Book Reviews, in Short

The Convalescent
By Jessica Anthony
McSweeney's, 2009

Granted, I'm only a few chapters in, but I'm thoroughly enjoying Jessica Anthony's debut novel, The Convalescent. It manages to be both absurd and strangely eloquent. Two representative paragraphs:

[The Opening Paragraph]
On June 15, 1985, at 3:42 p.m., a six-point-seven magnitude earthquake hit Puebla, Mexico, destroying two hundred and ninety churches, three hundred schools and four thousand houses, leaving fourteen people dead and over fifteen thousand homeless. Among the living was a young girl named Adelpha Salus Santino who, after digging through rubble at the old Vehiculos Automotres Mexicanos factory to find both of her parents suffocated, picked up a dusty knife, held it to her middle, and then stabbed herself in the stomach. She was rushed to the emergency room by paramedics who, when they could find no identification, asked the girl ¿Como te llamas? to which Adelpha Salus Santino replied, "Mariposa," which means butterfly.

[From Page 13]
Despite the fact that most historians only acknowledge ten tribes who migrated over the Ural Mountains that year; that the very word "Hungarian" is not a derivative of "Hun," as so many people stubbornly and incoreectly assume, but actually stems from the Finno-Ugric word onogur meaning "ten arrows," one for each tribe--despite this, I'm here to say there was an eleventh tribe. A tribe known for tripping over their own feet. For growling menacingly at perfectly friendly strangers. For stealing other people's food. We are a tribe that suffers yearlong, incendiary illnesses, and our presence will be eclipsed by the history books. We participae in none of the world's major events, and we have no official leader, as we know nothing of leaders and followers. We blink with uncertainty at quick-moving objects. We clean ourselves with our own tongues.
We are the Pfliegmans.

Intruiged? Go, read.