those trapped in a cynical theo-political system that works to deliberately perpetuate misery in the name of power.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Drawing<\/a><\/strong>
\nLaurie Lipton
\nLast Gasp<\/p>\n

Laurie Lipton works in the terrain so well exploited by H. R. Geiger\u2014a melding of (human) biological forms to mechanical\/industrial production ends. Whereas Geiger focused on yoking feral sexuality to mechanical repetition, Lipton focuses on contrasting consumer fantasy lives with Dickensian images of urban industrial squalor. Like Geiger, Lipton works with a limited color palette\u2014in Lipton\u2019s case, pencil and charcoal, sometimes on a scale of 6\u2019 x 9.\u2019 The argument behind Lipton\u2019s images is that the once liberatory role in individual human potential that the internet was supposed to provide in its wiki-valorization of free knowledge has led not only away from a utopian New Frontier but back to reproducing the misery of former times. Increased consumption leads only to increased misery, and Lipton\u2019s pictures are allegories of our time.
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_____________________________________________________________________________
\nPublisher Profile: 3TimesRebel<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

3TimesRebel is a new imprint out of England with a simple mission statement: \u201cWe translate female authors who write in minority languages. Only women. Only minority languages. This is our choice.\u201d The following reviews cover their first three titles, two translated from Catalan, the third from Basque.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Carnivorous Plant<\/strong>
\nAndrea Mayo \/ Laura McGloughlin<\/p>\n

This book should be read by everyone who has been in a relationship with a person with borderline personality disorder, whether parent, child, or lover. The storyline is simple: A woman, Andrea, finds herself increasingly absorbed into the physical and psychological orbit of Ibana (or Ib), an orbit like that of an object on the fringe of a black hole. Here, the fringes are the outer attractions that brings one person closer to another. But when told in retrospect\u2014it\u2019s hard to tell the tale otherwise given the cartoonish unreality of everyday existence with such a person\u2014Andrea reveals a life that none of her friends or family knew of: a life with a person who constantly denigrates and denies, who picks battles when none are to be had, and introduces chaos into a life that could easily be otherwise. The denigrations include of self, of friends, of career, of hobbies\u2014anything that might allow Andrea autonomy and a sense of escape\u2014or the confidence to even try.<\/p>\n

Ib detests her own family and Andrea\u2019s family and friends, whom she, Ibana, tells to avoid or risk her wrath. Andrea is one who ignored all the warning signs, reconfigured the signs into something innocuous or\u2014more likely\u2014as her own faults, Andrea\u2019s, that she brings to the relationship. Andrea lies to her friends about her relationship, cuts them off, lies to her family, cuts off her family, lies to hospital workers who suspect she\u2019s been beaten, and avoids contact with others. . . And this goes on for three years. (It can go on substantially longer when children are involved.)<\/p>\n

Although written allegorically, The Carnivorous Plant<\/strong> reads to me\u2014as someone who once married such a plant\u2014everything ring trues here. Except, I thought at first, except that the author, Andrea Mayo, doesn\u2019t address the aftereffects: The fears and anxieties that linger even years after\u2014in my case, the divorce with shared custody\u2014putting one on constant edge that surely it\u2019s time for another bad thing to happen. But although Mayo doesn\u2019t directly address the echoing fears, it\u2019s there in her name.<\/p>\n

\u201cAndrea Mayo\u201d is a heteronym of Flavia Company. And Flavia Company blog<\/a> is, according to Wikipedia, \u201cdegree[d] in Hispanic Philology, is a journalist, translator, teacher of creative writing and lecturer. . . works in . . . novel, short story, essay and poetry. . . publishes children’s literature. . . lives in Catalonia,” and\u2014most crucially\u2014”In June 2018, she embarked on a trip around the world that lasted four years. From that experience she wrote her book ‘I no longer need to be real’, which she signed with the name of Haru, one of her three heteronyms together with Andrea Mayo and Osamu.” Make of that what you will. But given the novel\u2019s topic, readers should also consider the type of emotional and rhetorical distancing Company has made from the novel\u2019s contents by framing the story as allegorical and the author as fictional.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d recommend this book to my daughters, but I think they\u2019d find it too raw, despite the hopeful ending.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Dead Lands<\/strong>
\nN\u00faria Bendicho \/ Maruxa Rela\u00f1o & Martha Tennent<\/p>\n

