The Night Tiger

 

The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I felt like this was a small crash course on Malaysia in the 1950's--the food, culture, language, beliefs, traditions, industry, and attitudes about English colonialism. Then add a some magical realism, a mystery or two and an unusual romance. Perhaps it was a little over ambitious but I enjoyed the story and the characters and learned quite a bit about that part of the world (at least in that time period).

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A keramat animal is a sacred beast, a creature with the ability to come and go like a phantom, trampling sugarcane or raiding livestock with impunity.  It's always distinguished by some peculiarity, such a missing tusk or a rare albino color.  But the most common indicator is withered or maimed foot.

After all, weren't the Confucian Virtues supposed to describe the perfect man?  A man who abandoned virtue lost his humanity and became no better than a beast.  

The Snow Child

 

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A beautiful retelling of a Russian folk tale about a childless couple that builds a snow child that comes to life. The magic in this rendition is that it gives a rational explanation for the magical elements, but still leaves plenty unexplained questions that enchantment can exist if you want. The Alaskan wilderness is its own character, wonderfully described so that you could feel the cold and see the beauty and awe in such a wild place. The story helps us remember the magic and beauty in each child, that miracles can happen if we are willing to help each other, and that love for each other is precious because life is precarious. Very enjoyable book.

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So he, too, was graying.  Each of them fading away without the other's notice.

need

 

need

the geography of my need

is found in your knees,

--connective tissue holding

a petal of bone--

your bone a hillock

raising my diamond depression,

my ballerina-pink satin scar

kissing your sanguine red welt,

our two griefs mating into sunset.

when we stitch them together 

knock-kneed, three-legged,

arm in arm, let our 

free hands violently swing

else we come

tumbling down

my knee on your knee

like your teeth on my ear

like my nails on your throat

Translation State

 

Translation State by Ann Leckie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A beautiful science fiction novel about what it means to belong. Leckie has more imagination in her little finger than most people have their whole lives. She explores belonging across borders of culture, gender, technology (AI), and species (aliens). Can you declare yourself to be something you are inherently not? What are the personal, interpersonal, and political ramifications of that? And even if, say, an alien decides it wants to be human, looks like a human, acts like a human, are there behaviors and urges that will always define them as alien? Leckie deftly shows the ramifications and shortfalls of simply declaring to be something you are not, but also how each character (species) has abilities that benefit the wider universe. She also makes a beautiful case of how a family (chosen, if need be) can be the ultimate place that you belong.

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How do I know what you say is true? I asked.   Words can say things that don't exist.

"You have only small and seemingly pointless choices available to you.  But if there is anything I have been trying to teach you, it is that small actions can have larger consequences.  If one has only small choices available, one must be patient, and canny."

"When you have decided what you want, remember that what one will not acknowledge is what one cannot properly control."

The Dutch House

 

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A second reading because: Patchett. This time around focused on how Patchett tells the story by others telling stories, how she used the idea of choice--can you just decide to not feel things? can you decide to feel things?, and the how places (not just the Dutch House) were used as conduits of emotion and reflective of a person's values and ideals (oddly, I realized cars figured predominately as a universally loved and cherished place). Once again, I was struck by Patchett's ability to create full characters (mostly--I have a feeling the stepmom Andrea would like her day in court) and bring a sense of parallelism so that despite the growth and change, there is a sense of closure and justice.

First reading: Ann Patchett can do very little wrong in my book. I liked it even better after book club discussion. It raises a lot of questions, without giving a lot of answers. Themes of class, priorities, judgement, forgiveness, and parenting. And of course, brilliantly written.

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what I felt in those blinded days just after my father's death was not the grief for who I had lot but the shame over what I had done.

That loss was too private, shameful in a way I couldn't understand.

exhausted by the burden of so many petals.

Well, your mother hated it and Andrea loved it.  He thought he'd solved the problem.

New York represented her shame about things that were in no way her fault.

