maises's reviews
54 reviews

Magdalena by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

2.75

“I screamed at them, saying there was no ghost in there, and if there were one, I would welcome her, welcome her, welcome her.“

It was a bit of a struggle to get through the latter half of the book, not because it was challenging, but possibly because it wasn’t. I think that there were some interesting themes that this novel touched, specifically on freedom, choice, and generational trauma. I don’t think it succeeded too much in expanding those discussions. Personally, Brainard’s writing fluctuated in its strength to me where there were more compelling chapters than others. I think we could have done without so many switching character perspectives, only because mid-point I was confused on who was who and what their relationship was to other narrators—it was already enough that all of it was achronological.

Despite my disappointment with Magdalena, I still plan on reading other works of Brainard’s, just to give it another go. Magdalena’s subject matter and execution was not quite to my taste, but I appreciated the effort in depicting difficult familial relationships. Also, I hate to be immature about this: I just really did not get the foot fetish inclusion. And the breast milk scene. I’m good.

Post-traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson

3.5

“Vivian was the center of it all, she had created this experience for the group and she could feel everyone in the room loving her, except for the people who were jealous of her, but they also loved her, they just blocked that love from consciousness.”

It was painful to be in Vivian’s head. I think of all the books I’ve read so far this month, this one actually activated something inside of me in a visceral way. I don’t know if I would say that Vivian and I ever had the same thought processes, but I found that a lot of her selfishness and fears and overreactions were things that either I or other people I know have experienced. The world isn’t made up of people “in recovery” who are actively healing versus others who are not; Post-Traumatic is a novel that underlines this fact. The worst thing that could ever happen could happen to you, and how you cope with it heavily involves what you are surrounded by and if you are supported. Vivian’s path towards wanting better for herself begins because she has that support, at least eventually.

They were all okay embarrassing each other, which irritated Vivian because she had organized her life in such a way as to avoid embarrassment. No roommates. No long-term companionship. No family. Elective relationships only. Yet, they had all done it. Traveled together and annoyed one another. Seen each other through sickness and broken hearts, witnessed each other's worst mistakes and failures, met each other's dysfunctional families. And none of them had stopped loving the other or at the very least hanging out.

Another huge part of this story was shame of the self, and especially of the body. A lot of it is societal, and Vivian’s true goal is to be her own ideal self, which is a practice done seemingly to preclude herself from rejection. My actual favorite scene, albeit pretty on-the-nose, was the very last:

re-potting a plant to give it more room to loosen its roots, and eventually to grow

. It is an apt metaphor for recovery; hitting the wall doesn’t mean the end. You just need the patience and care and space, even when it gets messy.

Alcestis/Hippolytus/Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides

5.0

I can’t give an in-depth review of this before I finish another collection first, but Philip Vellacott’s preface had the sharpest and most poignant takes on how Euripides wrote women.

Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

3.5

“‘Darling, darling,’ she murmured, ‘I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so.’”

I read the Lanternfish Press edition, published in 2019 and edited by Carmen Maria Machado. I have to be honest here: I was absolutely irritated by Machado’s editorial footnotes. She restates certain imagery via footnotes just in simplified terms multiple times enough to make me crazy, and some “additional” information like the general’s secret lover Kurt came without any actual source noted (I had to look this up because it seemed so specific, but it seems like some kind of made-up tidbit? Why?). I appreciated the very sparse geographical clarifications, but other than that Machado’s footnotes very much detracted and gave nothing to the overall work in general. Other than this unfortunate element of the book, I really enjoyed Carmilla.

Can Carmilla love? Did she love the general’s niece as Millarca, or Laura when she was known as Carmilla? Did she love the nobleman she had favored as the alive Countess Karnstein? I think that this novel Carmilla is a love story, beautifully written and remembered. Laura felt her love and gave it in return, as had the general’s niece, and likely the nobleman. But the love she imposes is all-possessive, encompassing. It leaves a mark.

“[…] You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.”

Here Carmilla states that there is no such thing as “indifference” to her, and this is true. Laura will always die for her, and she would do it willingly. But not once does she say she would die for Laura. In the last chapter, Laura recites how vampires sometimes indulges in “an artful courtship,” almost detached enough that it seems like this is something researched to comfort her own worries. With Carmilla no longer there to explain herself, how can Laura truly know what Carmilla felt for her, if she felt for her at all?

