James by Percival Everett is a terrific novel (and winner of the Pulitzer Prize) told from the point of view of the character Jim from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s different from Twain’s work in that Jim is now James, and intelligent man fully aware of the horrors of slavery. James runs away because he is about to be sold, but gains agency when he fights back against the system.
Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson was my book club’s selection for January. The authors criticize liberal democracies for being messy and inefficient because so many interests must be balanced, and therefore it is hard to get things done. The examples of how to accomplish big things are responses to emergencies, when governments simply must respond urgently. Apparently, they would rather abandon safeguards and environmental protections in favor of building cheap housing and nuclear power plants. I’m not convinced.
Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur (translated by Faridoun Farrokh) is an odd short novel set in Iran. The women in the book are independent, even when they may attempt to conform to Iranian norms. The author uses some magical realism elements, although mostly the book is realistic and partly set against a backdrop of demonstrations in the capital. Given the current political climate in Iran, the book is timely.
Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin (translated by Jamey Cambrell) is a disturbing short novel of political satire about modern Russia. Set in the near future, Russia is now ruled by a ruthless leader aided by the Oprichniki, the term used for Ivan the Terrible’s personal guard and secret police. Early in the book, the Oprichniki go to punish a nobleman who has done something wrong. He meets a brutal end, and his mansion is burned down, but the ugly part of the episode is when the enforcers gang rape the nobleman’s wife. I’m sure many people stopped reading at that point. Which is too bad, because they would have missed the grotesque scene near the end when the Oprichniki go to a bathhouse together and . . .. I won’t say what they do there, but it is a wildly imaginative activity.
Coming up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert Reich is my book club’s selection for February. I’ve never been a Reich fan because I feel he looks at the economy through a narrow lens, so I wasn’t expecting to like this book much. I did like it, though, because he’s telling quite a story over a period I’ve also lived. His work in multiple administrations, including his time as Labor Secretary under President Clinton, is fascinating. It’s clear that he didn’t much care for Hillary Clinton and preferred Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries—another point on which I disagree with him. One complaint I have about the book is that he spends only a couple of pages about the success of the Biden administration, and I would have thought he’d be a bigger fan. All in all, it’s a very good read.
