book reviews kindred

By Octavia E. Butler

‘Kindred’ by Octavia E. Butler is, at its core, much more than just a work of historical science fiction but also harsh drilling against racial social injustice.

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

With ‘ Kindred ’, readers observe how Octavia E. Butler’s masterly description and art of storytelling – with an easy, minimalistic flow of diction – make the book such an unputdownable piece of art. The book is a complete joy to read and has several takeaways and hidden lessons for readers to walk away with.

A Plunge in the Deep End

Octavia E. Butler – through ‘ Kindred ’ – dares to tackle a range of interesting topics which are considered very complicated and controversial to handle. And despite being written by a Black author, the book doesn’t show signs of pontification.

After reading ‘ Kindred ’, I’m left with one thought: It’s a brave and courageous book, and Butler must have been a brilliant writer of her time for going so deep and thorough on the themes in less than three hundred book pages.

Themes such as gender, violence, power, abuse, slavery, and marriage, among other things, are given a good amount of time in the book; and then there is the time travel aspect which in itself is as intricate as it is perplexing – and usually a stand-alone subject of thought.

Twenty-six years old young female protagonist Dana really does travel back in time on more than a few occasions to save her ancestor from potential life-threatening dangers which, for the most part, are caused by either Rufus himself or his mean father Tom.

Interestingly, it does seem as though Dana has the power to travel through time, but a more keen attention to the facts of the book suggests she doesn’t and is only able to do so because of being summoned somehow, someway into the 1800s by Rufus every time he’s in trouble.

However, Dana does have greater control over departing Rufus’ messy world and back to her own 1976 timeline, and this is usually when she feels afraid or becomes terrified for her life. Butler certainly gets readers in deep water with ‘Kindred’ but is also kind enough to salvage the story in ways that are verifiable and realistic.

The Precariousness of Racial Injustice

Butler is one of the first science fiction genre writers to unite gender, ethnicity, and race with the intricacies of time travel. And although her book ‘ Kindred ’ is mostly classified as belonging to sci-fi, interracial matters clearly top the list of important agendas discussed for the most part of the book.

In ‘ Kindred ’, Butler tries to compare life and the whole living conditions in two distinct realities – first is Dana’s present time of 1976, and second is Rufus’ era of the early 1800s. From a reader’s standpoint, it’s clear that the biggest cause of social instability in both timelines is racism – a concept to which the practice of slavery came to be born.

While policies have greatly improved interracial relationships in Dana and Kelvin’s world, it is a lot worse in Rufus’ world, and this is a major reason readers will notice a streak of political, socio-economic, and socio-psychological backwardness in Rufus’ time.

A Transgenerational Lesson for Posterity

Despite a torturous description of a world where one race dominated over the other – followed by a subsequent sufficing of actions that are abusive as they are dehumanizing, for posterity, the most important take away from Butler’s groundbreaking book ‘ Kindred ’ is the need for all of the human race to stand together in unity, and recognize that we are first of all humans – before we are Black or white.

How good a book is ‘ Kindred ’ for readers?

‘ Kindred ’ is an award-winning novel and considered perhaps the greatest work of prolific writer Octavia E. Butler. This makes it worthwhile for readers – especially if you love books about time travel, family, and interracial marriages.

What lesson can be gleaned from Butler’s book ‘ Kindred ’?

Unity is a strong message subtly passed across by Butler to her readers. There’s a call to unite and bury differences in others to attain a more progressive human society.

How long does it take the average reader to start and finish the novel ‘ Kindred ’?

‘ Kindred ’ is a book with less than three hundred pages, so it shouldn’t take more than a few hours reading a day for the average person.

Kindred Review

Book Title: Kindred

Book Description: 'Kindred' by Octavia E. Butler is a bold and unifying novel exploring the depth of human division and the potential beauty of unity.

Book Author: Octavia E. Butler

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: HarperCollins Publishers

Date published: June 26, 1979

ISBN: 978-0-06-075440-8

Number Of Pages: 261

• Transitioning

Kindred Review: We Were Humans First, Before We Became Black or White

‘ Kindred ‘ by Octavia E. Butler is a courageous book that dares to unite all people – irrespective of skin color, ethnicity, and gender. The book does so by showing readers the height of humanity’s disunity and how unpretty it could be, and then hints at the beauty and progress a united human race can become. It’s an award-winning book with several appraisals from top publishers and authors. It’s a book to not miss out on.

• Courageous narrative
• Promotes unity
• Easily readable
• Replete with violent scenes
• Slightly vague climax
• Not fact-based

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About Victor Onuorah

Victor is as much a prolific writer as he is an avid reader. With a degree in Journalism, he goes around scouring literary storehouses and archives; picking up, dusting the dirt off, and leaving clean even the most crooked pieces of literature all with the skill of analysis.

