via : Flavors.me.

Who’s your candidate to win? I’m betting on either the Syrian poet, Adonis, or the Algerian, Assia Djebar. One day, Margaret Atwood will get one; it’s hard to imagine what else she has to do. And, of course, it’s fun to think about Bob Dylan mumbling his way through a greeting in Sweden. However, I’m betting the Prize Committee won’t be able to resist a nod to the Arab Spring.

Join me on Friday, September 2, at 4:00 p.m. EST for an online reading and chat with Diana Abu-Jaber about her latest novel, Birds of Paradise, which comes out on September 1. You’ll be among the first to hear Diana read and discuss this latest of her four novels, an exquisitely-rendered family portrait of the Muirs, who have been decimated by the absence of their runaway daughter, Felice. Somehow, Abu-Jaber manages to merge her signature good humor and her detailed knowledge of cooking with this deeply affecting tale.

Go early to www.talkshoe.com to create your own ID so that you can ask Diana your own question via audio link, or just click on the link below and then on the link to the “scheduled episode” if you’d like to listen, only.

Here’s the link to the Jane Book Chat site where the reading/interview will take place:

http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/80383

BIRDS OF PARADISE
Diana Abu-Jaber
W. W. Norton, New York
ISBN 978-0-393-06461-2
September 2011
$25.95 hardback ($30 Canada)
368 pages

Diana Abu-Jaber’s fourth novel charms with delectable prose, vividly unique characterizations, and an exquisitely-rendered Miami setting, even as it wrenches the reader through a plot involving a family damaged by the voluntary disappearance of a thirteen-year-old girl. Our hearts and our appetites are stimulated by this extraordinary quest to the heart of family connections.

Abu Jaber’s Miami is a dazzling blend of Eden and the Mad Queen’s Wonderland, both graced with the natural bounty of fertile soil and teeming sea, and patrolled by human sharks with a taste for blood and excess. Her protagonists plot a course that brings us perilously close to all its edges. The financially successful and inventively gifted Avis and Brian Muir are enmeshed in a world of gourmet cuisine and predatory business law, respectively, while their teenaged daughter inhabits a world of skinhead-infested flop houses, wayward skate boarders, and electric nightclub lights, supporting herself with occasional modeling gigs while she hides from her parents. Her brother, Stanley, an entrepreneurial organic food purveyor, stands aside and watches the emotional mayhem.

Avis, an expert pastry chef who is always elbow-deep in crème fraiche, snowy mounds of lemon peel, and lavender-scented blueberries, is bewildered but faithful enough to take heart and gingembre en cristal in hand for every infrequent rendezvous arranged on her daughter’s terms. Brian, a real estate attorney working for developers whose plundering of the landscape and neighborhoods makes him cringe, despairs, also, but in a different way: he toys with the possibilities of infidelity and spiking the salacious deals that allow him to keep the facade of success. Stanley, rejected from his mother’s kitchen and squeezed from the spotlight by his beautiful younger sister, builds a life as far away from his parents’ as he can imagine. Felice, is an enigma: why would a daughter who is loved and treasured, who has the gifts of beauty and brains and a luxurious home, want to live on the streets?

“A cookie . . . is a soul, ” Avis says to her children when they are small. ” you think it looks like a tiny thing, right? Just a little nothing. But then you take a bite.”

Every member of this mangled family has a soul that shines light on what it means to love and cherish others. Abu-Jaber shows us not just her character’s thoughts, but also the ingredients that made them. She is at her best divining the myriad interconnections and split-second impressions that determine emotional choices, and, thus, fate. Avis, tried to a degree that the reader can hardly bear as she prepares for the meetings that Felice cannot be depended on to remember, numbly recalls all the ways she tried to avoid repeating the mistakes of her own neglectful mother. She will not allow that disconnect between herself and her own children. She will marzipan their world. Her two children respond in vastly different ways.

In her kitchen, Avis is in control. Perhaps too much so, as she drives Stanley away when he tries to give her the close bond she longs for with her daughter. But when a neighbor’s screeching exotic bird disturbs her carefully-constructed world of pâtés and crème Chantilly, Avis storms off to confront her, and finds in Solange a will more indomitable than her own, as well as a retreat that entices her away from ringing phones and delivery vans.

We divide our time as readers between Avis’ domestic kingdom and Felice’s skateboard and partying scene, with glimpses into Brian’s carefully controlled despair among cheating, lying denizens of his high rise office, and Stanley’s determined social responsibility. Food and flora create the paradise in which Avis comes to grips with her growing despair.

One of the pleasures of this novel is its toothsome complexity, as satisfying as one of Avis’ sugar-encrusted creations. None of the characters skates through a scene, not even Stanley’s overwhelming girlfriend or Brian’s conniving business associates: characters grapple, with each other, their dilemmas, their fates. Eventually, the family’s conflicts mount to a fever pitch as Felice’s eighteenth birthday and a hurricane approach in tandem. As her characters careen toward climactic encounters, Abu-Jaber shows us the imperfections in paradise and the hope that accompanies each step in its realization.

