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A reader has no favourite book

(eco-friendly reading diary)

Category: sometimes I feel like writing in English

Kajet: a journal of Eastern European encounters

Posted on 3 Apr 20213 Apr 2021 by Gabriela

I am finally getting around to write about something that I’ve been really excited about for a couple of months now: Kajet Journal. It might just be my ignorance, but despite it being around for 4 years, I hadn’t heard of it until January, when I saw the most recent issue in a bookstore and decided not only to buy it but also to try and find all the other issues because, ironically, I get all consumerist when it comes to leftist things (a broad term referring to literally anything). Unfortunately, I was a bit late and had to read the first issue digitally, but I have the other ones physically and they’re just pure beauty. Yes, they’re worth it even if just for being so aesthetically pleasing, but they’re a lot more than that.

The ethos of Kajet is to bring unexplored, neglected Eastern European narratives to the fore.

Kajet Manifesto

I’m not going to make an in-depth analysis of each of the four issues, as I don’t feel I could give a good enough account, but I think it’s worth mentioning that each has a central theme: On Communities, On Utopias, On Struggle, On Periphery. While being related to the central theme, each contribution (text, photographs and/or illustrations in the printed journal, but the digital version makes use of videos too) offers a completely different perspective, interpretation or instance of the topic so as to show the plurality of a world that is usually portrayed in a very unidimensional way by the mainstream Western narrative: Eastern Europe, the inferior Other.

Kajet aims to discredit this not by suggesting an equally limited counter-narrative, but by painting a complex picture: trivialising a culture or, even worse, multiple cultures to an easy to digest idea will never be satisfactory, however appealing it is to use such simplifications. In a world that cannot dream nor imagine the future, Eastern Europe is striving to forgo its past and history and get as close as possible to the neoliberal ideal, even if it means leaving a lot of people behind. Scrambling for an identity, we substitute it with a westernised chimaera that seems to be just a placeholder for something we are unable to make sense of.

What I really appreciated about each of these articles is that there is no fake impression of impartiality and they do not hold anything like that as their higher goal. Everything is unapologetically leftist, anti-capitalist, intersectional; each text has an embedded message and tries to be more than a superficial account of a phenomenon or situation: it’s not story-telling and it does not aim to be so. We are being presented with both further questions and conclusions without being told what to think – that is an equilibrium that is very hard to achieve without losing the complexity of the analysis.

One of the tendencies of these texts that really melted my anarchist heart was the continuous intention of redefining our relationship with the objects we possess, the buildings we live in, the places we occupy. The so-called inanimate bears the responsibility of our entire lives, but a capitalist society cannot allow us to build a deeper relationship based on this, as it would mean emancipation from our necessary roles as users and consumers. Addressing the topic of city-planning from a perspective that does not intend to aimlessly maximise productivity but to build communities and to entail mutual aid seems strange and unfamiliar, but it also feels like the appropriate way of designing something that we might end up calling home.

I could write about everything I loved about these journals all day, but I feel like I can’t actually make them seem any greater than they are so just go on http://kajetjournal.com/ and convince yourself. While being quite academic in formulation, I think that the writing is accessible for anyone that has some minimal knowledge of leftist theory and issues (and the references can be useful for learning more too).

Because I have no idea how to end this, I’ll just add another point from the Manifesto here:

Not being afraid to tackle apparently trivial matters, we consider that every socio-cultural development in the East shall be taken seriously. Everything needs to be questioned, doubted and interpreted accordingly.

Kajet Manifesto
Tagged Kajet, Kajet JournalLeave a comment

Natalie Diaz – ‘Postcolonial Love Poem’

Posted on 21 Mar 202121 Mar 2021 by Gabriela

Today is World Poetry Day and I wanted to write about poetry. It’s hard for me to do it and this is something that might never change. Every time I want to tell someone about a poetry book I read, I just find myself wanting to endlessly quote poems. What could I say more than what’s written there? How could I say it in a way that expresses everything I feel and does not shrink the value and beauty of the verses?

It’s not different for Natalie Diaz’s poetry. If you want to know anything about the poems in Postcolonial Love Poem, if you want to get an undistorted image, just read the poems. There is nothing that I could say to change that. What I can do is let you read the poems through me. In me, poetry becomes a confusing but revealing string of intellectual and emotional responses that stay around sometimes for long enough for me to understand them, sometimes just enough so I can know there was something – something I do not need to understand or be able to describe in order to experience. It’s hard for someone so rational to accept that rationality is sometimes futile and is even harder for someone so emotional to admit that ration doesn’t need to be cold, that ration can be kind and loving or angry and demanding. Poetry shows that there’s a fake, unnatural distinction between feeling and thinking just because it is so overwhelming to know that you don’t need to choose.

