Varieties of Exile

Several disparate yet extraordinary voices this week are linked by themes of heritage and displacement—from North Africa to Puerto Rico, Poland, even outer space. We also have a posthumous novel about Asian American fetishism by an accomplished and beloved writer. Two books feature punk rock musicians (one an author, the other a protagonist). All are animated by a pulsating momentum, often irreverent, always surprising.
 
My Friends by Hisham Matar
Matar once again explores the theme of loyalty as in his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, The Return. Three Benghazi men come of age in Edinburgh and London, each struggling with homeland allegiances and making new lives abroad. During a 1983 Libyan protest in London, Khaled and Mustafa are shot, marking them forever as anti-Qaddafi activists. Hosam, a young dissident writer, becomes part of this triangle and they form a decades-long friendship through the Arab Spring, each making different life-changing choices. Rarely can a writer combine the personal and political so eloquently. Through their fierce bonds amid the violence of Libyan politics, Matar composes a tenderly powerful novel of exile and the ways in which time tests – and frays – those bonds.
 
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
Parakeet was one of the few breakout novels in the early pandemic, no doubt due to Bertino’s indescribable wit. Beautyland stars Adina who discovers she is an alien sent to Earth to research humankind. “It is an interstellar crisscross apple sauce. Two celestially significant events occurring simultaneously: the departure of Voyager 1 and the arrival of Adina, early and yellowed like old newspaper.” As a child, she recognizes that she is different: she possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. Adina struggles with being accepted at school, follows Carl Sagan, and sends faxes to her superiors on Planet Cricket Rice. Despite or because of the wacky premise, the author brings real pathos and insight into a novel about belonging. And who hasn’t felt like an alien in this world of ours?
 
City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter
Fruchter, an award-winning writer and a former drummer in a feminist punk rock band in Brooklyn, offers up a rambunctious novel steeped in Jewish folk stories. The city in question is Ropshitz in Poland (once known as the City of Laughter), and it ties four generations of women together over a century. The characters include a modern-day queer Jewish scholar, Shiva (whose story has echoes of the author’s), who returns to Ropshitz to discover her great-grandmother’s secrets. Going back to the 18th century we meet a badchan (Yiddish for a wedding jester) as the novel is infused with spiritual lore, real and imagined, the literature and history of Jewish culture, a recurring shapeshifting trickster, and the essential importance of laughter.
 
The Best That You Can Do by Amina Gautier
Displaced Puerto Rican women populate this boisterous collection of stories, a snapshot of American lives circumscribed by families back home with all the untidy emotions that attend living in two worlds. Many are focused on the Civil Rights era. In “Making a Way”, a mother of two whose husband returns to PR is left stranded in Connecticut. Set during the 60s assassinations, she struggles to raise enough money to go back, making a ‘way out of no way’, as her mother did before her. Bursting with pop cultural and musical references of the time, including TV celebrities, Gautier manages to cram an entire diasporic experience into these zesty short pieces while refusing to shy away from loss, obligation, or interracial heritages.
 
The Fetishist by Katherin Min
Min’s novel comes four years after her untimely death from breast cancer. We are lucky to have it now, a zany revenge story in which Kyoko attempts to extract justice from the man responsible for the death of her mother. The Fetishist is the story of three people—Kyoko, a Japanese American punk-rock singer full of rage and grief; Daniel, a philandering violinist forced to confront the wreckage of his past; and Alma, the love of Daniel’s life, a Korean American cello prodigy long adored for her beauty, passion, and talent, but who spends her final days examining if she was ever, truly, loved.Fittingly this fictional daughter is avenging her mother, and in real life Min’s daughter is leading the publicity for this publication. That’s sweet synchronicity. And the novel has a sweetness to it, too.

Stay safe, my friends, and hope you're enjoying a great Fall season.
And in the meantime, happy reading!
​Joni