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by Octavia E. Butler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 2009

Butler is one of those accomplished science-fiction writers ( Mind of My Mind , 1977; Survivor , 1978) who tap out their tales so fast and fine and clear that it's impossible to stop reading at any point. And this time the appeal should reach far beyond a sci-fi audience—because the alien planet here is the antebellum South, as seen through the horrified eyes of Dana, a 20th-century black woman who time-travels in expeditious Butler fashion: "The house, the books, everything vanished. Suddenly I was outdoors on the ground beneath trees" . . . in 1819 Maryland. Dana has been "called" by her white ancestor, Rufus—on her first visit, Rufus is a small child, son of a sour slaveowner—and she'll be transported back to Maryland (twice with her white husband Kevin) to rescue Rufus from death again and again. As Rufus ages (the Maryland years amount to hours and days in 1976 time), the relationship between him and Dana takes on some terrifying dimensions: Rufus simply cannot show the humanity Dana tries to call forth; Dana, drawn into the life of slaves with its humiliation and atrocities, treads carefully, trying to effect some changes, but too often she returns beaten and maimed to her own century. And most frightening is the thought that, in the "stronger, sharper realities" of Rufus' time, Dana is "losing my place here in my own time." At one point Kevin and Dana lose one another (Kevin returns haggard, after five years working to help escaped slaves), but finally Dana, fighting off complete possession by Rufus, kills him and that past forever—but not the memories. There is tremendous ironic power in Butler's vision of the old South in science-fiction terms—capriciously dangerous aliens, oppressed races, and a supra-fevered reality; and that irony opens the much-lamented nightmare of slavery to a fresh, vivid attack—in this searing, caustic examination of bizarre and alien practices on the third planet from the sun.

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-8070-8310-9

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1979

SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM

From the remembrance of earth's past series , vol. 1.

by Cixin Liu ; translated by Ken Liu ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2014

Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.

Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.

In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

SCIENCE FICTION

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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Ken Liu

by Cixin Liu ; translated by Joel Martinsen

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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Various

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• Entertainment
• FX’s <i>Kindred</i> Is a Solid, Long Overdue Adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Masterpiece

FX’s Kindred Is a Solid, Long Overdue Adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Masterpiece

I t is absolutely wild that it has taken nearly half a century for Octavia E. Butler ’s 1979 novel Kindred to be adapted for the screen. Written in Butler’s propulsive, dialogue-heavy style and constructed out of elements—slavery narratives, time travel—that often fuel both prestige drama and genre franchises, the book cries out to be translated into a visual medium. And the same simple, poetic premise that has made it a classic of speculative literature all but guarantees the success of any competent adaptation: Dana, a young Black woman in mid-’70s California, is suddenly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation in 1819 to save a little white boy from drowning. While her initial disappearance is over in minutes, she’s summoned back, for longer and longer periods, every time the impulsive child puts himself in mortal danger. Eventually, her new, white husband unwittingly accompanies her into the past, where their marriage is illegal.

In an eight-episode first season that will stream in its entirety on Hulu beginning Dec. 13, FX’s long-awaited Kindred doesn’t quite dazzle in the same way that the very best recent novel-to-TV adaptations have done. Shows like last year’s The Underground Railroad (which has Kindred encoded in its DNA) and Station Eleven expanded upon brilliant source material with brilliant audio, visual, and storytelling choices tailored to the small screen. But this series does, for the most part, do justice to the metaphor at the center of Butler’s masterpiece. That’s another way of saying that you shouldn’t miss it.

Writer and showrunner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a relative newcomer to TV whose previous work as a playwright has earned him a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and made him a Pulitzer finalist, is faithful to the spirit but not the letter of the novel. Working with a team of executive producers that includes The Americans duo Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields as well as filmmaker Darren Aronofsky , he’s wise to update the present-day story to 2022; while the book took place in the bicentennial year of 1976, what’s more salient in this adaptation is how contemporary Kindred still feels, two generations later. In this telling, 26-year-old Dana (recent Juilliard grad Mallori Johnson, with what should by all rights be a career-making performance) is a single aspiring TV writer who has just sold the family brownstone in Brooklyn following the death of her grandmother and bought a house of her own in Los Angeles.

Jacobs-Jenkins makes it hard, at first, to figure out what kind of story the show is telling. The outstanding premiere, directed by Janicza Bravo ( Zola ), moves deftly between genres and moods. It opens on a chilling, flash-forward vignette. We see Dana lying on the floor of her darkened home, wearing only underwear and a bloody tank top, crying out for someone named Kevin. She collects knives from the kitchen, runs a bath and salts the water, gets in the tub without undressing. The cops show up and demand to check on her. It sounds like they’re about to break down the door. Watching the nightmare escalate, you’ll likely wonder if this woman has lost her mind. She hasn’t—and the scenes that follow might lead some viewers to consider whether they’re especially quick to mistake trauma for derangement when the afflicted is Black and female.

