Brandon Sanderson! Spinner of yarns and stretcher of story! I was hooked by the story all the way through but this was a long ass book where very little happened and I don't trust the journey to be worth the destination, heresy though that might be.
A delightful discovery I made while starting to write this re-review was a blog post I wrote 10 years ago about the books that made a deep impression on me. Tangerine was one of those books. I'm tempted to rattle off things that my home town had in common with Tangerine/Lake Windsor Downs—a citrus growing industry, strange segregation between white and Hispanic neighborhoods and people, groves with fans and heaters for cold nights (I think I remember the orange glow of smudge pots on winter nights, but perhaps that is a memory incepted by this very book, as they were banned in California decades before I was born). The truth is that there were as many things completely outside of my experience in Paul Fisher's life as there were in it. My parents were not image-conscious people. We were not a sports family, and I did not have any physical characteristics that made me different other than being fat. I did not have a tormenting older brother; to my eternal shame, I was that older brother.
What Paul Fisher and I had in common, however, was the fear.
After Paul joins the War Eagles and the team comes together, they start winning:
“The War Eagles have set out on a bloody rampage through the county. We have destroyed every enemy. We have laid waste to their fields and their fans. There is fear in their eyes when we come charging off our bus, whooping our war cry. They are beaten by their own fear before the game even begins. This is a feeling that I have never known before. Anyway, I have never known it from this side of the fear. Maybe I am just a [substitute], maybe I am just along for the ride, but this is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.”
Paul feels the catharsis of stepping out of the fear that he experiences all of the time through soccer, a healthy channel for that need. As a teenager, I tried to escape that fear in ways that were unhealthy just as often as they were healthy. I spent a lot of time alone with music, creating a zone of safety around me, but I also was mean to people and made fun of others because while I was directing the target of mockery, it could never be me. Maybe it's because his fear is so focused on an actual threat, but Paul can see the fear and shame in those around him:
“Mom took me into the kitchen and got me a glass of water. She ran her finger under the strap of my goggles and slipped them off. Then she said, “Honey you know how it is with your eyesight. You know you can't see very well.” And that was that. But I can see. I can see everything. I can see things that Mom and Dad can't. Or won't.”
Tangerine
Tangerine
Reading Habibi is like watching Craig Thompson juggle with chainsaws. The huge ideas he works with: the intractable divisions of gender, sex, ecology, religion, and colorism, are live and dangerous and complicated. He chose to set this story in a dreamlike world outside of time and concrete geography, and it frees him to explore these divisions as aspects of the human condition.
There are no easy answers found in this story, grey area is everywhere and anyone looking for relief or prescriptions is bound to be disappointed. Except maybe in the values of story and art. Story, art, words and ink are intwined, and I have to note as well that I cannot think of a more beautiful object than the book that is and contains this story.
I thought this was such a beautiful book on a sentence-by-sentence level. Greenwell is a poet, and you can feel that in his language.
There's a petty reason why this is not going straight into my soul, and that's because Greenwell's protagonist is well observed and well written and has a plausible internal subjectivity, but his life experience is so different from mine and with such a different toy box of issues, repressions, and contradictions that it's hard for me to see myself in him. It's like an incredibly well aimed bullet striking the person just to your left.
Of course, that's not the only purpose of fiction, and I enjoyed the journey anyway.
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