Category Archives: fiction reviews

Buckskin Cocaine, stories by Erika T. Wurth, reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker

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Buckskin Cocaine
by Erika T. Wurth
Astrophil Press, 111 pages

reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker

Sometimes we read fiction to escape, to experience the art of writing, or to lose ourselves in plot. Non-fiction is often imagined the territory of learning, absorbing direct information on a topic. We often forget that fiction still has this power, to take you somewhere real you’ve never been, to introduce you to people you might not have otherwise met. Fiction can convey social realities and erode the “otherness” of others. Sometimes even when we set out to read to escape, to read for fun, we are confronted with truths about our world. But of course, true art about the human experience never eludes the social and the political.

I find myself in this dual mindset with Erika T. Wurth’s recent collection of short stories, Buckskin Cocaine. This collection of eight different first-person-voiced stories covers a lot of terrain over 111 pages all the while exploring the distinctive world of “buckskin” filmmaking, a once exploitative Hollywood Western subgenre that nowadays signals a world of Native directors, actors, and film festivals. The story titles bear the names of the protagonists, among them “Barry Four Voices,” “Candy Francois,” “Gary Hollywood,” “Lucy Bigboca,” “Mark Wishewas,” and “Olivia James.” Buckskin Cocaine explores this particular corner of Native America and in doing so illuminates so many of the universal issues facing Native Americans. Wurth is particularly interested in themes of authenticity and compromise. She asks, Where lies creativity when Native filmmakers feel pigeonholed into only making Native films? Where lies integrity when non-Native filmmakers care only about stereotypes and revisionist history, but work is hard to come by for a Native actor and a paycheck is needed?

What makes this emotionally satisfying reading is how well the prose brings to life the various voices all within this same small world. George Bull is a director who makes Native films that show at buckskin film festivals. He constantly denies any social obligation to justice or fairness. Rather, he says he’s in it for the money (of course, how could that be true, his work speaks for his commitment to his people). There’s Lucy Bigboca, who boasts about how traditional she is and yet shouts in text-speak full of LOLs and LMAOs jolted by exclamation points. With all her boasting and shouting, she truly has a big boca.

Gary Hollywood’s voice is the most distant and distinct from the others’. He revels in the buckskin roles that let him be “so terrifying that it is utterly beautiful.” He says, “And I feel like someone should be proud. Look at me up there, my hair so black, my naked chest so brown, my eyes filled with stones. I look like a warrior. I dance, I sing, I fight. I am so beautiful in the dark.” These roles reconfirm for him that he was “born for blood” and make him feel connected to an aspect of his heritage. He speaks as if out of a dream and takes us through his childhood in Oklahoma and his time killing in the jungle (most likely Vietnam, though he never says), but now he drinks too much and regrets past acts that sound like domestic violence. He cherishes his dreams though, and the dreamy nature of acting.

Erika T. Wurth

The penultimate story is narrated by the book’s biggest wannabe, a scenester and hanger-on, who we feel for as he waits in the wings, always on hand, trying to impress the cool, connected people at the film festivals and hip watering holes. In a turn Joycean-Pynchonian, the character is named Mark Wishewas, and oh how he “wish he was” making real serious films with people like George Bull and Robert Two-Stories. For the reader, Wishewas is also a revealing critic of the Native film. At one point he laments that the buckskin films his fellow Natives direct are all about the past. He says, “I mean, Jesus, what about talking about how we are now? That’s what I was always thinking about when I was thinking about writing a short story collection though I never had time to write it. I mean, I work in a library and that takes up a lot of my time. Plus the writing world is completely full of crap. I’m totally done with it. At least film has an audience. Plus, the writers I meet are always total jerks.” His story is both sweet and tragic.

The final story is the longest, with the widest character arc and most complicated tricks of narrative-time-play. Olivia James is a ballet dancer with a life separate from most of the characters we’ve met before. She leaves her home and her father in Denver for a career in New York and ultimately Europe, experiencing success. After reading the other stories in the collection we understand a greater depth to her journey, the pressures, the temptations, and the politics. Her path might be separate from the others we have met but it shares themes of authenticity and identity. Olivia worries about retaining her heritage while also embracing a European art form. She wants to be seen as a dancer, not a Native American dancer, while still never losing who she is. We relate to her and feel for her as we watch her grow, but there is a tragic tone beneath the surface. We have met her before, an older version of herself, in George Bull’s story. She’s there at the Native American Film Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, aged out of dancing; she’s a teacher and academic, but in George’s eyes she’s another scenester, drinking, partying, rubbing elbows, part of this Native film world yet just as uncertain as to who she is as everybody else.

Buckskin Cocaine doesn’t build into a novel (there is no overarching plot) but through theme and connected characters, it gives way to a particular view of a much-hidden world. With its pettiness, infighting, beauty, inspiration, leaders, followers, wannabes, and has-beens the buckskin scene seems at first just like any other. Yet this is a kind of Hollywood illusion. Just beneath the surface, Wurth’s characters wrestle with dual and triple identities. A people who have survived a legacy of genocide and marginalization face obstacles from within and from outside their own communities, whether they choose to face them or not. Wurth’s point may be that the best film sets make it almost impossible to tell what is actually real.

Jordan A. Rothacker is a poet, essayist, and novelist who lives in Athens, GA where he received an MA in Religion and a PhD in Comparative Literature. His books are The Pit, and No Other Stories (Black Hill Press, 2015), And Wind Will Wash Away (Deeds, 2016), and the meta-text My Shadow Book by Maawaam (Spaceboy Books, 2017).

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AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE, a novel by Tayari Jones, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

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AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE
by Tayari Jones
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 306 pages

reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

Do Roy and Celestial have an ordinary American marriage? The title of Tayari Jones’ fourth novel implies that perhaps they do in fact have a quintessential American life, and in many ways they do…

Roy and Celestial are newlyweds. He grew up in Louisiana, to a blue-collar family. He worked hard, studied harder, earned his way into Morehouse College in Georgia, and went on to become a business executive. She, a talented visionary born and raised in the Peach State, grew up in a comfortable family. She excelled at a neighboring liberal arts college for women and now makes her income as a successful artisan. Together, they exemplify the Dream–thriving and very much in love. Early on, Jones paints a picture for the reader, through Roy:

…we kissed like teenagers, making out under the bridge. It was a wonderful feeling to be grown and yet young. To be married but not settled. To be tied down yet free.

About a year after their wedding day, the couple decides to drive across the South to visit Roy’s family in Louisiana. In the dead of night, a horde of rapacious police officers charge through their motel room door, drag Roy outside, and violently arrest him for a heinous crime that he did not commit. Despite the lack of any concrete evidence, the court finds him guilty and sentences him to twelve years in prison—largely because the judge and jury choose to believe the testimony of Roy’s white accuser over Roy, a black man. Wanton declarations of guilt such as this are not mere fiction. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men will be locked up in their lifetime—and receive ten percent longer sentences than white defendants for the same charge.

Tayari Jones

Up to the point of his conviction, Jones tells the story in a standard prose form, with Celestial and Roy taking turns as narrator with each new chapter. Once Roy is wrongfully incarcerated and sent to prison, the form shifts into an epistolary style: The two protagonists continue to alternate as storyteller via handwritten letters that illustrate, in vivid and frank detail, their pain as they combat their mutual and separate tribulations. This letter-writing technique, on Jones’ part, works to incarnate the distance growing between husband and wife throughout their forced estrangement. In an especially tender letter, Celestial confesses, “just because I’m not in the same agony as you are, I’m in pain,” and then, “marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life.” And after a considerable amount of time, Roy writes back: “Everything I do is a love letter addressed to you.” But as the days go on, the time between correspondences grows and the letters themselves shrink.

Imprisonment, in the story as well as in real life, takes an emotional and fiscal toll on everyone close to the matter, not just on the persons behind the bars. Over time, Celestial and Roy’s once-picturesque union slowly crumbles. She, “the kind of woman who will never belong to anyone,” finds herself adrift, robbed of her marital bliss—they had been preparing to put down roots and begin a family prior to his unlawful arrest. And while he combats the penal system from the inside, she must fight her own punitive battles on the outside. She struggles to stay afloat spiritually and financially on her own, as countless women of color throughout history have and continue to do. But as months become years, times get really tough and Celestial discovers a place of solace in the company of her longtime friend Andre, who had been Roy’s best man at their wedding.

Five years into his sentence, Roy’s conviction gets overturned, and as soon as his “hostage of the state” era ends, the letters cease, and the novel returns to its initial form. Roy and Celestial, still legally wed, pass the narrative baton back and forth as he tries to reclaim his life. But a third first-person point of view enters the picture and stays for the remainder of the story: Andre, now more than just a friend, offers his perspective and cements his impact on the titular marriage.

Tayari Jones calls An American Marriage “a love story.” And it is. Roy and Celestial’s love for one another is continually tried and warped by a broken justice system that values white lives—and dooms black lives at an exponential rate. Throughout the story, their love takes on different shapes, but never withers, as it faces its own trial and struggles through its own internment period—while refusing to give in. In a sense, Celestial and Roy’s love, represented by the resoluteness of their marriage, is a character unto itself—a character tested not only by Roy’s unjust incarceration but also by Celestial’s budding feelings for Andre.

An American Marriage is not a novel about who really committed the crime that sent Roy away. It never even for a second moves it in that direction because that doesn’t matter; that is the theme of another book—a safer book. An American Marriage is about our twisted judicial system that unremittingly turns “standard-issue American Negro” men like Roy into “a victim of America”—and how those two concepts are all too often one and the same.

So do Roy and Celestial have an ordinary American marriage? Well, according to Jones herself, “it depends on who you ask.” Of course, not all couples are ripped apart so ruthlessly, no, but, for a lot of folks of color, the potential for it to happen is always present, since we live in a society of skewed courtrooms and a prison-industrial complex that views black convicts as easy wins and dollars. So, in a very brutal sense…yes, Roy and Celestial do have an ordinary (black) American marriage.

Brandon Stanwyck studied film, literature, and theatre at Cleveland State University. While there, he led a student-run theatre company. He currently lives in Ohio, where he divides his time between working on independent movies and writing fiction. His words have appeared in The Fiction Pool, Corvus Review, and elsewhere. Twitter: @BrandonStanwyck.

MIRROR, SHOULDER, SIGNAL, a novel by Dorthe Nors, reviewed by Brendan McCourt

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MIRROR, SHOULDER, SIGNAL
by Dorthe Nors
translated by Misha Hoekstra
Pushkin Press, 188 pages

reviewed by Brendan McCourt

Although I am not a middle-aged Danish woman who translates Swedish crime novels known for their graphic mutilation of women and who in her spare time flees from nature retreats to eat cake and sit in the rain, I relate to Sonja, the protagonist of Dorthe Nors’s 2017 Man Booker International Prize shortlisted novel. Unassuming, if spiritually and sometimes even physically lost, Sonja can’t drive, let alone shift gears for herself, and her sister won’t answer her calls.

Such is Sonja’s state at the beginning of the novel. Cooped up in a small car with her driving instructor, Jytte, an often coarse and unapologetically racist woman from Jutland, Sonja narrowly dodges bicyclists, Jytte’s chronic insults, and—in a scene that brims with comedic angst—a hot dog vendor. It is Jytte who shifts gears for Sonja, an act that becomes the novel’s main metaphor for Sonja’s inability to move forward in her life. This opening chapter ends, like most of the chapters do, with Sonja’s reflections on the moment. Here, Sonja blocks out Jytte’s confrontation with a delivery van in the middle of an intersection to reflect on a brief yet poetic moment of clarity when she looks out her window to see a graveyard: “Sonja thinks about the dead prime ministers in the cemetery. It’s lovely to take a blanket there. […] The dead make no noise, and if she’s lucky a bird of prey might soar overhead. Then she’ll lie there, and escape.”

Fiction, like an automobile, is a mode of transportation. It allows one to traverse landscapes of the mind, escape into other spaces, other minds, where even the most fantastical elements pang with a sense of familiarity. Opening a cover is like opening a car door, turning a page like turning the key: escape is imminent. It is a metaphor which extends to life itself, where fiction is as much an exploration of life as it is an escape from it, and Sonja finds herself struggling with acquiring the means to move forward in life, the means which inevitably entail her to leave something meaningful behind.

One’s ability to escape, this novel proposes, is limited if you can’t drive. Like others who got a late start to driving, I share in Sonja’s sense of enclosure induced by the inability to drive. And what’s more, I always felt the freedom afforded to those who can drive comes at a cost of empathy. On occasion I have seen well-meaning, levelheaded people become angry misanthropes in the blink of an eye (or is it signal?). Behind the wheel of a car, a person becomes susceptible to easy rage, and Nors’s Jytte seems to confirm this suspicion.

As a child growing up in the farmlands of Denmark, Sonja was able to escape her reality by hiding in a little enclosure she made for herself in a rye field. But in the din and clamor that is Copenhagen, there are no rye fields, and Sonja must adapt. Here we see Sonja retreat into the inner recesses of her mind, finding intellectual solace when a physical form can’t be found. Nors’s prose braids past and present, interior and exterior action to mimic the turmoil embedded in Sonja. In a scene toward the end of the novel, Sonja has dumped Jytte for Folke, the head driving instructor himself, and confrontation with Jytte ensues. Sonja rebukes Jytte’s accusations of betrayal by returning to an imaginative heather filled with whooper swans and deer, her substitute for the rye field of her childhood. Then, after leaving the confrontation without a single goodbye—“Not saying goodbye,” we are told, “isn’t something Sonja learned at home”—she walks away into the streets of Copenhagen and back into her heather.

Dorthe Nors

None of this is new territory for Nors who, in addition to six book-length works of fiction, holds the accolade of the first Danish writer published by the New Yorker. She is certainly in company with the greats of Continental literature—Kafka, Beckett, Kundera—for the dark humor woven into the fabric of her fiction. In an interview with The Paris Review’s Dwyer Murphy, Nors comments on this aspect within her short story collection Karate Chop, which extends itself across her oeuvre, as “Danish irony.” “We don’t like to read a book,” Nors says, “about how bleedingly easy things are. We like the complicated stuff.”

In a novel that doesn’t extend itself beyond daily life, “the complicated stuff” entails menial tasks, chance encounters, and, most importantly, interpersonal relationships. Sonja’s relationship with her sister Kate haunts most of the novel. Multiple times Sonja writes to her sister, either on postcards or computer paper, but never bothers to send the letters: her thoughts are scattered and insubstantial, and her inability to communicate honestly is disrupted by thoughts of an old boyfriend, Bacon Bjarne. When she calls, Kate either hands off the phone to her husband or makes the excuse that she is in line at the supermarket. Sonja knows her lie, but lets it go.