Then we meet the smart, charming if unmoored Dana of two days earlier. At dinner with her kind aunt (Eisa Davis) and cranky uncle (Charles Parnell), who are now her only living relatives, she announces that she’s moved to their city permanently and is surprised to find they disapprove of her choice to uproot herself and chase a dream. The meal goes so poorly that she refuses a ride home and ends up in the car with their waiter, Kevin (Micah Stock giving Jake Johnson). So begins the rom-com portion of the program. Almost a decade Dana’s senior, Kevin (who shares a name with Dana’s husband in the novel) is a washed-up indie rocker whose warmth compensates for his music snobbery and tendency to monologue about himself. Gazing out at L.A. from a scenic overlook, they learn that they both lost their parents as kids. When she offers to reimburse him for gas because he’s spent all day driving her around, Kevin protests: “We’re in the orphan club together now. Orphans don’t pay orphans. They barter. With trauma.”

Neither realizes that they’re on the brink of an experience that will make the considerable hardships they’ve already suffered look trivial. This is what makes the initial genre confusion so effective; Dana doesn’t know what kind of story she’s at the center of, either, when she starts traveling back to the early 19th century to save young Rufus (David Alexander Kaplan) from himself. The choice feels true to Butler’s unique novel, too, which is sometimes classified as sci-fi but was considered by its author to be a “ grim fantasy ” and contains all the thematic depth of great literary fiction. For me, Kindred —with its real-world backdrop, fantastical premise, and potent political commentary—comes closest to the brutal beauty of the best Latin American magic realism, which is another reason why it might’ve benefited from more imaginative soundscapes, production design, and cinematography, particularly later in the season.

Still, in moving between the present and the antebellum past, where Dana and later Kevin can only survive by adhering to the norms of Rufus’ parents’ ( True Blood alum Ryan Kwanten and GLOW ’s Gayle Rankin) plantation, Jacobs-Jenkins unearths layers of meaning so elegantly embedded in Butler’s narrative. The big picture is of a nation that, almost 250 years into its existence as such, remains so scarred by the legacy of slavery that it’s always falling through metaphorical trap doors into a violent white-supremacist past. But it’s the details that give Kindred its nuance. Dana’s connection to Rufus invokes the complex history of who Black Americans’ ancestors really were. Among the enslaved characters, there are questions about complicity, rebellion, survival, internecine conflicts—and whether a well-intentioned Black woman from the 21st century can truly know how to help her 19th-century counterparts.

The show alters Dana and Kevin’s relationship in a way that keeps the focus on her, yet like the novel, it identifies a possibly unbridgeable gulf between a Black woman and a white man who otherwise have a lot in common. Can she love him after enduring the horrors that white men (and to an only slightly lesser extent, white women) inflicted on Black women firsthand? Can he live as a pampered guest in Rufus’ home, with Dana posing as his slave, without internalizing a toxic quantity of entitlement? Will these two ever truly be able to understand each other?

Despite the odd overly broad character (see: Dana’s new next-door neighbor, a prototypical Karen) or stiff line of period dialogue (“This rogue would protect his property before my daughter’s honor!”), the writing is solid. Jacobs-Jenkins’ most salient additions to Butler’s narrative are story lines about Dana’s family that seamlessly extend the time-travel allegory. There are plenty of promising places left for the show to go in the event that FX gives it a second season to follow up on the finale’s assorted cliffhangers.

But when Kindred really achieves excellence, it’s usually through Johnson’s extraordinary performance. As a woman adrift in young adulthood and unstuck in American history, she conveys the extremely specific double consciousness of a modern Black woman who must try to bend the antebellum world to her will. From the most harrowing punishments (which the show dramatizes sparingly and, to its great credit, never gratuitously) to Dana’s blissful early hours with Kevin, but most of all in quiet moments when the character is clearly thinking or feeling something she can’t safely articulate, Johnson conjures an entire topsy-turvy universe within a single consciousness. Belated as it is, no tribute to the work of Octavia E. Butler could be more apt.

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'Kindred' Review: Octavia E. Butler's Novel Deserves Better Than This

You'd be better served by reading the book on which the series is based since little in this retelling is able to capture its enduring impact.

