Adding the the string of depressing and demoralizing books I’ve been reading, let’s read one about Soviet Ukraine and the murder of Anna Politkovskaya / The Second Chechen War. Because why be happy when you can read about how horrible humanity can be to each other?

In one sense, the stories are light. Most are people telling about their lives, without poetics, without justifications. This is how it was. This is the, to modify Kundera, the incredible lightness of being. But this is also where the weightiness comes in, from what it was/is. There was no need to put the weight of writing into the narrative, because the weight is the reality. The reader isn’t meant to be emotionally-exploited into caring, because trying to add that on top of the weight of what happened/is happening would drag us all down. The stories are stark enough as it is, difficult enough to chew through without an addition of faux-literary pretension and posturing. They float like a helium balloon. They drag you down like a concrete block.

But then there are gaps, or misprints, or entire sections seemingly misplaced. Ukraine in the first half, pages cut off mid-sentence. Then later, in the 2000s, in Chechnya, Ukrainian sections reappear. A misprint? A throw-back? Proof that Russia as a concept has often been a fascist one, with concept-mother-Russia first, the humans in the edges of her empire second? Or just questions? Questions questions questions. How can we be so cruel? How can we be so empty?

Add more and the book sinks under the weight of all the wrongs it wants to document. But as it is, it’s transience can feel like an insult. Can you fix this? Can anyone? How do you write about the worst of humanity without sickening us to the point of not wanting to read?

So what to do? More questions. All I have is questions. I can play as Stalin in Civ IV, the man who starved my distant relatives in the Holodomor, which the first half of this book talks about (and which, contrary to the blurbs, I did know about beforehand since I am Canadian, of part Ukrainian descent, and it’s a teeny-tiny deal here). But to play as Stalin, how is that appropriate? How is any of this fair? I feel sick with not knowing the way out of this maze.

The front says like Joe Sacco. I scoffed. Then I read it. It is like Joe Sacco though. I shouldn’t have scoffed. Read at your own risk.

The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks by Igort went on sale March 15, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A short decade of essays and fiction pieces about what it means to be other or an outsider or identity or — I’m not really sure what the prompt was for these essays precisely. I think it’s identity, maybe. That seems like a big enough umbrella to fit all these essays underneath.

And they aren’t all essays either. Both Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s and Hanna Krall’s submissions are fiction (or at least, intentionally read like fiction), and of course, with my love of narrative and difficulty following non-narrative arguments, those are the two that’ll probably stick with me (and not just because Gundar-Goshen’s story is very similar to a story idea I had a few years ago so it’s time to put on my tin-foil hat so she doesn’t steal any more of my ideas). But the white space in the snippets by Hanna Krall — I have put the only Hanna Krall book in the library on hold so I can read more from her. I suppose that’s the point of collections like these, hit or miss, it’s unlikely that all is a miss. So you find someone new you wouldn’t have found otherwise. The rest just sort of fades.

Life From Elsewhere by various authors went on sale June 21, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Not sure who decided the cover, but:

I had a hard time seeing that as a fish at first. Even now, I have to really tell myself it is one.

And it’s not the little black fish protagonist either. Why wouldn’t we have the little black fish on the cover instead of a picture of his mother, who is only in the comic for the first five or six pages?

I don’t get it.

Actually, I don’t really get a lot of this comic. I almost do — a beloved Persian children’s story, interesting art, a story that’s supposed to be a lesson (although I’m not one hundred percent sure what the lesson is supposed to be if we don’t go for the literal, and yet universal, don’t-get-eaten-by-a-heron-lesson). It seems like a great idea for a comic book. But I just feel that there’s something I’m missing, something off a little bit. Even how I would describe this book seems off. I’d say cute but that’s only because there isn’t really a word that means what I want to say otherwise. It’s kind of bloody and without a happy ending, but nevertheless, cute. See — that’s off.

Tesfa looked over my shoulder when I was reading it and was really interested in the art work. Maybe what’s off is that I’m not a kid. I’ve lost that by now. Maybe as a kid I’d appreciate this comic more.

Still, why isn’t the little black fish himself on the cover?

The Little Black Fish by Bizhan Khodabandeh went on sale May 15, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

First things first: I know nothing about contemporary poetry, especially contemporary poetry geared towards adults. Sure I can recite Disobedience by A.A. Milne and most of Alligator Pie, but grown-up poems — I think the last grown-up book I read with poetry in it was A Poet and bin-Laden, which seemed to have been written under the illusion that there simply wasn’t enough poetry in novels about Central Asian politics (it was kind of like reading Tolkien except the inclusion of poetry was even more baffling).

So I know nothing about poetry.

And I read a book of poetry.

And said I’d review it.

Even though I don’t know what I’m doing.

Can I end the review here?

I’m going to say I liked it. I’m going to say the poems were interesting. Divided into three (really four, but one section has one poem only) sections, one about Iraqi Kurdistan, one about the Northwest Territories, one about Azerbaijan, within the sections, the poems inter-relate, if only due to geography. I’m going to say I got a sense of each of the locales, even though there was no plot to weave together. This is big for me — I love plot. I love stories. The stories here were more ephemeral. Maybe they didn’t exist. Maybe it was negative space I put stories into. Or maybe the stories were deep and I only skimmed the surface, not realizing their depths.

As I said, I don’t know much about poetry.

Some of the poem rhymed though. I do have a great appreciation for rhyming poems.

Also, Patrick Woodcock seems to know a lot of kids to dedicate poems to. Not that the poems he dedicated to these kids would be of much interest, necessarily to kids. A kid would probably rather Alligator Pie. Maybe they’ll appreciate them when they’re older.

I think I’ll end the review now here.

You can’t bury them all by Patrick Woodcock went on sale April 12, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.