The Moment of Tenderness

 

The Moment of Tenderness / Madeleine L'Engle
NY: Grand Central, c2020
285 p.

This is a collection of previously unpublished short stories ranging over the earlier years of Madeleine L'Engle's writing career, now gathered by her granddaughter. It's an interesting project, and shows the development of some of L'Engle's themes and her style. 

There are 18 stories, mostly all written in the 40s and 50s, moving from her early writing years in college to just before the publication of A Wrinkle in Time. They are different in setting -- from rural locations to her familiar New York -- and reveal some of her preoccupations with faith and her own personal experiences transmuted into fiction, much of which shows up in the novels of her later career as well. A thorough introduction by her granddaughter Charlotte examines the place of these stories in both L'Engle's life and her writing career. 

I enjoyed this -- I am a L'Engle fan, have been for years, and have read nearly everything she's ever written. So this was a nice addition to the collection! I appreciated how this collection ranges from realism to more speculative stories too, showing her interest in science and fantasy and how they combine. 

The evolution of her style was fascinating to see too, although even her early college stories are already really good and show her control of language and the relationships that are a strong element of her subject matter. The prickly mother-daughter relationships of a couple of the stories are clearly drawn, while a couple of the later stories are more speculative and focused on ideas. The range is wide, within her clearly defined style and subject choice. The concept of the collection is interesting, and I think it really worked. 

A couple of my faves from this set: 

The Foreign Agent, about a young woman under her mother's thumb who blossoms when she meets her mother's new, young literary agent when they move to New York.

Poor Little Saturday, a fantasy with a witch and a camel and an abandoned plantation house, which reads almost like a Ray Bradbury story

The Fact of the Matter, set in a little town much like L'Engle's rural Connecticut, which is the one that felt most grounded in a specific place and time to me. About outsiders and belonging and facades and people in all their complexity.

If you've read this, or will, I hope you'll share your favourites too. 

Fibershed

 

Fibershed
Rebecca Burgess & Courtney White
White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, c2019
281 p.

As some of my readers here know, I really love sewing and textiles. So when I saw this book at my library I picked it up right away -- and read it over the course of one day. It was fascinating! Written by the founder of the Fibershed movement, it explains what a Fibershed is, and how it works, explaining along the way about sustainable agriculture, the false promise of synthetic fibres, and how a regional system of production helps fight fast fashion, climate change and precarious industries.

So what is a Fibershed? It's a place-based textile system, as she says in the introduction:

Similar to a local watershed or a foodshed, a fibershed is focused on the source of the raw material, the transparency with which it is converted into clothing, and the connectivity among all parts, from soil to skin and back to soil... It is place-based textile sovereignty, which aims to include rather than exclude all the people, plants, animals, and cultural practices that compose and define a specific geography.

She introduces us to her own background, and the organization itself. She talks about natural dyeing, and her journey to farming her own indigo as well as other natural dyers in the area (really fascinating!) There are also featured farmers who raise specific breeds of sheep that are best for the microclimate their farm is in;  and a cotton farmer, Sally Fox, who breeds and grows naturally coloured cotton -- did you know that cotton grows in colours other than white? I didn't! 

There is talk about local mills (few and far between), how growing different kinds of fiber crops like flax, hemp or even nettle can work as regenerative agriculture and increase the ability of the soil to sequester carbon -- a very in depth and illuminating chapter that digs into the facts and felt really outside my knowledge and experience. From animal fibres to plant fibres, from the growers to the processors, to dyers, weavers, knitters, and sewists, she moves from the source to the end product and shows how and why it's important.

And then shares a bit about the organization and how it works with other groups interested in the same things, and how this might be replicated (they even have an affiliate system). 

It's a great read, illuminating and inspiring. I felt hopeful when I was done, and very intrigued by all the information about local producers in her Fibershed, leading me to wonder about my own region. Fortunately for me, there is an affiliate Fibreshed group in my area, the Upper Canada Fibreshed! 

If this kind of thing interests you, be sure to give this book and their website a look. It's encouraging and brings up a wide range of subjects all connected to a new Textile Economy. 

(first published at Following The Thread)

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower /
Brittney Cooper
NY: St. Martin's, c2018
288 p.

This is one of the books by Black women that I found in my library last month, and I really, really liked it. Brittney Cooper is indeed eloquent, and lets the rage fly. I learned so much. 

