Kate Degelau-Pierce

Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write is Claire Messud’s answer to who am I?

It starts with personal essays about her family, her childhood, and her life now. You learn about her Mediterranean origins (her father was a pied-noir from Algeria, and he studied the Turks and Ottoman Empire), her childhood that ranged from Toronto to Australia to France, her aunt, her dogs, and more. This section was the most compelling for me, personally. It’s a glimpse into her life and how she was formed.

The second part is essays about books. She has post-graduate degrees and her career has been both writing and teaching creative writing. What I’m trying to say: she has many intelligent thoughts about books, and the first three essays are about Camus and the pied-noir experience in Algeria. It’s a graceful segue from her personal essays to her literary ones.

The third and final section was the one I found least compelling, which is art criticism. This may be a personal issue: I haven’t read a lot of art criticism, so I find it harder to read. I don’t know its form and how it works; I also find it difficult to read about something visual without the actual visual art in front of me. I kept interrupting my reading to search for the artists and paintings she was talking about.

But the who-am-I-ness of it is undercut by a passage in one of the early essays: anything that gets written about necessarily gets flattened from something complex into something digestible and comprehensible. (For example, Kant, instead of being the complicated philosopher full of complicated ideas, becomes a Prussian who liked to think about stuff.) So how much of Claire Messud’s story is a flattening of who she really is and how she really thinks?

So does Kant’s Little Prussian Head tell you who Claire Messud is? To a degree. I know more now than I did before I read it – but it’s a good reminder of how difficult it is to ever really know anyone else. Maybe especially if they’re telling you.

I get the impression that John Green had a very intense few years. He became well-known by YA readers after The Fault in our Stars was published in 2012 (it became a movie in 2014). He has said that he felt a lot of pressure whilst writing Turtles all the Way Down, his next book. Once that book was out, he stopped being able to write.

So he turned back to reviewing; he started his writing career by reviewing books for Booklist, and this was a return to that, sort of. The Anthropocene Reviewed reflects on various aspects of the human-centered world, ranking them on a 5-star scale. The short essays cover everything from the Lascaux Cave Paintings to The Plague to Diet Dr Pepper. It’s quite random.

The project started as a podcast in 2018 – I would download the episodes, make a cup of tea, and go sit on my front porch while listening to him ponder whatever he was pondering that week. Time passed, and it became 2020 and then mid-March 2020 and beyond, his thoughtfulness about the world and the pandemic and the things changed by it helped me. He talked about only being able to write if he sat next to a local creek, so he would bring a camp chair with his laptop and sit and type away, and I felt that same bizarre anxiety. We all came up with our own ways of getting through: why not a camp chair and a laptop in the middle of nowhere?

The essays included in the book are mostly from the podcast. There may be slight tweaks to them, but by and large they’re the same. Most don’t mention the pandemic, but some do, and it’s jarring to realize that we’ve come so far from the unknowingness of spring 2020 while still not being wholly out of it. I wasn’t sure I was ready to read about how I was feeling last year yet, but I read those essays anyway.

John Green’s earnestness and sincerity and thoughtfulness about everything he writes about makes this book moving and worth focusing on. It’s like a good meditation session or maybe a good sermon, one that moves you and isn’t so long your mind wanders. He communicates what he thinks and why he cares and you start to think that maybe you should too.

I give The Anthropocene Reviewed four and a half stars.

The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of The Iliad, from Brisies’ point of view. Who is Brisies?, I can hear you asking. She is a teenaged girl, a slave who used to be the queen of a small Trojan town up the coast from Troy (she was already married), but who was captured when the Greeks raided and destroyed it. She was Achilles’ prize.

The main action for The Iliad comes when Agamemnon has to give up his prize slavegirl to her priest father, and so he decides to take Brisies from Achilles. Achilles throws a temper tantrum and refuses to fight, and events continue from there. (Mostly this person killing that person who goes on to kill this other person.) But Brisies, in the original, doesn’t have even a line of dialog. She’s the macguffin that sets the action going. She might as well be a shield.

It’s offensive, quite frankly. So Pat Barker sets out to tell the story from Brisies’ point of view – the point of view of the slavewomen. You get who belongs to whom, which women get along with each other, and there are glimpses of Brisies’ life before her capture. But the story is still largely Achilles’, just told through someone else’s eyes.