It is hard to fully call Kindred , a new series from FX , an adaptation of the late Hugo Award-winner Octavia E. Butler ’s 1979 novel of the same name. There is the same general premise in telling the story of a Black woman, Mallori Johnson 's Dana, who finds herself being unexpectedly pulled back through time to a pre-Civil War plantation. However, from a narrative and thematic perspective, there are a series of significant changes that fundamentally alter and increasingly compromise the many rich complexities of her story. While all works of adaptation make modifications, the ones being undertaken here all feel perfunctory at best and purposeless at worst. Though the committed performance by Johnson is a high point and the early direction by Janicza Bravo draws you in, each is ultimately let down by a story that can’t ever hope to even hold a candle to what Butler achieved all those years ago.

The first of many changes comes down to timing. Where the novel is set in 1976 and wastes no time in establishing the stakes of what is happening, the series begins in a vastly different fashion in the modern day. While not entirely surprising, as many adaptations feel a need to be more immediate, this focus on the present doesn’t ever provide much of anything new. It is here that we find Dana in the aftermath of one of her many jumps through time. She is grievously injured and lying on the floor, alone in a new home that we will learn she only recently bought. Soon, police lights flash outside as she tries to send an email though is hindered by spotty Wi-Fi. A nosy neighbor looks in through the window and officers then attempt to forcibly get inside despite Dana telling them she is fine. Of course, they don't listen.

While this opening and much of the first episode are well-directed by Bravo, it is only the beginning of the series telling a vastly different story that lacks the same incisiveness as Butler’s original work. We then flash forward to see Dana laughing and watching television on the same laptop she remains blissfully unaware will be her lifeline in the looming crisis. While she had cried out for help before, she is now alone and unconcerned before rushing off to a dinner she had forgotten. Dana has only recently moved back to Los Angeles and hopes to break into writing for television; it is a change she is quite excited about.

The dinner she then goes to is meant to be a happy one where she updates her aunt Denise ( Eisa Davis ) on all of these significant life changes. However, Denise’s husband Alan ( Charles Parnell ) soon voices his disapproval of her life decisions and things deteriorate from there. It is tense, but the two are all the family that Dana has left as she previously lost both of her parents. When she then tries to leave, Dana encounters Kevin ( Micah Stock ) who works there as a waiter. A white man who was her husband when we first encountered him in the book is made a stranger in this adaptation. Still, Dana accepts his offer for a ride home as her phone is dead, and she can’t call a ride service. Later that evening, she matches with him on this universe’s equivalent of Tinder where he begins sending her corny messages.

RELATED: New 'Kindred' Trailer Travels Through Time to Reveal Sinister Secrets

The two then begin an often awkward flirtation that lacks the same complicated history that was felt in the novel. It is in the midst of this that they get swept up in the perilous predicament of being taken back through time without warning. The only thing that seems to cause this occurrence is a young white child named Rufus Weylin ( David Alexander Kaplan ) facing down danger. Be it when he is a baby almost suffocating in his crib or nearly drowning a few years later, in each instance Dana comes back in the midst of his suffering. The only person who sees this happen is Kevin who will subsequently also be taken back with her through time. It is there where days can pass that will only be hours in the present that they were ripped away from. They must then play along in order to survive.

When both are taken into the past is where the series starts to really stumble. The primary cause of this is that, in the eight-episode first season, only about one hundred pages of the novel are covered. While some of this is part of how there are new storylines introduced, it also feels like the strong foundation of the story has been stretched to a breaking point. There is none of the same interiority and care that Butler gave to her characters while still seeing the world through Dana’s eyes. It remains a work that is both more focused and more human than anything playing out here. The canvas on which the story plays out is far more scattered, making it so that many of the more striking details get lost.

Where the book was written in first-person, the show bounces around to other characters in the past and present even when Dana is not there. In the past, there is much more time spent with Kevin as he bumbles his way through the rules that govern the plantation while being immune from much of any risk as a white man. He still manages to find ways to mess things up, including when he references a Jane Austen book he should not have known about, something played for laughs but just feels out of place. The series still reflects the same themes of how Butler would show Kevin's ignorance of the realities of what Dana faces each day, though it lacks the same meaning when this is a man that she has just barely met a few days prior.

That this series is written to have them being such strangers to each other robs the story of its sharper observations. In the novel, there is a more unsettling undercurrent as Dana often fears that Kevin, the man she still loves and knows deeply, could become someone that she will have to fear just as much as the other white people running the plantation. It creates a more nuanced portrait of evil where those doing harm are monstrous though all-too-human in their cruelty. All of this is lost in the series which portrays him as being a well-meaning, flatly amicable guy without any greater nuance or wrinkles to his character. This isn’t the fault of Stock; rather, it is the way in which his character and the story are written.

