UNPUNISHED VICE

My review of Katie Ward’s excellent debut also ran in Shelf Awareness this week:

Katie Ward’s debut novel, Girl Reading,is better described as a collection of seven self-contained but intertwined stories drawn from nearly as many centuries and settings. Each story centers on the creation of a portrait of a girl, reading; each reveals a complex and profound relationship between reader, writer and artist.

The book begins in the 14th century and takes us to the year 2060. In between, a teenage orphan poses for Italian Renaissance master Simone Martini; a grieving countess commissions a portrait of her dead poetess lover; a man takes a picture of a young woman reading in a bar in modern London and adds it to his Flickr stream. The stories, though differing in character and circumstance, are threaded together by a deep sense of synchronicity and sparkling allusions to art and literature. In a testament to Ward’s deft talent, every character is richly drawn, every chapter crisp with authenticity. When a cameo by Rembrandt and a reference to Flickr comfortably exist in the same book, you know the author has done her work.

Girl Reading’s best quality, however, is also its flaw. Ward’s tight control over seven centuries of vividly imagined stories is almost too good; the chapters often end too quickly and neatly, just short of satisfaction, lest they sprawl out into books of their own. But in a novel that celebrates the intimate, complicated bonds between women and their books—and each other—that is an easy fault to forgive. —Hannah Calkins, Unpunished Vice

My latest in Shelf Awareness. Truly loved this one—a gorgeous and brave book.

Beautiful Thing is a portrait that begins in profile: “Leela’s face was a perfect heart,” Sonia Faleiro writes. “And knowing well the elegance of her little nose, Leela would flaunt it like an engagement ring. On certain evenings at the dance bar, when she needed to increase the padding of hundred rupee notes in her bra, Leela would engage only in silhouette.”

Faleiro met 19-year-old Leela while she was researching an article on Bombay’s “bar dancers,” the thousands of maltreated, disenfranchised, often alarmingly young girls who make their livings performing for men in dark bars, frequently selling sex at the behest of pimps. The article, deemed “un-newsworthy,” went unpublished—but Faleiro, captivated by Leela’s irrepressible vitality, knew this proud, independent girl had a story that must be told.

Beautiful Thing is Leela’s story, but through her, Faleiro unveils a larger narrative of Bombay’s bar dancers and sex workers, one colored by love and violence, glamour and squalor, sex and corruption—and one that reveals the dark heart of Bombay itself. The city (glittering with promises but “toxic, no less than an open wound”) and its dance bars attract girls like Leela, who are lured into working “on the line” because of the immediate financial independence it promises. Faleiro discovered that essentially all of these young women were fleeing horrifying home lives rife with every kind of abuse; she recounts that “every one of the bar dancers in Leela’s building had either been raped by a blood relative or sold by one.” But even though life on the line is a landmine of danger and exploitation, Leela relishes the freedom it seems to allow her.

Faleiro follows Leela through a year of her life—into dance bars, into brothels, into tiny flats cramped with beautiful girls and plastic bags stuffed with gifts from their customers. She meets a vibrant, heartbreaking array of dancers, prostitutes and hijras (physiologically male sex workers who dress and act as women), as well as the pimps, madams, gangsters and corrupt police who govern their lives. Customers and lovers come and go; friendships are intense, rivalries brutal.

Never judgmental or condescending, Faleiro delivers Leela’s story with a reporter’s distance and a novelist’s immediacy. She animates journalistic observations with vivid descriptions, and her dialogue sings with slang and dialect. Leela moves through the pages as a remarkable, tragic and inspiring figure—victim, heroine, survivor. —Hannah Calkins

From Shelf Awareness:

Hanne Blank follows up Virgin: The Untouched History with Straight, a compact and engaging look at not just the history, but the construction of heterosexuality. Yes, that’s right: the construction: Blank argues that heterosexuality is a concept “coined for a world in which the ideal of economically and socially viable adulthood meant marriage, children, and middle-class domestic responsibility”—in other words, “heterosexuality” is just a stamp invented to legitimize sexual desire and activity between men and women.