The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of a connoisseur, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases, it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. 

Carmilla’s fiery love and attention comes with death as a conclusion. How transactionary is love supposed to be with the people you adore? Can you say you love someone, own them body and soul, even though all you do is take? Maybe in when Laura tries to carve herself a future in the aftermath, she finds the answer. As for me, all I can say is that Carmilla loved Laura, but not enough to starve.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

3.75

“But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had.”

Less than the actual content of The Stranger itself, what sticks with me most is the memory when my friend and I would jokingly call each other “Mersault” in high school, which had us on Camus for a semester on existentialism. That’s actually what I had her named in my phone contacts for years, before I thought it wasn’t so funny anymore and barely recalled why I had ever done it in the first place. I suspect the heart of the joke was that we, as teens—beyond any other body of the population—were beyond familiar with the feelings of passivity in the face of absurdity. In many ways, Mersault could have been a teenage girl in the mid 2010s.

The Stranger feels like an exploration of the rule of thirds, where the expressed absence of something only draws interest to what should actually be there. What I’m trying to interpret here is that even in a story that opens with “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know,” we still might just be looking at an individual ruled by feeling and emotion. Existentialism, nihilism, absurdism… I have nothing to digress about the isms themselves. The only thing is that I realize after rereading again as an adult that what this book is not is a book about being unfeeling. Instead, the main character Mersault is extremely honest about the emotions that he feels, his likes and dislikes. He gives into his whims. He smokes when he feels like it, gets lazy enough not to want to transfer eggs from the pan to a plate, goes swimming as soon as the urge hits. He doesn’t force himself to endure Raymond or any of the people he knows; he spends time with them because he doesn’t mind it, and it’s too much trouble otherwise. He doesn’t go along with Marie’s marriage proposal because he wants her to shut up; in his own words, “it didn’t really matter” whether he was a married man or not, but he wouldn’t just marry anyone he had no interest in at all, because, again, Mersault does not do anything he abhors. He might endure something he marginally doesn’t care for, but he won’t do something he outright hates. Mersault’s dislikes are made known through repetition: being uncomfortable, the heat, the prosecutor’s attack on his character, the blank gazes of the woman from the diner and the young reporter, the police. He notes that he does not like these things and would rather avoid them, if possible, just as any other human might. “I explained to [the magistrate], however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings,” he says, and it isn’t a lie. I suppose another ism we could add is hedonism, but even that doesn’t quite describe what Mersault is going through. When he tells the judge that he murdered someone in cold blood “because of the sun,” what he really meant to say was that his irritation from bodily discomfort that day on the beach had him express it in that way. Does that make Mersault a psychopath? Speaking from a modern perspective, not even touching on the racial implications of dehumanizing “the Arabs” and “Moorish women,” I probably would say very possibly. But he isn’t Ted Bundy, exactly. He’s just some guy. A stupid one, and more so a jackass than anything else. If I was the defense, I’d plead insanity, though I wouldn’t really believe it. I think what The Stranger also inadvertently (or purposefully) becomes is a critique on the French justice system at the time of writing; the defense’s argument being so weak when the prosecutor’s isn’t even marginally better (and based on empathy and emotion, juxtaposing Mersault) will always annoy me. I think I was most shocked about the guillotine over everything else. I wonder what that young, blank-faced reporter that Mersault didn’t like wrote after the proceedings.

[…] he remarked that sometimes we think we're sure when in fact we're not. I didn't say anything. He looked at me and asked, “What do you think?” I said it was possible. In any case, I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't. And it just so happened that what he was talking about didn’t interest me.

Mersault is impulsive and does what he likes. When he kills the man, he’s not unaware of what he’s doing as he does it. He’s uncomfortable, the sun is on him, so he kills the armed man on the beach without more reason to it than sweat getting in his eye. If the first shot was him expressing this, the next four was his own annoyance at giving in to his impulses, actively aware that he’s ruined his own life because of his spontaneity. Like I said, Mersault might just be a jackass. But even that isn’t so simply explained away to what happens to him; this may be when the existentialist essays jump in, but at its core The Stranger is really only a man dealing with a consequence that he didn’t expect, and is attempting to cope with it. Plenty of people have gone through this before him, and others would in the future as well. His final conclusion is acceptance.

