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Strange Doings by R.A. Lafferty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve seen R.A. Lafferty’s name on the spines of books in plenty of used bookstores for years, but it never occurred to me to actually pick up any of them – mainly because I kept confusing him with R.A. Salvatore, whom I associate mainly with the Forgotten Realms franchise, which doesn’t really interest me. Anyway, like probably a lot of people in recent years, I decided to check Lafferty out after Neil Gaiman kept namedropping him as one of the greatest writers ever. Then of course I couldn’t find anything by him for ages until I finally found this short-story collection in a used bookstore in the US a couple of years ago.
By the second story, I could see what all the hoo-ha was about. Lafferty is generally classified as an SF/F writer, but these 16 stories aren’t really straight SF or fantasy but a blend of playful oddball surrealism, where the wordplay matters more than the story itself. There are a lot of tropes here – mad geniuses, explorers visiting strange planets, aliens invading Earth, sailors seduced by the sea, people whose imaginations become reality – but Lafferty takes none of them seriously and uses them all to make weird things happen, and his characters either roll with it or refuse to accept it.
In that sense, these aren’t short stories in the traditional sense – they’re more like good-natured surreal thought experiments. No wonder Gaiman is a fan. The downside for me is that I ended up not remembering too much of what actually happened in many of these stories, but I had a great time while I was there. Lafferty’s dialogue alone is a whimsical delight and well worth the price of admission. I’ll definitely be seeking out more of his work.
The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve only read James Baldwin once before, but Go Tell It on the Mountain made me want to read more, and this novella-length essay presented my first opportunity to do so. Ostensibly it’s about the Atlanta Murders, in which 28 black children, adolescents and adults were murdered between 1979 and 1981. Wayne Williams (also black) was convicted for murders (both adults), and the rest have been attributed to him, although no proof ever emerged to confirm this. Baldwin was asked by Playboy editor Walter Lowe to cover the trial, and so he did.
Which is why the first thing to mention is that it helps if you already know the basic details of the case, because Baldwin – perhaps unsurprisingly – approached this as a literary social critique, not a straight journalism piece. Consequently, his interest lies not so much in the case itself but the overall context in which it was happening – not only America’s racist history in general, but the context of Atlanta itself, a self-styled cosmopolitan city of the “New South” trying to show it was separate from the rest of Georgia in terms of racial progress – yet “the city too busy to hate”, even with a black mayor, a black police commissioner and black judges, still found itself beholden to the same systemic racism that plagues all of America.
That alone makes it worth reading in these days of #BlackLivesMatter and the resurgence of white supremacy, where a common tactic is to claim black-on-black crime is the bigger problem and that the police can’t be racist when there are black officers on the force. The reality is more complex, and here’s Baldwin explaining why all the way back in 1985 (and he wasn’t the first). Less tangentially, Baldwin reflects the feelings of many that the case against Williams wasn’t a slam-dunk, and that Williams was unfairly credited for the other murders – in a sense, just another victim of injustice (though Baldwin never flat-out proclaims Williams’ innocence).
People expecting a straight true-crime book may be frustrated with Baldwin’s ponderous, fragmented and meandering prose (and I’ll admit even I found it a bit frustrating at times). Nonetheless, it was a provocative read in 1985, and is no less provocative now. So it’ll probably be banned from Florida libraries soon (if it hasn’t been already), is what I'm saying.
View all my reviews
Same as it ever was,
This is dF
Strange Doings by R.A. LaffertyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve seen R.A. Lafferty’s name on the spines of books in plenty of used bookstores for years, but it never occurred to me to actually pick up any of them – mainly because I kept confusing him with R.A. Salvatore, whom I associate mainly with the Forgotten Realms franchise, which doesn’t really interest me. Anyway, like probably a lot of people in recent years, I decided to check Lafferty out after Neil Gaiman kept namedropping him as one of the greatest writers ever. Then of course I couldn’t find anything by him for ages until I finally found this short-story collection in a used bookstore in the US a couple of years ago.
By the second story, I could see what all the hoo-ha was about. Lafferty is generally classified as an SF/F writer, but these 16 stories aren’t really straight SF or fantasy but a blend of playful oddball surrealism, where the wordplay matters more than the story itself. There are a lot of tropes here – mad geniuses, explorers visiting strange planets, aliens invading Earth, sailors seduced by the sea, people whose imaginations become reality – but Lafferty takes none of them seriously and uses them all to make weird things happen, and his characters either roll with it or refuse to accept it.
In that sense, these aren’t short stories in the traditional sense – they’re more like good-natured surreal thought experiments. No wonder Gaiman is a fan. The downside for me is that I ended up not remembering too much of what actually happened in many of these stories, but I had a great time while I was there. Lafferty’s dialogue alone is a whimsical delight and well worth the price of admission. I’ll definitely be seeking out more of his work.
The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James BaldwinMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve only read James Baldwin once before, but Go Tell It on the Mountain made me want to read more, and this novella-length essay presented my first opportunity to do so. Ostensibly it’s about the Atlanta Murders, in which 28 black children, adolescents and adults were murdered between 1979 and 1981. Wayne Williams (also black) was convicted for murders (both adults), and the rest have been attributed to him, although no proof ever emerged to confirm this. Baldwin was asked by Playboy editor Walter Lowe to cover the trial, and so he did.
Which is why the first thing to mention is that it helps if you already know the basic details of the case, because Baldwin – perhaps unsurprisingly – approached this as a literary social critique, not a straight journalism piece. Consequently, his interest lies not so much in the case itself but the overall context in which it was happening – not only America’s racist history in general, but the context of Atlanta itself, a self-styled cosmopolitan city of the “New South” trying to show it was separate from the rest of Georgia in terms of racial progress – yet “the city too busy to hate”, even with a black mayor, a black police commissioner and black judges, still found itself beholden to the same systemic racism that plagues all of America.
That alone makes it worth reading in these days of #BlackLivesMatter and the resurgence of white supremacy, where a common tactic is to claim black-on-black crime is the bigger problem and that the police can’t be racist when there are black officers on the force. The reality is more complex, and here’s Baldwin explaining why all the way back in 1985 (and he wasn’t the first). Less tangentially, Baldwin reflects the feelings of many that the case against Williams wasn’t a slam-dunk, and that Williams was unfairly credited for the other murders – in a sense, just another victim of injustice (though Baldwin never flat-out proclaims Williams’ innocence).
People expecting a straight true-crime book may be frustrated with Baldwin’s ponderous, fragmented and meandering prose (and I’ll admit even I found it a bit frustrating at times). Nonetheless, it was a provocative read in 1985, and is no less provocative now. So it’ll probably be banned from Florida libraries soon (if it hasn’t been already), is what I'm saying.
View all my reviews
Same as it ever was,
This is dF
