A short, expressive lesson on preserving and safeguarding Black history.
In her latest novelette, Clovis guides readers through Black stories.
This second-person narrative places “You,” the reader, in Princeton University’s Firestone Library. You’re there to uncover and reveal Black stories before the librarian “captures” them for herself. The key to this mission is in her spectacles, which you’ll simply need to swipe from her face. Their lenses “can warp time and magnify distant galaxies of thought and experience.” They take you to a special world where language transforms into a visualization of ideas in a space called “the miracle of reading.” Stories connect the past, present, and future. For example, in 2021, Clovis sits in Einstein’s old Princeton classroom, where university housecleaner Carnethia, a Black woman, once studied Einstein’s formulas on boards and spoke to him about his lectures. The author links Black stories to such concepts as space-time and synchronicity, recurring themes in her work. These unique voices, passed from generation to generation, create a “circular field of dream time” where the tales are as infinite as the universe. Like Clovis’ preceding novelette, The Kingfisher(2021), this book is allegorical. Rather than focus on Black stories’ specific content, she centers on the importance of keeping them alive. Mutual understanding, too, plays a significant role; the spectacles the reader wears help Clovis, “the scribe,” see herself in her audience. Despite a largely conceptual story, Clovis weaves in tangible elements, equating heavy breath with a “200-pound gorilla” on the reader’s chest and offering a delightfully literal view of string theory. Moreover, her poetic passages brighten every page: “The synchronicity of ripples of gravitational waves that stretch and squeeze space like an accordion of music pulsating behind the spectacles of magnified time encountering planets, stars, and black holes in opposition.” While this book may end, Clovis assures readers that stories of people’s lives never do.
A short, expressive lesson on preserving and safeguarding Black history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 82
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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