Literary Persuasions: Book Reviews by Aberjhani

Transgression and Resolution in Michal Majernik’s Mechanical Bull

6/27/2023

Fans of stylistically-rich literary fiction have only to read the first few pages of Michal Majernik’s novel, Mechanical Bull, to realize they have just discovered a rare kind of talent. It is one sharply aware of the soul-suffocating urban environments in which 21st century humans have encased themselves, and equally cognizant of the psychological dilemmas caused by their pursuits of illusory security and something resembling genuine love.

The question after realizing the rarity of Majernik’s gifts (a relative newcomer to literary fiction, at least for this reader) becomes: what is he going to do with them for the rest of this book? And how might he utilize them in future works? For now, it’s worth noting that previous efforts as represented by his short story collection Alibist, and work as a journalist reporting on businesses in Canada, are put to advantageous use. Occasional typo malfunctions in the current work raise some concerns but, fortunately, do not diminish the strength of the story itself.

Lava and Tears

Mechanical Bull (Adelaide Books, 2021) is a novel driven by the mercurial force of its three main characters’ often unpredictable, and at times violent, personalities. Each stars in their own chapter. We first meet Berlin Fearne, an “energized and positive achiever” on her way to work in Hogtown (if you’re thinking Chicago, switch to Toronto). In her professional life, Berlin appears to be an ambitious exacting marketing executive who demands promptness and precision. By contrast, in her personal life, she is prone to compulsions and obsessions which lead her to casually commit theft while simultaneously purchasing expensive items which she neither can afford nor has any intention of keeping permanently.

At home, Berlin and husband River Fearne argue over who is more to blame for their financial and marital woes. Is it her for being “miserable” and “shallow,” or him for being “the animal and the demon” loser who has not held a steady job in 10 years and does not know how to comfort her? In short, they routinely physically and verbally abuse each other to the point of accepting their lethally toxic relationship as love, like two volcanoes convulsively spewing lava and tears all over each other. It is clear the mania and desperation driving them can only lead to something horrible. What that horrible thing may or may not be, however, is less apparent. Should, for example, the reader interpret it as literal or metaphorical when the author writes, “Emptiness filled her. Coma took her”? Any doubt is erased 115 pages later.

Style and Heartbreaking Substance

Majernik’s style of literary construction fuses elements of different forms in lushly-layered passages of poetic prose with blade-sharp dialogue. Exchanges between characters run the gamut from unsparing intensely-heated tirades to soft menacing seductiveness. These are perhaps qualities of the raw naturalist and transgressive genres with which some readers will likely identify Mechanical Bull. While the author’s individual tweaks of the blended forms are effective for his creative purposes, and more than likely thrill any number of readers, it also possibly leaves those who prefer more linear plots and bluntly descriptive background stories feeling frustrated.

At the same time, it has to be said that Majernik depicts his characters’ ever-evolving states of mind––whether driven by heartbreak and loneliness, or disappointments and delusion and drugs––with exceptional skill. So much so, in fact, that a reader can come close to empathizing with their twisted brands of logic.

Introducing Clare Morgan

Following our introduction to Berlin, we meet Clare Morgan. She is a college student who engages in various kinds of sex for pleasure as well as for different profitable purposes (including obtaining well-written papers). She imagines making herself “available” to different young men in order to “save them from themselves.” Among Clare’s multiple multicultural lovers is her former internship supervisor, and Berlin’s husband, River Fearne. On the surface, Clare appears to be comfortable with her recreational dalliances and for-profit hook-ups. Beneath that surface, she intentionally inflicts pain upon herself for her transgressions and prays at length: “…heavenly Father, that you Transform my unyielding Heart of Stone into merciful Heart of Flesh.” (p. 58)

She invests faith in her “boundless love” for River to a degree that, as Beyonce once sang of such obsessiveness, is DANGEROUS. In a letter, she writes: “…My beautiful River, my Judas, my Patron Saint of Torments, I love You, and I will never permit you to abandon me… May I eat your wounds?” (p. 95-96)

Witnessing the extreme back-and-forth of this schism between abandoned moral convictions in pursuits of success, and the physical punishing guilt that can follow, immediately brought to mind passages by James Joyce. And perhaps Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes from Wise Blood. Annoyingly, I kept picturing Joyce at times grimacing, laughing nervously, or crying. O’Connor might have been secretly impressed and just as quietly alarmed by Clare’s use of self-harm as a path to divine grace or love.

