Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars


Gerardo Sámano Córdova‘s first novel Monstrilio begins as a couple’s young son dies, and his mother, in grief, excavates a piece of his lung to keep. His father, discovering the mutilated body, is horrified.

This brief prologue is told in a third-person voice. The point of view next switches to Magos, the boy’s mother, and the story continues as an allegory of grief: She nurtures the lung until it forms a sentient creature. From here, the novel splits tonally between the theme of grief and the fun of this quirky creature. “Lung,” as Magos calls him at first, is cute and mischievous, like a cat given to extremely violent episodes when it gets hungry.

The book splits further as it progresses, driven by a narrative structure that’s revealed from the beginning. After Magos, it switches to Magos’s old friend Lena, then the boy’s father Joseph, and finally, Monstrilio himself. This splitting allows Córdova to focus on other aspects of the story, but it also dilutes the effectiveness of the themes he’s developed. The voices aren’t very distinct, and the characters are coarsely drawn. In the end, Monstrilio is the only one we understand well. The others make inexplicable choices that serve more to complicate Monstrilio’s life than anything else. This approach would be fine if the book were a silly rollick, but it certainly wasn’t set up that way.

As it progresses, the novel focuses more on homosexuality and otherness than on grief and loss. Much of this aspect seems forced, grafted awkwardly onto the players. I would have liked to have seen the characters and themes that were set up at the beginning developed and played out more thoroughly. In general, though, Monstrilio is an enjoyable read, and Monstrilio himself a remarkable creation. Without the unconvincing detours, it might have been a fantastic short story. I’ll be interested to see what Córdova comes up with next.

My Specific Awe and Wonder: Poems by Reuben Jackson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I first came to know of Reuben Jackson as the host of the radio jazz program “The Sound of Surprise” on WPFW in Washington, D.C. It was my son who encountered him as a poet at the American Poetry Museum, an outreach museum where Jackson worked on weekends giving advice to and mentoring young poets. I met him only a couple of times before he died in February 2024 of a stroke. After his death, I learned of his years in Vermont and discovered that one of my writing colleagues knew him from his life there.

My Specific Awe and Wonder: Poems is a collection that Jackson was working on before his death. His publisher says he called it “a love letter to Vermont…with all the potholes visible.” It’s a consistently excellent collection, opening with a section about Vermont, particularly his experience of being a Black man there. This is followed by a set of witty, incisive persona poems supposedly written by a cranky friend named Kelly Donaldson. Next is a section of travel poems and then copies of handwritten drafts of several more poems paired with typed versions.

The collection holds thoughtful insights into being a Black American, both at home and abroad, but Jackson has too broad a lens to focus on our differences. One poem, “East Barre,” begins with the lines:

The salesclerk claimed that the snow fell
with a Vermont accent.

It seems a good characterization of the collection’s overall vibe.

The fairly small volume also opens with a tribute poem by Rajnii Eddins and ends with a transcription of a voicemail that Jackson left his publisher in December 2023 with a wonderful draft poem, “How to Get There, 11th Grade Mix.” Jackson’s last words on the voicemail are an apt conclusion: “Thanks for listening. Keep on keeping on, okay? These are trying times. Trying AF. Bye-bye.”

Jackson’s poetry has been published in many anthologies. This final collection of warm, wide-ranging poems is a great addition to his body of work.

The Joke by Milan Kundera

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Milan Kundera‘s The Joke is a complicated novel. It takes place against a background of initial enthusiasm over the Communist Party takeover of Czechoslovakia, which is replaced by disillusion as authoritarianism and bureaucratic corruption create a state of decay.

Ludvik, the main character, is a faithful member of the Communist party and a true believer. The “joke” that sparks the novel’s action is a silly, snide comment on a postcard that he writes in frustration to provoke an infuriatingly humorless love interest: “Optimism is the opiate of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!”

Seeing this as a statement against the party, she hands it over to the authorities. Ludvik’s friends then turn against him, and he is expelled from the party and sent to work in the mines at a military camp. His anger consumes him and years later, once he is out and living comfortably, he sees an opportunity to get revenge on a former friend who betrayed him. He seizes it and commits a cringey, despicable act with disastrous results.

The book’s title works on many levels. Beyond the postcard that serves as the spark for the novel’s action, the bigger joke is on Ludvik, and on greater society for embracing a corrosive, destructive force that crushes their souls. Trotsky advocated for a decentralized form of planning that focused on workers’ control. He criticized the bureaucracy and anti-democratic tendencies of the Soviet state, believing in continuous change driven by workers. Over the course of his life, he was arrested, exiled, and eventually assassinated in 1940 by a Stalinist agent. Trotsky was an idealist crushed by the power of the state, and Ludvik can be seen in much the same way. Despite the novel’s age (it came out in 1967, delayed for two years by the Communist party) and setting, it serves as a chillingly relevant cautionary tale for us today.

The Joke works simultaneously on personal, philosophical, and societal levels. Its critiques about how both capitalism and communism, when used in the wrong ways, can harm the individual, are sobering. But it is a bit clunky and difficult to get through. This was Kundera’s first novel, and it’s told from four different points of view, which can be confusing, as their voices aren’t easy to tell apart. The last section rotates among three perspectives without any of the headers that preceded it, and I had trouble distinguishing two of the voices except from the context of their stories. The fourth perspective, which appears only in one fairly long, solid block, is almost an authorial voice, revealing secrets about Ludvik’s love interest from years ago that Ludvik never had any idea about. How the man came to know about this and then convey it to Ludvik depends on ridiculous coincidences, although it was probably the most entertaining part of the book.