[REVIEW] Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

 

FifteenDogs_cover

Coach House Books

171 pages, $17.95

 

Review by Lynne Weiss

 

Fifteen Dogs, the latest novel by Canadian writer Andre Alexis, compellingly explores the human condition—the need for purpose, spiritual sustenance, food, sex, sensual gratification, and most of all, for love and language—through the perspective of fifteen dogs who have been given human consciousness in the course of a bet between Hermes and Apollo.

All fifteen dogs happen to be in a veterinary clinic next to the Toronto tavern where Hermes and Apollo formulate their wager. “I’ll wager a year’s servitude,” says Apollo, “that animals—any animals you choose—would be even more unhappy than humans are if they had human intelligence.”

Apollo’s brother Hermes (they are both sons of Zeus), accepts the bet on the condition that if even one of the creatures to whom they grant human consciousness dies happy, he wins the bet. Continue reading

[REVIEW] Einstein’s Beach House, by Jacob M. Appel

Einstein

Pressgang

188 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Lynne Weiss

 

The theme of the highly readable and surprising stories that comprise Jacob M. Appel’s Einstein’s Beach House is aptly expressed in the first sentence of the first story, “Hue and Cry”—these stories describe things that are “funny” when they happen “to other people.” Things, the narrator goes on to explain, like “tarring and feathering, Peeping Toms, mad cow disease.” In a sense, all three of these things happen to characters in this first story, which describes the plans of a man dying of a brain-wasting disease to teach his daughters forgiveness by taking them to meet a paroled Level 1 sex offender who has recently moved into their neighborhood. The protagonist is 13-year-old Lizzie, one of the aforementioned daughters of the dying man. While everyone else in the neighborhood is protesting the presence of the parolee (metaphorically tarring and feathering him), Lizzie’s father is making plans to befriend him, and Lizzie and her friend Julia are the Peeping Toms who put a watch on the sex offender’s house and break into it to look for something unspecified. “We’ll know it when we find it,” Julia assures Lizzie, and Lizzie does find something in the course of the story, but it has nothing to do with the sex offender and much to do with her coming to terms with her father’s death and declining powers.

Appel is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in more than 200 literary journals. According to his website, Appel is has an M.D. from Columbia and has been admitted to the bar in New York State and Rhode Island. Einstein’s Beach House, which is published by Pressgang, a small press affiliated with the Butler University MFA program, is Appel’s second collection of short stories. He has also published novels and collections of essays. Continue reading

[REVIEW] Remnants of Passion by Sarah Einstein

remnants

Shebooks

40 pages, $2.99

 

Review by Lynne Weiss

 

I thought I was going to love Sarah Einstein’s collection of four essays, Remnants of Passion, as soon as I read the first sentence: “Mommy Buddha is grousing again, hitching up his skirts and planting his big, black Chuck Taylors into the rutted mud of the road.”

I knew I was going to love it a few pages later when I laughed out loud, because I really love good writing that startles me enough to make me laugh. Having read the collection a few times now, it’s hard to remember exactly which sentence was the first one that made me laugh out loud, but it might have been the one in which our narrator/protagonist describes overhearing an ex-boyfriend (specifically, the one she describes as Terry-who-was-my-boyfriend-before-that-awful-business-with-the-cops-and-the-weed) describing a Thanksgiving at his parents house, and “his father grousing at the words we’re using on the Scrabble board, words he doesn’t know, words like textual and orality, which he says don’t sound like good Christian words to him …” The sentence goes on, though I’m not going to include it all here, because I’m supposed to be the one writing this review, and Einstein has a gift for writing long sentences woven of many strands of meaning and experience that carry a reader into the very sensations and sensuality of the world she is describing in these essays. Continue reading

The Mercury Fountain by Eliza Factor (A Review by Lynne Weiss)

 

Akashic Press

280 pgs/$15.95

The Mercury Fountain is Eliza Factor’s first novel, so I did not know her writing or reputation, but her book caught my eye because of the publisher, Akashic Press. Akashic is what you might call a “big” small press with a catalog of about 250 titles built up over the sixteen years they have been in business. With the tagline “reverse-gentrification of the literary world,” Brooklyn-based Akashic has carved out an interesting niche for itself with its dedication to “publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction.” Founded by Johnny Temple, a former bassist of Girls Against Boys, Akashic has had great success with among other things, its city-based Noir anthologies. The first in the series was Brooklyn Noir, but the series has expanded to include nearly every major and not-so-major American city and many international cities, with titles such as Baghdad Noir and Lagos Noir forthcoming.

