Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Why Reading Other Novelists Helps Improve One's Own Writing

A Conspiracy of Paper (Benjamin Weaver, #1)A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As someone who has written an in-depth novel with lots of characters and intrigue, I can see my own shortcomings as a writer as they mirror my criticisms of the shortcomings of A Conspiracy of Paper.

Years ago, I had decided to read it while I was reading novels to learn how to tell my own story of complexity. This novel is recommended on its jacket as a novel similar to An Instance of the Fingerpost, the latter which I consider to be one of the most brilliant contemporary historical fiction novels ever written. Mind you, An Instance might be the first historical fiction that I had ever read, to my memory, so that could have been part of its mystique. But that book is brilliant.

I love brilliant writing. This author does a commendable job of writing in an English prose of perfection for the time period, although certain phrases are used ad nausea ("for the nonce..."). Nevertheless, Liss has a way of using witty, sophisticated dialogue, in a Jane Austen manner that makes you want to hear what the characters are saying. He also catches the time period brilliantly, and transports you to 18th Century England. You can almost smell the putrid smells of London, and the visuals of the time-period are like a movie. The clothing, the hackneys, the beggars, the streets, the filth, are conjured up admirably. He literally places you there.

The problem with the novel is the problem with my own: there are way too many characters. In his case, however, because they are all in the same field of employment (relating to business and stock-jobbing, in things of a financial nature) they all blend into one another. There are so many names, but the faces all look the same to me. So, I did not care for them. Luckily, my readers have told me differently about my own characters, thankfully.

The characters that did interest me were better defined and quite memorable, usually persons in whom the protagonist had an actual friendly relationship: Miriam and Elias, in particular, whose friendships with the protagonist Weaver were human and relevant to the story. As long as one of them was in the scene, I could be guaranteed to pay attention.

The theme of the book does come across, albeit in a muddled way, but just when you're about to give up, the author inserts a paragraph that sums up where we are in the book, and that guided me along. I wish, however, that I could have gleaned what was going on without his paraphrasing. I also didn't like that I could read the mind of the author as he was writing, not knowing exactly where he was going in telling the story. You could tell where he was stuck, where he had to pivot, and when he was lost in his own story-telling. His character spoke too much about this, which was part of the mystery, but which I could not help but hear the desperation of the writer. I could be wrong, however. But those musings jumped out at me.

Writing about fraud is very difficult. I know that as an attorney who takes on complex cases. He's done a commendable job, however, of explaining where financial fraud's beginnings lay: in England in the creation of the stock markets. Overall, the book is a cautionary tale for how we find ourselves where we do now, as a civilization, creating value in worthless paper that is manipulated by central banks, employed by persons of questionable repute.

I doubt I'll read this book again, whereas I will read An Instance of the Fingerpost again. I'm not sure I recommend the novel except for the complimentary aspects I mentioned above.

I will say though, that David Liss, as an American, has done a good job of copying the brogue and the feeling of the English, through the eyes of an outsider, a Jewish Englishman. There was no trace of his American background in his writing, except for his location for some of the major meetings in the novel, in a restaurant called "The Laughing Negro." Unless there is an actual place in English history, I would say his need to insert American pejorative parlance in a novel about England was totally out of place, and an indicator of why he may aspire to be English, but cannot think like a Brit, in the long run.

I should give this 3.5 stars, and maybe a 4.

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Monday, April 17, 2017

For Black Diaspora Reading Aficionados, There's No Place Like Home: Sister's Uptown Bookstore.

Proud to be feted by the only Black-owned bookstore in Manhattan
I still fancy myself as international, although I haven't travelled overseas in over 15 years. I traded in my passport for being my mother's caregiver. I miss the sights and smells of traveling overseas. Moreover, I miss the freedom of feeling...well...free. More free than in my own native country. I have lived in the Philippines and Thailand, traveled to Brazil, Jamaica, and Nigeria, and can say that I felt more secure and at home in all of those places than in my own USA.

Pitiful, but true.

Now, I know there's some falsity in my assertions because, when I traveled, I was perceived as a regular American. Here, not so much. Also, I had money to spend, and the color green seemed to overwhelm any trepidation people may have had about my brown-colored skin. So, in many ways, although I didn't look like a white Tammy-tourist, I was still "the other". But no one seemed to make a big deal about it.

