Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

Sunil Yapa’s debut novel, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, is a fantastic look at the differences in how people perceive the world, and how they deal with the existence of suffering. Set in the Seattle during the World Trade Organization protest in 1999, the novel weave several different stories together beautifully. Victor is a nineteen-year-old who ran away from home and his Chief of Police father after the death of his mother. King and John Henry are protesters preaching nonviolent protest trying to stop the meetings that will establish ‘free trade’ policies across the world, arguing instead for ‘fair trade.’ A trade delegate from Sri Lanka trying to find ways to bring his war torn home into the same arena as global leaders fights to find other ways to accomplish his goals, and two street cops deal with the conflicting emotions that arise when the city they are charged to protect becomes the targets they are told to defend against. The result is a beautiful, emotional, complex novel.

The story jumps rapidly between character to character, changing the point-of-view seamlessly. Yapa uses flashback, sentence structure, and dialogue extremely well so that there is never any question to whose head we are in. He couples this with complicated and intriguing histories for each character that makes their choices and interactions feel very real. They are complicated, at times contradictory, and they embody the ideologies that are at war between the protesters and the delegates. They all feel like real people that could be walking down the street on any given day, ones who may have been there on that day in 1999.

His use of language to convey emotion is masterful. He uses metaphor and description to portray how people would feel and react to traumatic events, and the effect is extremely realistic. He uses sentence structure to set the mood: short choppy sentences make time seem as if it is moving fast, longer, flowing ones accompany longer flowing thoughts as to the nature of the world and how such violence could exist.

While the story is set fifteen years ago, many of the issues that the characters grapple with feel extremely relevant. Victor is biracial and struggles with the differences between his white father's world and his own. The use of police force against the people they are policing is questioned, and the line between necessary force and brutality is blurred. There is a struggle throughout the book with the different ways people deal with and perceive suffering, between class, race, and nationality.  The result was a fresh look at ideas that we are grappling with today.

Every once in awhile, a book comes along that makes you stop and think, to take a fresh look at the way we think about and discuss the struggles that we face. Yapa forces us to do this in Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, and the result is a fantastic, exciting, thought provoking novel that feels extremely relevant, with characters whose struggles hit extremely close to home. The heart may only be a muscle the size of a fist, but, sometimes, it can swell to envelope everyone.

Learning to Fly

Hey everyone! Book #102 is Learning to Fly by Steph Davis, and you can see the review here.

Brothers Vonnegut

"It was purely an internal matter. Every kid past sixteen knew this fork, what the good guys did here, and the bad guys. Good guys stayed true to their love of science, their pursuit of knowledge for the good of humanity. Bad guys were venal. They made choices based on money."

Ginger Strand

The Brothers Vonnegut

If this is your first time to this blog, I really, really love the works of Kurt Vonnegut. I think his books are brilliant, honest, funny, and heart breaking. He does a fantastic job contrasting what we do as a society and a species against what we know we shouldn't. Most people know him for his book, Slaughterhouse-five, his book explaining the firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut's personal life greatly influenced his work. But I had absolutely no idea how much.

In The Brothers Vonnegut, Ginger Strand follows the lives of Kurt and Bernard Vonnegut just after the end of World War II. Bernie was a scientist working on atmospheric studies, and Kurt was a (secretly) aspiring writer. Both of them ended up working at GE, in New York, a place that was every scientists dream for the short peace that existed momentarily between WWII and the Cold War, where money was abundant and scientists were encouraged to follow their curiosities and to discover knew things about the universe. Kurt and Bernie saw as these discoveries and the prevailing attitude towards science shifted from one of creation to one who's purpose was for war. These tensions greatly shaped the brothers lives as they struggled with the same deep questions. They led Bernie to make great discoveries that still affect us today (Project Cirrus eventually let to an examination on how man effects climate), and the questions that Kurt pondered in his books are ones we must answer today. 

This book was fantastic. Strands storytelling is brilliant. It pulled me through the book quickly, and she moves between the two brothers flawlessly, brilliantly mixing their two stories to find the big questions surrounding science and morality that plagued both of them. She did a wonderful job relating both the technical scientific ideas and the complex moral ones, all while brilliantly relating the history of Project Cirrus, which changed the way we think about weather and climate. 

I highly recommend

this book.

Book 100

Hey everyone! I just read the 100th book this year, but my year is not over yet. I still have until April 8th to end this project, and I am very curious to see how many books I can read. If you all will bear with me I think I can squeeze a few more in!

Hope in the Dark

"Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement, pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone."

Rebecca Solnit

Hope in the Dark

"The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing a future can be, I think."

Virginia Woolf

I sometimes feel overwhelmed. I feel that things are far from what they should be, and it sometimes seems that no matter how hard we fight, we will never get to the place where we should. Things sometimes feel desperate; sometimes it feels like we've barely made a step forward, only to be forced two or three steps back. I sometimes feel this way with a lot of things: women's rights, health care, living wages and affordable housing, war, climate change. Its often frustrating, often overwhelming. 