This may be the best work yet from the author of the critically acclaimed Arabian Jazz, Crescent, and the memoir, The Language of Baklava. Certainly, this novel belongs with the pantheon of authors–Connie May Fowler and Carl Hiaasen come to mind–who have used Florida’s bountiful setting as an element in their plumbing of the human soul. Writers will want to savor and deconstruct Abu-Jaber’s graceful prose. Foodies will be rapt by Abu-Jaber’s deft descriptions, and parents–present and potential–will find much to ponder here. Anyone who has ever wondered how young girls cope with the demands of a sex-obsessed society will want to put this one on their lists. And if you love South Florida, or any vision of paradise, come taste the sensations and swim with the sharks. Highly recommended.

Sorry to be so late in pointing this out, but if you haven’t yet read Jeanette Winterson’s incredible personal essay in Granta, Spring 2011, entitled All I Know About Gertrude Stein, run to your bookstore and hope they still have a copy, or check out Granta online. I read it there first, then lucked out this past June–B&N still had a copy. I mean it–run! It is the most exquisite thing I’ve read in many years.

Looking forward to Diana Abu Jaber’s new novel, Birds of Paradise. Hoping to have my very own copy and a review to share with you soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve just finished Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje. Short, very short review: Stunning language and very deep thought about why people do horrific things to each other. A message for our times.

What is ekphrastic poetry: Glenda interviews Kimmy Van Kooten: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/97765

Rhapsody for Lessons Learned or Remembered

By Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

Plain View Press

www.plainviewpress.net

ISBN 978-10935514-64-0

$14.95

An intrigue of a title, right? A sign that here is a poet who won’t let you down easy. Indeed, Georgia Banks-Martin states her purpose here in the introduction, to move beyond race as a signifier of identity, moving deep into the individual imagination and history to build a bridge with the reader.

Nothing is more admirable than a high reach. Mostly, Banks-Martin succeeds in pulling us along into her world through these ekphrastic poems, neither denying nor insisting on her African-American ethnicity for connections, so that when she chooses to write from a Jacob Lawrence painting, the poem “Railroad Station” chronicles people who are certainly African-American, but also immigrants from Southern cotton fields, traveling with uncertainty and nerves and dogged hope, and they might be understood anywhere. Deftly, Banks-Martin catches the wife’s whisper to her husband, the father weighed down by more than luggage, the children’s innocence focused elsewhere than the perils of the journey.

One of my favorite poems here is “The Floor-Scrapers,” after Gustave Caillebott, in which the poet merges the imagined instruction of the master to his apprentice with her own memories of each mark on the wooden floors of her childhood home, and brings forth from that combination issues of respect and aspiration.

Van Gogh is here; Monet, Renoir, and Vermeer, too, but also writers and visual artists from other canons, all engaged with skill: Romare Bearden, Natasha Trethaway, Anne Sexton, Robert Mapplethorpe, even the fairy artist Jasmine Beckett-Griffith. (A handy reference list in the rear identifies the inspirations for each poem.) This is a poet with many interests and, yes, a high reach. She perfectly captures the exhausted quality  of Anne Sexton in her own weary paean to colorism, and excels at describing the Southern landscape:

From “Evening Guitar”:

Someone loaned me a book

filled with images of Mississippi, of people washing clothes,

fishing, pressing hair.

. . .

The book smells of smoke

from the coal-burning stove,

sharing the table with the lady’s

porcelain tea service,

the pages repeatedly read,

savored between long sips.

And she does not shy away from race or class or gender issues; this is not a poet who leads with artifice. Instead, the work is grounded in, but not overwhelmed by, the poet’s identity. As a consequence, the reader’s eye darts everywhere the poems lead. Here are a classmate’s suicide, a religious man’s repressed daughter, a tired man on a bus, numerous glimpses of rural Alabama. Generally, she does not go for the obvious image, but scrapes for us the layers that obscure other possibilities:

From “On Highway 80″

. . .

I’ve seen the fog lift like a curtain

to reveal a flock of fat buzzards,

with heads tucked between wings,

sitting atop a half-circle fence,

like a string of pearls,

around a woman’s neck.

. . .

If there is a concept in common to all these poems, aside from their reference to other works of art, it is that pretense wounds in a hundred ways, and rejection makes everyone bleed. A girl being urged to walk like a lady and deny her sexuality, a sidewalk musician capturing the blues from passersby, New Orleans after the storm––all images of unconsoled heartache. But there is also joy, the intense Southern commitment to beauty, and, above all, a wide sensibility engaging the world.

I have re-read this collection three times, not because I had to in order to write this review, but because bits of it kept sticking in my head like a new favorite song.

What more does a reviewer need to say?

2011 Pulitzer Prizes

http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/2011

I haven’t warmed to Egan, the Fiction winner, finding her characters and plots very contrived, but she’s certainly inventive. Foner is always excellent, so I will probably acquire this books, too, but I confess the most fascinating book here, which is on my to-do list, is the Mukerjee biography of cancer. A wonderful concept and the excerpt I have read is sharply written.