Alana Estelle

It’s been a while since I’ve done an “Under the Radar” post. In these posts, I highlight fantastic books I’ve come across that don’t get the hype they deserve.

On to the 5th installment! 

“I believe that many more miracles take place in the world than we think. You only need to know how to see - how to follow a thread, how to follow the links in a chain of events, not rejecting something merely because it’s improbable, neither jumbling the facts nor forcing your own explanations on them.”

Female Russian author Teffi is a real treat and Subtly Worded, which is a collection of short stories, is such a fun and interesting read. Subtly Worded includes both fiction and non-fiction. This collection includes her accounts meeting both Rasputin and Leo Tolstoy. Teffi’s writing is witty, precise, evocative and at times, down right hilarious. We also get glimpses of Revolutionary Russia. In the short story “Petrograd Monologue”, the narrator cannot stop thinking about how hungry she is. Teffi’s commentary on Rasputin is the highlight to this collection for me. Her descriptions of him are so eerie and mysterious. There is even a more philosophical piece that focuses on old age, death and reflections of one’s life. Fans of Russian lit - this is for you!

“I like what’s uncertain - what’s imperfect. I like what - what breaks out behind the features and is suddenly there and gone again.”

The Weather in the Streets by, Rosamond Lehmann has lived in my head rent free since I read it last year. This is a novel about an adulterous relationship between Olivia Curtis and the married Rollo Spencer. Olivia and Rollo, childhood acquaintances, cross paths in adulthood and quickly pursue a relationship. Rosamond eloquently portrays the reality of leading a double life and the damage that adultery inflicts on the parties involved. Lehmann’s writing is poetic, descriptive, evocative. 

She will often meander from 3rd person to 1st person in the same paragraph and it’s so elegantly done, that I didn’t even realize what she was doing. As one could assume from the title, weather plays a significant role in the narrative. Lehmann is constantly describing the weather and uses this as a device to foreshadow immediate events to come. I was also surprised to detect an existential undertone throughout the book.

“She had been a child then, in the first embrace of belonging, equating love with order and homogeneity, identifying color as the core of character. Now, through falling in love with Meade, she had been forced to admit that identity is not inherent.”

The Wedding by, Dorothy West is a novel about a prominent black family that is preparing for the wedding of one of their own - Shelby. However, Shelby’s fiancé is a white jazz musician, Meade. Instead of focusing on the relationship of Shelby and Meade, the narrative goes into the family tree of this prominent, northern black family and how, through their lineage, as slaves to a family of doctors and socialites, living in well-to-do areas of New York City. This novel could have easily been a story about the complexities of interracial relationships, however, West goes deeper and explores the complexities of race, colorism, and classism from multiple perspectives. She calls everyone out - black and white. Shelby comes to the realization that “color” and race really have no bearing on a person’s character. Society boxes people into categories, based simply on their outward appearance. People are people and all groups of people have issues because all groups of people are comprised of fallible human beings. It’s when people with a conscious and a desire to do good, regardless of what they look like, come together is where good change happens.

Have you read any of these novels and if not, are you interested in picking any of these up?

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“But how Shelby, who could have had the best of breed of her own race, could marry outside her own race, of her father’s profession, and throw her life away on a nameless, faceless white man who wrote jazz frivolous occupation without office, title or foreseeable future, was beyond the Oval’s understanding…”

“Her mother blew the trumpet of praise for marriage to her own kind, if not color, the right color being preferable but not as mandatory to the right class.” 

We see marriage portrayed in a way that is very common across all societies - as a business arrangement and status symbol, rather than two people coming together because they connected. However, West uses the generational structure of the novel to highlight how the younger generations deviate from this mentality. Shelby and her sister Liz marry men that are outside of their family’s expectations. 

“You’re not that blind, you’ve just got a blind spot … Maybe past generations had color prejudice, but my generation has color appreciation.” 

Shelby comes to the realization that “color” and race really have no bearing on a person’s character. Society boxes people into categories, base simply on their outward appearance. West blatantly makes the statement tat both black and white people do this and this ultimately is a disservice. West does not sugar coat the realities of slavery, being black in the north or south, and the mindsets of those who were slaveholders, however, she allows for nuance and doesn’t lump all black people together and all white people together, just because they have their skin tone. 

“Because you don’t know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes they throw off like sparks. Lute equals black, Meade equals white.  But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires. Trying to figure what a man is going to think or do based on the color of his skin will tell you as much about you was it will about him.”

"Color is a false distinction; love was not.”

In The Wedding, West provides interesting commentary about the rise of the black middle and upper class, as well as the important and often forgotten role that single, white women played in this. 

“She was the hand of God who had plucked him out of the Jim Crow riddle south and into a new life. So many whites has done do so much to make the colored man’s life miserable that it was all too easy to forget the miraculous migration of white spinster school teachers, women … who flocked to the south giving up everything they had to teach a generation of newly emancipated children…”

One question main question came to my mind when reading this novel and this last quote was the lightbulb moment. How does this novel, published not that long ago in 1995, challenge the thesis of books like White Fragility? People are people and all groups of people have issues because all groups of people are comprised of fallible human beings. It’s when people with a conscious and a desire to do good, regardless of what they look like, come together is where good change happens. I know personally, I assess people as individuals and avoid making broad, sweeping statements about a person based on how they look because, that just makes no sense. And sometimes people are jerks, just because they are jerks, not because of the color of their skin. But that is conversation for another day. 

Overall, I really enjoyed The Wedding. It was a quick read that packed a punch. I appreciate that West tackled these topics in a detailed and nuanced manner, however I was still hoping to get more into Shelby and Meade’s relationship. In fact, we never meet Meade at all. I understand that wasn’t the point one of the novel, but this did leave me feeling a bit disappointed. I really enjoyed West’s writing style - it’s descriptive and at times quite witty. Her writing is more descriptive than Barbara Pym’s, but the sarcastic humor did remind me a bit of Pym.

Rating 3.5/5

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It’s Black History Month in the US - as I’m sure the majority of people are well aware. Here, I have two authors from my collection that I’m looking forward to reading. 

Alexandre Dumas - Infamous for his timeless classics The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo (I always want to say Crisco, like the shortening that makes pastries and cookies so good, but so bad…), people often over look that fact that Dumas was born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and was the son of Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved woman of Afro-Caribbean ancestry. I’m quite eager to get to the Count of Monte Cristo, perhaps this year and if not, then next year. One thing I look forward to most regarding Dumas is his humor. 

Dorothy West - A novelist and short story writer during the Harlem Renaissance, mainly writing about the lives of upper-class black families. She wrote alongside notorious African American authors like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, though she is often glossed over. She’s another author I’m eager to get to this year, and I’m leaning towards starting with this collection of short stories The Richer, The Poorer. 

Have you read any of these authors works?

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