You Might Have Missed… Brick Lane

January 15, 2012 in fiction, reviews by Stephanie

Brick Lane by Monica Ali
 (Scribner, 2003)
Eileen Y. Lee

“If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men.”

Monica Ali’s most recently published novel, Untold Story, is the “what-if” tale of Princess Diana—what if the glamorous icon had not died in a Parisian car crash and instead had moved secretly to Midwest America with a new identity and taken up the simpler life?  The book was released in the UK during the run-up to this past year’s royal wedding media extravaganza.  Ali, however, started her writing career in different waters with the socially aware Brick Lane, the story of a married Bangladeshi woman living in London public housing.  This first novel thrust the Dhaka-born, Oxford-educated author into the literary stratosphere, earning her a nod as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, while Brick Lane was short-listed for the Man Booker prize.

The beating heart of Brick Lane is Nazneen, a village girl who is sent to London for an arranged marriage to a 40-year-old man.  Part immigrant story and part meditation on the fate of women from a particular religious and cultural background, the novel is ultimately focused on Nazneen’s transformation from passive Muslim housewife into an individual possessed of free will who says, “I will decide what to do.  I will say what happens to me. I will be the one.”  This transformation happens—but not before one begins to wonder whether her richly-detailed life will simply collect dust as the narrative moves from 1985 to the months following September 11th.

During its quiet unfolding, Brick Lane flits between Nazneen’s childhood memories of her sorrowful mother and letters from Hasina, the sister she had to leave behind in Bangladesh.  The letters depict a life filled with hardship and small joys, all written in Hasina’s broken English and naïve voice.  Even shocking details about her own rape and then a story about a friend burned with acid as punishment is told in several letters rather matter-of-factly.

As a chronicle of Nazneen’s marriage, Brick Lane is delightfully comical and at other times, sadly painful.  Early on, Nazneen learns to put aside any “high notions” of herself when she overhears her husband, Chanu, on the telephone: “Perhaps when she gets older she’ll grow a beard on her chin, but now she is only eighteen.  And a blind uncle is better than no uncle.  I waited too long to get a wife.”  Pretentious Chanu is continually the source of a good chuckle whenever he rails against the “ignorant types” of British society or forces his wife to listen to his pedantic speeches on philosophy or his “first love,” English literature.  “Have you heard of Richard II?” he says, “It’s not easy to translate.  Give me one minute.  This is a wonderful passage.”

Chanu is as equally proud of his university degrees as he is of his numerous framed certificates from night classes and correspondence courses on such varied topics as cycling and IT communications.  Driven to improve himself, yet ineffectual in his career, Chanu speaks constantly of a promotion that the reader—and Nazneen, as she grows more insightful—knows he will never get.  While a gentle soul, he can sometimes be heartless towards Nazneen, such as when he condescendingly mocks her suggestion to go to Dhaka to locate Hasina, who leaves her love marriage and must fend for herself in Bangladesh’s capital city.  He says:

“Shall I pack a suitcase?  Perhaps you have prepared one.  I shall go to Dhaka and pluck her instantly from the streets and bring her back to live with us.  On the way, I could pick up the rest of your family and we could make a little Gouripur right here.  Is that what you have in mind?”

It is only because of Ali’s sensitive regard for her characters that Chanu does not become a caricature of a husband.  Chanu eventually garners his own sympathy as his full portrait is painted, showing that he is a decent husband, loving father to their two daughters, and a man of quashed ambitions in a society that lumps him together with every other dark-skinned immigrant.

At its most incisive, Brick Lane is a sustained study of both its major and minor characters.  Even when the novel’s plot languishes midway through, the supporting cast in Nazneen’s life continues to shine.   Her best friend, Razia, is feisty (“Do you know why I’m going to learn English?  So that when my children start telling dirty jokes behind my back, I’ll be able to whip their backsides.”), but chooses to turn a blind eye to her son’s worsening drug addiction until nearly all the furniture in their home is sold.  She lives a life that matches her independent spirit only after her controlling husband is killed in a factory accident by the crush of “seventeen frozen cows.”  If there is a villain in Brick Lane it is Mrs. Islam, the elderly, sweet-tongued usurer lady, who will bring along her thug sons to enforce payments in the neighborhood.  Her changing relationship with Nazneen is woven throughout the story.

The most pivotal character is the decisive community organizer, Karim, who also delivers clothes for Nazneen’s sewing jobs and is therefore able to cross the threshold into her domestic world.  His appearance as her younger lover comes as a surprise, as is Nazneen’s decision to start attending radical Bengal Tigers meetings at his encouragement.  This is the first time the outside world penetrates her narrow life—as talk of the World Trade Center attacks comes to dominate the local meetings and her family’s mailbox becomes the target of a “leaflet war” that seeks to draw or erase the battle lines between “native” and “Islamic” elements.

