John Freeman (3)Reviews

A mixed bag if ever there was one. Some of the stories here were a struggle to get through - there seemed nothing to them - and others were not stories at all but excerpts from the writer's upcoming novel, which I think should have disqualified them from inclusion here. It's like paying for Amazon's "Look Inside..." feature. But a few were good, including "Small Mouth, Thin Lips" by Antonio Ortuno, "The Bonfire and the Chessboard" by Matias Nespolo, and the deeply mysterious "Olingiris" by Samanta Schweblin.½

Let's get one thing out of the way before we go any further. There is little of what most people would call "horror" here. Granta is a magazine for really hip smart people who don't stoop to reading genre writing. So don't buy this if you want to read stories about spooks and zombies, or creepy things, etc. Unless you want to wade through a bunch of other non-horror stuff too. Okay, there is one zombie story. Caveat emptor.

It's actually kind of sad that Granta feels they need to file these pieces under any sort of label since it creates an expectation that could cause one to miss the point. What we do have here is a book/magazine of very, very good short fiction, non-fiction, and art that is interesting and sometimes disturbing.

There are 4 or 5 really good stories here, about half the book. As always in Granta, the writing is good even when the subject matter is weak. If I miss a few it is because they were forgettable. I hate most poetry so I'll skip the poem.

False Blood is a pretty good autobiographical essay by Will Self about a guy who has to have a pint of tomato sauce removed from his veins every week because of some disease he has. Oh, he hates needles too. Yuck.

Your Birthday Has Come And Gone - pointless, meandering piece that had one paragraph that stretched on for eight pages.

Brass by Joy Williams is a real, actual horror story, although the payoff won't come until the penultimate paragraph. Good stuff.

The Starveling - I hated this story from the get go and I was right in the end. Overlong and with a plot hole so wide you could fly the space shuttle through it.

The Mission - depressing non-fiction about Somalia. Certainly horrifying but not HORROR.

She Murdered Mortal He - I'm sure this is just one of those stories I'm too stupid to get. Pretty good build-up, but it turns out to be a dog bites man story, literally. Lots of symbolism, ooooh.

Nice artwork in the middle.

Deng's Dogs - another depressing (non-fiction?) tale about Peru. Well told and grim, but not much different than anything you would see in The Atlantic.

The Infamous Bengal Ming - Now we're talkin'. This is a story told from the point of view of a tiger in a zoo. I kid you not. Sounds corny. I was pretty skeptical when I started but this turned out to be a very original fantastic horror story. The sort of story Saki would write.

The Ground Floor - Goofy.

Insatiable - In my opinion a strained attempt to connect Dracula to The Leaves of Grass (Hey, I don't make this stuff up). Sure they are both creepy, but I don't buy the connection. Like something you would turn in for an English final exam to show how clever you are.

The Colonel's Son - You knew Granta was going to put one REAL horror story in just to show they really do get it, and it's so campy and fun to be weird and creepy, and aren't we crazy and edgy here. Zombie mayhem. Enjoy it even though you know why they threw it in.

Then, we get the Stephen King story, another Granta nod to the real genre here. A good story, not a great story. Actually, a pretty good old fashioned horror story.

Unfortunately, instead of finishing on a high note there is one more clinker at the end; a tedious exposition of Alzheimer's disease that goes: "She remembers...She doesn't remember...," for page after page. There's more to it than that, of course, but the repetitive style just doesn't engage the reader at all.

Enough blather...Worth reading, just don't get suckered.

Excellent!

A great collection of essays, poetry and stories. I love it and am going to propose it for my book club, lots to talk about

A B C Zzzz
Review of the Corsair UK hardcover edition (2020) of the MCD X FSG original USA edition (Nov. 2019)

The premise in the synopsis did make this sound intriguing:

From A to Z, “Agitate” to “Zygote,” Freeman assembled the words that felt most essential, most potent, and began to build a case for their renewed power and authority, each word building on the last. The message that emerged was not to retreat behind books, but to emphatically engage in the public sphere, to redefine what it means to be a literary citizen.