The book is a set of personal essays, ranging between topics like sexuality, anger, women's friendships, respectability politics, exceptionalism, religion, and more. In every essay, black women's lives are centred. As the book's blurb says, 

Far too often, Black women’s anger has been caricatured into an ugly and destructive force that threatens the civility and social fabric of American democracy. But Cooper shows us that there is more to the story than that. 

She certainly does. She is both justifiably angry about a lot, and extremely eloquent. It was a pleasure to listen to this on audiobook and hear her arguments and reasoning about so many things. I appreciated having to move out of the way as not the intended audience for once, which I usually am as a white middle aged female reader, and listening to her words that are completely and thoroughly based in black women's lives. 

I found her powerful in her analysis and pointing out of social absurdities, and also often very funny. Her intelligent sarcasm was refreshing and the kind of conversation I can really engage with. There were experiences she discussed, especially those of a good girl growing up in the church, that I really resonated with myself, and recognized issues that resulted from that upbringing. This isn't a churchy book, though; there's lots of swearing, discussion of sex, women's desire, and the not so great aspects of religion, even while she recognizes faith as an important element of her life. I love the way that everything is there, and not siloed off into separate things that pretend not to co-exist. 

This was both a purely enlightening and enjoyable book. Maybe not enjoyable in terms of the subject matter, when she's bringing up racism, sexism, daily microaggressions, and oppressive history, but in the way she talks about it, shines light on it, and leaves the reader with a sense of her power and personal presence in it all. A great read. 

The Godmother

The Godmother / Hannelore Cayre
trans. from the French by Stephanie Smee
Toronto: ECW Press, 2019, c2017.
184 p.

I'm finishing up my #WITMonth reads with this crime novel from France. I really enjoyed it!

Patience Portefeux is a translator, Arabic to French, for the judicial system in France. She's 53, and becoming an "invisible woman". She's underpaid, living in a small apartment, and not very close to her two daughters. 

She's also the daughter of two outsiders who lived on the edges of French society when their own original countries were no longer there for them to return to. They made their living on the edges of legality, well, quite far over at various points. So she knows the routine, even though she's become respectable in her own life, for her own daughters. 

But then something happens. A crime family transporting hash to France, whom she's been following via her police translations, has a crisis. Patience is connected with them in another unexpected way, when she discovers that one of them works in her own mother's old age home. So she warns them. And then has insider knowledge that she suddenly decides to make use of. 

Patience becomes The Godmother, a mysterious drug dealer who appears out of nowhere and confounds the police, including her own sometime boyfriend, a cop himself. And what she does and how she does it is a clever reflection of societal expectations and prejudices, and the social stratification in France. 

Throughout this crime book (and don't worry, if you're like me and don't like dark gory crime, this is for you) there are statements about the corruption of the state -- how some Arabic drug dealers are arrested with great pomp and publicity, but others, including the police who profit from the same drug trade, are left to do as they please. How some people are punished for crimes that others profit by, how some people make a lot of money, but begrudge anyone else a cent. How judgments are made, both social and judicial, with a very uneven hand. This adds a strong flavour of social critique to the book, which, while it doesn't necessarily excuse some of the action, does give it more context. 

And the conclusion was satisfying, to me at least. To see Patience's decisions, to see how she reads the situation and adapts instantly, how she provides for her daughters first and then takes what she needs -- it all adds to her character. 

I really liked this one. Patience was an unusual and very believable character, and this novel has a sense of modernity and expands on a woman's role in all levels of contemporary life. Lots of issues are brought in, in a natural and fitting way, but it still reads like a crime novel and is full of interest and suspense. A great genre read to finish off this month with! 

Bitter Rose

Bitter Rose / Martine Delvaux
trans. from the French by David Homel
Montreal: Linda Leith, 2015, c2009.
105 p.

This little book is really more of a novella; it's very short. And impressionistic too, in short chapters examining years of the narrator's childhood. Although Delvaux is a Quebecoise writer, this book feels a bit France-French as well. 

A young French girl moves to a Francophone community in rural Ontario; it's awful, dreary, depressing. Her friends have names like Manon-just-Manon and are generally neglected or outcasts. And girls go missing from this town, too. The years in this village are described with calm detachment, although it's clear she wants out of this dead-end place. 

