May report

Why did it take me an entire American month to get my life back together after gallivanting for three weeks in London? Because I prioritized seeing friends and watching basketball and barreling up to the Cape to go whale watching with Friends of the Report, Jayne and Julia. Hello from Massachusetts, I hope to read more in June :)

What I read in May:

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023)—Bear with me—

In 2015, Friend of the Report, Burcu, bought me a reading journal, and I have recorded every book I’ve read in it since then, or so I THOUGHT!

As I sat down to write about Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel, I wanted to see when I read his debut short stories, Friday Black (2018) but to my shock, it was not recorded in the journal! Thinking about it jogged my memory. I had to have read it in December 2018. I remember buying it in the airport (!!) on the way to Palm Springs and I remember how the brain-soothing sun and the saltwater pool only made the experience of the stories more surreal than they already were. I remember feeling like Adjei-Brenyah’s writing was like nothing I’d ever encountered before, even if it sometimes read like George Saunders1 but sharper and still its own thing.

This is all relevant because if I had not had that experience, I might have avoided Chain-Gang All-Stars, which sounds like it contains (because it DOES) a lot of violent imagery, and I can be kind of sensy about that!2 And I don’t want to pressure anyone to read this novel but I will say that, not unlike There There (2018), it depicts violence with a documentary lens and only toward the purpose of contextualizing the uniquely American drive to commit and sensationalize brutality and in order to contextualize alternative possibilities, to imagine what it might look and feel like if we could reject the exploitative systems that explicitly promote a specific kind of violence as both a distraction and a release.

In Adjei-Brenyah’s novel, people within the for-profit private prison system are coerced into participating in a televised modern day gladiatorial program where, if they survive weekly fights to the death for three years, they can “earn” their exoneration/freedom. Chain-Gang All-Stars explores this speculative, bleakly realistic world largely through the perspective of two of the circuit’s biggest stars, each calling on different strategies to survive the weekly battles and to hold on to their humanity even as they are forced to kill for entertainment again and again and again.

This is another “Big Social Messages” novel and it is one that I am glad I read. Adjei-Brenyah does more than document (documenting is important!!)—he doesn’t tell, he shows. He also does more than critique (also important!)—he lays the necessary groundwork for readers to be able to see not the detailed ways that things could be different but the foundational beliefs that can animate a much more humane way of being.

Samantha Irby, Quietly Hostile: Essays (2023)—The blurb on the cover of Irby’s latest essay collection calls her “the bard of quarantine.” All due respect to Parul Sehgal, but on the same day the review that contains that quotation was published, Yours Truly published her own review calling Irby “the bard of indoors.”3 I guess great minds review and appreciate quality humor writing alike!

Anyway, I’ve loved Irby’s writing since the earliest days of her blog, which wasn’t private back in the early 2010s!4 Though she has deservedly experienced more and more success, she remains as funny and insightful as ever.

What I didn’t finish reading in May:

Magda Szabó, tr. Len Rix, The Fawn (1959/2023)5—I wanted to like this postwar Communist Hungary novel about a theater actress reflecting on her life, even despite the fact that half of the narrative is written to an unnamed “you” whose identity isn’t revealed until the end,6 which made for a bit of a challenge, since Eszter, the narrator, refers often to shared memories with this unknown addressee that are hard to understand without knowing who that “you” is. I struggle when a psychological novel is so “realistic” that it feels claustrophobic, especially if the mind the reader is asked to inhabit is a deeply unhappy one.

Anyway, Eszter is a bitter and vengeful adult. I am pretty sure that Szabó is not trying to suggest that the Eszter of the present is the way she is because of her difficult childhood, but rather that she is complicated and has been kind of rotten from the start. What else could possibly explain the scene that made me stop reading where, SPOILER:.

.

.

.

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.a young Eszter kills the fawn owned by her wealthy and kind classmate who Eszter hates with an inarticulate rage?

I just—I don’t have it in me to want to spend time with characters who kill animals?? Even if those characters are possibly meant to be allegorical figures for totalitarianism or at least for life under totalitarianism (nevermind the fact that Eszter kills the fawn before World War II and Communism happen)??

What I’m looking forward to reading in June:

Sharon Dodua Otoo, tr. Jon Cho-Polizzi, Ada’s Realm (2023)

Lara Maiklem, Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames (2021)

Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme, My Life in France (2006)7

Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity (2023)