Fans of such dysfunctional, self-destructive misfits from William Faulkner\u2019s Yoknapatawpha County as the Snopes family will find much of interest here, told in the manner of As I Lay Dying<\/strong> (in which each chapter is narrated by a different character, only easier to understand). N\u00faria Bendicho\u2019s Dead Lands<\/strong> begins with the murder of a middle child by a family member, a situation no one in the family will talk about after the fact. The story is hard to describe without spoiling key aspects of the novel, so let me offer a few generalities: (1) Move the setting from Faulkner\u2019s rural Mississippi to rural Catalonia, near Spain. (2) The characters and motivations remain as they might be in Mississippi, only here they speak Catalan. (3) Plot elements: (a) Chronic intrafamily violence: Check. (b) Retardation and physical deformity within the family unit: Check. (c) Incest: Now enthusiastically consensual, although its nonconsensual form remains in practice, as do the predatory sexual instincts of authority figures outside the otherwise close-knit family unit.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly enough, Bendicho (with the aid of translation from Maruxa Rela\u00f1o and Martha Tennett) is able to arouse sympathy for members of a family stuck in an eternal cycle of violence boring through every aspect of their lives. For instance, we discover reasons why the mother of Jon, the murdered boy, doesn\u2019t seemed much saddened by her son Jon\u2019s death: a childhood spent with a father who had daily beaten her and her mother, eventually killing her mother (a point of contention later in the novel), then abandoning the daughter. After her father leaves, she walks to the farm where lives another 21-year-old like herself and proposes to the boy\u2019s father to marry the boy, who eventually becomes Jon\u2019s father. She exchanges one hell for another.<\/p>\n

The humor here is bleak (as it is in As I Lay Dying<\/strong>): The family, unwilling to spend money on a coffin, stuff Jon\u2019s corpse in a chicken coop too small for his body, requiring . . . alterations . . . to be made. And the mother\u2019s send-off (a description of which would reveal too much) is also described by Bendicho with a narrative satisfaction similar to Faulkner\u2019s jaundiced take on white trash yee-haw-ism.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Mothers Don’t<\/strong>
\nKatixa Agirre \/ Kristin Addis<\/p>\n

An exploration of the many physical and emotional aspects of that section of womanhood called \u201cmother\u201d and its all-encompassing demands\u2014specifically, the subsuming of one\u2019s own desires and identity to the needs of a child\u2014that lead some women to kill their offspring. In this novel, a writer and mother of a 14-month-old child sees in the news a story of woman she once knew who has been arrested for the drowning of her twin children. What woman would kill her own children? For that matter, what woman would indulge in a casual affair for the duration of her pregnancy, as the narrator has? Intrigued by the murder case, the narrator contacts an old friend from college who also knew the woman when they were younger.<\/p>\n

Impulses, attractions, repulsions, notions of responsibilities\u2014and responsibilities toward whom and what and why, all in the context of being an individual and non-individual simultaneously, in the case of mothers. The narrator chooses to attend the trial of the mother, from which she will write the book we are reading.<\/p>\n

Courtroom testimony from various professionals\u2014psychiatrists, forensics, and police\u2014ensue, as well as from the mother, her husband, and their nanny. Although the upside of the testimony from professionals is \u201cthese things happen\u201d and that the \u201cthing\u201d that \u201chappened\u201d happens pretty frequently. One aspect of murderous post-partum depression the book seems to hint at is that in some cases murdering one\u2019s children isn\u2019t an irrational eruption of psychosis but a horribly a-rational act to preserve the mother\u2019s self.
\n_____________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Trouble in Wonderland<\/a>
\nKathy Reed
\nBook Baby<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trouble in Wonderland<\/strong> is third in Kathi Reed\u2019s who-done-it series featuring Annie Fillmore, erstwhile indie video store owner (circa early 1990s) with an uncanny ability to find corpses piling up in unexpected places, giving her an excuse to apply her equally uncanny ability to sleuth and see that matters are set right judicially. In Trouble<\/strong>, Annie attends a regional distributor\u2019s convention for indie video store owners held in a sleepy Kentucky burg. Inadvertently assigned an off-limits room, Annie opens the door and sees the chalk outline of where a corpse had been and the blood stains remain. Once she starts asking questions, she quickly stumbles upon a seething network of repressed resentments involving prominent members of the little town. What the motivation might be and what it would take to stop the bodies from piling higher is what Annie sets out to find out. Accompanying Annie during her stay in Wonderly, the small town the convention is in, are other video reps, an unexpected visit from an unexpected suitor, some of Wonderly\u2019s citizens, her mothers (sic), and other diversions that add color to an otherwise sordid series of events.<\/p>\n

The mortal violence is off-stage, blood only identified as such, swearing minimal, and sex thought about only as an idea people sometimes have. So be warned!<\/p>\n