In practice though it became rather wearisome and dated. Only a few of the essays here came across as relevant and compelling in 2020. A few of them did seem especially prescient especially as this was inspired in 2016 and probably written from 2017 to 2018 or so. The most interesting were those in the central section with J(ustice), K(illing), L(ove), M(onument) & P(olice) and in the final section of W(omen). Much of the rest was tedious and did not really inspire much thought or contemplation.

I read Dictionary of the Undoing as part of my subscription to Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company's 2020 Year of Reading New Releases.

I will be honest: I borrowed this book because I thought it was actually a book of maps. I wasn't expecting poetry, but I wasn't disappointed. These are lovely poems; evocative and transporting. They explore the map of human emotions from California to Bosnia. My favorite poems were "Rockets" and "Fish". I would like to own a copy of this book.

There are a few really great essays in here, but I would say no more than 20%. I was very looking forward to reading this, but found I slugged through most of the content. I simply did not find most of the writing engaging.

Good - well, I like the topic, and there's a Murakami essay in this issue. I particularly liked the essay on caving.

This may be THE book to understand the current moment. So many great voices trying to capture a corner of the world. Fantastic effort.

A very variegated experience. I've been cheated into reading Jennifer Egan by the way her story in this collection turned out to be a chapter of a book; I am thankful for that in the end. Beautiful Bolano, engaging, austere Chris Offutt, a nice story by Victor LaValle. On the other hand, almost everything translated from the French incredibly disappointing, especially Emmanuel Carrère, who seems to be a well-known author; the story Granta chose is one I'd burn and bury as a standard unit of mediocrity. Some stories are no more than actual descriptions of sex experience; they are mostly slightly above a story slam level. Jeanette Winterson's story at the end of the volume I'd been waiting for so eagerly seemed contrived and overwrought with ideas, almost turning me off. But I will try reading her again.

All in all, the magazine delivers what it's bought for. Also, it has pictures and poems which did not influence my "rating", but make the three stars glitter.

"America is broken. You don't need a fistful of statistics to know this. You just need eyes and ears and stories."

This book provides the stories--essays, short stories, poems, and personal anecdotes--which as the editor writes, "demolish the myth of Horatio Alger and replace it with the reality of what it feels like to try to keep a foothold in America today."

This is a diverse collection by many of today's best writers. Some of the ones that stood out to me include:

--"Death by Gentrification" by Rebecca Solnit, in which she relates the true story behind the headlines about a Hispanic teenager who was shot and killed by the police in his own neighborhood. The police were called by one of the "new" residents of this gentrifying San Francisco neighborhood, people who were afraid of other people who did not look like them. The police shot before talking.

"Dosas" by Edwidge Danticat--a short story about immigrants from one of the places DJT considers a shithole, Haiti.

"Outside" by Kiese Layman--a personal essay starkly laying out the different treatments given for minor drug crimes committed by the privileged students at an elite college and the treatment given a young janitorial employee at the same college who committed a similar crime.

"White Debt" by Eula Bliss, a personal essay on white privilege--being comfortably with what one has, but uncomfortable with how one came to have it--"one of the conundrums of whiteness."

"Leander" by Joyce Carol Oates--a short story about a comfortable suburban matron who wants to do something to help a Black Live Matter-like group, but finds herself very uncomfortable attending one of their meetings.

"We Share the Rain, and Not Much Else" by Timothy Egan--an essay about how Seattle has changed from its gritty pre-Microsoft/pre-Amazon past when a blue-collar worker could lead a comfortable life.

"To The Man Asleep in Our Driveway Who Might Be Named Phil" by Anthony Doerr--a personal essay about the dilemma of coming home to your comfortable suburban home to find a homeless man sleeping in your driveway.

"Looking for a Home" by Karen Russell--a personal essay about living above a homeless shelter.