Above all else, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal is a novelist’s novel. Literary-minded readers will revel in the novel’s allegorical framework extending anywhere from cautionary tale to failed bildungsroman to a metaphor of novel reading itself. For example, early in the novel Sonja is getting a message from her friend Ellen in Ellen’s apartment and, in an almost Cartesian meditation, Sonja ruminates:

There’s something in Ellen’s way of parsing other people’s bodies that reminds her of her university classes in textual analysis. Everything’s supposed to mean something else, everything’s supposed to be rising, tearing itself free of its wrappings, climbing up to some higher meaning; it’s supposed to get away from where it’s been. Reality will not suffice.

Mirror, Shoulder, Signal attempts to rectify this observation by showing that, while transcendent meaning is possible in reality, the meaning we get is often fractured, unfulfilling. In this way, Sonja transmutes quotidian minutiae into an absurdist metaphor with a decidedly Danish twist. But it’s all Sonja has, and in fact, reality will have to suffice.

Brendan McCourt is a student of English and Philosophy at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania. A Philadelphia native, Brendan primarily writes in short forms, including poetry, flash fiction, and prose poetry. Brendan is also the editor-in-chief for his university’s undergraduate literary magazine Quiddity.

HER BODIES AND OTHER PARTIES, stories by Carmen Maria Machado, reviewed by Rosie Huf

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HER BODIES AND OTHER PARTIES
by Carmen Maria Machado
Graywolf Press, 245 pages
reviewed by Rosie Huf

For those of us still traumatized by the 2016 Presidential election, the debut novel Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado, is the emotional and intellectual release for which we have been waiting. It is electric with the #Resist spirit. It underscores the importance of the #MeToo movement. And, it tackles issues such as gender, language, and human interaction through a fresh, folkloric perspective. Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize and finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, the Kirkus Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, this collection of ten short stories is timeless, yet also a necessary way to transition from 2017 to 2018.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in fiction, and current Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, Carmen Maria Machado has a deft hand at spinning culturally relative, purpose-driven narrative. Into each short story she’s woven elements of pop culture, feminist social criticism, literary fiction, and magical realism, varying each in measure. Threads of influence from authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, even a little Andrea Dworkin strengthen Machado’s overarching theme, which is a clear call for renewed efforts toward female liberation: Liberation for women to genuinely desire and enjoy sexual gratification without fear or stigma; liberation to be an individual with thoughts and actions and intimate moments separate from her spouse or lover; and liberation to exist creatively outside the stereotypical confines of the male perspective.

Three stories in particular exemplify Machado’s literary skill as well as her commitment to furthering discussion on feminist and social issues: “The Husband Stitch,” “Especially Heinous,” and “Real Women Have Bodies.”

“The Husband Stitch” paints the portrait of a woman whose head is being held to her body by the grace of a single green ribbon. She is nameless and frequently recounts folktales she heard as a girl that run parallel to her own life’s journey. The paradox of her situation is that although she fulfills every wifely duty expected of her by her husband, society, and cultural tradition—from performing as the insatiable, sexual nymph most men desire to bearing a son her body could barely hold—it is still not enough for him. Everything that belongs to her belongs to him.

That night, after my son is in bed, my husband reaches his hand across the couch and slides it up my leg.

“Come to me,” he says, and I twinge with pleasure. I slide off the couch, smoothing my skirt very prettily as I shuffle over to him on my knees. I kiss his leg, running my hand up to his belt, tugging him from his bonds before swallowing him whole. He runs his hands through my hair, stroking my head, groaning and pressing into me. And I don’t realize that his hand is sliding down the back of my neck until he is trying to loop his fingers through the ribbon. I gasp and pull away quickly, falling back and frantically checking my bow […]

He is silent for a long minute, then “A wife should have no secrets.”

My nose grows hot. I do not want to cry. “I’ve given you everything you have ever asked for,” I say. “Am I not allowed this one thing?”

For him to feel loved, as if she is truly bound to him, he must possess all aspects of her being. This is the tale told by grandmothers to granddaughters over boiling pots in a kitchen: beware of people who take pleasure in the complete consumption of others.

In “Especially Heinous,” basically a collection within a collection, Machado has strategically crafted micro-narratives from the ascending episode titles of Law and Order: SUV. There is one story for every episode of SUV’s first twelve seasons. This piece is laden with pop-culture allusions and nods to feminist theory. It is particularly reminiscent, tangentially, of Dworkin’s essay, “I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape.” In truth, many parts of this collection seem like a nod to Dworkin’s essay. Machado describes the episode “Vulnerable”:

For three days in a row, there is not a single victim in the entire precinct. No rapes. No murders. No kidnappings. No child pornography made, bought, or sold. No molestations. No sexual assaults. No sexual harassments. No forced prostitution. No human trafficking. No subway gropings. No incest. No indecent exposures. No stalking. Not even an unwanted dirty phone call. Then, in the gloaming of a Wednesday, a man wolf-whistles at a woman on her way to an AA meeting. The whole city releases its long-held breath, and everything returns to normal.

And then, describing the episode “Screwed”:

The DA calls in sick, again. “The sixty-fifth story,” Benson whispers into her ear, “is about a world that watches you and me and everyone. Watches our suffering like it’s a game. Can’t stop. Can’t tear themselves away. If they could stop, we could stop, but they won’t, so we can’t.”

The story speaks to the thesis that were viewers not consumed with violent content, not conditioned to accept violence and aggression as bi-products of humanity’s existence, we would possibly have a better chance at eradicating rape, murder, human trafficking, etc. We should be cognizant, Machado warns through her micro-narratives, of our actions, or lack thereof, which cultivate and sustain the suffering of others.

Later in the collection, with visions of disappearing women, “Real Women have Bodies” touches on the detrimental effects of miseducation on female existence.

Carmen Maria Machado

The narrator, again nameless, works at Glam, a special occasion dress shop owned by an older woman named Gizzy. The store sells all types gowns, ranging in price and design, but the most popular ones come with a secret. Folded into the fabric of highly sought after dresses, unseen by the unobservant patrons, are remains of the disappearing women. “The women started showing up a few years ago—they just fold themselves into the needlework, like it was what they wanted,” Petra, the daughter of the seamstress tells Machado’s narrator.

The narrator asks, “Did you try to tell Gizzy?”

To which Petra responds, “Of Course. But she said that as long as they sought us out, it was all right. And those dresses do so well—they sell more than any my mother has ever made before. It’s like people want them like that, even if they don’t realize it.”

While later contemplating the problem of these disappearing women, the narrator watches a mother admonish her young daughter for wanting a pretzel because “Pretzels are junk food. They will make you fat.” Another night she watches the evening news, where “pundits point fingers at each other, screaming as the cohost between them shimmers and wavers under studio lights. They are talking about how [they] can’t trust faded women […then] the woman blinks away mid-broadcast, a microphone tumbling to the floor. The camera scrambles to look away.” By the end of this story, the narrator concludes, “None of us will make it to the end.”

Outside the pages of this collection, young girls, well under the age of 18, take to the internet daily asking strangers to rank their hotness. Teens commit suicide because of shaming. The fashion industry Photoshops models and suffocates readers with unattainable beauty standards; they propagate mindsets that excuse fatal eating habits. And powerful men silence women because our voices are not conducive to their happy endings. Fiction mirrors reality, and this piece of fiction questions, “What are we doing to our women?”

Through ten separate yet tangentially themed stories, Machado’s female protagonists struggle to fill internal voids that inevitably lead to their self-destruction. By the end of each piece, the reader is left questioning to what extent the narrator lives by her own sense of agency; and, to what extent is she merely acting in reaction to the experiences put upon her by family, friends, acquaintances, and social expectation.

Over the course of several centuries, women have been speaking plainly and boldly about the treatment of their gender by society. Yet even through the clearest, most succinct rhetoric, their points were only half heard. So Carmen Maria Machado has, it would seem, chosen to continue their efforts via a more inventive, striking method of narrative. Her Body and Other Parties leaves readers raw from self-reflection and spikes of unexpected but due emotion. Yet it is a relief to respond so sharply to Machado’s collection, rather than misguided presidential tweets, or discussions of our failing, democratic system.

Rosie-Huf-200Rosie Huf is the Senior Editor of Cleaver Magazine’s Life As Activism feature and manages the Editors’ Blog. Recently, she received her Master of Liberal Studies degree from Arizona State University, the concentration in Nonfiction and Publishing. She has had several interviews published in Superstition Review and has a forthcoming nonfiction piece in Sundog Lit.

SCHLUMP, a novel by Hans Herbert Grimm, reviewed by Kelly Doyle

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SCHLUMP
by Hans Herbert Grimm
translated by Jamie Bulloch
NYRB, 263 pages

reviewed by Kelly Doyle

When Hans Herbert Grimm’s semi-autobiographical novel Schlump was published in 1928 alongside All Quiet on the Western Front, it was advertised as a “truthful depiction” of World War I. It is no surprise that Grimm took on the the pseudonym Schlump, just as his protagonist does, to hide his identity. As explained by Volker Weidermann in the afterward, Grimm “describe[s] the German soldiers of the Great War as less than heroic,” and “the entire war as a cruel, bad joke.” While this caused the Nazis to burn his book in 1933, today it gives the text, translated by Jamie Bulloch, a feeling of authenticity.

The novel opens in Germany to a sixteen-year-old troublemaker, Emil Schulz also known as Schlump, who can “think of nothing but girls and the war.” It is 1915 and, picturing himself in a flashy military uniform, he defies his parents and volunteers to join the German army in WWI for nothing more than honor and sex. His romanticised idea of war is strikingly unrealistic; Grimm describes it like a painting, without the sounds and smells and feelings of real war. He imagines that as soldiers they will “lean on the muzzles of their rifles, dreaming of home and being reunited with loved ones. In the morning they’[ll] break camp and march singing into battle, where some [will] fall and others [will] be wounded. Eventually, the war [will] be won and they’[ll] return home victorious. Girls [will] throw flowers from windows and the celebrations [will] never end.” He does not delve into the true meaning of his commitment or the gravity of his sacrifice. The novel follows Schlump’s time in the army, but is interspersed with other stories, which take the form of long monologues by an array of characters. The stories are scattered, leaving the reader with not much to grasp onto except a flurry of people and places and ideas, with occasional moments of powerful emotion and dark humor.

Schlump is first stationed in a French town where he receives the respect and female attention he desires. It is hard not to be struck negatively by the depictions of women in the novel. Grimm sets the tone with the very first description of Schlump’s mother at the start of the novel. “When her tiny breasts began to swell beneath her blouse and she realized that she was a girl, she stayed quietly at home, dreaming of pretty clothes and beautiful shoes,” he writes. “Back then all the boys would give anything to get a good gawp at her.” In France, Schlump’s romantic hopes for women and war, modeled after this standard, come to be. Everything seems to go just as he imagined and his innocence remains precariously intact. He meets countless caregiving women who jump at the opportunity to feed him, sleep with him, and ask for nothing in return. He never considers his cause or his nationality or that he is in a position of authority over the women who give themselves to him. The sounds of cannons in the distance are adopted as part of the landscape. While Schlump does not think about death or danger, the reader can feel them looming in the distance, highlighted by his exaggerated naivete. When Schlump is finally sent to the front lines, he is entirely unprepared and his transition into adulthood occurs in a matter of moments. “It was as if he’d awoken from a deep sleep; for the first time in his life he was thinking seriously about himself and the world.”

Hans Herbert Grimm

Grimm’s narration of the story produces an odd sort of disconnect. In close third person, sometimes the reader receives great insight into Schlump’s thoughts, but other times none at all. Perhaps Schlump himself could not even narrate his own feelings amid the barbarity of the front line. His outward emotional state varies between utter boredom, long days filled with dirt, lice, and aching feet, and extreme highs of adrenaline that cause him to laugh and howl on the battlefield like a madman. He never dwells long on the suffering and death of others and describes these atrocities matter of factly, but his compassion is revealed through his dreams of fallen comrades happy and in love.

Eventually, Schlump begins to think that the only way that the war can become what he imagined, the only way that he can overcome the military hierarchy and achieve the respect that is denied footsoldiers, is by becoming a hero. He waits for an opportunity to act heroically and, after a long time, one presents itself. The narrator explains that, retreating from an attack on the other side, a “young fellow, became stuck in the barbed wire” outside of the trenches “and couldn’t go forwards or backwards.” The boy is shot and injured gruesomely. Schlump, in the hopes of becoming a hero, runs into the open, “untangle[s] the boy…and carrie[s] him in such a way as to shield him from enemy fire.” By the time Schlump returns to the trenches with his burden, the boy is dead. This signifies the beginning of Schlump’s true change. Not only is he aware of the danger of war, but he is aware of his own position within it. He realizes that there is no honor to be had for him. This is soon followed by another realization. “We’ve lost the war,” he says. There is nothing glamorous or beautiful about nitty-gritty, day to day war, only the romanticised broader story that incorporates a cause. Grimm uses this contrast to meditate on the differences between an individual’s war and a nation’s.

“Are you trying to tell me the individual counts for anything?” asks one particularly interesting character, another soldier who Schlump refers to as “the philosopher.” “The individual is nothing,” the philosopher says, “he has no intrinsic value, he is just part of a much larger totality, a nation. The individual has no soul, but a nation does. And the individual only has value when he is of use to his people […] Indeed, it would be better if we forgot the names of these men altogether.” The reader does, in fact, begin to forget Schlump’s true name, Emil. And, amid the constant cameos of one character after another, it becomes hard to remember anyone’s name. Even the author was nameless at the time of publication. The war on this micro level is confusing and chaotic, nothing like the macro level story commonly told that Schlump himself had once believed. But the characters who remain at home and out of the trenches remind the reader that these individual tragedies are significant and far-reaching.

A young woman, Johanna, makes this clear when she writes to Schlump from the homefront. “You’ll wonder who is writing you this letter, and yet you know who I am, because it’s me you kissed beneath the chestnut trees when the war broke out,” she writes. “You said you’d dance with me in the Reichsadler, but you didn’t come. But I haven’t been able to forget you.” Poor Joanna is tormented by the thought of her beloved in war. “I’ve had no peace,” she writes. “You can do what you want, just let me know you’re alive.” The words of mourning from Johanna, Schlump, and all the other soldiers he meets along the way solidify the philosopher’s theory as insane. It proves to be an unsustainable mentality. No one can truly adopt the perspective of the nation without completely losing the sense of himself.