Interview with Kathi Reed<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mysteries come in a variety of flavors, from the tea-cozies of Agatha Christie to the intemperate foibles of Mickey Spillane\u2014at any rate, writers from around the world have adapted the format to suit the needs of exploring dangerous territory in the name of moral balance. Plus, they\u2019re lots of fun to read. Who were your influences, and which aspect(s) of their writing appealed to you the most?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I remember the first time Mom took me to the library to actually choose a book and not stand beside her while she was choosing one: my heart fluttered. I chose The Five Chinese Brothers. I think I chose it because the dimensions of the book were different than all the others: tall and skinny. Foreshadowing for sure. Not the size of the book, but because it was different.<\/p>\n

I read a lot as a child, teen-ager-young adult; but when I had my first child I started reading mysteries. All of Agatha Christie (not just a tea-cozy in my opinion) but a dip into character in way to solve a puzzle. Then so many more: Ngaio Marsh, Patricia Highsmith\u2014really too many to mention. After I first read Sue Grafton I thought, I can do this. Then I read Lawrence Blocks\u2019 Bernie Rhodenbarr books, and thought I WANT to do this: Murder with a laugh.<\/p>\n

Ongoing inspiration: Kate Atkinson, who in her crime novels, writes multiple stories and magically brings the pieces together as in a thousand-piece puzzle. So maybe, the puzzle is what intrigues me. Finding out what the heck is going on \u2026 kind of like life.<\/p>\n

Not a crime writer, but Otessa Moshfegh, inspires me because she\u2019s so absolutely fearless. I\u2019m fascinated by her weird mind. Really, I have a crush on her writing.<\/p>\n

How did your character, Annie Fillmore, come about, as well as her setting? Single, white woman, middle-aged owner of an indie video store, circa the early 1990s\u2014just at the outset of the now-defunct Blockbuster\u2019s abilities to put such competitors out of business. How\u2019d she get there, and how long can her store last?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Annie got there because I got there. I owned a video store in the late 80s and 90s, and I started to write the idea for Trouble for Rent <\/strong>back in 1990. But running a business was all-consuming. The Mapplethorpe brouhaha really got my attention \u2026 and I decided I had to write about it\u2014some day.<\/p>\n

As the owner of a small Mom & Pop store and being in leadership positions within the video industry both locally and nationally VSDA (Video Store Dealers Association), I could see the writing on the wall. Mom and Pop stores were going to go\u2013did go. I have plans for Annie\u2019s store if I decide to keep writing the series. But there\u2019s so much else I want to write; I may have to end it after a few more.<\/p>\n

Do your novels re-cast true life crimes you\u2019ve heard about, or do you begin with filling in different parts of the plot, or something else?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, all the murders in my books are fiction. I\u2019ve not (yet) based a murder on anything I\u2019ve heard about. I begin filling in different parts of the plot as I go along. I\u2019ve found I can get to about Chapter 13 when I think, oh wait! At that point I go back and start to line things up. I don\u2019t like an outline. I like ideas to flow forth as I\u2019m writing, then figure out how to make it all work.<\/p>\n

What is there about human behavior you find most interesting to explore in such an extreme area\u2014lives violently ended?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well\u2026human behavior sucks as we know. I think it\u2019s why mysteries are so much fun to read, because we all know someone whose character flaws can lead them to some dastardly ends: greed, jealousy, self-hatred, stupidity. Yada yada yada.<\/p>\n

Describe a typical writing day.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I\u2019m ensconced in a book, I start at about 8 in the morning and write until I have to stop because 8 hours have passed. So, I write until I\u2019m finished. With the short stories, it\u2019s different for some reason. I\u2019ll write for about three hours in the morning and get on with what else I have to do for the day. I have found that not writing is sometimes as important as sitting down and doing it. For me, I have to get out in the world for ideas to start buzzing, while sitting and trying to think of what\u2019s next doesn\u2019t always work.<\/p>\n

How did your experiences at The New Yorker, Time-Life, and Random House teach you about editing and thinking about your audience?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to think my experiences at those places did teach me something about writing, but what I learned was the characters of the people I worked for and with. I don\u2019t think about my audience (perhaps a fatal flaw).<\/p>\n

What sort of mischief do you see Annie mixing herself in next?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve started book four of the Annie Fillmore series, so there\u2019s plenty of trouble a foot in that one. There\u2019s endless mischief for Annie, because she expects it, and life is all around.
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\nAre you interested in trying out a new persona for crime-solving?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, I don\u2019t foresee another persona for crime-solving. I do have a long list of ideas for books that are not crime novels, not entirely anyway.<\/p>\n

Any short stories on the horizon?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am writing short stories now and have sent a few off into the wild blue yonder of the short story publishing world. Some are mystery\/crime stories, others are \u2018literary\u2019 in scope.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Chirri & Chirra: In the Night<\/a><\/strong>
\nKaya Doi \/ David Boyd
\nEnchanted Lion<\/p>\n