"Happy" by Brad Watson--an essay about growing up in a white family in Mississippi with a black maid. More honest than The Help.

These were the ones that spoke to me most, but there are many other worthy pieces by other authors, including Sandra Cisneros, Ann Patchett, Richard Russo, Roxanne Gay, Julia Alvarez, Ru Freeman, Annie Dillard, and lots of other authors.

Highly recommended.

4 stars

The first time I learnt about the Rwandan genocide was in high school English when we watched Hotel Rwanda. I was deeply affected and completely devastated. How could anyone be capable of such atrocities, the scale and timeline of it were shocking, but what made it so incomprehensible for me is the method. The Milgram experiment showed how we humans are capable of inflicting pain on one another when we can separate ourselves from our act through the flick of a switch. But machetes, there is no remove, if anything, there is a very physical act, there is intimacy, and more than intimacy, overnight, your neighbours turn into deadly enemies, familiar faces, your community, incited for blood. After a while you are numbed to the cruelty but what happens afterwards. How can a country, how does its people, how do the survivors cope with knowing that only yesterday that the person they have to continue living next to wished to them dead or worse, can such a country ever heal itself?

All that is a very long-winded way of saying how much I loved this volume (125) of Granta, called After the War, especially Lindsey Hilsum's piece on revisiting Rwanda ten years on, and how Rwanda has attempted to live with the events on a national government-imposed scale and also on an individual scale. It's wildly appropriate that this volume also featured Aminatta Forna, author of The Hired Man set in a small village where the supposed calm idyll is beset by constant reminders of the civil war that pitted neighbours against each other. I also highly recommend Herta Müller's Always the Same Snow and Always the Same Uncle about betrayals and writing, how some things never change and the betrayals of previous generations are filtered through and repeated now.

About life-changing events big and small, from the Chernobyl disaster to attempted suicide, After the War gives a glimpse of what happens after the war - the conflict, internal or external - ceases to be of front-page material, the search for meaning in inexplicable events, the need for justice, the ripples that pass down through generations and the all important question of what we can do to prevent it from ever happening again.½

As someone whose typical work day feels too much like treading water as I process hundreds of emails in addition to my regular work, I completely agree with John Freeman. But then I wonder, can anything be done to stop it? I fear, for better or worse, we're heading towards a future of instantaneous communication and all the expectations that come with it.

The Tyranny of E-mail is a fascinating history of communication in addition to a critical rant against email itself.

Like another reviewer, I turned first to the Alice Munro short story, "In Sight of the Lake", and of course it was wonderful. She has returned to Munro country, in southwestern Ontario. She said several years ago that she was retiring from writing but there have since been a few short stories published here and there, including at least a couple in the New Yorker. I'm glad she has changed her mind.
"Thirty Girls" by Susan Minot was a powerful short about a nun who is a headmistress of a girls' school in Uganda, and she sets out to reclaim her students who were abducted/confiscated/stolen by rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army.
Anne Tyler's "The Beginner's Goodbye", about a newly-minted widower, was gently funny and poignant without being sentimental. And one could say the same about John Barth's "The End?"

The essay by Tahar ben Jelloun, about the Tunisian street vendor and the Egyptian nobody who symbolized everyone, and how they sparked the revolutions in their countries, was especially moving. Pico Iyer's essay is great too - he welcomes the white affluent Westerners to his world where dark-skinned people from not-the-west are routinely viewed with suspicion. Post 9-11 we all get to share in feeling aggrieved as we are treated by police, airport security, etc. as guilty of something. Nadeem Aslam's story Punnu's Jihad shows how little autonomy a young Afghan man has. The warlords control everything and so control the arc of his life.
Some good stories and essays, predictable but powerful nonetheless.