So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.

I read the translation by Stuart Gilbert, who adapted the novel into American English. I don’t recall reading the version by Matthew Ward, but that’s likely what I had read in high school. I enjoyed Gilbert’s short, succinct prose and imagine it’s close to Camus’s own voice here.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

5.0

“‘There's no way out of this,’ he told him. ‘It’s as if it had already happened.’”

This is probably the most cinematic read I’ve had in ages, and has to be a new favorite of the year so far. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is not a whodunit, a howdunit, or a whydunit. It’s a story of stories, which examines “that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammeled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold.” The whole story is pieced together by many different sources, and not always reliable, but what rings true is that this was a completely preventable death. The build up that all of this led to was surely the most memorable and iconic novel endings of all time.

Fate, the universe, God—these outer, meddling elements are not waxed on in Chronicle, but go unsaid. This is a play. Everyone has their roles that they play to perfection: Angela Vicario accuses. The Vicario twins go on their hunt. Santiago Nasar dies. The townspeople themselves have their own role of disruption as judges, jury, and witnesses. It doesn’t matter that Angela Vicario may not have been telling the truth, or that the twins, at many points, lose heart in playing out their part. The outcome had already been set in stone, and Santiago Nasar would have always died, in every iteration of the day.

For years we couldn’t talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren’t doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate.

Is the town culpable for this singular crime, even without physical involvement? This might be what Chronicle is telling us. Nasar’s death, or pre-death, becomes a collective involvement, a festival. In my Vintage International edition, translated by Gregory Rabassa, the starting epitaph is from Gil Vicente: “The pursuit of love is like falconry.” I’m not sure if that’s supposed to mean that taming a falcon is dangerous, like love, which I assume is too simple, or if the predation of prey by falcons itself mirrors love. But what love is it referring to? Bayardo San Román couldn’t have really loved Angela Vicario when he returned her to her family; their “love story” only happened after Nasar’s death. It’s heavily implied that Nasar was not the one Angela Vicario had no actual tryst, so there wasn’t love there either. Familial love and friendship seem closest, with Cristo Bedoya and Nasar’s mother trying to save him, among others. Whatever it is, love is the driving force, but love doesn’t save Santiago Nasar.

There are other things to say, specifically about Angela Vicario. If they simply didn’t live in the society that they lived with, if her brothers weren’t obliged to return her honor from the man who took her virginity, then none of this would have happened. She deals with the cards she’s been dealt and lives out the rest of her life, not happy, necessarily, but with the semblance of her own autonomy, which is the most a woman in her position could hope for.

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon

4.5

“We owe it to each other to love and insist on meaningful revision until the day we die.”

I think How to Slowly Kill Yourself And Others in America is about making your mark and being seen in a world that is acclimated to ensuring those marks are washed off concrete. It’s a love letter to teachers. Each one of them in the classroom and out of it. There is a level of responsibility inherent in being a person living in society with other people, not necessarily accountability, but of knowing. Accepting. To be seen and heard is all that people ask, and these are the things that make a drastic difference in someone’s life: real support changes people. As Laymon says in his epilogue, “I have failed and I have maimed myself and others close to me. But I believe in transformation, and for the first time in my life, I really get how transformation is impossible without honest acceptance of who you are, whence you came, what you do in the dark, and how you want to love and be loved tomorrow. Baldwin wrote years ago that the only real change is a moral change.”

We are all dying, but we are all living. The key is to live with as much dignity as you can and never ever bring other people down because you've given up on life. Your work is finished but your worth is still being revealed. Your life was not in vain, Jimmy. You made a difference.

Laymon’s writing is intimate. He is honest in being “bad at being human,” and in doing so layers his personal history of being a Black man navigating white American academia and lifestyle, of Black men kinship in the backdrop of early 2010s American political stirrings, of being a nephew, a grandson, and a son. All the essays had gravitas and impact and a touch of something private, written just for Laymon himself, that made me genuinely shed tears from how bare it felt. We Will Never Ever Know showcased this, repeated again in the letters seen in Echo: Mychal, Darnell, Kiese, Kai and Marlon. I thought even Reasonable Doubt and the Lost Presidential Debate of 2012 (still on the pulse when reading in 2025) displayed Laymon’s personal dealings with his involvement  and place in the greater picture at large—something all Americans eventually come to terms with and grieve when living in America. 