Wars are often reported as if there is one winner and one loser. Each battle is a single event, each loss, a single loss. But when put under a microscope, as Grimm does, it becomes clear that a war produces thousands of personal tragedies on both sides. Perhaps that is why Grimm wrote the novel as a patchwork of random lives, tiny story after tiny story, beginning each portrait before abruptly moving on to the next, simply to overwhelm the reader with the sheer scale of lives interrupted. From this outlook, Schlump’s moments of humor and optimism and his uncanny ability to survive make him a hero in a way he never anticipated simply by providing the story that rarely exists, even in newspaper reports.

Kelly Doyle studies English, creative writing, and psychology at Emory University. Her fiction has appeared in Firewords Quarterly, Stories Through the Ages College Edition, and others. She is the editor-in-chief of Emory’s literary magazine, Alloy, and she works in a developmental memory lab on campus. She loves to read and travel, and she plans to pursue a career in writing.

A WORKING WOMAN, a novel by Elvira Navarro, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

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A WORKING WOMAN
by Elvira Navarro
translated by Christina MacSweeney
Two Lines Press, 189 pages

reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

“She wanted […] the location of her madness to be now the location of her art.”

This is how the narrator of The Working Woman analyzes her roommate, but the same can be said of the narrator herself, and perhaps as well of the only figure in this postmodernist novel who actually “speaks:” the author, Elvira Navarro. The text becomes the conjunction of madness and art, which share one abstract and yet delineated “location,” madness needing expression through art, or art uniquely poised to express madness.

I may have gotten ahead of myself; I haven’t introduced the novel properly. The work itself forfeits any loyalty to structure or linearity in favor of a narrative that prioritizes aesthetic backways and internality. It is a quiet, decisively not flashy postmodernist masterpiece, a book packed with subtlety and originality that still manages to give insight into contemporary society.

Navarro has received various honors in Spain and around the world, including the IV Premia Tormenta for best new author and inclusion on Granta’s list of the 22 best writers in the Spanish language under 35-years-old. She is praised both for her original, avant-garde writing style and her dealing with important issues in contemporary Spain. In fact, her mixing of the two distinguishes her and makes this novel such a multi-faceted pleasure.

Elvira Navarro

There is a sense in which postmodernism is associated with the deconstruction of fixed meaning, the absence of a recognizable truth. Although Navarro’s writing style certainly embraces this element, the topics she explores also craft a narrative of structural problems—job insecurity, mental health, the abandonment of urban peripheries—that need to be addressed. Navarro’s Madrid, a crucial presence in the novel, is a city of many cities formed internally and externally by each person’s experience, an apt metaphor then for the possibility of deconstructing what seems stable while not denying the presence of a certain overriding construct(ion) we must all live with.

In this case, the translator of the novel, Christina MacSweeney, also deserves praise. The English version of this precious novel flows easily and is packed with such original, creative, and insightful uses of language; I can hardly imagine the Spanish version being superior. Here is just one example of the informal, poetic, and pleasantly surprising prose that never falls into cliché or background noise:

Neither had I taken my medication, and that did matter, although not enough for me to abandon my observation post over the wasteland where pale yellow hedge mustard grew in spring, and which allowed me a Tetris-scale view of the Palacio Real, the ugly Almudena Cathedral, the dome of the Basílica San Francisco el Grande, the Moncloa transmission tower with its restaurant that no one patronized on the observation deck, the unimpressive buildings of the University City. I went on unconsciously interrogating the cityscape, just as it manifested itself to me from the balcony in some way that was impossible to gauge. From there everything fit in the palm of my hand, extended toward an illusory sky.

The book’s plot is, however, harder to trace. Navarro divides her story into three uneven parts, each written from a slightly different perspective, though all three are also literally “written” by the same narrator: Elisa Nuñez, a young writer in Madrid barely scraping by financially as an independent contractor in a publishing company. Her sharing of initials with Navarro is a sneaky move revealed halfway through the novel the single time her full name appears. This not wholly original maneuver only increases the desire to see the entire book as a smokescreen for Navarro’s exploration of herself, the ultimate postmodernist gesture the narrator Elisa admits to doing as a way of achieving catharsis. But it also reminds us of the futility of these conjectures; while Navarro may purposefully be trying to lead us to think about her backstage role with this use of initials and narrative framing, as readers we can see only the text and not the person beneath it (and Barthes has already told us we shouldn’t care about the author anyway). Thus we are left with a text that proudly asserts its rejection of fact or knowledge—a “flimsy construction,” Elisa announces—and an embrace of madness.

The first part of the book is told from the perspective of Elisa’s roommate, Susana, though it becomes clear during the second part that in actuality Elisa has written it based on stories Susana had told her about her old life in Madrid, specifically, about the time when she focused her “desire [on] finding someone to suck [her] pussy while [she] was having [her] period,” and ended up having as lover a dwarf called Fabio with exceptional olfactory powers. Occasional italic segments—Elisa’s reflections on Susana’s stories—interrupt the otherwise fluid, semi-stream of consciousness, first-person narrative. It all does sound a bit absurd. And the fact that Susana reveals she was taking various medications for mental illness increases the reader’s skepticism. Elisa also admits to her doubt in the italicized interruptions but ultimately she wonders why she shouldn’t just “accept [Susana] did whatever she liked with the story of her life, that she reinvented herself whatever way she felt sounded best?”

The second (and longest) part is from Elisa’s own perspective. She talks about her job insecurity, her long nocturnal walks through Madrid, her own struggles with mental health, and her relationship with and curiosity about Susana. Elisa’s story is not as absurd or as unbelievable as Susana’s, but it seems similarly difficult to trust the account of someone who, like Susana, is searching catharsis, and who does this not through constant reinvention but through writing. The third and final part, a mere three pages, is entirely set in a dialogue, and functions to cast a shadow of doubt over the last almost 200 pages. Writing, Navarro suggests in typical postmodern fashion, is an unreliable speech act often expressed, not to impart truth to a reader, but out of a writer’s own desire for structure and release. The reader, however, can take such a speech act and recast it for herself, as Elisa herself does with Susana’s speech act, which she rewrites with her interjections in the first part of the novel.

There were times while reading the text that I was reminded of écriture feminine, the idea, introduced in the 1970s largely by French feminists, that there is a certain stylistic quality that determines whether writing should be considered women’s writing, i.e. the gender of the author is irrelevant. James Joyce, for instance, is often given as an example of écriture feminine. This women’s writing is characterized by an opposition to traditional plot structures and linear narratives, which are seen as representing hegemony and patriarchy. It involves tying “femaleness” with “otherness” in our patriarchal culture; so that writing that is proudly “other” becomes a way of inscribing the female onto language—this includes writing focused on interiority, stream-of-consciousness, illogical narratives. A Working Woman seems often to fit the paradigm of écriture feminine, with its rejection of literature as a way of gaining that flimsy construction that is knowledge, its meandering narrative voice. The novel, however, produces two ways in which to understand that term: there is its avant-garde, “other” writing style, but there is also the fact that it is a female-populated novel, written by a female writer and about a female writer and her roommate, who also deals with the stresses of life through art (in her case, miniature reorganized maps of cities). It is also about madness; Susana’s desire for oral sex on her period and during the full moon seems a nod to the kind of metaphors that adorn descriptions of écriture feminine as lunar, tapping into feminine hysteria and madness. Yet the novel is not so simple as a display of écriture feminine and female craziness. Writing becomes also a way to structure life and improve mental health; art more generally becomes a way to order and curb unwanted madness.

The need for some kind of structure to heal and deal with life is necessary because of the very real topics the novel discusses. The structure of the narration is not taken as an excuse to deal exclusively with interiority and characterization at the expense of making social points. Primarily, what she portrays are the difficulties of a demographic that is not, by far, one in dire distress—her two protagonists are Western and relatively privileged. Yet what she depicts is also a reality that is increasing in Spain and in other Western countries: the loss of security that comes when young people leave the relative security of family or education and enter the job market. In a certain sense Navarro is taking issue with the very structure of Western society—neoliberalism—although in a subtle roundabout way. The book’s title in Spanish is La Trabajadora, which translates to “The Working Woman,” but the word is more essential than that. “La trabajadora” is like a feminized version of “worker,” so the emphasis is more squarely on an entity defined by being a worker. The irony is apparent; although often the worth of someone in Western societies is determined in part by their job, jobs themselves are slipping away, people going, like Elisa, from part-time to independent contractor, to eventually, perhaps, unemployment. This is not just a stressful period of youth—as the novel shows through Susana, who is in roughly the same position as Elisa but about twenty years older, financial insecurity is becoming more and more of a permanent state-of-being, even among those who started off privileged. Mental health seems inextricably bound with this mode of existence. The idea, as some suppose, that mental health can be extricated from social and economic causes and blamed simply on genetics becomes an excuse not to deal with those problems.

The setting here—and simultaneously a focus of the novel—is the sprawling city of Madrid, but not the Madrid of the Prado or the Royal Palace, which appears only in the distance: this is a Madrid of back-alleys and endless peripheries. It is no surprise that Navarro herself ran a blog called Madrid is periphery. In one way this is a continuation of Navarro’s preoccupation with insecurity and instability of contemporary life: she sets her novel on the fringe. Elisa, appropriately, is a walker. She enjoys walking through these peripheries, observing abandonment or the sneaking of a fat cat that indicates a squat among the ruin. She walks almost every night, searching for squats and signs “to confirm [her] theory of the existence of another city.” But perhaps Elisa is overthinking it: there are plenty of clues in the novel to suggest that the city is hardly a uniform entity, that each person’s experience of it—each person’s journey through it by bus and foot and metro—creates a different version of it. Would it be too much to say that there are as many Madrids as there are people in Madrid? In “Walking in the City,” a chapter in The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau compares walking to a speech act that “speaks” the city into being. Cities become, therefore, a series of discourses in which different citizens take part. Susana seems to intuit something of this kind with her devotion to miniature clippings. She sits in her room or the living room cutting out all the shapes—trees, cars, buildings—from maps of Madrid until only the street grid is left. She wants “to relocate the buildings. Her aim [is] for the map to be just the same in terms of structure, but with all the various elements transposed.”

Of course, the city is also a deep and recurring metaphor for the psyche. Elisa and Susana live in the peripheries of Madrid and they also have to wrestle with the peripheries of their own minds, their repressed desires and fears, the parts of them that are falling apart. Elisa, like Madrid, may not be one consistent uniform entity either: she writes from Susana’s perspective, she writes from her own, she feels a kinship to Susana, she wants her out. There is certainly an underlying structure to all her moods—even she admits the “similarity between [her] voice […] and Susana’s” when she writes from Susana’s perspective—and yet the complexities of the mind, like those of the city, seem to shrug away from a simple bounded characterization like that found in canonical literature.

But this all speaks to the beauty of the novel—writing, walking, these become ways to organize and come to terms with oneself and the world around one. Art and exploration become not simple cures to madness but ways to make that madness productive, ways to channel it for beauty and surprise, for healing.

Melanie-ErspamerMelanie Erspamer studies English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She is half-Italian and half-American and has lived most of her life near Boston. Her work has been published in The Purple Breakfast Review, Nomad Magazine and Unknown Magazine, and her one-act play was performed at the University of Edinburgh. With her sister, she also has been running an anonymous literary magazine based in bathroom stalls, called Bathruminations.

 

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DAUGHTERS OF THE AIR, a novel by Anca L. Szilágyi, reviewed by Leena Soman

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DAUGHTERS OF THE AIR
by Anca L. Szilágyi
Lanternfish Press, 184 pages

reviewed by Leena Soman

Tatiana is supposed to spend the summer before her junior year in high school in Vermont with her only friend while her mother summers in Rome. Instead, she hitches a ride from her boarding school’s Connecticut campus to Brooklyn. It’s 1980, and Tatiana renames herself Pluta, an alter ego she has long cultivated to meet the demands of this adventure. So begins Anca L. Szilágyi’s debut novel Daughters of the Air.

It’s worth pausing a moment to admire the book’s unique cover. Szilágyi selected an image by artist Nichole Dement who is interested in contemporary myth, a fitting synergy with the author. The image, called Bird Moon, is one of several haunting pieces in the artist’s Oracle series, and the frenzy of human form and nature in muted tones is nothing short of striking. This beautiful cover art demonstrates a thoughtfulness and sophistication that carries through to the story.

The book’s chapters alternate between Pluta’s present circumstances as a runaway in New York, and the previous two years leading to her arrival in the United States from Argentina. In 1978, Pluta’s father, Daniel, a sociology professor in Buenos Aires, leaves for work at the university and never returns. Many novelists, Argentine and otherwise, have revisited this awful period of recent history known as the Dirty War. Szilágyi, whose family arrived in the United States as immigrants and refugees from Romania, began developing the novel when she noticed some alarming similarities between the rhetoric of the U.S.’s War on Terror in the early 2000s and Argentina’s Dirty War. She doesn’t investigate the specific political movements and cultural complexities in Argentina during that era as much as she homes in on Pluta’s coming of age in the context of this turmoil and the personal isolation that can result from ceaseless questions that defy answers.

Pluta’s mother, Isabel, tries to find her husband, but it is relatively soon after the guerrillas have been defeated and the worst of state repression has begun. To ask too many questions, to publicly make too much of what has happened, would be unwise. Isabel and Pluta flee to Isabel’s estranged older sister, Lolo, who lives in Manaus, Brazil, and then to the United States, where Pluta will attend boarding school. But her father’s disappearance weighs on her, and after two years without solace, she decides to start a new life with a new identity. Szilágyi writes,

Now there was only the specter of that other certainty. Not yet proven but lurking, a lugubrious hobglobin crouching heavy and low upon her insides, seeping dark juices, ready at any moment to spring: he wasn’t ever coming back […] There could be anywhere. There was away. She needed there; here was closed in, too falsely safe, too hiding of truth. For now, there was New York, sprawling and alive, big as Buenos Aires—bigger—a place to run and burst and be, unenclosed.