It is in Clare’s story that readers may experience the clearest sense of the author’s interest in how socioeconomic hierarchies make and break individual lives, and how those who maintain them spawn the darkness-versus-light narratives that dominate many people’s day-to-day existence. Majernik curve-balls his own narrative when sharing the views of one of Clare’s wealthier connections, Etienne Leclerq:

“…Money made the poor believe that they were alive, they shopped and indulged in order to live… Power was the one true value in the world, an immovable object, the undefeated timeless effort, the stone that held the sword. Money owned the poor. Power owned the rich, and the rich didn’t mind” (p. 80).

Should readers attribute such musings to Majernik’s stated fondness for classic authors like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Emile Zola? Or should they simply consider it a natural outcome of economic and racial inequities observed worldwide prior to the pandemic and suffered dramatically during it?

The Philosophical Question

The author on occasion has described himself as “an agent of the absurd” that rings with loud truth as readers get to know River Fearne a lot better in the third final section. A barrage of explosive and implosive occurrences bring his character and the novel as a whole into a greater focus. Exactly what role River might play in any final resolutions or conclusions is, at first, hard to anticipate because the nature of his character can be interpreted in different ways.

He appears at times to be a transplanted victim of his society’s institutionalized bias and his wife’s neurotic ambitiousness. In his best moments, he comes across as a sentimental thug, reciting to anyone who stands still long enough to listen: “Did you know that all matter in the universe comes from collapsed stars? You and I are stardust.” This poetic scientific refrain was first popularized by the late astronomer Carl Sagan and seems River’s way of affirming he is as good as anyone else, despite any societal data or individual behaviors suggesting otherwise.

In total contrast to the letter which his lover Clare wrote him earlier in the story, he types the following to his wife Berlin: “Your life is a monument to gamble, and I can no longer live life on a constant edge, in constant anxiety, in constant fear of losing everything… you always run into unsettled situations. A hard life with no resolution in sight” (pp. 121-122).

At his worst, River numbs the pain of his anguished frustrations with an overload of drugs and alcohol. The resulting blurred lines between reality and hallucination lead inevitably to the death of an innocent at, of all things, a baseball game. The word ‘death’ instead of murder is used intentionally here because the philosophical question which follows it becomes similar to one posed by the predicament of Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas in the novel Native Son. Is this death more the fault of the one who finds blood on his hands? Or that of the machinations of a society which, arguably, make such outcomes inevitable?

The anticipated resolutions to all that has occurred before––or the “click” as termed by Majernik––does arrive. It comes in the form of a string of absurd, and even comical, events which function to both punish River for, and absolve him from, his transgressions. I will leave the details of these events for readers to discover on their own.

Only a Single Glimpse

Authors who have boldly ventured into the unconventional territories of transgressive and naturalist fiction include such contemporary notables as Megan Abbott, Bret Easton Ellis, and Chuck Palahniuk; plus, more classic talents like Williams S. Burroughs, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and the aforementioned Joyce. There is much in Majernik’s novel o suggest he might one day earn a solid place among them.

What makes his bitches brew of a book called Mechanical Bull worth reading is how finely he renders his characters against a subdued background of conflicting societal demands. These demands routinely grind out barely-surviving metaphors of a humanity still blessed with tremendous opportunities for genuine fulfillment but too scarred by perpetual trauma to realize them. This is only a single glimpse, albeit through a mirror darkly, of our chaos-plagued world but one luminous and revealing nonetheless.

READERS ARE INVITED TO POST ANY RELEVANT COMMENTS BELOW.

Aberjhani
author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

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‘Talks Between My Pen and Muse’ an Inspired Literary Debut from Poet Aurie Cole

4/10/2021

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The title of Aurie Cole’s debut collection of poetry, Talks Between My Pen and Muse, caught my attention and held it from the moment I first saw it. That a contemporary young poet acknowledged such a thing as a “Muse” was captivating in itself because it meant the poet was willing to let something other than ego-driven rage, lust, envy, or self-righteousness control completely the contents of her lines. It also meant she was attempting a partnership between classic notions of how poetry functions in the world and her own modern vision of it. My curiosity was stirred enough to place the title on my list of poetry books to read during National Poetry Month 2021 and I am glad I did.