There is no greater investment to be had in the romantic relationship between Kevin and Dana when it is made so simplistic. All the ways that Butler sought to explore gender, race, and power through the lens of a time travel narrative are largely abandoned for a far more standard story woefully devoid of depth. It instead focuses primarily on Dana trying to piece together what to do about an existing familial connection she has to the plantation that is different from the one that she has in the book. This addition is interesting in theory, with a couple of more complicated conversations that prove to be compelling, though it all gets drowned out in the rest of the still superficial story. It ends up seeking to include more going on, only to end up saying something with far less meaning. The series just keeps straying farther and farther from Butler’s more multifaceted work until there is only a tenuous sense this is her story at all.

This all amounts to what feels like a missed opportunity most of all. While watching the Kindred series, some of the passages that keep bouncing around from the novel pertain to the nature of television itself. At a couple of different moments early on, Butler establishes how Dana is processing what she was seeing and experiencing and how it differs so drastically from what she has seen on television. All the real violence feels more present than any on-screen representation ever could. The Dana of this story is an aspiring television writer, another difference from the novel, which could have set up a potential narrative that grappled with some of these ideas in a new way. Instead, the greatest detriment of the series is that it feels more like the shows that Butler called attention to in her writing. Where the novel had texture to the characters and world, this adaptation just goes through far more conventional motions. It loses sight of the perspective, power, and poetry of Butler’s original story for one that is far more thematically thin without adding anything new.

All of its best ideas we earn glimpses of are those that are left over from the source material. Even when the performances and direction try to reach for something more, it always just ends up falling short through its own lackluster construction. The one saving grace is that it may get more people to revisit Butler’s book, but this is hardly praising what this adaptation has done in its opening season. Though there is a possibility for Kindred to explore more in a second season, as there is still plenty of the book ahead, if it continues to frame the story in the same way then it will continue to run into many of the same problems. By the time it all comes to an oddly open-ended conclusion, what remains clear is that the most meaningful parts of the series are those that were already done better and with more care in Butler’s hands.

You can watch all eight episodes of Kindred Season 1 on Hulu starting December 13.

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Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes review – a new understanding of humanity

In this impressive reassessment Neanderthals emerge as complex, clever and caring, with a lot to tell us about human life

H omo sapiens’ relationship with our long-lost relatives the Neanderthals has undergone a lot of rethinking since our relatively recent reintroduction in 1856. Until then, three years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species , we had no idea that they existed. Thanks to the Parisian anatomist Marcellin Boule, who “inaccurately reconstructed” a skeleton in 1909, the popular image of them has been of an ugly creature with a stooped spine and a “decidedly ape-like” appearance. Now, a blink of an eye later, we know that many of us – at least, those without sub-Saharan heritage – carry between 1.8 and 2.6% Neanderthal DNA. So it’s reassuring to read that these people whose genes we share were not the brutish caricatures of Victorian myth, but complex, clever and probably caring individuals with a lot to tell us about human life.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes has studied their landscapes, territories and tools and emerges as an expert and enthusiastic character witness for Neanderthals and their way of life. In Kindred she looks at their “life, love, death and art”; and in the light of the fascinating evidence that is painstakingly presented here it seems likely that they had sophisticated tools, built home environments, art and ornamentation, family structures and possibly even “a richer culinary world than ours”. There is even evidence that they tidied up. Neanderthals probably didn’t have PR, but they do now.

Neanderthals became a distinct population 450,000 to 400,000 thousand years ago, and lived all over the world from north Wales to China and Arabia, in climates ranging from glacial to tropical, until about 40,000 years ago. They were shorter than we are, with strong arms for working hides and fine motor skills for making small tools, but probably saw, heard, smelled and possibly even spoke much like we do. With a sketch and a short piece of fiction at the start of each chapter, Wragg Sykes paints a vivid picture of life as lived by a Neanderthal parent, hunter or child. She doesn’t just want us to see Neanderthals for who they (probably) really were; she wants us to see their world through their eyes.

The prose is a combination of the scholarly and the writerly, combining dizzying amounts of information about different types of stones, tools, bladelets and flakes with sentences such as “Squabbling crossbills and crested tits yielded to crass jays and mellifluous nightingales, until cold mornings saw clattering capercaillies sending breathy vapour into biting air.” The knowledge condensed here is certainly impressive. “The sheer amount of information is hard to process,” Wragg Sykes writes. “Few specialists have time to read every fresh article in their own sub-field, never mind the total scholarly output.” She describes, for example, how archaeologists refit tiny fragments of knapped artefacts back together like “an immense 4D jigsaw puzzle” to see how Neanderthals worked stone tools; what isotopes in dental calculus tell us about their diet and smoky fires; and how microanalysis of soil samples suggests careful placing – if not technically “burial” – of the dead. It’s clearly a subject that encourages and repays obsessive interest.

