Book Review: Homesickness

 By Colin Barrett

• Pub Date: 2022

• Where I bought this book: Prologue Books, Columbus, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: I'm a sucker for short story collections by Irish writers

 *****

 

   The writing here is lovely. The descriptions are spot on. The characters are people you might see passing on the street. They are well drawn and quirky, and you can see in them someone you know.

    But the stories are, shall we say, a bit mundane. They portray little more than a routine day in an ordinary life, sometimes trite, and a wee  bit confusing.

    I really wanted to like this book. The blurbs talked of emotion and originality, of people struggling to find a life beyond the normal.

   Oh, there are some shining moments. There are one-off characters you'd like to get to know better, such as Jess, who is asked a question while drinking in a pub. "Jess took her time before answering, as she took her time before answering any question. She was looking at him, and he was looking at her, and she was looking at him looking at her."

    I know these people -- the great football lad from a small town who falters when he moves to the big city, a wanna-be poet whose talent never goes beyond the local poetry slam. The characters include three orphans struggling with life on their own, and a family of brothers sitting in an Irish pub, looking for a bit of adventure.

    So the actors are there. The settings are classic: A kitchen. A workplace. A pub.

    But you want more. You want a tale to spark a glimmer of hope, despair, or meaning. You want substance, significance, a moment to savor. Instead, you get striking if strange characters, who simply live lives of quiet desperation.

Book Review: Foster

 By Claire Keegan

• Pub Date: 2010 in Ireland; 2022 in U.S.

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I read her novella, Small Things Like These, and then found this one

 ********

    

    A magnificent piece of prose about finding love and acceptance.

    Keegan's writing is crisp, memorable, and puts one in a time and place, in this case, 1981 Ireland. Her stories are good hearted, but with her being Irish, always have a sense of foreboding. 

    Perhaps that's why I found the ending a bit confusing and worrisome. I couldn't tell if everything was as it seemed, or a metaphor for the hardness and sadness of rural Irish life.

    The story concerns a young girl, perhaps 9 or 10. She has a troubled home life in a large family, with her father overbearing and a drinker, and her mother pregnant again. She is sent to live with the Kinsellas for the summer.

    Keegan's lyrical writing is on display as the girl goes to bed the first night at the Kinsellas.

I think of my sisters who will not yet be in bed. They will have thrown their clay buns against the gable wall of the outhouse, and when the rain comes, the clay will soften and turn to mud. Everything changes to something else, turns into some version of what it was before.

  The Kinsellas are kind and loving, treating the girl with love, dignity and respect. They teach her about home and the farm, showing her she is accepted and, perhaps, loved. One time, Mr. Kinsella takes her down to the sea, showing her the lights across the water. When they arrived, two lights were blinking. As they leave, he points out a third, steady light shining between them. 

    Yet, the heart of the story shows something is up. This being a short story, we learn is quickly, and the sense of foreboding sinks in. But Keegan handles it gently, although the ending, like an Irish landscape, is a bit hazy.

Book Review: King of the Armadillos

 By Wendy Chin-Tanner

• Pub Date: 2023

• Where I bought this book: Irvington Vinyl & Books, Indianapolis 

• Why I bought this book: It's about Chinese immigrants in the Bronx, and it has a great title.*

 *******

    Hansen's disease has been around at least since Biblical times, and it's always been seen as a nasty, frightful, and stigmatizing sickness. It attacks both the body and mind, with painful skin lesions, muscular weakening, growths on or swelling of the nerves or skin, and potential blindness. 

    Formerly called leprosy, those afflicted had been damned as lepers. It was believed to be caused by sinful actions, wrongly thought to be highly contagious, and, more recently, to be spread by people from China.

    That last part is particularly meaningful to this novel, which tells the story of an immigrant Chinese boy who contracts the disease in 1950s New York.

    This self-enclosed novel takes places in that period, and oftentimes brings in the characters' pasts to explain their actions and choices. And those choices matter, whether immediately or sometime in the future. And while time goes by, we see the results and longer term implications of those decisions. 

    Victor Chin is the young boy who emigrated from China to New York with his father, Sam, and older brother Henry. Sam's wife and the boys' mother, Mei, stays behind in their  Chinese village of family obligations. She writes often, and everyone plans for her to one day join them in America.

    Sam works in and later buys a Chinese laundry. There, he meet Ruth, a Jewish woman who soon becomes his lover, and a maternal figure to the two boys.

    But their lives are turned upside down when Victor contracts Hansen's and is sent to a sanatorium in Carville, La.

    It is here where the story begins to move quickly. Victor finds friends, perhaps love, continues to write (never mentioning his disease) to his mother in China, and finds a new relationship with Ruth. He also exhibits a growing independence from his family in New York, and a love and genius for music.

He'd never been exposed to much religion, ... but Victor thought there might be something spiritual about what music made him feel. Maybe that was what people meant when they said they felt the presence of God. A feeling of not being alone, a feeling of being safe. A feeling that there, in the temple of sound he visited when he listened or played, he could let go of what he'd been holding on to so tightly.

    This is the strength of the tale, the heart and soul of the story. Victor begins to find his place in the world, and while knowing that his family may always be there, knows he must take control of his life. We learn more about the background of the other characters, and where they come from.

    Now, it is Victor's turn to stake out his life, to grow up, to come of age as a Chinese immigrant in American.

    The writing here is superb, and the story is about a life -- making decisions, growing and learning, not knowing what the future may portend, but willing to move forward while holding on to the memories and places and people that helped make you.

---------------------------------------------------

    *He considers himself the King of the Armadillos and takes them as a mascot after learning they are one of the few mammals, beside humans, who contract Hansen's disease.