In Pluta, Szilágyi has created a character with ample charisma and contradiction to carry the story. She is naïve, thoughtful, and daring. While we have access to her internal landscape through rich, lyrical description of what she’s thinking and feeling, she is active, constantly on the move, and her actions, as she wanders Gowanus mostly, often have consequences she can’t anticipate. Though bright, Pluta isn’t endowed with trope-like precociousness, which is refreshing. “‘What’s that?’” Pluta asks when her ride into the city tells her he’s an entrepreneur. Szilágyi writes, “She knew the word, but sometimes she liked to play dumb; it seemed like a tricky thing to do. Some people liked to explain things. This saved her from talking. Her father liked to explain things, but he wouldn’t have liked her to play dumb.” This moment, like so many others, perfectly establishes her intelligence and inexperience, as well as the degree to which her father’s absence is fully present in her life.

Anca L. Szilágyi

In telling this story, Szilágyi grapples with the challenge of dramatizing loneliness. Pluta and Isabel spend a great deal of time alone. For most of the novel, they are in exile, and Szilágyi has to reconcile presenting the unspeakable pain of this experience with the literary craft of creating dramatic tension between and among characters. Pluta had been closer to her father and, even before his disappearance Isabel struggled to connect with her awkward, moody daughter. Once he’s gone, mother and daughter each cope with Daniel’s vanishing in isolation. Pluta’s aunt Lolo is the novel’s most compelling character, and the story is at its most stirring when Isabel and Pluta are with her, partly because the characters’ interactions reverberate with tension and conflict. Lolo is eleven years older than Isabel and her foil, a warm, maternal presence. She communes with the spirit world, especially her dead husband, forty-four years her senior and many decades gone. Isabel, conservative and preoccupied with appearances, disdains her sister’s eccentricity, but cannot deny Lolo’s affection for her daughter. With the rich family history Szilágyi has developed for her characters, and her nuanced rendering of varied communities across Argentina and Brazil, this trio of women has greater potential than the novel allows them.

In New York, Szilágyi focuses on Pluta’s encounters with three men: Bobby, the young man who initially provides her with a ride out of Connecticut and a place to stay in Brooklyn, an older man named Leonard, and an unnamed man with red hair and freckles. Szilágyi creates suspense as Pluta pinballs among them, and it is gripping to read about a young girl in 1980s New York, no smartphone in hand, and how a clever and reckless child might find herself making do.

Indeed, one of the most fascinating parts of the story is Szilágyi’s inclusion of fairytale elements to magnify and probe the surreal quality of Pluta’s young life. In Manaus, Lolo takes Pluta to the opera where she sees the story of Orpheus performed on stage. The author was born in Queens and raised in Brooklyn, and extends the notion of a secret underworld in describing early 1980s Gowanus. If anything, this impulse for contemporary mythmaking could have been mined for even greater effect and might have helped to solve the problem of building organic relationships between characters in a story about silences and isolation. For instance, one of the first things Pluta does with her independence in New York is get a tattoo. She does not have enough money to get the full ink she’d like, and the artist would prefer to stage the process out given the scale of the drawing she wants anyway, so he starts with only an outline of the image she requests. “The needle frightened her, but she wanted to defy that fright,” Szilágyi writes. “In some sense she saw it as training. She was becoming courageous, sometimes even scaring herself with this business of courage and defiance, which made her laugh. Following rules had stopped working. She would do whatever she wanted. That’s what felt right.” This arc proves to be pivotal, and later, when something remarkable happens with the tattoo, it never occurs to Pluta to return to the artist as someone who might be able to offer her counsel or at least recognize her in a city of strangers. It seems a missed opportunity to establish more grounding relationships and create the type of character interactions that enrich a story and propel it forward organically. Pluta does reconnect with Bobby, thankfully, but it is by chance, and his presence in her life begins as arbitrarily as the others she encounters.

At the book’s climax, Pluta commits a crime. For some reason, Szilágyi chooses to not resolve this subplot, a decision I found frustrating considering the severity of the incident. The author could have easily disposed of the inconvenience of working through a crime investigation and the emotional impacts of the act on Pluta if she didn’t want to address it outright by referring to how a police investigation might have ended differently in early 1980s New York or given it a supernatural treatment in keeping with the magical realism in Daughters of the Air, but doesn’t bother. This decision amplifies the theme of unresolved endings, of having to somehow reconcile with unyielding uncertainty, but feels unsatisfying. Other aspects of the book’s conclusion are harrowing, but certainly more satisfying, demonstrating the author’s skillful control.

Toward the end of the novel, we see Isabel in the story’s present, but like Pluta, she is lonely and mainly alone. The only people she interacts with are a shoe salesman in Rome, the principal of the boarding school, and a private detective and his assistant. By making Isabel closed off to talking about what has happened to her family, we too are closed off from a layered understanding of her relationship with her husband and from feeling the loss of Daniel from her perspective. This is the bind of the novel—as a reader we need more, but part of the ambition of the story is that we must do without it.

Isabel and Pluta’s isolation get to the heart of what’s driving this novel: the many shames of political violence and the trauma of uncertainty. It’s easy to see the injustice of Argentina’s Dirty War in all its terrible dimension in hindsight, but what Szilágyi reveals is the sheer torment of experiencing it while it was happening without the benefit of perspective or reflection. While we may long for details regarding the particulars of Daniel’s sociological research and scenes of him at the university to understand what exactly might have gotten him into trouble, Szilágyi withholds this information, even when a curious girl like Pluta would want to know about her father’s work, how he spent the hours he was away from her. The point seems to be that it doesn’t matter what he studied, what he has done or not done, for the government to disappear him. Innocence or guilt is a false question with a regime steeped in arbitrary power. Just before his disappearance, Daniel, Isabel, and Pluta attend a fair, and Daniel suspects he is being followed.

In the pit of his stomach, that irksome twinge sharpened: at some point, he’d grumbled to the wrong person. He didn’t even know who; perhaps he’d grumbled to a few of the wrong people. When he shouldn’t have grumbled at all. It wasn’t even the content of the grumbling that was an issue anymore; the fact itself seemed worrisome enough. An offhand remark in the office? Perhaps after a lecture? A darkened face. He recalled a darkened face in the lecture hall. How long can this go on? Was that all he’d said? Had the darkened expression in the audience registered its answer: as long as it takes? He’d been upset about the students—the one and then the other. Was his question ‘suspicious’ enough? Radios everywhere implored citizens to report ‘suspicious activity.’ Everything suspicious threatened ‘national security.’ How many people used those hotlines? A wave of nausea surged.

Isabel cannot explain to her young daughter what has happened to her father because she knows, but does not know. Without anyone or anything to pin her rage and confusion on, she blames her husband, wonders what he must have said or done to get himself in trouble and put his family in danger. This isn’t particularly likeable behavior, nor is her penchant for shopping, but again, this seems to be Szilágyi’s point, and it is profound. Would we feel her anguish more if she were the ideal wife and mother? How do we expect someone to act in the face of such terror, when confronted with the truth of how little control we have over our lives, no matter our wealth or social standing? Szilágyi’s portrayal of how people draw into themselves, get trapped by their own questioning when there are no answers is authentic and moving, but also creates a narrative dilemma. When we insist our characters be alone, we risk writing ourselves into corners where characters, and readers, get stuck in our own minds. Nevertheless, Daughters of the Air is a clear-eyed meditation on the experience of being haunted by the unknown and what we are perhaps too scared to imagine.

Leena has an MFA in fiction from Bennington College and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming online at Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and Harvard Review. She lives in New York and is at work on a story collection.

 

 

 

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MALACQUA, a novel by Nicola Pugliese, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

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MALACQUA
by Nicola Pugliese
translated by Shaun Whiteside
And Other Stories Publishing, 198 Pages

reviewed by Robert Sorrell

It begins with the sea. Out the windows, down the alleys, on the perpetual edge of the city’s consciousness. In Nicola Pugliese’s Naples, the sea is everywhere. “From the street,” he writes, “loneliness falls gracefully away to the sea.”

A few years before the main events of Malaqua transpire the government and police of Naples decide to block access to the beach on a beautiful summer day. For a while, the children stare angrily at the line of police along the shore. Eventually the children slink back into the shade and despair of their homes and courtyards. But the sea, not one to be defeated by local government, begins to rise. It rises until it reaches the first row of houses, then moves farther into the city, leaking into basements, waterlogging wooden boards, wetting socks and shoes and the hems of dresses and pants. The police come to realize they cannot guard the sea, and so they leave.

“This had in all likelihood been an alert, a warning significant in its way,” the narrator informs us. The alert is for the events of October 23rd through 26th, the four days over which the novel takes place. The four days of rain.

Anyone who picks up And Other Stories’ edition of Malacqua, the first English translation of Nicola Pugliese’s Italian novel from 1977, will be immediately alerted to the strange weather which serves as the novel’s catalyst. Emblazoned across the book’s cover is Malacqua’s unofficial subtitle: Four Days of Rain in the City of Naples, Waiting for the Occurrence of an Extraordinary Event. Before even opening the book, the reader is clued into Pugliese’s supreme fascinations: water and Naples. And of course, the collision of the two.

The deluge brings chaos to the streets of Naples. Giant sinkholes open up and rescue workers swear they hear voices coming from the pits. Unearthly screams are heard throughout the whole city, seeming to emanate from the 13th century Maschio Angioino (also ironically known as the Castel Nuovo). Later, five lira coins will begin to play music that only children can hear.

The novel is divided into four parts, one for each day of rain, and loosely follows the perspective of Carlo Andreoli who, like Pugliese, is a journalist covering politics and local events in Naples. Pugliese was born in Milan but spent most of his life in Naples as a reporter. Malacqua, his only work in another genre, was published at the insistence of Italo Calvino by Italian literary powerhouse Einaudi, who also worked with Calvino and other luminaries including Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese, and Antonio Gramsci. But after quickly selling out its first print run, Pugliese decided to pull the plug on the project. No more copies were printed until after his death in 2012. This translation, by Shaun Whiteside, which comes 40 years after the original, is the first English version.

Pugliese is a playful writer, and many of the novel’s most enjoyable moments come from his quirks of language. He describes a mirror as “returning” a face to its owner. Waiting for the rain to stop is a “gruelling, progressive illness.” The weight of silence becomes “an airborne jellyfish, a transparent dream.” Not all of his experiments in language are as pleasing and strange, however, and at times his style can feel a bit forced, almost like a missed attempt at Thomas Pynchon.

Nicola Pugliese

And there are other aspects of Pugliese’s writing that disappoint. Even a Republican Senator would have a hard time denying the author’s misogyny. Men are often visually assessing women, and in various interior monologues from the viewpoint of Neapolitan women Pugliese justifies sexual harassment, office affairs, ogling. “Ultimately a hand on your backside,” Pugliese writes, “is always an act of homage, a gesture of esteem.” The way that Pugliese not only allows but encourages his male characters to harass women, and then uses his omniscient narratorial powers to have women apologize for and accept this treatment as not just okay but almost desirable, is sickening at times. It says much about Italian culture (and literary culture in general) of the 1970s that sentences like the one above were not outside of the norm.

Experiencing something so outdated and uncomfortable in the novel, however, made me more surprised to find a theme in the first two chapters that seemed downright contemporary: what appeared to be an attempt to grapple with climate change in fiction. Or at the very least, horrific weather and climatic events, and humans inability to do anything about them.

Pugliese writes, “With all that water coming down and coming down, and when you were about to say: there, it’s stopping now, you didn’t have time to open your mouth before the water violently returned, a harsh and predetermined rancour, an irreversible obstinacy.” The final words, “a harsh and predetermined rancour, an irreversible obstinacy,” could very well be used to describe the horrible repercussions of the changes we have wrought on our planet. Is he answering the call of recent writers such as Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood to include and incorporate climate change in fiction?

Pugliese does not use the words “climate change,” and nor is it likely that was he thinking in those terms when he wrote the novel in the 1970s (the advancing water feels akin to Calvino’s warning, in Invisible Cities, of the “inferno” of inhuman urban sprawl). However, despite any direct link, many of the themes and tropes that contemporary writers find important in integrating climate change in their fiction, in “climate fiction,” or any other genre, are present in the early pages of Malacqua. Weather, catastrophic events outside of human control, play a stronger role in the plot than the actions of any one person. And Pugliese is deeply attuned to the ways that the rain is simultaneously terrifying to the Neapolitans and, like climate change for many in the twenty-first century, quotidian. Malacqua is not a tale of apocalypse, but a tale of how humans adapt and survive in the face of bizarre and catastrophic climate events. The deaths of seven Neapolitans during the rains is described in chilling terms by local members of government and the police. “A mournful event, certainly, a tragic event, but also predictable, in some respects, from the ancient perspective of a city that lives its life in a continuous form of multiplication.”

Later in the novel, however, it becomes clear that Pugliese’s use of these non-human devices is more metaphorical than political. The story (almost a parable) of the sea rising above the shore and entering Naples to seek out children barred from swimming, should’ve been a sign. Not just to the inhabitants of Naples, but also to me. This is not a book about climate change. It’s just a novel with a touch of magical realism.

About this point in the novel, Pugliese’s narrative begins to drag. His strengths lie, like many good journalists’ do, in deftly stitching together narratives and quickly limning characters and situations. The novel glows when it is discussing the mood of crowds at the beach, people on the street, a group of police and government officials searching a building. When the rain overflows open sewers in part of the city, Pugliese writes, “Also gritting his teeth and muttering fuck off was Biagio Di Sepe, 45, from Avellino, who was determined not to give a toss and had put on his rubber boots.” Pugliese’s Naples is a fractured place, more town than city, still recovering from the war. But despite its bleakness, there is something like love in his descriptions of Naples and its inhabitants, shot through with a touch of symbolism and literary finesse. Neapolitans look out across the sea at night towards Capri, “outstretched and remembering, as alien to the city as an undeciphered tower, close, yes, so close, and far away, too.” Neapolitans who may not have much still have their city, their dialect, which one character calls, “not a literary invention, an artificial construction made by experts and linguistic experimenters, but the most authentic, the most genuine and the most felt expression of an entire people.”

