George Saunders, Liberation Day *** 1/2

For all of their superficial differences, the stories in Liberation Day share a theme: we end up punishing ourselves when we lash out at others. Genevieve and Brenda let their personal animosity escalate and end up taking each other down in "The Thing at Work"; "The Mom of Bold Action" regrets her bold action in which she abandoned the spirit of forgiveness; the denouncers in the totalitarian society of "Ghoul" all get kicked to death by their peers. The villains exploit the heroes by replacing their memories of our common humanity with a simplified political agenda. You can definitely glean Saunders' view of contemporary society by considering the collection as a whole.

Liberation Day is similar to Saunders' previous collection Tenth of December. It has callbacks to his previous work –– "Ghouls" takes place in the same sort of amusement park setting as "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and "Pastoralia", and the title story has people being used as props of social status like "The Semplica Girl Diaries" –– but the best stories are the most direct and realistic ones. Saunders is excellent at capturing the repetitions, false starts, and humor of our everyday thought processes.

No, she loved people. People were great. Even that dolt on the bus. He'd probably given her that cranky look because he'd had a bad day, which, given that ugly mug? No surprise there. Who'd marry that? Nah, even ugly folks got married. They married other uglies. It all worked out. Plus, she herself wasn't married. At the moment.

Lincoln in the Bardo proved that Saunders can infuse the wildest premises with emotional tenderness. The stories in Liberation Day reinforce his belief in the power of empathy and (even feigned) kindness.

Ling Ma, Bliss Montage ***

Based on reading this story collection and Severance, I would say that Ling Ma's specialty is using clever science-fiction premises to explore the influence of the past. 

The hook in Severance is an outbreak of Shen Fever, which causes people to mindlessly repeat routines, but it's main theme is the immigrant experience in a commodifying America. Most of the stories in Bliss Montage feature a fantastical element –– a drug that renders you invisible, a portal to another dimension, yetis meeting women in singles' bars –– and follow a woman who is in thrall to a past relationship. This pattern is explicit in the first story, "Los Angeles," where the narrator lives in a mansion with her husband and all of her ex-boyfriends. The story with the invisibility drug, "G," is about a woman attempting to leave behind her best friend from college, whom she has outgrown.

I admire Ma's metaphorical use of the outlandish but am often disappointed in how the narrative plays out. It seems like the author abandons the metaphor as the story progresses. My favorite stories in this collection turned out to be the most realistic ones.

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz ****

The most notable effect of Sebald's style is a pervasive sense that the book is actually about something other than the eccentric preoccupations of its narrator, that there is a deeper theme that underlays the melancholic tone and obsolescent subjects. In The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, the deeper theme remains unspoken and repressed; in Austerlitz the subtext becomes text when its protagonist learns he was separated from his parents during the Holocaust.

Austerlitz shares many aspects of the Sebaldian style: a monologue about the history of fortification design, visits to nearly empty museums and towns, desolate photographs, chance encounters, and overlapping storytellers: 

From time to time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell a tale of how once, after a trade union meeting in Teplitz in the early summer of 1933...

Events span a time period from the 1930s to the 1990s, and it is purposely difficult to keep track of what happens when:

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like..

In many ways, the last half of book provides an exegesis of how to create the Sebald effect. Once Austerlitz is explicitly investigating the fate of his parents, you understand the source of his earlier obsessions. The focus on absence, inanimate objects, and personal identity makes sense.

Ultimately I prefer Sebald's more elusive and allusive books. The mystery is a large part of the appeal for me.  Austerlitz's  direct confrontation with the Holocaust feels too "on the nose," and the clear provenance of the photographs robs them of their enigmatic quality.

Hua Hsu, Stay True *** 1/2

Stay True is a memoir about the college years of a first-generation Taiwanese American. Hua cultivates an indie persona (thrift shop clothing, publishing zines, haunting independent record stores) while becoming close friends with Japanese-American Ken despite Ken's apparently mainstream tastes. Over the summer between their junior and senior years, Ken is killed in a robbery/carjacking.

On my reading, the main subject of Stay True is how and why we choose our personas. The growing friendship between Hua and Ken is largely a matter of negotiating their personas. Ken defers to Hua's musical taste while Hua allows Ken to drag him to social events that he publicly scorns. Their identity as Asian Americans comes into play, but I had no trouble identifying with their efforts at crafting a personality.

One source of my enjoyment is that Hua attends UC Berkeley. Despite the fifteen-year gap between our college experiences, I recognized many of the locales. As a freshman he lives in Ida Sproul Hall; I lived in Spens-Black Hall in the same Unit 3, not far from "the left-wing bookstore tucked inside the parking garage." Cody's, Amoeba, Cafe Roma, apartments on Channing. Hua manages to capture something vital about the group of friends you accumulate in college, a somewhat random collection of roommates and classmates and friends of friends with whom you establish meaningless rituals. In other words, the book brought back memories of my college days.

I thought Hua was less successful at conveying the impact of Ken's death. His prose in the last couple of chapters tends toward the cliché and lacks the specificity of the earlier parts of the book. 

I'm somewhat surprised by the amount of critical attention that Stay True received. It won a Pulitzer Prize and appeared on multiple lists of the 10 best books of 2022. It's good, yes, but it ultimately feels a bit too personal to speak to all of us.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives ****

I became interested in Afterlives when I heard an interview with Abdulrazak Gurnah on NPR around the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I don't remember the details, but the interview left me with the impression that the story would offer a somewhat hopeful vision of characters rebuilding their lives after colonial wars in Tanzania.

Afterlives is a much lighter and less ambitious book than I expected given the weighty subject matter and the Nobel Prize. Gurnah describes the brutality and subjugation of the war in a matter-of-fact tone, without melodrama and with an even-handed acknowledgement of the impact on the German characters. The love story between Hamza (injured in the war) and Afiya (whose brother is missing) is sweet. Their lives are shaped by the competition between European colonial powers but personal trauma is not a defining trait of their characters. The story develops organically without any distortions introduced to promote the author's themes.