I think that Natalie Diaz’s writing is the perfect illustration of what I incoherently tried to articulate: it would be outward ignorance not to notice the care and precision in the language; and while that is a rational choice, the level of intimacy in the same language cannot arise from pure rationality. Diaz knows she writes for a public, so she’s structuring her poems so as not to miss the chance to get the message across to whomever might read them, but each poem seems a whisper, both soft and rough, to herself and her lover.

The title of the book (which is also the name of the opening poem) is as clear as it could be. There is love after colonialism. The people we’ve tried to kill and successfully decimated, the people we still don’t allow to reclaim their identity, the people we prefer to ignore because it is much easier than repenting, these people are not only alive, but they love, they love strongly and passionately and seductively. Could you still love after you’ve been stripped of everything you had and were?

At the intersection of multiple identities – Native American, Mexican, queer – Natalie Diaz navigates her own complexity in her poems, the complexity of her being and her feelings. And those feelings, despite the title, are not just love nor should they be. A love poem can still be a love poem and express anger, frustration, desire, or worry. She knows that in order to love and be loved, you need to have a body. A body of flesh. A body of water. A body of land. The body is forever entangled with the physicality of the world it was shaped by, not only with its spirituality. Therefore, to keep your body, you need anger and power. Being sexually desired by your oppressor can never be enough. you need to be more than an object of desire or an award-winning athlete to avoid complete erasure. You need to be able to choose and to be asked for consent, need to be allowed to exist within yourself before your existence is defined with respect to a framework that never recognizes you. These are basic human rights, but somewhere along the line we forgot about their universality. Human rights are something everyone should be provided with, they say. And the saying is the only thing that could ever prove they hold that belief.

I feel like I keep rewriting the same thing over and over again. I can never say it well enough, loud enough. But that doesn’t mean we should stop. We should never stop.

They Don’t Love You Like I Love You

My mother said this to me

long before Beyoncé lifted the lyrics

from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,

and what my mother meant by,

Don’t stray, what she knew

all about it – the way it feels to need

someone to love you, someone

not your kind, someone white,

some one some many who live

because so many of mine

have not, and further, live on top of

those of ours who don’t.

I’ll say, say, say,

I’ll say, say, say,

What is the United States if not a clot

of clouds? If not spilled milk? Or blood?

If not the place we once were

in the millions? America is ‘Maps’ –

Maps are ghosts: White and

layered with people and places I see through.

My mother has always known best,

knew that I’d been begging for them,

to lay my face against their white

laps, to be held in something more

than the load light of their projectors,

as they flicker themselves – sepia

or blue – all over my body.

All this time,

I thought my mother said, Wait,

as in, Give them a little more time

to know your worth,

when really, she said, Weight,

meaning heft, preparing me

for the yoke of myself,

the beast of my country’s burdens,

which is less worse than

my country’s plow. Yes,

when my mother said,

They don’t love you like I love you,

she meant,

Natalie, that doesn’t mean

you aren’t good.

Tagged Natalie Diaz, Postcolonisn Love Poem, World Poetry DayLeave a comment

Are you even a reader if you don’t talk about what you read?

Posted on 7 Mar 20217 Mar 2021 by Gabriela

The short answer is yes. Yes, you are a completely valid reader without going all out to recommend books or talk about them. So if you were looking just for the answer to this question, this is it. However, you might want to stay for the rest of this (you’ve already opened the article so why not read it?).

I was just discussing with a friend about our need to tell other people about what we read, the need to better understand the books we read by hearing other people’s opinions and to make sure that the books we love so much reach as many people as possible. I love doing all of those and I really found myself wanting to write a review because what a better time to do that than when you should be revising for exams? But I am currently reading Marx’s Grundrisse and that guy really hated his readers’ sanity (but we still ended up loving him xoxo Marx) and Aragon’s Le Monde réel and both of those are going to take a while until I finish and decide if I should review them. So let’s not talk about a specific book, but about reading in general.

Why do we talk about books and why don’t we do it enough?

By my own observation (no data to back this up, sorry) people usually see themselves as either fully-equipped-book-people and will end up in a conversation about reading 90% of the time or just-not-book-people. And sadly, just-not-book-people are a lot of the time people that feel they are not fully-equipped-book-people enough to actually go out there (this is a very fluid concept, it could mean the internet as I do or just to a friend that is always ready for some book talk) and say what they think. What if they’re wrong? What if they didn’t get that very subtle hint on page 98 and their understanding of the book is miserable because of it? What if they liked a book that is generally considered a terrible book?