There is nothing particularly noir about Factor’s novel (and Akashic also has an extensive list of literary fiction and political nonfiction), but the second aspect of the book that appealed to me was the setting: a utopian community on the Texas-Mexico border in the early 1900s. I can’t say that I love reading books about this time and place (I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of another novel with this setting) but I’m interested in the time period, so I took it on. From the first sentence- The scream must have come from Casa Grande– I was trapped like a miner in a tunnel. In fact, from that first sentence we move quickly to a terrifying (for this claustrophobe) several pages of journeying into the netherworld with Ysidro, a 12-year-old boy who understandably develops his own fear of the mines as a result of his journey, and thus finds pursuing his expected occupation- mining- impossible to pursue.

Pristina is no typical mining town. It was founded by Owen Scraperton, a Massachusetts idealist, on the principles of  “clarity, unity, and purpose.” In practice, this means a community based on rationality and racial harmony rather than religion and ritual. And yet much of what drives Scraperton is his aesthetic fascination with mercury. Although mercury, or quick silver, had considerable industrial value in 1900 (it was used to extract gold and silver from ore), Owen’s fascination with this substance is also aesthetic. He places a mercury fountain in the center of Pristina so that residents can enjoy the fascination of this substance, which exists between liquid and solid forms.

The fountain was not efficient or didactic or scientific- it was beautiful. Owen had some sort of excuse that beauty acted as the engine of evolution and therefore ought to be studied and generated in order to spur the race along. But forget about that. It was lovely in itself, the way the mercury flowed over the rim, its mobile, mirror effect.

Unfortunately, the toxic qualities of mercury were little understood at this time, and Ysidro is not the only character trapped by the mines. Owen invests everything he has in Pristina, where he falls in love with Dolores, a vibrant, independent, and aristocratic young Mexican woman.

Owen had first seen Dolores on Generalissimo, skimming across the Coahuilan plain, nothing like the side-saddled women he’d grown up with. It was incredible to him, finding her. Religion had warped every woman he had met to one extreme or another. And there in Mexico, with the whole country under the pall of dictators and priests, Dolores rode on her horse, free as the day she was born.

Owen is drawn to Dolores for her passionate nature and her willingness to defy convention, but just as he rationalizes his fascination with mercury because it is useful, he believes that he can base his relationship with Dolores on rational principles. It is only much later that Dolores understands that Owen’s attitude toward marriage is at odds with her own:

He didn’t want a woman at all; he wanted an enterprise-sharer. Shopkeepers, he said, had the best marriages because they were immersed in the same enterprise. Did she look like shopkeeper? Is that what he had seen?

One of the strengths of Factor’s book is her ability to portray Owen’s fascination with Dolores, as well as the community’s love of Dolores over time. Owen, it seems, is great on the vision thing, but when people need help or support or sympathy, his devotion to rationalism fails them. Factor also brings to life Owen and Delores’s shared love for their daughter Victoria, who tries to bring her father’s rational idealism and her mother’s earthy passion together.

I admired this novel’s portrayal of a long but not always happy marriage. Dolores’s dissatisfaction is very real, as are her reasons for continuing with Owen. But what I admired the most was the structure of the novel. The story covers a span of twenty-three years, but like Mercury or mercury, it coalesces and moves through time, carrying us to each pool of crisis, tension, and change and providing with quick strokes– all the background we need to understand where we are in the story and what has happened in the intervening years, portraying a world that is fascinating and yet doomed.

 

Lynne Weiss’s work has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Larcom Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; and Radcliffe Magazine. She has received grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo.