Dear Martin by Nic Stone

The systemic injustice perpetuated against Black Americans has been thoroughly documented in nonfiction and dramatized in television, film, and other media. On one level, the conversation is nuanced and complex, but at the same time the conversation is pretty simple: racism ensures unequal opportunities for purportedly equal Americans. Fiction can help to engage young people in these conversations, which is where books like The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and Dear Martin by Nic Stone come in.

Dear Martin is a story about Justyce, a promising young Black man on his way to Yale. The book opens with him trying to get his drunk half-Black ex home safely by taking away her keys and loading her into the back of her car. An officer assaults him, cuffing him and accusing him of nefarious crimes. Stone balances the story of Justyce’s trauma from the encounter alongside his love triangle situation—his hot ex Melo and his debate team partner, SJ, of whom his mom would not approve because she’s White. We see the day-to-day exchanges at Justyce’s prep school, where vocal White boys like to loudly pretend that racism in America is over. The story takes a turn midway through the book—Justyce and his best friend Manny are at a stop light when a White man pulls up beside them, demanding that they turn their music down. The conflict escalates, and as Justyce reaches to turn the music down, the man shoots them both, fatally wounding Manny. The rest of the book is the fallout, the trial, and Justyce trying to work things out.

In terms of police violence narratives, I’d place Dear Martin ahead of The Hate U Give on the grounds of pace alone. Where The Hate U Give starts with a traumatic scene and then takes its time reaching a conclusion, Dear Martin moves forward at a rapid clip. Sometimes, that clip is even too quick—particularly with respect to the climax and resolution, but as a ‘teachable’ book I think it would retain more engagement from students, even if it sacrifices some of the Black joy that peppers Angie Thomas’ work.

To keep the tight clip of the book, Stone is put in a position of more rapid intensification. At times, I really appreciate that. For example, the court case gives a sample of critical conversations instead of an extended back and forth. At other times, the intensification seems a little bit convenient. For instance, at the climax of the book one of the antagonists is killed off suddenly without any ramp-up, which is pretty deflating, and, while true to life in its irresolution, feels a little narratively unsatisfying. There’s another scene where Justyce is roped into a group Hallowe’en costume of ‘stereotypes.’ He presents himself as a thug, but one of the White kids in his group goes as a Klansman. It doesn’t feel in character with Justyce, even if he is trying to fit in.

While the book has some level of the inescapable cringe of YA dialogue, the characters generally felt sincere and likable. The White boys are a little too villainous; the gang members a little too TV-movie, but in the closing scene of the book I found the interaction between Justyce and Jared at Manny’s grave genuinely moving.

From a formal standpoint, the book keeps things fresh. Stone alternates between chapters written in third person, describing Justyce’s daily goings on, and letters that Justyce writes to Martin Luther King Jr. as part of a reflection exercise. There are also sections that revert to a screenplay format replete with snappy dialogue and parts that offer one-page news reports. The style is somewhat inconsistent, but I really appreciated the big swings Stone took for a young adult fiction novel, blending theatre and reportage and the epistolary form.

I also like Stone’s use of symbolism throughout the book. There are a few different reasons that she draws attention to Justyce’s wrists—starting with handcuffs before moving on to some tender moments with SJ and a gifted watch that had been intended for his dead best friend. The resonances are a nice treat for observant readers.

The debates that get illustrated cover a range of complications and contradictions in the Black experience. I think most of the conversations would be familiar to readers, but they get presented in a way that I could see teachers engaging productively with students to address social issues. It’s always tricky when navigating using a text like this as a core novel. As a White teacher, is it my place to force Black students to read about and discuss traumatizing experiences with their predominantly White classmates, especially when the book makes reasonably frequent use of the n-word? Am I shirking my responsibilities by not teaching the book and having White students open their eyes to injustices? These questions are tough ones to navigate that can only really be answered contextually in the moment.

All things considered, Dear Martin is an engaging text that has a lot to offer to young readers. The book isn’t without its faults, but Nic Stone covers a lot of ground in what amounts to be just a few hours of reading. Fiction is a vehicle for more deeply understanding the reality of others and Dear Martin is a really nice portrait of the systemic injustice we need to continue to rail against. 