Book Review: The Granny

 By Brendan O'Carroll

• Pub Date: 1996

• Where I bought this book: Last Exit Books, Kent, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: I read the first two parts of the trilogy, and liked the stories.

 ******

     Not as laugh-out-loud funny as The Young Wan, nor as disappointing as The Mammy, the conclusion* of the four  stories of Agnes Browne's life is sadder yet more real. It shows her children growing up, their successes and failures, as they experience life in Ireland and beyond in the latter half of the 20th Century. 

    Agnes, the matriarch of the clan, is in many ways a typical Irish mother -- demanding, often self-deprecating, always with more love for her children than herself. She's always willing to go to bat for her brood, but just as willing to shake her wooden spoon at them and threaten to beat them within in inch of their lives.

    But whether those six boys and one girl are kind, loving, and gentle, a common criminal, or a successful businessman, she accepts them for who they are. Even Rory the gay son is accepted, even though his lover and companion is only acknowledged as his close friend.

    But it's a touching, heart-warming family story as the children grow up, make mistakes, cause harm, and break away to find themselves. Sometimes, it a little contrived, and the tales fall into clichés and melodrama. Still, it works, and you should ignore that cynical part of yourself that wants to eye-role, and accept the family for who they are and the tale for what it is.

-------------------------------------------------------

    *Conclusion is not the right word, as the books are written out of order. The Mammy was published in 1994; The Chisellers (which focuses on the children), in 1995; The Granny in 1996, and The Young Wan (about Agnes as a young woman) in 2003.

Book Review: Bitch

 By Lucy Cooke

• Pub Date: 2022

• Where I bought this book: Left Bank Books, Saint Louis. 

• Why I bought this book: I heard a Science Friday interview with the author, and I was fascinated

 ********

     Lucy Cooke takes on a lot in this wide ranging study, from Charles Darwin himself, to the male scientists who ignored female ingenuity over the years, to the female scientists who are seeking to right those wrongs, to Disney's ignorant portrayal of the natural world. She does so with a sharp eye, a sharper wit, and mountains of research and interviews to back her up.

    I'm not sure what is more impressive about her work -- her thesis that the females of the species have been wrongly portrayed over the past two centuries, or the staggering amount of research, field trips, and people she has interviewed while working on this book.

    It results in wide ranging factual discussions about animals from the tiny spiders who engage in all kinds of kinky sex -- including oral sex, cannibalistic sex, bisexuality, and bondage -- to the great orca whale, one of five species on earth -- including humans and three other toothed whales -- who undergo menopause.

    She starts by blaming Darwin as a man of his Victorian times, the founder of evolutionary science, who believed it dictated the activities of the two sexes. Males take advantage of the abundance of sperm and mimic it by being active, aggressive, and promiscuous in their sex lives. Females, who have to protect their limited supply of eggs, became coy, passive, and selective. These traits were projected onto humans. So it was, and so it ever shall be.

    Bollocks, says the Oxford educated Cooke.

    As just one example of misguided illusions she cites: In the animated movie Finding Nemo, the anemone mother, Coral, dies while laying her eggs during a barracuda attack, leaving just one hatched egg to survive. Years go by, and we are shown how the overprotective father, Marlin, goes to search for his missing son, Nemo. But clownfish such as Marlin and Nemo are female-dominant species. Should the mother die, the male father would switch to female. The son would quickly mature and mate with her, producing more young.

    I'm guessing Disney did not find evolution particularly family friendly in that case.

    (Also, penguins do not exist in Madagascar, and ring-tailed lemurs have a queen, not a king, because they are a female dominant species.)

    But Cooke takes down more than pop culture's assumptions. She offers, sometimes gleefully, the many female-dominant species that are promiscuous and cunning in their sex lives. Take the female songbirds, long thought to be monogamous for life, who often slip away for a little extra sexual relations on the side before returning to the nest. They may be socially monogamous, but they seek out and enjoy the extra male attention.

    Why all this happens is still being debated, investigated and researched. It's a lot of work, and example of contradiction abound. For instance, chimps and bonobos, our closest primate evolutionary mates, are total opposites.

From the book: An image
of a female bonobo
in the throes of passion

    Chimps are male dominated, aggressive, and violent. Bonobos are female-led, aggressive only in sharing sexual activities -- they enjoy frottage as foreplay, for helping them reach decisions for the group, and as a social diversion -- and peaceful. (And yes, bonobos are believed to be one of several species in which females enjoy orgasms.)

    A few quibbles here: Cooke tends to repeat herself over the chapters. And sometimes, she provides too much information, such as telling us how she interviewed a scientist over Zoom or Skype, which honestly felt irrelevant. 

    But her research is impressive. After a book of 288 pages of heavy if enjoyable reading, she has 90 pages of acknowledgements, notes, and an index. There are also numerous footnotes in the text, and you should read them. How else would you learn that a 16th Century Catholic priest with the unlikely name of Gabriele Falloppio was the first to identify and describe the clitoris -- and invent the first prophylactic sheath to shield against syphilis?

    Cooke hopes her book's reception will lead to more research, more equality between the sexes in human culture, and a greater acceptance of gender fluidity, which is rampant in the natural world. The transitional anemonefish "rocked my world," she said in closing.

    Discovering that biological sex is, in truth, a spectrum and that all sexes are basically the products of the same genes, the same hormones, and the same brains, has been the greatest revelation of all. It's forced a shift in my perspective o recognize my own cultural biases and try to banish any lingering heteronormative assumptions about the relationship between sex, sexual identity, sexed behaviour and sexuality.

    All I can add is, #MeToo.