But when he turns his focus away from the city to dip further into the lives and minds of a smaller handful of Neapolitans, he becomes moralistic, even preachy. In these sections, the writing loses a bit of its luster, and the novel begins to feel a bit overly “artistic.” (The final 51 pages of the book take place in the protagonist’s thoughts while he is shaving. I am not against this experimentation, but the decision does not seem to add to the novel. It does not enrich the sense of the character’s emotions or the tableau of Naples. It feels, rather, like a good writer trying hard to seem clever.) Instead of these interwoven stories giving a sense of Naples as a whole, it makes the book feel more curtailed, insular. Each character seems to be living inside her own reality, her own space, which no one else can enter. Perhaps in its way that is Pugliese’s point. That not even a semi-apocalyptic event can make people communicate, break down the barriers of tradition, gender, and class. By the novel’s end, I too felt like the Neapolitans driven inside by the rain: claustrophobic and melancholy, craving a breath of air, a hint of blue sky.

robert-sorrellRobert Sorrell is a writer and photographer living in Philadelphia. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago’s English program and has a piece of narrative nonfiction forthcoming from Mosaic Art & Literary Journal.

 

 

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SHOT-BLUE, a novel by Jesse Ruddock, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

LATE FAME, a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

THESE ARE THE NAMES, a novel by Tommy Wieringa reviewed by Robert Sorrell

PETITE FLEUR, a novel by Iosi Havilio, reviewed by August Thompson

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PETITE FLEUR
by Iosi Havilio
translated by Lorna Fox Scott
And Other Stories Publishing, 120 pages

reviewed by August Thompson

The greatest allure of fiction is the unexpected. Every good book surprises you, and every great book surprises you in a way that, after the astonishment is complete, feels wholly natural—this strangeness couldn’t have happened any other way.

Iosi Havilio’s Petite Fleur is a great book because it is a work of surprises intimately knotted around each other. The plot twists and writhes. Murders and magic lead to diatribes about jazz fusion that leads to rebirth and love and examinations of the anxiety of parenthood and marriage. The unexpected is constant, the satisfaction complete.

The novel is about an Argentinian man, José, the narrator, and his startling power. In a starburst of fury, he discovers that he can kill without consequence. Every time he murders his waddling, jazz-and-whiskey-obsessed neighbor, Guillermo, the neighbor returns to life the next day with no memory of the violence from the night before. Each killing is set to a take of the song “Petite Fleur,” of which Guillermo owns 145 variations— that’s the kind of guy Guillermo, and many of Havilio’s characters are: passionate, pretentious, and innately killable. This first surprise propels the book as it opens. The rest of the story is too fun to give away in great detail. Spoiling the book’s madcap plotting is to ruin its essence, and to take away from Havilio’s mystic accomplishment.

Iosi Havilio

In a book dense with surprise, Petite Fleur’s most stunning achievement is that it works despite how much it plays with things that should fail. The novel takes form in one breathless, 120-page paragraph. No matter the subject, Havilio never gives the reader’s eyes or mind a rest. After the first killing of Guillermo, José sprawlingly describes the nit and grit of the action, “The blade went in far enough to knock his head out of line and with the same momentum again, barely more deliberate, the metal edge reached halfway through his neck. At least that’s how it looked to me, although it could have been a lot less than that, or possibly more.” This pendulum style of writing, with every presented reality undercut by unknowing, insecurity, is initially exhausting, but its constancy builds a portrait of an anxious mind that is compelling and convincing.

Beyond its aggressive style, the novel turns other on-paper flaws into virtues: it imbues, praises and mocks Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Jodorowsky all at once; it contains plot points that verge on cutesy (a firework factory goes up in flames, a stumped writer rediscovers his passion); it mirrors the spiraling repetition and the anxiety and fury that comes from boredom and loneliness.

To read Havilio’s novel is to experience the joy of watching someone bludgeon, stab, incinerate and smother the rules of writing. Every time Havilio introduces an errant plot point or a violent departure of character—and there are many, especially considering the book’s slenderness—there is a natural gut check that says but why? Why the killings, the cruelty, the nature walks, the lengthy scene dedicated to Elektra Complex fulfillment? The answer, which is maybe unsatisfying in its obviousness: because Havilio can, because he must. The world he’s built somehow demands it all.

Havilio’s alluring, enigmatic and fun prose is the grand unifier through all of the book’s oddness. It keeps you steady and intrigued when the book repeatedly sheds its skin. From the first sentence—“This story begins when I was someone else.”—Havilio sets a tone that I can only describe as seductive. You are in on the book-length joke the narrator is telling, but also scared by its intensity, its disassociation.

Upon another pilgrimage to Guillermo’s, José is again overcome with the inexplicable bloodlust that inspired his first killing. “His severed head invaded my mind, I felt the power again, the limitless rage.” In writing this, Havilio accomplishes something impressively manifold: this idea of José’s is funny because of its heightened absurdity, it’s disturbing because of how unhinged the imagery is, and it’s vaguely erotic, because of its dedication to power.

Repeatedly, José, an unemployed homemaker living in a machismo-infected society, finds his only power in the primal. After many of the killings, he makes passionate love to his wife, Laura. He fantasizes about the local baker’s assistant in a similar voice as when he fantasizes about murdering the cult-leader/spiritual-healer Laura may or may not be sleeping with. (The healer, by the way, is a self-described, and unconfirmed, disciple of Jodorowsky that advocates for the aforementioned Elektra-fulfillment, and another brilliant comic character.) For José, and, for many of us, one suspects, sex and violence are kin because they are both actions that follow the call of impulse. José feels fury and eroticism with the same parts of his brain.

Writing about sex is not an easy thing because, like hearing someone describe a funky dream, you really had to be there to understand the wonder of the experience. But Havilio manages to convey the automatic pleasure of making love, particularly to someone you know intimately. It’s rote until it’s surprising, it’s a relief and, at times, a stress or a symbol. José and Laura have a child and a life together. They have sex frequently when they’re happy and less when they’re not. José pines for other women and obsesses about Laura’s fidelity and is willing to give into kink and fantasy to help his wife achieve psychological absolution. Though their relationship is often tormented, their sex life is an interesting through-line that combines the domestic with the perverse. This juxtaposition is both tender and horrifying.

Writing about violence is maybe easier, or at least more appealing. Few of us know what it’s like to act out on true violence, which means reading about it is exciting in a way that reading about sex isn’t. Still, Havilio manages to infuse the violence with freshness and, more importantly, comedy. José’s freedom to kill without repercussion makes for something like a running joke across the book—every week,  José goes to “return the spade”—the phrase quickly becomes a continued euphemism for murder, to hilarious effect— he borrowed from Guillermo. The two build a rhythm: they talk, they drink, they listen to records, and then José plants the spade in Guillermo’s neck, or lights him on fire, or bashes his brains in, before returning home to look after his baby or fret about his increasingly depressed wife. Each incarnation more dramatic, more indulgent. José gets to play God one night a week, and the result is a delicious brand of asylum humor. It’s when sex and death meet that the book strikes its most refined comedy—a type of joke that is right on the precipice of upsetting the reader, “partly due to the incomparable lust that violent death arouses, I took Laura on an acrobatic sex voyage that lasted till dawn.” I can think of few writers that do stark deadpan as well as Havilio.

The translation work by Lorna Scott Fox is wonderful because it imports Havilio’s gymnastic approach to writing without sacrificing José’s conversational tone. Another pleasure of Havilio’s style is that it feels as if José is telling you one long story as you sit beside him. He’s a smart narrator, unafraid to use words that surpass dollar-bin colloquialisms, but also a narrator that is convincingly retelling a story he can’t quite believe happened. In the retelling, José finds another form of power.

It is tempting to talk about Petite Fleur, Havilio’s fifth novel, in the way that one always talk about things that are challenging, confusing, absurd and comic: it’s a nightmare, a fever, it’s Tolstoy on acid, a vertigo-romp through the nether. But the use of these words is usually shorthand for saying that the work inspires that perverse quake of relation, a narrative that beckons the oblivion within us all. An oblivion that few of us, if any, understand.

So let’s leave it as it is: Petite Fleur is a book about that queasy feeling where the primal, the inexplicable, and the contemporary mash together. And its impact, its askew joy, can only be truly understood by being there, thumb on the page.

August Thompson has worked as an editor and writer since graduating from NYU in 2013.  When he’s not working on fiction or watching the Boston Celtics, you can find him at the movies.

THE MINORS by Chris Ludovici reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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THE MINORS
by Chris Ludovici
Unsolicited Press, 376 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in professional sports. A fastball travels at 90 miles per hour, moving from the pitcher’s mitt to the catcher’s glove in approximately .44 seconds. If the batter blinks, he’ll miss. For the last few feet that the ball travels, it is essentially invisible to the hitter. He has to have made his decision by then, whether to swing, how he’ll swing.

I did not know anything about baseball when I picked up Chris Ludovici’s The Minors. Nick Rogers, one of the protagonists, reflects on the difficulty of hitting a baseball, and I ended up spending too much time engrossed in an ESPN Sport Science episode checking Nick’s information. It turns out that, football fanatic though I am, the fastball is a formidable opponent: 90 mph is a frightening, lethal speed, and statistically speaking, it is almost impossible to hit.

However, when we meet Nick in The Minors, baseball is part of Nick’s past, thanks to a shoulder injury. Back home and living with an aunt, the 28-year-old Nick tries to forge ahead by working as a contractor and living a self-serving life dating a succession of girls (most of whom, he claims, came onto him and not the other way around).

Until he is hired by the Heller family. Ludovici’s other protagonist is 16-year-old Sam Heller, whose family is preparing to move to Chicago. Sam’s father has relocated ahead of the family, and it is left to Sam’s mother to get the house fixed up and sold while shepherding Sam through her junior year of high school and keeping up with Sam’s eight-year-old brother, Oscar. Sam is a reflective young woman trying to navigate the abandonment she feels at her father’s moving ahead to Chicago, the alienation she feels from her mother (who she is sure only tries to make her life harder) and her emerging identity as someone very different from either her father or her mother.

Chris Ludovici

Ludovici has given Sam a complex character befitting her age; her internal monologue moves between both narcissism and the philosophic questioning of reality that is part of adolescence, making her believable and interesting. When we first meet Sam, she is ruminating on her impulse to try a cigarette, even though she knows she shouldn’t, and her internal debate covers everything from health to what she learned in psychology class to the sex appeal of oral habits:

So sometimes, when faced with a decision, she froze. Was her desire to smoke the next logical step in some long chain of desires that was set in motion when she was just a baby? Or was it some desperate, pointless attempt on her part to rebel from whatever programming was driving her these last sixteen years? How could she ever know?

Sam is never sure she knows, but she tries hard to discover what the rational system is that makes the adult world make sense, instead of trying to force reality to always fit her own childish wishes. Her self-awareness is unique, perhaps not entirely adolescent, but that is part of what I would say might make The Minors a great book even for teenagers. Sam doesn’t just want to rise above her youth, but wants to become someone she is happy being:

It was all a question of identity. Who did she want to be? Did she want to be the girl who, when faced with a situation she didn’t like, threw a big fit and made everyone around her miserable? Like her mother? […] Or did she want to be more like her dad? Someone who rolled with things, worked with them, found the good in everything and focused on that.

At the same time that Sam is trying so hard to understand herself, her limited understanding of what the adult world is like causes her to constantly stumble: She has misunderstood her mother’s motivations and she has oversimplified her dad’s reasons for “rolling with things.”

Nick is the contractor hired to fix up the house, from renovating a bathroom to fixing kitchen tile and rebuilding the old deck. In the Heller house, Nick feels needed and takes on some of the responsibilities of a big brother and father: he instructs Oscar about baseball, teaches Sam how to drive, and enjoys Liz’s nonjudgmental counsel about his girlfriends. For a short time, the Heller family takes on an unconventional form, and it changes Nick and Sam and their understanding of adulthood and relationships.

“What’s the deal with you and these people?” asks Nick’s aunt as he becomes more and more involved with the Hellers. Nick initially lacks the self-awareness to fully understand what is it with him and “these people,” and how quickly initial connection becomes affection, and how quickly affection becomes the responsibility. Like Sam, Nick possesses believably contradictory qualities. While he is brutally judgmental of wealthy white-collar men like Steve Heller (the first time he meets Steve he wonders, “What kind of a dickhead put product in his hair on a Sunday morning?”) he is deeply empathetic about the work that a mother like Liz does in raising her children, even while he is an insensitive jerk in his own dating relationships with girls.

The Minors is essentially a coming-of-age story, but it is unique in that “coming-of-age” is not restricted to the teenage character, Sam. Sam and Nick take turns telling the story, and both must “grow up” in different ways. Their perceptions and relational needs make these two connect with each other and ricochet off each other in sweet and painful ways: their relationship has overtones of sibling, parent, and suitor. Unfortunately, in such a complicated relationship it is hard to do everything right. It might be easier to hit a fastball than to always make the right moves in family life or know how to best care for loved ones.

This is a character-driven story, and Sam and Nick and the others have the nuance and beauty that comes from genuine affection on the part of the author. Such writerly love is infectious; it only took a few pages for me to care about Nick and Sam. The story’s premise about the nature of people and adulthood is fundamentally compassionate; people aren’t bad, Nick contends, they’re “just stupid.” They make mistakes and stumble through their relationships. In The Minors, coming of age is the acknowledgment that no one has really made it out of “the minors,” that everyone is trying their hardest and there are good moments and bad moments to life. When Liz describes her own coming of age, she says:

I thought there was going to be some corner I turned or switch I flipped and I would just be an adult. But it never happened. Instead, I was just the same old me, but I was doing grown up things. I was the same silly girl inside, but I was cleaning my house instead of an apartment; I was driving around suburban streets instead of city ones. There were times I felt like an adult, sometimes when I was with Sam or Oscar […] But even then there was a part of me that was always aware that I was doing these things that I was just unprepared for, that I had no business actually doing. That’s what I think adulthood really is—it’s just little kids playing dress-up.

For a teenager like Sam, internalizing this kind of compassionate view of others as “unprepared” means rejecting the narcissism of adolescence and embracing forgiveness. For Nick, this also means rejection of his old narcissism, but we’re not sure where the rest of his “adult” life will take him. I wouldn’t mind finding out where Nick goes in future books or short stories.

The baseball analogy is not overdone in the book; I’m actually harping on it more than Ludovici does, simply because I like it. This is Ludovici’s first novel, and it reminded me strongly of The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein, another debut novel about a family, with well-written characters and an apt sports metaphor. I noticed however that this is not Ludovici’s first time writing a compelling younger female character: he has a short story in the second issue of Cleaver featuring Daisy, a fourth grader who has to figure out the difference between “being cool,” and being “awesome.” The Minors is a pleasure to read because of Ludovici’s capacity to give nuance to the experience of growing up and also being an adult. He makes us wonder, Is it different? Don’t we “grown-ups” know exactly what both Daisy and Sam are talking about?