Keep up the good fight!

Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

If Ocean Vuong continues to write for another fifty years, I can almost guarantee he will win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Prior to Night Sky With Exit Wounds, as far as I can tell, Vuong had only published a few chapbooks. So, to have this as your debut collection is pretty astounding (and his follow-up novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, bearing the same title as one of the poems in this collection, only served to skyrocket him into the literary limelight).

The collection as a whole deals with issues of family, immigration, death, loss, grief, and sexuality. The opening poem in the collection is an astounding start. “Threshold” is a rich set of off-set couplets. The speaker of the poem is on his knees looking through the keyhole at a man showering “but the rain // falling through him: guitar strings snapping / over his globe shoulders” (3). The man sings and Vuong writes, “His voice — / it filled me to the core / like a skeleton” (3), an image that I really like. There’s a sort of parallel of near-spectral bodies and the nearly religious imagery of the piece serves as a kind of opening prayer for the collection.

Another early standout for me was the poem “Trojan.” The opening line has a metaphysical quality and also takes a turn with a clever line break: “A finger’s worth of dark from daybreak, he steps / into a red dress” (9). It continues, “A flame caught / in a mirror the width of a coffin” (9). The juxtaposition of ideas is a welcome surprise, unexpected. In another moment, there’s a visceral image of decay that has just a hint of horror: “The bruise-blue wallpaper peeling / into hooks as he twirls” (9). The metaphor of the main character being a Trojan horse is crafted wonderfully with a blend of the elegant and the violent. For instance, “He moves like any / other fracture, revealing the briefest doors” (9). Further “The dress / petaling off him like the skin / of an apple. As if their swords / aren’t sharpening / inside him. This horse with its human / face” (9).

Vuong rides a challenging line very effectively. Some poets shine through their pithy one-liners. Some poets shine in the big picture, details be damned. There’s no shortage of beautiful standout lines, but the conceptual and thematic frameworks of the book give it a wonderful cohesiveness that never feels too repetitive. For an example of a standout line, in “Aubade with Burning City,” Vuong writes “Snow scraping against the window. / Snow shredded / with gunfire” (11). It’s that surprise violence that penetrates serene images that Vuong conducts so masterfully.

I’d follow that up by commenting on the poem “Always & Forever.” It maintains the sense of surprise that makes so much of his work work. The poem opens with the following lines: “Open this when you need me most, / he said, as he slid the shoe box, wrapped // in duct tape, beneath my bed” (17). I suspected the poem was about some kind of emergency self-care box or a letter of support to help get through the hardest days. The poem goes on for about a half a page before revealing what’s in the box: “sunk in folds of yellowed news / -paper, lies the Colt .45—silent & heavy // as an amputated hand.” The heaviness of the implication hits hard. The suggestion that the gun is what he needs most has such a surprising and dark overcast to it and the narrator wonders “if an entry wound in the night // would make a hole wide as morning” (17). It’s a stunning turn and the poem ends just as strong: “The boy pretending / to be asleep as his father’s clutch tightens. // The way the barrel, aimed at the sky, must tighten / around a bullet // to make it speak” (18).

Something I find surprising and somewhat characteristic of Vuong’s work is that he often embodies the perspective of his mother. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, he writes extended letters to his mother. This collection explores similar themes regarding sexuality and race. There’s even a moment about phantom pains that predates the unforgettable, perfect scene in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous of his mother massaging the empty space where a woman’s leg used to be. In “Headfirst,” Vuong seems to write as his mother to himself in aphoristic and allusive ways: “Don’t you know? / There are men who touch breasts / as they would / the tops of skulls. Men / who carry dreams / over mountains, the dead / on their backs” (20). She says, “Stupid boy. / You can get lost in every book / but you’ll never forget yourself / the way god forgets / his hands” (20). The final line serves as an aphoristic piece of advice for life: “My son, tell them / the body is a blade that sharpens / by cutting” (21). Again: darkness at the edge of beautiful phrasing and imagery.