In his introduction, Laymon noted he wanted to layer these essays like tracks in an album, and it resonated in a call and response of these themes interspersed between the pieces, beautiful and memorable in their execution. I blasted through this in a day, in the middle of a growing American sociopolitical cyst that continues to kill myself and people in America. This book held my hand, put in Laymon’s terms, whether or not I deserved it.

Indeed, my living is your living, is your father's living, is my father's living, is my mother's living, is the stranger's living, and it is the revolution.

The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

3.0

“How do you kill any religion? You convince its flock that their shepherds are wolves.”

I didn’t expect this to be a retelling going in, until the tidbit about the mermaid’s Hans Christian Andersen-esque story being told incorrectly across the land. I’d prefer to read or reread the original work when I know I’m about to get into a retelling, but I’ll let it slide here since it seems like Khaw is pulling it in as a very loose inspiration. Instead, it’s an amalgamation of many different tales to create a new, broader storyline. Just like Shrek. 

Regardless of whether or not it’s a retelling, I find it difficult to pin down what sort of world this is supposed to be. Is it a divergent world from ours that includes harpies, mermaids, magic? It’s not a full fantasy universe separate from our own. They talk about a Hippocratic oath—implying the Ancient Greek civilization once existed, and seemingly the World Medical Association currently does—and “Judas” in context of a traitor, which hauntingly implies that one of the many religions mentioned by the characters in this world include Christianity for some reason (ignoring the use of “saints” here)? Someone brought up the French language. Yet there are also kingdoms and nondescript wars between civilizations. Where’s France in all that? I probably shouldn’t be prodding this much, but if it really is our world with the same human events it can explain how we get the Hans Christian Andersen’s version of The Little Mermaid mentioned in-story dismissed as an inaccurate autobiography. It’s a little too on the nose, but I guess that element of it doesn’t detract much from the plot.

This next critique is likely preferencial, even though it’s the sole reason I couldn’t fully enjoy this book. To preface: I love pedantic writing. I love indulgence. I think it’s fun to be whimsical. Educational, even. I expect this style to be what Khaw has endeared to as a writer and I respect that, but really: “rotate the polished rostrum,” “I gave him another koan,” “minute paroxysms,” “rheumatic gaze,” “epauletted by amethyst”, “its inchoate apex,” etc. I adore my in-app dictionary function as much as the next guy, but in excess this much archaic and obscure phrasing is plain distracting. And weird. It’s uncanny because no one on earth talks like this, not even individuals who make a living off of being pedantic themselves. When looking up most of these words, the known definitions don’t quite match the context either. How can a gaze be rheumatic, which refers to rheumatism or rheumatoid arthritis, the inflammation of bone joints? I actually went on a Google rabbit hole and found that arthritis can plausibly affect the eyes with dryness and some redness, so there might be something there, but having to do actual homework for a throwaway descriptor is unreasonable. I also figure it’s used inaccurately anyway. 

I would never tell a writer to change their preferred style, and I’m always partial to when a writer lets loose; I only suggest putting down the thesaurus every few sentences to read the occasional poetry chapbook or something. Whatever it takes to cleanse the soul. In my opinion, stories have a singular duty to the reader: to be understood. The awkward, unnatural speech was something that legitimately interrupted my reading flow. How can I be compelled during a thrilling scene when I’m thrown off by the casual (and not quite right) use of the word “antumbra”? I already had to face “penumbra” on page one.

I want to leave on a positive note. Despite what I wrote above, I still did enjoy the narrative that played out in The Salt Grows Heavy. The main characters are interesting and have depth to them. I liked the plague doctor, who became my favorite, and I thought the mermaid’s general apathy was quirky and entertaining. In their delusion, the doctor-saints were memorable antagonists. I thought the entire latter half has the right amount of cool and nasty and horrific that I usually like to watch unravel. But again, a lot of this is bogged down by the execution. Overall, it’s a relatively straightforward story with an interesting premise and ghoulish, heart-wracking icky bits. I thought the epilogue was a nice touch, too, including the prequel vignette at the end. I just don’t see myself reading it again, let alone picking up any other work of Khaw’s.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

3.5

“When you love something so much that you dream of emptying yourself out for it, you'd be forgiven for wanting to let your love finish the job.”