Overall an interesting collection but the quality is fairly uneven. It did introduce me to some new and interesting authors: Anam, Alderman, Mohamed, Wyld, Thirlwell, Hall 8 Apr 2017

Shamsie: Vipers - sharply observed tale on the hypocrisy and racism on Indian troops fighting in WWI.
Beauman: Glow - sordid little story with no redeeming features
Anam: Anwar gets everything - interesting account of a Bangladeshi labourer in the Gulf
Alderman: Soon and in our days - very funny tale of the return of the prophet Elijah to Hendon but the point was either too obvious or too subtle
Mohamed: Filsan - fine portrait of a Somalian female revolutionary captures complexities and contradictions
Szalay: Europa - A well-crafted portrayal of the emotional - and actual - inarticulateness of two men and a woman as they drift into prostitution
Wyld: After the hedland - Nicely nuanced account of workers on an Australian sheep station
Selasi: Driver - Somewhat confusing examination of the relationships between a Ghanaian chauffeur, his boss and their families
Thirlwell: Slow motion - Absorbing juxtaposition of the ordinary response to the extroardinary as Ed wakes up next to a dying woman he has never seen before
Hall: The end of endings - Intriguing double taster with a videocam observation and a writer offered a strange commission
Markovits: you don't have to live like this - Unremarkable if perceptive walk through relationships between a bunch of Yale students
Kavenna: Tomorrow - "Be yourself. Unless you are a lone weirdo. Then be someone else". The lone weirdo from Streatham Hill.
Smith: Just right - interesting Bildungsroman observation of the power and complexity of mother/son relationships. With puppets.
Hall: The reservation - ditto, except this time its a mother/daughter relationship from an adult perspective. And with wolves.
Guo: Interim zone - overly short tale of a Chinese boy driven into exile by an uncaring father
Oyeyemi: Boy, snow, bird - Difficult to place tale of a bookshop assistant's birthday party
Fagan: Zephrys - No idea what this is about and no interest in finding out.
Sahota: Arrivals - fine depiction of various reactions to cultures, sub-cultures and changes therein.
Raisin: - Submersion - town flooded, Dad dead, so what?½

I read this as an e-galley, which means I missed out on all the lovely journal experience—the handsome cover, the way pieces look on the page of those nice perfect-bound volumes. But I liked the content very much, and would definitely consider getting hold of the next in the series. There's a bit of a Granta v2.0 sensibility in a good way—strong, eclectic global writing—but, other than a series of short pieces at the beginning, there are fewer "name" writers and more new(ish) talent. And very global representation, much less of Granta's Brit-centricity.

I like a lot of the choices he made in terms of tempo, up to and including ending it with a longish, dryish piece by Lydia Davis on teaching herself Norwegian by reading a 400-plus page experimental Norwegian novel from start to finish. That piece is really kind of marvelous, very meta, because the more she goes on about getting pulled into the minutiae of the language the more the reader gets pulled into the minutiae of her process... it's one of those essays that shouldn't work but does. At least it did for me—it'll probably put off people looking for a more breezy, popular kind of essay. Maybe that's why he put it at the end, so you can just put the journal down if it's not for you and not miss the rest. But I thought it was a slow starter but neat. And the rest of the journal is a lot of fun.

Also: new-to-me essayist Garnette Cadogan. I will definitely be looking for more from him.½

A 2009 issue of the UK literary journal, themed on Chicago. There are many good pieces, half a dozen excellent pieces, and I’m glad to have finally sampled Stuart Dybek, Nelson Algren, George Saunders. The low-income housing projects have long fascinated me, and Camilo Jose Vergara’s photo essay of their rise in the 1950s and demolition in the 2000s was haunting. The entries focus on the cliches and downsides of Chicago, and altogether it is effective and suffocating. Still, c’mon ... there is optimism and success in Chicago.½

9. Granta 125 (2013, 255 pages, read Jan 21 - Feb 15)
Main editor: Sigrid Rausing
link to issue: http://www.granta.com/Archive/125

This was my first time reading an issue of Granta. I liked that I have heard of many of these authors in some way, because it gives me a chance to read something short by them and gives the whole issue a sense of being of higher quality and somehow more important. But the downsides are that I bring higher expectations to each story (which makes any story worse...), and that there are fewer surprises.