In short, Night Sky With Exit Wounds has a lot to offer. Its language is rich. It offers great turns of phrase and thinking that are engaging and surprising. Vuong’s promise has already transformed into proof of his excellence, given how much attention his subsequent books have received. This early glimpse into his work already has a lot to offer and if Vuong continues to grow in his craft, we can only wait and see how many accolades he’s going to round up.

Happy reading!

It Ended Badly: Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History by Jennifer Wright

If you’re looking to start your summer early, It Ended Badly by Jennifer Wright is about as close as I come to a beach read and I’d recommend it as a fun, light read where a bunch of people get murdered. Subtitled Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History, Wright narrates the termination of relationships of historical figures and their often surprising or amusing fallouts. She presents history in an accessible and entertaining mode, with her writing style taking on a breezy quality that would welcome even the most history-averse folks.

Wright’s research has uncovered all kinds of amusing anecdotes—sometimes darkly comic—and her writing style makes use of short sentences and casual tone to enhance the comedic effect. For instance, when writing about Nero murdering Poppaea, she writes, “Finally, one night, after Nero had been at the races, Poppaea, who was pregnant at the time, began yelling at him. And so, he jumped up and down on her belly until she was dead. Nero felt bad about this.” The simplicity and directness of that last sentence gives the passage a great comedic punch, despite the grisly death it describes. 

Actually, if you want just a taste of the book but don’t want to commit to a full-length text, Wright’s first chapter, covering Nero and Poppaea, is the one most likely to grip you. In describing the historical context for Nero’s relationship and breakup, Wright really paints a picture of Rome that counteracts the romanticism it is generally imbued with. It is a place of grisly deaths, endless plotting, and arbitrary slaughter. She shows how wildly violent ancient Rome was, including how in gladiatorial matches (which often ended in death anyhow), audience members would be pulled into the arena and thrown to the animals. In her words, “Romans loved finding creative and unexpected ways of killing people.”

Wright relies on historical accounts to help build her narratives. For instance, she draws from Tacitus’ accounts of Claudius’ death. Some of the details are speculative. When Wright talks about Aggrippina poisoning Claudius, she explains: “Claudius attempted to use a feather to induce vomiting. Remember: Claudius was a smart man and doubtless thought if he had been truly poisoned, he could tickle his throat and vomit up the poison. Great planning, right? Really clever. Agrippina poisoned the feather. At least, that’s my favourite version of this story about how Claudius died. There’s some dispute.” When in doubt, Wright makes sure to offer the most amusing and sensational versions of the tale. 

Nero is by far the weirdest of the figures she examines. After murdering Poppaea, for instance, Nero “ordered that rather than being consumed by fire, her body should be stuffed with fragrances and embalmed. [...] Later, when performing in classical dramas, Nero would wear a mask depicting his dead wife for all female roles. He also grieved the end of their relationship by murdering her son.” See what I mean about these short sentences juxtaposed at the end? The comic bent is always present. Wright also describes how Nero would dress as an animal, be confined to a cage, be released, and then attack the genitals of prisoners. One unfortunate boy seemed to have a resemblance to Poppaea and Nero made a eunuch of him, married him, and then after Nero’s death he was passed around among other wealthy weirdos. Poor guy.

Speaking of wealthy weirdos, Wright traces the lineage of a number of figures throughout history, like the third marquess of Queensbury who was discovered eating a servant that he’d been roasting on a spit. He was a ten year old cannibal. Meanwhile an 11th century Venetian princess was put to death for eating with a fork because “there was a lot of talk around that time whether or not forks were tools of Satan.”

Alas, you likely want to know who is discussed in this book of historical oddities and breakups. Taking a chronological approach, Wright addresses Nero and Poppaea, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II, Lucrezia Borgia and Giovanni Sforza, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, Anna Ivanovna, Timothy Dexter, Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron, John Ruskin and Effie Gray, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Edith Wharton and Morton Fullerton, Oskar Kokoschkla and Alma Mahler, Norman Mailer and Adele Morales Mailer, and finally Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor.

