After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I passed out a LOT of business cards at the Bay Area Book Festival here in Berkeley spring of 2023, and Selby Wynn Schwartz or her publicist responded with After Sappho: A Novel, which is really not a conventional “novel” at all, but a sort of epistolary, interlocking set of semi-biographical sketches of brilliant, creative women who loved and were inspired, embraced and periodically surrounded by other brilliant, creative women in the simultaneously ignorant, tolerant and brutally hostile worlds of men’s law, culture and morals from mid 1800s Italy through Paris and Britain of 1928.

All interspersed with lucid declarations, crystalline fragments of Sappho’s’ poems in translation and stunning pulsations of Schwartz’ prose that read like lyric verse. It’s mostly chronological, but not always, often seeming like an echoing, simultaneous present; and the names, genders and identities shift with time, relationships, marriages, threats, mysteries, maturations, forgettings and identities as much or more; and for oddly similar reasons as Myers’ The Forger of Marseille and Doctorow’s red team blues: a martin hench novel do.

Schwartz “holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and has been happily teaching writing for more than a decade. While on faculty in Columbia University’s Undergraduate Writing Program, she helped to shape new writing curriculum around human rights, gender and sexuality, social justice issues, and the arts… explores the politics of embodiment.”

“Explores the politics of embodiment.” 

Doesn’t that have a nice ring to it? No wonder After Sappho was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. *

She/They/He does understand WHY some of “these things” are going on. 

Schwartz expresses “why” like Arachne weaving Zeus and other gods’ seduction, rape and infidelities into her tapestry in her textile contest with virgin warrior rationalist Athena. The craft of Schwartz’s writing in such a captivating manner displays masculine overreach cruelly oppressing and purposely misunderstanding the divine modern muses of Isadora Duncan, Eleanora Duse, Colette, Vita Sackville-West and many more with their petty, arrogant and bullying legal, religious and cultural chains.

Sappho can be erased, fragmented and minimized with the lie that she committed suicide for the love of a man; but only if her courage, self-love, love for women, nature and artistry are torn apart and thrown away, too.

"These things now for my companions/ I shall sing beautifully."

Sappho, Fragment 160.

*  https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/authors/selby-wynn-schwartz 

Published 19 October, 2023 as “Boundaries of Fiction, Power, Humans,” Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times.


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red team blues by Cory Doctorow

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cory Doctorow’s red team blues: a martin hench novel is “science fiction” foreseeing an honest and moral international cybersecurity sleuth (Hench) among brilliant, violent and/or unscrupulous high-tech financial power barons that feels “all too true.” I mean, look at Elon Musk and our “very stable” former President – are these the guys we really want clashing and finagling over our lives, planet, governments and billions of dollars’ worth of semi-invisible, somewhat intangible and very volatile digital resources?  Do we have a choice? (I hope so...)

Some of them/us are humane, some bumbling, some crazy and some downright rotten to the core; just like Doctorow’s awesome and eventually captivating cast of characters.

Doctorow starts out spamming us with tech talk in the first 20 pages, trying to drive out the non-nerds, I guess, but then really picks up with a more and more believable and endearing first person narrator (Hench) in a fast-moving, dialogue-rich, both serious and entertaining tale of hide-and-go-seek action and research “gone bad.” 

Very, very bad. But not nearly as “over the top” violent and objectifying as John Wick, The Wild Bunch et cetera. He carves out mostly sympathetic, genuine relationships of all kinds and multi-dimensional, intelligent female characters! Thank you! 

It’s all set in the Bay Area (of course) and environs, which makes it even more relevant; and deeply conscious of our phenomenally wealthy / horrifically poor divide full of spectacular elevations, suffering populations and plummeting overnight crashes. His character development, detail and voice consistency are quite good, without being bulky: well-balanced and compact in a way that other writers haven't all mastered. 

A good read!

Published 19 October, 2023 as “Boundaries of Fiction, Power, Humans,” Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times.


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The Forger of Marseille - Linda Joy Myers

The Forger of Marseille: A Novel by Linda Joy Myers

        My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 

The power of “fiction” is its believability. Linda Joy Myers’ The Forger of Marseille: A Novel does a very good job of stepping from her previous genre of memoir into historical fiction. At the Berkeley Books Inc., Myers outlined her four years of travel and research --interviews, tours, memoirs, stories, true life accounts; how she pursued “info trees,” “research rapture” delving into “the tome of history” to produce a blending of the Spanish Civil War, Nazi demonizing of race, politics and religion in Germany, Austria and Poland reaching into France from 1938 Berlin to the Marseille of 1940-41. With her key characters so positioned and swept along; she’s created believable SS, Vichy government agent and Americans’, artists’ and resistance collaborators’ efforts, failures and successes.

I would have liked a little more detail of the main characters’ and places appearances in order to place and picture them adequately throughout the book; particularly as their names change with their passports as they travel from here to there. Not all of us have been to Le Boulevard Saint-Germain, or even remember exactly what it looks like even if we have. Get lyrical, if not poetic! You can do it, and it might even be fun.

And, quite honestly, the lack of contraceptive use by the lovers is a major plot blunder in this day and age and then. It stopped me in my tracks. They could not have had that much intercourse and still produced all those forged papers and midnight passports over two years without quite a few “French letters” in between, n’est-ce pas? 

Young, somewhat healthy, persistent? A hot lover with medical background? C’mon. Naive young woman and lusty young man or not, at least he “ought to know better,” as well as Myers, because the power of “fiction” is its believability. I’ll forgive Myers for this because it’s her first novel, but it makes her heroine just a tiny bit false.

Her “stateless” citizens and refugees in prisons, interrogations, internment camps and under aerial bombings are not that far from the Ukraine, U. S. borders and Middle East of today. Or the Vietnam, Iraq and Irans of our lifetimes.

I love one of her main themes: 

“never, never forget the power of art.” 

– très bien, merci!
 

Published 19 October, 2023 as “Boundaries of Fiction, Power, Humans,” Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times.


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