THE HOUSE OF THE BROKEN ANGELS

The House of the Broken Angels, Luis Alberto Urrea, Little Brown and Company, 2018, 321 pp

 

This family story about Mexicans living in the United States turned out to be much better than some reader reviews had led me to expect, though many critics praised it. Luis Alberto Urrea, a Mexican/American writer whose roots go deep into Mexican history, is I think one of the better authors we currently have. Especially when it comes to the Tijuana border situation and the immigrant experience.

 

The "Angels" of the title are the patriarch Miguel Angel de la Cruz, known in the family as Big Angel, and his half brother, known as Little Angel. The Angels share a father who had two wives, one Mexican and the other American.

Big Angel is on his death bed. (Death bed novels have been cropping up quite a bit for me lately, causing me once again to name a genre: Death Bed Lit.) This current head of the family wants one last birthday party and summons all the disparate branches, siblings and offspring of his father's far-flung people.

Over the course of two days they assemble and their complicated history becomes known to the reader as they tell their stories. Most of them live in and around San Diego, the California city that practically sits on the border, that encompasses a wide diversity of economic strata and racial combinations.

So, with equal parts humor and tragedy, love and hate, family ties and turmoil, I got yet another understanding of the forces that drive people to reach for opportunity, happiness, safety and love. Also the prices paid and the schemes gone wrong.

The novel is not a polite story. Big egos, infidelity, wayward youth, drugs, sex, heroism, and violence fill the pages. If you have a nice polite family background composed of upright people with admirable values, you will either experience discomfort or receive an entertaining yet compassionate look at men, women and children who have gambled everything to live in Los Estades Unidos.

AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART

America Is Not the Heart, Elaine Costillo, Penguin Random House, 2018, 408 pp

 

I read this debut novel because it was a contender in the 2019 Tournament of Books. It did not win though another debut novel I read did: My Sister the Serial Killer.

 

While I ended up liking the novel, I felt it suffered a bit as far as structure went. It jumps back and forth in time quite frequently. I could tell that the author was relating the main character's present life to incidents from her past but it was somewhat awkwardly done. I often felt like I needed more information sooner than I got it.

 

Other than that, I was caught up in the story of a late 20s Filipina come to America because the Philippines had become too dangerous for her. Her name is Hero and she was born into a wealthy family. After spending some years studying to be a doctor in her home country, she went rogue and joined the resistance to its current government.

Hero spent 10 years hiding out with a cadre of resisters until finally she was arrested, imprisoned and tortured. After her release, her uncle, now in America, pulled strings to help her emigrate. In the present time she is living in Milpitas, CA, a suburb of San Francisco in a section called the South Bay, now part of Silicon Valley. She stays in her uncle's house in a neighborhood of Filipino immigrants helping out with her young niece.

The story tells how she deals with her PTSD and her bi-sexual orientation among a heavily Christian group of people. She also comes to terms with her birth family in the Philippines while finding her place with her new family in Milpitas.

I am glad I read America Is Not the Heart. I never knew much about the Philippines beyond its figuring in WWII and I learned plenty. I enjoyed reading about the customs, ceremonies, food and interactions of the Milpitas Filipino community. 

While living at our previous home, my elderly neighbor had a live-in caregiver who was a Filipina. They were both lovely women and we became friends as we shared a driveway, but I never asked Denia about her background.

Back in the 90s, when I used to tour to promote my albums, I played at a Borders Books and Music store in Milpitas, never knowing about the Filipino community there. Music played a big part in the book, both traditional and popular. The people would have parties in their garages, sitting on the concrete floor, drinking and eating and dancing to the tunes spun by one of their people who worked a side-line as a DJ.

All part of the tale of immigrants in America.

THE PARKING LOT ATTENDANT

The Parking Lot Attendant, Nafkote Tamirat, Henry Holt and Company, 2018, 174 pp

 

I read this debut novel about Ethiopian immigrants living in Boston because it was a contender for the 2019 Tournament of Books. I am feeling pretty mighty because this year I managed to read 14 of the 18 books selected for the Tournament, with two more I intend to read over the next month or so.

 

The story is gloriously off-kilter. If you live in any large city, you probably use downtown parking lots. In Los Angeles these are sometimes in permanent locations and other times are pop-up affairs on evenings and weekends. You turn your keys over to some guy who is clearly not white mainstream American. You hope you get your car back without dents. You don't leave valuables in your car and you are careful not to lose your ticket. Usually you pay a pretty good price for not having to drive around looking for a place to park.

But have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes? Wonder no more. The Parking Lot Attendant has two main characters. Ayale, who runs the lot, and the narrator, an unnamed 15 year old girl. All the characters are Ethiopian but you only get to know Ayale, the narrator, and her father. 