Ryan Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University and an M.A.T. from Clayton State University. She is currently an instructional designer and researcher. Her most recent instructional design project is the development of a class in writing and qualitative research methods at Georgia State University, where she is also a doctoral student. Her most recent publication is an upcoming book chapter on populism in young adult novels. She lives and works in the Atlanta area. Read other reviews by Ryan here.

 

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THE MADELEINE PROJECT, a work of creative nonfiction by Clara Beaudoux, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

ALL THAT MAN IS, a novel by David Szalay, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

NOTES OF A CROCODILE, a novel by Qiu Miaojin, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

MIKHAIL AND MARGARITA, a novel by Julie Lekstrom Himes, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader 

 

 

A MYRIAD OF ROADS THAT LEAD TO HERE, a novella by Nathan Elias, reviewed by Kelly Doyle

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A MYRIAD OF ROADS THAT LEAD TO HERE
by Nathan Elias
Scarlet Leaf, 72 pages

reviewed by Kelly Doyle 

Nathan Elias’ first novella, A Myriad of Roads that Lead to Here, tells a story that is simultaneously frustrating and accessible. This bildungsroman provides a snapshot into the emotional journey of a naive and sometimes selfish narrator, Weston, as he grapples with the untimely death of his mother, which had occurred a few months before.

Home from college for the summer, Weston decides to walk to the ocean. He hopes that this trip, modeled after stories he has read, will cure him of his pain. Unfortunately, the reader quickly realizes that this journey is not only fruitless, but may have the reverse effect than was intended. Brief moments of human connection, as fleeting as smoking a cigarette and seeing another person doing the same or giving a child a quarter to buy a candy, are all that give Weston any relief on his walk.

During these moments, when Weston reaches out to another human being, the reader can feel the void in his heart. That void only grows as he moves on, determined to finish his painful quest and all the while aware that his life is falling apart. “I write in my journal about things I haven’t had time to think of,” Weston says, “what my life will be like without my mother, the fact that I may actually be in severe credit card debt after this trip, and what I plan to do when I get back.” He wishes he wasn’t “consumed by fear.”

When Weston invites his friend Saul to accompany him on the journey to the ocean, he envisions the two of them walking through the forests of America, clutching copies of Walden, breathing in the clear air and emerging at the end like newborns, all of their pain and sorrow cast along the side of the road. He hopes to find peace and closure, to banish the thoughts of ghosts that torment him. His pain is vague to the reader but present, manifesting in the form of dreams and ghosts and torturous thoughts that are never described in more than general terms. Beyond expected mourning, Weston appears haunted. This extreme inner turmoil may be explained by Weston’s very open and abrupt admission that he once partook in self-harm with an old girlfriend. Weston never elaborates on the incident aside from regular references to his scars, but it could indicate that Weston’s young adult life was not easy.

Whatever form of pain Weston experiences, he strives to escape. He hopes to find “freedom and independence” and, at the same time, he tells Saul, “Whatever it is that will cleanse us both of the distress we feel from losing our mothers.” Weston chooses Saul as his companion not because they are particularly close or because Saul is particularly savvy, but because Saul has also lost a mother. They can suffer together. Rather than escaping, Weston builds his own microcosm of suffering. He pretends to be positive, playing the devil’s advocate when Saul proclaims that he cannot “see everything as beautiful” as Weston does, but his pretended positivity doesn’t breach the surface. Weston begins to live off of other people’s kindness while maintaining the facade that he never accepts help.

Nathan Elias

Weston often seems selfish, but this selfishness is followed by subtle reminders that he is only a kid. He misses his mother “sitting in the front seat, within arms reach, every so often checking on [him] to give [him] a smile, to realign [him] to a peaceful state.” The circumstances of his mother’s death are conspicuously absent from the text, aside from a vague reference to her habit of checking herself into the emergency room. Still, it seems clear that her death was sudden and occurred before Weston had an opportunity to grow up and learn to care for himself. Not only is he dealing with the loss of a loved one, but he is suddenly thrust into independence.

Weston chooses isolation and hardship to prove that he can care for himself, that he can live without his mother. He asks himself, “how can I ever find freedom and independence if I keep depending on people,” and decides that the only way to prove he is capable is to dissociate himself from the support system at his disposal. He is strung between desiring independence and desiring to be cared for. “You look at dependence like it’s weak,” his girlfriend tells him. “It’s not weak. It’s okay to let people love you. You know that, right?” Weston admits that he does not. Still, his obvious naivete proves that he cannot grasp the independence he wants, not yet. The conflict between his mind and heart manifests as hypocrisy and selfishness, dominating a character who consistently says one thing and does another.

Weston’s romantic idea of a Walden-esque journey proves ill-conceived and badly planned. The two men do not pack enough food, yet their packs are too heavy. They cannot walk the distance they expected and they cannot sleep outside like they had hoped. Rather than walking through vitalizing forests like Thoreau, they find themselves growing exhausted alongside highways and parking lots. Weston repeatedly reiterates that he does not want help from anyone, nevertheless, he and Saul soon resort to hitching rides, staying in people’s homes and shelters and eating others’ food, refusing to admit that their adventure is a failure. Weston turns to his girlfriend for help, admitting that he began dating her solely because she supports him. Once again, his selfishness becomes apparent, but this selfishness emerges out of his disorientation in a world without his mother.

When Weston and Saul arrive in the welcoming home of Weston’s cousin, the warmth and love they find bring Weston’s true problem to the forefront. Weston realizes that he “lost touch with a lot of people” after his mother’s death. He finally begins to recognize that this might be part of his suffering. Unfortunately, this realization seems to be quickly forgotten. He continues asking his girlfriend for favors. He continues contemplating his own struggle while remaining blind to the struggles evident in his cousin’s immediate family. Oddly, none of his family members mention the death of his mother or the unusual nature of his trip, and the novella never addresses the statuses of his father and stepfather.

Weston does not know who he is, what he wants, or how to fix his problems. His lack of experience, worldly knowledge, and self-awareness makes his healing process exasperating for the reader. His troubled young adult life offers some sort of explanation and his initiative provides hope for the future, but all the reader is actually given is the middle of his journey. Elias provides very little information about Weston’s family or the circumstances of his mother’s death; his narrative stops short before Weston has an opportunity to truly change before his life is either repaired or destroyed. This renders the story incomplete, missing the truly essential moment of change that Weston surely was looking for.

Who was Weston before this tragedy and who is he after? The reader is left to wonder. Nevertheless, this short snapshot into a young man’s life, though incomplete, succeeds in portraying the painful confusion that follows a tragedy. This novella provides readers who have experienced loss an opportunity to see their own feelings of confusion, fear, and disorientation reflected in a character’s search for rightness in a world that feels anything but.

Kelly Doyle studies English, creative writing, and psychology at Emory University. Her fiction has appeared in Firewords Quarterly, Stories Through the Ages College Edition, and others. She is the editor-in-chief of Emory’s literary magazine, Alloy, and she works in a developmental memory lab on campus. She loves to read and travel, and she plans to pursue a career in writing.

 

 

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THE MASK OF SANITY, a novel by Jacob Appel, reviewed by Kelly Doyle

SWIMMING LESSONS, a novel by Claire Fuller, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

KONUNDRUM: SELECTED PROSE OF FRANZ KAFKA by Franz Kafka reviewed by Eric Andrew Newman

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KONUNDRUM: SELECTED PROSE OF FRANZ KAFKA
by Franz Kafka
translated by Peter Wortsman
Archipelago Books, 384 pages

reviewed by Eric Andrew Newman

With the centenary of Franz Kafka’s first three major publications having passed just a few years ago, a plethora of new translations of Kafka’s stories have recently been released. Among them is Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, with works chosen and translated by Peter Wortsman, a writer known for his own micro fiction. Wortsman’s selection of what he considers to be the very best of Kafka’s short prose, whether it’s a story, a letter, a journal entry, a parable, or an aphorism distinguishes Konundrum from the other new translations. This approach contrasts with the single book-length work of Susan Bernofsky’s new translation of “The Metamorphosis” and Michael Hofmann’s new translation of all of Kafka’s unpublished stories in Investigations of a Dog.

In the acknowledgements, Wortsman states that his only criterion for inclusion in the book is the ability of a piece to amaze him. In this way, his selections are more personal than a collection of Kafka’s most important works, or works that were published while he was alive, or works that went unpublished in his lifetime. Wortsman also says that his publisher gave him the complete freedom to dip into Kafka’s entire opus and translate whatever strikes his fancy. This kind of freedom is a gift not only to the translator, but also to the reader, as it gives Kafka novices the ability to sample his letters, journals, parables, and aphorisms without having to dive into each of the separate volumes dedicated to the subject and meticulously published by Schocken Books, the gatekeeper to most of Franz Kafka’s available writings.

Franz Kafka

The first translations of Franz Kafka’s works from the German into English were completed by Edwin and Willa Muir, and published by Schocken Books in the decades following his death. The opening of Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” as translated by the Muirs, is perhaps one of the most well-known first lines in all literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” However, later translations, such as my worn high school copy of Joachim Neugroschel’s version, would go on to describe Samsa as having transformed into a “monstrous vermin,” beginning the decades-long debate of whether it is more accurate to translate Kafka’s phrase “ungeheueres Ungeziefer” as “monstrous insect,” or “monstrous vermin.”

Wortsman, who retranslates the title of “The Metamorphosis” here as “Transformed,” sidesteps this issue by using the more colloquial phrase of “monstrous bug.” In the introduction to her new translation of “The Metamorphosis,” Susan Bernofsky mentions that when Kafka spoke of the story to his friends, he often referred to Samsa by the more playful term bug, rather than the stricter term vermin. This more playful, colloquial sensibility of Wortsman’s translation is also reflected in the new title of the piece, which translates directly from the German into English as “The Transformation.” With his new title, Wortsman wanted to strip the English translation of the heavily classical connotations of Ovid’s The Metamorphosis and give it a more accessible air, choosing the form “Transformed” due to how often the word appears in the text.

Kafka’s playful sense of humor is also highlighted in an excerpt from a letter that he wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer, “I Can Also Laugh:”

I can also laugh, Felice, you bet I can, I am even known as a big laugher… It even happened that I burst out laughing—and how!—at a solemn meeting with our director—that was two years ago, but the incident has lived on as a legend at the institute.

With this collection, Wortsman endeavors to bring the comedy back to Kafka. In the forward to his previous book, Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, Wortsman relates the story of his aunt going to a reading given by Kafka in Vienna when she was younger. While she didn’t know what to make of “the gawky man and his strange stories,” what struck her the most was that throughout the reading Kafka could barely keep from shaking with laughter.

At first glance, one might assume the book is arranged in chronological order, as it begins with Kafka’s first known writing, a note he wrote to a friend, and ends with his last known writings, the notes he wrote his doctor while dying in a sanatorium. But on a closer inspection, the rest of the book doesn’t follow suit. Throughout, Wortsman alternates between early published pieces and later unpublished ones, whether they are stories, parables, reflections, or journal entries with no real discernible pattern. This approach, however, allows readers to experience the prose on its own merits, rather than as a strictly defined literary form. It also shows the reader how porous the literary borders between Kafka’s short prose and more informal writing can be.

Translator Peter Wortsman

One example of this porousness is the short piece, “A Hybrid,” a favorite of mine from the collection. In the story, the narrator tell us about a creature he cares for that is half cat and half lamb, and how it is the favorite spectacle of the local children. He describes the mysterious creature as:

Head and claws come from the cat, size and stature from the lamb; both bequeathed the glint and wildness in its eyes, the soft and snug coat of fur, the manner of its movements no less leaping than skulking.

Even though it reads like a polished story, it was actually taken from one of Kafka’s journal entries. In the acknowledgements, Wortsman says he chose to include several journal entries that he imagines Kafka might have taken and published as stories, and it’s hard to argue in the case of “A Hybrid.”

However they came about, this reader is happy to have more of Kafka’s short shorts in print. Many of Kafka’s short shorts, particularly the ones from his first book, Contemplation, and his later book, A Country Doctor, seem to have been the prototype for the recent flash fiction, or micro fiction movement. Wortsman is singularly qualified to bring these short short stories back into the zeitgeist, as he himself is a writer of flash and micro fiction, having published a book of the form, A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Micro Tales. In fact, Wortsman published his translation of Kafka’s short “A Hybrid” in Gigantic, a contemporary literary journal that only publishes flash. Another favorite short short is “Poseidon,” a parable that imagines the god Poseidon so buried in bureaucratic paperwork he doesn’t even have time to enjoy the sea.

While the selections Worstman includes in Konundrum are terrific, I also have to wonder about the pieces he chose to leave out. One major omission here is Kafka’s breakthrough story, “The Judgement.” As one of Kafka’s first major works published in his lifetime and the product of what Kafka considered to be his ideal artistic process (he wrote it all in one night), it’s essential to any Kafka short prose collection. Still, Konundrum includes the rest of Kafka’s greatest hits that were published in his lifetime, like “Transformed,” “The Hunger Artist,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Report to the Academy,” as well as lesser known, but just as great, stories that went unpublished while he was alive, like “The Burrow,” “Investigations of a Dog,” “A Hybrid,” “The Bridge,” and “Poseidon.”

In his afterword, Wortsman remarks on how fresh and alive Kafka’s prose still is today and I can only agree. Once you dust them off and give them a new coat of paint, his surreal stories are just as relevant now as they were a hundred years ago. The absurdity of bureaucracy, a singular object of Kafka’s work, only seems to have grown in the intervening. Wortsman does an excellent job of maintaining the long, looping run-on sentences essential to German grammar, while at the same time keeping a rhythm and readability for the English speaking reader. In addition to being a solid collection for the Kafka beginner to start reading and enjoying his work, Konundrum is also a good collection for more modern and experienced readers who might appreciate a fresher, looser take on Kafka’s prose.

Eric Andrew Newman currently lives in Los Angeles, but is originally from the Chicago area. He works as an archivist for a nonprofit foundation by day and as a writer of flash fiction by night. He has previously been named as a finalist for the Robert J. Demott Short Prose Contest and the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Exposition Review, Gargoyle, Heavy Feather Review, Necessary Fiction, and Quarter After Eight, among others.

