Maria Maria and other stories – 3/5
I picked up this book because it was nominated for the National Book Award, and it reminds me of how dubious I often am of story collections being nominated for fiction prizes that should probably go to novels. This is a perfectly good collection of stories, with some stories really standing out like the opening story in which a witch is dealing with a troublesome class of new students in a college witching class.
Other stories that stand out include a story about a woman dealing with her husband’s remains, and the title novella, which traces the lineage of a group of women named Maria through time as they sort out who they are in the world. Part of the problem of many story collections, especially debut ones is that some of the stories are very good and some just are not as good. If I had spent more time looking, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the less polished ones were included along with the polished ones to help pad out a still very slim collection.
“Tijuana
Epifania Fogata gave birth to three girls and four boys. My dad’s bedtime stories were full of defeated warriors and lost battles. Each night my grandmother asked him, What did they do wrong? How could they have won? When he was a teenager, he was entrusted with details of an inherited revolution. Two of his sisters were sent to schools in New England and one was sent to Paris. His brothers were taught to dig.
The walls along the border between Mexico and the Unites States disrupted the natural migration pattern of every living creature that couldn’t fly or swim. The mountain lions and jaguars suffered tremendous losses to their populations. They would have become extinct if not for the ingenuity and vast underground network built by the Fogata Landscape Company. When the mountain lions discovered they could travel under the freeways, their populations boomed and spread across Southern California. Moving the jaguars required meticulous planning. The Fogatas devoted decades preparing for their journey.
Nha Trang
After we all graduated from high school, I moved to L.A., my sister stayed home, one of my cousins became a trophy wife, and her sister backpacked across Southeast Asia. At the farewell barbecue before Miriam’s trip, she asked my dad if he had anything she could take for him when she visited Vietnam. Miriam told us about a documentary she’d seen about veterans who went back to the jungle to do a burial ceremony for the lives they’d taken—and for the parts of themselves now lost. She said she’d be happy to take something or bring something back if that would help him heal. My dad said he had nothing to heal, he was A OK, baby and served himself another plate of ribs.”
The Haunting of Hajji Hotak – 3/5 Stars
This story collection has several good stories and three that definitively stand out. The opening story, with the wonderful title “Playing Metal Gear V: The Phantom Pain”, tells in second person voice about going to the store in order to buy the new Metal Gear game. This involves saving up among other things, and when you start to play it, you kill a lot of Russian soldiers, which you like because you’re family is Afghani and then you kill a bunch of Afghani soldiers, which you ignore, because it’s Metal Gear. It goes on, but this sensibility of making irrational but understandable choices to have a little fun speaks to me. There’s a novella in here too, The Tale of Dully’s Reversion, about a grad student who reverts into the form of a monkey and accompanies his mother, an activist, on a mission is also very strong. The last story and title story is also very good about viewing a family through the eyes of the US intelligence officer spying on them. Over all the collection is mixed, but with several strong entries.
“You don’t know why, exactly, you’ve been assigned to this particular family, in this particular home, in West Sacramento, California. It’s not your job to wonder why. Nonetheless, after a few days, you begin to speculate that the suspect at the heart of your assignment is the father, code-named Hajji, even though you have no reason to believe that he has ever actually completed the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. In fact, Hajji hardly leaves home at all. He spends hours at a time wandering around his house or his yard, searching for things to repair—rotted planks of wood, missing shingles, burned-out bulbs, broken mowers, shattered windows, unhinged doors—until his old injuries act up, and he is forced to lie down wherever he is working, and if he happens to be in the attic or the basement, or in some other secluded area of the house, away from his wife and his mother and his four children, sometimes he will allow himself to quietly mutter verses from the Quran, invocations to Allah, until his ache seems to ebb and he returns to work.
When Hajji has exhausted himself, he often retires to the living room, where he watches murder mysteries or foreign coverage of conflicts in Islamic countries. If his wife, code-named Habibi, is in the kitchen, and if she isn’t already chatting with one of her many friends, most of whom you know Hajji despises, he will request a cup of tea and ask about his mother’s health, which is never very good, but Hajji’s wife doesn’t tell him this, because his mother, code-named Bibi, is sitting just a few feet away, and though she doesn’t acknowledge her son’s presence, Bibi is always listening.”
Shutter – 2/5 stars
I kept waiting for this novel to open up it’s premise more and get compelling. The writing also suffers from a little too much…well “I’m writing a novel and people talk like this”ness. The story involves a crime photographer who can see dead people and this leads her to be a useful investigator in part, if any one would bother to believe her. The execution is not as fun or compelling as I would like and not weird or dark enough to work in the other direction. The result is a split bag that spills its contents too readily on the ground.
The Bird Catcher – 4/5 Stars
A very good novel by Gayl Jones, who reminds us with ease how smart and worldly she is. We have a love-triangle happening with our narrator, a romance novelist turned travel writer, who is in Ibiza with a couple of a friends. The husband, whom she is attracted to, and his wife, an artist who has bouts of “madness” are also there, and the three get involved in the early parts of the novel. The novel opens up in the second half to involve another would-be suitor as well as a collection of kind of impressionistic snippet of thought to close us out.
The Shadow Puppet – 3/5 Stars
A small mystery and an early Maigret in which Maigret witnesses a series of strange signaling and then a later murder. This all leads to a dead man with a questionable will, several women the man seemed to be involved with, and a step-son who might not get any inheritance. A minor one and largely forgettable.
If I Survive You – 4/5 Stars
This novel in stories circulates around a family of Jamaican immigrants in Florida, but especially the two sons Deleon and Trelawny. Trelawny doesn’t look Jamaican people keep telling, by which they mean dark-skinned and Black. Instead, they ask him a lot where he’s from or make accusations about him. The opening story in the collection is a long second-person story about going to college and to the bane of all first-generation children being an English major. The final story in the collection revisits this form as the two brothers fight over their literally sinking house and their father’s love. The other stories tell other stories from the family some in first person and some in third. All the stories are very good, and together the book works as a novel and one that I liked a lot.
“The summer he turned thirteen, Cukie Panton set out for the Florida Keys to meet his father for the first time. By then, Ox meant little more to Cukie than a syllable spat from his mother’s lips. What he knew of Ox was that he was American— the catalyst for Cukie having been born in Baptist Hospital, right on Kendall Drive—and that Ox had stuck out the first two months of fatherhood, then bounced, leaving to Cukie the dried ink on his birth record that spelled out Lennox Martin.
More than a dozen years after this abrupt departure, Cukie’s mom answered the phone to hear a remorseful Ox, saying he should know his boy. By this time Cukie felt ambivalent. It didn’t help that Daphne Panton figured that the drink or else some brush with death must have resuscitated Ox’s conscience to bring him calling. Perhaps Andrew had inspired Ox’s reemergence, the hurricane having wiped away so much that would have to be rebuilt, not even a year ago. Whatever the affliction, Cukie’s mother assumed it was ephemeral. The calls continued, though, and when plans grew specific, she told Cukie to pack his duffel and they departed Kendall for Smuggler’s Key.
In summers past, they’d have followed U.S. 1 thirty short minutes south to Cutler Ridge, where Cukie would spend weeks with his cousins Trelawny and Delano. But Aunty Sanya and Uncle Topper had separated in recent months, dividing their sons and Cukie’s nearest idea of a functioning family unit. His mother hadn’t offered the why behind their separation when she relayed the news, but when she mentioned Uncle Topper now, she dropped the Uncle.”