"We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental."
Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife. The edge of her white kimono flapped open in the wind and I could see her breast, low and full. I sat next to her, and we stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand. I wished things were back the way they had been, that Barry was still here, that the wind would stop blowing. I was twelve years old and I was afraid for her.
My mother was not herself in the time of the Santa Anas. "Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind." She held up her large hand and spread the fingers, let the desert dryness lick through. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. Overall, if you’re a historical fiction fan, Oleander City is a well-executed take on one of the most fatal days of the last century.T HE S ANTA A NAS blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. The boxers and their plight forward the story of the racial tensions at the time, but they often felt like they could be their own separate book. As their stories begin to intertwine, greater commentaries about family are woven into the text. The chapters that focus on Hester, a child survivor of the storm, and Diana Longstreet-the second in command to Clara Barton in the Red Cross-are by far the most compelling in the book. The book includes the stories of these people and their attempts to find peace, safety, and a way forward in the wake of a storm that took upwards of 10,000 lives. Told through several different points of view, Bondurant’s novel looks at the effect of that horrific event on children, the KKK, the women of the newly formed Red Cross who’ve come to assist with the relief effort, and Joseph Choynski, a Jewish boxer contracted to fight Jack Johnson, a Black “hometown hero” known as the Galveston Giant.
The aftermath of the destruction, however, was fraught with racial tensions and class divides that threatened to undermine any potential renewal or repair. When the Galveston hurricane of 1900 descended upon the city, it did not discriminate. Perhaps best known for his unflinching nonfiction, Matt Bondurant’s latest novel, Oleander City, capitalizes on the same strengths to weave a fictional account of one of the most horrific natural disasters in American history.
0 kommentar(er)
