This big ol' pile o' books is threatening to topple onto my workspace if I don't deal with it, but I tell myself that I ought to write about what I've been reading before I put it all away. Writing about books makes me happy, usually, but this particular pile is a bit mixed. I'll highlight the three I found most interesting:
Let's get the bad news out of the way first: George Saunders's new collection of short stories, Liberation Day, is kind of meh. I love George Saunders and I always look forward to introducing my students to the weird but oddly familiar world of "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," but this collection feels like a rehash of things he's written before, as if he's transported old characters to new settings to say the same old things--things worth saying, yes, but when a writer known for originality starts recycling his own material and becomes predictable, I lose patience. He's best when he's moving into new territory, as in "The Mom of Bold Action," in which he channels the inner voice of a mother who's constantly attempting to transform ordinary life into compelling fiction, casting her can opener, for instance, as a character in an imagined story called "The Trusty Little Opener." Everything she encounters becomes fodder for the fiction she isn't writing:
"The Tree Who Longed to Come Inside." Once there was a tree who longed to come inside and sit by the woodstove. He knew this was weird. He knew that his fellow trees were being cruelly burned in there. But, gosh, the kitchen looked so inviting. Because of all the hard work the mother had done. Painting, and whatnot. When she should have been writing.
These false starts always end before the mom can write anything down, but when she finally manages to fill pages with angry words, her words surprisingly create real-life consequences for her family and community. This obsession with the power of words appears in several other stories as well, mostly in dystopian settings where an oppressive power controls language in order to control people, but the idea comes across most tenderly in "Love Letter," in which a grandparent tries to give his grandson advice without arousing the suspicions of certain Thought Police who seem to have sprung from today's news.
Control of language also plays a part in The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, a novel that beautifully recreates the awkwardness of female adolescent friendship while also raising interesting questions about ownership of stories. Two girls in post-World-War-II France entertain themselves by fabricating fictional worlds, only to find that their stories can cause real harm in their own lives and those of others:
A long time ago, when the game of writing was only an idea, like the idea of growing happiness, Fabienne said that we should write books together so people would know how it felt to be us. That, I now know, was the only mistake she made. What we wrote was about many things, but not about us. When the books were read by others, we were nowhere to be found.
The girls found in this beautifully written novel feel real and the consequences of their fabulation are utterly believable, even if some of the minor characters seem to have stepped out of the pages of a Dickens novel.
Maria Dahvana Headley takes a different route toward breathing new life into old stories. Her translation of Beowulf, published in 2020, feels fresh and powerful and poetic, primarily because she imagines the poem being told by a bunch of guys sitting around a mead-hall drinking. The problematic first word of the poem, "Hwaet," has been previously translated as "Lo!" or "Behold!" or "So," but Headley starts with "Bro," which feels just right. Headley's translation sometimes echoes the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse without sounding stuffy or artificial, as in this snippet from Beowulf's boast to Hrothgar:
I heard tell of Grendel from sailors--seriously,
the whole world knows the stories, swapped and sworn,
of Heorot Hall's early curfew, how every night
you surrender to silence when the sun sprints
out of heaven, leaving the celestial dome dark.
Every elder knew I was the man for you, and blessed
my quest, King Hrothgar, because where I'm from?
I'm the strongest and the boldest, and the bravest and the best.
Yes: I mean--I may have bathed in the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Seriously, if I were in a position to teach Beowulf to young people, this is the version I'd choose: totally un-stuffy and full of fresh fun. (But watch out--the alliteration is contagious.)
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