Reviews and Comments

Pursuing a humanities degree has left Kate saddled with a huge student debt and the only way she sees to pay it back is to go and work in the Alberta oil fields. Life in the camps is quite miserable: the same grind day in, day out, toxic dust and sludge that irritates the skin and kills ducks, an unsafe work environment with many work victims and, for Kate and the few women in the job, a daily experience of sexual harassment and, not infrequently, sexual violence. The drawings are simple, like a comic strip, and the narrative is very repetitive; intentionally, I think: every day is cold and filled with sexist comments. Something I enjoyed is how Kate is determined to not demonise the men around her, and tries to understand how they can be loving fathers to some distant daughters and absolute creeps to her. Loneliness and alienation are the answers she comes up with.

Something that I found maybe slightly problematic is her handling of indigenous people and their claims to the land that is being destroyed. She explains that, as a just-graduated twenty-something, she was barely aware of this issue, which is fair enough. And to be clear: I believe that we should always be curious and outraged when people are exploited and made to suffer. But the book was published a good 15 years after the end of the story, so possibly it's a shame she didn't wave this more into the stories.

As a child in 1980s Albania, Lea grows up feeling free. She believes in the ideals of socialism and in 'holiness' of Enver Hoxha. She doesn't miss the freedom to consume what she wants, happy to choose between toasted and non-toasted sunflower seeds. She is unaware of the system of political repression of which she is a tiny cog, and that has harmed her direct family in quite brutal ways. Then, the dictatorship falls, and capitalism comes to town. Suddenly, freedom is on everyone's mouth, but Lea starts to notice unfreedom everywhere: people lose their job and have no money for things that used to be provided for free by the state, they are forced to migrate because of unemployment, while not being allowed to migrate because of borders. Money replaces imprisonment as the main engine of coercion, until the dramatic ending when, as the country is torn apart by a quasi civil-war, Lea is not even allowed to leave her house or risks being shot. Alongside Lea, we learn to know her family: first and foremost Lea's dad, Zafo, and her granny, Nini, as well as her more distant mother, and a host of more typified characters that are also braving the same transition: the dogmatic socialist teacher, the ridicolous World Bank consultant, the street bully. I really enjoyed this book!

Another Orlando-inspired novel, straight after Andrea Lawlor's, this time setting out to interrogate what gets lost when one is socialised as female. The protagonist, a slightly uptight university professor of literature, struggles to read Virginia Wolf, which she accuses of being mortally boring. Until the unruly part of her decides to escape, taking the form of a boy. The two half of the selves are gendered in a bit of a conventional, essentialist way, but of course the fact that they are both within her makes it more interesting. To my taste, the writing verged on the erudite-for-erudite sake, but with a hint of self-irony about that too. Often, that humorous touch was provided by the ominiscent narrator, who, unfortunately, had decided it wasn't becoming to describe the sexual encounters of the escapee who, keen to act on decades of repressed desire, loved to cruise (while disappointing while reading, I can see this was probably a reasonably choice on the part of an author who, likely, has never gone cruising). As an aside, this is the straightest book with a gay protagonist I have ever read (not in a bad way).

This was such a great holiday read, I loved it! I know many would understand 'Holiday read' to mean shallow, fun-but-devoid-of-literary-merits. Here, I use it to mean: joyful (though also heartbreaking at times), very queer and very, very horny, with loads of really well-written sex scenes.

It is sold as a queer-er, 1990s Orlando, and I would need to have read Orlando (on my list) to be able to comment on that. What I can say is that Paul is a careless gay boy, a ready-to-fall-in-love-so-hard dyke, a curious gender-queer person, constantly trying to have sex as a way to connect, have a fun, feel alive, deaden the pain, self-destruct, or just while the time away. They can be a sissy boy, a hunky gay man, a soft butch, or a feminine girl flirting with frat boys at parties. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it goes horribly wrong. Mortality is all around, as the AIDS crisis looms, and then hits. But there is no tragic ending for Paul, nor a happy one either, the book ends, but, I imagine, Paul just keeps at it.

While the book is marketed as an 'AIDS memoir', I would rather describe it as a provocative essay. In the first pages, Sarah professes to hate books that revolve around a single argument, yet I'm tempted to summarise the one at the core of this book as follows:

*Before AIDS, queers in New York (and possibly everywhere) were outcasts and rebels who made edgy art, which sometimes was good, sometimes was not; but it was experimental and meaningful. After AIDS, most gay people are just hipsters and yuppies, who work in the arts but have sold out and/or are concerned with professional success and paying rents, something that admittedly has become a lot harder to do. AIDS was the key event that marked, and possibly even caused, this transition.

I don't buy the causal relation implied here (AIDS having engendered gentrification), although I'm sure it looks that way from Sarah's standpoint. But that's very much secondary. The description of how gays became shallow is absolutely convincing, and the analogy/link between this shift and gentrification really helpful. Sarah manages to critique some personal consumption choices while keeping the focus on the loss of collective organising and political vision. Finally, I feel compelled to mention how strong a ranter Sarah is. She rants about homophobia, she rants about chic restaurants, she rants about lesbians making babies, she rants about MFAs and the publishing industry, she rants about youth these days...and I'm here for it. I hope to stay inspired and keep my inner gentrifier at bay.

The premise of The City and the City is fascinating: two overlapping cities functioning as separate countries, separated by a cross-hatched border. Residents are taught from a young age to unsee what happens in the other half, the separation policed by a mysterious higher power, Breach.

