Mini-Reviews of recent reads
by Sunita
I’ve read a couple of shorts, DNF’d a new release, and am still mulling over a novel I had many many feelings about. In other words I don’t have lots to say about any of them at the moment, so here’s a brief roundup.
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again by Zen Cho
Nominated for a Hugo in the novelette category this year. I have Cho’s new full-length novel sitting on my ereader but I’m not quite reader to dive into that yet. I hadn’t heard of this story until I saw the Hugo list, and it is free to read at the B&N blog site. It’s more of a short story in length, in my opinion (the Hugo people obviously disagree), but there’s plenty here to sink your teeth into.
This is a lovely little story about Byam, an imugi who cannot seem to become a dragon no matter how hard it tries. And it has been trying for hundreds of years. In order to ascent to heaven as a dragon, an imugi has to be recognized as a dragon by a human. Byam comes close but never makes it. It gives up and unexpectedly finds itself in a loving and rewarding relationship with Leslie, a human. But imugi live much, much longer than humans, so what happens after Leslie?
Cho writes little jewels of stories in which there is always a deeper theme but one that meshes beautifully with the characters and plot that are front and center. The voice that I love from her other short stories and novelettes permeates this story, and it is funny, wise, heartwarming, and sniffle-inducing all at once. Go read it.
The Bewitching Hour by Vivi Anna (Harlequin TBR #510)
A short in the Nocturne Bites series that delivers a bit of story and a bit of romance. Part of a longer series set in the same world. I picked this up to read because it met the “something different” requirement for Wendy’s TBR Challenge category for March, but 40 pages seemed like a bit of a copout. Still, I’m glad I read it.
This short is set at a wedding where our two main characters meet. Fiona has paranormal powers that she can’t control very well, so she’s your basic adorable, cute, but clumsy heroine. Hector is a human in this paranormal world and works in the paranormal CSI unit with other regulars from the series. Since it’s a novella (maybe even a novelette) and they haven’t met before, they have to have lust at first sight, which they do, but it’s nicely done and competently written. I enjoyed it.
I have a number of Vivi Anna’s books from this series in the TBR and this one makes me want to read more, so I count that as a win. The Nocturne series has been hit or miss for me, but I have a bunch of them in the TBR and I’m glad to find an author whose books are likely to be hits. And I got to knock one off the Harlequin TBR!
Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza
I saw a very positive review of this novel in the Guardian, and I’ve been reading a fair amount of autofiction and Spanish-language fiction, so this seemed like a good fit. Alas, it was not to be. Gainza is an art critic who lives in Buenos Aires, and the novel integrates observations about art and artists with vignettes from her life. I found the art sections engaging and interesting, but the autofiction parts felt much less fresh and insightful. Not that her life isn’t worth reading about, but I never really had a sense of why I was reading it, and the style wasn’t enough to sustain my interest on its own. I quit at about 40% once I realized I was moving through events and scenes but not necessarily going anywhere. I may go back to it, but not right away. There’s too much I already know I want to read.
Phantoms by Christian Kiefer
I saw this novel on a number of coming-soon lists and put myself on the hold list at the library and I was #1, so I got it the week it came out. Readers, I have so many thoughts and feelings about this book. It’s set in Placer County, CA, an area with which I have some familiarity. It involves two storylines, one set during World War II and focusing on the war, Japanese Americans and internment, and the effects of both on two families, and the other set in the 1960s-80s and focusing on the long-term consequences of decisions made during the earlier period. The narrator is a Vietnam vet who has come back with drug addictions and PTSD and is living with his grandmother, away from his parents in Southern California. He becomes drawn into the families’ stories through his connection to one of them: the white family’s mother is his grandmother’s cousin.
The first chapter felt clichéd but then the second chapter made me think that that was intentional because the register changed and became much more effective. The perspective of the narrator worked well for me because while the majority of the storyline(s) revolved around nonwhite and female characters (and the narrator is a white man), it was his perspective on what was happening rather than an attempt to directly represent theirs. But then, toward the end of the novel, I realized that the book was as much about him as about the women or the Japanese American men, which kind of pissed me off. I wanted him to remain an observer, but in the end he was the one who came out doing the best from everything that happened. I can’t be more specific without massive spoilers, which I won’t give away since the book just came out. But I found it really frustrating and it made me angry that in the end, the white male narrator (whom I mostly liked), wound up pretty much embracing his privilege despite his awareness of how it benefited him and how others didn’t have it.
It retrospectively made his telling of the story of internment and its consequences, which so was not his story, feel far more problematic than it did at first. I can’t explain why very well but it made me almost angry to have read the book. I think it’s the combination of self-awareness and introspection about what he gained (and at whose cost) with the fact that his life, despite the legacies of Vietnam, turned out pretty damn well, especially compared to everyone else’s. And he didn’t do a thing to ameliorate anyone else’s losses. Add to that the repeated textual invocations of Great White Male Writers just in case we didn’t get the allusions to Wolfe, Faulkner, Styron, et al. (he even namechecked *The Confessions of Nat Turner*). Acknowledging your privilege (I’m talking about the narrator here) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient substitute for actually doing something with it and about it. I don’t really care how being blessed makes you feel. I care about what you do with those blessings, especially when they are born from the theft of what belonged to others.