Ayale is a character right out of an Iris Murdoch novel: charismatic, controlling, hidden agenda. The girl, having an absent mother and a mostly silent father, falls under Ayale's spell. She is in it for the attention she gets from him but does not know enough about the world to understand how she is being manipulated. Ayale turns out to be a schemer, amassing a following and the funds to take back political power in Ethiopia; at least that is his plan.

This novel is a mostly successful mashup of unreliable narrator, coming-of-age, loss of innocence, African politics and the alienation of the immigrant. Pretty good stuff, experimental in an accessible way while it plays on the reader's heart. 

By the end I was singing a Beatles song in my head:

"You say you want a revolution

Well, you know

We all want to save the world"

Revolution, 1968

A TERRIBLE COUNTRY

A Terrible Country, Keith Gessen, Viking, 2018, 335 pp

 

 

I read this for the Tiny Book Club and because it is one of the three books of the play-in round at The Tournament of Books. I expected the novel to be interesting and it was. I don't know why I am so drawn to Russia but I have read many, many books set there as well as written by Russian authors old and current. Perhaps because for all my life they have been our chief enemy.

 

A Terrible Country is somewhat subdued in comparison to all those other novels but in its quiet way gave me a feel for what Russia is like now.

Andrei Kaplan, single, early 30s, son of Russian immigrants, dragging out his PhD dissertation in New York, has been called by his brother Dima to return to Moscow and care for their elderly grandmother. Dima had been living back in Russia for some time, as a kind of lesser gangster, but one of his schemes has landed him in enough trouble that he must leave the country or risk going to jail.

Andrei goes. He finds his grandmother in a progressive dementia. He finds Moscow fairly unrecognizable from what he knew in his youth. His Russian is rusty and his money is tight.

His grandmother is confused, a bit rickety though she likes to walk, but when she is not moaning about how all of her friends are dead and how lonely she is, she is sweet. My dad had Alzheimers and though he was not always sweet to my mom or his caregivers, he was always sweet to me. Some years after he died I cared for my mom who had had two bad strokes. So I could relate to the scene of Andrei in a small apartment with this elderly woman, his fumbling attempts to help her out, his frustration and apprehension about losing her. Both of Andrei's and Dima's parents are dead. She is the only family they have left.

Over the course of a year, Andrei learns his way around, his Russian comes back, he finds some guys to play hockey with and he befriends a group of activists who stage small protests against the Putin government. The pace of the story is a bit slow but I didn't mind. Spending 335 pages inside Andrei's head, I came to a fondness for him despite his loser demeanor. He even finds a girlfriend. 

 

But he is no match for these people who grew up under communism and have lived through all the changes since. This is a political story but Keith Gessen makes it personal. That was the main appeal of the book for me since I only know of today's Russia through the news. The other characters make more clear how the country is made up of people, not just their leaders. 

Beyond that I got a poignant look at an immigrant who goes "home" only to feel like an exile from America and then to find out how American he actually is.

(A Terrible Country is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.

WARLIGHT

Warlight, Michael Ondaatje, Alfred A Knopf, 2018, 226 pp

 

 

Somehow I have never read Ondaatje's most famous book, The English Patient. I think I saw the movie. I did read The Cat's Table and liked it more than many other readers.

 

I liked Warlight but did not love it wholeheartedly. As in The Cat's Table, there is a boy trying to figure out his parents. In the year following WWII, in London, a 14 year old boy named Nathaniel and his older sister are left in the care of some dodgy characters when their parents leave for Ceylon, or so they are told. It is all quite mysterious concerning those parents.

The kids are supposed to be in boarding school but they hate it there. Their enigmatic guardian, The Moth, arranges for them to live at home and commute to school. Eventually he does not even insist they go at all.

Thus Nathaniel has an unsupervised coming of age that includes his adventures with a criminal friend of The Moth's and a passionate affair with a wild girl. Then life becomes dangerous, the mother reappears, the father never does.

I liked the first section when the parents are gone. Nathaniel is a plucky lad, learning the ways of the world.

The second section after the mother returns and supposedly finishes raising her children was less satisfying. She is the ultimate secretive woman and later in life Nathaniel figures out why. In this section, it is all terribly sad and his life goes nowhere. All the highlights were in that year with The Moth.

The writing is beautiful, I must admit. The story of what happened to the characters is a piece of little known Postwar history and undoubtedly important, but lives are ruined in a John le Carre type of wasted lives story. No redemption.

It was not that I was surprised by how horrible the world can be. I just think the second section laid it on a bit too thick.