"Home is so sad," Maeve said.  "It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go as if to win them back.  Instead, bereft of anyone to please, it withers so, having no heart to put aside the theft."  Once she was certain Maeve had stopped, Celeste picked up the line in a softer voice.  "And turn again to what it started as, a joyous shot at how things ought to be, long fallen wide.  You can see how it was: look athe pictures and the cutlery.  The music in the piano stool.  That vase."

I'd never been in the position of getting my head around what I'd been given.  I only understood what I'd lost.

Fluffy's stories had stayed fresh because she had kept them to herself. Fluffy still knew what she knew.

Any configuration of luxury seen from a distance felt like a window on my youth.

We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.

laying the tremendous burden of her grief and shame directly on my sister's heart.

 

her voice as quiet as a page turned.

They were living together in their own paradise of memory.  

I can use the time I've got to be furious, or I can feel like the luckiest person in the world.

Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.

Look at the three of us, undone by a house.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is what I appreciated about Black Leopard, Red Wolf: the use of language is exceptional. I felt almost like I was reading a different language and I'll admit it took me at least 10% of the novel before it clicked and instead of struggling through, I was immersed in this strange new world. It's a dark world--dark being an understatement--dark, crude, primal. I'm reading the Old Testament at the same time, and it is definitely the same sort of setting, giants, talking animals, magic, curses, vengeance, violence and sex. There are several passages I had to gloss over just from sheer exhaustion of violence and lewdness. However, I did grow fond of Tracker and his misfit band, laughed, grimaced, cried. There is mystery, comedy, romance, family drama, power struggles, riots and uprisings, monsters and witchcraft. Some of the most original world-building as well as some of the scariest monsters I've encountered. The ending seems to show that humans are the cruelest of all the monsters and the most illogical--how we will grab at power regardless of its consequences (for ourselves, our country, even the instrument of power itself). I wish it was a bit more hopeful, and despite all its virtues, I probably won't ever re-read because it is so dark and crude.

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You kill the boy who is you, to become the man who is you, but everything must be learned. 

night fat with heat

Of all the terrible features of your form, shame is the worst.

Quiet is the opposite of sound, not the absence of it.  This was absence.

The animal had learned of the shame of men, the same man who once said that the Leopard would have been born with skirts if he was supposed to wear any. 

For you to say that sadness is not the absence of happiness, but the opposite of it.

Something to fight for, or nothing to lose, which makes you a finer warrior?  I have no answer.

Even going down, we stood high enough to see all of the city and the flat land beyond it.  I heard once that the first builders of this city, back when this was not yet a city, and them not yet fully men, were just trying to build towers tall enough to get back to the kingdom of sky and start an war in the land of gods.

Our wisdom is foolishness to the foolish.

miracle fruit--makes bitter taste sweet (a real fruit).

It is not that you lie, but that you don't know truth.  There was enough venom spewing from your mouth to kill nine buffalo.

Word is divine wish, they say.  Word is invisible to all but the gods.  So when woman or man write words they dare to look at the divine.  Oh, what power.

Glyphs are supposed to be the language of the gods.

Someone cried that Kongor is lost, for how can we have a future without our past?

Everything in the world cooks down to two.  Either-or, if-then, yes-no, night-day, good-bad.  You all believe in twos so much I wonder if any of you can count to three. 

Western Lane

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is between a 3 and 4. It was a short, sweet read about a young British Indian girl and her family trying to cope with the death of the mother. Gopi's father attempts to bring purpose and routine to the family by training his three daughters rigorously in the game of squash. Gopi, as the youngest, shows the most passion and promise but the pull of grief proves to be too much and the family starts to unravel. What seems to start as a tolerant deference to the father turns into a passion and love of the game for Gopi, if not for her sisters. But Gopi's ghost mother hovers in the pages as different characters attempt to cling to her. It's a little unclear whether it is the obsession of squash and new friends or the ghost of Gopi's mother is responsible for the ultimate dissolution of their family. Although Gopi narrates, there is a dream-like quality to this book, and her intentions and motivations are not obvious.(view spoiler)[especially her decision to live with her uncle. Why would she choose to live there when she could not play squash there? (hide spoiler)]. An interesting read, that could almost have been longer exploring themes more in-depth.

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