Nazneen finds herself in turmoil over her relationship with Karim.  At these times, Ali’s graceful writing can unfortunately veer towards romance novel territory with such sentences as this: “Unbidden, a memory of Karim came, entering her as he entered her, tearing apart her passive soul.”

Karim sees Nazneen as a concept of maternity and security (“A Bengali wife.  A Bengali mother.  An idea of home”) and hopes they may marry, but time is running out as Chanu aspires to take his wife and daughters back to Bangladesh.  In the end, Nazneen’s choice is not between her husband and Karim, or London and Bangladesh, instead she must decide to be the director of her own destiny.  For those who have waited patiently for the dust on the pages to be swept away, the last chapters provide a frenetic energy and offer an ending filled with hope and new beginnings.

Eileen Y. Lee has a B.A. from Vassar College and a J.D. from Boston College Law School.  She studied abroad in London for one year and counts it as one of her favorite cities in the world.

Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout

January 1, 2012 in nonfiction, reviews by Stephanie | No comments

Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss
(HarperCollins, December 2010)
Maria Sholtis

Powers of Attraction

Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive offers an illustrated history of Pierre and Marie Curie, whose partnership and research changed the world—for better and for worse. This 2011 National Book Award finalist cannot be called a picture book, though, or even a book with pictures. The former suggests something suitable for young children, and though its cover and spine glow in the dark, Radioactive wouldn’t work well as a bedtime story. Yet, “a book with pictures” isn’t quite right either, because the images are not subordinate to the text; to the contrary, they’re absolutely vital to the narrative’s success. The most pleasing term I’ve found to describe Radioactive—from sources ranging from The New York Times to NPR to Vogue—is a “visual” or “graphic” biography.

Redniss dedicates the first part of her book to the Curies’ lives prior to their discovery of radioactivity. We learn about Pierre and Marie’s upbringings, early romances, and eventual meeting in a Paris laboratory. Redniss quotes the Curies at length, selecting and arranging their words to allow these two long-deceased lovers to tell their story. The overlapping dialogue provides a vivid portrait of a relationship built not only upon love, but upon a shared passion for science:

MARIE: “He caught the habit of speaking to me of his dream of an existence consecrated entirely to scientific research, and asked me to share that life.”

PIERRE: “It would, nevertheless, be a fine thing . . . to pass our lives near each other, hypnotized by our dreams, your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream, and our scientific dream.”

The second part of Radioactive occupies nearly four times as many pages as the first. It concerns the repercussions of the Curies’ research and the latter half of their relationship, which ends tragically with Pierre’s death. As one may expect, this marks a significant shift in the book. Suddenly, Marie is left to juggle multiple roles alone: mother, professor, Nobel Prize-winning scientist. Her later research and subsequent affair with another scientist—and interestingly, the work and relationships of her children—occupy significant space in the latter part of the narrative.

Throughout the book, Redniss’s own writing style takes a backseat to story. Her straightforward voice mingles with those of her subjects, a pleasant contrast to the lyrical quality of the quotes:

After four years of steady labor, four hundred tons of water, and forty tons of corrosive chemicals, on March 28, 1902, they managed to extract one tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

MARIE: “I shall never be able to express the joy of the untroubled quietness of this atmosphere of research and the excitement of actual progress.”

With the constant companionship that accompanied their research, the Curies’ love deepened. They cosigned their published findings. Their handwritings intermingle in their notebooks. On the cover of one black canvas laboratory log, the initials ‘M’ and ‘P’ are scripted one atop the other.

Aside from directly chronicling the Curies’ history, Redniss relates radioactivity to period developments such as the X-ray, spiritualism, and Art Nouveau. She also makes frequent leaps forward in time to visit the contemporary uses (and misuses) of radiation: a boy being treated for cancer, the bombing of Hiroshima, the accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the technology needed to protect and dispose of nuclear materials. The majority of these cutaways worked quite well, though some felt a little too abrupt and even tedious compared to the main plotline.

And amidst all of this, supporting and enhancing the narrative, is the art. Redniss’s drawings are unearthly, eye-catching, and faintly grotesque. This is “a tale of love and fallout,” after all, so the oversized eyes and curving limbs and strangely delicate hands suit Radioactive’s inherent strangeness. Redniss also used a process called “cyanotyping” to give some of the images a beautifully surreal, luminous appearance, like a negative image lit from beneath. Yet, I often stopped reading to wonder: “Who is that man, and why does he have three eyes, two noses, and two mouths? What is this mass of green and yellow meant to signify? . . . And why is that person suddenly naked?”

