Review: Me, Who Dove Into The Heart Of The World by Sabina Berman

title: Me, Who Dove Into The Heart of the World [purchase here]

author: Sabina Berman

translated by: Lisa Dillman

genre: fiction

pages: 242

published: August 2012

source: I received an advanced reader's copy from Henry Holt via 

LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.

"Okay.

     That's what I said to Pena and my aunt over the radio; they were awaiting news in the tower in the dock.

     I like that word very much: okay.  It's from the 19th century, the American Civil War.  Generals used to write it in their war reports when nobody had died that day.

     Zero killed = 0 killed = 0K= Okay.

     Okay, over and out, my aunt responded.

     Outside the radio cabin on deck, the man from Greenpeace tugged off the hood of his wetsuit.  He had brown hair with blonde tips like Ricardo.

     The most stress-free tuna catch on the planet, he said.  Congratulations.

     I corrected him.

     Except for those in Palermo, where they still use preindustrial methods. 

     No, he smiled.  More stress-free than those.

     And then he added:

     And 100% dolphin-safe." (page 112)

Me, Who Dove Into the Heart of the World follows the story of Karen Nieto, a woman who started her life as a feral child, and is later diagnosed an autistic savant who has the unique ability to put herself in the "shoes" of animals, specifically fish, specifically tuna.

From the back jacket: "Karen Nieto passed her earliest years as a feral child, left alone to wander the vast beach property near her family's failing tuna cannery.  But when her aunt Isabelle comes to Mexico to take over the family business, she discovers among the squalor a real girl.  So begins a miraculous journey for autistic savant Karen, who finds freedom not only in the love and patient instruction of her aunt but eventually at the bottom of the ocean swimming among the creatures of the sea."

Berman's plot is really engaging and very clever. Who knew a book about a tuna cannery could be so engaging? And Karen is such strong, fully realized character.  How Berman is able to completely assert herself into Karen's psyche and write so truthfully from her perspective is really something. The way Karen thinks and reasons is so consistent, so thought through down to the detail...such a brilliantly rendered character.  My favorite parts were when Karen described other people's emotions, and how she would have to consciously go into "relating mode" to decipher what people were feeling.  Reminded me of Dr. Sheldon Cooper...

...in the best possible way (he is currently my FAVORITE character on TV).  

What was fascinating was the way Karen chose to approach Descartes infamous statement: I think, therefore I am.  Karen would argue that we are, and then we think, and it's hard to argue with her reasoning.  Through Karen, Berman presents a way of looking at the world so vastly different than what's expected, but so refreshing and very much needed.

Rubric rating: 7.  I would love to read more from Berman.

Review: Understories by Tim Horvath

title: Understories [purchase here]

by: Tim Horvath

pages: 252

genre: short stories

published: May 2012

source:  I received an advanced reader's copy from Bellevue Literary Press via

LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.

"It was the comfort of your tongue tripping on your own sweat, a friendly reminder that of the world's salt, a share is yours." (p. 14, Circulation)

The back jacket copy is what compelled me to request Tim Horvath's Understories from the May Early Reviewers batch on LibraryThing:  "What if there were a city that consisted only of restaurants? What if Paul Gauguin had gone to Greenland instead of Tahiti? What if there were a field called Umbrology, the study of shadows, where physicists and shadow puppeteers worked side by side.  Full of speculative daring though firmly anchored in the tradition of realism, Tim Horvath's stories explore all of this and more, blending the everyday and wondrous to contend with age-old themes of loss, identity, imagination, and the search for human connection. Whether making offhand references to Mystery Science Theater, providing a new perspective on Heidegger's philosophy and forays into Nazism, or following the imaginary travels of a library book, Horvath's writing is as entertaining as it is thought provoking."

As a collection, Understories was a bit uneven.  Not all of the stories seemed like they belonged in the same book.  That said, there were more than a few that stood out to me as really quite good:

• Runaroundandscreamalot   By far, my favorite story in the book, but also the story that felt the most misplaced.  The action follows a divorced father as he takes his daughter, Sasha, to a local indoor playground and the relationship that develops between himself and the mother of a child named Hahn.  Really tight with strong, compelling characters...I just really bought into this slice of the characters' lives he allows us to peek in on.
• Altered Native     This piece ponders what would have happened if Gauguin found his inspiration in icy Greenland, as opposed to tropical Tahiti.  Particularly deliciously crafted for the reader who knows a bit about Gauguin's Tahiti experiences...
• The Conversations    Spontaneous combustion sporadically occurs across the globe during specific types of discussion, and Horvath explores what happens when we worry as much about what we shouldn't talk about as what we're trying to communicate.
• Urban Planning: Case Study Number Seven  A City in the Light of Moths     Horvath imagines a world where film is shown 24 hours a day on every available square inch of surface, and his world building and description in this piece is exceptionally strong.
• The Understory      Heidegger.  A Jewish arborist.  An unlikely friendship.  Nazis and philosophy and trees.  Horvath's result is nuanced and balanced. 