 

GODS ON THE LAM, a novel by Christopher David Rosales, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

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GODS ON THE LAM
by Christopher David Rosales
Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, 302 pages

reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

Christopher David Rosales, on the dedication page, describes Gods on the Lam as “an homage to Roger Zelazny, without whose books I may never have been inspired to write.” Zelazny’s influence is evident. Famous for his direct execution and his penchant for genre-mixing, the lifeblood of the late speculative fiction author rushes through the twisty veins of this strange novel—Rosales’ second.

Gods on the Lam opens with a man named Wayne waking up alongside an Arizona highway in a ’70 Chevy that he’s “somewhat sure” belongs to him. He’s only halfway confident that the truck is his because he has no memory. To get a sense of what’s going on Wayne drives to the nearby town of Show Low, where he encounters Ruby, a mother on a decade-long search for her missing son. Believing that the answers to their questions may be linked, Wayne and Ruby team up and stumble upon a string of bizarre (possibly alien) abductions that have been afflicting the area, disappearances that have come to be known locally as the Burials.

As the cover art perfectly suggests, Gods on the Lam is a vibrant, pulpy collage that transcends genre. Rosales alludes to this in a brief scene during which Wayne chats with a hotel clerk with literary aspirations. “So, what’s the book about?” Wayne asks, and the clerk sums up his efforts with, “Sort of a Western-Sci-fi-Horror-Detective-Romance.” And Wayne, in his usual lucid way, responds: “Someone’s willing to publish that?”

Gods on the Lam’s eccentric nature is not immediately apparent, although the nuts and bolts that made the dime novels of the past so iconic are: a small southwestern town, set in the near past; a macho protagonist-narrator; a resolute but still potentially dubious dame, who admittedly used to be the kind of person who “would steal your wallet, and then help you look for it”; a shifty new sheriff in town who would prefer that some truths stay hidden; and a dark-hearted big business boss who purportedly has the ominous power to “make life where life was not meant to be made.” With secrets abound and treachery around every corner, old school detective fiction readers should have no problem getting sucked into this mysterious world. As a gritty neo-noir tale about lost memories and missing persons, Gods on the Lam plays into many of the genre’s familiar clichés and stock characters then moves beyond them.

Christopher David Rosales

Rosales, not one to waste time, sprinkles in elements of horror and science fiction early on. Soon into their mutual investigations, the ensemble crosses paths with a skeletal “creature,” one of several seemingly subhuman monstrosities that have been reported in Show Low area newspapers prior to this encounter. The group deduces that the beasts must be the “cleanup crew” for whoever is behind the Burials, though it becomes evident later on that these primal figures may actually be the result of chemical testing gone awry… With Wayne as his conduit, Rosales illustrates in gnarly detail the horrors that certain human beings willingly unleash upon one another.

Wayne’s narration, while colorful, at times reads as awfully brusque—almost abrasive, in fact, with its candor. In one scene, a handful of characters traverse the “true wilderness” of a forest that has been untouched for generations, and Wayne describes a female character ducking away from menacing branches “as if they were the grasp of a rapist,” a jarring simile (and probably not one that’d be used to describe a male character’s actions). Wayne, later, compares dangling gasmask filter tubes to “limp wrinkled cocks.” Not exactly eloquent, but it paints a carnal picture. At one point, Wayne’s phrasing concerns Ruby, and he addresses his proclivity for indiscreet descriptors. “Sometimes I’m not good with my words, okay?” he admits, to which she responds with “I know” and moves on, an apparent sign that readers ought to do so as well. After all, the offhand narration manages to fit the tone and the hybrid nature of the text.

Gods on the Lam, at its heart, is a love letter to midcentury noir and speculative literature. Rosales’ palpable fondness for the inner workings of genre shines on each page—and thanks to that high-octane passion, Wayne’s voice comes to life and soars. Although his diction may be troublesome once in a while, the anomalous expressions add to the turbulent atmosphere of the narrative, because Gods on the Lam is one hundred percent bananas, in the best way possible.

Brandon Stanwyck studied film, literature, and theatre at Cleveland State University. While there, he led a student-run theatre company. He currently lives in Ohio, where he divides his time between working on independent movies and writing fiction. His words have appeared in The Fiction Pool, Corvus Review, and elsewhere. Twitter: @BrandonStanwyck.

 

 

 

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THE MASK OF SANITY, a novel by Jacob Appel, reviewed by Kelly Doyle

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THE MASK OF SANITY
by Jacob Appel
The Permament Press, 256 pages

reviewed by Kelly Doyle

The protagonist of Jacob Appel’s 2017 novel, The Mask of Sanity, is a doctor, a family man, and a murderer. Appel offers a rare insight into the life of this high functioning sociopath, Dr. Jeremy Balint. With a staggering seven master’s degrees, medical degree, law degree, and experience in clinical psychiatry, Appel is certainly authority enough to paint a convincing psychological profile of such a troubling protagonist. The close third person narration allows the reader to hear Balint’s twisted thoughts, while also observing and nearly falling victim to the carefully constructed facade of “the most ethical human being on the planet.”

Balint, in fact, appears to have a perfect life. After overcoming a difficult childhood, he becomes a successful cardiologist, marries a smart, beautiful woman, buys a house with a pool, and has two daughters who he adores. Living this beautiful life, Balint is tormented by the thought that it might not last. And it won’t, of course. He soon discovers that his wife is having an affair with a notoriously slippery colleague, Warren Sugarman. It quickly becomes apparent that Sugarman, a womanizing egomaniac, is sleeping with many women including Balint’s wife while neglecting his own ill-adjusted son. Balint reasons that the most important thing he can do is keep his domestic life intact. And so, as Appel writes, he “decides to murder his former friend and classmate.”

The reader becomes less sypathetic to Sugarman’s plight throughout the novel as he continues to schedule outings and dinners with both Balint and his wife, coaxing her to fall deeper in love with him as Balint watches and plays dumb to the affair. These particular scenes are made even more horrible by the fact that Balint’s wife appears to be geniunly in love with this clearly manipulative man. The sickening progression of this affair almost allows the reader to understand Balint’s fantasy of ending Sugarman’s life, despite his admitting at the start of the novel that “the real reason he was going to eliminate [his wife’s] lover was simply that he had decided he was going to do so–nothing more, nothing less.” Balint spends the rest of the novel spinning elaborate justifications for his actions, generally revolving around his two young daughters. This becomes a distinct pattern for his character. Everything is always justified around his subjective interpretation of morality and human worth.

Jacob Appel

Balint tries to convince the reader that his daughters “matter above all else: his ultimate legacy, the guardians of his image after his death,” and that he is committed to maintaining the ideal home environment he and his wife had spent a decade building for them. The strength of this argument is lessened by his wife, who shows no intention of leaving them and continues to prioritize her family over Sugarman, conducting the affair silently in her free time. Still, any sympathy that this justification may have ilicited is quickly erased when Balint decides “that his plan require[s] multiple victims.” In order to cover up this well motivated killing, Balint decides to murder five other random people, and signify his actions by tying an emerald ribbon around each of their necks. For each murder, he provides several reasons why he acted justly, but he also becomes more and more obsessed with his public image as “The Emerald Choker” and actually begins to enjoy the killing itself. Throughout this process, Balint wins awards for ethics in medicine, “given to a clinician who has mastered the art of ethical decision making,” promotes a charity organization through his synagogue, and climbs up the rankings at the hospital where he works, effectively subverting readers’ stereotypical expectations for serial killers as social outcasts.

Balint is an intriguing character, but the narration limits the reader’s interpretation by providing what is practically a diagnosis for his condition before the novel begins. The book’s introduction argues that sociopaths are not usually iconoclasts or pariahs as we imagine. Instead, they are “all around us, smiling and perpetrating evil.” This is a fresh picture of sociopaths, people who “recognize the difference [between right and wrong], but simply do not care” and are not capable of developing that care. After this introduction, the reader is thrust directly into the narrative with the first line: “Killing, Balint discovered, was the easy part.” This leaves little doubt that Balint is a sociopath, essentially removing any possibility for redemption, limiting any questions or hopes that the reader might have and thereby sacrificing an opportunity for suspenseful ambiguity. Balint himself even considers the possibility of his condition, but decides that “whether he actually was a sociopath…was not worth thinking about.” Likewise, the reader is spared having to come to his or her own conclusion.

Nevertheless, the novel is haunted by the eerie paradox of having a killer who is also a doctor, a criminal who is also a hero. Appel continually exploits the one essential similarity between these two roles. Both doctors and murderers believe that they have the right to determine the fate of others. Balint is part of a committee who decides which patients receive heart transplants and which do not, deciding in essence who will live and who will die. This is a surprisingly unscientific process. His occupation’s assumed right to play God cultivates the ego and confidence necessary for his killing. To Balint, “life is like a game of chess that people play with God. And as long as you’re winning, God lets you stay down here on Earth. But when God wins, that’s when He takes you.” In this case, Balint is God. The book flashes between Balint sitting in on the transplant committee, and Balint roaming the streets searching for victims. These moments begin to feel strangely similar. In both cases, the parties involved try to justify their decisions, but the justifications never really feel right. One can’t justify murdering a young boy because he is fat and will in the future be bullied, just as one can’t comfortably deny life to a father because he has high cholesteral or used to smoke.

The novel concludes suddenly, leaving the reader with a pressing question. Throughout, the reader is led to believe that Balint never comes close to being discovered as a killer, but the unexpected last page may indicate otherwise. What went wrong? No clear foreshadowing seems to provide the reader with an answer to this question, resulting in a somewhat unsatisfying finish. The reader inevitably curses the author for not providing the answer somewhere between the lines earlier in the text, but only because the author has succeeded in shocking and engaging her.

The Mask of Sanity offers a new image of sociopaths and criminals while reminding readers that the same God complex often driving them is present in people we admire. Some of those people we call heros. That concept in itself may cause readers to second guess their neighbors, friends, maybe even spouses, providing a delightful fear that speaks to Appel’s accomplishment as a writer.

Kelly Doyle studies English, creative writing, and psychology at Emory University. Her fiction has appeared in Firewords Quarterly, Stories Through the Ages College Edition, and others. She is the editor-in-chief of Emory’s literary magazine, Alloy, and she works in a developmental memory lab on campus. She loves to read and travel, and she plans to pursue a career in writing.

 

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MY SHADOW BOOK, a novel by MAAWAAM, edited by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by William Morris

 

MY SHADOW BOOK, a novel by MAAWAAM, edited by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by William Morris

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MY SHADOW BOOK
by MAAWAAM
edited by Jordan A. Rothacker
Spaceboy Books, 227 pages

reviewed by William Morris

In the summer of 2011, novelist and scholar Jordan A. Rothacker discovered a box containing the journals of a being known as Maawaam. Thus begins My Shadow Book—part literary manifesto, part metafictional frame narrative. The novel itself is credited to Maawaam, while Rothacker gives himself the title of editor. This framing device, the found manuscript, is used throughout literature as a way of creating verisimilitude in the reading experience. By claiming to have found and compiled Maawaam’s papers, Rothacker gives the novel legitimacy as a real, authentic document, while also absolving himself of any blame for the contents: he simply discovered these writings, and so is not responsible for their creation.

Despite Rothacker’s apparent effort to distance himself from the fiction, in Maawaam we have the character of a struggling writer. He calls himself a Shadow Man, a “double agent” writing in the darkness while presenting himself as a functioning member of society in the light. Is “Shadow Man” another way of saying “artist,” or is Maawaam otherworldly? Perhaps both. In his journals, Maawaam quotes William S. Burroughs, Anna Kavan, and Guy Debord; he writes about his love life and his deepest anxieties; and he includes excerpts of stories, poems, and novels he’s trying to write. He is deeply human. And yet all of this takes place in the shadows, where he convenes with other Shadow Men and Women. Maawaam refers to regular people as “the people of the sun.” He fragments his journals with a series of black stars, both to indicate section breaks and to remind readers that he lives by the light of a different, darker sun.

As in his previous novel And Wind Will Wash Away, Rothacker here displays his wisdom, subversive influences, and literary prowess. He crafts a character better read than most of us, but also greatly troubled by his own psyche. Maawaam’s ruminations read like a love letter to suffering artists everywhere:

There are those nights when you get up to go to the bathroom—she remains there asleep—and you catch your reflection and you can see he is dying and you feel like you’re dying and you can feel it, the dying slowly and you wonder, is this how everyone feels all the time?

That question—is this how everyone feels all the time?—is fundamental to why we read. Literature gives us the opportunity to glimpse other lives and understand how other people think and feel, and the more we read, the more we realize that our feelings can be found reproduced in countless others.

Maawaam is obsessed with the phrase “give up the ghost,” which he interprets as a Shadow Man giving everything to the people of the sun. This sounds like both an unburdening of the soul and also a form of death. He says: “I have tried in my own way to be free… I have tried in my own way to give up the ghost. So many ghosts to give up before the final ghost.” These ghosts are the innumerable lives he’s created in the shadows, through fiction and poetry. For Maawaam to give up the ghost he must share his work with the world—a monumental task requiring him to finish the stories, poems, and novels he’s begun, or show them to us in their rough, unfinished state.

In The Secret Name, one of the novels Maawaam is writing, the protagonist (named Landry Bread) is sent on a journey to discover his “secret name.” Landry is a hopeless guy living in Atlanta, and wants nothing more than to believe there’s something more to him, some secret other self waiting to be discovered. Instead, what Bread finds is a novel titled Amerika the Beautifuk by a mysterious and enigmatic author named Maawaam (a book within a book within a book). Here we have the character, Maawaam, discovering his own secret name inside the text he’s writing:

in finding that name, and writing that character, I was writing a role for myself. I could write the novel, The Secret Name, and I could stage it like I found it, a manuscript in a box somewhere, and I am just the editor of it, and the actual author is this MAAWAAM. He is the author of the inner and outer text. The story of Landry Bread just floats there in the middle.

Jordan A. Rothacker

The writer is essentially and irremediably tied to his work. Attempts to detach from the writing—through pseudonyms, frame narratives, and invented worlds—invariably lead the writer back to himself and his own anxieties and obsessions. But there is also pleasure in inhabiting this invented world. Maawaam’s mind is labyrinthine, and while it may contain some fictionalized elements of its creator, it is unique and compelling, and worthy of being explored in the closeness My Shadow Book achieves.

Rothacker’s novel, disguised as a journal containing a novel (and so on), is at times dizzying. The form is challenging in its unyielding metafictional twists. Identities are nested one within the other. What makes the novel so impressive is how, through all of these experiments in storytelling, Maawaam’s vulnerability and desire are thoughtfully articulated and reiterated in various aphorisms, quotations, and poems, in a feedback loop of loneliness and longing.