Color, text placement/shape, and the use of empty space also affect the reading experience in Radioactive. In the black and while illustrations at the beginning of the book, Pierre’s story occupies the left-hand pages, while Marie’s occupies the right. When they meet, this pattern starts to dissolve; their quotes are placed on the same pages, and they begin appearing in color illustrations together. This is a clever gesture to how Pierre and Marie’s lives ran parallel to one another before finally veering into a relationship.  And the chapter’s name? “Symmetry.”

While much of Radioactive is illustrated by Redniss’s own hand, she also includes copies of historical documents and photographs. More of the latter would have been a welcome addition to this book, as there are only three realistic renderings of Marie in the book, and none of Pierre. (While the book’s subtitle gives them equal billing, Radioactive offers more attention to Mme. Curie. Every chapter opens with a quote from her; two pages are dedicated to listing “luminaries, flora and fauna” of Poland, her homeland; she is the one illustrated on the cover. This imbalance isn’t too much of a problem, as Marie’s experiences are textured enough to fill these rich pages.)

Page by page, this book confronts traditional notions of what nonfiction “should be” and what the form can accomplish. By challenging the boundaries of its medium, Radioactive doesn’t just leave its reader looking forward to Redniss’s future material, but also the works that it might inspire other artists to create—a fitting outcome for a story about discovery and transformation.

Maria Sholtis is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Follow her on Twitter here.

You Might Have Missed… This Clumsy Living

November 15, 2011 in books, poetry, reviews by Maria

This Clumsy Living by Bob Hicok
(Pitt Press, 2007)
Mandy Malloy

On the Rollercoaster

Open any of Bob Hicok’s collections, and I suspect you’ll be dazzled by poems plumbing the depths of the self as they skim the fascinating, frustrating surface of contemporary American life. Using a neo-surrealist net to capture heart, humor, and the sublime in one cast, Hicok’s best poems do not merely entertain—they teach my mind to function in patterns I can only call Hicok-esque for at least an hour or so after I’ve put them down. In an intimate, chatty tone, I find myself prone to narrating my thoughts to myself, often surprised by whip-smart connections between the observed world and my mind’s internal workings that I suspect Hicok’s poems have trained me to make. Pun, sarcasm, retort, leaps of logic that at times assume mystical proportions meet the absurdities of a morning’s passage through a subway station or a trip to the market. As the effect fades, I know I’ve experienced the full power of what Elizabeth Bishop termed the “mind in motion.” I know it’s what I expect out of poetry.

Winner of the 2008 Bobbitt Prize, This Clumsy Living (2007) stands out among Hicok’s books. Balancing craft at the level of both the individual poem and the book is a hard-won achievement for any poet, but it is particularly gratifying to see a poet of prodigious strength one-up himself. Where Hicok’s earlier books were less adept at organizing his bountiful energies into a coherent emotional arc, This Clumsy Living succeeds beautifully—perhaps, in part, by beginning with an admission of clumsiness.

A quick read down the Table of Contents shows the oscillation of Hicok’s energies: “The busy days of my nights” abuts “A poem with a poem in its belly” and “Waiting for my foot to ring” with “War story,” all in the mysteriously-titled first section “Twenty-three windows.” Real-world narrative flashes chronicle the speaker’s wrestling with political and social events in everyday life, a drive that springs from the Whitmanian well of “full report,” even as the speaker soothes himself by engineering temporary escape via surreal leaps in time and space that always manage to lead him back to the indelible fact of “this clumsy living.” “If we could solve that equation, we’d be happy,” Hicok poignantly suggests.

Yet, what are the chances of solving such an equation, Hicok’s book seems to ask. In “The New Math,” math is a rhetorical structure Hicok recognizes not only as “strange,” but imperfect. We cannot rest easy with a single solution any more than we can disown our drive to try to reduce our problems. Poetry’s algebra may be a fraught construct, the poem whispers to us, but its process just may deliver a bit of happiness along the tortuous path.

Hicok would probably be the last to say we shouldn’t have fun with either the world, our psychological attempts to diminish loss, or poetry. This Clumsy Living keeps an emotional balance by swinging between extremes of existential terror and a lively absurdist humor. “Her my body,” about the inability of poetic thought to soothe a speaker imagining cancer striking his beloved (“If you are comforted / by this thought you are welcome / to keep it”), is followed by the zany, zippy “The busy days of my nights,” where our speaker meditates on zombie films (“writers struggling with the inbred / mutant Appalachian cannibal dialogue”), and the aforementioned Elizabeth Bishop (“remembered the ladybug / walking across ‘At the Fishhouses’ open on my desk”).