This is a slim volume of 75 pages divided into 8 parts. Obviously, the sections themselves would have to be brief but the emotional intensity and aesthetic intentions come through with impressive power and precision. Unless there should be any confusion, the title of each section includes its definition. For the purposes of this review, I will leave readers to discover for themselves Cole’s preferred definitions but these are the headings (caps per original text): 1) MUSE; 2) RELATIONSHIP; 3) PITY PARTY; 4) SABOTAGE; 5) MISCONSTRUE; 6) FORGIVE/FORGIVENESS; 7) REBOOT; and SELF LOVE.

“Loving, Happy, Untamed, Passionate"

What I thought I might encounter with the first poem was either a dialogue between the poet’s pen and her muse and or a monologue from one pouring out grievances to the universe. Instead, the very first poem is titled “Stolen Muse.” There is no doubting the seriousness of this theft as Cole screams at the beginning:

Somebody call the cops!
My muse has been stolen
I repeat my muse has been stolen…

The pain of this crime is felt in each stanza as she dramatically describes the sleep deprivation and loss of creativity it has caused. Yet there is also gentle self-deprecating humor while observing:

I feel too normal
I need my abnormality back…

The depth of her need is amplified with the following simultaneously pleading and demanding lines:

I want it back the way it was taken
Opinionated, LOUD, wild, confused
Loving, happy, untamed, passionate
Smart enough, encouraging, kinda shy
Uncorrupted by the norms of society
Unpierced by the actions of my peers
AND ALL MINE

In the poems which flow immediately afterwards, titled “Nicking,” “Lost Scared Afraid,” and “My Muse,” the poet’s attachment to what most inspires her can be understood at different times in different ways. In one moment, it is an addiction of a healthy variety rather than a destructive one. In the next, it reads and feels a lot like a love affair brutally interrupted by the kind of heinous disregard which too often in our current over-technologized world leads to tragic consequences.

In the Tradition of Baring One’s Soul

The poems in the RELATIONSHIP section are as introspective and soulfully analytical as a reader might expect. But they also demonstrate Cole’s passion for language with titles like “Imbroglio” and “The Rage of Words.” The latter is particularly powerful for its depiction of language as a weapon in a battle between intimates. The quality of intimacy, in fact, is one of the stronger aspects of poetry throughout Talks Between My Pen and Muse. In poem after poem, it weaves back and forth between elements of trust and distrust, strength and fragility, condemnation and forgiveness, and love and risk.

The poems “Caged Bird” and “Caged Bird Freed” reinforce the perception of Cole as a writer with classic leanings. The titles’ obvious references to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “Sympathy,” which provided Angelou with the title of her famous autobiography, place Cole within the tradition of soul-baring African-American literature without restricting her to it.

Instead of offering strategies for navigating the painful uncertainties of her personal journey, the Savannah, Georgia-born poet simply presents her own efforts at balancing them. In this way, she self-identifies with humanity as a whole rather than with a single segment of it. Near the end of the volume, she notes the following in a letter to herself:

I know you
From your favorite color
To your deepest secrets
From your untold feelings
To your wildest dreams

I care about
Your every word
Simplest request
Smallest dreams…

There is a tremendous amount to appreciate in this first edition of Aurie Cole’s debut volume as her pen makes its free-styling way through shock and despair toward hope and self-determination. However, it has to be said as well that serious readers of poetry are likely to find a number of typographical errors distracting. These are understandable enough because talented young poets rarely receive the kind of publishing support which ensures the absence of such mistakes. (How many, after all, such as the celebrated Amanda Gorman are likely to receive an invitation to recite their poetry at a presidential inauguration and subsequently get Oprah Winfrey to write a foreword for their book, basically guaranteeing its status as a number 1 bestseller?)

Other critically-minded readers may question the absence of poems dealing with such timely issues as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, or Black Lives Matter. In a way, it may be argued that the more deeply personal writings inspired by the poet’s muse are a kind of response to these very concerns as they illustrate the power of sheltering within the integrity of one’s own sanity in a world knocked off balance by myriad forms of chaos. The important thing may be the knowledge that Talks Between My Pen and Muse is only a first important literary step for Aurie Cole and readers hopefully can look forward to many more writings from her pen and muse in the future.

Aberjhani
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

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Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 3 of 3)

12/18/2019

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Postered Chomatic Poetics "Wonder & Enigma of Flannery O'connor" title art graphic by Aberjhani.

Impaired as she was by lupus, O’Connor may not have been able to barrel ahead with the same level of prolific productivity as some of her contemporaries—such as James Baldwin for example-- but neither did she let it bring her career to a screeching halt between the time of her diagnosis and her death on August 3, 1964.