When one girl too many disappears her mother decides it's time to leave, and they move to a shiny new suburb of Ottawa. The house, the other girls nearby and the lifestyle are described in much the same tone as the earlier part of the book. And after she leaves home to strike out on her own, she discovers that one of the girls she befriended there has also gone missing. 

This is a strange little story. Not much plot, just the slightly rambling discussion of childhood to adolescence to early maturity. The years fly by with a couple of impressions pinning them down. There doesn't seem to a real point to it, and the tone is so detached that I didn't really connect with it. It's a very cool French narrative, but I felt that this theme is one that's a bit overdone, and the style didn't really catch me either, despite the writing itself being very smooth and careful and well done. 

It's like a mix of Quebec Gothic and prairie realism, but unfortunately it left me a bit cold in the end.

Translation Thursday

It's Translation Thursday! Each Thursday this month I'm going to share the translation I'm currently reading plus a few more on my reading list. Here's today's list:

Currently Reading:

Confessions / Kanae Minato
trans. from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

To Read:

Breasts and Eggs / Mieko Kawakami
trans. from the Japanese by Sam Bett & David Boyd

Strange Weather in Tokyo / Hiromi Kawakami
trans. from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell

Tokyo Ueno Station / Yu Miri
trans. from the Japanese by Morgan Giles

Desire for Chocolate

Desire for Chocolate / Care Santos
trans. from the Catalan by Julie Wark
Richmond, Surrey, UK: Alma Books, 2015, c2014.
448 p.

I enjoyed this book, another told in three parts. I started it in July to prepare for the #WITMonth proceedings but I did find it slow going at first -- the first story was the least compelling for me, so I had to keep going and find my pace in the book. I did get there, and the next two parts were delightful. 

The book is loosely based around a chocolate pot, just big enough for three cups.The book begins with the chocolate pot being knocked off a table and broken into pieces, and Max trying to fix it, and we follow this fateful pot to its origins through the stories to come.  We are first introduced to it in a contemporary story of Barcelona, a love triangle of sorts featuring Sara, daughter of a chocolate making family, her husband Max and their friend (and Sara's sometime lover) Oriol -- they met in a chocolatier class as young people. It's told in the third person and is very modern and edgy. I wasn't taken with this story, and the affairs, and the sexual content, and the fixations of the various characters, so I did nearly put this down shortly after starting. But there was enough promise that I picked it up again and kept reading. 

The second section goes back to the 19th C. where we meet Aurora, daughter of a maidservant who has a very unexpected life ahead of her. When her mistress runs off with another man, Aurora is cast out of the house under suspicion of aiding her -- untrue, and in her anger, Aurora takes with her the chocolate pot that she'd had to prepare for that feckless mistress each morning (and was fond of scooping the dregs out for herself later.) She guiltily tries to return it for years but no luck. Her new position is as housemaid to an eccentric doctor, and over the years they develop their own charming relationship, intellectual and emotional as well. I liked this story; interestingly, it's told in the second person, a hard thing to do, but it mostly works here. 

And then the finale of the book takes us back to 17th C. Barcelona where Mariana, the wife of a famous chocolate manufacturer and official purveyor to the French court, is struggling to keep her business going in her husband's absence (pretty final absence though she is hiding that). A French delegation has come to Barcelona to find out the secret of the new chocolate mill that she has invented, carrying with them the gift of a chocolate pot made by a French princess. One of the delegates falls in love with Mariana despite himself, and this is the romance we follow. And of course, it's told in the first person. This story was swashbuckling, colourful, engaging, and lots of fun. It finishes with the moment of creation of our trusty chocolate pot, an object that now holds much more interest for the reader.

It was a risky choice to write this book in reverse chronology. The further back it went, the more interesting it got -- but I nearly didn't get there because the opening did not draw me in in the same way at all. I admired the concept though, and the decision to change the narrative perspective, too. Once I got into it, I enjoyed this book a lot, especially the second and third stories, and loved the overall arc of the narrative following an object. I did find that I had a craving for hot chocolate even in the heat wave that was occurring while I was reading this though, so beware!

I do recommend it, as it is clever, with lots of great detail, and a good concept. You might also like one story more than the others, but do give them all a chance, and you'll find they work together neatly.