The shifts in tone that occur from poem to poem are well-matched in a greater variety of forms than appear in previous books. Hicok experiments with the lengthy stanza shape typical of his earlier work, a narrative flow eschewing visual pacing (stanza breaks, etc.) in favor of compact density. While individually such an effect is excellent, in a book full of such poems I find myself experiencing the pleasant exhaustion that comes from preparing for the same rollercoaster ride over and over again. Not, per Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that—Hicok’s earlier work conveyed a sense and vision of his American moment, most notably in terms of the dissolution of the working class in his home state of Michigan and American foreign policy. (May we hope for Hicok’s response to the labor protests earlier this year?)

Hicok also avoids the over-writing afflicting his earlier books, whether as a result of an inability to kill his proverbial darlings or an understandable desire to perform for his usually-rapt audience. Most markedly, the word “which” appears much less frequently. (I say this as one also afflicted by the curse my seventh grade English teacher referred to as “whichery and thattery.”) Ultimately, how could I not be filled with admiration for a poet who manages to write a lovely lyric stanza about shit-eating dogs, thanking deer for their scat at the same time as he is able to turn a discussion of his mother’s morbid obesity into a loving paean to mothering in “Documenting a Decision”?

A fat body resembles a pregnant body, resembles hope, start. ( . . . ) This is more the way of the mother than the father. ( . . . ) This is my prayer: Lord, make me round.

Reading poetry is not only about the pleasure we take in the artifact of a finished poem—it is also about the journey of the poet. This Clumsy Living witnesses a gifted poet taking a leap. Hicok’s neo-surrealist impulse pushes his earnest lyric narrative mode just off-balance, keeping conversational tones from feeling either tired or disingenuous. The poems’ speaker is aware he navigates an imperfect world with imperfect tools, but also sees no other way to go about it—the very essence, perhaps, of Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” If reading This Clumsy Living feels at times like being on a rollercoaster—emotionally and visually, tonally and metaphorically—through Hicok’s mental countryside, we do well to remember he warned us, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

Mandy Malloy is a writer and graphic designer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program and a 2011 Norman Mailer Colony Fellow, her poems have appeared most recently in The Portland Review.

Publishing Solo: Self-Publishing Success Stories

November 11, 2011 in blog by Robyn | 1 comment

by Beth Steidle

Publishing Solo is a new monthly blog series focused on topics relating to self-publishing. Its purpose is to provide information and engage conversation amongst both up-and-coming and established writers as we search for new ways to get our work out of that sad desk drawer and into the changing literary world.


We tend to think of self-publishing as a new development, a practice that has cropped up in the past couple of decades. We envision perfect-bound paperback books multiplying in the shadow of publishing conglomerates. But in reality, self-publishing has a long and fairly storied history, whose stars (listed chronologically in order of self-published dates) include: Benjamin Franklin (early to mid-1700’s); Thomas Paine (late 1700’s); Edgar Allan Poe (1827); Henry David Thoreau (mid-1800’s); Walt Whitman (1855); Oscar Wilde (1881); Mark Twain (1885); Zane Grey (1903); Ezra Pound (1908); Carl Sandburg (early 1900’s); Upton Sinclair (early to mid-1900’s); Virginia Woolf (early 1900’s); Gertrude Stein (1914); and D.H. Lawrence (1928); e.e. cummings (1930’s). This is by no means a complete list.

Many of these now literary giants self-published for the same reasons we are doing so today: to combat censorship, to maintain control, and, most commonly, to conquer manuscript rejection.

In the early 1900’s, James Joyce’s seminal work, Ulysses, was faced with rejection from publishers due to page length and obscenity laws. His solution? Collect money from friends, patrons, and fellow writers for pre-orders.

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover was “privately published” (sounds much more sultry when you put it that way, doesn’t it?) in 1928, thirty-two years before its official publication in Britain.  The reason? Too sexy and too many dirty words.

Mark Twain tired of finicky publishers and paid for the publication of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn himself.

Zane Grey supposedly borrowed money from his wife to launch his book career as the father of the modern western novel (proving, once again, that so many problems can be solved by marrying up).

