2022 in books: #5, Luster by Raven Leilani

Hello! Feel free to skip this italicised section if you’ve read any of my other 2022 wrap up blogs!

A little bit of background: since the 6th grade (14 years ago!) I have had a personal mission I call “The Million Page Project.” This has taken the shape of paper logs, excel sheets, blogs, websites and most recently — an increasingly active twitter handle that talks sporadically about books and incessantly about all my other random thoughts.

The goal is to read a million pages before I die. Why? Because my 6th grade teacher set a challenge to the school to collectively read a million pages in a year and I — knowing nothing about scale — was like hmm, I could probably do that alone?

The number I’ve gotten to so far is 163,480 pages or 454 books (as of Dec 22) for anyone who’s wondering. But to be more honest, it’s not about the number — it’s just a way for me to do something I love and catalogue it. As I read, I try to review the books in my own sprawling way to capture how it made me feel, and that’s what I’ll be sharing here. It’ll have spoilers, no coherent summary of plot and often the character names will be missing. But what it will have is a whole lot of heart!

My fifth recommendation, in no particular order: Luster by Raven Leilani, which I read in June.

Luster was SO FREAKING GOOD. Such a unique tone — truly — and yet it flowed incredibly naturally? I wish I had written a longer review when I had just finished reading it and it was still fresh in my mind, but unfortunately all I wrote was the ‘so freaking good.’

Luster kind of reminded me of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” in that the internal monologue and the actions of the protagonist seem unhinged and completely self destructive objectively, but while you are reading it, you are so immersed in her voice that the shock value is redirected — it’s not lost entirely, but you feel the reverberations rather than hear the crudeness — the way it would feel if the voice was coming from inside your own head. You know how your voice sounds different to you because you hear it and feel it through the reverberations in your body — and it alters it from it moving through the air as a medium to someone else? That’s what I mean with this. The medium becomes the message – you’re not on the outside, looking in and passing judgement. You’re in her mind so seamlessly that you judge it for personal affect – you’re more focused on feeling what she’s feeling because the language is so visceral.

Also because there’s almost no moral valence assigned to her own pain or loneliness — it is felt and unfelt, held at an arms distance and picked on, like a favourite scab that never quite heals.

And the whole dynamic — not just between her and the white man but with his wife, with their family, with her own body in a very physical sense — not just as a sexual being but as a person who eats and digests and sweats and moves — it was just so interesting? I think it traverses the social, economic, sexual power dynamics so seamlessly, almost with no forethought simply as one fact leads to another — like the very first page where she talks about her breasts and how they warp her spine.

I think Luster from the get go looks desire in the eye, no matter how deranged the prolonged eye contact makes the exchange. It just keeps looking and looking, and in that gaze at desire it somehow shows us that in the periphery is the one thing she won’t look at, which is loneliness/a profound alienation.

I wish I could do this book justice. It’s definitely not a fun read or for the faint hearted. But from start to finish it is relentless — in the way only some of the best voices are.