That claim may raise even the most progressive eyebrows, but Blank’s surprisingly short history is also surprisingly convincing. She traces the development of heterosexuality from the word’s first appearance in 19th-century Germany to its current status as “emblematic of an inherent physical and psychological normalcy.” While displaying this impressive scholarship, Blank makes Straight personal as well as academic, using her not-quite-hetero relationship with an intersex partner as a powerful frame for her argument. “To lay claim to heterosexuality, it seems to me, after all my explorations into its history and nature,” Blank writes, “is to pledge allegiance to a particular configuration of sex and power in a particular historical moment. There isn’t much in that configuration, or its heritage of classicism and misogyny, that I find appealing enough to want to claim as my own.” However, skeptics (even those quite attached to this “particular configuration”) will find plenty to learn from in Straight about sexuality, gender, history and the messy intersection of all three. — Hannah Calkins

…She was sitting on the stoop with a notebook, wearing flip-flops, which made it easy to admire the shape of her toes. Most people’s toes look like extra things to me, like earrings or beards. Nancy’s look necessary. They work for her.

From “Hot Pink” by Adam Levin.

Scratching out my review of Katie Ward’s Girl Reading for Shelf Awareness. It’s a good book. I’ve been reading this over and over:

I fear that before long I shall lose the ability to recall your voice and your smell and your advice. You have left a Frances-shaped hole. Everything familiar is falling through it.

It may be the context of the story, but my heart snags on that line every time.

Throughout her life she was ironic and strict with her thoughts. She went dancing most Friday nights in town. People said that Maytree, or felicity, or solitude had driven her crazy. People said she had been an ugly girl, or a child movie star; that she inherited fabulous sums of money and lived in a shack without pipes or wires; that she read too much; that she was wanting in ambition and could have married anyone. She lacked a woman’s sense of doom. She did what she wanted — like who else on earth? All her life she found dignity overrated. She rolled down dunes.

Never have I read a description that does so much describing without doing any at all. 

The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History (Flavorwire)

3. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce

“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

Today, Shelf Awareness, a daily newsletter for book industry professionals, launched a new twice-weekly version for regular folks. I write reviews for this new reader publication, and for their inaugural issue they’ve included my review of Irshad Manji’s Allah, Liberty and Love. (It’s at the bottom of the page. Credited to some chick named Hannah “Caulkins.”)

This is it:

Irshad Manji is a Canadian journalist and the author of bestselling The Trouble with Islam Today(2005), a provocative critique that sparked both outrage and solidarity around the world. Allah, Liberty and Love is built on the foundation of that book. If Trouble was the critique, Allah is the roadmap to reform, as Manji lays down seven lessons in “moral courage” that will guide us—Muslim or not—to peace and freedom.

A devout Muslim, open lesbian and passionate advocate of democratic ideals, Manji is perhaps an ideal voice for progressive reform. Writing in an engaging, open style, she combines the strength of her own faith with a clear-eyed, relentless insight into the troubling politics, fears, and narratives that govern contemporary Islam.

With an unwavering commitment to integrity and conscience, Manji argues that culture is not sacred, clinging to group identity is a trap, and that offending people is the price of asking tough, vital questions: “My questions re-imagine the public discussion so that Muslims and non-Muslims can find shared purpose in human values.”

Manji’s writing has been criticized for being too personal, but matters of faith, conscience and individual liberty are personal—profoundly and urgently so. Manji’s project is not to provide a removed, scholarly study of her religion; it is to motivate people around the world, of any faith or none at all, to listen to their consciences, ask questions and challenge dogma for the benefit of the greater good. —Hannah Caulkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice

Discover: A bold, compassionate and highly accessible argument for Islamic reform.

I will ignore my wounded pride over having my byline misspelled because I GOT PAID FOR THIS. Wheeee!