All reviews copyright 1984-2024 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE SCHOPENHAUER CURE by Irvin P. Yalom:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/06/2012]
THE SCHOPENHAUER CURE by Irvin D. Yalom (ISBN 978-0-066-2144-12) tries to blend psychotherapy and philosophy, and a lot of people like it, but it just does not work for me. I have two problems with it. First, Julius Hertzfeld seems to put Philip Slate into his group therapy sessions for insufficient reasons. Slate wants to get certified as a psychotherapist, but Hertzfeld does not think he is ready. So instead he puts him into a group therapy session with other patients, without appearing to think about how it will affect their therapy. And second, when he is in the group, all he does is quote Arthur Schopenhauer ... at length ... at great length. All that keeps it from being labeled an info-dump is that Schonpenhauer wrote philosophy rather than science or history or something explicitly fact-based. If a patient in a group therapy session is actually allowed to monopolize it as much as Slate does by reciting long stretches of his favorite philosopher, this does not speak well for the effectiveness of group therapy. I will admit that I am not a psychologist, so I may be misunderstanding what is going on here. But to an outsider, it does seem as though Slate is a disruptive influence and Hertzfeld does nothing about it. (SPOILER: That all this Schopenhauer actually helps cure the group members is clearly a plot contrivance rather than something that seems likely to happen.)
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/17/23]
Three years ago, James Davis Nicoll had a column about THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION STORIES 1949 edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty--the very first "Year's Best" of science fiction stories (it ran from 1949 to 1954, along with a "Year's Best SF Novels", 1952-1954). Through the years many other editors have taken up the baton: Judith Merril (1956-1968), Lester del Rey (1972-1976), Donald A. Wollheim (1965-1990), Terry Carr (1972-1987), Gardner Dozois (1984-2018), David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer (1996-2013), Jonathan Strahan (2007-2019), Rich Horton (2006-2021), ... You could even include Isaac Asimov if you want to count his retrospective "Great SF" series (though the choosing was reportedly done by Martin H. Greenberg, and Asimov just wrote the introductions to each story).
My favorite series these days is the one from HarperCollins, as part of their "Best American [xyz]", where "xyz" could be "Science Fiction and Fantasy", "Essays", "Mystery Stories", "Science and Nature Writing", and so on. (There was also a short-lived "European Fiction" series.) The primary editor is John Joseph Adams, but each year has a different co-editor, and what I like is how (at least in the "Science Fiction and Fantasy" series) works are chosen from sources I would never have known about. The stories chosen may not be the "best" (and by whose choice and what metric?), but they are a way for readers to find really good stories that they might not otherwise have seen. (The major drawback, of course, is that all the stories must be American.)
That's what I liked about the Datlow & Windling series of "Best Horror & Fantasy" (though I pretty much read only the Windling fantasy choices)--it wasn't full of familiar stories from familiar sources.
(And there are two types of "hidden gems": stories from science fiction and fantasy sources that do not have a big circulation, and stories from *non*-science fiction and fantasy sources that people who read only/primarily in the field almost definitely missed. (Someone might have noticed a science fiction story in PLAYBOY, but what about something from a college literary magazine, or an English-language magazine published in another country?) Clearly even the best editor cannot read everything, but they can certainly do a better job than I can.
KAFKA IN BRONTËLAND AND OTHER STORIES by Tamar Yellin:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/05/2007]
KAFKA IN BRONTËLAND AND OTHER STORIES by Tamar Yellin (ISBN-13 978-1-59264-153-6, ISBN-10 1-59264-153-9) is a collection of thirteen Jewish-themed stories--but also literature-themed. So we have a Jewish Odysseus, a Kafka living in Yorkshire, a mystery man who loans the narrator a copy of THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA, and so on, including the final piece, "A Letter from Josef K." Since Yellin herself is a Jew raised in Yorkshire, she understands how to meld the various cultures, and has a gift for language that makes the stories a joy to read.
