Brandon Hobson
Autor von The Removed
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Bildnachweis: Photo by Kaylynn Hobson. Photo Source: https://www.harpercollins.com/blogs/authors/brandon-hobson-202011111441480
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Cherokee Nation - Kurzbiographie
- DR. BRANDON HOBSON IS A 2022 GUGGENHEIM FELLOW. HE RECEIVED HIS PHD FROM OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY. HIS NOVEL, WHERE THE DEAD SIT TALKING, WAS A FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, WINNER OF THE READING THE WEST AWARD, AND LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD, AMONG OTHER DISTINCTIONS.
HIS SHORT STORIES HAVE WON A PUSHCART PRIZE AND HAVE APPEARED IN THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, MCSWEENEY'S, CONJUNCTIONS, NOON, AND ELSEWHERE. HE TEACHES CREATIVE WRITING AT NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY AND AT THE INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS. HE IS THE EDITOR IN CHIEF OF PUERTO DEL SOL. HOBSON IS AN ENROLLED CITIZEN OF THE CHEROKEE NATION TRIBE OF OKLAHOMA.
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ETA: This book and these characters continue to do a slow burn through my consciousness, and I'm going to take a guess that it's not one of those books I'll have trouble remembering anything about a few years down the road. Hobson's interest in the closeness and intermingling of the physical and supernatural worlds and in the history and continuing effects of Cherokee/Native trauma are pretty good hooks for me.
The Removed is an exercise in applying Cherokee myth and history to the struggles of a fictional contemporary Cherokee family. It identifies a people's stories and ancestors as key strengths in dealing with the harm that has been done and continues to be done to them. The Cherokee context makes it interesting and unique even as it bears a startling resemblance to another book I recently read, [b:Sharks in the Time of Saviors|45892255|Sharks in the Time of Saviors|Kawai Strong Washburn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1567550978l/45892255._SY75_.jpg|70730151], in its very similar structure of a native family being at the heart of it, the same rotating first-person storytelling, even the same affliction of the father character in his older age and his cure through reconnecting with native culture and ancestors.
Ray-Ray is dead at the outset of the novel, a Cherokee teen killed in an unjust police shooting fifteen years earlier. But he may not be gone. Owls and hawks are everywhere in the novel, and in Cherokee myth they can embody ancestors keeping watch and giving warnings to those alive. Is Ray-Ray a guardian raptor? Many Native American cultures believed in reincarnation, and a fifteen year old Cherokee boy, Wyatt, stays as a temporary foster child with the parental characters. Wyatt's personality and characteristics strongly recall Ray-Ray. Is he Ray-Ray reincarnated?
Edgar, his younger brother, has become a drug addict in a neighboring state. His addiction is symbolized through another bird, a red fowl, which he is given and keeps, and which follows him to the Darkening Land after an overdose. The Darkening Land is an in-between place in Cherokee myth, and Edgar has some things to work out before he can move on. Hobson evokes an appropriately creepy Otherworld that is just close enough to ours to be recognizable, filled with rotting buildings, darkness and storms, and constant dust and fog the residents cough out.
There is a sister, Sonja, who has some good bits ("This was the manner of men, it seemed to me, so often unaware of their own aggression") while working out some issues re: hereditary guilt and justice. There is violence in this storyline that reflects the changing nature of violence towards people like the Cherokee - lessened, sure, but still troublesomely present.
Tsala, the ancestor voice, gives the reader many stories and prophecies from Cherokee myth while still, it seems, working to protect and help his people in the present.
The final rotating first-person voice is Maria, the mother, trying to keep her family protected and well and organizing their upcoming reunion on the occasion of Ray-Ray's death and Cherokee National Day. At the concluding bonfire the family and the ancestors come together and all, in a manner, is right.
The similarity of this novel to another I'd recently read and the rotating first person point of view, not my favorite way of writing a novel, work against The Removed for me, while the Cherokee aspect and the new work with old myths of Edgar's storyline work for it. The prose itself is mostly average.… (mehr)
The Removed is an exercise in applying Cherokee myth and history to the struggles of a fictional contemporary Cherokee family. It identifies a people's stories and ancestors as key strengths in dealing with the harm that has been done and continues to be done to them. The Cherokee context makes it interesting and unique even as it bears a startling resemblance to another book I recently read, [b:Sharks in the Time of Saviors|45892255|Sharks in the Time of Saviors|Kawai Strong Washburn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1567550978l/45892255._SY75_.jpg|70730151], in its very similar structure of a native family being at the heart of it, the same rotating first-person storytelling, even the same affliction of the father character in his older age and his cure through reconnecting with native culture and ancestors.