In the book, Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit addresses this question of why we should hope, especially when the problems that we need to solve seem insurmountable. She discusses why hope is valuable and necessary, especially when problems seem to be at their worst, and reminds us that things are never as dark as they seem. Often things are better than they were yesterday, and change is often extremely slow.

She also talks about many of the important and under reported movements lead by activists around the world and examines why they are often successful, even when they did not 'win' the day, and why they aren't talked about much in the United States.

Solnit (author of Men Explain Things to Me, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and the Faraway Nearby) does all of this with masterful prose and beautiful composition. Her language pulls the reader through the book, covering a multitude of subjects (with occasional footnotes for the necessary backstory), and ties the book together extremely well. 

This book is a must read for everyone. It shows us that our actions will always make a difference, even when the world is to dark to wade through, and sometimes acting when there is no light at the end of the tunnel is the bravest thing we can do.

Flight

"Maybe you can't kill somebody twice for real, but it sure hurts your heart just the same."

Sherman Alexie

Flight

Growing up is hard. Growing up is especially hard if you are a zit-faced, teenage Native America boy struggling through a hardly fail-proof foster care system like Zits is. Abandoned by his father at birth and after his mother died when he was six, Zits has a bunch of problems. He can't find a foster home that fits, he drinks a lot, he starts fires, and he does drugs. One day in prison he meets another teenager, named Justice, who convinces him to run away with him and to shoot up a bank full of people because of what whites did to the Native Americans. Right after he pulls the triggers, he finds himself spirited back in time into the body of one of the FBI agents working to bring down IRON in the 70's. His journey doesn't stop there. He leapfrogs from body to body across time, experiencing snippets of the lives of several different people: a Native American boy at little bighorn, a general in the US Army during one of the many massacres in the settling of the west, a pilot instructor reeling from the death of his Muslim friend from Ethiopia. Along the way he learns what it is like to walk in another mans shoes, and learns a whole different way of looking at the world.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story. I loved the way it looked at how our actions affect others, even if it is years later. I loved the way it looked at how connected we all are, and how two wrongs don't make a right. I loved how it looked at ways we could all be better as people, and the many reasons why what we are doing now is not enough. I loved this book.

I especially loved the character Zits. I loved the way that he described things, and how the language used really made you feel that you are in the head of a sad, hurt, and confused teenager. His character is fantastic, and I really love how the events that happen to him force him to consider really hard questions like those regarding shared cultural blame, absolute moral laws, trust and forgiveness. This was a truly fantastic book. Sherman Alexie is a magnificent writer.

Battleborn

"That's what I prayed for then: divine preservation of something I would never understand, the safeguarding of something I'd already lost."

"Everything I can say about what it means to lose, what it means to do without, the inadequate weight of the past, you already know."

Claire Vaye Watkins

Battleborn

Nevada is a strange state. Its large and beautiful, made up of basin and range as the state is slowly stretched apart. It's dry, held in the rain-shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Most population groupings are small, spread out, based on mining, with exceptions in Reno and Las Vegas. The Comstock lode put Nevada on the map, the civil wars need for silver making it a destination. It is a strange place. The Sagebrush Insurgency experiences a large amount of support, Manson was able to convince others to follow him into the hills. It is a fascinating and often overlooked state in the rush to get to booming California and whatever happens in Vegas is supposed to stay there, though it seldom does. 

Nevada is the the theme of Claire Vaye Watkins (who also wrote Gold Fame Citrus) collection of short stories, Battleborn. It is a wonderful, dark collection that speaks on themes of desperation, isolation, and loneliness.  Each story is different, some taking place in present day, either in the big cities or out in the rural wilderness, while others take place in the past, during the settling of the state when people considered it a vast and dry desert to be crossed on their way to the mountains full of gold. I loved it. Her characters are diverse, from men seeking their fortune to whores at a brothel outside of Vegas, an old rock hound to college kids fleeing Reno for the weekend. She changes voices flawlessly, and does an incredible job conveying what is happening in the characters heads. 

One of my favorite stories is "The Diggings," which follows two brothers in the eighteen hundreds as they travel west to the mountains to search for gold. It bluntly shows the hardships that they experienced, which is so incredibly different from the glorified image we have of the settling of the west today. It shows the poor living conditions, the racism (mostly against the Chinese and the Native Americans), and how the greed drove people to do terrible things. The main character, Joshua, is often the voice of reason, and his kindness and realistic view of events was a fantastic contrast to the surroundings and drove home how cruel and brutal it was.

This collection was fantastic. Every story was well done, the characters all well rounded and complex, the storytelling beautiful, and the prose fantastic and gripping. I highly recommend it.

It was strange reading, though. I lived in Nevada when I was little, and I remember many of the places she talked about, the roads over the passes, the small towns of Beatty and Verdi, the mines out at Battle Mountain. I remember the places, but I was too young to really see some of the dark things that happened, to see the effects of drug and alcohol problems, the fall out from the mining. It is a beautiful place. It still feels empty out in the middle of the state, unlike most of the rest of the country. It is fantastic.