I felt comfortable even in England, where I lived for a year as an Atlantic Fellow in Public Policy, although I didn't escape from being noticed by one drunkard at a formal dinner who slurred loudly enough for me to hear him say to a man next to him,"What is that?" referring to me. I guess my neatly twisted hair made me seem other-worldly to his jaundiced, inebriated eyes.

That question should have been my retort about him, however, as he looked like a W.C. Field's caricature, with his pregnant belly and his toupee askew. He was quite comical. I pretended not to hear because I didn't want to embarrass the man who received the remark, and who, shocked, immediately made an overt gesture to speak with me as a social balm to deflect the perceived wound his uncouth colleague had attempted to inflict upon me.

But I heard him. We hear it all the time.  Black people don't need supersonic ears to hear the insults lobbied about us over our heads. We catch them so quickly because we must be alert wherever we are...because we are hated, pilloried, envied, and shunned for being Black, enslaved, then freed (kinda sorta).

But I digress.

What I really want to talk about is where Black people can go to find their own safe places. One of them is Sister's Uptown Bookstore and Cultural Center, in Manhattan, New York.

Book-lovers at Black-owned Sister's Uptown Bookstore
Ironically, it was a White book buyer and writer Kurt Thometz (who was introduced to me via word-of-mouth - "call him and he'll tell you who is who, etc.") who told me about them, as I am generally a stranger to everyplace in New York except Times Square, where my sister lives. I only know Harlem to walk down the street and to visit Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.  Blvd., searching for the Juice Bar when it was there. It was a place where you could get vegetarian soul food. I'm no vegan, but I loved going there (it moved to a different location, but wasn't the same, but I hope it's still doing business). After living for 15 years in New Hampshire, feeling almost a foreigner to Black environments, I just liked hanging out on the street, talking to the vendors to get my dose of Blackness. A recharge of sorts.

A family for our Family of book lovers
Have you ever slipped into a warm, heated towel after a shower or bath, and wanted to stay in it, forever?

Or, have you ever felt like Cinderella when she actually fits the magic slipper to wed the prince?

That's Sister's Uptown Books.

It is an oasis.

It is heaven on earth.

It is your grandmother's sofa and hot corn bread that never gets cold.

It is mother Africa hugging you to her bosom.

It will put you in a place where you feel safe and secure. Without prickly safety pins.

It's just...home.  It touts as much, as it's not only a bookstore. It's a community center. A cultural home.  And the fact that it embraces not just Blackness but Black literature makes it one of the most important places on the planet for me.

The owner and manager are a mother and daughter team, Janifer and Kori, who receive you with open arms, something we are not always open to doing as a people, as we have been taught to guard each other with suspicion, like the slave masters taught our slave ancestors, and as some of us still unconsciously do.

My book, "Severed, a novel" had been named as a finalist in first-fiction for the Phyllis Wheatley BookAward at the Harlem Book Fair, and I traveled during the award-ceremony weekend with copies of my novel, which Janifer and Kori accepted without reservation. The few independent stores I've approached locally have loved the cover, as it is quite professional (thank you, Ingram Spark), if just a tad difficult to place by genre. It is a mystery that I hope is part-literary, so it's difficult to typecast, and to sell for that, matter.

But Sister's accepted 7 paperbacks on the spot. When they called a couple of months later and said they needed more copies, I was ecstatic, of course. And when I was invited to speak about my novel over Thanksgiving weekend to their book club members, I was even more overjoyed.

The book club members are extremely well-read critical-thinkers: my favorite audience. They were rapt at attention, ingested my story, and gave me their own insights into the novel. They were the audience I have waited for my whole life: intelligent, they love and support their race. My novel is not an easy read. There's a lot of information to digest. That these readers embraced it so gleefully was worth the fifteen years it took to write it.

Kori - committed to the cause of Sister's
Sister's is the only Black-owned bookstore in Manhattan and is only one out of 54 in the country, down from 400. Our bookstores are dying out, as Black Americans become consumers without a conscience. Like most Americans, they "want-it-now" and "want it easy," which supersedes the thoughtfulness of helping another Black business. We seem to owe allegiance only to our desires. The problem is that we don't realize how we are destroying our history and legacy, which, according to Janifer, fits easily into America's system. We will become obsolete, by design, as our history and contributions to the country diminish.

Sister's Uptown Books is trying to take things to the next level, for people to understand that supporting Black businesses, and writers, in particular, is as necessary as keeping our race alive.