Lavinia (Aeneis’ wife – a partial retelling of The Aeneid from her perspective instead of the male hero’s) gets around this by lopping off a bunch of the original poem that she wouldn’t have known about (Dido isn’t mentioned), and it gives her a rich life before Aeneis shows up and shows how she lives after he dies. It’s her story, not his. The Silence of the Girls doesn’t show much of Brisies’ life outside the Greek camp, just enough to give you some context about who she is.

What it does do is take the shine off the Greeks and their camp. It shows you that these are a bunch of entitled rich guys playing with other people’s lives. Brisies is powerless. All of the women are powerless. They are people with inner lives and wants and needs and desires and all of that just goes out the window in the original. Brisies shows us the grossness of a camp that’s been lived in for ten years by dudes who are not good about keeping themselves or their quarters particularly clean. There are dead rats and body odor and everyone is sleeping outside and there are giant trash heaps along the beach. It’s gross and awful and no one who has a big part in the Iliad is shiny or deserves respect. Brisies herself is just getting along and trying to make her life going forward a little bit better.

The Silence of the Girls doesn’t entirely succeed in making this Brisies’ story. The action and the plot are still Achilles’. But she becomes more than a macguffin; the characters and the setting are hers. And while The Iliad deals with anger, The Silence of the Girls deals with the grind of survival. It’s like getting an additional take on something you already know, something that lends complexity to a story fundamental to Western culture. And that’s worth your time.

Suicide Club is trying to be a more profound, or more robust, book than it is. The author comes from the monied world of London finance; the futuristic world she is trying to build is based on that and wants to be a critique of it. However, the non-Manhattan/London/financial world, non-achiever, non-striving parts of this book felt unrealistic at best.

In the book, a future American society has given over to a corporate wellness culture. A shadowy and ill-explained Ministry has developed products to help people be healthier with the aim of living longer; it pairs these with systems of observation (think of your smartwatch reminding you to stand up periodically throughout the day) to keep people in check.

At least in theory. The only real consequences of not following the exercise and diet requirements seem to be going to therapy. The Ministry isn’t a very scary villain, even though Lea, our protagonist, finds its ability to thwart her high-acheivement self problematic. That’s the level of the threat: problematic. She’s not going to get hurt, there’s no immediate threat of death (the punishments seem to be either being ignored or having to go to ineffective therapy), and the ostensible threat of living forever is presented as a worthwhile goal to strive towards in the book.

The book’s sole solution for fighting the Ministry is for people to self-immolate? Which: don’t get me wrong, the Arab spring of 2011 was started with a man setting himself on fire in Tunisia. It can be a very effective form of protest. But what if people just don’t? What if they don’t buy the products? What if they don’t get the treatments? What if they don’t stand up when they get the reminder to stand up? What if they eat ice cream and fruit and sit around entertaining themselves all day long? Doing nothing and eating badly would be a form of protest against the Ministry and it’s deeply unclear what power they would have over you. But none of those are presented. Nope, it’s setting yourself on fire or nothing. What?

I am clearly not the audience for this book – I find the basic premise confusing at best and problematic at worst. Definitely skip this one.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is seven short stories, and essays about those short stories. They come together to turn into lessons about writing and storytelling.

I took this book in chunks. It’s arranged with story, essay, afterward for one lesson; then the same three sections for the next story. It wasn’t a fill-in-the-holes-in-your-day kind of reading; it was definitely sit-down-and-pay-attention-for-awhile reading.

The writing lessons were somewhat prosaic. The story only needs what matters, but that means you as a reader need to pay attention to everything. Fewer words are usually better, but more words are sometimes good, especially when you’re establishing voice. Keep tinkering with your words. Go back over what you’ve written a few times to make sure that’s really how you want to say it. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it was packaged in such a way that it made the lessons easy to learn.

I say prosaic, but the simplest lessons are the hardest to put into practice. I’ve started being more focused in my writing since reading this book. I’ve been re-writing more too. There’s no good way to get practice writing that isn’t just writing. Just because the lessons are simple doesn’t mean that you automatically use them. Personally, I’m happy to practice more. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a useful craft book.