McSweeney's Issue 43

McSweeney's 43 is a compact volume, consisting of two volumes, one of fiction and nonfiction, the other of very factual fiction from South Sudanese writers (following Issue 15's tribute to Icelandic writers and Issue 35's Norwegians). Artwise, both volumes are given spooky grayscale/sepia paintings of lost villages, care of Gregory Euclide.Both volumes evoke Dave Eggers' apparent m.o. for life that is his Voice of Witness brand, where he gives lesser voices the ability to speak their truths to power and, sometimes, purge themselves of past horrors through the therapy of storytelling. This impulse of Eggers has always been questionable, certainly well-intentioned but also undiscerning as to whether those voices doing that witnessing actually have anything to say. And especially here, featuring South Sudanese writers, after the publication of his own book "What Is the What," set in (what would later become) South Sudan and featuring war-ravaged South Sudanese, it all seems a bit too suspect--it seems like so much axe-grinding.Luckily, despite such suspicions, the South Sudan stories are very good. The best is by Nyuol Lueth Tong, who writes about a boy and his mother attempting to find the father who abandoned them. It's a geographic, chronological, and spatial journey through Sudanese villages that develops unexpectedly as, rejected by their father, the two seek help at the hands of a deeply unsettling extended family member. It's engaging and vivid in showing South Sudan in its everyday life and rituals.Many of these stories follow that bent, showing real life away from the horrors of headlines. Much of African fiction focuses on these assertions of normalcy (Marguerite Abouet's graphic novel "Aya" comes to mind). Indeed, Victor Lugala writes a diary of a man working several awful jobs in Port Sudan, seeking what joy he can find in the eveningtime. Samuel Garang Akau writes a teenage love story about the ways we learn the bait-and-switch subterfuge of attraction and dating that's relatable regardless of where you're from. Arif Gamal writes a bucolic poem about palm trees; John Oryem pens a simple fable about a child who, having been given potatoes, is then accused of stealing those potatoes. It unfortunately plays out like a silly after-school special, with all the ridiculous melodrama ("I will kill you!", "Mama kicked the door open") those entail.Other authors do touch on the war with Sudan: Edward Eremugo Luka offers a snapshot of war in a boy escaping gunshots blindly, separated from his friends. David L. Lukudu writes a story that has the tenacity to be told from the perspective of a radical Muslim fighting AGAINST South Sudan. Lukudu's protagonist questions the certainty of his martyrdom as his friends die all around him. A bit of a revenge fantasy, but the main character is thankfully not a villain. Totally against the grain of the other stories is Taban Lo Liyong's bizarre tale of an ambitious island ruler's final days before he's found dead. It plays out like a terrifying and grisly fever dream.The fiction/nonfiction "regular" supplement proves to be mostly hits. Beyond the never-entertaining letters, the best story here is old reliable T.C. Boyle's convergence story wherein a group of boys explores the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas, trying to goad the fiercer animals out of their malaise. A tiger springs forth out of its cage and kills two boys, while just in the future, a flower girl at her sister's wedding explores the zoo just after the tragedy. It's a captivating story that reveals the threats that lie just beyond the façade of civility, as well as our modern disconnect from wildness. Catherine Lacey has a startling, wonderful piece, dissimilar from anything else I've seen in McSweeney's, in which a woman, wrongly detained (apparently), considers her actions in loving and leaving her husband. It's intensely introspective, with spare few external details, though the quality of introspection far and away forgives the lack of narrative. A psyche-driven piece so good in its breakdown of human emotion it denies its basic need for Freytag.William Wheeler includes a nonfiction account of the fall of Qaddafi as told by Libya's rebel forces. After the fight, the revolution, and the victory, the country is thrown into its worth dilemma yet: "Your bullets saved us, your celebration is killing us." Charles Baxter writes a dual-POV story about two humanitarian lovers in Africa getting back to the reality of home; the first lapses into poverty and crime, the second tries to save him. A Theme story ("Charity") well-played. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya writes a fully engaged, true-to-form, unironic Russian fairy story: A babushka tries to get her granddaughter to wear the dress she made her, under the philosophy that love, like a camouflaged predator, can strike at any time.And then there's Noor Elashi, and she's what keeps this from being a five-star review, and moreover reveals a very worrisome trend in McSweeney's at large that I hope doesn't inform future issues. Elashi writes an eventless account of her family visiting their father in the prison where he's being wrongly detained. It's a tedious play-by-play of their conversations, mixed with needless exposition and long, long descriptions of yoga moves. Nothing happens nor threatens to happen; clearly, Elashi's family are all heroes and the detainers are all villains, and so here she is, saying, "Can you believe this?!" Irredeemable, irremediable, the essay little more than a social-message conduit.I worry that McSweeney's could veer away from being the samizdat of great literature it is at its finest, and could become instead an expansion of this story: a microcosm of boasted injustices lacking in any literary value, blandly written and fiercely non-narrative, Eggers' "Voices of Witness" series expanded past curiosity into mandate. Maybe it's good that "unknown voices" are finally being heard, but any voice, unknown or not, first has to have something to say. I understand the value in being anti-Canon, too, but multiculturalism for its own sake, or as mere vengeance, is never interesting. Ditto goes for merely topical writing--even the good pieces here include some forced topicality (i.e. Lacey's, that has something to do with Homeland Security that's completely unnecessary). McSweeney's itself is at a junction, then: either it can tend towards Dull Topical Social Issues Quarterly or it can go back to being the best literary journal on the market. I believe it's too good, and has too strong of a history, to do anything but continue that history.

McSweeney's 42 was a bit of a miss, but this two-volume follow-up is a much stronger release from McSweeney's. The stories in 'There is a Country: New Fiction from the New Nation of South Sudan,' were excellent and immediately engaging. The authors all had a vivid, straight-forward style, giving an eye-opening look at the status of the country now and the years leading up to it's independence as a nation.Issue 43 itself is roughly half fiction and half non-fiction, with the strongest pieces coming from long-time short-story master T.C. Boyle, and a starkly personal piece from Charles Baxter. The 'Letters' section was, as always, entertaining and at times thoughtful, and the issue ends with a strong and well-documented non-fiction account regarding the Lybian Revolution.There is an emotional heaviness to this issue, which the lovely and somewhat abstract illustrations reflect. As McSweeney's editors are so often talented at accomplishing, within these pages there is both entertainment and truth, a mesh of real-life and fiction that leaves one with a sense of stillness.

The 43rd issue of McSweeney's sheds all pretense of humor (except for the always entertaining Letters section) and presents an exemplary collection of internationally excellent reads. Ranging from fiction to non-fiction, the collection consists of only exemplars of awesome writing. Readers looking for gritty or cutting edge will likely disagree. The depth of the collection excels in essays regarding U.S. internment and Libyan revolution. Cheers, McSweeney's.

Das Buch ist super schnell angekommen.Es war ein Weihnachtsgeschenk und ich hoffe, dass es gefällt.Mehr kann ich dazu nicht sagen.