Amidst Traffic – a Review.

Amidst Traffic by Michel Sauret. Available on Amazon U.S. and Amazon U.K.

“The pond was deeper than its size suggested.” 

‘Amidst Traffic’  is, without any hesitancy at all, the most interesting book this reader has experienced this year. It is deeply philosophical and psychological fiction, taking a careful and always critical look at people and situations we usually dismiss with a cursory glance every day. We might also call it “Visionary Fiction.” 

Many of the characters in this collection are visionaries: prophets in their own ways – some forces for good, some forces for evil. These stories are remarkable for their examination of “the big questions” in very unusual ways. They are not easy stories. We find alter egos and a cacophony of voices just this side of schizophrenia. 

We meet: 

Trevor who actually hears voices and defies a bank robber in ‘A Voice With Reason;’ 

Eli and Charles who, unbeknownst to either of them, share similar obsessions in ‘Three Straws’ “So he went on until the pain was too much, which was better than anxiety, and the hole grew deeper.” 

Myron, his introduction to Iraq, and his attempt to witness to his fellow soldiers in ‘Blessed Are the War People.’ 

We see: 

Lyonya and her tattoos, as she observes the shadowy narrator in the title story: ‘Amidst Traffic’ from her window, as she contemplates “How could she make her boy love her? How could she make him the central focus of her life and purpose? “ 

The Pizza man, Bobby Black and Dante as “… maybe the cars sweeping by just dragged the air behind them, carrying lives and voices along. Melodies and furies…” as they shoot a hapless pigeon on their quest for the source of a strange hum: “All of it clean. All of it a bit too shiny for a game of attrition and muddy shoes to have played the night before. ” in ‘Tin Can Mind.’ 

The ‘Return’ of a football – a transaction that was much more and much less than we might expect. 

We hear: 

The ‘Clouds in The Water,’ one of my favorites, as is Three Straws.  Jenny and Samuel and waterfalls where: “Only the buzzing of wasps held the authority of sound.” 

A cell phone sounding the alarm in ‘Lost In The Night’ while Grace and Kevin try to find their way back to a status quo ante. 

Adren and Daren at the Circle K, where time stands still: “On the clock across the highway, the time is still midnight. Still midnight. Still midnight” 

Taps in ‘Consumed’ and the flag folded for a small boy. “And in all of my days, the sky never looked as blue as the eyes of that child.” 

Scott Myers and his shoes discussing milk, singing in French and existentialism.

“Tête, épaules, genoux et pieds. Genoux et pieds,” Jean was singing on my third day there, and already I was getting sick of it. “Shut up you freak! Shut up!”

‘The Problem with My Shoes’ becomes our problem too. 

We feel: 

Momentum and pain as Simon tests his mettle in ‘Rolling Down the Mountain.’ 

The loss of Hailey and a doe as they collide with Rob and disappear into the night. in ‘The Chase.’ 

What it might be like to be divine and judge strangers as we observe them in ‘The Staring Game.’ 

A flight not taken,a newspaper received and a newspaper given in ‘Gratitude.’ 

More terror in ‘Black Coats at the Cheyenne Diner’ 

Relief at Victor’s reprieve in ‘Small Pleasures.’ 

And still more stories pummel us. ‘The Follower’ and ‘When the Knife Opened’ are intensely psychological stories. In fact, most of these are so. This reader can say honestly that she found each and every one fascinating in its own peculiar way. One must note that there are a few anomalies in the editing, but the writing is very strong. The narrative voice (and all the others) will disrupt your thinking with an intense interference pattern. This collection of stories is a challenge. 

Leila Smith, for The Kindle Book Review. The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair and honest review. We are not associated with the author nor with Amazon.

Jung On Men And Women – A Review

Jung on Men and Women: a Swiss travelogue by Cheryll Barron.

Five stars for this one!

Available on Amazon U.S. and Amazon U.K.

Cheryll Barron has written a unique and informative meditation on the irony of Helvetia as the female symbol of Switzerland. Helvetia appears in a flowing gown with a spear and a shield, embodying the “anima” and “animus” about which Barron’s erstwhile intellectual mentor Carl Jung wrote. 

Helvetia is the name of the Gaulish tribe living in Switzerland until the Roman invasion. Gaulish or Gallic is a P-Celtic language spoken in Switzerland until Latin and Germanic languages supplanted it. Gaulish women were very different from Roman women in that they were occasionally queens or warriors, with property rights, and held in high regard by the society. Rigani or Boudica would not be possible in the Switzerland inhabited by Jung in the 19th century. 

She notes that Swiss women did not get the vote until 1971, but by December of 2010, Switzerland has a female president and women hold 4 of 7 Federal Council seats. 

