I’ve Been Reading Lately - May 2024
Looks at books by Souvankham Thammavongsa, Mordecai Richler, Ben Sonnenberg and more
It’s been a while since I did one of these, so my bad! Life has been busy lately: freelance articles and pitching are taking up all of my free time. I’ll be back in the groove soon, I hope, with some posts about Steve Lacy and other musics. But for now, here’s what I’ve been reading lately.
How to Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa (McClelland and Steward, 2020)
The debut collection of stories from poet Souvankham Thammavongsa shows her as a real talent and a distinctive voice. Her stories all focus on the Laotian immigrant experience: people working low-level jobs, struggling with language and culture barriers, and the conflict between them and their children. Her stories have this gentle, almost tender edge to them where one sees these people making mistakes or falling head over heels for their adoptive country - be it country music, trying too hard to avoid showing weakness, or falling for their boss - yet there’s never the sense that Thammavongsa is inviting readers to cast judgment. These people simply are. Often her stories are at their most moving in the way mothers fail to connect with their daughters: a real standout being “You Are So Embarrassing” which shows this connection severed.
There isn’t much information on when these stories were written, which is usually normal for a collection like this, but the publishing history of them makes me wonder how fast Thammavongsa graduated from small Canadian journals like The Puritan to large international ones like Granta or The Paris Review. Since this book’s publication, she’s also written for The New Yorker. One wonders if she’s quickly becoming Canada’s foremost short story writer. She’s certainly got the makings of one.
Never Whistle At Night - edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C Van Alst Jr (Random House Canada, 2023)
Billed as a collection of Indigenous Dark Fiction, Never Whistle At Night has all the flaws and strengths of most anthologies of short fiction. There’s several new and exciting voices, a handful of established ones to lend some gravitas, and a couple of bum notes. Overall it’s pretty good stuff and has introduced me to some voices I want to keep an eye on: DH Trujillo, Amber Blaeser-Wardzala, Richard Van Camp.
The collection takes readers into reserves, back in time, and deep into the wild country. This is a world of spirits and danger: snakes burst from bodies, monsters stalk men across frozen tundra, and voices lure people to their doom. The best of these stories are engrossing and scary tales with just the right tinge of folklore and oral storytelling to make them linger in your mind.
But occasionally they veer into white society: a professor who collects heads of visible minorities, a mother so focused on her son’s racial purity that she demands a sacrifice from a prospective bride, a storyteller who profits off other people’s history. When this move happens, the collection is at its best and openly demands the reader think about how they’re interacting with this collection.
I kept this one at my bedside for a couple of months, occasionally poking in before bed. May I recommend you do the same?
Lost Property: Memories and Confessions of a Bad Boy - Ben Sonnenberg (NYRB Classics, 2010)
In his lifetime Ben Sonnenberg Jr wore a lot of hats: playwright, spy, editor, book collector, raconteur. Something of a bon vivant and a flaneur in a 19th century way, he spent the second half of the 20th century moving between Europe and his native New York City racking up debts and breaking hearts all along the way. In his slim, stylish memoir, he lays out his past like a guy who’s spent his life chasing the finer things yet somehow found time to be conversant in everything from Zola to Adorno. A remarkable guy, to be sure - if one believes him, that is.
His father was a PR baron in NYC who rose from obscurity to become rich, eventually owning the townhouse at 19 Gramercy Park. Relations between Ben Sr and Jr weren’t great, with the younger openly living a lifestyle that thumbed a nose at his dad. He was also an incredible name dropper: everyone from Orson Welles and Glenn Gould to East German spy John Peet pop up in these pages. And throughout, Sonnenberg speaks of sleeping around, cavorting with the CIA, and skipping bills all around the world - ones his father usually had to come clean for.
He isn’t a bad guy, exactly. He comes across as a bit of a snob and like someone who might not give a pleb such as myself the time of day, but doesn’t go around setting bombs or anything like that. I guess he’s more of a Byronic figure than anything, the kind of guy who I didn’t think existed this recently in history. It does strike me as interesting that he and Leo Lerman, two NYC born and bred writers who each had similar lifestyles and literary tastes, never seemed to cross paths. So it goes.
Broadsides - Mordecai Richler (Viking, 1990)
Someone mentioned to me on Bluesky the other day that book reviews don’t age well. Don’t I know that! And this collection hasn’t either. Composed mostly of pieces written for GQ and the New York Times Book Review, this is full of Richler being snide and sarcastic, picking at low hanging fruit for a cheap laugh or two. Richler was a good writer, both in his novels and non-fiction, but he wasn’t above slumming it from time to time and this one catches him at a nadir. He goes to a wicca convention and has a good laugh at the participants, scoffs at celebrity memoirs far beneath his talents, and goes to town on forgotten books about divorce, writing advice, and relationships. It’s almost unbecoming.
Sure, he’s far from alone in this category: one thinks of Christopher Hitchens teeing off on Tom Clancy, for example. But where Hitch tried to think through the implications of Clancy’s potboiler and what it said about a disdain for elected government, Richler seems mostly content to mock and not actually engage with the books. Maybe he had deadlines to fill, maybe he was too busy working on Solomon Gursky to spend more than an afternoon on these. It’s too bad, but I guess it’s also out of print for a reason.
Who’s Afraid of Gender? - Judith Butler (Knopf Canada, 2024)
An Evening With Birdy O’Day - Greg Kearney (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024)
Look for reviews of these soon - I read them for professional reasons!