Howling Frog Books

Here we have a good chunk of my April reading, except the CC Spin title which will be out in a few days, and the long-term, slow books I'm reading, like Red Famine and Les Miserables.  So I do have some more serious titles, but also I get so sleepy these days when I'm reading!  I know we all have this problem...  Carrie's War , by Nina Bawlden : I'd heard this middle-grade novel described with high praise, and a copy had been sitting on my tablet for a while.  And yep, it's really good!  12-year-old Carrie and her brother Nick are evacuated from London and sent to rural Wales (which means there's very little of the outside war in the story; it's all about Carrie figuring out her life).  They live with Mr. Evans, the village shopkeeper, and his sister.  Mr. Evans is fanatically frugal and bullies everyone around him, though he seems to be totally unaware of the effects; he's surprised when people don't like him.  "Auntie Lou" is kind but ...

 The Popol Vuh (Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings), translated by Dennis Tedlock I am so happy with my Spin title!   The Popol Vuh is amazing stuff, and Tedlock puts in plenty of explanatory material to help with comprehension.  I loved it.  Mythology/religion readers, put this on your list! The Popol Vuh is the holy book of the Quiché people in Guatamala -- the Mayans.  The book tells of the creation of the earth, the start of the Quiché, and goes right down to the writers' own day, which was the 1550s.  The men who wrote it down kept themselves anonymous for fear of punishment.   (Tedlock is of the opinion that they were the three Masters of Ceremonies mentioned near the end.) Of course I can't go through the whole thing, but...at first there is nothing but a quiet sky and sea.  The gods arrive and decide to create an earth and people for it; they want the people to be able to na...

 Seeing Red, by Lina Meruane (Sangre in el ojo) I was quite interested in this Chilean novel, which I saw billed as "one of Chile's most exciting young writers" in her first work translated into English, which was about trauma and its effects.  I didn't quite expect what I got! Lina is a young Chilean grad student living in the US with her boyfriend, Ignacio, but she has to be extremely careful with her eyes, which have a bunch of extra veins growing in them, and they're brittle.  So the first thing that happens is that the veins burst and Lina becomes very nearly blind as one eye fills with blood and the other comes pretty close.* Immediately, her life becomes far more difficult, as she has to take a leave of absence and usually depends on Ignacio to get around.  The doctor wants to wait and see if the blood kind of goes away.  Her family back in Chile want her home immediately and for her to see a proper Chilean doctor; she and Ignacio do travel down, but Lina...

Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, by Angelica Gorodischer, trans. by Ursula K. Le Guin I'd really been looking forward to this, and it did not disappoint.  Angelica Gorodischer is an Argentinian writer, and has published quite a bit, but this is her first book to be published in English.  This book was originally published in two parts, in the early 1980s.  Each part is a collection of stories. Most of the time, the stories are told by an old storyteller -- but not always.  Some are different.  All purport to tell small parts of the extremely long history of the Empire, which has existed in various forms for thousands of years.  There are dark ages, many dynasties, and waxings and wanings of power. The first story actually tells of the complete destruction of the Empire in what you might call prehistoric times, since all knowledge was lost for quite some time.  People lived in a new stone age until one young man ventured further...

I now have seven books sitting in front of me to review, and some of them were read well before the fire.  Now I can barely remember them.  So, I'm going to do quickie reviews of all of them, and consider that a fresh start to the winter season. The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy, by Daniel Kalder:     Oh boy, this was not to be missed!  How do you pass up that title?  Kalder gives us a tour of the terrible, awful literary productions of 20th century dictators, from Lenin on down.  The material is no fun, but he helps the reader survive with a large dose of wit.  The big names go first, with Mao taking up quite a lot of space, but there's room for a whole lot of less-famous dictators, such as Salazar of Portugal and Hoxha of Armenia.  Everybody felt the need to write books that would dictate how the world should work: Gaddafi wrote the Green Book , Saddam Hussein wrote allegorical...

The Seven Madmen , by Roberto Arlt Why did I pick this novel?  Well, it came along and I was looking for an Argentinian title that wasn't Borges.  I love Borges!  But I thought I ought to branch out a bit.  And this has a pretty intriguing title, plus I had heard of Erdosain before.  Upon such frail whims are my reading choices based. Background: this novel was written around 1929, thus before anything I know about Argentinian history.  No Peron yet.  (Probably Hercule Poirot's buddy Hastings is running a cattle farm somewhere!)  The Depression hasn't even begun yet. Erdosain is a hapless guy who is getting fired from his sad little job as a bill collector.  He embezzled 600 pesos* and he's got to pay it back right away.  Then his wife leaves him, and all he's got left is this awful cousin he hates.  Erdosain wanders the streets of Buenos Aires and meets up with a bunch of guys, most of whom are pretty strange, but the strange...

