Ten books to read in April

Michel Stone, Border Child In Stone’s first novel, The Iguana Tree, Héctor makes the risky border crossing from Mexico into the US and finds a good job in South Carolina. When his wife Lilia follows him, she is separated from their infant daughter Alejandra. Border Child begins several years later, back in their home village in Oaxaca, where both of them mourn their Alejandra, fearing she is dead. Then comes a message that they might be able to find her. As Lilia prepares for the birth of their third child, haunted by the consequences of her actions, Héctor sets off on a search that leads to a possibility neither had considered. Stone makes palpable the vulnerabilities and exploitation of Lilia and Héctor, hard-working parents seeking a better future for their family. 

 

David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees

David George Haskell, The Songs of TreesHaskell makes repeated visits to a dozen trees around the world. “The forest presses its mouth to every living creature and exhales,” he writes in the Amazonian rainforest in Ecuador, a place of unrivaled plant diversity. There he climbs to the crown of a giant ceiba tree at least 150 years old and traces its connections to plant, animal, bacterial and fungal life. He visits an olive plantation in Jerusalem, and tracks seasons of new growth after a green ash falls on the Cumberland plateau in Kentucky. On New York’s Upper West Side he wires a Callery pear planted above the subway, describing how the city’s sounds affect the tree’s growth (“when a plant is shaken, it grows more roots”). Each acutely observed essay is resonant as a poem.

 

Nick Joaquin, The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic 

Nik Joaquin, The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical GothicFor the centenary of his birth comes the first US publication of a compilation of work from Filipino writer Nick Joaquin, including his best-known stories and the 1966 play A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. Joaquin’s writing is laced with references to his country’s colonial history, Catholicism and pre-Christian rituals. The “two navels” in the title story refer to symbolic ties to Spanish and American colonial periods. (The once-heroic father in the story, who chooses exile in Hong Kong over American occupation, is overcome with despair when he finds his ancestral house in Dinondo destroyed.) May Day Eve and The Summer Solstice dramatise the lure of pagan celebrations (in the latter, Dona Lupe is transformed after joining dancing village women: “her eyes brimmed with moonlight, and her mouth with laughter”). 

 

Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky 

Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When a Man Falls from the SkyFrom the Nigerian-born, Minneapolis-based Arimah comes a story collection full of dazzlers. Light, in which a father taking care of his 11-year-old daughter in Nigeria while her mother is in the US pursuing her MBA discovers he wants to preserve her “streak of fire”, won the 2015 African Commonwealth Prize. In Who Will Greet You at Home, a National Magazine Award finalist after publication in The New Yorker, an assistant hairdresser creates a yearned-for baby out of hair, only to discover its insatiable appetites. In the dystopian title story, a finalist for the 2016 Caine Prize, a woman who specialises in calculating grief faces the question “What would happen if you couldn’t forget, if every emotion from every person whose grief you’d eaten came back up?” 

 

Richard Bausch, Living in the Weather of the World 

Richard Bausch, Living in the Weather of the WorldThese 14 flawless new stories from a master craftsman deal with betrayals, distances and unspoken family conflict. In The Same People, as a couple married for decades prepare to end their lives, the wife says, “I wish we’d had children.” The young Memphis painter in The Lineaments of Gratified Desire finds his engagement disrupted when he is commissioned by a wealthy 83-year-old to paint a nude portrait of his 23-year-old bride-to-be. Two Iraq war veterans drink cognac with a Vietnam vet who owns a Memphis bar; Veterans Night ends in tragedy. As the gloomy narrator of Map-Reading a gay man estranged from his family who is meeting his half sister on a windy, rainy day, puts it, “this was life in the world: getting yourself drenched even with an umbrella.” 

 

David Owen, Where the Water Goes 

David Owen, Where the Water GoesNew Yorker staff writer Owen examines the origins, scope and current state of the Colorado river in the American West that supplies water to more than 36 million people, irrigates six million acres of farmland, and powers two of the country’s largest hydroelectric plants. Over the last century the river’s water has been “over-allocated,” Owen writes; this imbalance has been exacerbated by the drought in the West. He brings us to key spots along the river, from the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas, the Imperial Valley, and the Salton Sea. He describes struggles with water shortages, and solutions that may arise in the future, including desalinization, diverting other rivers, and cloud seeding. Where the Water Goes is an eloquent argument for addressing the impact of human inhabitants on the natural world. 

 

Martha Cooley, Guesswork 

Martha Cooley, GuessworkCooley spends a 14-month sabbatical from her life in Brooklyn in the medieval village of Castiglione del Terziere with her Italian husband, Antonio Romani, a fellow writer and translator. There she comes to terms with the deaths of eight dear friends within the past decade. Her mother, nearing 90, is becoming increasingly frail. Her father suffers from dementia. These accumulated losses, she writes “have upended me.” Cooley describes her daily life with Antonio, the feral cats and bats and villagers they encounter. She muses on time, mortality and ambition. Midway through her break, she realises she has dwelt more upon endings than on beginnings – a new novel, a new marriage. In these lyrical essays, Cooley brings us along vicariously to feel time loosen its grip, allowing a renewing self to emerge.

 

Leonora Carrington, The Complete Stories 

Leonora Carrington, The Complete StoriesCarrington, the surrealist painter, was also a writer of strangely dark and unearthly short stories, collected here for the first time (and including three previously unpublished tales) – those in French are translated by Kathrine Talbot, those in Spanish by Anthony Kerrigan. Born in Lancashire on the day the US declared war on Germany, Carrington ran off to France with Max Ernst at 19. When he was interned, she became unhinged and ended up in an asylum, given the pharmaceutical equivalent of shock treatment. Witness to cruelties and terrible disruptions of reality, Carrington wrote stories filled with fluid creatures caught somewhere between animal, vegetable, mineral and human. One narrator sends a hyena in her place to her debutante ball; another visits a nearby house to discover her neighbors are long dead, possibly vampires. Like her paintings, Carrington’s stories are hauntingly original. 

 

Anne Garreta, Not One Day 

Anne Garreta, Not One Day“There’s only one key to unlock the secret of our subjectivity: desire,” writes French author Garreta, a member of the Oulipo school, which sets structural constraints on literary composition. The narrator of this short novel, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, in its first English translation, commits to writing five hours a day for a month, recounting memories of lovers past. The goal: “not one day without a woman.” More than a year later, she has written a dozen portraits. There’s *B, whose attractiveness is “a super acute mental intensity”, pursued with uncertainty one night in Rome, and *E, who turns seductive after a boring academic symposium. These encounters and others unfold as Garreta pursues her playful task of “confession, or how to scrape the bottoms of mirrors”. Not One Day won France’s Prix Médicis.

 

Adam Kirsch, The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century 

Adam Kirsch, The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st CenturyAward-winning critic Adam Kirsch achieves a fresh take on world literature in this collection of essays about eight global writers who encompass six languages and five continents. What unites these eight, Kirsch argues, “is the insistence on the global dimension not just of contemporary experience, but of contemporary imagination.” The new migrant novel is one of the most significant literary expressions of the 21st Century. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Mosin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the US is “a stage of life rather than a final destination”. Examining these plus Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Haruki Murakami’s IQ84, Roberto Bolano’s 2666, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Houllebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, Kirsch gives hope for “the capacity of fiction to reveal humanity to itself”. 

Source: BBC.com