Understanding Neanderthals’ place in history is important to show “how evolution didn’t follow an arrow-straight Hominin Highway leading to ourselves”, and to skewer white supremacist notions that sprang up around our early (mis)understanding of who different types of humans were. It is hard, though, not to draw some warnings for humanity from the fate of our near kin. Did Homo sapiens only thrive because of our larger and stronger social networks – “being welcome at the fires of friends many valleys away” when things got tough? Did Neanderthal populations collapse after one climate change event too many, and how might we survive our own? Or might they have been killed off by “a terrible contagion” that jumped between species? Sadly, we don’t know, though the next discovery may be the one to tell us. Until then, Wragg Sykes concludes, Neanderthals will continue to function as “the shadow in the mirror … a multispectral reflection of our hopes and fears, not only for their apparent fate, but our own”.

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Book Reviews

Two new novels investigate what makes magic, what is real and imagined.

Marcela Davison Avilés

In an enchanted world, where does mystery begin? Two authors pose this question in new novels out this spring.

In Pages of Mourning by the Mexican magical realism interrogator-author Diego Gerard Morrison, the protagonist is a Mexican writer named Aureliano Más II who is at war with his memory of familial sorrow and — you guessed it — magical realism. And the protagonist Alma Cruz in Julia Alvarez's latest novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is also a writer. Alma seeks to bury her unpublished stories in a graveyard of her own making, in order to find peace in their repose — and meaning from the vulnerability that comes from unheard stories.

Both of these novels, one from an emerging writer and one from a long celebrated author, walk an open road of remembering love, grief, and fate. Both find a destiny not in death, but in the reality of abandonment and in dreams that come from a hope for reunion. At this intersection of memory and meaning, their storytelling diverges.

Pages of Mourning

Pages of Mourning, out this month, is set in 2017, three years after 43 students disappear from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College after being abducted in Iguala , Guerrero, Mexico. The main character, Aureliano, is attempting to write the Great Mexican Novel that reflects this crisis and his mother's own unexplained disappearance when he was a boy. He's also struggling with the idea of magical realism as literary genre — he holds resentment over being named after the protagonist in 100 Years of Solitude, which fits squarely within it. He sets out on a journey with his maternal aunt to find his father, ask questions about his mother, and deal with his drinking problem and various earthquakes.

Morrison's voice reflects his work as a writer, editor and translator based in Mexico City, who seeks to interrogate "the concept of dissonance" through blended art forms such as poetry and fiction, translation and criticism. His story could be seen as an archetype, criticism, or a reflection through linguistic cadence on Pan American literature. His novel name drops and alludes to American, Mexican and Latin American writers including Walt Whitman, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel Garcia Márquez — and even himself. There's an earnest use of adjectives to accompany the lived dissonance of his characters.

There's nothing magical, in the genre sense, in Morrison's story. There are no magical rivers, enchanted messages, babies born with tails. Morrison's dissonance is real — people get disappeared, they suffer addictions, writer's block, crazy parents, crazier shamans, blank pages, corruption, the loss of loved ones. In this depiction of real Pan-American life — because all of this we are also explicitly suffering up North — Morrison finds his magic. His Aureliano is our Aureliano. He's someone we know. Probably someone we loved — someone trying so hard to live.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories

From the author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents , The Cemetery of Untold Stories is Julia Alvarez's seventh novel. It's a story that's both languorous and urgent in conjuring a world from magical happenings. The source of these happenings, in a graveyard in the Dominican Republic, is the confrontation between memories and lived agendas. Alvarez is an acclaimed storyteller and teacher, a writer of poetry, non-fiction and children's books, honored in 2013 with the National Medal of Arts . She continues her luminous virtuosity with the story of Alma Cruz.

Author Interviews

Julia alvarez: literature tells us 'we can make it through'.

Alma, the writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , has a goal - not to go crazy from the delayed promise of cartons of unpublished stories she has stored away. When she inherits land in her origin country — the Dominican Republic — she decides to retire there, and design a graveyard to bury her manuscript drafts, along with the characters whose fictional lives demand their own unrequited recompense. Her sisters think she's nuts, and wasting their inheritance. Filomena, a local woman Alma hires to watch over the cemetery, finds solace in a steady paycheck and her unusual workplace.

Alma wants peace for herself and her characters. But they have their own agendas and, once buried, begin to make them known: They speak to each other and Filomena, rewriting and revising Alma's creativity in order to reclaim themselves.

Code Switch

How julia alvarez wrote her many selves into existence.