Honestly, we won’t really care. I spend too much time on YouTube listening to reviews of books I might not even care about. I love Antastesia, who mostly reviews classics and I read those maybe 5% of the time; I adore paperbackdreams, who reads books I don’t intend to read and I am a big fan of 4fără15 or Nabolita who have content that is most suitable for my literary tastes. I do watch these people for book recommendations sometimes, but most of the time I do it just because it’s so much fun to hear people so passionate about books, for me it is a fascinating crossover of two things I love so much: humanity and books.

More than this, I feel like I always deepen my understanding of a book by hearing other people talking about it and I understand my own position better by writing about it. Before I write a review for a book and even if I don’t intend to write one, I go all over the internet looking for reviews, watching vlogs and even reading professional literary critique because yeah, that still exists. My reading experience doesn’t end when I finish the book and it would be so much poorer if I didn’t have this many opportunities to understand other perspectives. And while the internet is so cool for that, organic human-to-human interaction remains my favourite way of doing this and some of the most valuable and original takes I’ve ever heard about certain books came from people who read no more than a few books every year. And that’s probably because they weren’t bound by all these artificial criteria I might have unintentionally developed just by reading too much for my own good.

So yeah, it’s fine if you don’t feel like talking too much about what you read, but remember we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to message me about a book, leave a comment, write a review even if you don’t usually do that or just contradict me, I might be totally and foolishly wrong.

Tagged reading, review, shareLeave a comment

Donna Tartt – ‘The Goldfinch’

Posted on 25 Dec 202025 Dec 2020 by Gabriela

I’m not usually a Grinch, but it seems that I’ve just decided to write a not-so-good review to a book I thought I’d love. This is your warning, if you don’t need me ruining your Christmas with my rant about poorly written (female) characters and lack of depth, just go. But don’t forget to bookmark this for when you want to enjoy my (maybe) too subjective critique. There are some spoilers in the next part – though some uninteresting ones that don’t really spoil anything, but you might still want to stop reading here. (This is the second time I’m asking you to just go. Is this self-sabotage?)

I will start by saying I really enjoyed reading the book and thought the plot was generally captivating and at certain moments really smart. This is the story of a famous painting stolen/saved by a teenager from an explosion, solely because it was his mom’s favourite piece of art. She dies in the same explosion and the book revolves around Theodore Decker, her son, and his coming-of-age story.

I think that’s all I have to say about the positive aspects of this book. The story is a crucial consideration, dare I say the main one for most readers and this is why The Goldfinch has been repeatedly praised – by friends and press and librarians in any bookshop. For me, the amount of attention it received a couple of years ago when it was translated in my native language only made my expectations unnaturally high so it was bound to disappoint me. This is the list of things that bothered and annoyed me:

  1. Ok, I said that the plot was generally good, but there’s something I have to say. Why is death almost the only event that makes the action move forward? The whole story is generated by the death of Theo’s mom and then all the novelties in his life come due to his dad’s death and, some time after that, his friend’s death. I agree that death is a natural part of life and it shouldn’t be totally avoided, but it seemed that it was overused. This made sure that any changes that happened were sudden and without a deeper meaning. It might be just Tartt’s favourite trick or a way of covering that she’s not very good at writing about how life usually looks like in more ordinary circumstances, but maybe she could try to diversify a bit.
  2. What is wrong with those characters? At the beginning, I was really mad about the fact that there were no female characters that had any more attributes than those strictly necessary to hold the story together. Needless to say, the book is far from passing the Bechdel test. The depiction of non-Americans is also very superficial – they are just stereotypes. Even Boris, a mixed background character (mainly East-European), which is one of the main characters is portrayed only based on his background as an immigrant: strong accent, violent dad, reading Dostoyevsky as a teenager and dealing drugs and getting into the shadiest businesses as an adult. There’s always a condescending attitude towards anything that’s different from the American norm, be it Dutch, English or Ukrainian. In the end, I just realised that all the characters are badly written: Theo is defined by his obsessions with a painting and a girl, Andy is shy and weird, Hobie is the the nice, generous and forgiving man, Pippa is just amazing, but we don’t know anything about her apart from that – we get a hint that she’s a good listener at some point and that’s why she stands out from the other women, because she makes Theo feel important. Each character is just a couple of adjectives and there’s no hint they are actually complex human beings and not accessories to Theo’s life.
  3. Does Tartt really think we’re stupid? I always felt that there was a bit of unnecessary explaining everywhere, like I was reading a first draft and that editing would take out all that babbling (which made the book so close to 1000 pages, when it didn’t really need more than half of that). The last chapter was too much for me. It’s just like an essay which explains everything, what we should take away from the story, what everything means, no flexibility allowed, no imagination required. It’s as if the writer thought that by the end of the 800 pages, no one would have the energy to think for themselves and reflect on the book. I probably would have been a lot more lenient if the ending left me in a better mood. But it didn’t and I cannot begin to understand why Tartt wouldn’t let her story have a new life in the perception of each of its readers, instead of having a plain general image that everyone shares, but nobody feels as they own it. Tartt blocked here the crucial conversation between the piece of art and its audience and this is probably the only thing all great books have. People might get over imperfect plots and characters, but they can’t get over the lack of connection.

