Colm Tóibín, Homage to Barcelona ** 1/2

One final souvenir from our trip to Spain, purchased in Barcelona at the Llibreria Anglesa. The Irish author Tóibín lived in Barcelona at the end of the Franco years, and Homage to Barcelona promised a portrait of the city emerging from dictatorship.

I was expecting the novelist Tóibín to provide insights into the unique spirit of Barcelona and the distinctive style of the artists who lived there (Gaudí, Picasso, Miró, Dalí). What distinguishes Barcelona from other cities? I hoped Tóibín would identify subtle attitudes that would elucidate aspects of our personal experience there.

Instead the book is largely a stick-to-the-facts summary of 20th-century Catalon history, devoid of a personalized perspective. The Modernisme style incorporates Gothic elements; art is inextricably tied to Catalan nationalism; Spaniards don't like to talk about the Civil War –– yeah, yeah, tell me something I don't know from Rick Steves.

I learned that Picasso painted his "blue period" works just off La Rambla, but this information doesn't enhance my appreciation of his work or the location. Tóibín mentions that Picasso and Federico Garcia Lorca were both from Andalusia rather than Catalonia, but he declines to explain the significance of the regional differences (even though Lorca gave a talk on the very subject!).

Felipe Romero, The Second Son of the Silk Merchant ***

One way in which I attempt to prolong the glow of an overseas vacation is to read their local literature. During our trip to Spain, I picked up The Second Son of the Silk Merchant, a novel that takes place in Granada just after the Catholic conquest. Much of the working class population is still Muslim, known as Moriscos. Church builders discover a collection of manuscripts purportedly from the early centuries A.D.  indicating that the local population was Arabic-speaking Christians (true story). The books enhance the status of Granada until they are exposed as forgeries and inspire the Inquisition to deport all Muslims from Spain.

The author takes great pains to describe life in Granada at the turn of the 17th century. Unfortunately, the narrator sounds like he's reciting lightly narrativized dialogue from a museum exhibit.

In this Venice my father lived from the age of nineteen until forty. There was where all the wealth of the world flowed, where everything from black pepper, cinnamon, ginger, blue and red French and Catalan wool, velvet and Damask brocade, lace from Bruges, muslin from Monsul, gauze from Gaza, Brazil wood, cedar from Lebanon, cloth from Flanders to emeralds from the New World, diamonds from Africa and pearls from the Asiatic seas were hoarded. ... All this wealth flowed from the seven maritime routes, seven maritime routes that served many enormous, robust merchant galleys...

The story proper doesn't start until page 75, and it's soon interrupted by an idyll in the Andalusian countryside. The narrator Alonso Lomellino is an extremely passive character who drifts through the religious life his father chose for him, eventually becoming a mystic.

So: a vivid but largely static picture of 17th-century Granada which squanders a fascinating real-life controversy and underplays the tragedy of the expulsion of the Muslims. 

Dosde (publisher), Various Spanish souvenir books ****

Shopping in tourist shops during our trip to Spain, I found that the best options for souvenir books always seemed to come from the publisher Dosde. They had the best pictures and the most appropriate level of detail in their explanations. I ended up buying and reading three: Tilework in the Alhambra, The Alhambra of Granada, and Modernisme. I also tried to buy The Royal Alcazar of Seville, but the English edition was out of stock. The books aren't perfect –– the callouts don't always match the illustration and they tend to just drift off near the end –– but they provide me with what I need as a tourist.

I sometimes wish I were the kind of person who wants scholarly books like Reading the Alhambra, but really I just want the pretty pictures.

Javier Marías, A Heart So White ***

For our long-delayed trip to Spain, I chose a novel by Spain's (internationally) most famous contemporary writer. I should have known that a Marías novel was not going to supply any kind of local color to the trip: his plots and digressions deal in universal themes.

A Heart So White is similar in many ways to Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me: a Shakespearean title, a loquacious unreliable narrator, deaths at the beginning and end, long tangents on thematically related but narratively separate subjects. 