Ray-Ray is dead at the outset of the novel, a Cherokee teen killed in an unjust police shooting fifteen years earlier. But he may not be gone. Owls and hawks are everywhere in the novel, and in Cherokee myth they can embody ancestors keeping watch and giving warnings to those alive. Is Ray-Ray a guardian raptor? Many Native American cultures believed in reincarnation, and a fifteen year old Cherokee boy, Wyatt, stays as a temporary foster child with the parental characters. Wyatt's personality and characteristics strongly recall Ray-Ray. Is he Ray-Ray reincarnated?
Edgar, his younger brother, has become a drug addict in a neighboring state. His addiction is symbolized through another bird, a red fowl, which he is given and keeps, and which follows him to the Darkening Land after an overdose. The Darkening Land is an in-between place in Cherokee myth, and Edgar has some things to work out before he can move on. Hobson evokes an appropriately creepy Otherworld that is just close enough to ours to be recognizable, filled with rotting buildings, darkness and storms, and constant dust and fog the residents cough out.
There is a sister, Sonja, who has some good bits ("This was the manner of men, it seemed to me, so often unaware of their own aggression") while working out some issues re: hereditary guilt and justice. There is violence in this storyline that reflects the changing nature of violence towards people like the Cherokee - lessened, sure, but still troublesomely present.
Tsala, the ancestor voice, gives the reader many stories and prophecies from Cherokee myth while still, it seems, working to protect and help his people in the present.
The final rotating first-person voice is Maria, the mother, trying to keep her family protected and well and organizing their upcoming reunion on the occasion of Ray-Ray's death and Cherokee National Day. At the concluding bonfire the family and the ancestors come together and all, in a manner, is right.
The similarity of this novel to another I'd recently read and the rotating first person point of view, not my favorite way of writing a novel, work against The Removed for me, while the Cherokee aspect and the new work with old myths of Edgar's storyline work for it. The prose itself is mostly average.… (mehr)
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Recommended if you're a fan of Ottessa Moshfegh, who both offers a blurb for this novel and named it as one of her six favorite books in a 2017 interview (I might should go read all that list!). Hobson's Deep Ellum is an interesting compare/contrast to Moshfegh; while both get deep inside characters inhabiting the alienated edges of society, barely hanging on to the deformed shape of a life which is the best they've been able to fashion to this point, and are able to do so with not necessarily a lot of pages, I've always felt Moshfegh's work was steeped in misanthropy, while Hobson doesn't really seem to have that quality to his fiction, even here. His characters may be equally fucked up, yet his calm and undramatic prose offers them more grace.
Possibly it's partly age - as Hobson says he took a long time to work out his fiction; Deep Ellum was published when he was 44 and is his de facto debut, if you leave out a short experimental long out-of-print work published eight years before this one. Moshfegh in contrast isn't even 40 yet and has several major novels to her name. Will she move further towards grace and away from misanthropy in her novels of the next decade? I'll certainly be reading to find out.
Deep Ellum reads like an extended short story, leaving much unresolved and ambiguous. It's about family, and addiction, and mental illness. It paints a compelling picture and characterization without ever spelling a whole lot out. The characters are mostly depressed. It's almost as if the prose itself is depressed, rousing itself to tell you a little, but then sighing, "whatever, nevermind". Gideon, our narrator, pops hydrocodone pills, but the prose just tells you "I took a hydrocodone", without any fuss. The reader can construct what that means for herself.
Plot wise not a terrible lot happens. Gideon takes a walk through the Deep Ellum neighborhood. He chats with a girl. He scrounges a job. He sees an old friend who works at Taco Hut. He gets into a bath with his older sister (here too just hints of something dark, not overly spelled out). He takes pills. He visits his mother, gets in a fight with his stepfather. Little bursts of activity that form a picture of a whole.
On the final page the family all gets together and "It seemed this would be the moment of a great communication for all of us, but as we walked along the fence toward the barn, nobody said anything." Without saying much, this book says a lot, which is always a nice trick.… (mehr)