HUNGRY HEARTS by Anzia Yezierska:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/13/2019]
HUNGRY HEARTS by Anzia Yezierska (Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-118005-6) is about the immigrant experience. For example, the first-person narrator in "The Free Vacation House" hears about a program that will give her and her children two weeks in the country. When she expresses interest, a social worked shows up and starts asking her questions: How old is she? Where is she from? How long has she been in this country? What is her husband's name? How old is he? How long has he been in this country? What is his job? How much does he make? How much is the rent? How many children do they have? How old are they? Does anyone else live with them? She asks why all the questions, and is told that the charities want to make sure she deserves it. She doesn't want charity, but it seems there is no choice.
Two weeks later she gets told they can go to the country the next day, and to go down to the office at 9AM. There she waits for over an hour, and then is asked the same questions: How old is she? Where is she from? How long has she been in this country? And so on. Then they are led through the street like children, and taken by train to the country, where a third person asks all the same questions, and then they are given a long set of rules about where they can go, what they can do, and so on; the people running the vacation house want to keep it looking nice in case the people paying for it come to inspect.
Oh, and all this takes place in the 1910s, although it sounds very much like the way social programs are still implemented today.++
Many of the stories do seem more anchored in that earlier period, although when one thinks about them, there are many connections to the present. One of the biggest differences may be that the emphasis on marriage for girls back then is no longer as strong. While it is true that within many immigrant communities there is still this emphasis, the wider society has a much stronger effect on the opinions of the younger members.
The ultimate effect is both to understand the period in which Yezierska wrote, and to understand our own a little bit better.
There was also one story that reminded me oddly of an Agatha Christie story. "'The Fat of the Land'" is about Hannah, a woman who starts out in poverty, but her children manage to do well and eventually she is living in luxury instead of a slum apartment. But her children are ashamed of her because she still sounds and acts as though she is still in the slums, and she feels useless. So she goes to visit an old friend who is still in the slums, and finds that she [Hannah] has been spoiled by her comforts: she can't sleep on the rickety bed, the mice running across the floor keep her awake, and the place smells bad. She concludes that there is no place for her. "She had fled from the marble sepulcher of the Riverside apartment to her old home in the ghetto, but now she knew that she could not live there again. She had outgrown her past by the habits of physical comforts, and those material comforts that she could no longer do without choked and crushed the life within her."
In Agatha Christie's "The Case of the Rich Woman". on the other hand, a rich woman goes to Parker Pyne, discontented with her wealthy life. Through a series of events, she finds herself living as a housemaid on a poor farm in a very distant part of Britain. The accommodations are basic, the food is simple, and the work is hard. Yet ultimately she chooses the farm because she is happy there. Admittedly, she is not in the desperate poverty of Hannah, but one gets the impression that Christie was never as poor as Yezierska, or even in contact with people as poor as those in Yezierska. (In fact, Christie was born into a wealthy upper- middle-class family.) It is easier to write about the nobility of poverty and hard work when one has had little or no experience of it.
THE HAUNTED TRAVELLER by Barry Yourgrau:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/30/2004]
I finally read Barry Yourgrau's THE HAUNTED TRAVELLER, which are a series of vignettes told by a traveler. I would describe this as magical realism in the style of Lisa Goldstein's TOURISTS or some of Jorge Luis Borges's works. It was also more what I expected Ursula K. LeGuin's CHANGING PLANES to be (and wasn't).
HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE by Charles Yu:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/18/2011]
Our science fiction group's book this month was HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE by Charles Yu (read by James Yaegashi) (ISBN 978-0-307-37920-7, audiobook ISBN 978-1-449-83487- 6). I had read this book before, so this time I listened to the audiobook. Yaegashi did an excellent job, with a very believable delivery as the first-person narrator, sounding as though he were talking directly to the reader rather than reading off a page.
This is another example of a science fiction novel written outside the field. Yu is more concerned with the emotional content than with the technical aspects of his novel, so the mechanics of building a time machine are somewhat glossed over, and instead we get more reflections on emotional states and family relationships. This is not to say Yu is unfamiliar with the science fiction field--one character has named a time machine part a "Niven ring", and another in a moment of excitement shouts, "Holy Heinlein!"
