April report

Ladies and gentlemen, we got ‘em. “‘Em” in this case meaning, I read three books instead of one in a month. If you’re wondering how it feels, let me tell you—it feels great. This is all I want! Books that hold my attention and make me think or at least make me feel like I’m encountering something I’ve never encountered before!

What I read in April:

Helen Oyeyemi, Parasol Against the Axe (2024)—I hope I never figure out what it is about Helen Oyeyemi/her writing that makes me feel so happy to read something I don’t understand. Being content to just let the words wash over me and for me to be totally unbothered by my incomprehension is such a special and specific joy—is this the peace which passeth understanding?1 I’m only joking a little bit!

If someone had interviewed me while I was reading Parasol Against the Axe and asked how much of its 256 pages I understood, I would at various points have answered anywhere between 60% and 90%. Now that I’ve finished, I feel as though I 100% understood what happened in the book, but do I understand why it happened? To what end? Absolutely not. And to be clear, that’s one of many things I love about Oyeyemi.

She’s saying something about identity, modernity, and literature, but what?? (laudatory). I hope someone can explain it to me but I also wouldn’t mind if I only stay understanding the fragments I was able to wrap my little pea-brain around.

Praise to whoever wrote the book jacket summary for Parasol, for their ability to convey the broad strokes of the novel’s plot—a woman travels to Prague for the bachelorette party of her estranged friend; she brings with her a book whose contents change every time she picks it up; a third estranged friend appears and drama ensues—while leaving enough room for all the real weirdness contained in this book. What a fool I was to think that the drama would be something so normal as a Girls’ Trip™ fight! Oh also (the summary doesn’t tell you this, but I am telling you), the book is narrated by the city of Prague.

Maybe Oyeyemi’s not reinventing the novel per se, but she’s certainly jamming defibrillator paddles on contemporary literature’s chest and cranking the dial all the way UP.

As I noted the last time I read one of her books, she is by far the most experimental living writer I regularly read and love. Apologies in advance if every time I report on a book of hers the post says the same thing over and over—I can’t explain what it was about! I didn’t really get it! I love it! It’s vibes! On the sentence level and structurally, I simply love everything she does!

Elspeth Barker, O Caledonia (1991/2022)2—Ali Smith calls Barker’s only novel, first published in 1991 and then republished in 2022, “[o]ne of the best least-known novels of the twentieth century” and I couldn’t agree more. Sometimes I think I know so much and then a book that’s right up my alley but that’s never been on my radar materializes to show me how little I know. And every time that happens, I am delighted.

I can only assume that a higher power kept me from picking up this book—published literally the week I was in the UK—at any of the bookstores I visited, because if I’d read that while I was in Scotland? Reader, I would have never left that country. The prose about the landscape!! And the weather!! Plus an awkward, book- and animal-loving protagonist for me to identify with??

But it’s not about me and what I love. This book is so great because it opens with the death of Janet, its protagonist, and spends the rest of its narrative dwelling on Janet’s life, a move that affected me in two ways:

1. I changed my mind about the protagonist several times, as more information deepened my understanding of the character and of what Barker Was Really Up To with this novel

2. I nearly forgot to want closure/knowledge of who killed her and why!

This novel is truly one of a kind—a caring, gentle, and often funny, portrait of a particular way of life in mid-century Scotland. O Caledonia is a gift.

Jorie Graham, To 2040 (2023)—Something I love about poetry is how I never know when the urge to read poetry will strike me. It comes from nowhere (it must come from somewhere) and when it urges me to read a poet I haven’t read in nearly 2 decades, I am glad because it makes me remember the young Book Reporter who first read the poet in question and feel gratitude that she was introduced to that poet back then.

Jorie Graham! Would I know of her if she hadn’t been on the syllabus for the Contemporary Poetry course I took in undergrad?3 Maybe! But maybe not! Anyway, I probably hadn’t read anything by her since that class, but an article about her poems being adapted into a musical composition made me suddenly need to read something recent by her.

So this collection, in which she reflects on mortality (her own and the planet’s). Wow!! She’s still got it. It’s hard to quote lines of poetry to give a sense of what makes a poem so powerful. Graham’s poems especially creep up—but visibly!—until all of a sudden you feel like, “what did I just read? How did words do that to me?” Ahhhh!

Happy Poetry Month to us all, even if it’s technically now over.

Cat report:

When I wasn’t reading this month, I was helping to socialize the tiny little medium-haired sprite we started fostering, Miso. I never knew it could be so thrilling to get a cat to eat a treat from my hand, but it was a big step for this lil’ guy, who began his life in a house with too many cats. Proud of him!!

What I’m looking forward to reading in May:

Mauro Javier Cárdenas, American Abductions (2024)

Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body? (1923)4

Lauren Groff, Florida (2018)