Spring Tempests, Canadian Book Competitions, Etc.

It's a changeful spring day, after a changeful spring week.

Yesterday I was riding my mother's bicycle around Alexanderplatz, minutes after a hailstorm. A grey cloud front barred the sky in front of me, but a huge rainbow with colours straight out of a picture book was arcing across it, and after a while a pale outer rainbow appeared too. In the distance the sun shone brightly, however, on a modern apartment or office tower. And then a minute or two later the sky cleared, white summery clouds heaped in an otherwise clear blue sky, as wispier clouds zipped by at a lower altitude, and a jet streamed its trails.

The crocuses are out — pale autumn crocuses with white stems like fondant and lilac-purple blossoms in the lawns of the Karl-Marx-Allee, deep purple and golden elsewhere. But the last snowdrops, a few of them thriving but a few of them looking as if a passerby dog had gnawed at them, and bleached yellow winter aconites are lingering. The flower buds are thronging on the Oregon grape bushes, but mostly haven't burst open yet, and the lilac leaves and forsythia flowers are (depending on how much wind shelter they have where they're growing) beginning to emerge. Last year's vegetation is still, however, incredibly dead — there's little green undergrowth, likely due to the deep frosts.

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From a human perspective, I feel that these are uneasy times. I don't feel happy that coronavirus infection rates are rising again in Berlin and in Germany at large. It was nicer when one could feel that there were fewer unnecessary deaths, fewer people offering the lives of others to their own stubbornly stupid impulses.

But the vaccination programme is proceeding; over 7% of Berlin's population has received a single vaccine or more, and half of those have received two doses.

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Last week I followed this year's Canada Reads competition, in which five Canadian public figures debated five different books by Canadian authors over four days, on television, and at the end one book was declared the winner.

The jurors this year were an actor-director, television actor, chef/musician, Olympic athlete turned radio broadcaster, and a songwriter.

Butter Honey Pig Bread, I'd already almost finished reading before the competition broadcast began. It's a magical realist family novel from 2020, by the debut author Francesca Ekwuyasi.

Its main characters are three women who were born in Nigeria: a mother and twin daughters. The mother is an ogbanje, or 'witch,' who is always torn between her real-life existence and the demands of her Kin, the spirits who torment her in a weirdly comforting analogy of mental illness. Her daughters have a little of her magic, but mostly live like everybody else. They move to London and Canada and Paris and other places, going apart due to a horrible event, but try to find each other again in Nigeria, where their mother has settled.

I found the book good — I told Mama that it was like a cross between Toni Morrison and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and I felt that some things that I hadn't liked in the two other authors I did like here. (For example, Adichie's sex scenes always made me feel like I was searching through a stranger's underwear drawers, whereas Ekwuyasi's feel much less voyeuristic.) But I don't know if I'd want to reread the book; the themes of death, mental illness, etc., although well handled, were heavy.

Jonny Appleseed was published a year earlier, in 2019. Writing in an engaging, mercurial style, the author Joshua Whitehead represents the life of a young Indigenous man who grows up on a reservation. He returns to the reservation for the funeral of his stepfather. Jonny is gay and proud of it; and he refuses to feel guilty about making his living from sex work. That said, I only read the earliest chapters, so my summary of the plot might be wrong.

Regarding style, I'm not sure if every reader would pick up on pop culture references like Grindr, or Indigenous cultural references like the word kokum for grandmother. I also felt that Whitehead's style was more heterogeneous than Ekwuyasi's, mixing literary phrases that are reasonably good Creative Writing Course, with less self-conscious slang. But Jonny Appleseed really is, as the book's champion said on Canada Reads, easy to read; it flows, and the chapters are brief and to the point.

An idea behind Jonny Appleseed seems to be that gloomy, heavy narratives of Indigenous and gay lives are more depressing than cathartic for readers who know these experiences anyway. (In last year's Canada Reads, an actress argued that Indigenous readers might not want to explore topics like intergenerational trauma due to child abuse in residential schools yet again. This year, the Olympian/broadcaster also pointed out that she was weary of reading about the abuse of Black female bodies.) So this book is meant to be a more inspiring, happy departure.

Like Butter Honey Pig Bread, the book is more graphic and explicit than what I'd usually read in literary fiction. But it is wholesome at heart. I only felt uncomfortable that the book glosses over relationships where Jonny is badly exploited. — Just because fictional Jonny chooses to move on, doesn't mean that there isn't a problem, one that would affect many real-life people very differently.

Anyway, Jonny Appleseed is a 'pain eater,' who tries to take pain and give back happiness in its place; and I guess the book mirrors his mindset.

The other books in Canada Reads were The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk, a feminist fantasy set vaguely in a Regency world if I remember correctly; Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots, a dark comedy about a villain's henchman who takes up a crusade against the overzealousness of superheroes; and Two Trees Make a Forest, a memoir of a Canadian woman visiting Taiwan inspired by a letter that her grandparent wrote, and connecting to the natural landscape. I haven't begun reading them yet, but they all sound appealing.

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Aside from that, I am still reading other books.

A few of these books are cookbooks: so for the past two days I've been baking peanut butter cookies, blending cherry-chocolate smoothies, and getting a few ingredients for another round of trail mix with dried goji berries and mulberries. It does feel good to be able to afford these ingredients thanks to my job, even if ideally I do want to cook much more local and seasonal food that is less expensive because its production and transport are more sustainable.

I also cooked a Palestinian soup from butternut squash, lentils, onions, etc., flavoured with a lovely spice mix with toasted coriander seeds and cinnamon, and topped with croutons, which I'd bookmarked from the Guardian's food section many years ago. This is a little closer to the ideal of local-ish food; at least I'm pretty sure that the butternut squash didn't travel too far.

I can hardly wait for the springtime glut of local-grown rhubarb and asparagus, then strawberries,... etc.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama is almost finished, and I want to move on to Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys next. It's from a book subscription that my aunt gave me as a birthday present. And after that I still have a few gifts to read through!

And I'm still reading the first volume of Nelson Mandela's autobiography with my voice coach, and listening to/reading other South African books at home, as part of my literary trip around the world. I'm looking forward to reading South Korean books by way of change soon. But reading about apartheid feels important, not so much of course for literary reasons, as for reasons of learning how to be a good citizen in dramatic scenarios: understanding the extremes to which our societies can go if we're not careful.