Ana Castillo
Birth Year Project:
You supply your birth year, I respond with a short list of books published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I'd recommend. If your year's already been done, I'll do an update. So far, we’ve done 17 years altogether, between 1944 and 1989. [See BYP Index in navigation bar.]
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you're unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I'll aggregate and post.
As any devotee of the old spinning metal book racks in lobbies, airports, drugstores will tell you, we’ve now entered the era of Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steele, and a host of others—V. C. Andrews, Jeffrey Archer, James Clavell, Carl Hiaasen . . .
Well-known/Bestselling Fiction:
Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy
The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy
It, Stephen King
A Perfect Spy, John le Carré1
The Bourne Supremacy, Robert Ludlum
A Sampling of Literary Fiction:
Mixquiahuala Letters, Ana Castillo2
Rubicon Beach, Steve Erickson3
The Sportswriter, Richard Ford
An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro4
The Lost Language of Cranes, David Leavitt
A Summons to Memphis, Peter Taylor5
Six Works From the Rest of the World:
The Bridge, Iain Banks [Scotland]
News From the Empire, Fernando Del Paso6 [Mexico]
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, José Saramago7 [Portugal]
Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, Ken Saro-Wiwa8 [Nigeria]
The Beautiful Mrs. Siedenman, Andrzej Szczypiorski9 [Poland]
Moscow 2042, Vladimir Voinovich10 [USSR/Russia]
Special mention:
Maus: A Survivor's Tale [graphic novel], Art Spiegelman11
My List:
The Blind Corral, Ralph Beer12
Those Days: An American Album [memoir/reportage], Richard Critchfield13
Making Hay [nonfiction], Verlyn Klinkenborg14
The Progress of Love [stories], Alice Munro15
Kate Vaiden, Reynolds Price
Easy in the Islands [stories], Bob Shacochis16
Fools Crow, James Welch17
James Welch
Perfect Spy: This might be my favorite le Carré. It involves a spy, Magnus Pym, but it’s not a genre spy thriller. I’d argue that it’s straight novel set in the world of espionage. Pym has gone to ground; we find him in his safe house, writing the story of his life.
Pym is the perfect spy by virtue of his upbringing by a high-rolling con man father. What was willful and criminal in the father, is existential in the son. Pym is an onion, not a peach—that is, there’s nothing hard/regenerative in the middle. As we see in the story he’s putting to paper, all that’s left after the peeling back is the discarded layers.
If this novel weren’t listed here, it would be on my list below.
Castillo: This writer was not on my radar [writing from the American Southwest is one of my blinds spots], but she’s had a long, passionate, multi-genre writing life. This title is her first novel. Her 2007 novel, The Guardians, was widely praised. Another for my TBR list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Castillo
Erickson: If you like offbeat speculative lit, you should know Erickson. He has a fairly deep biblio; I haven’t read many (yet), but they seem to be dependably askew. I was a big fan of 2017’s Shadowbahn—starts with a long-haul trucker encountering NYC’s Twin Towers in the wilds of South Dakota, and riffs throughout on twins (including, um, Elvis’s stillborn brother). They’re more fun to read than to try describing—trust me on this, OK?
A note for the unwary: Not to be confused with the prolific Canadian fantasy writer, Steven Erickson.
Here’s our Erickson’s Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Erickson
Ishiguro: His second novel, set in post-war Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Artist_of_the_Floating_World
Taylor: A Southern gentleman. I loved a story from The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985), “The Gift of the Prodigal.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Taylor_(writer)
del Paso: Another writer I'd never heard of. Wiki's description of this novel underscores how abysmally ignorant I am about Mexican history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_del_Paso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_from_the_Empire
Saramago: Nobel Laureate in Literature (1998).
As I’ve noted in earlier posts, Blindness is one of the great novels. But The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis was my introduction to Saramago. Like certain members of the Latin American Boom (notably Garcia Marquez) and fellow Portuguese novelist, António Lobo Antunes, he uses magical realism—often in a novel’s basic design. In this one, Ricardo Reis, having learned that Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa, has died, comes home from Brazil. Though a doctor, he doesn’t resume the practice of medicine, but squanders this last year of his life in a Lisbon hotel. Here’s the catch: Ricardo Reis is one of the multitude of identities, or heteronyms, Pessoa wrote under (there were seventy-some). I know, sounds a bit meta, but it’s a good read.
These days, especially outside Portugal, Pessoa is best known for his hard-to-classify work, The Book of Disquiet (1981), written piecemeal over his lifetime, and not published until 47 years after his death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Saramago
Saro-Wiwa: A hugely important figure in both Nigerian literature and non-violent political activism. His execution by a military tribunal in 1995 became an international cause célèbre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Saro-Wiwa
Szczypiorski: I thought I better finally learn how to say his name. I listened a few times—still having trouble matching that clot of sound with these letters. Oh well.
When the Soviet states around Eastern Europe fell I guessed we’d soon see a publishing boom in translated work, and indeed there was. This novel was one of the first of these I read—along with Aleksandar Tišma’s, The Book of Blam ( 1972), novels by Ivan Klima, Ishmael Kadare, Dubravka Ugrešić, Slavenka Drakulić, and others.