However, the view of women ascribed to Jung by Barron: “He found more darkness than light in almost any female aspirations beyond a hausfrau existence” suggests that Jung (1875-1961) might be astonished and critical of the current state of affairs. Barron extends her observation to contemporary Swiss women, noting that once married they dress in drab unisex uniforms with short haircuts.

Helvetia evokes the positive aspects of the “animus.” But according to Barron “anyone who gets immersed in Jung’s writing about psychological types cannot help noticing that the manifestations of the animus are far more likely to be negative than positive. It is impossible to shake the strong impression that he casts nearly all women who use their heads in their work or who aspire to lead or guide other people in an unflattering light.” 

‘Jung On Men And Women’ is a travelogue, yes, but as much through the mind of  Jung and his cohorts particularly and through the minds of the Swiss generally, as it is through the frozen Swiss countryside on the way to Bollingen, the tower retreat Jung built for himself. Yes, it has a tower, and yes, he was a student of Freud. Curiously, there is not really any mention of Jung’s religious views in this book(individuation), nor of dream analysis, nor of his dabbling in alchemy and the occult. But other books cover those subjects. 

“What is she doing, anyway, on a sightseeing expedition half an hour from sunset with no map?” Barron asks the question before we do. The descriptive language is beautiful and evocative: 

“I waited at a bus stop at the drab edge of Jona-on-the-way-to-Bollingen, the only person standing there as a great, black, bruised eye of a sky wept in fits and starts onto grubby heaps of snow turning to sludge.”  Not only did she start out late in the day, ostensibly because of an argument with a credit card company (always appraising our worths), but as we join her “reluctant, foot-dragging excursion to his legendary abode” she is cold, bedraggled and lugging a computer, battery pack, and other accoutrements of modern exterior life.  The sun is setting on her enthusiasm and on the Zurich See. 

Bollingen is an unlikely Mecca for a British tourist.  Five changes of trains and buses and then a long walk.  We are told that Barron was already in Switzerland and decided to visit on the strength of a conversation with his great grand-son Daniel Baumann some 11 months earlier. Initially she goes to the wrong Bollingen, but then corrects her course. She protests that it is only the “weakest sort of curiosity” and “ambivalence” that draws her and that she is not easily drawn to shrines. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”  She discusses her introduction to Jung’s ideas in her twenties and the captivation with archetypes and his understanding of cross-cultural patterns. But she also discusses what Rowland, Greene and Wheelright (Jungian scholars) have to say, and argues for balancing Jung’s misogyny against his contribution to modern psychology and literature. 

Barron discusses ambivalence and opposites in abundance: Jung’s long-term marriage to Emma Rauschenbach vs. his long-term affair with muse Toni Wolff. Then there is the study of the unconscious for signs of pathology by Freud vs. study of the unconscious for a source of creativity and culture by Jung. Can we separate the personal history of a thinker from what he/she contributes to the intellectual ether: Lawrence Van der Post’s understanding of Jung vs. his degradation of women in his personal life? Jung’s range and depth vs. his lack of understanding of women, and worse, his castigation of them as lesser creatures? Logos vs. Eros? To build vs. to be? Extraverts vs. Introverts? 

She writes of Regina Wecker, and Iris von Roten, Swiss feminists, in her quest to understand Swiss mentality, but more importantly Jung’s mentality and why he never attained self-conscious thought about his views on women. (His mother was apparently a schizophrenic and psychic.) Barron notes, however, that his culture’s xenophobia did not dictate his view on Native Americans or Asians. 

At long last Barron reaches the gate, and finds herself underwhelmed and wondering if there might be an outhouse closeby. The latch cannot be opened. Did she find the Golden Fleece?  I will leave you to your own reading of this intriguing and captivating book to determine what happened next.

A Deconstructed Heart – A Review.

A Deconstructed Heart by Shaheen Ashraf-Ahmed. Available on Amazon U.S. and Amazon U.K.

“…when you have little time left, you understand how to sift every action, every word, weighing it against that little store of time. Not one grain is wasted.”

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), an Arabic-speaking Jew from Algeria, father of Deconstruction, would love this book. He taught that to begin Deconstruction, we must strive for “peaceful coexistence” of opposing concepts, which in Western thought, are usually in “violent hierarchical” relation to each other.

First, we have to break the link between the two concepts. Second, we have to keep the old concepts apart so they don’t re-establish their former hierarchy. Third, we have to create some new ways to understand the old concepts; develop unique new languages which do not fit in either of the prior oppositional corners. But there can be no “synthesis.” We must understand and interpret the differences.