All these being said, I must admit my hypocrisy – my criticism doesn’t change my enjoyment while reading the book. There are books that I enjoyed much less but gave better reviews. This is probably just my pedantry that makes me appreciate a great literary technique or deep psychological implications, even in the absence of a real story, while not being very excited at the sight of a good story which lacks everything else.

I really want to read the other books Donna Tartt wrote so as to see how these compare to The Goldfinch and decide if the issues I’ve discussed here are particular to this book or not.

Sorry for being that one negative person on your Facebook News Feed on Christmas, but how would you appreciate all the positive vibes out there without me?

Tagged Donna Tartt, The GoldfinchLeave a comment

Brandon Taylor – ‘Real Life’

Posted on 27 Oct 2020 by Gabriela

I read this book as part of an anti-racist reading group in my college, but I find it hard to say this is a book about race. It is, indeed, a book about race, about graduate education, queerness, trauma, but most of all about the way all of these intersect so uniquely in Brandon Taylor’s writing.

His most prominent and articulate talent is the portrayal of emotion, by creating a sense of undeniable closeness between the reader and the characters. Wallace is gay, black, comes from Alabama and is part of a biochemistry PhD programme in a predominantly white university. This would be the so-called objective way of describing this book. But I’ve learned that objectivity is useless and Brandon Taylor’s craft is just another supporting argument.

Wallace is confined to a hermetically sealed world and the oxygen is running out. He’s used to being with himself, into his own mind, nodding or just ignoring everytime he’s attacked and nobody seems to muster up the courage to say something. It’s easier this way. People that love him don’t have to feel guilty for being cowards and he can just blame himself for putting up with this.

Emma puts her head on Wallace’s shoulder, but she won’t say anything either, can’t bring herself to. No one does. No one ever does. Silence is their way of getting by, because if they are silent long enough, then this moment of discomfort will pass for them, will fold down into the landscape of the evening as if it never happened. Only Wallace will remember it. That’s the frustrating part. Wallace is the only one for whom this is a humiliation.

The graduate world is cruel, competitive and unforgivable, especially so when it is so easy to talk about the gay black man coming from an underprivileged environment, as they say. It is so easy to do that because then one doesn’t need to look at one’s faults, at one’s own unhappiness and desperation. Seeing him struggle is enough to feel better about oneself, so there’s the need of keeping him in that same position. When he feels like retorting, Wallace doesn’t. Even when he’s called a misogynist, a gay man (nobody really dares to talk about race, but everybody knows that’s what it boils down to) who thinks he can take all the spotlight away from the other oppressed groups. Maybe he doesn’t have enough oxygen left to counteract so he just sinks deeper in his own claustrophobic world. He can’t reach out and even if he did, who would be there to reach out to that would feel competent enough to help? That wouldn’t get terrified of being the chosen one? That wouldn’t feel the burden is too heavy? That’s what Wallace feels about himself: he’s a burden. So he says no to party invites and goes home. He says no to sailing with his friends and goes into the lab. It seems easier to be less involved than to feel unwanted.

The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgement. It’s unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.

When two such closed worlds collide, the pressure has a chance to either be relieved or to increase even more. Wallace and Miller, who can’t get over his internalised homophobia while starting to become vulnerable with Wallace, start a dance in which the two options alternate in an almost obsessive manner: the powerful impact, the eroticism that makes the tension go away for a short time, the increase of danger as they share their stories in a desperate attempt at an intimacy none of them is prepared for and then the inevitable parting, each of them alone with their own fears and insecurities. All the frustration is turned into erotic desire and it is unclear to say if this has the result of strengthening the fragile bond they share or if it ends up just building another barrier that keeps them from getting close.