As with a lot of nonfiction, I found myself most drawn to the subjects with whom I was already familiar. That said, each chapter had some interesting historical note or offered some deeper insight into the time. For example, Wright really challenges my perception of Henry VIII. Apparently he was very talented and very attractive? Who knew! It was also compelling to hear about the last words his executed wives had to say, particularly because there was such a difference between them. I had no idea that Lord Byron was so intensely cruel, either.

Other literary figures took on a prominent place in my imagination for this book. Edith Wharton is painted with particular compassion. Wright documents Wharton’s inexperience of life, offering some slight literary commentary, as well. The story shows Wharton as being naive and unable to find information about married life. She comes across as incredibly sheltered, with an even malicious tone from her mother when she asked about bedroom matters. With her mother telling her she was being inappropriate, Wharton gets married having little idea of the facts of life. It’s kind of a tragic tale, especially because her husband was kind of a boring dope devoted to her while the rakish Morton Fullerton seduced her and opened her eyes to a world of passion she was never able to quite recover after their breakup.

Wright preserves particular malice for Norman Mailer. In the introduction to the book and in several other chapters, Wright references Mailer as being just the worst. Admittedly, his story is pretty wild. The fact that he is still at least somewhat revered as a novelist is pretty unbelievable, given that he stabbed his wife twice at a party and told everyone not to touch her and “let the bitch die.” Granted, he doesn’t even come close to Nero’s level of weirdness or cruelty, but given that this happened so recently in history gives the whole thing a much more sordid quality. I already had a bad taste in my mouth after reading his 1300 page novel Harlot’s Ghost, which has no ending and has sequels that were never written, but this truly clinches it.

Beyond those people with whom I was already familiar, there were some new figures who warranted a place in the history books for their oddities. Timothy Dexter stands out as a peculiarly eccentric fellow. He seemed to have an incredibly lucky track record with starting businesses that were by all accounts doomed to fail. He then faked his death and his wife wasn’t sad enough, so he just…pretended she was a ghost. He would refer to her as a ghost, talk about her death, and act as if she didn’t exist while in conversation with others. And others seemed to kind of go along with it? It’s a very peculiar homelife. He also fancied himself a philosopher and published a number of volumes with no punctuation (postmodern before his time, maybe?). He referred to himself as the greatest philosopher in the Western world and when someone suggested he could “probably use at least some punctuation,” Dexter made an alteration to the book’s second edition. He “added a page of punctuation at the end so readers could insert marks wherever they liked, or, as he claimed, ‘I put in enough here and they may be pepper and salt it as they please.’” What a strange fellow.

All things considered, It Ended Badly is an informative history book—it’s not the hard facts and dates you might expect of a historian, but it’s an entertaining and engaging way to delve into the past. The humorous tone of the book is inviting, if maybe a little over reliant on eating icecream breakup stereotypes. It’s a nice light read if you want to take a bit of a break from all the heaviness of the world. Sure, things are heavy in this book too, but with time and distance even forcing people to sleep in an ice palace to punish them comes across as more funny than malicious.

Hope your reading—and your relationships—are happy as ever!

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

    There are times that books call your name. Some Minor Detail stands out and draws you in. In the case of Adania Shibli’s novel, I’m not sure what it was: it’s a thin volume, a black spine with white text, and completely unassuming on the shelf. Yet, in perusing the collection at The Bookshelf it called to me and when I read the back it was surprisingly contemporaneous. It’s a novel about life under occupation in Palestine with one narrative taking place in 1949 and one a number of years later.

As you can imagine, the book is steeped in controversy. 

I’ll first provide a short summary of its reception that I’ve gleaned from Wikipedia. The book was published in Arabic in 2016, but received an English translation in 2020. When the English translation was published, it seemed to be met with a slew of positive reviews. Shibli’s novel was the finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and then it was selected for the LiBeratupreis in Germany following a German translation in 2022. Before the Frankfurt Book Fair, the organization LitProm cancelled the awards ceremony, and postponed it to an unspecified date. The rationale was the “war between Israel and Hamas.” There was an outcry from a number of public intellectuals and they wrote an open letter in defence of Palestinian writers. On the other side of the coin, some of the LitProm jurors objected to the book who claimed it was “anti-Israel” and “antisemitic.”