The adorable bicycle-riding twins are back. This time, Chirri and Chirra take their bikes on a night-time adventure in which they gain entrance to a party hosted by cats. Beginning with a visit to the bar, they are prepared \u201cfull-moon sodas made from black grapes and other goodies,\u201d which transform them into cats. At this point, they are ready for the festival to begin! Then, things get weird (in a welcoming, non-intimidating way). I suppose that some Americans will feel squeamish over the idea of children (ages 3-8) reading about stand-ins for the transformative powers of inebriation, so be warned. (Asians (Doi is Japanese) and Europeans have different notions than Americans about what is appropriate for children.) Otherwise, have fun!
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\"\"<\/a>The Traces<\/a><\/strong>
\nMairead Small Staid
\nDeep Vellum<\/p>\n

One young woman\u2019s exploration of the marvels of existence, as recounted through her memories as a student studying art history over one summer in Italy. Dante, Calvino, medieval religion, painting and sculpture, friendship and love are all explored here in a form true to the original meaning of \u201cessay\u201d: To test an idea by taking it through various permutations to discover where it leads. Staid brings to the book an assimilation of years\u2019 worth of thought, supported by her own observations, of course, and those of her professors\u2019 and friends\u2019, too, as well as by readings from Benjamin, John Berger and Vasari, and others. Traces is a young adult\u2019s devotion to understanding the world and her place in it that she will probably spend the rest of her life tearing down and reforming.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Plaza<\/a><\/strong>
\nYokoyama Yuichi \/ Ryan Holmberg
\nLiving the Line<\/p>\n

Plaza\u2019s story is all action, no plot or dialogue, but lots of transliterated onomatopoeia. The setting appears to be something like a conveyor belt set at just above head level. About the width of a suburban side street, the conveyor belt\u2019s length would seem to be infinite. Below it is a scrim of standing audience, humanoid in form but lacking discernable gender difference, with heads\/masks\/helmets that are spherical with a black cone attached where a nose might be. Depending on the actions occurring on the conveyor belt, the audience either seems to be cheering, beating each other up, or ducking from being struck by a deadly instrument coming from the conveyor belt.
\nAnd what is on the conveyor belt? What appears constantly changes, like a parade, but bodies rise, descend, or swoop out of holes in the floor of the conveyor belt, projectiles are shot, explosions occur, long knives are swept across the audience, swinging long knives, and so forth \u2014organized chaos, in other words, in which the challenge the artist set for himself seems to have been to design as many costumes, devices, maneuvers and actions he can with without repeating himself.<\/p>\n

Making the busy, chaotic action on the conveyor belt visually denser are lines indicating movement (horizontal, vertical, and spin) and overlain characters indicating onomatopoeia that take up about a third of each panel. In short, Yuichi turns manga into abstract art. Readers who like conventional manga will probably avoid this book. Readers, like me, who are indifferent to manga are likelier to enjoy the chaos.<\/p>\n

The book includes an interview with Yuichi translated by Ryan Holmberg about the making of Plaza and Yuichi\u2019s career in general.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Creature: Paintings, Drawings, and Reflections<\/a><\/strong>
\nShaun Tan
\nLevine Querdo<\/p>\n

Shaun Tan writes and illustrates works for children that adults also appreciate. Probably best known in the U.S. (he hails from Australia) as the author of The Arrival (a story of an immigrant\u2019s arrival in a strange new country) or his Academy Award-winning animated short, The Lost Thing. I first read The Arrival soon after my first fourth months living in working in Shanghai, a country whose languages I couldn\u2019t speak or writing I couldn\u2019t read, where different social practices and foods prevailed, and the line between safe and dangerous was ambiguous.<\/p>\n

Tan creates environments where the familiar and new or alien meet and the line between safe and dangerous is blurry. Still, enquiring minds (children\u2019s, in particular) want to know, and Tan encourages our curiosity to reveal the rich worlds it reveals and makes available to us. Tan\u2019s Lost Thing, for instance, is not just a creature but also our Virgil, giving us a tour not of Hades but of brave new worlds with such things in them as other Lost Things, and the tour ending with the vanishment of fright.<\/p>\n

Creatures collects a wide range of Tan\u2019s encouragers of curiosity that he has created over the years, including on paintings, sketches, and illustrations from a number of his previous publications. It\u2019s large size and print quality do justice to Tan\u2019s work, and several points along the way the pages turn to Tan\u2019s thoughts on creativity and his creatures. To be clear, this is an anthology of illustrations, not a story. As a sampler of his considerable illustration abilities, this is a great book for Tan\u2019s fans as well as for readers who enjoy and appreciate well-wrought works.
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