In this new story, Alvarez creates a world where everyone is on a quest to achieve a dream — retirement, literary fame, a steady job, peace of mind, authenticity. Things get complicated during the rewrites, when ambitions and memories bump into the reality of no money, getting arrested, no imagination, jealousy, and the grace of humble competence. Alma's sisters, Filomena, the townspeople — all make a claim over Alma's aspiration to find a final resting place for her memories. Alvarez sprinkles their journey with dialogue and phrases in Spanish and one — " no hay mal que por bien no venga " (there is goodness in every woe) — emerges as the oral talisman of her story. There is always something magical to discover in a story, and that is especially true in Alvarez's landing place.

Marcela Davison Avilés is a writer and independent producer living in Northern California.

Shedding his Lemony Snicket persona, Daniel Handler lets off some steam

In his new book, “And Then? And Then? What Else?,” the author of “A Series of Unfortunate Events” explores the joys, frustrations and ironies of the writing life.

Writers lead messy lives, constantly condemned to days of lousy first drafts, failed ideas and chronic misstatements. Daniel Handler feels this deeply throughout his kinda-sorta memoir, “ And Then? And Then? What Else? ” Eventually it reaches a boiling point. Late in the book he abandons his quirky-cool demeanor — he’s best known as Lemony Snicket, author of the offbeat children’s books “A Series of Unfortunate Events” — and lets fly with an f-bomb-laden rant about cancel culture and the pressure writers feel to be everything to everyone.

It’s a fierce cri de coeur at a time when books — especially kids’ books — are targeted on the right and writers who misstep on the inclusivity front get targeted on the left. (Oddly, Handler doesn’t mention his own moment as a near-cancelee. Onstage while emceeing the 2014 National Book Awards, he directed a racist watermelon joke at Black author Jacqueline Woodson ; after a social media pile-on, he apologized.) Handler isn’t interested in wading far into the politics of writing today — elsewhere his prose tends toward the gentle, sprightly and personal. Still, it’s not hard to see why he made room for the tirade: He wants to encourage you to give up seeking easy answers about who writers are and how writing works.

“And Then?” — the title comes from a poem by Baudelaire, the namesake of the “Unfortunate Events” siblings — doesn’t have a subtitle to explain itself. But a good one might be “A Memoir of Writerly Confusions.” For Handler, the writing life means forever stepping into frustration and strange ironies. He recalls writing nine drafts for the “Unfortunate Events” movie before being fired from the job — and then being asked to consult on the script, without pay. “Previously I had considered these people innocent,” he says of the moviemakers, “and then maybe dumb, and then maybe a pack of vicious demons. I understood, too, that they were, at least obliquely, the reason I owned a house.”

Plainly, embracing the mess has made him a success: He recalls how some young Lemony Snicket fans were so excited to see him at readings that “bookstores began to have contingency plans for when a child, excited to meet me, threw up.” (The life of a reader can get messy, too.) So understandably, he’s fully embraced the idea of mess-as-process, that successful writing means wrestling with demons. On that front, he’s had a few. In one chapter, he recalls that during his college years he was stalked by visions of malevolent figures, accompanied by seizures that briefly sent him to a psych ward. Recovery wasn’t conquering those visions but making a kind of peace with them: “I still, to this day, see these figures, frequently but not frighteningly, not anymore,” he writes.

That experience has fueled a sensibility in which he does best when he’s open to strangeness. He takes inspiration from the melodrama of opera but also finds joy and insight in tacky kitsch like “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.” His polestars as an artist are art-film figures like Guy Maddin, who tweaks silent-film conventions, and, most obviously, Edward Gorey, whose not-for-kids-but-really-they-are illustrated stories inspired the Lemony Snicket books’ mordant brilliance. Still, he keeps his heroes at arm’s length: Recalling sending Gorey a fan note, he writes: “I never heard back from Gorey, but shortly afterward he died. I like to think that I killed him.”

Lines like that reflect the sort of tone we want from writer’s guides — intimate, self-deprecating. But these days, we also want them to be practical. The most prominent modern example remains Stephen King’s memoir “On Writing,” and countless others since have borrowed its tone and intention. George Saunders’s “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain” invites us to study classic Russian short stories. In “Essays One,” Lydia Davis brilliantly dismantles her own stories like a car engine. Handler’s book belongs in that company, but he’s skeptical of how much he can offer in terms of practical tips: Whenever he hears the word “process,” he writes, “I wish I could lay my head down on a table.”

Yet there are moments when Handler warms to the role of advice giver. Like every author, he encourages you to read a lot — he recalls the teacher who introduced him to Muriel Spark, the perfect writer for him at just the right time. And he encourages writers to abandon bespoke notebooks and keep it simple; he describes his (yes) process for gathering and reshuffling notes into stories, and how he forgives his sloppy drafts. He’s taken a lesson from his occasional musical collaborator, Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt, who’s “a devout corraller of happy accidents, encouraging musicians to try the wrong approach, the bonkers note, anything to fill the blanks.”