I can see some people objecting to the book as being anti-Israel because the soldiers don’t come across very well. The entire first half of Minor Detail is about Israeli soldiers patrolling the desert a year after 700, 000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948. The soldiers come across a group of Bedouins and proceed to slaughter them, leaving only a young teenage girl alive. I’ll allow you the sorrow of your own imagination to determine what this group of soldiers did to her before murdering her, too. So, yes, Israel does not come across particularly well in this work of fiction. Except, well, this happened.

In the second half of the novel, the unnamed Palestinian narrator goes looking for information on the case, compelled to investigate because of the strange parallel that it happened on the same day as her birth, twenty-five years earlier. Readers then witness the lengths she has to go to find information, including obtaining false papers so that she can pass through checkpoints, and eventually, seemingly, being killed by Israeli soldiers on patrol (though the ending of the book does not explicitly state that). Again, it’s not as if events like this have never happened, so to claim that the book is anti-Israel is maybe the case insofar as the realities of Israeli occupation are anti-humanitarian.

As a literary work, I think the content of the book and its style compliment each other beautifully to evoke the oppressive feeling and the dread of living under occupation. There are certain motifs that recur and repeat again and again, making it feel like there is no escape and no alternative. For instance, the book continually refers to white soap suds, crushing insects, sand clinging to grass, the smell of gasoline, dust, bug bites, and so on. Add to that the blazon of place names and maps to see the disorienting and oppressive reality for the central character. As she navigates to a place long-gone, she pulls out a slew of Palestinian maps and Israeli maps and finds them in contradiction. There are long lists of names, past and present, that make the distance feel interminable, even more so since the village she’s seeking has likely been destroyed.

There’s also a sense of anonymity that pervades the text. None of the characters are named, which I find yields simultaneous and diverging effects. For instance, in not naming the girl who is raped and murdered, she is not given the dignity of human life. When the narrator in the second section is described in somewhat parallel terms, the anonymity gives them a sense of affinity—because both are somewhat lacking in their identities, they are more connected (and more than just because of her birth date). As for the Israeli soldiers and the other Israelis the second narrator encounters, their lack of identity seems to imbue them with the cold banality of evil. 

The other piece of this is the permeability or non-permeability of borders. The narrator for the second half of the book notes that she has an “inability [...] to identify borders between things, and evaluate situations rationally and logically” (59). That mindset proves infectious. There are descriptions that seem like there’s no border between past and present, and you know rationally that it wouldn’t be possible, and yet… For example, there’s an Israeli man who runs a museum and when the narrator asks him about his past, he talks about finding a girl in the desert when he was a soldier and you know it wouldn’t be him—the time frame doesn’t seem right—but it’s tempting to think that that barrier between identity has been eradicated (especially since they have no names). There’s a barking dog in the first section. There’s a barking dog in the second section. It’s tempting to believe it’s the same dog that has some sort of knowledge of circumstances—but of course, this is impossible unless the dog is a new record holder for age.

Minor Detail trains you to be perceptive to little details, potentially to a disorienting effect. In the same passage about the inability to identify borders, the narrator continues as follows:

[it] leads me to see the fly shit on a painting and not the painting itself, as the saying goes. And it is possible, at first glance, to mock this tendency, which could compel someone, after the building next to their office at their new job is bombed, to be more concerned about the dust that was created by the bombing and that landed on their desk than about the killing of the three young men who had barricaded themselves inside, for instance. But despite this, there are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence. (59)

This is one of those “master key” passages that gives you a way of approaching the text. As alluded to above, the second half of the book starts with the narrator going to her new job. She goes to the building for the first time and someone opens a window to prevent it from shattering when the bombs drop. She finds herself irritated by the dust from that building that lands on her hand, and it’s those small obsessions that distracts from the the big picture, as she notes in her narration. She describes the “dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting” as the nuanced, precise attention to detail. While she diminishes their importance, it is also revelatory of an ethical imperative. Consider, for instance, how many young people have been murdered in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet, the narrator is focused on one particular death, one particular girl, and her entire journey is intent on one minor detail.