I note that ‘A Deconstructed Heart’ is on a list of “Desi Chick Lit.” I don’t want to disparage “Chick Lit,” but this book is an existential triumph – much deeper and dimensional than what we usually associate with the genre.

This wonderful book by Ashraf-Ahmed shows us first hand, the opposing concepts of Western and Eastern ways of speaking, living, being, and what happens during that painful period of adjustment when the new language is still forming. Not incidentally, her language to describe the coexistence is wise and careful. She handles her characters gently with love and compassion.

Of Amal, she tells us:
“Occasionally, she would join friends at parties, but she did not drink, and she took a taxi back home alone when the music gave her a headache, returning to a house that had settled into a perpetual twilight, with its orange-brown sofas and their embroidered antimacassars and the cream wallpaper with pink roses, yellowing in the corners. Every weekend, she called her parents’ home in India, and asked a nephew or cousin who had dropped by to pass the phone to them.”

Amal, the niece, was raised traditionally, but now lives in England. She must understand her own past in her new context and decide if she will become a part of the Western world, or return to India with her parents.
Mirza Uncle and Naida Aunty, in this novella, are the first casualties of East meets West, Traditional meets Modern, Architect counters Artist, Extended Family shifts to Nuclear Family.

Naida is the first to understand the opposition and acts upon it: she leaves to pursue her artistic future in the West. Naida is frustrated with her life and her traditional, absent-minded, introverted husband.

After ten years of trying to have a family, their house is still barren.
“…the neighbors were always attentive to their gardens, and [the Chaudry's] couldn’t look “as if we came from the gao,” said Naida. “We’re always the last to mow our lawns, it’s such a cliché, the Indian fam–,” she paused, and then began again, “The Indian couple with the run-down garden. It’s embarrassing. We might as well just bring in a couple of goats to complete the look.”

“Soon, she began smashing the empty bottles, using the broken glass to make mosaic-decorated flowerpots and paving slabs, spending hours arranging and re-arranging the shards to create swirls of colored glass that winked and sparkled in the garden. She took an art class and made oceans of blues and greens, caught in place by grout. Crystal forests of green bloomed icily on side tables and picture frames.” That was Naida Aunty’s deconstruction.

As an unintended consequence, young Amal becomes caretaker for her father’s brother who is very much rooted in the past, to the extent that he experiences visitations from his long-dead neighbor and chess opponent, Khan. Khan gives Mirza comfort while he mourns the loss of Naida. They look together at photographs from the distant past and reminisce about times gone by.

Of Mirza Uncle, the narrator tells us:
“Then he grabbed handfuls of different colored glass pebbles from the sacks, throwing them like seeds for the birds, blood red, royal blue and turquoise against the fading day until the patio gleamed with refracted light, like a cold river under the moon.”

The garden, a place of growing and rose bushes, becomes a central factor in Mirza Uncle’s return to life, and in an important way, a metaphor for the embryonic new language, growing where nothing grew before.

Amal experiences some happy moments in that garden with Rehan, but he retreats to his loneliness and she is forced to retreat to hers. Ultimately, she learns to make her decision and live with it, to keep Urdu in her heart and the new language in her head.

Unabashedly, I can say I loved this book.

Leila Smith, for the Kindle Book Review.

Nobility – A Review

MacRath venne, e vide e vinse. A Literary mêlée in which a tall poetic stranger takes out six gods-mortals prevail, August 12, 2012 Nobility by Reb McRath.

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This review is from: Nobility (Reb’s Rebel Yell Yuletide Chillers) (Kindle Edition)

Nobility ranks right up there with Oh Brother Where Art Thou, a rendition of Homer’s Odyssey also set in the South. In this fine novel, we find a pantheon of Roman gods, (rather than Greek) wreaking their vengeance on unsuspecting passengers riding that soon-to-be-infamous train – the Amtrak Crescent on a Christmas Eve in 1999, when time is running out.

The word craft is delicate and beautiful at times: “A faint flurry of snow flirted shyly with the glass.” “…Ice now filigreed the window. Beyond it the sky looked unendingly black, too powerful even for Frank.”
At other times the author matter-of-factly describes the jargon of the pickpockets: Poke, Mark, Dip, Lambs, et al. “..light-fingered and wing-footed (a nod to Homer) enough to split with the wallets or pokes, the thieves bagged before the marks knew they were missing.” Another character is known by his epithet: silver beard.

As another reviewer has noted, the Palindrome Fever chapter is quite clever and there is a great deal of skillful word play throughout the work. There is also the crackle of the supernatural in this book – the otherwise unexplained bolts of electricity sent from above.