The novel is a contender for the 2019 Tournament of Books, pitted in the first round with Call Me Zebra, a book I loved. I predict that Warlight will win that round and that is also sad to me.

(Warlight is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. The paperback will be released in April, 2019.)

SPEAK NO EVIL

Speak No Evil, Uzodima Iweala, HarperCollins, 2018, 152 pp

 

 

What is it with human beings always trying to fix each other and make us all the same so we fit into a box of being and looking the "right" way? The latest example that keeps coming up on my radar is gay conversion therapy. Not that this is a new human endeavor. It just keeps coming up.

 

I recently saw the movie, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Cameron, a teenage girl who is attracted to girls, gets sent to a gay conversion camp run by religious people. Camp is bad enough but Gay Conversion Christian Camp? What could be worse?

 

Speak No Evil revolves around the teenage son of Nigerian immigrants in Washington, DC and the white girl who is in love with him. When Niru becomes aware of his sexual orientation (gay), his father drags him back to Nigeria to the village church where he is prayed over so he can cast the evil from himself. That scene is like a compressed version of the one in James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain. 

 

Of course, Niru is not cured. He just has to go underground while still living at home. When Meredith realizes why Niru does not return her advances, she flips and supports, even encourages, his inclinations because first and foremost they are best friends. Tragedy ensues. Nearly everyone in the novel is destroyed in some way.

 

This is a powerful novel, full of surprises that creep up on the reader. I finished it almost a week ago and it took me all this time to figure out what it meant to me. I still don't have it all figured out, except that it behooves no one to play God. 

 

 

(Speak No Evil is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. The paperback will be published on March 5, 2019 and is available for pre-order.)

 

 

 

 

 

WASHINGTON BLACK

Washington Black, Esi Edugyan, Alfred A Knopf, 2018, 334 pp

 

 

Back in 2014 I read this author's amazing second novel, Half-Blood Blues. I said in my review that I would never forget it and I have not. With Washington Black she has outdone herself.

 

Esi Edugyan has a fine pedigree. She was born in Alberta, Canada to Ghanaian parents. Her first novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, which I need to read, explores those roots. All three of her novels deal with the complex particulars of racism and their psychological effects.

Washington Black was born into slavery on a Barbados sugar plantation in the mid-19th century. All he knows is hard labor in the fields and the unspeakable brutality of the plantation owner. When he is brought into the master's house to serve the master's brother as an assistant, he experiences for the first time kind treatment from a white man. He also discovers he has an ability and passion for drawing.

Christopher, his new master, is a naturalist, inventor, and an abolitionist. The Wilde family however is full of troubled eccentrics and the safety Wash feels with Christopher is still disturbed by a constant fear of violence to himself and his people.

The plot includes the many travels of Wash with Christopher all the way through the American slave states and on to the most remote outposts of the Arctic. Wash is never secure. He is trailed by a slave catcher and then abandoned by Christopher in the Arctic. That trauma is only the beginning of his wandering and the rest of the story traces Wash's struggle to find safety for himself and his talents while he searches within himself for the reasons he has been so often abandoned.

How does the least free, the most betrayed of men find freedom? What is freedom? Can a man keep reinventing himself against all odds and find a way to heal his psyche from all he has experienced?

Esi Edugyan writes with incredible intensity and grace. Her sensitivity to human feeling is as deep as, if not deeper than, many authors I have loved. She has filled in her picaresque frame with truth and took me on another journey I will not soon forget.

(Washington Black is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER

My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Doubleday, 2018, 192 pp

 

 

Do you follow the annual Tournament of Books, hosted by The Morning News? I have participated in it to varying degrees since 2010. I don't always read all the books in play (16+) but I enjoy following the results. Best of all, I have discovered some pretty great undersung authors.

 

When the list of books came out for the 2019 Tournament I had only read five of them. I am planning to read several more by March when the fun begins. That is how I came to read this one.

My Sister, the Serial Killer is set in Nigeria, written in English by its Nigerian author. It has been called a satire. I can see that it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek as far as society in Lagos goes. The story is over the top improbable but its underlying angst was not what I would call funny.

Two sisters still live at home, daughters of an abusive, now deceased father, and a delusional mother who spoils the younger sister and has charged the older one with protecting her. The big secret between these sisters is that the younger, when she tires of a boyfriend, just kills him. No remorse, no sense of having done anything wrong. The older helps her get rid of the bodies and the evidence. After the third murder, that younger sister qualifies as a serial killer.

The chapters are short and cinematic, but each packs plenty of action and emotion while filling in the back story and creating convincing characters.  I read it because it was short and readily available on my library's eBook service.

Surprise! It was a super fun read even though the story is serious.

(My Sister, the Serial Killer is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)