We Blacks must find our own safe places; we need not look for well-meaning Whites to provide them for us. We must create them ourselves. Sister's Uptown Bookstore and Cultural Center is one such place. Never forget that during slavery, slaves could be killed for learning to read. And American history is continually being doctored, with current textbook efforts to dilute history by saying that enslaved Africans were "migrant workers" to the U.S. (SMH) But shaking our heads isn't enough.

Sister's Preparing for Future Readers
Janifer explains our current mindset: "Why is it that it's left out of our equation to support our own? We don't care who we purchase from... it doesn't matter if it's a Black owned business."  Her store is determined to change that behavior: "It's not just consuming.... we need to think, too... or we will become extinct. We don't get it. It started so long back. We think if we emulate what others have, we've arrived. When that's gone, you have nothing." She mentioned the climate change misfortunes that have created mudslides, Katrina, and other catastrophic incidents. "What do you have if [those possessions] are gone?" She talks about our forbears, when they die and "go to the other side" without time to tell us that our legacy must be kept alive, after our purchases, that we covet so much, are gone.

Janifer and Kori's goal is to "take the chains off our brains, the same ones that used to be on our (ancestors') wrists and ankles." She continues: "My premise is to find a way to work with our minds." It isn't her goal to just sell a book. "It's not just have someone buy from me, but to help each of us get out of survival mode to free our spirits up... that's what we came here to do."
"I was looking at Hidden Figures (about the Black female), mathematicians helping the U.S.)  get to the moon. There's nothing we haven't done. But if we don't read., (we'll) never
know." And most of our stories are not made into movies. When Janifer decided to open her business, people murmured that she wouldn't make it, because Black people don't read.  Seventeen years later, "Sister's" is still around.  Janifer is also grateful for Troy Johnson of African American Literature Book Club, who suggested that Sister's Uptown Bookstore sponsor the Medgar Evers National Black Writer's Conference.

The colors of Sister's are vibrant like its patrons
The Cultural side of Sister's Uptown Books
Janifer says Black Americans have survived everything. "Ain't no way... we're no weak people." But she aims to inculcate in everyone who visits her store that we need to take it to the next dimension: to reverse our thought processes. "I'm in observation mode. I ask the creator to open the way and reveal to me how to help. Send more people who are awake. We're going to get it. This is our time. I believe that if I just continue to hold on and hold out... it will be revealed".

We must find our places.  We must find an underground railroad for Blacks, by Blacks; not to fight the power, but to rest.  To rejuvenate.  The diaspora needs a divan.

As the nation continues to gentrify and Blacks get pushed into the margins of the cities in which we live, we must go out of our way to support Black institutions like Sister's Uptown Books.

"More brothers are coming now. They're hungry for the information." Citing the books they're leafing through and buying: the Black Marxist, the story of Assata: Assata Shakur's biography, and books like A Taste of Power, Blacks Against Empire...these enlightened brothers want to support the store. Even ones who haven't opened a book in 5 to 10 years are asking for help in being re-introduced to reading. These new avid readers are Janifer's "consolation." "Those folk. More and more sisters are coming with book clubs.  Janifer became even more excited as she talked about the new clientele making themselves known.

"So that's it. That's my freedom, to see people hungry for knowledge." Sometimes she can't even sleep she's so excited. She puts books out in front of her store for free. Just to get people reading again. When they open her store's door to confirm the price, she tells them, "Sure it's free. But come back to me when you're done reading the book and let's talk about what you read."

Make your pilgrimage to Blackness in all of its greatness when you go to Sister's Uptown Bookstore and Cultural Center in Harlem. And buy a book (or two, or three, or four....), or even arts and crafts (there's lovely hand-crafted artwork there, too).

I'm so glad that Sister's was revealed to me.  I'm grateful for Sister's Uptown Books for embracing my novel, but, more importantly, for embracing our people. In all of our diversity. Blacks in the diaspora have traveled the world, but few places in America truly feel like home.  Count Sister's as one of them.



Saturday, February 11, 2017

My Review of Kindred, by Octavia Butler

KindredKindred by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(If you have not read the book, you might not want to read this review, although I'm cautious about what I reveal).

Kindred

This book is extremely well-written (should be 4.5 stars) and thought-provoking on so many levels, but I hope that any reader of this review can reserve my criticisms of this unique story as navel-gazing theorizing, and not an indictment of Ms. Butler.

As Black Americans, we tend to guard each other such that every work of Black authorship must be lifted up, as lifting up the rest of us, to the degree that we fail to allow criticism that we would certainly entertain after reading non-Black authors.