Roman gods arose from a strange confluence of cultures and superstitions around the Latium area, later known as Rome. Here we have a strange convergence of ne’er-do-wells who are willing to kill and maim to sate their newest appetite: Jove(a/k/a Jupiter, powerful, cruel and vain), Janus, Mercury, Mars, Cupid, Venus, Vulcan(god of fire), each with a role. You’ll have to read the book to enjoy each one and his/her role.

MacRath creates a banquet of the gods in the bar car:” Now the crowd in the bar car began to go wild, believing the roll held their losses. And Janus completed the picture…” but the gods were not devouring figs. It is a scene of controlled mayhem and some very fine writing.

The sights and sounds are rendered with great care and love. You will hear the clackety train on the tracks, the hiss of the radiators, the doors sliding open and shut. Note the use of black and white as you see the times and places from the narrator’s perch.

But this book is only nominally about pickpockets. Its real story is about redemption and the need of each mortal to have a purpose for his/her life. Ray and Misty discover their true missions as the train rolls on into the 21st century. “Father Thomas cleared his throat, then with a smile began to read. And his voice was just bursting with colors.” Odi et amo, indeed, but mostly amo – not “lost in the translation.” Merry Christmas in August.
(Oh, and MacRath’s mastery of the semicolon is the cat’s meow; period.)

Need To Breathe – A Review

Union Cross has become more than a place filled with barbecue pit-cookers … selling their famous Brunswick Stew

By Tara Staley

The Kindle Book Review

 

This review is from: Need to Breathe (Kindle Edition)

Union Cross is also filled with carpenter bees and bumble bees, beeswax, ancestors and descendants, complex relationships, hand-made quilts, fast cars, butterflies and flutterbys.

Need To Breathe is a complex book in terms of structure and characters. The narrator is Millie, the heavenly “incorporeal agent” of a woman who died giving birth in 1922. She’s been assigned as the guardian angel to a girl baby, Claire, who survives a botched abortion in 1975.

Despite the fact that Millie’s own daughter, Mae, an orphan, still struggles on earth with dementia and careless “caregivers,” Millie looks after Claire, sometimes reluctantly.

Her antagonist emissary is Liam from the underworld: ‘His eyes flash orange, a mirror of this horrible place, full of flames and workers that never rest. There are thousands of them, faceless men and women filling coal carts on this ashy plain. They start gathering around Liam and me as we fight. Punch! “You thug!” Punch! “You scumbag!” He grabs my wrists to restrain me.’

Manda and Mick are Claire’s accidental parents. Manda, mentally ill, obsessed with cheerleading, product of stern and judgmental parents married “pay-the-bills” Mick, a sympathetic character with a beer belly who “works in hydraulics.”

Mick gets his daughter to her frequent medical appointments and bonds with her much more closely than most fathers usually bond with daughters. They are bound together of necessity.

Manda confesses: “My job is to make homes beautiful, and I wreck my own. I earned a degree that amounts to harmony and synchronization, and I’m an expert at nothing but discord. Look at the way my relationships end up–my mother, my husband, my daughter.” Release, I say. Let it all out. Maybe I should have been a landscape architect…”

The prose in this book is often breath-taking: “BLACKBERRY WINTER OCCURS in Union Cross at the same time you see the rhododendrons’ pom-poms, bird fest at the feeders. Mr. Grosbeak’s breast is so pink it would make the blameless blush. Spring is not too terribly different from what Heaven looks like year ’round. It’s a cross between blooms and diamonds–softness, color, sparkles. The sky is a luscious shade of tangerine and there are clouds of all colors–colors you don’t see on earth. They make music and wrap around you like robes. There are several Chambers, like cloud-enclosed skywalks, filled with Columns and Pearls and Doors and Bottles and divine Whatnots. They say God collects people’s tears in those Bottles and holds them close in love.”

And the prose rushes at the reader relentlessly: ‘Sometimes that first memory is seeded deeper, though, like a cavity. Foreboding like a pair of mating mosquitoes. You don’t like to mentally go back to That Place, where you banged on a locked door, visited Daddy in jail. Or maybe it’s how Mama swiped a finger across a bleary, hollow eye and said, “There’s no use. I can’t make him love me.” The pain, the esprit, something about that First Memory.’

Of Claire, Millie says: “She marvels over lattice and cocker spaniels, louvers and copper eaves, green shutters and screened porches. She sees people’s white rocking chairs, and that makes her think about her daddy sitting out in the barn, listening to the bug zapper go off while the moon sings Father Abraham.”

