Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco, reviewed by Debbie

Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

Normally I would start a review with a summary of the plot, but having only read "Ocean Sea" once, I don't feel competent to summarise it. Suffice it to say that some characters get together at a hotel by the sea, and there's a chap painting the sea with sea-water, a woman who's going to die unless the sea can cure her, another woman who's trying to choose between her husband and her lover, and a lot of strange children. Plus a professor who's writing love letters to a woman he hasn't met yet. And some other characters.

"Ocean Sea" is written in a lyrical, elliptical prose style that will enchant some readers and infuriate others. There's a lot of rhapsodizing. There's cuts between different stories that are connected but don't immediately appear to have anything to do with each other. There's a lot of work for the reader to do, and it's for the individual reader to decide if that work was worth it in the end.

One aspect that did puzzle me arises from what I thought easily the best-written part of the book--the narrative by Savigny of the events on a drifting raft crammed with survivors of a shipwreck. Although it is perhaps overlong, it's written in an urgent and engaging fashion that brings the horror of his situation to life. However, the raft and the shipwreck so obviously derive from the wreck of the Medusa that it's a puzzle why Baricco names the ship Alliance instead. Perhaps it's an attempt at irony, as anything less like an alliance on that horrendous raft is hard to imagine. But given the characters have the same names as those on the Medusa's raft, the effect on the reader is to have them thinking, "But this is the Medusa! I know it's the Medusa!". It's hard to believe this is the effect Baricco sought.

In contrast to the sombre events of the Medusa shipwreck, and the terrible revenge exacted by one of its survivors, we have the mordantly funny tale of Professor Bartleboom and his mahogany box of love letters. Having finally found the woman to whom he should deliver it, he encounters unexpected and often hilarious reverses, but in the end brings happiness to an entire village, and perhaps to himself.

This book is very much a pot-pourri, although perhaps all its parts do make sense once put together. I'd need to read it a second time to be sure.

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The Lone Star Stories Reader, edited by Eric T. Marin, reviewed by kaolin

The Lone Star Stories Reader by Eric T. Marin

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars

// WARNING: gushing follows.

If you've read any issue of the long-established webzine Lone Star Stories, you've seen it's not tied to Texas in any particular way (the introduction to this collection helps explain how that came about). If you've not yet read an issue of LSS, you're missing out.

Having been familiar with LSS for a few years, now, and being an especial fan of the /printed/ word, I was thrilled to hear editor, slush-reader and fastest rejecter in the business Eric Marin was bringing out a collection. "The Lone Star Stories Reader" contains fifteen stories ranging considerably in length, for a grand total of two hundred sixty pages. These are all stories that originally appeared online at LSS between 2004 and 2008, all of which can still be read online at http://literary.erictmarin.com.... But for those of you who prefer your fiction in a tactile form, I heartily recommend this handsomely-presented book.

With most collections, you expect a few clunkers--pieces that don't resonate with you as much as they might with someone else. I felt this anthology had been prepared with me in mind. The stories are inventive; some toy with you, some slap you around, some curl up next to you and purr sweet demands. My only complaint might be that the occasional denouement was more ethereal than I would have liked.

Since they are all exquisitely written, here's some picks to give you a taste for the variety.

"The Frozen One" by Tim Pratt might just blow your mind: a visitor from "someplace else. Sort of a kingdom next door" steps into our reality to tell a parable. "It's like, if you teach a kid to play chess, he doesn't just learn how to play chess, he learns how to think a certain way." They're training us--"there's some bad stuff happening there, way more complicated [...:], but there might be some ... refugees." The parable's an engaging moral tale as well--I loved it, and I have a thing against moral tales.

"The Disembowler" by Ekaterina Sedia is a beautifully inventive piece about a being running around disemboweling cars and appliances. I was skeptical a few paragraphs in, but everything was explained far better than I could have asked for, and the logic was consistent as well as surprising.

"A Night in Electric Squidland" by Sarah Monette is a strange dystopian paranormal detective story set in the bowels of a BDSM nightclub, an otherworld that feels here-and-now except for the magic suffusing it.

"Seasonal Work" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman is an exceptionally brief piece of mystic realism (or perhaps there's no genre involved--that's almost up to the reader) set at a gift-wrapping station.

"Angels of a Desert Heaven" by Marguerite Reed sets up the question of the place of gods and culture in a land with cultures both melted together and oddly segregated; it's a poignant tale that spreads itself across several, including those of rock music stardom and fortune telling.

There is so much beauty here, densely packed yet woven like gossamer thread. Buy a copy for yourself and one for a friend who needs a touch more beauty in their lives.

Disclaimer: I've been shooting to get my own works in Eric Marin's table of contents for some time now.

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Going Down South by Bonnie Glover, reviewed by Julia

Going Down South: A Novel by Bonnie Glover

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a reading-group book. You can tell because it's about mothers and daughters, because it has race- and gender-based complications, and because it has Reading Group Questions at the back. Unfortunately, I don't think I found it as edifying as I was supposed to. Going Down South has a solid sense of time and place and culture, even while jumping around between them, but is weaker in plot and characterization, which make that sense of the settings more difficult to appreciate and learn from.

The first two sections of the book constitute the Going Down South itself. They use a car trip from Brooklyn to small-town Alabama as a frame for a series of flashbacks setting up the story, first from the point of view of Olivia Jean, a teenager whose unplanned pregnancy is the cause of the trip (her parents want to hide her away until the baby is born), and then of Daisy, her mother, who hasn't been back to see her mother in Alabama since she was a teenager herself and left home under unpleasant circumstances. The third section is told from the point of view of Birdie, Daisy's mother and Olivia Jean's grandmother, reflecting back on Daisy's childhood and her own as she waits for her family to arrive. This car-trip flashback structure is an interesting idea, but in practice, I found that it seriously screws up the pacing of both the reference-time story and the backstory, and I got frustrated with it very quickly.

The second half of the book is structured rather differently, with a floating point of view but a much straighter narrative thread. There are still plenty of flashbacks -- the three central characters are all working through their issues with themselves and each other, which requires much delving into the past -- but they are spaced in a more conventional fashion. This improves the pacing, and various other aspects of the storytelling improve as well. The characters -- all of whom come off as rather stock toward the beginning -- seem more nuanced and original, and the humor rings truer. (There is also less of the repetition and narratorial summaryishness that further bog down the first sections.) The ending is satisfying, if predictable, and rounds off the plot arc nicely.

As well as the book-group discussion questions, this edition of Going Down South also includes an interview with the author. Mostly nothing unexpected, but I did find one thing about it interesting: When the interviewer asked Glover to describe her characters and how she wrote them, she immediately pegged Olivia Jean as a gutsy and intelligent girl who just needs guidance, and said she didn't have any difficulty writing her or imagining her life, whereas she found her mother Daisy -- passionate, bitter, and pretentious -- much harder to understand and to write (though in the end she empathized with her more). However, from the reading side, I found Olivia Jean something of a cipher, while Daisy's inner life and motivations come through much better (at least in the second half). There may be a lesson in that, more than in what can be found in the text of the book.

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