In between many of the stories were short pieces entitled Urban Planning, created I imagine to weave the stories together into a cohesive collection.  A couple of these, particularly Case Study Number Six and Case Study Number Eight, were delightfully strange taut little mini-stories and would have worked out of the context of the greater collection as well.

Horvath's strength is absolutely concept:  he imagines places and scenarios, and "what ifs" himself into the most interesting premises.  To be a fly on the wall in that man's imagination...which also sounds like a plausible premise for one of Horvath's stories...

One thing I did notice is that Horvath does have a tendency to use several words where one would suffice, so if economy of word is your thing, he might not be the right writer for you to explore. 

Rubric ruling: 7

I have no idea why, but my reading has tended toward the dystopian/surreal/ speculative/downright bizarre lately.  Just wait until I share with you my thoughts on Blake Butler's There Is No Year... I'm beginning to have some really strange dreams, and I absolutely blame Butler...I think it might be time to crack into Anna Karenina and The Dud Avocado!  

Review: A Small Fortune by Rosie Dastgir

title:  A Small Fortune [purchase here]

author: Rosie Dastgir

genre: fiction

pages: 373

published: 2012

source:  I received an advanced reader's copy from Riverhead Books via 

LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.

Real talk: I’ve been putting off writing this review of Rosie Dastgir’s A Small Fortune because, honestly, I had a really hard time finishing it.  Not because the text was complex or emotionally taxing…just the opposite, actually. The writing itself was a bit wonky and the tone of the piece was fairly static.  A lot happens in the story, but due to what came across to me as issues with character development, the narrative didn’t seem to progress anywhere that felt realistic. 

Premise: (from the back jacket)  Harris, the presumed patriarch of his large family--both in England, where he's made his home, and in Pakistan, where he was raised--has unexpectedly received a "small fortune" from his divorce settlement with an Englishwoman:  £53,000.  As a devout Muslim, Harris views this sum as a "burden of riches"; all he  can think upon receiving it, if of how best to divest himself of it.  But deciding which deserving relatives to give it to proves to be a burden of its own.

Here's where I feel Dastgir went astray...

Characterization:  Real people can be incredibly complex in terms of personality.  Sometimes, you can know someone a lifetime and still be surprised by their decisions and contradictions.  It’s the very nature of choice that gives humans the leeway to be hypocritical.  But in a novel, I don’t have the luxury of knowing your characters for a lifetime; I get 373 pages.  The central character of Harris was particularly inconsistent, which stood in the way of my being able to empathize with his choices and decisions throughout the story.  Personally, even if I can’t fully get behind the choices of a character, as a reader, I want to be able to know enough about them that I can understand where each decision came from.  With Harris, I feel like I’d learn one thing about him and then he would do something that seemed to completely contradict what I had just been told.  He’s supposed to be very traditional when it comes to his Islamic culture, yet he changes his name from Haaris to Harris when he moves to England.  He’s upset with his daughter having a live-in English boyfriend, yet he engages in a sexual relationship with a widow he meets through family members.  He’s constantly in need of money, but when he receives a settlement from his ex-wife, he gives it away (!!!) to a cousin who he seems to look down upon, not to his family back in Pakistan.  I felt myself asking “where did that come from???” over and over again and not finding that question answered by the text.  So my thinking is this:  1) Harris is one of those people who makes whatever decision benefits him or paints him in the best light in the moment, and spends his time thereafter justifying his actions…someone who has an incredibly difficult time seeing the world from any other perspective than his own in the immediate present.  But I can’t imagine that an author would sit down and create a main character so dense and inconsistent that it renders him this difficult to get behind, so it leads me to think 2) that the problem might be that her writing process was…

Action rather than character driven:  The book reads like Dastgir had decided what was going to happen in the story and then made the characters behave as needed to move the plot along, which resulted in the inconsistent characterization.  This inconsistency made her characters less believable to me, and the farther I progressed through the narrative, the less and less I bought in to the action.  And the way the book was concluded...everything was tied up far too quickly and a bit too neatly...coupled with the disjointed characters, this made it seem less and less real. 

Focus:  What was this book ABOUT?  And WHO was it about? Too many things are touched upon but nothing is really investigated or discussed, if that makes sense.  The entirety of the discussion of radical Islam seems fairly surface, when that's such a complex and rich issue to delve into.  Most of the chapters focused on Harris, but then we’d get a few that focused on Alia (his daughter) or on Rashid (his nephew)...and their treatment felt very surface.  My metaphor for characterization:  If characters are plants, mediocre authors only deal with what the sun shines on.  Great authors take on the soil and the roots.  I want to see some sediment when I read.  And I feel like Dastgir only got as far as the grass line and stopped. Whose story was this?  I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to walk away thinking or feeling.

Dastgir has the foundation to be a skilled writer (there were absolutely some gorgeous moments, mostly in description of setting), but this absolutely feels like a debut novel.  I think with the right mentor or writing group or maybe just with time, she has what it takes to be a successful novelist.  I’d be willing to read her again, but I’m going to wait until she’s written a few more books.

Rubric rating: 4.5