But all this — Spark, Gorey, B-movies, weird troubling figures in the corner of your eye — doesn’t solve the problem of producing good writing. As for what does, Handler recalls working on a script for a director who sent his draft back pockmarked with the letters “DB,” short for “do better.” Handler was infuriated at the vague note, but he took the lesson: “Now I write it in my own margins all the time, shorthand for I don’t know what’s wrong here but it needs to improve. I want to write better, but I usually don’t know how. Nobody does, really.” For Handler, knowing there’s no right way to do it is the most liberating advice of all.

Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and the author of “ The New Midwest .”

And Then? And Then? What Else?

By Daniel Handler

Liveright. 240 pp. $26.99

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6 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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This week’s recommended books include two memoirs by writers recalling their parents: “The Whole Staggering Mystery,” by Sylvia Brownrigg, digs into her father’s secret history, and “Did I Ever Tell You?,” by Genevieve Kingston, aims to capture her lost mother on the page. We also recommend two books about Mexico (a history and a journalistic exposé), along with a look at the neurological effects of climate change and a novel that puts U.S. immigration policy front and center. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

THE WEIGHT OF NATURE: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains Clayton Page Aldern

Aldern, a science journalist, asks us to consider the impact of climate change on our brains: According to this alarming book, a warming planet and natural resource depletion will mean everything from angrier, more anxious people to dolphins with Alzheimer’s disease. The litany, he writes, is almost “comically apocalyptic.”

“Aldern is the rare writer who dares to ask how climate change has already changed us.”

From Nathaniel Rich’s review

Dutton | $30

THE WHOLE STAGGERING MYSTERY: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found Sylvia Brownrigg

When Brownrigg’s remote and enigmatic father, Nick, died, his children were left with a key to his past in the form of a mysterious scrapbook. What they found was wilder than they could have possibly guessed: This hippie dropout, seemingly without family, was in fact heir to a British title and had a complex history that included colonial postings, mysterious deaths, lost novels and unexplained estrangements. Brownrigg sets out to discover what, exactly, happened — and does so with style and sensitivity.

“Gets at … the way in which, over generations and in the face of good intentions, family bonds can loosen and die. It’s dreadfully sad, and yet through Brownrigg’s sleuthing, something touching is redeemed.”

From Emma Brockes’s review

Counterpoint | $34.99

AMERICAN ABDUCTIONS Mauro Javier Cárdenas

In his new novel, Cárdenas considers the devastating effects of U.S. immigration policy on Latin American families, using expansive, pages-long sentences full of references to art, mysticism and ominous technologies. The main narrative involves an ailing Colombian man, recently deported from Califorrnia, and the painful choices facing his American-born daughters.

“Cárdenas creates what I’ll call an art-polemic — a melding of play with political purpose. From it, the cruelty of American immigration policy emerges: How else to capture such surreal inhumanity?”

From Gina Apostol’s review

Dalkey Archive | Paperback, $17.95

HABSBURGS ON THE RIO GRANDE: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire Raymond Jonas

Jonas vividly recounts the story of Maximilian I of Mexico, the delusional Austrian archduke who tried to establish an enlightened monarchy on America’s southern border in the midst of the U.S. Civil War. “May my blood end the misfortunes of my new country,” he said as he stood before a republican firing squad, in 1867. “Viva Mexico!”

“Vividly reconstructs how Maximilian’s power was forged and maintained by the sharp end of a French bayonet. … Jonas is astute and judicious in navigating the kaleidoscope of contradictory political ideologies that came together in the Second Mexican Empire.”

From Natasha Wheatley’s review

Harvard University Press | $35

THE WAY THAT LEADS AMONG THE LOST: Life, Death, and Hope Among Mexico City’s Anexos Angela Garcia

An investigation of Mexico’s makeshift drug rehab centers for the poor, Garcia’s book combines anthropological field work with personal history, delivering an unvarnished chronicle of desperate patients, brutal treatment regimes and her own struggles with depression and a traumatic past.

“Offers a view of the war on drugs that differs from the familiar one. … The characters who populate Garcia’s pages reside on the periphery of urban life, and of the conflict itself.”

From Azam Ahmed’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $29

DID I EVER TELL YOU? Genevieve Kingston

In this heartfelt memoir, Kingston reflects on her mother’s death, in her late 40s, from breast cancer and the carefully cataloged notes and gifts she left for her children to open when she was gone. Kingston opens each on schedule, while reflecting that “the person I needed … was not the smiling, gentle mother wrapping birthday gifts” but “all of my mother, not only the softest pieces.”

“Wrenching. … Helped Kingston see the rage and terror her mother had papered over, as well as the steely will she’d summoned to keep going.”

From Kim Hubbard’s review

Marysue Rucci Books | $28.99

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