Mick’s mother, Estelle, is, of course, the antithesis of Manda’s mother, Mrs. Willard. We also meet Big Mac, Claire’s chum who works at a fast-food joint. And Carly and Charlie, the kids next door – the Vances. Charlie’s love for Claire deepens, despite her smoking, cussing, delinquent life style – and despite her chemical burns and palsied knee. He loves her red hair and freckles and her goofy aphorisms.

The book follows the Life of Claire from NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) to the prom and then to her own impending motherhood. It is, perhaps, the most unusual book I have read in the past year. The character development is excellent, and I was drawn into Millie’s celestial sphere in spite of my preconception about such a narrator.

Claire cares for her elderly great aunts, Grace and Gertha, and they care for her. She brightens while they fade away into the Southern hereafter.

This is the sort of prose that compelled me to keep reading: “The stars flirt with our eyes tonight, and the cold worlds wane as I tell Claire how much I love her. Love, the ginseng of existence. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, so– She and Mick start their annual stamp-licking and coupon-tearing, scabbing over the deals, saying that, surely, if you enter enough Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, you’re bound to win something. The night fudges friendly as they settle in, saying “what color is your Jaguar?” Claire says red. It matches her hair. And Mick says blue, although I know what he’s really thinking. He’s getting a great deal, three girlie mags for seventy percent off the cover price.”

I am giving this book only three stars because despite the fine, fine writing, the book is peppered with homonyms used incorrectly, misspellings, misplaced apostrophes, incorrect verb tenses, and words used completely out of context. It’s almost as if the author occasionally uses the Thesaurus, picks an unusual word, and plops it into a sentence, malapropos. The malapropisms serve to distract the reader and interrupt the rhythms of this otherwise wonderful book.

Island of Whispers – A Review

Inchgarvie, a place of ghosts, demons and eerie whispering winds.

by Brendan Gisby

Available on Amazon U.S. and Amazon U.K.

 

“Standing on his hindquarters in the centre of the platform among the half-eaten corpses of the Rulers, Slasher rallied the latter defenders….Slasher had claimed the throne. he was their undisputed King-rat now.”

How apt that this allegory of race, class, and a latter-day feudal society -plays out in the deep dark recesses of a long-ruined medieval monastery, the kind one can see all over Ireland and Scotland.

The hierarchy of power which was prevalent in the feudalism of the Middle Ages also applied to the monasteries.

Just as the monks answered to the dean who answered to the prior who answered to the abbot…who answered to a bishop, the anthropomorphic rats ultimately answered to the Rulers, the Chamberlain, the Assembly, the King. The Watchers, Scavengers, Protectors and others all had their preordained roles from which they could not deviate.

Rats could become both powerful and successful breeders – if only they were born into the right caste until one cataclysmic day when the inexorable urge to be free coincided with a centenary celebration of the cantilever railway bridge over the Firth of Forth (don’t you love that phrase?)

A chance event altered those grim expectations of the Watcher caste. Rising unfulfilled expectations have led more than once to human revolutions. In this book, rats like humans break the surly bonds of their oppressors.

Long Snout, Neck Snapper, Bone Cruncher, Fat One, Twisted Foot, Grey Eyes all have their unique personalities. I was reminded a bit of the Homeric poems in the epithets applied.

There was murder, mayhem, cruelty – not the sort of subjects I would usually choose for recreational reading, but the story telling is so masterful, and the language so good, that I kept reading straight through. This is the kind of storytelling one gets only in Ireland and Scotland.

The Ripening Time (The Tomato Man) – A Review

This book is a lotus in the sea of internet flotsam and jetsam. by Catherine MacLeod and Alistair Mair. Available on Amazon U.S. and Amazon U.K.

The Tomato Man by Alistair Mair, in its most recent incarnation by his daughter Catherine MacLeod is a gem. The writing and the characters span three generations of MacLeods and the authors do not spare any character. They now live in my mind with an unvarnished reality as seen by a third-person narrator. They are plain, but complex, unembellished folks and well reflect working class life in Glasgow from the WWII era of Thomas MacLeod, the father, to the 1963 life of Thomas MacLeod, the son. The writing is fine, understated and elegant and captures nuances brilliantly. When Jessie “sighed and took her hand away…,” Thomas the younger “felt the loss of it like a wound.” The “small brass nameplate” which says “Tom Macleod…still clearly, though twenty-seven years of polishing had blurred the definition of the letters more than twenty-two years of widowhood had blurred her memory of the man whose name it had been.” This enduring brass nameplate becomes a metaphor for Thomas himself as he emerges as a man to develop his own ideas, crippled relationships and, of course, his own garden. The comparison to DH Lawrence by the prior reviewer is apt. There is a fatalism and inevitability here as the characters play the roles for which they have been groomed.