There’s a convergence of aesthetics and ethics here. In considering the fly shit on the painting, the narrator continues that “There are even art historians who make these same claims. All right, they don’t exactly claim to notice fly shit on a painting, but they do make a point of focusing on the least significant details, not the most significant ones, in order to determine, for example, whether a painting is an original or a copy” (59). There is an interaction between the forest and the trees and their inseparability seems to be the focus here. For the most fundamental issues to be determined (is it an original or a copy?), we can only arrive at that by focusing on the minutiae. “Forgers,” she continues, “pay attention to major, significant details, like the roundness of the subject’s face or the position of the body, and these they reproduce precisely. However, they rarely pay attention to little details like earlobes or fingernails or toenails, which is why they ultimately fail to perfectly replicate the painting” (59). There’s a reading of the world that cares for that which is least significant, paradoxically being the most significant. 

Hence, the details of the book are of utmost importance. There are a number of symbols, metaphors, and allegorical readings involved. For instance, the girl’s murder takes place on the narrator’s birthday—as though her death is the ‘birth’ of the second woman. I’m sure there’s a parallel there to how acts of violence give ‘birth’ to their resistance. At the symbolic level, there’s a number of details related to animals and animality. In the first section, there’s a dog that persistently barks (a symbol of conscience? guilt?). There’s also a section where the main soldier is bitten by a bug and his leg becomes increasingly infected and painful. It seems to be symbolic of his own personal guilt and his own loss of humanity. His response to finding bugs in his room is then to crush all of them, going around destroying every one of these nuisances. It’s also telling that when they first come across the girl in the desert after murdering everyone in her group, including their camels, she is described as a beetle. 

Another recurring motif is that of sand, and in particular its ability to absorb that which is around it. For instance, there’s a chilling moment after the Bedouins are killed where Shibli lingers on blood in the sand. The sand sucks up the blood and darkens but then it disappears. Later, when the soldier is spraying the girl down, again the water is absorbed into the sand. There’s an implication that the landscape absorbs life; there’s also the implication that the historical landscape of Israel-Palestine comes from the blood of others. In another chilling detail, when the Bedouins are murdered, the camels are killed and there’s a clump of grass with sand still clinging to it. It’s an evocative image, charged with meaning, with layers of being uprooted, of clinging for dear life, and so on.

There are subterranean connections that operate in that image, in particular. Later in the book, the narrator says, “one cannot rule out the possibility of a connection between the two events, or the existence of a hidden link, as one sometimes finds with plants, for instance, like when a clutch of grass is pulled out by the roots, and you think you’ve got rid of it entirely, only for grass of the exact same species to grow back in the same spot a quarter of a century later” (60-61). I find the premise compelling. In a clever narrative technique, the second narrator describes things that we know about that are completely inaccessible to her. She would never have known about the camel clutching the grass, and here she is narrating something inexplicably similar. I think the suggestion here, too, is that the imperative toward eradication is a doomed venture—impossible to fully remove the subterranean links that bring people together across time and space, “trespassing borders once again” (61).

Where the message becomes less obvious is when echoes exist between characters that would have a more unlikely connection. Shibli lingers on the soap suds that whiten the girl’s body when she is being hosed down like an animal. Shibli then provides a scene of the soldier shaving and it lingers once more on the white soap suds on his skin. Why is it that the soldier and his victim are brought into this mysterious identification?

When actively seeking answers and trying to find connection, the second narrator experiences a series of challenges. It’s a halting kind of narrative. There are blockades and heightened tension of her not knowing whether she’ll be able to pass or if some serious harm will befall her. One of the most powerful lines in the book comes from the journey out. She describes driving the car she rented to investigate this half-a-decade-old murder, noting that as she tries to start the engine, “what appears to be a spider begins spinning its threads around me, tightening them into something like a barrier, impenetrable if only because they’re so fragile” (64). The next line is again one of the most crucial “key passages” of the book: “It’s the barrier of fear, fashioned from fear of the barrier” (64).