She followed the novel Wise Blood with a collection of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find, in 1955; the novel The Violent Bear it Away in 1960; and the short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge ––a book on which she worked virtually right up until her death–– published posthumously in 1965. In between the writing and the publishing, she marshaled her strength to travel (aided by crutches) and lecture, write articles for popular magazines (for which she was generally well paid), and write numerous letters to friends, supporters, and critics.

(To read part 1 of this story please click here. For part 2 click this link.)

The O’Connor readers and scholars now know would not have been possible without a tightly woven network of friends and family members who supported her work through belief in, and out of love for, her. After illness derailed her plans to live the life of a postmodern New York author, she famously surrounded herself with peacocks at Andalusia, her family’s farm, and allowed the world to come to her just as much as she continued to embrace it on the page and through speaking engagements. Fellow authors, theologians, aspiring writers, general admirers, and would-be lovers in the form of men as well as women often made their way to her front door.

Flannery O'Connor quotation art graphic by AZ Quotes.

Her editor, Robert Giroux, believed enough in the corpus of her work that in 1971 he published The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. A compilation of all her short fiction, The Complete Stories went on to win the National Book Award for Fiction in 1972, and in 2009—shortly after Brad Gooch’s biography was published–– was voted “The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction.”

Mother and Daughter Together

Of all those who shared their life’s energies to help endow Flannery O’Connor’s with enduring meaning possibly none were more crucial than her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor. The relationship between mother and daughter could alternate between a sensitive symbiosis and a barely-restrained combativeness. But: the fact is that despite her great intellectual prowess Flannery O’Connor was made an invalid by her disease and it could not have been any easier for her mother to watch her daughter’s slow agonizing physical decline any more than it had been to watch her husband’s. She nevertheless bore the “cross” of the affliction which defined so much of her own life’s story.

As such, she did the kinds of things caregivers tend to do when committed to ensuring as high a quality of life as they can for someone they love: setting aside a thermos of hot coffee at night to share with Flannery in the morning, running a farm to secure an income, tolerating the droppings and cries of beautiful but annoying peacocks, traveling abroad with her daughter even when she herself was ill, and standing guard at her hospital room door to ensure a chance at rest and possible recovery.

Regina Cline is very much present in the pages of Flannery but a section or two presented within the context of her struggles to assist her daughter might have made this powerful biography even more compelling. She outlived the writer by almost thirty-one years, dying on May 8, 1995, at the age of ninety-nine.

In Praise of Those Who Wait

In the acknowledgments section of his biography on the author, Brad Gooch informs readers that he “first stepped into the world of Flannery O’Connor in the late 1970s.” Thoroughly smitten by what he found in that world, he respectfully wrote her close friend Sally Fitzgerald, editor of The Habit of Being, Letters of Flannery O’Connor, to obtain her blessings for his hope to write a biography. Fitzgerald advised him in 1980 against such an undertaking because she was already in the process of writing a literary biography of her friend. Consequently, Gooch held off and waited, even beyond Fitzgerald’s death in 2000, for a book that never appeared.

Then, approached by an editor in 2003 about a biography on O’Connor, it clearly was not an offer he could refuse. A dream which had been deferred for more than two decades finally saw the light of day in 2009 and by most accounts it was very much worth the wait.

Author

Aberjhani is co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance as well as author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah and Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind.

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Biography Presents Compelling Portrait of Life, Times, and Mind of Jean-Paul Sartre (part 2 of 2)

7/11/2017

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What was at the center of Sartre’s sometimes mercurial passions and obsessions? Perhaps it was less a rejection of personalities and movements that it was a devotion to something which likely was not always apparent: the facilitation of an organic dialogue on how best to steer humanity toward acknowledgement of the ways it engineered unspeakable tragedies and why it is imperative we accept collective responsibility for correcting them.

To read part 1 of this article please click here.

In this, he was much more a world citizen, or internationalist, than a nationalist. Cohen-Solal demonstrates as much through accounts of his physical and psychic immersion into different cultural and political environments as a traveler, and through applied adjustments of his literary focus as an engaged philosopher. Referring to the aftermath of a 1945 trip to the United States:

“What Is Literature?, Anti-Semite and Jew, The Respectful Prostitute, these are some of Sartre’s works that in the months to come, deal with the reality he has discovered in America. His recent awareness of the black problem [Jim Crow racism] is enhanced by his friendship with the American writer Richard Wright, whose autobiographical novel, Black Boy, was published in March 1945” (Cohen-Solal, p. 242).

