A January wrap-up in mid-March, part 2: classics and new favourites

This is where it gets really great. The first three books of this January wrap-up were good enough. They had their highs and lows, many average bits, but for the most part they had not blown my mind. The last two books of January, however, were absolute bangers that I cannot recommend enough.

The Summer that Melted Everything (2016)

I will die on the hill that this is a modern classic.

I did not know what to read after the dud that was Snow Crash, only that I NEEDED it to be good for my own sanity. The heavens must have heard me, or rather my partner, because she enthusiastically recommended this novel. I knew very little about it but that was endorsement enough.

I have to admit that I am a bit snobby. Or, rather than snobby, I am a bit wary picking up recent releases. There is a limited amount of books I will be able to read in my lifetime, and I do not want to waste it reading bad to meh literature, which means that I am a lot more likely to go for classics that have withstood the test of time than I am to buy a new novel. This is not foolproof by any means, and I am aware that I am missing on great new authors, and yet each time I go to the book shop I make a beeline to the classics. What can you do?

All of that to say that I was not expecting to feel like I was reading one of literature’s greatest novelists when I started The Summer that Melted Everything. And yet, it’s what happened.

Fielding’s cartesian lawyer dad, Autopsy Bliss (absolutely love the names in this novel, which feel a bit Appalachian (or what feels Appalachian to me, a French woman, which means it’s probably not Appalachian-like at all)), in a show of agnostic didactism, places an ad in the classified section of a newspaper inviting the Devil to come visit him. Reactions in the small town are varying. Some see it as silly, others as recklessly jeopardising one’s immortal soul. Problem: a while later, an unknown black boy called Sal arrives in tow, and he claims to be the Devil, Satan, Lucifer, the morning star, prince of darkness, father of lies; and surprisingly, from that moment on, things start to go a bit funny in Blessing, Oregon.

I loved this book, yet it would be difficult to summarise it. It deals with so much, yet I would be hard pressed to say what the « story » is, except that it is a record of that fateful summer when the Devil came to Blessing and befriended Fielding, changing his life and his family’s forever. It deals with faith, familial love, loss, prejudices and their soul-crushing, lethal effects on people’s lives, but also domestic violence, first loves, hopes, and corrosive remorse. It is beautiful. Sal’s actions and lines often brought tears to my eyes. I cannot say more about the story because I want you to be able to dive into it as I did, knowing precious little about it.

Apart from the absolutely beautiful, gut-wrenching story, what struck me was the prose of Tiffany McDaniel. Word of warning, it is VERY poetic and metaphorical, so much so that sometimes it can be a bit difficult to follow her train of thought or to picture what she is describing, but I think it actually added to the atmosphere of the story. Similarly to the characters of the novel, we experience this summer like a fever-dream, something that is beyond logic. It was a unique experience and I thank my partner for pushing me to challenge my prejudice against newish books, because I would have missed a gem.

Monstrous Regiment (2003)

However I am not all-the-way cured, so I did go back to classics of sort (the fantasy parody/satire/spoof kind) and read my first Terry Pratchett, a long-awaited introduction to the Discworld! And what an introduction!

When I first decided I wanted to read me some Terry Pratchett, I was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of texts he published within the Discworld (more than fifty!) and promptly left that decision for another day. That day, as it turns out, was the one I came upon goddamshinyrock‘s handy flowchart posted on Pinterest. I jumped on it. My only criteria was that it was a stand alone, and after googling the plot of some of the options, I was swayed by the title of Monstrous Regiment and its background.

In Borogravia, Polly has been worried about her brother’s fate ever since he has been declared missing in action in the international armed conflict (yes, that is the legal terminology for war) that opposes their State to… basically everyone but mostly their neighbour Zlobenia. But why is everyone attacking their sweet, innocent country? The real question is why wouldn’t they? Borogravia is like these little dogs that bite at your ankles because you breath too loud near them, you see, and its belligerence is far from being assuaged by its deity’s teachings, which take the form of incessant decrees. You are a ginger? Too bad. Starting Monday, you are an Abomination onto Nuggan, so you should get that checked out. Ever worn blue socks? Yikes, that’s been banned since Friday, do you live under a rock (careful, that could soon become an Abomination)? I guess we’ll visit you in jail.