As the narrator repeatedly notes, she defies barriers—but this can serve as a disadvantage. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator has been driving around all day and ‘spill[s] some gasoline on [her] hands and pants” (92). I felt an immediate dread. Gas—first of all, that potentially flammable material that now coats her—is referenced earlier in the novel in an ominous way. The girl that is murdered smells of gasoline when the soldier first rapes her. The smell is so offensive to him, actually, that he turns his head away. [Sidenote here: this would be a good opportunity to re-read Slavoj Zizek’s Violence, which has a section about how we are willing to accept strangers until we can smell them on the bus.] The girl is also covered in gasoline prior to her death.

For the narrator to be covered in gasoline evokes a terrible dread. Again, it’s the minor details—-the echoes—-that, if you read them, mean the most. The narrator describes being covered in the smell of gasoline racing ahead of her. As she gets closer to the Nirim settlement where these events took place, she seems to be aligned more and more with the girl. There’s then a stilted narration of the route to get there and all the blocks in place that prevent you from getting there in the most direct fashion. As she is increasingly drawn into the past and aligned with the victim from 1949, you can feel the danger increase, which is why the ending of the book feels so ominous. Her investigation into the past is halted when she notices Israeli soldiers and tries to act inconspicuous before being, presumably, shot to death, perhaps in the same location as the former victim.

When paying attention to very minor details, the slight changes seem even more significant. Nowhere is this more emblematic than when dust comes in the window from the bombing and irritates her to a bombing later in the book. In a different context, the following passage appears:

Bombing sounds very different depending on how close one is to the place being bombed, or how far. The rumblings from  this shelling aren’t strong at all, and the noise isn’t unsettling; rather, it’s a deep, heavy sound, like a languorous pounding on a massive drum. And the bombs causing it don’t shake the building I’m in, even though the walls are thin and made of light wood; they don’t shatter the glass, even though the windows are closed. And when I get out of bed and open the windows, the room isn’t filled with a thick cloud of shuddersome dust; instead, what sneaks inside is the soft, tender air of dawn. I keep listening, my ears trained to the sound of repeated bombings, and I feel a strange closeness with Gaza, as well as a desire to hear the shelling from nearby, and to touch motes of dust from the buildings being bombed. The absence of dust brings an awareness of how profoundly far I am from anything familiar, and how impossible it will be to return. (94)

I have very little to say about this particular quotation, other than the fact that it is representative of Shibli’s distinct style. One reviewer described it as “controlled,” and I think that is actually the perfect description. Every detail matters and gives life. Every detail is a step toward justice.

And it is in the dust that we find our strange closeness. May we cultivate that closeness and overcome together.

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry

    Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry is an odd duck of a book: it’s mainly a novel, but the influence of drama pervades the text alongside glints of poetry. The story’s central characters are Maurice and Charlie, two ex(?)-gangster Irishmen in search of an estranged daughter; which one of them is the actual father is a matter of some debate.

    This is another one of those novels that oscillates between present-day and years earlier. In the present, Maurice and Charlie are waiting in a Spanish port for the twenty three year-old Dilly, who fled from home three years earlier to join a kind of weird cult-like group of nomads with dreadlocks who take care of dogs. I’m a little fuzzy on how it all works, but basically it seems you can’t travel with dogs so there’s a network that trades off who takes care of dogs in different places. Anyway, Maurice and Charlie are trying to reconnect with her. The other half of the novel delves into the backstory of Maurice and Charlie and their involvement in drug trafficking, their tumultuous relationship with Cynthia, Dilly’s mother. 