I would characterize the book's style as being like a jazz tune. It starts with a pair of impressive episodes that set the melody. The narrator then starts telling other stories that elaborate on some of the themes in those early melodies, riffing on them until the connection seems tenuous. At the end, all the elements come back together to restate the melody more fully. The book also uses a strategy I associate with David Lynch films: when the resolution of a narrative mystery seems imminent, the narrator defers the satisfaction of that resolution by shifting to another thread in the story.

I didn't enjoy A Heart So White as much as I did Tomorrow in the Battle. The beginning and the end are both awesome, but I struggled to care through much of the middle.

Kristen Roupenian, Cat Person and Other Stories ***

The story "Cat Person" was a viral sensation when it appeared in The New Yorker back in 2017. It's the story of a tentative courtship that leads to a bad date or worse depending on your interpretation. The fact that it was published at the height of the #MeToo movement in a magazine whose readership skews older than the protagonists probably accounts for the controversy it engendered.

Most of Roupenian's stories deal with the constant shifting of power in relationships, especially in the early stages where each person is unsure about how to interpret the others' actions and insecure about what they want. She captures this dance beautifully, but I often found the narrative uninteresting. 

My favorite story was "The Matchbox Sign" with its portrayal of a married couple dealing with the wife's unexplained illness.

Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary *** 1/2

Did you like The Martian? If so, then you'll like Project Hail Mary. It has the same nerdy smart-ass narrative voice, the same lone-guy-solving-science-problems plot, and the same concern for accurate hard sci-fi. I really think Weir should have made Project Hail Mary the second book in a series: The Martian's astronaut Mark Watney would make more sense in every way than the junior high-school teacher Ryland Grace.

The scientific challenge is far more consequential than the one in The Martian. The fate of all humanity is at stake. An alien organism is gobbling up energy from the Sun. An international research mission heads to the nearest star that appears to have evaded the organism. Only our intrepid narrator survives the trip, and he is just recovering his memory of the mission's purpose when he encounters an alien spaceship apparently on a similar expedition.

There are three major storylines:

• Research into the existence and properties of the alien organism Astrophage, with the goal of finding a "cure" to eliminate it from our solar system
• Learning to communicate and collaborate with the other intelligent alien species
• Designing the spaceship and planning the mission

I've listed the storylines in order of plausibility, or perhaps I should say ease of suspending disbelief. The success rate for Grace's jerry-rigged experiments is too high, and I felt that he ignored the Astrophage problem for too long while learning to communicate with the alien, but these nits didn't undermine my enjoyment of the story. On the other hand, the flashbacks to mission planning on Earth are entirely unbelievable, starting with the teacher being given a central role in the project over literally every other scientist and astronaut in the world. Project Hail Mary would be far better if Weir found a more realistic way to convey the necessary backstory.

Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves ***

Strangers to Ourselves presents five case studies of people struggling to cope with mental illness. Aviv is most interested in how people's understanding of their condition affects their sense of identity and the course of their lives. How is your experience different if you attribute your distress to a chemical imbalance versus a spiritual crisis?

The stories identify various potential sources of mental anguish, such as repressed trauma, chemical imbalance, societal pressures, or religious experiences, and shows how they offer at best a partial "explanation" of the person's behavior. However, individuals typically latch on to one or another of these factors to incorporate into their personal identity, and their choice impacts the type of treatment they receive. For example, Naomi comes to believe that "the ruling elite" were targeting undesirable elements of society such as her and her (Black) children, and since racist elements do in fact exist, doctors initially diagnosed her as righteously angry rather than paranoid and psychotic.

The topic is fascinating and important, and Aviv clearly empathizes with her subjects. However, her journalistic writing style is at odds with her desire to present people's experience with mental illness from the inside. She describes her subjects' behavior and reasoning in a flat "just the facts" manner and seems reluctant to make explicit conclusions (perhaps because explicit diagnoses are what cause problems in the case studies). I would have appreciated a more imaginative account of each person's "reasoning" coupled with a more forceful set of arguments for a phenomenological approach to what William James calls the "unclassified residuum" of their experience.