But then again, maybe that’s the point. Maybe the fact that, in the waning years of the 20thC, the narrator is able to be the beneficiary of an inheritance that he acquired through the injustice, unfairness, and violence visited upon the nonwhite Americans who were his neighbors and friends, maybe that is the message that is meant to be conveyed. That’s certainly the reality of the situation that ends the novel, and the narrator is well aware of it. So maybe I’m looking for certainty when ambiguity is the goal. I just don’t know. I’ll leave you with the single paragraph that addresses this question head-on:
And of course there are other shadows here as well and a good many of them are my own. This place has been handed to me utterly without warrant: the house, the old orchard trees, even the remains of the home in which the Takahashi family once lived. It is difficult not to feel that the whole of it represents the spoils of some war in which I was, wittingly and unwittingly, a participant. … That the family was not destroyed by what the Wilsons—by what my family—did to them, a series of actions built upon a legacy of sanctioned violence both subtle and overt, is but a testament to their strength. And perhaps it is, too, a comment on my own weakness that, despite everything, I choose to live here with my own family, to occupy this place, a place which I have, in no conceivable way, earned.
Hmm, not so brief on that last entry. But it’s helped me work out some things about it. If you have any thoughts about what I’m grappling with, I’d love to hear them.
ReaderWriterVille 
The Cho sounds charming and I would like to read it.
With regard to the Kiefer, I can see what might be part of the problem from the paragraph you quoted. The paragraph acknowledges a great injustice, but doesn’t hit on the narrator’s selfishness in benefitting from it hard enough. It’s just kind of there. I mean, there’s no “perhaps” to this situation if his family harmed the Takahashis and he is now living on their land.
But maybe it can’t be hit harder because he is the narrator? I mean, since the selfishness in benefitting from his privilege and doing nothing about it—out of “weakness” or greed or whatever—is his, it may be something that he can’t acknowledge to himself as strongly as he acknowledges all the rest?
In other words, it’s possible the narrator is meant to be unreliable in regards to his own flaws, but his sensitivity to what the Takahashis suffered makes it hard for the reader to view him entirely that way.
I dunno. I once tried to write a short story with some similarities to this, except dealing with the Holocaust, and I couldn’t pull it off. I wanted my narrator’s callousness to be evident to readers, but because she saw the injustice so clearly, my beta readers couldn’t view her that way. I ended up dumping that story.
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Janine, I think that’s exactly right. The narrator isn’t unreliable, exactly, because he’s quite upfront about his own flaws. And the text nails some of the little things about the Takahashi family’s experience and their reactions so well that as I was reading I was more persuaded than I expected that this kind of writer lane-crossing could work. And it did in a lot of ways.
But what happened to me in the end, when he’s sitting there in his Victorian house looking out over his 20 acres, was that I realized that while some things felt authentically depicted, others did not. The narrator had to imagine Ray Takahashi’s experiences (Ray was the son who served in the war), and every time he had to give Ray a voice (or the women, for that matter, when he wasn’t relating their words and actions), it just didn’t work as well. So that, combined with the fact that he benefited from his family’s treatment of the Takahashis, pushed me away from the narrator and made me reevaluate my earlier perceptions.
Even if the narrator accepted his ill-gotten gains, I wanted him to grapple with it more directly. So what if the Takahashis were strong? If they had been weak that would have been totally understandable. What mattered was that they were abused and stolen from (and worse) and while the narrator was sympathetic, to them, he had his line, and his line was keeping what he’d inherited.
But of course, that’s what many people did. Not all, but many. So maybe that’s the point of the story.
I can see why your beta readers had trouble. It’s really hard to make a character understandable without making her repugnant in such a situation. Same problem here.
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In my short story it was the reverse problem. My narrator was also benefiting from / exploiting the suffering of others, but in a different way—she was a theatrical actress who would turn to a photo of people being rounded up as way to make herself feel good when things (an audition, a date) weren’t going her way. I wanted readers to reach the conclusion, at the end of the story, after much insight and imagination of the situation in the photograph on her part, that she was morally repugnant, but they saw too much empathy in her. I didn’t know how to convey that what they saw as empathy was something else.
But that is just the other side of the coin of what you are describing. In both cases, the character’s understanding of the suffering well yet reaping selfish benefit from it muddies the characterization.
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Yes, that’s it. The characterization is confusing in a way that makes it hard to make sense both of the narrator and what the story is trying to say. Thanks, Janine, this helps a lot! I hate being angry at a book and not being able to figure out exactly what is leading to that feeling.
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You’re welcome! I hate that too.
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Thank you so much for your review of Zen Cho «If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again» and for the link. It is really a wonderful story.
I shared your rec – attributing the merit of it to you ;-), and a friend found out that on Zen Cho’s website there is an uplifting sequel to the story also free to read: «Head of a Snake, Tail of a Dragon» (https://zencho.org/head-of-a-snake-tail-of-a-dragon/).
By the way I’m sorry for not commenting more often, but I really don’t manage to follow everything. Thank you for sharing your insightful points of view.
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Hi Antonella, great to “see” you! And you are always welcome to lurk, comments not required. 😉 There are too many things on the internet to feel guilty about lurking.
I’m so glad you enjoyed the Cho story, and thanks for the info on the prequel. It sounds great.
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Thank you. The story is a sequel though, not a prequel. In the meantime I’ve read it. It is also lovely, but maybe slightly less «polished» than the first story.
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