In 1644, John Milton self-published Areopagitica, a polemical tract arguing in favor of unlicensed printing, saying, “he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.” Of course, while the freedom to print one’s own work has long been argued for, neither the publishing world nor practices of literary consumption are the same today as they were in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, or much of the 1900s.  And yet, while formats and reading practices have changed, the possibility for self-publishing success has not. Here is a look at a few of our more contemporary self-published phenomenon:

The Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer (1931): Rombauer, a St. Louis, Missouri housewife, wrote this book amidst the emotional and financial devastation following the suicide of her husband in the previous year. Initially she had 3,000 copies printed by A.C. Clayton, a commercial printer of labels for shoes and Listerine. In 1936, The Joy of Cooking was picked up by a standard publisher. Since that time, the book has been in continuous publication, is considered a staple of the modern kitchen, and has having sold over 18 million copies.

What Color is Your Parachute?, Richard Nelson Bolles (1970): One of the most popular texts for job seekers, Bolles originally self-published this book in 1970 before it was picked up commercially by Ten Speed Press in 1972. The book has been revised every year since its original publication and has sold over 10 million copies worldwide.

Real Peace, Richard Nixon (1983): Nixon chose to self-publish this work on geopolitical strategy and the establishment of long-lasting peace. He felt the issues addressed in the work were too timely to wait 18 months for a publishing house to go through its many motions to prepare the book. Little Brown & Co. went on to create the first trade edition in 1984.

The Plant, Stephen King (2000): In March 2000, at King’s request, Simon & Schuster digitally published his novella, Riding the Bullet. According to the NY Times, over 400,000 fans downloaded the text upon its debut, making it the universe’s first mass-market e-book. In July of that same year, King began to digitally self-publish The Plant, a serialized epistolary novel featuring a ferocious vine terrorizing a publishing house. In principle, readers would pay one-dollar per installment, a fee that was monitored by the honor system. However, King did threaten to cease posting installments if the percentage of paying readers fell below the 75% mark. Over the next few months, King fiddled with the pricing and readership faltered. The last installment was published in December, but the book remains unfinished. While King’s attempt to jump-start “Big Publishing’s worst nightmare” has floundered, you’ve got to appreciate his efforts. Of course, the problem could have been the silly content (which, unlike the similarly themed film The Happening, did not feature Mark Wahlberg talking to a plastic plant).

Eragon, Christopher Paolini (2002): Paolini, the wunderkind who began writing his now-famous young-adult fantasy novel at the age of 15, was assisted by his parents in the novel’s self-publication. Subsequently, he and his family spent a year on a promotional tour throughout the United States. While on the tour, Carl Hiassen’s stepson happened to pick up a copy, which he reportedly fell in love with, prompting Hiassen to show the book to an editor at Knopf.  Published by Knopf in 2003, the book became an instant hit, landing Eragon on the NY Times Bestseller List for 26 consecutive weeks. In 2006, Eragon was adapted into a film which garnered $249 million worldwide.

(various), Amanda Hocking (2010-present): Another Paolinian wunderkind, former assisted-living assistant Amanda Hocking wrote 17 novels in her spare time. In 2010, frustrated by the lack of a publishing deal, Hocking began to self-publish her young-adult paranormal romances, which have since been described by the NY Times as “literature as candy, a mash-up of creativity and commerce.” Hocking, a self-proclaimed “unicorn enthusiast” and college dropout, self-published nine novels whose sales exceeded 1 million copies. Despite a low per-copy cost ($.99 to $2.99), Hocking’s books garnered an unprecedented sum—close to $2 million in the first year. Put it another way: in 2011, Hocking was selling 9,000 books per day. That same year, she signed her first conventional contract with St. Martin’s Press for another whopping $2 million dollars.  The decision put self-publishing panelists in a tizzy at last year’s BookExpo America; according to their unofficial (yet sensical) figures, Hocking was on track to make more money by continuing to self-publish.  So why did she do it? In response to her shocked fans, Hocking said: “I’ve done as much with self-publishing as any person can do…I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation.”

Now—don’t get too excited. Success stories like Hocking and Paolini are few and far between. In the same way that traditional publishing rarely turns a profit or creates a superstar, self-published authors rarely become household names. But what do all successful self-published works have in common? The author’s belief in the validity of their work; a willingness to fund, promote and produce one’s own work; and the drive to get the book out into the wide, wide world.

The moral? If you’re willing to work hard—to be your own corporation—you have a much better chance of success. If you’re willing to work hard and you have talent, your chances are that much better. With so many options for self-publishing, there really is very little excuse to not take the leap. After all, if you can sell a couple thousand copies on your own, you’ll become much more attractive to gun-shy publishers. And if you can sell 900,000 copies on your own, then, well, you’ve most likely written a paranormal-zombie-vampire-werewolf-romance-literary-snickers-bar. Who am I to judge?


Miss part one of our series? We’ll be taking a blogging break in December to focus on our new issue, but check back in January for the next installment of Publishing Solo.