Shrieks & Whisper’s resident literary critic, Harriet Sprout, shares the month’s most interesting publications.
The Preponderance of Tadpoles by Flubert Fhlessnik
Postmodern literature is bound to ruffle the feathers of Good Taste, but Fhlessnik’s latest offering might be a bit too much for even the most open-minded readers. A heavy-handed allegory for the Rohingya genocide in which Burmese government officials are represented as frogs and the Rohingya are portrayed as (you guessed it) tadpoles, this 800-page behemoth of a novel can’t help but drag in sections.
There are, as in all of Fhlessnik’s works, moments of genuine beauty, but one can’t help but wince at the sections narrated by Prime Minister Ribbit. Does Fhlessnik want us to sympathize with the oppressors, or to understand their point of view so that we can work to make amends? The Preponderance of Tadpoles offers no easy answers.
Seven Score and Four by Blite Kieblear
Historical fiction is a genre packed to the gills with odd choices, and Seven Score and Four is no exception. In Blite Kieblear’s sophomore effort, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln are part of a seven-person polycule, and on the night of the historic assassination, two of its members go mysteriously missing. While grieving her husband’s untimely demise, Mary Todd vows to find the missing lovers. Don’t let the premise turn you off; between the twists, the turns, and the steamier scenes, this novel has something for everybody.
No Exit by Elif Batuman
No Exit follows Selin, the protagaonist from Batuman’s first two novels, through her junior year at Harvard in 1997-98. Batuman does a commendable job conveying the slow but measurable process of Selin’s maturity in what is most certainly becoming the preeminent bildungsroman series of the century; in her previous novel, Either/Or, Selin explores her sexuality and ponders, in the way only a 19-year-old can, questions about how one out to live their best life or parse the past with the future.
In No Exit, these questions remain as unanswerable to Selin as they are to any of us, but they have faded into the background. Selin leaves Breton and Kierkegaard behind, takes a trip down the rhetorical pathways of Heraclitus and Kafka, but ends up, as so many of us are wont to do, at Sartre’s doorstep.
Hell, as Sartre wrote in the play that shares a name with Batuman’s novel, is other people. To live in the perception of others is hell; in Selin’s case, to be percieved by the Ivan, in the way she believes him to perceive her, is hell.
Perhaps the most charming passages are Selin’s musings on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, which are smoothly written into the larger narrative about love, life, and growing up.
Vivisections, Vituperations, and Vicissitudes by Valerie VonVeight
In this fascinating collection of semiautobiographical essays, world-renowed vivisectionist Valerie Von Veight shares her uniqe perspective on life. Readers will laugh with Von Veight as she tells stories of men showing up to her office looking for a vasectomist, and cry as she writes about her difficulties living with the guilt of killing her neighbor’s pet dog while looking for a missing wedding ring.
There are few careers more conteoversial than that of the vivisectionist, and Von Veight makes the case that it is only in the crosshairs of public scrutiny, where she has spent most of her career, that one can arrive to a solid sense of identity and contentment. Whether or not her arguments hold water is up to the reader to decide.
Glub and Other Blubs by Herbert Herplitude
There’s apparently a good reason Herplitide is known for his science fiction: he can’t write other styles. In this ill-conceived crossover into romantic comedy, Herplitude’s jokes fall as flat as his prose. Case in point, the following attempt at a love scene:
Pleekpon laid back on the electrobed in a seductive pose. “Why don’t you come relax with me?”
“But you’re a glub, and I’m nothing but a blub!” Broobleigh exclaimed. “Our love can never be?”
“Who said anything about love?” Pleekpon asked, wiggling all her glubbins and glubbets in a seductive ‘glub hither’ motion.
Broobleigh shook with anxiety. “But what if the Supreme Governing Body catches us?”
A naughty laugh rose out of Pleekpon’s laugh-hole. “The only body I’m worried about supremely governing is yours.”
“Well,” Broobleigh said, crawling forward, “when you put it that way…”
Ugh! That’s about all I can stand. Another swing and miss from Herbert Herplitude.
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