One of Yu's ideas is so clever I almost hate to quibble over its accuracy. (But you know me--I'll do it anyway.) He has a problem with his time machine and finds himself in a Buddhist temple with his mother. But not his mother as she was, or as she will be, but as she might have been, a perfect mother, the Platonic ideal of his mother. This, he concludes, is neither the past nor the present, but the subjunctive:
She turns to me, and I see at once that this woman is exactly like my mother. She is The Woman My Mother Should Have Been.She is not a could have been. Could have beens are women who are not exactly like my mother. For any given mother, for any given person, there are many could have beens, maybe an infinite number.
No, this woman standing in front of me is something else, she is the one and only Woman My Mother Should Have Been, and I have found her. Looking for my father, I have found this woman, I have traveled, chronogrammatically, out of the ordinary tense axes and into this place, into the subjunctive mode.
While he recognizes that the subjunctive is not on the same axis as past and present, he does not address the problem that the subjunctive is not a tense, with some chronological position, but a mood. One can have the past subjunctive, the present subjunctive, or the future subjunctive, just as one can have the past, present, or future indicative. So the question of whether a time machine could invoke the subjunctive is problematic.
But I suppose that one can even have this discussion indicates that Yu has put more into this book than one usually finds in a time travel novel. And while there are good time-travel novels marketed as science fiction, Yu's style makes this a refreshing change from the usual.
"The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/29/2012]
"The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld) is okay, but I do not see why it got a Hugo nomination.
FROM DUST, A FLAME by Rebecca Podos:
THE GHOSTS OF ROSE HILL by R. M. Romero:
THE INQUISITOR'S APPRENTICE by Chris Moriarty:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/05/24]
I've been reading a lot of YA Jewish fantasy lately.
In FROM DUST, A FLAME by Rebecca Podos (Balzer + Bray, ISBN 978-0-062-69906-0) sixteen-year-old Hannah is tired of being constantly on the move with no explanation. Then on her seventeenth birthday she discovers her body is changing--not in the usual ways, but in that she suddenly has golden eyes with slits for pupils. Her mother leaves Hannah and her brother Gabe to try to find help, but after she fails to return, Hannah and Gabe must search out what clues they have to try to solve the mystery and cure Hannah. I'm not sure how much of the fantasy is "authentic" Jewish folklore, and how much is extrapolated, but it all fits together as Hannah and Gabe discover their pasts, and the pasts of their family.
THE GHOSTS OF ROSE HILL by R. M. Romero (Peachtree Teen, ISBN 978-1-682-63552-0) is a story told in free verse about Ilana Lopez, a teenage Jewish Latina sent to live with her aunt in Prague. There she discovers an abandoned cemetery, and a ghost named Benjamin, and the joys, the sorrows, and the terrors of the past.
THE INQUISITOR'S APPRENTICE by Chris Moriarty (Clarion, ISBN 978-0-547-85084-9) is set in an alternate early twentieth-century New York, where magic is real, but forbidden (although as with alcohol during Prohibition in our world, it still exists, both on a small-scale and on a large). Sacha is a rare sort who can see magic, and where the Inquisitors discover this, he is swept up to serve their purposes, apparently the first Jewish member of that group. There is a lot of atmosphere of the New York of our world in that time, with rival neighborhoos and gangs based on ethnic and religious differences, as well as the story of the effects of magic and such. It does make one egregious error, where Moriarty writes that the old Jewish men talk about "the possibility on a purely theoretical level of maybe perhaps coming up with a tentative plan for coaxing an obviously reluctant Messiah into coming back some time in the next few millennia..." How can the Messiah come back when he was never here in the first place?
All three are probably good reads for teens (or, I suppose, adults). THE INQUISITOR'S APPRENTICE concentrates a lot more on Jewish life of the its time than the other two, sometimes to the level of heavy-handedness.