teach me the art of war

Still working through old reviews, this one is mostly stuff I read for school, plus one tile for queer book club.


Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan
This being the book club one. A trans woman in contemporary London feels trapped by mediocrity and inertia. She has a job she doesn't like but pays well enough. She has friends she more or less gets along with, but aren't great people. She writes poetry that does okay, but never really goes anywhere. She has tense meetings with her family, who love her but are bound by an inability to actually communicate. Meeting a new guy seems like it might nudge her into something better, but her overwhelmingly low standards and lack of ambition might sink that too. There are also flashback from the boyfriend's point of view, about a youthful trip to South East Asia, which ends in violence.

This book was a lot of people being mildly terrible, and everyone feeling like they ought to do something about improvement, then... not doing that. It was often quite funny, and Dinan has some great one-liners that cut through to the core of people's motivations. Though it's mostly about the failure mode of... pretty much everything, there were glimmers of the protagonist at least trying to work on the people around her, and maybe even herself. None of that was really enough to lift the book out of its mire of dreariness, though. It was a lot of time to spend with the grindingly unpleasant.


Death Threat by Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee
I read this when it came out, and remember not being deeply impressed. I think I expected there to be more of a story, or perhaps more of a resolution. Rereading it some years later, I liked it a lot better. (Though several of my classmates had my initial "Is that all there is?" reaction.)

Vivek starts getting oddly poetic transphobic death threats via email, and becomes obsessed with the sender, paranoid it could be someone she knows, afraid it could be a stranger on the subway. She collaborates with artist Ness Lee (always shown drawn in her distinctive black and white line art, while everyone else is in colour) to make the novel we're reading, while still being haunted and possibly hunted by the letter writer.

This benefits from close reading, as the images are symbolically very rich, and the colourists do a lot of work with motifs and character themes. Literary graphic novels can be redundant, at times, with the pictures just showing you what the text is already saying, and a general feeling that this could've been an e-mail, but the art here is telling its own story, running alongside, underneath and through the text. It's very well done, and I'm sad that Shraya switches genres with every project, as I'd like to see more of this from her. Though she does great work in all the other genres, too.


Fun House: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
I hadn't managed to read this before, and it's a lot. Bechdel tells the story of her relationship with her father, including discovering he was gay, and his ambiguous death. She's based the story on her teenage diaries, found documents such as family photographs, newspaper clippings, dictionary entries, and maps, and a reading list she shared with her father. Each section takes on themes of one of the works mentioned (including In Search of Lost Time, Great Gatsby, The Importance of Being Earnest), going over and back over the events of her youth and her father's death. The whole thing sits inside a frame of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, though it's not clear which character is meant to be whom.

The text is dense and recursive, as if Bechdel is still unable to face what happened full on, and keeps sliding up to it sideways, keeps feeling the emotions vicariously through other stories. At one point, she talks about how in a childhood bout of OCD, she kept writing symbols over top of the names of important people and things in her diary, as a kind of ward against the evil eye. To some extent, the whole novel feels like that: as if she's writing over and over the events of her childhood to take a curse off them. It probably rewards rereading, but it's also a lot.


Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
Second time through this, and it's still great. It's difficult to imagine the impact of this in the early 1980s, when queer lit was very much a thing, but also more siloed and less diverse. I should look up contemporary reviews, and see if this was indeed like a bomb going off, or was taken in stride. Incredible depth, incredible emotion, wonderful literary voice. I don't have a lot to say otherwise: It's great and you should read it!

It was interesting what I remembered from reading it a few years ago: the abortion, the execution of the Rosenbergs, working in the factory, not fitting in with the butch/femme lesbian bar scene, Kitty. I was surprised at how late in the book we meet Kitty, and how abrupt the ending was.