Something strange about Tolentino’s writing is that, in order to properly critique a subject, she has to declare her otherness to it, but also must end with a stress on her proximity to that subject, and how, occasionally, she directly benefits. She does this often with American whiteness as an entire subculture, but also mostly femininity in the face of a patriarchal society. I don’t necessarily think her acknowledgement of these things are bad, but somehow doing so in multiple different essays loses the veracity of any of the points: those main critiques lose their teeth. I Thee Dread ends on, “I have always accommodated everything I wish I were opposed to,” and I was left thinking, “Cool. Now what?” 

Because Tolentino has these detailed observations and breakdowns of current societal structures, you would think that she could offer her insight as to what her general opinion is on the dismantling of these systems, but she skirts around subjects like that often enough that it’s a bit too noticeable. In Ecstasy (one of the ones I thought was written strongest), there is a part where she seesaws between the white Evangelical Christian lifestyle in Texas and its somewhat disproportionate opposite (the key to her first taste of freedom)—chopped and screwed music. This is all a segue into drug culture and ecstasy, of course, but this connotation and line of thought just reads as extremely goofy to me, and frankly kind of surprising for someone who touts as a liberal (leftist? After the Clinton praise, I doubt it). Though she mentioned it in passing, this kind of Filipino-American-born-in-white-suburbia unable to find solace in said whiteness and turning to Black American subculture, oftentimes encroaching into appropriation, is a tale as old as time.

Contextually, even when she wrote about feminist issues, she seemed to think even a sprinkle of mention about marginalized communities were enough when those were seemingly the more interesting parts about the narrative. Maybe it’s also a personal thing, in that I was unable to relate to her frustrations about certain issues simply because of its own vicinity to white feminism itself.

I did still enjoy reading her prose. And though she lost me on some of these, I obviously still stuck it out. My favorite pieces were Reality TV Me (for the pop culture relevancy and fun of it), Ecstasy (she went all out in prose here), and Pure Heroines (nothing new yet still written in a riveting way). It was intriguing to actually read a piece detailing how the GOP preys and devalues feminist rhetoric and weaponizes liberal techniques in The Cult of the Difficult Woman, though again, doesn’t deliver anything I haven’t seen before. In the dawn of a new administration now, it does fall pretty heavy.

I found the research-heavy essays particularly interesting, like in Ecstasy, Pure Heroines and The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams, and I liked how she structured her works. It was a fine collection, otherwise I wouldn’t have finished. It’s just a shame that sometimes more interesting points were left at the tip of her tongue.

At sunset, the night sky billowed into mile-wide peonies, hardly an arm's length above me, and it felt like a visitation, like God was replacing the breath in my lungs. I sobbed—battered by a love I knew would fall away from me, ashamed for all the ways I had tried to bring myself to this, humiliated by the grace of encountering it now.

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy by Anne Carson

4.25

“A cloud? he’ll say. We went to Troy to get a cloud? We lived all those years knee-deep in death for the sake of a cloud?”

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is my second attempt at Anne Carson, the first being The Autobiography of Red, which I had read years ago at a younger age. At the time, contextually, much of the callbacks and themes went over my head. It’s nice to better be involved with what topics are being deconstructed in a short vignette like this after all. Carson’s prose is always melancholy and beautiful and sharp and she uses Greek mythology and pop culture history as a venue for fascinating remarks on forced-feminine veneers.

There is an alternative mythology documented by a few Ancient Greek authors where Helen of Troy was not in Troy during the entirety of the Trojan war, but in fact in Egypt, and in her place was a cloud in her exact form called an eidolon. Carson floats this line of myth with the idea of Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood starlet, as Norma Jeane Baker’s own “cloud.” A decoy, but not a deceit of any kind. “Substitute the playful and musical Russian expression maskirovka: masking.” This is what Carson is exploring in this piece, the idea of masks and clouds as protection, particularly as marks of surviving womanhood.

If you pick a flower, if you snatch a hand-bag, if you possess a woman, if you plunder a storehouse, ravage a countryside or occupy a city, you are a taker. You are taking. In ancient Greek you use the verb ápπáζειν, which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum and gives us English rapture and rape — words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.