Knowing China Melville’s legendary status as a leftist author, I was expecting this to go in the direction of political satire, as the setting would lend itself so well to problematising borders, or perhaps more broadly our collective capacity to pretend not to see. Instead, I would firmly place the plot in the crime novel genre and, I must say, not in a particularly satisfying way. I did not find the characters fully fleshed-out or convincing, I did not think the twists were particularly well constructed, and I wasn’t dying to know who did it. I was also disappointed at how pro-cops the book was, given my aforementioned expectations. Did I miss something?

When I was in my first years of high school, in the early 2000s, this book was all the rage, especially among the leftist teens from my provincial town who were trying out politics in the alter-globalisation movement. I joined a little, from the sidelines, too shy and awkward, and perhaps a bit too arrogant, to be able to feel part. With the perverse logic of the adolescence, I decided that reading such a cool book would be an uncool thing to do. Too cliché. Urgh. Twenty-plus years later, as a white tourist in India, I decided it was finally time and a good way to immerse myself a little in the country. So cliché that it is original again.

I had a lot of time to read and it kept me very good company. The story moves back and forth between the present (i.e. the 1990s) and the 1960s, when siblings Rahel and Esta were children, living with their mother Ammu, their grandma, and a host of other relatives. They childhood is a sort of creepy lost paradise: happy and tragic, dark but not as dark as the lives that await them. Gender, class and cast are grappled with in a way that felt, to me, quite useful. All the characters felt to me very believable and three-dimensional, except perhaps for Velutha, the smart, handsome, sweet Paravan-caste carpenter who is uncomfortably saint-like. I should also mention that, although the story is very sad indeed, the language is extremely playful, sometimes in a chuckle-out-loud sort of way.

*Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn't an "exactly when." It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha's silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.

Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was--into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets--to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers awhile to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.

Estha occupied very little space in the world*

I read this book in my twenties, but managed to completely erase any memory of it. It isn't just that I didn't remember the plot: I didn't even retain a vague impression of what it was like for me to read it. This time around, my mind was blown. Perhaps even more blown because I read the book before and after going to see the play that has been showing at the ITA.

I don't want to draw a point by point comparison, because that will feel like I'm dissing the play, which is a perfectly enjoyable adaptation, with some very hot dances. The main issue may be that, if one looks only at the plot, the book is a crazy over-the-top gay melodrama. But, Baldwin being Baldwin, it manages to also be a very nuanced book about masculinity, sexuality and inequalities - in the best, non-didactic possible way. The notion of 'being out' is refracted through the different characters. The wealthy older men in the book, Jacques and Guillame, can afford to be 'out', but pay a high price, despised by everyone, including David and Giovanni. They are also creepy af. Giovanni is out enough to admit he is in a desperate sort of love with David, but his courage seems to be born out of loneliness and alienation. There is nothing 'gay' about him. He despises the effeminate men preying on boys in the bars, and prefers to take refuge in his room. As a poor Italian migrant Giovanni is clearly racialised in David's eyes, not quite Black, but not white either, and class and race arguably are as much of an obstacle to this doomed love. And doomed it certainly is, relentlessly so. Every sentence is beautiful and terrible.

Despite its title, this book is only approximately 20% of lesbian novel. The rest is "high brow author reflecting on her creative process in a fictionalized interview form", which is about as bad as it sounds. To be fair to the author, the format works in as far as it forces one (i.e. me) to long for the lesbian novel bits in order to find out what happens, and also to enjoy some vicarious sex/romance. That's an interesting literary device, but not enough to sustain a book.

I have low patience for artists talking about being artists in general terms, and found the interview bits fairly pretentious and boring. This especially stood out because the author is clearly ambivalent about lesbian romance novels: I had the feeling that she wants to like them, knows that not liking them is uncool [controversial opinion: nothing wrong with disliking them, you do you Renee], but somehow cannot get pass the fact that she doesn't. So, she feels self-conscious about her romance writing, constantly wants to interject, justify, self-deprecate, let us know she knows better than that...when it's the other 80% of the book that needs some more self-awareness. Harsh, I know. The author does sound lovely though, and I hear some people enjoyed it.

In this age of aggressive queer-baiting and pink-washing, sometimes I hear that 'representation is important' and want to bang my head against the wall. Fuck representation. I really do not need a Disney princess to look like me, thank you very much. Then I come across a book like this, clearly written by a queer person for queer people because of a genuine desire to share, and I calm down. Because it is of course important to feel not-alone.

What can I say, I love A.K. Summers, I want her to be my friend and build shelves together. She is an old-style butch lady, part of an identity group that is almost disappearing. She knows it and mourns it in the book, at times perhaps coming a bit close to a 'why does gender have to be so complicated' stance, or at least a 'youth these days' stance, but she is saved but what seems like an honest sense of curiosity and openness to try and learn why fewer younger people feel able or willing to identify as masculine women, a desire I see expressed through the list of reading recommendations at the end of the book.

I also love the book's graphic style. It really has the vibe of a DIY internet strip, seeming rough and ready compared to the many recent graphic novels where every single frame could become a picture to hang on the wall, and every detail is carefully thought through.

Butch pregnancy sounds tough, but in the way many things in many lives are tough. A.K. Summers if freaked out by her body, feels lonely, is in pain, doesn't feel up to the task - all things that are surely related to her gender identity but also probably quite common, if unspoken, experiences for pregnant people? In one of the last spreads, she's giving birth and imagines herself on a jumping board, realising that whether she jumps or not, she's going fall: she no longer needs to feel she won't be able to do it, because she's in the middle of it and there is no stopping it.