On the continuing saga of a Fullmetal Alchemist read-through, I'm up to Chapter 19 being completed. As always, you either know the series or not, but I do still love how Arakawa keeps things moving, while always keeping characters in mind. The latest chapter dealt with finally revealing the full details of the Ishbalan War and it remains quite strong.I'm also appreciative of the way chapters 16-18 radically alter the stakes, introduce new threats and allies, and reframe the entire story in a fairly organic manner.
On more "traditional" reading, I also read through Denis Johnson's Largesse of the Sea Maiden. It's a collection of five short stories from someone considered a master of the art, and these stories don't dispel the notion. I'd give heavy credit to the first two tales. In the opener an aging marketing manager relates seemingly disconnected vignettes of his life in sparkling prose and knotted cul-de-sacs. I'll give a special nod to the following story, "The Starlight on Idaho", though, which revolves around correspondences from a fuck-up in his nth stay in rehab as he writes to God, Satan, his parents, and even his first love, a girl he knew in 5th grade. Rather than write up so much more, I'll just quote my favorite passage/metaphor -
Dear Jennifer Johnston,
Well, to catch you up on things, the last four years have really kicked my ass. I try to get back to that point I was at in the fifth grade where you sent me a note with a heart on it said "Dear Mark I really like you" and I turned that note over and wrote on the back of it "Do you like me or love me?" and you made me a new note with twenty hearts on it and sent it back down the aisles and it said "I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you!" I would count there to be about fifteen or sixteen hooks in my belly with lines heading off into the hands of people I haven't seen since a long time back, and that's one of them. But just to catch you up. In the last five years I've been arrested about eight times, shot twice, not twice on one occasion, but once on two different occasions, etc etc and I think I got run over once but I don't even remember it. I've loved a couple thousand women but I think you're number one on the list. That's all folks, over and out.
I followed up with Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. I approached the book expecting more of a clinical analysis of the actual specifics of our epochal moment, but Kolbert threw a curveball by analyzing the history of how humanity came to even realize the possibility of extinction as real, filtering each new discovery through a particular extinxt species and illuminating the threads of our current issues, from climate change to human proliferation, throughout. Essentially, each chapter is trying to perform two or three balancing acts, all feeding into a greater whole, and it accomplishes it with aplomb.
I then moved on to Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater, which relates the life of a young Nigerian woman who is born housing numerous demigods that operate more as the coping mechanisms of a traumatic life. The clever conceit here is that nothing Ada undergoes is particularly traumatic in ways that exceed normal human bounds, implying that any of us house just as many personalities. In many ways it attempts to stifle the usual uber-traumas that precede most narratives of this nature (until a kind of off-kilter ending that feels both abrupt and momentous). The prose is also quite gorgeous, though occassionally nebulous enough to prove difficult. An early passage -
We were three and she was a snake, coiled up on the tile in the bathroom, waiting. But we had spent the last few years believing our body—thinking that our mother was someone different, a thin human with rouged cheekbones and large bottle-end glasses. And so we screamed. The demarcations are not that clear when you're new. There was a time before we had a body, when it was still building itself cell by cell inside the thin woman, meticulously producing organs, making systems. We used to flit in and out to see how the fetus was doing, whistling through the water it floated in and harmonizing with the songs the thin woman sang, Catholic hymns from her family, their bodies stored as ashes in the walls of a cathedral in Kuala Lumpur. It amused us to distort the chanting rhythm of the music, to twist it around the fetus till it kicked in glee.
As a final note on this roundup, this last weekend I blew through Kwame Appiah's The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. As a long-gestating follow-up to his wonderful take on cosmopolitanism, Appiah's primary task is presenting countless examples of how identity, a relatively new idea in human history but one that suffuses our modern discourse, is far more malleable than many assume. He devotes a chapter to religion, nationality, class, race, gender, and culture. The strongest bit of writing revolves around religion and nationality, in which he points to the way national identity was particularly difficult to ascribe to, say, a German-Italian writer of the late 1800s for whom neither country fully existed at his birth. Or what of the tantamount entwining of religious identities and edicts over time? Appiach can give you a hundred examples of how religious identity is based more in location and time, and the beliefs follow, rather than the erroneous view that belief influences identity. The weakest section, sadly, lies with race. While Appiah delineates all of those liminal places in which identities abut and rebound, his discussion of race feels extremely clipped and rushed. Still, I love Appiah, and it's a book worth reading, especially if this is a new or interesting topic to you. I came to love Appiah due to the clarity of his writing and his deep humanity, and this new book only reinforces those qualities.