The best for me were Aminatta Forna recalling her experiences in the Iran Revolution, in 1979, Paul Auster's You Remember the Planes & Thomas McGuane's Crow Fair. Other highlights to me were Lindsey Hilsum's essay on Rwanda, entitled The Rainy Season, Yiyun Li's complicated short story From Dream to Dream, Hari Kunzrus essay on visiting Chernobyl, entitled Stalkers and an intriguing poem by Ange Mlinko's, Revelations, although I didn't quite get it.

The story by story summaries below are mainly for my own memory. Asterisks for favorites.

*Lindsey Hilsum - The Rainy Season - Non-fiction essay on Rwanda Genocide, read ~Jan 21
Hilsum was the "only English-speaking foreign correspondent" to witness the beginning of the Rwandan Genocide (Racial undertones in that description, regardless of Hilsum's ethnicity. Surely there are English speaking Rwandans.). In this essay she returns to Rwanda. She doesn’t seem to dig into too deep, but she has to say provides more then I could respond to in any coherent way.

Romesh Gunesekera - Mess - fiction in post-civil war Sri Lanka, read ~Jan 23
A clever story narrated by a driver taking a priest to meet a military general in Sri Lanka after the fighting has stopped. Although this is quite good, and she manages to put a curious mystery over the whole thing, bringing much to the story, I didn't enjoy it. Not clear why. It felt maybe a touch too slick, not to mention not terribly original.

**Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - fiction, read Feb 2
Took me a little to get into, but this became a wonderfully complex assortment of tensions. The narrator and his brother have a troubled response to their mother’s increasing dementia, especially when it leads to uncontrolled rambling and uncomfortable secrets come out. Great, living, breathing, characterizations. A lot going on here.

one quote:

Kurt was right: left to Dad we would have probably not gone very far, not been nearly so discontented.

A.L. Kennedy - Late in Life - fiction, read Feb 4-5
Very subtle about a woman who is dating an older man and starts to see her dependence on and vulnerability in the relationship, without wanting to. Is she just giving sex for financial benefits of the relationship? Too subtle for me.

Herta Müller - Always the Same Snow and Always the Same Uncle- personal essay, read Feb 8
Published in German in 2003, translated here by Geoffrey Mulligan
I thought this might need some time to sink in, instead I've forgotten it completely. My notes tell me, "On the surface it’s about how words have meaning only by putting them together in ways that don’t, on the surface, make any sense, and then how words change meaning. But it’s also about her past, her difficult emigration from Romania and her mother’s five years in a Russian prison camp."

**Aminatta Forna - 1979 - personal essay on the Iran revolution, read Feb 9
My favorite entry. When Forna was 14 & 15 she lived in Tehran as the daughter of a British Foreign Service worker. She recounts her naive experiences, and change of moods as the revolution becomes more and more conservative. Fascinating stuff.

**Paul Auster - You Remember the Planes - personal essay, read Feb 9
A 2nd person summary of his life, I think, as the child of Jewish American immigrants growing up in the 1950’s. Fun to read. This is from his Nov 2013 publication Report from the Interior. I have wanted to read Auster, so this was a nice find.

*Yiyun Li - From Dream to Dream - fiction about a Chinese-American immigrant, read Feb 11/12
I thought this might bore me. It opens will one of those thoughts you are supposed to ponder, but...well, if you are like me you kind of want to know what you are reading before you start thinking. It only slowly becomes apparent that the narrator is planning her suicide. I guess that's a spoiler. Anyway, at that point it’s a new story with added weight and I had to go back and reread that opening section and ponder away. Good stuff here.