It would be too much to give it up, to be alone in the dark, now that he has been with Miller in the dark. What he fears, though, and it’s a cold, glittering fear rising in him, is that now he’ll never be able to face the dark alone again. That he’ll always want this, seek this, once it’s lost to him.

This book is so compelling because it combines the talent of the writer (hard to believe this is just his debut novel) with the non-altered truth that doesn’t try to appeal to the white fragility of the potential readers. In an interview for The Guardian, Brandon Taylor said:

When white people and straight people would read my work, they would fail to see what was going on.Anyone who comes of age in this country and is not a straight white man automatically gets devalued. We’re made to feel like, ‘I’m not Dostoevsky. My story is small and niche.’ That it doesn’t have all the great drama of human life. Eventually, it was this matter of centering my own experiences and pursuing with a really intense focus and conviction the stuff that spoke to me. Because I could have written this book to be more sympathetic to the white gaze, but it would’ve been a worse book.

I needed to read this book. We need this book to be read. From academia to industry and to day-to-day interaction, a plethora of perspectives and experiences is shut off because we* don’t feel ready to hear them out or because we’re just too ignorant to even acknowledge them. We worry about our feelings because it’s easier to see that we’re not the only ones with feelings.

*By we I mean the general white population that lives according to an unnoticed whiteness which is seen as the norm. I use this word because racism is a collective issue and we need to start looking at it this way instead of just insisting that we’re too unique individuals to be included in such a group.

Tagged academia, Brandon Taylor, graduate education, homophobia, racism, real lifeLeave a comment

Will Carver – “Nothing Important Happened Today”

Posted on 26 Apr 2020 by Gabriela

I’ve never been into crime fiction. This is not an excuse or an apology. This is a heads-up that I’m not going to tell you about how amazingly the crime(s) in this book are planned or described. Honestly, I don’t think I’m the right person to judge that. I haven’t killed anyone, have I? (Please understand that this is a rhetorical question so don’t go and look into my past, you might not find what you expect).

As I was saying, when I read a book I care too much about words and feelings and too little about the narrative. I am more into the theme than into the plot.

Nothing Important Happened Today was no exception. I liked that it was about suicide and the perfect serial killer. And I liked how more than half of the book was narrated as if there was no real action. Part of it was a manual for future serial killers, part of it was a quite detached description of the lives of the victims, and the rest was the actual plot, being there just because the other two parts needed an excuse to exist (or this might be just me looking for familiarity in an unfamiliar context – a crime fiction book).

The book it’s about a so-called cult put together by a mysterious passive killer that doesn’t actually kill anybody, they just convince their victims they have to commit suicide. And they kill themselves only because they don’t want to do it. That’s fucked up, isn’t it? I won’t go on spoiling it more for you, but I’ll just tell you that I looked into the perfect rope length I’d need if I wanted to hang myself.

But there’s one thing I really need to talk about. I suppose this book is supposed to be some kind of social critique, otherwise I don’t know why the narrator would go into so much ranting about the excessive use of social media, about the human disconnection and the sadness it involves. But most of the time I felt just like when I hear somebody that’s clearly trying to deny the advances in the society and technology by reliving their past. I thought we were over regretting the past and we could start building a present by embracing what’s changed. And a 2019 bestseller still doing that makes me a bit disappointed about the stage we reached.

I just think that this killer deserves some justice. If they really thought about such a clean way of killing, they probably were more complex than somebody that just doesn’t want to accept things change.

I’d say it’s a 6.5/10, a fine book to read when you don’t want to worry too much (it’s funny saying this about a book about hundreds of suicides), but don’t get too excited about it being a literary masterpiece. And I’m just fine with that: not everything needs to be a masterpiece so don’t worry if this book is going to be your guilty pleasure. We all know how those work.

Tagged crime fiction, Nothing Important Happened Today, serial killer, Will CarverLeave a comment

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche – “Americanah”

Posted on 1 Mar 202021 Mar 2020 by Gabriela
The book in the front of a laptop with a wallpaper saying "International Women's Month"

As busy as I’ve been lately, I can’t miss the start of Women’s History Month. My reading list for this month is all-female, including among others George Eliot, Sandra Cisneros and Marina Tsvetaeva.

I first met Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche when I read Purple Hibiscus about seven years ago. I was 13 and I couldn’t really grasp the deeper meaning of the novel, but I could see that the world described was so different from my own. Nevertheless, I could understand the struggles and I could enjoy the little happy things. I couldn’t relate, but the words made me understand. And I think that is the power of Adiche’s storytelling.