Anyway, a good number of those Nugganitic laws strictly regulate women’s behaviour (shocking) which is a bit of a pickle (are they an Abomination? …Let’s be cautions and replace this pickle with a cabbage), which is a bit of a cabbage because Polly is currently cutting her hair, binding her chest, and performing her best reverse-burglar act by booking it out of her family’s tavern through the window to join the army and find her brother.

credits to goddamshiny rock on Tumblr

I am already looking to read more and I will probably start with the Witches series as soon as I get back to France.

Bartleby, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!, and Benito Cerino (1850ish)

You could think that these three short stories by Herman Melville did not quite have the same vibe as Monstrous Regiment, and you would be mostly right, which means that you would be a bit wrong, and as far as I am concerned that’s all that matters. Because Melville is funny too. It’s not the same humour as Pratchett, it’s a lot more biting and sad, but it still pulled some nasal ‘hmfff‘ out of me.

This collection of short stories was loaned to me by a friend who really enjoyed Benito Cereno. It had left a huge mark on her memory, and since she has immaculate taste in literature (as well as in friends) I took it home. I was interested in reading some of the other stories in it too because I have not yet managed to get through Moby Dick and I wanted to get into Melville’s writing through an easier door.

So I started the first story, which was Bartleby, the Scrivener. In the 19th century (for some reason, I always think that Melville was a 18th century guy when most of his work was published squarely mid-19th century…), scriveners were kind of secretaries, paralegals, and notaries all rolled up in one. They wrote the cleaned-up versions of contracts drafter by lawyers for exemple. The narrator of Bartleby is a lawyer of sort (I might be a jurist, but I understood jack of what his job was supposed to be) who just hired a third scrivener to help with his world load.

Enter Bartleby. A quiet, monotonous man, his favourite sentence soon becomes « I would prefer not to » which he uses each time his boss asks him to do one perticular task. Then, it is his reaction to two sorts of tasts. Then three. Then he won’t leave the office anymore. And so on. It’s a little bit funny. It’s a lot strange. It’s great! Read it, especially the endnotes which offer really interesting interpretations of who or what Bartleby is supposed to represent.

At that point I was running out of time before my partner and I were supposed to leave the country for six month, and my friend was leaving a week before us for her big-shot job, so I skipped the other short stories and finally got to Benito Cereno. Near an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, captain Delano’s ship is mooring when him and his crew come across a ship that seems in distress. He goes aboard to offer help and finds out that: a. this is a slave ship; and b. both the crew and the enslaved captives look like they have been through hell (one might say that one of those two groups actually is), so he sets out to stay a while to help them find their bearings. But all is not as it seems onboard… dun, dun, dun!

What I found interesting was that it was a fictionalised account of a real event; however, by the end of it, I was quite confused as to what Melville’s perception of this event was. While the narrator seems to disapprove of slavery, he also is confused by the slave ship captain’s – the titular Benito Cereno – lack of reaction regarding what he perceives as brazenness from the enslaved characters, as well as his reliance on one of them named Babo who never leaves his side. When all is revealed (I still think it is worth a read so I will not give more details), I could not help but feel that the moral of the story was that the reaction of the Black kidnapees had been equally as violent as enslavement, that all violence is bad and why can’t we get along and be civilised towards each other?

I know what I got out of the story: a harrowing, heroic tale of the quest for freedom. But was it what Melville intended? That, I am not sure, and neither are the scholars who have published on the subject…

Wrap-up!

I hope you will enjoy these texts as much as I did, or that you at least will find a modicum of interest in them. Do not hesitate to share your thoughts, and if you have not read in a while, I hope that you will be motivated to ignore everything else important in your life and read along with me✨

Until next time!