So, before I am deemed a hater who is jealous of Ms. Butler I will say I am nothing of the sort. Her writing is peerless in her narrative. It's engaging to a fault. But I do find some "kindred" in our backgrounds that makes me understand her unique voice (my use of the term "kindred" is not to be mistaken for how it is used in the novel, which is for you to decipher).

I grew up in Carson, California, a neighbor to Pasadena, where Ms. Butler also grew up. As a newly-minted fan of hers, I would like to think that our families' lives intersected somewhere in our ancient histories. My mother was born there, and my grandparents were scions of the local AME Zion Church in Los Angeles. Ms. Butler and I could have passed each other on the streets or highways of Los Angeles County.

I hear Ms. Butler's voice and it sounds somewhat like my own (although I freely admit that my editors, including my voracious reader mother, helped liberate my writing voice for my own novel). Lower and middle-class, even upper-class families in Pasadena and Carson speak the Kings English as perfectly as any Boston Brahmin, and our accents are indecipherable from that of our Southern California white neighbors in many ways. That's how we sound. I say this because Dana "sounded White" to me. But as I've been accused of the same, I mention it only to say that I found her voice to be familiar, but strange, at the same time. But maybe that was intentional, on her part. Again, this book is deep on so many different levels. I don't grade my accent as a sign of my having arrived. Rather, I see myself as a microcosm of the American dream. As children of the 60s (and 1970s in my case), we went to integrated schools, our friends were of many different races, and we were, overall, Southern Californians. So, I definitely vibe with Ms. Butler and her voice, in general.

So, on some levels, I really get her. I would even go so far as to guesstimate that her plot might have unconsciously been influenced from the same cartoons I used to watch growing up: Fractured Fables--one in particular in which, whenever an adventurous turtle got in trouble, he would yell for "Mr. Wizard" to come save him. However, Ms. Butler's story is far from cartoonish. In Kindred, we're transported to the slave-holding South, where a family of slave-holders resides, and where our protagonist, Dana, finds herself. She is bonded to a young boy to whom she shares a genetic history, one which makes their lives cross over and over again.

This revelation is not really newsworthy. The story is not about the fact of Dana's time-travel. The story is about what she sees and experiences as a freed-woman turned "worker" on the white boy's family's land. It is the realness of the slave experience that is so riveting. The slaves had names. They had families. They had relationships. And they had no freedom.

None.

They were chattel to be worked, beaten, raped, and desired in a way that should make anyone feel the anguish, anger, and repulsion at not being able to control your own sex.

This country is still steeped in the taboos of Black sexual prowess and mystery--currently lionized by a blonde-tinted gyrating, hip-shaking multi-millionaire named Beyonce who flaunts her sex for all to covet and/or admire. But you can't touch, now, where you could in Kindred's time. How terrible was that institution that has its mark on so many of us--in our skin color, our eyes, our hair, our expressions, borne of white men who had their way with so many of us. Our popular television shows depict the same. We are still the mistresses of white men of power. But I digress.

So...my "critique" of the book has to do with some of the relationship choices Ms. Butler made. For an author who decried Gone with the Wind and the "Happy Negro" phenomenon (I admit to being an apologist for the actual film because I'm a big Clark Gable fan and because Hattie McDaniel stole the show), I'm not sure that Ms. Butler deviated from that plot in her choices of relationships. Did she dare go where Margaret Mitchell didn't--showing how the emotional bonds and perverted bondage of sexual slavery likely entered too many of America's families' bedrooms, too?

Or were her choices because she's a product of the 60s, where everyone explored interracial relationships and it was okay to do so? Was she showing that Black women are always chattel in some sense, and if so, why would she continue that mantra in her choice of romantic relationships? Can a Black woman not be in a loving relationship with a Black man or is our "freedom" our choice of with whom to partner (I believe many a Black man feels that in his choice of mate, which too often neglects women of his own race)? What does it say about the impotence of the Black man in the book, and the message it sends to this day about the plight of the Black man? Or am I being too protective? Or condescending, even?

I am not a fan of science fiction, but if this is science fiction, then I need to explore it more. Overall, I am so glad that I finally read it. I feel richer because of it. And I am, indeed, I am proud of Ms. Butler. I remember when she passed away recently, gone too soon. I knew we were losing an icon, but I finally know why. I look forward to reading interviews and scholarly works about her. Her one book could be a full semester course.

View all my reviews

Why Reading Other Novelists Helps Improve One's Own Writing

A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss My rating: 3 of 5 stars As someone who has written an in-depth novel with lots of characters and int...