I discovered her again, in Americanah. This time, knowing a lot more about race but also being aware of how little I actually know. Because race it’s not just about being racist or not. Not being racist doesn’t make me feel better about the world when racism still exists. It doesn’t help me escape my own privilege – I’m damn privileged and my only hope is that I can be the Special White Friend Adiche describes in her novel:

One great gift for the Zipped-Up Negro is The White Friend Who Gets It. Sadly, this is not as common as one would wish, but some are lucky to have that one friend who you don’t have to explain shit to. By all means, put this friend to work. Such friends do not only get it, but also have great bullshit detectors and so they totally understand that they can say stuff that you can’t. So there is, in much of America, a stealthy little notion lying in the hearts of many: that white people earned their place at jobs and school while black people got in because they were black. But in fact, since the beginning of America, white people have been getting jobs because they are white. Many whites with the same qualifications but Negro skin would not have the jobs they have. But don’t ever say this publicly. Let your white friend say it. If you make the mistake of saying this, you will be accused of a curiosity called “playing the race card”. Nobody quite knows what this means.

(…)

And have your white friend say how funny it is, that American pollsters ask white and black people if racism is over. White people in general say it is over and black people in general say it is not. Funny indeed. More suggestions for what you should have your white friend say? Please post away. And here’s to all the white friends who get it.

Americanah tells the story of a Nigerian woman that’s been living in America for 13 years and decides to move back in Nigeria. Thus, her life has three parts: before going to America, in America, and after leaving America. If you really want to think about the plot as being the most relevant bit of this book, it is a love story. For me, it wasn’t. The focus was never really on the love story itself or on Ifemelu’s (the main character) lover, Obinze. Only a few chapters are narrated from his perspective and they exist mainly for the plot and not to help to build the character. That can be a literary fault, indeed, but I didn’t really mind it. I didn’t need the drive you usually get from a love story to be mesmerized by Adiche’s great writing.

Being a book about love and about race, the most fascinating parts of it were when these two themes collide. We keep talking about race on a macrolevel i.e. race and society, but how does race affect the more intimate parts of our lives i.e. race and relationships?

The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would’ve been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberals dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.

(…)

The simplest solution to the problem of race in America? Romantic love. Not friendship. Not the kind of safe, shallow love where the objective is that both people remain comfortable. But real deep romantic love, the kind that twists you and wrings you out and makes you breathe through the nostrils of your beloved. And because that real deep romantic love is so rare, and because American society is set up to make it even rarer between American Black and American White, the problem of race in America will never be solved.

In America, Ifemelu starts writing an anonymous blog about her experiences and observations as a Non-American Black in America (NBA). Her voice is sharp and echoes in the minds of the readers that understand or want to understand, while the people that are still in denial about some race issues find her posts disturbing. The popularity of her blog makes her rapidly a must in any workshop and event about diversity in general and race in particular. But she soon finds out that she’s not invited there to speak her mind – people hate it when their ways are criticized. They just want a pat on the back and a you’re doing great, buddy.

The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change, but to leave people feeling good about themselves. (…) During her talks, she said: “America has made great progress for which we should be very proud.” In her blog she wrote: Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.

Remember this whenever you feel proud of how far we’ve come. Whatever we do to reduce racism, there’s always a lot more before eradicating it, and that seems to be really far.

I cannot just leave you without quoting a description of Ifemelu’s love. Her love is, of course, a description of herself, as love allows us to be ourselves.

If she was considering coming back to Nigeria, then it meant she was no longer with the black American. But she might be bringing him with her; she was after all the kind of woman who would make a man easily uproot his life, the kind who, because she did not expect or ask for certainty, made a certain kind of sureness become possible. When she held his hand during their campus days, she would squeeze until both palms became slick with sweat, and she would say, teasing, “Just in case this is the last time we hold hands, let’s really hold hands. Because a motorcycle or a car can kill us now, or I might see the real man of my dreams down the street and leave you or you might see the real woman of your dreams and leave me.”

I can’t find the right ending line for this book review. Because, truth be told, I’m not nearly finished with it. I talked to all my friends about it for the last couple of days and there are still so many aspects I missed. Sometimes, when reading about discrimination, you tend to think that this is not about you; you’re great, you’re inclusive, you watch the way you speak and treat people and would never discriminate – is racism still a thing? Well, it clearly is, and this book is amazing because it makes you realize you are part of the problem so you need to be part of the solution.

