I've let this one marinate for a few weeks and have given up any hope of saying something intelligent, let alone original. It goes without saying that Ursula was a genius, a gifted weaver of stories. You certainly have to be a master of your craft to build such a textured, engrossing setting in such a compact novel.

Strangely, however, I think this is only the cherry on top, the set dressing for a profound work of political imagination. The book feels investigatory as Le Guin uses fiction to explore capitalism, anarchism, and communism. As a thought experiment, she pushes the tenets and facets of these ideologies to their extreme logical conclusions. I could sense Le Guin's thought process in a marvelous way, watching her process the Cold War in real time. She's incisive and fairly balanced in where she turns her authorial microscope, constructing nuanced ethical dilemmas that demonstrate the benefits and drawbacks of anarchism and capitalism, individualism and collectivism.

Especially in these dark times, it feels comforting and powerful to have access to stories like this one. How refreshing, to imagine a world that organizes itself around different values. The book asks what we are willing to compromise or sacrifice to achieve this, and changed some of my assumptions about how to answer that question.

Charlotte Salomon has been my hero for a few years now. She was a German Jewish artist who was forced to leave art school and flee to France to care for her grandmother, who was having a major mental health crisis. After her grandmother's suicide, Charlotte's grandfather lashed out and revealed the truth that had been kept from Charlotte her entire life: nearly all of her maternal relatives, including her own mother, died by suicide. While hiding in France, she created 1,200 urgent, beautiful gouache paintings. She arranged them into a musical memoir format, the paintings overlayed with text and musical cues. She called it Life? Or Theatre? and it's a masterpiece.

I read Life? Or Theatre? and was deeply moved by it. As someone with a history of suicide in my family, Charlotte helped heal some wounds I didn't realize I have. I got so much out of experiencing Charlotte's art on its own terms, but reading this wonderful book has given me fresh insights and even more appreciation for Charlotte's genius.

This is the most methodologically interesting nonfiction I have read for a long time. Felstiner seamlessly moves between all sorts of innovative sources and methods, from close reading the scant official documents to contextualizing Charlotte in art history and her specific German Jewish milieu to weaving in statistics that demonstrate Charlotte's uniquely gendered experience of the Holocaust. There are even some experimental passages that I'd classify as creative nonfiction, very abstract and almost mystical in tone. And I loved every word of it.

This book navigates so beautifully the tensions and symmetries between history at the scale of one life and the scale of millions of lives. I love how Felstiner interprets Charlotte's memoir as the first person account of an ordinary woman during a crucial period in the rise of fascism. Felstiner brilliantly incorporates her thesis into the very structure of the book, articulating a pattern that she finds in Charlotte’s life and extrapolates to the lives of other victims of the Nazi regime:

Charlotte’s states of mind make visible the inner stages of a huge historical process – stages identified in my chapters as secrecy, affiliation, obsession, tenacity, expulsion, desolation, premonition, conception, presentation, asylum, collision, and deception. I call my approach personified history, a way of embodying an era’s irony and tragedy, its surge of suicide and genocide, within a few uncommon lives.” -p. xiii

I was so surprised when I realized this came out in the 1990s, and then even more baffled that it's not been hugely influential. It's honestly world class scholarship. This book would have been perfect for so many of my undergraduate and graduate history courses when we were reading Natalie Zemon Davis and the like. I do wish I had read it earlier. It's so good that I would honestly pay Felstiner to critique my own writing.

This novel is fascinating. It tells the story of a feminist collective in the early 1970s, but with an experimental twist. All of the characters use na/nan pronouns and have gender neutral names or nicknames, hence the title. For context, this is only four years after Ursula K. Le Guin didn't have the guts to use alternative pronouns in The Left Hand of Darkness. Arnold's sharp observations of social life in the American South provide jarring moments when a particular character's gender, race, class, and/or age are painfully obvious, not because the author tells us so but because of how other characters treat them.

Arnold wrote the novel based on her experience during the 1971 Fifth Street Women's Building Takeover, of which she was a key organizer. More information about the historical event at the bottom of the review for those who are interested!

The Cook and the Carpenter is a fascinating document providing a firsthand account of the women's liberation and housing rights movements. And it's much more intersectional, community-oriented, and class conscious than you might expect based on all the stereotypes about second wave feminism. There are some quotes about identity, movement work, intersectionality, and consciousness that truly struck home for me, even as a bisexual trans-inclusive feminist of a totally different generation. It's made me think we might have thrown some babies out with the bathwater when it comes to the cynical mainstream assessment of the WLM.

Arnold is doing something complex here. She's simultaneously dismantling the socially constructed nature of gender while also demonstrating the necessity of gender in a society that uses gendered violence to police identities on a variety of axes. And she's showing how frustrating, contradictory, and rewarding it can be to live in an intentional community with others who are different from but allied with you. Imagining a new world is hard, and building one from scratch is even harder. But were they wrong to try? I don't believe so. It gives me hope that someone tried.

I'll be thinking about this one for a long time. And researching it, because I'm working on Wikipedia articles about both the Fifth Street takeover and The Cook and the Carpenter. Isn't it wild that neither has an article yet, not even a stub?!

More about the 1971 Fifth Street Women's Building Takeover. Arnold changed quite a few details when developing the plot of The Cook and the Carpenter, so this isn't really a spoiler in a strict sense:

On New Year's Eve 1970, a group of women from nearly every feminist organization in New York City occupied an abandoned city building on East Fifth Street. By candlelight, they sealed up windows, set up temporary shelters, and began repairing the building.

Hundreds of women worked together to establish a food co-op, daycare center, health clinic, and lesbian center. They operated non-hierarchically yet accomplished an incredible amount in two weeks. Teams worked on special projects like negotiating with city officials, providing services and materials in Spanish, and hosting classes in carpentry, plumbing, home repair, and arts. Long-term goals included providing abortion care, setting up a feminist school, and legal aid for lesbian mothers who had lost custody of their children.

The city welfare office asked for the names of women who went to the Fifth Street building to receive services. The group refused to provide a list, and they were shut down soon after. Over twenty women, including Arnold, were arrested. Some managed to have their charges dropped by turning their backs during mugshots and wearing heavy makeup and coiffed hair to court, so they were unidentifiable. The city destroyed the women's building and built a parking lot for a police precinct.