And, as philosopher and social justice advocate Cornel West points out in his introduction to the biography, despite any criticisms of the man:

“Sartre will always be remembered as the most visible and influential European intellectual who put a limelight on the struggles against U.S. and French imperialism in Africa and Asia and against white supremacy in the United Sates. This is no small matter and it took great courage to do so. His support of freedom struggles in Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, South Africa, and the United States—regardless of the outcomes that resulted—was heroic” (West, p. xviii).

French edition of Sartre: A Biography, by Annie Cohen-Solal, now considered the definitive biography of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

The book publishing industry being what it is in 2017, marketplace titles are often the result of sensational headlines or celebrity personalities rather than the value represented by the quality of a manuscript’s substance. As such, in addition to Cohen-Solal and Cornel West, readers of the American trade paperback centennial edition of Sartre: A Life can thank The New Press for its proven dedication to principles and practices that support the publication of books based on their intrinsic merit. Doing so is not about worshipping someone like-Paul Sartre––whose closest contemporary counterpart may be the African-American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison—as a cultural icon. It is about maintaining access to the kind of literature on which humanity depends to help preserve whatever hard-won rights and freedoms still exist.

In Closing

Among the most beguiling of Sartre’s diagnostic tools of philosophical inquiry was how he chose to employ the biographies of others, such as Jean Genet’s and Gustave Flaubert’s, as mirrors. Rather than emulating their approaches to literary form, metaphysical paradoxes, or political conundrums, he used them to “think against himself,” as if his intellect were a knife, or sword, and theirs whetstones upon which he sharpened concepts and strategies. It is possible Cohen-Solal, though she indicates otherwise, has done the same in regard to Sartre with her masterful examination of one of the 20th century’s most engaged, courageous, and influential creative thinkers.

Author-Artist

Aberjhani is an American poet, historian, essayist, editor, journalist, social critic, and cautious artist. His many honors include the Choice Academic Title of the Year Award, the Notable Book of the Year Award, Outstanding Journalist Award, and Poet of the Year Award. He is currently completing final edits on a work of creative nonfiction about the cultural arts, race relations, immigration, and human trafficking in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia.

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Literary & Cultural arts Persuasions:
Reviews & Remembrances by Aberjhani

Transgression and Resolution in Michal Majernik’s Mechanical Bull

Lava and Tears

Style and Heartbreaking Substance

Introducing Clare Morgan

The Philosophical Question

Only a Single Glimpse

Aberjhani
author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Contact Author-Artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

‘Talks Between My Pen and Muse’ an Inspired Literary Debut from Poet Aurie Cole

“Loving, Happy, Untamed, Passionate"

In the Tradition of Baring One’s Soul

Aberjhani
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Contact Author at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 3 of 3)

Mother and Daughter Together

In Praise of Those Who Wait

Author

Biography Presents Compelling Portrait of Life, Times, and Mind of Jean-Paul Sartre (part 2 of 2)

In Closing

Author-Artist

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Categories

Literary & Cultural arts Persuasions: Reviews & Remembrances by Aberjhani

Transgression and Resolution in Michal Majernik’s Mechanical Bull

​Lava and Tears

Style and Heartbreaking Substance

Introducing Clare Morgan

The Philosophical Question

Only a Single Glimpse

Aberjhaniauthor of These Black and Blue Red Zone DaysCo-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Contact Author-Artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

‘Talks Between My Pen and Muse’ an Inspired Literary Debut from Poet Aurie Cole

​“Loving, Happy, Untamed, Passionate"

​In the Tradition of Baring One’s Soul

AberjhaniAuthor of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My MindCreator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Contact Author at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 3 of 3)

​Mother and Daughter Together

​In Praise of Those Who Wait

Author

Biography Presents Compelling Portrait of Life, Times, and Mind of Jean-Paul Sartre (part 2 of 2)

In Closing

Author-Artist

Archives

Categories

Literary & Cultural arts Persuasions:
Reviews & Remembrances by Aberjhani

Lava and Tears

Aberjhani
author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

“Loving, Happy, Untamed, Passionate"

In the Tradition of Baring One’s Soul

Aberjhani
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Mother and Daughter Together

In Praise of Those Who Wait