Tagged Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, George Eliot, Marina Tsvetaeva, Sandra CisnerosLeave a comment

Margaret Atwood – “The Testaments”

Posted on 18 Sep 201918 Sep 2019 by Gabriela

IMG_1286I won’t say I was overly excited about reading this book. I’ll just say that I preordered it three months ago and when it finally arrived last week, I tried to finish the book I was reading as fast as I could (I still had time to write a review for it though) so I could immerse myself in the revolting and repugnant world of the Gilead.

My largest fear: that all my efforts will prove futile, and Gilead will last for a thousand years. Most of the time, that is what it feels like here, far away from the war, in the still heart of the tornado. So peaceful, the streets; so tranquil, so orderly; yet underneath the deceptively placid surfaces, a tremor, like that near a high voltage power line. We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.

As expected, the writer did answer to most of the questions that readers kept asking after the first book: what happened to Offred? how did the Gilead find its end? We know this now. The book’s definitely added to the storyline in quantity, but did it do anything else?

For me, The Testaments was nothing more than a young adult fiction book. It felt like that. In A Handmaid’s Tale, nobody really cared about the action (or at least I didn’t), because there were more important things at stake. The message itself mattered more than anything else and this is what I love in Atwood’s books. However, here the conspiracy and the thrill of the escape where the main focuses. Apart from some secondary characters working for the Mayday (about whom we don’t find out anything of importance), nobody in The Testaments is really driven by a belief in freedom. Not even Aunt Lydia, whose controversial attitude towards everything that’s going on (is she trying to destroy the Gilead only because she knows she might lose her power?) makes her seemingly noble actions not very inspiring.

Yes, I’m disappointed in this book, but I don’t think there’s something wrong with it. There was something wrong with my expectations of it. I wanted a manifesto, and I got just a book with a story and a plot and characters. I wanted this book to make me shout Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, but it just made me whisper it.

But there are some parts in it that are manifesto material. Feminism is still at the base of this book but it doesn’t make it to the reader as much as I’d expected it.

What my father was doing in there was said to be very important – the important things that men did, too important for females to meddle with because they had smaller brains that were incapable of thinking large thoughts, according to aunt Vidala, who taught us Religion. It would be like trying to teach a cat to crochet, said Aunt Estée, who taught us Crafts, and that would make us laugh, because how ridiculous! Cats didn’t even have fingers!

So men had something in their heads that was like fingers, only a sort of fingers girls did not have. And that explained everything, said Aunt Vidala, and we will have no more questions about it. Her mouth clicked shut, locking in the other words that might have been said. I knew there must be other words, for even the notion about the cats did not seem right. Cats did not want to crochet. And we were not cats.

What I really appreciated about this book was that it talked about more specific problems in our culture. In A Handmaid’s Tale, it’s been talked about equality and freedom in general, but The Testaments raises the issue of (sexual) abuse and of the lack of sexual education or a poorly taught sexual education that causes more damage than it helps.

Women are only one of the commodities – I hesitate to call them commodities, but when money is in the picture, such they are (…).

Women are not commodities (anymore), but do they still get treated as if they were?

Tagged A Handmaid's Tale, feminism, Margaret Atwood, The TestamentsLeave a comment

“The Secret Life of Bees” – Sue Monk Kidd

Posted on 31 Jul 201918 Sep 2019 by Gabriela

Yes, I did start reading this book just because it seemed easy to read and I needed something to fill my 10-hour bus trip. I was right. It is such an easy book to read. But it is also such a difficult book to get over.

It’s a story told in the voice of a child. The innocent voice of a girl who cannot accept that bad exists in the world and is shocked to see it. She cannot accept that she’s been abandoned, that people really think that skin colour is a relevant way of assessing the value of a human being. She lives on love and happiness alone. Isn’t she the best human being out there?

Thinking she might’ve killed her mother and growing less and less happy with her tyrant father, she decides to leave and find the truth. And she finds it. Of course, she finds what happened to her mother, but that’s not the truth I’m talking about. The truth she finds is love, so many kinds of love, all contributing to her becoming herself, not being just another human built on the same pattern, fitting all the social constructs and never using their own minds.

We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn’t that a shame we don’t have many more ways to say it?

The most important part of this book, for me, only takes two lines, but it is what makes it so important: it validates the need of change. Change is the only thing that makes world better (but it doesn’t mean it always manages to do so). Change.

‘We can’t think of changing our skin,’ he said. ‘Changing the world – that’s how we gotta think’.