The Story of My Teeth , by Valeria Luiselli Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, otherwise known as 'Highway,' has a career change in mid-life and becomes an auctioneer and collector.  Not just any auctioneer, but a legend and story-spinner, who can auction anything by using the auctioneering styles he has learned and invented: hyperbolic, parabolic, allegoric, and more.  Having bought Marilyn Monroe's teeth and implanted them in place of his own, he decides to auction off his original teeth as historical artifacts from famous people.  And then his estranged son steals his teeth and imprisons him in a room with scary video clowns... I am not even kidding about that last one.  This is a surreal novel that reminds me a lot of Mario Bellatin's Shiki Nagaoka .  Bellatin even makes an appearance here, along with many other literary figures, or sometimes just their names attached to other characters.  Highway has an uncle named Juan Pablo Sánchez Sartre. There are a lot ...

Los de abajo -- The Underdogs , by Mariano Azuela It's my very first official Reading Around the World title, and I chose to go next door to Mexico. The Underdogs (literally, those from underneath) is a short novel about the Mexican Revolution written in 1915; Azuela served as a doctor during the fighting.  I've got the Norton Critical Edition (and if you're going to read it, you should too, unless you know a lot more about the Mexican Revolution than I do), and the translator says not only that it's the best novel about the revolution, but in his opinion "may actually be the best Mexican novel ever." Demetrio Macías is a tough peasant rancher in the sierra.  When he offends some local official, the Federales burn his home and he becomes the leader of a ratty bunch of rebels.  They move around, doing some fighting and some looting, and when Demetrio is injured, they spend a lot of time in one village.  A literate journalist, Luis Cervantes, joins them; he ...

Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo As I've confessed several times here, Latin American literature is one of the things I'm not very good at.  So I purposely put a few titles on my Classics Club list, so that I would jolly well have to read some.   Several of those didn't work out as I hoped, so I've done some switching around as I've learned a bit more, and this is one of my replacement titles. Juan Rulfo, besides being mentioned in the Shiki Nagaoka book I wrote about the other day, became a major literary figure in Mexico in the 1950s.  His surrealism, vivid imagery, and inclusion of magic in his novels was a new departure in Latin American literature and was a large part of the movement to magical realism that is so well-known.  So here we go, one of the earlier works of magical realism: He is traveling to Comala, his mother's home village.  She is dead, but told him that his father, Pedro Páramo, was there.  The village is empty now -- nearly all...

Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction , by Mario Bellatin This is one of the odder books I've come across lately.  Bellatin is a Mexican novelist who writes experimental fiction stuff.  This is a biography and analysis of the famous, mysterious, and reclusive Japanese (?) author, Shiki Nagoka, whose massive nose led him to spend his life within a tightly circumscribed neighborhood -- living alone, working at a photo booth, and writing.  He lived part of his life in a monastic cell. Nagaoka's work has a cult following and has inspired many famous novelists (such as Juan Rulfo and Jose Maria Arguedas), but none of it has ever been translated into English, except for one edition that was entirely destroyed.  His most famous work, a novel, in written in an untranslatable language and still hasn't been completely deciphered. The writer's day job at a photo booth gave him plenty of inspiration through images, so his work included many photos.  There are quite a few...

Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya Way back in college I had to take a course on modern American literature, which I was quite annoyed about at the time, but turned out to be a good thing because I found out that there were lots of books I liked after all.  One of our titles was Bless Me, Ultima, and at that time I enjoyed it.  I decided to put it on my Classics Club list as a re-read to see if I would like it again.    Antonio is a small boy torn between loyalties.  His mother wants him to be a priest and like her family, the quiet, earth-connected Lunas; his father wants him to follow the independent and wild M á rez ways.  He loves the church but is drawn to the hints of older animistic beliefs he sees around him and wonders if the golden carp in the river might be a better god to follow.  As Antonio starts to grow up and witness the tragedies that happen in his town, he depends on his special relationship with Ultima, the curandera , for...