Here’s a good review of this novel from NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2013/05/12/182372388/marked-by-darkness-a-war-novel-that-sheds-light-on-past-hurt
Voinovich: Satirist, dissident, dystopian. Died in 2018. He sounds like someone we should know about. I’m putting Moscow 2042 on my TBR list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Voinovich
Maus: I’m sure most of you know this graphic novel, one of the foundational works that showed mainstream readers that comics can be literature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maus
Beer: I don’t ordinarily do this, but here’s a link to The Blind Corral at Amazon, where you can have see how readers feel about this novel:
https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Corral-Contemporary-American-fiction/dp/0140102655/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=dJtjO&content-id=amzn1.sym.cf86ec3a-68a6-43e9-8115-04171136930a&pf_rd_p=cf86ec3a-68a6-43e9-8115-04171136930a&pf_rd_r=140-0938574-5556016&pd_rd_wg=jlGFT&pd_rd_r=1ed5a37e-6630-4fd7-b460-028b34007471&ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk
He has published several other books, including In These Hills (2000), a collection of his “Ranch Life” columns for Big Sky Journal.
Those Days: Critchfield was a journalist who focused on village life in the Third World. This led him, eventually, to write a book-length piece on his home town and ancestors. I was surprised just now to see how little presence this book has at Amazon. More people she know it.
Klinkenberg: This is a great example of journalism that makes you keen on a topic you didn’t think you weren’t interested in (not that I have anything against hay); it’s personal, immersive, detailed in the way good New Yorker pieces are. I liked a subsequent book of Klinkenberg’s, The Last Fine Time (1990), a social history of a tavern/post-war eatery in Buffalo, NY.
Munro: Winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. As I’ve said in various posts, she was a major force in my story-writing life. See Reading Project [9]: You Are What You Read. I like some stories better than others—and there’s no one story I can point to and say, This is the one! I like “Carried Away” and “Friend of My Youth” especially, and many others scattered throughout the collections. I often talk about the fierce candor that surfaces in the work—the ending of “Miles City, Montana,” for instance.
From Munro I learned something about the knack of going sideways in a story. What do I mean? Some narratives go from start to finish like shot arrows; others take the scenic route. The scenic route can be risky—while you’re admiring the view you can take roads that peter out, leaving you scratching your head, mapless, possibly out of gas. Munro’s stories don’t rush you to the end point—going forward surely, they go sideways as needed. A student might be told to lose the backstory stuff—all the flashback and character biography and whatnot. C’mon, we say, Keep ‘er moving! Eyes on the prize! But Munro, over her long writing life, has taught us how to read her work, to appreciate long stories, to absorb the material without—consciously or unconsciously—separating it into vital tissue and filler, or figure and ground, as in a painting.
Late in my teaching life, I came to the thought that one quality we respond to in art is its saturation. I don’t know as we’ve ever settled on a good name for the property I’m trying to describe here. Each artwork has an essence—that word is close, but still suggests something inside, at the heart, like a nucleus. I mean something different. A powerful work of art is saturated with what it’s about—wherever you look, there it is. Consider Picasso’s “Guernica”: whatever your eye lands on, it’s “Guernica”—every square inch of the canvas is made of “Guernica”-ness. There is no figure and ground. This is how I’d answer anyone complaining that Munro keeps digressing—she’s not, it’s all one thing.
Thank you, Alice!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Munro
Shacochis: Winner of the American Book Award for First Fiction in 1984. I haven’t kept up with his work, but he has a diverse bibliography. Here’s a 2016 piece from LitHub and his Wiki:
https://lithub.com/bob-shacochis-how-surfing-lead-me-to-writing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Shacochis
I’m including this collection on the basis of a short story (“Hunger”) which has made me laugh for years.
Fools Crow: Jim Welch was first a poet—Riding the Earthboy 40 (1971)—then wrote the spare, now-classic novel, Winter in the Blood (1974), the story of a young Indian man coming to terms with his disconnected self. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon, he tells us on page 1 (a line I’ve remembered for nearly fifty years).
In 2013, it was filmed by Alex and Andrew Smith, sons of Montana writer Annick Smith—Homestead [memoir] (1995), paramour of my mentor Bill Kittredge; the female lead was played by Lily Gladstone, now a name we all know from Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).
Winter in the Blood, the book, was just making its splash when I arrived in Montana. I eventually got to know Jim a bit—he was unfailingly kind to me. He and his wife Lois (a force to be reckoned with in UM’s English Department) lived along Rattlesnake Creek near Dick Hugo (my other mentor) and his wife, writer Ripley Schemm. Sad to say, he died at age 62.
Fools Crow is a major work—the coming of age of a young Blackfeet man, set against the historical events leading to U. S. Cavalry’s massacre of a friendly Blackfeet band in 1870, six years before Little Big Horn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fools_Crow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Welch_(writer)
1955