This is not a literary masterpiece. And it doesn’t aim to be so. But it is a manifesto, a statement about the humanity and its most important attributes.

Actually, you can be bad at something…but if you love doing it, that will be enough.

The Secret Life of Bees is maybe the only book that I would describe as lovely and strong, sweet and powerful. It made me happy, it made me laugh and smile, but it never stopped making me believe in its message. It might be a book about racism, but the message trascends this particular case and it talks about the condition of human beings at any level, it talks about equality and liberty, using the metaphor of the bees. The bees do live according to a hierarchy, but what do you know about their secret life?

Tagged humanity, racism, Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret life of BeesLeave a comment

Shaun Bythell – “The Diary of a Bookseller”

Posted on 17 Jul 201918 Sep 2019 by Gabriela

I’ve been told that this is the type of book I would read. Which is very accurate – I really was reading it back then so making this statement didn’t require to be a master of human psychic or logical deduction.

But it is true, it is my type of book. Mostly because I don’t have a type of books (or anything else, to be fair) that I like. I love books in general. So books about books are vent better. Writers come up with those all the time. But what about booksellers? They spend so much time around books. They must have something to say.

And Shaun Bythell really has a lot to say. About anybody and anything. He loves books and at times it might seem that he hates humans, but deep down he loves them. Otherwise he would just stop doing anything that isn’t just a way to get profit. He could just sell his books, like a normal boring bookseller and not bother doing anything to popularise reading. But he’s not doing that. He’s helping with the Wigtown Book Festival, founding the Random Book Club and writing a book in which he (indirectly) depicts the importance of books.

Isn’t that the best argument for his love for people? He knows that neither books or people are of any use by themselves. Books are just paper without readers. And people? People can exist without books, but that is such a sad and limited existence I’d rather ignore that possibility.

I hate comedy books or movies or anything that tries straightforwardly to be funny, without any deeper meaning (I’m very picky with my favourite stand-uppers too). Humour has to be unexpected, subtle or just purely sarcastic for me to actually enjoy it. And Bythell does a great job with that. He’s not particularly subtle, but he’s smart and able to see the most important aspects about his clients (by “important” I mean anything that can be made into a good joke or a witty remark).

Just a short excerpt of Bythell’s lovely misanthropy:

Three customers, when entering the shop, complained that they couldn’t see anything in the shop because it was so bright outside and their eyes had not adjusted. This is far from unusual and often explained in a tone suggesting that I am personally responsible for the involuntary reflex of the customer’s irises.

A customer came to the counter today and said, ‘I’ve looked under the W section of the fiction and I can’t find anything by Rider Haggard.’ I suggested that he had a look under the H section.

At 11 a.m. a customer came to the counter with a pile of railway books for her husband. As she was paying, she told me, ‘Never marry a railwayman’, as though this might be something I had seriously considered.

While I was repairing a broken shelf in the crime section, I overheard an elderly customer confusing E. L. James and M. R. James while discussing horror fiction with her friend. She is either going to be pleasantly surprised or deeply shocked when she gets home with the copy of Fifty Shades of Grey she bought.

But among all these observations, Blythell finds the chance to write about the relevant things for the publishing and bookselling industry:

The phenomenon of the best-seller in the publishing industry does not seem to translate into the same financial cash cow in the second-hand book industry. Perhaps people who buy into the best-seller concept will always buy their books new, to be on the crest of the wave as it breaks rather than the troughs behind it. Perhaps also because the Dan Browns and Tom Clancys of this world are published in such vast quantities that there is never any scarcity value in them for the dealer or the collector. What passes for a best-seller in the new book market is precisely the sort of book that will be a dog in the second-hand trade. Customers often fail to understand this and think that the first edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is worth a fortune, when in fact 12 millions of them were printed. As an author’s success and fame increase, so too will the size of the print runs of their successive books. Hence a first edition of Casino Royale (of which only 4728 first edition hardbacks were printed) will be worth considerably more than a copy of The Man with the Golden Gun, which had a first-edition, first-issue print run of 82000.

I won’t be able to go to the Wigtown Book Festival, but I’ll definitely take a weekend off to visit The Bookshop and I will keep an eye on the Facebook page to see if I caught Bythell’s attention. I’ll move books around, talk loudly and negotiate over the price of the books I want, only to leave without buying anything – that’s how much I want to be the subject of one of his posts.

Tagged books, bookworm, Shaun Bythell, The Bookshop, The Diary of a Bookseller, Wigtown Book FestivalLeave a comment

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