*Hari Kunzru - Stalkers - essay on visiting Chernobyl, read Feb 15
The point here seems to be pondering our attraction to disaster sights, and includes some interesting photographs, not all the authors. (The title derives from a video game, based on a novel?, based on another novel?, based on the Chernobyl incident)

Patrick French - After the War - personal essay on WWI ancestor, read Feb 15
French comes from a family of military men, Irish but in the British military. His great uncle, Maurice Dease, was awarded the first Victorian Cross in WWI for his heroic death. French is a pacifist and his essay explores his feelings toward and discomfort with his lineage. It was quite interesting, even if the pacifist aspects were not well expressed.

Poetry
The poetry is spread out a kind of gets lost.
Jean Paul de Dadelsen - from Opening Invocation
Ange Mlinko - Revelations
Rowan Ricardo Phillips - Pax Americana

Photography
Dave Heath - A Sparrow Fallen
Justin Jin - Zone of Absolute Discomfort

To read in the context of my 2014 LT thread, go here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/163456#4581109½

A large collection of John Freeman's interviews with writers over the past decade; provides brief biographies of the authors so we have some background in understanding the interview questions and answers. He explains how each publication was received by the writing world and the public; the process of writing; how time, experience and memory can change writers' perspectives.

I particularly enjoyed learning how each writer came to write. Some knew early on, and others didn't begin until much later. Many used their own lives and environments as subjects while others needed to travel to find inspiration. Some used volatile political situations, or little known historical facts, and others, love, or the future or all of the above to create.

Freeman describes the individuality of each author while also comparing them to writers of the past, or present.

I was concerned this book would be filled with boring literary analysis and criticism; but was pleasantly surprised by how readable and compelling it actually is.

This is a surprisingly strong collection of short stories, across the board. Granta really uncovered some wonderful new Spanish-language authors to share with us. Although there are many wonderful stories, I think my favorite was the very first one, "Cohiba' - it just flew off the page and put me deep into those places we all go in life where we are trying to learn or experience and are constantly riding the border of danger. It was just a wild reading experience - I couldn't put the story down, and I was a bit anxious to learn what happens. Not all the stories are 5-star, but all are good, and some are great. My only complaint is that were no authors from Central America and it seemed very Argentina/Spain heavy - so I looked forward to the stories set in countries I don't read about all that often. A nod to the translators too. I don't speak fluent Spanish, just a bit here or there, but the stories all felt very natural and I never felt that there was a language barrier, so I believe they did a great job bringing these stories to non-Spanish-speaking folks.½

The essay by Tahar ben Jelloun, about the Tunisian street vendor and the Egyptian nobody who symbolized everyone, and how they sparked the revolutions in their countries, was especially moving. Pico Iyer's essay is great too - he welcomes the white affluent Westerners to his world where dark-skinned people from not-the-west are routinely viewed with suspicion. Post 9-11 we all get to share in feeling aggrieved as we are treated by police, airport security, etc. as guilty of something. Nadeem Aslam's story Punnu's Jihad shows how little autonomy a young Afghan man has. The warlords control everything and so control the arc of his life.
Some good stories and essays, predictable but powerful nonetheless.

Favourite writers and stories in this: Sarah Hall, Santiago Roncagliolo, Stephen King, Mark Doty.

Like another reviewer, I turned first to the Alice Munro short story, "In Sight of the Lake", and of course it was wonderful. She has returned to Munro country, in southwestern Ontario. She said several years ago that she was retiring from writing but there have since been a few short stories published here and there, including at least a couple in the New Yorker. I'm glad she has changed her mind.
"Thirty Girls" by Susan Minot was a powerful short about a nun who is a headmistress of a girls' school in Uganda, and she sets out to reclaim her students who were abducted/confiscated/stolen by rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army.
Anne Tyler's "The Beginner's Goodbye", about a newly-minted widower, was gently funny and poignant without being sentimental. And one could say the same about John Barth's "The End?"

This "magazine" consists of several talented authors, commentators and journalists. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this mix of writing voices and mediums. It's a great way to learn some about Pakistan and the region. I will say that Nadeem Aslam remains my wholehearted favorite. His writing, on so many levels, is pure joy and makes reading an absolute perfect activity.