    There is a dramatic difference between how much I enjoyed the two sections of the book. The present-day waiting room felt like a bottle episode of a TV show and I was absolutely for it. Beginning the book, I was prepared for 250 pages of waiting in the same location and the hijinx that would ensue. The flashbacks largely lost my interest and they lost even more steam towards the end of the book. There were two-point-five exceptions to the lacklustre flashbacks: 1) the moment Maurice contemplates a murder-suicide with his infant daughter, preparing to drive the car into the water 2) the moment Maurice slices his eye open with a razor — such a cringe-inducing visceral moment and 2.5) when Maurice and Cynthia have a bad land deal that makes them think their new build is haunted and that it will destroy their luck.

    It’s hard to place the two timelines into relationship with one another, but I will attempt to outline some differences:

    The present-day narrative is replete with snappy dialogue. It reads like a play, specifically Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were sinister while being comical. As a result, it feels far more lively than the flashbacks, which are more narration-driven much of the time. The relationship between the characters feels more sincere, whereas in the past I’m a little unclear on why Maurice and Charlie both fell in love with Cynthia or why it really matters that they reunite with Dilly*.

    The present-day, before Barry reveals the past, is more infused with tension. At the outset of the novel, you’re not clear on why they’re waiting for Dilly or what they’ll do if they get a hold of her. In one scene they are interrogating a boy they suspect knows her and there’s an underlying tension to the conversation which escalates when they jab their thumbs into his eyes. It’s a shocking scene and the stakes are unclear, which makes it even better: are they going to hurt Dilly, despite their love for her? Is she part of a more sinister network, too? Given that there’s a line in the book about how drug trafficking isn’t profitable anymore (with the implication that human trafficking is more lucrative), there’s an underlying tension with what the backstory might have been.

    The heart of the story was in the present and the past felt lifeless by comparison, leading me to the conclusion that not every book needs to delve into backstory or parallel narratives. As more about the past gets revealed, there are some surprising moments that serve to enhance the relationship between Maurice and Charlie in the present. Most notably, and this is a spoiler, it is revealed that Charlie and Cynthia were caught in bed together and Maurice stabbed him in the leg. Their reunion in a mental hospital is an amusing coincidence. (Okay, as I write this, maybe there were more charming moments in the past than I’m giving credit for).

    I used an asterisk earlier noting a complaint that I had about how the stakes and importance of finding Dilly are unclear. I think I needed more moments of Maurice bonding with Dilly and/or more of Maurice and Charlie talking about their reasons for loving the ambiguously-fathered Dilly. I voice the criticism with reservation, though, because Barry does offer something for consideration that would mitigate such a criticism. In the backstory, Maurice’s father is presented as having mental illness, possibly dementia, and Maurice seems to have a fulfilled genetic predisposition where he ends up in the mental hospital later. When Charlie joins him they hang out all day watching Goodfellas. Their perceptions of themselves seem so grandiose, kept in check by Cynthia and her daughter. To circle back, if the two of them are committed to reuniting with Dilly as a vapid “blood is thicker than water” mob mentality (excuse the pun), it gives their characters a purposefully pathetic dimension.

    When it comes to the writing quality, I’ve mentioned the dialogue, which is great. The other component that I quite liked were phrases of surprising poetry within the text. The whole book is written in short sections—whether one sentence or half-page paragraphs—that gives it an aphoristic quality. In turn, there are brief moments of poetry describing images. There are also poetic semi-philosophical claims, my favourite of which being “we are in the suburbs of hysteria” (7).

    Ultimately, though, the book ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. In the interest of seeing how my thoughts compare to those of other readers, I went to the Wikipedia page and found that Johanna Thomas-Corr “panned the novel and called its story ‘flimsy.’” The word that had come to mind for me was “thin.” Thomas-Corr says “A novel needs interiority, an intimacy between characters and reader [...] Barry does the bare minimum.” I feel like that’s a fair critique, if a bit harsh. There is much stated, I’m sure, in the subtext but I am not an adept enough reader to appreciate it. The idea of the book ending on a missed connection is fine, but I needed something. Some sort of transformation to make the book feel worth it (though the fact that the central characters never change is pretty crucial to some of their misadventures). I often get excited for Booker Prize winners and nominees, which is why I picked this up (it was longlisted), but overall it was just alright.

    Happy reading!