This is a strange and ambitious novel. To invent a writer whose work is as bizarre as Maawaam’s and then to lead the reader into those works, is no easy task. Rothacker writes from the heart, but disguises that heart in shadows. Or maybe he truly has discovered a heart in a box of papers in a shadowy closet, and he is illuminating it for us here. Either way, My Shadow Book is sharp and singular and full of mystery.

William-MorrisWilliam Morris is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His work has appeared in print and online, most recently at Sediments Literary Arts Journal, Fiction Southeast, and Red Earth Review. He divides his time between St. Louis and Salt Lake City, and is always reading. He also works as an editor at Natural Bridge. His other areas of interest include cats, coffee, and cryptozoology.

 

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ALL THAT MAN IS, a novel by David Szalay, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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ALL THAT MAN IS
by David Szalay
Graywolf Press, 362 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

In an interview with NPR, David Szalay pointed out that the title of his novel, All that Man Is, can be read two different ways: “either as a sort of slightly disparaging, sort of all that man is, and this is it. Or it can be read as a sort of almost celebratory—everything, all the kind of great variety of experience that life contains.” Szalay seems to see his work as falling somewhere in between, not entirely “disparaging” nor precisely “celebratory,” since it is a study of men dealing with situations of personal crisis. While many reviewers have described All that Man Is as bleak and depressing, Szalay confesses that he might have a “lower expectation of life than the average.”

Whether the story is bleak or not, Szalay’s masterful writing has won All that Man Is significant international recognition, including being a finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, Britain’s 2016 Gordon Burn Prize, and it was listed by the New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2016. Szalay is Canadian-born and currently lives in Budapest, but lived most of his life in Britain. British reviewers have compared him to fellow English writers Tessa Hadley and Edward St. Aubyn, while American reviewers have compared his thematic concerns to David Foster Wallace and his writing style to John Updike.

All that Man Is is not a traditional novel. It is nine separate stories with few substantive connections between the stories; the characters’ lives do not connect to make any narrative wholes, although the themes do work together to build a metanarrative.

Simon is a university student traveling on holiday with his friend Ferdinand. “What am I doing here?” wonders Simon several times, not just referring to where he is that precise moment but what any of his traveling activities mean. A fan of Eliot and The Wasteland, Simon ruminates on the illusion of free choice. Bernard, a young lazy Frenchman, is fired by his uncle and decides to go on a solitary beach holiday. In his decrepit hotel he befriends and has sex with a mother and daughter who are vacationing. Balázs, a Hungarian, has been hired as a bodyguard for Gábor and Gábor’s wife, Emma. Enamored with Emma, it takes Balázs a while to realize that she is a high-priced escort, and that “protecting” Emma is to be complicit in selling her. Karel, a self-absorbed university professor, is in the midst of a holiday weekend with his girlfriend, who tells him that she is pregnant. “That’s shit,” is Karel’s first response to the news, and decides he must convince her to have an abortion, even if it means being manipulative. Kristian is a Dutch news editor, about to break a huge story of an affair by an upper-level government official. At the height of his career and in love with the power that information gives him, Kristian is also at the height of hypocrisy: he had an affair of his own and has concealed it from his family. James is a sophistic salesmen of swanky real estate in the French Alps, who is trying to turn some condominium sales to his advantage while leading on his young assistant, Paulette. Murray, a washed up businessman living in Croatia, is unwilling to accept the financial and relational wreck of his life. Aleksandr is a Russian iron tycoon considering suicide in the wake of both losing much of his fortune and his wife’s announcement that she is leaving him. Tony, a retired septuagenarian and repressed homosexual, is facing the reality of aging, as he suffers from a car accident and well-meaning caretakers.

Roughly speaking, the age of the main character increases throughout the stories, with each man’s external crisis and corresponding internal identity crisis reflecting their unique stages. Altogether, the stories could be seen as telling The Story of a Man as he goes from university student to retired 70s, ricocheting from moments of decency to infatuation to narcissism. And yet, the fundamental need for meaning never changes, from university to retirement.

David Szalay

As a woman reading a novel about the male experience, I did not find All that Man Is entirely bleak, and I do not think that I have a lower expectation of life than average. But I also did not think it had the “great variety” that the title suggests. Szalay does not shy away from description of men indulging carnal appetites, contemplating suicide, sacrificing integrity or family for positions of power, success, or prestige, or simply suffering from painful existential confusion. Interestingly, these men are not paragons of moral virtue, but they are convinced that something like “moral virtue” exists, somewhere, and they’re desirous of reaching it, even if the reaching is confused and ultimately doomed to failure. There is something tender to Szalay’s insight and description of male frailty in the face of what he calls “the predicament that we all find ourselves in,” which is facing mortality: these men have realized, to varying degrees, that sooner or later they will die. While their responses might sometimes make us cringe or roll our eyes, they are also entirely believable: these are men that I’ve known, men that I’m related to, and students that I’ve taught. It’s not all of them, hence my resistance to the notion of the “great variety” of male experience in this story, but it is certainly a worthy depiction of many of them, and the internal conflicts they describe as they wrestle against reality with very flawed characters and sometimes destructive desires.

One complaint some readers will have is the lack of complex female characters. To dwell on this, however, would miss the point of Szalay’s project. There is the obvious fact that strong female characters would alter the narrative landscape and the plot, and would easily steal the show from many of these men. But ultimately, I think it would miss out on one of the privileges of reading the book as a woman: to see that, even though these male characters express human appetites and desires in some less admirable male ways (for example, Karel refers to “chasing skirt” and Bernard debates a friend about Gwyneth Paltrow’s breasts) the expression of appetites is their effort to create a system of meaning. To get bogged down in the gender divisions that circumscribe the lived experience of these characters is to miss this, the connection between these male experiences and human experiences, and the book’s major theme of time, aging, and the futility of the appetites that motivate people. Karel, the university professor of the fourth story, for all his narcissism, has this powerful reflection on why he loves to study the medieval world:

Wonderful to imagine it, though. The whole appeal of medieval studies—the languages, the literature, the history, the art and architecture—to immerse oneself in that world. That other world. Safely other. Other in almost every way, except that it was here. Look at those fields on either side of the motorway. Those low hills. It was here. They were here, as we are here now. And this too shall pass. We don’t actually believe that, though, do we? We are unable to believe that our own world will pass. So it will go on for ever? No. It will turn into something else. Slowly—too slowly to be perceived by the people living in it. Which is already happening, is always happening. We just can’t see it. Like sounds changes, spoken language.

It struck me several times while reading this book about men that I was reading about how they were there, in some other world. But reading Szalay is to be immersed in there, and to realize that it’s here. These men are not “safely other.” In a strange way, Karel’s passages about medieval studies could be about the way that fiction brings together readers and experiences that might otherwise never connect.

One of the few connections between stories is that Simon, the young university student of the first story, reappears in the final story as Tony’s grandson. These are two of my favorite characters, and their connection is important not because they are biologically related but because they are the youngest and oldest men. In separate spaces they are simultaneously beginning and ending their adult lives, but they are asking the same existential questions. Tony, in one of the lovelier moments of introspection in the novel, contemplates an inscription on an abbey porch that says, “Let us love what is eternal and not what is transient,” and asks himself:

What is eternal, in his world? Wherever he looks, from the loosening skin of his weak, old man’s hands—which somehow don’t seem to be his, since he does not think of himself as an old man—to the sun shedding white light on the flat landscape all around, wherever he looks, he sees only…that which is transient.

The truth, Tony decides, is that the only eternal thing is the passage of time. Time has no end, although it dictates the end—and beginning—of everything else. Nearing the end of his life, Tony chooses to see his own participation in time as participation in an eternity that connects him with everything else that is time-bound. Aging then, and wrestling with time, is the eternity that—though it emphasizes the impermanence of each individual life—also connects Szalay’s men in a shared human narrative. Whether it is really an “eternal” narrative or not, is still debatable.

But Tony—and arguably, Simon—are the only characters that achieve this kind of revelation and change of perspective. Most of the stories are extended vignettes, and their sense of disconnection from each other mirrors the characters’ disconnection from other people. Szalay, who lives in Budapest and has lived in other parts of Europe, is intentional about representing his characters as geographically “decontextualized.” All of the men are Europeans who cross borders between countries at some point in their stories, whether it is for vacation or work, and Szalay has commented that the kind of movement possible in open-borders Europe can be liberating and also isolating in its freedom—the man who can move about at will, has no home. Every kind of human community—family, town, country, an ethnic community, a shared language—is tested by geographic distance.

The geographically decontextualized aspect of Szalay’s characters is important, and touches on my hesitancy to accept the novel as “all” that man is. These characters are all that man is when he is disconnected and decontextualized. In genres of self-awakening, like the bildungsroman, a character discovers context in some way: it might be fatherhood, or religious awakening, or the esprit de corps of the military, or any other number of connections, but immersion in some kind of community is the vehicle for wholeness. Szalay has not exactly inverted that norm, since his characters do not usually discover “wholeness,” but he has challenged it. If Tony is correct, and the only thing that is eternal is time, then attempts at other kinds of connection are only transient, and are as malleable as geographic borders are for Szalay’s characters.

Ryan Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University, and an M.A.T. from Clayton State University. She is currently an instructional designer and researcher. Her most recent instructional design project is the development of a class in writing and qualitative research methods at Georgia State University, where she is also a doctoral student. Her most recent publication is an upcoming book chapter on populism in young adult novels. She lives and works in the Atlanta area.

 

 

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THE FUTURE WON’T BE LONG, a novel by Jarett Kobek, reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker

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THE FUTURE WON’T BE LONG
by Jarett Kobek
Viking, 416 pages

Reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker

Not even the greatest writers can write the story of how their own careers will go. Behind every success story that doesn’t involve something like the dark arts there’s always a lot of hard work, but also the presence of the most elusive element, luck. In his latest novel, The Future Won’t Be Long, Jarett Kobek meditates on the nature of artistic success. He follows two friends coming of age in New York City in the late-’80s to mid-’90s as artists, their personal development and their artistic development hand in hand, all hard living, hard work, and big dumb luck. While this is Kobek’s first book from a major publishing house—a measure of success for a once indie small press writer—he is no rookie; this is his seventh book to date (next year will see another, a 33 1/3 on Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s debut solo album, “Return to the 36 Chambers”). Kobek’s own career trajectory might mirror that of his characters, as he’s the kind of writer not afraid to dance back and forth across that nebulous boundary between art and reality.

If you read Kobek’s I Hate the Internet (We Heard You Like Books, 2016)—as you should have, it was one of the best books of last year—you’re already familiar with the protagonists of The Future Won’t Be Long. Here we begin with Adeline and Baby, meeting for the first time in 1986, in a squat in Alphabet City, and each takes turns telling the story in alternating chapters. We know from I Hate the Internet that in 2013 Adeline will be a famous comic book artist and Baby a famous science fiction novelist, but now we get to see how they get there, how a deep yet tumultuous friendship becomes the center around which two very different lives and careers orbit and evolve.

The New York City of the decade in which The Future Won’t Be Long is set is a city in transition, sloughing off the dirty skin of a seriously fertile artistic period to eventually reveal a heartless skeleton scraped clean by Mayor Giuliani and the NYPD by the book’s end. From the start, the city is riveting for Baby, who describes how he “wandered New York, its manic energy seeping into my bones. The pavement vibrated, resonating with billions of earlier footsteps, centuries of people making their way, the city alive with the irregular heartbeat of its million cars and trucks, of its screaming pedestrians, its vendors and hustlers. The roar and clamor infected my blood, transforming my walk.”

Adeline and Baby experience lower Manhattan for all it has to offer culturally from ’86 to ’96, mourning the passings of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquit, and David Wojnarowicz, and hobnobbing with such people as science fiction novelist, Thomas M. Disch, Bret Easton Ellis, Grant Morrison, Norman Mailer, and club promoter/convicted murderer Michael Alig. And while Kobek might cram reality into his fiction through noted historic personages, there is a brilliant moment of trans-fictional reality where after the death of Basquiat, as Adeline stands outside his apartment on Great Jones Street, a friend of hers mentions musician Bucky Wunderlick who used to live on this block. The friend releases a small diatribe about how great Wunderlick still is, but how his most recent albums are different from his early work. Of course it is true that Wunderlick did live on Great Jones Street, but only in the Don DeLillo novel, Great Jones Street.

Kobek’s narrative deftness in this novel is illustrated by how the reader experiences the aging of the characters. Even though the alternating first person narrators talk to the reader and seem to be speaking from the present, the language, perspective, and awareness of each grows with each chapter as the narratives move forward in time. This conjoined narrative and character evolution is reminiscent of Joyce’s project in Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man as the narrative grows more clear and intelligible as Stephen Dedalus matures. In much of Kobek’s fiction, his characters often feel like props for cultural criticism and while this might be a problem, or cute gimmick, in the hands of a lesser writer, he pulls it off. He does so because he’s created round characters of depth and the incisive and witty critiques they convey further build out their identities while helping establish a time and place. Most importantly, the cultural critiques and observations delivered by Adeline and Baby mature with them, not just the level of perception, but the chosen topics too.

Early in the work we see Adeline defending the film Pump Up the Volume, with the insight of a precocious teenager: “Even if one strips away all the terrific clichés and demands of the three act screenplay, there is something enormously appealing about Christian Slater establishing that radio station in his parents’ basement. One doesn’t often see that in film, one doesn’t often see private worlds, disconnected realities built by outsiders through force of will, constructed with taste and abstention.” Soon enough Adeline treats the television show, The Wonder Years, according to its wider social context, tossing off the line: “The whole thing is an excuse for Baby Boomers to remind everyone yet again the irrefutable Monumentalness of the 1960s.”As we enter the 1990s the focus of her gaze gets more serious and we see the deep wisdom of an old soul. Her take on the first Gulf War rings even more true today: “it hadn’t been a Good War where all the citizens buckled down under the weight of collective sacrifice. It wasn’t even a Vietnam, with the American poor and dispossessed mangled by freedom fighters. The war was a video game in real time on a global scale, in which we unleashed billions of dollars of weaponry on a bunch of ill-educated Arabs.”

Baby is more of a babe in the woods of the New York wilds and the wealthy, cosmopolitan Adeline plays a mentor role until he is financially and intellectual more able to stand on his own. Stripped of innocence through club land sojourns, Baby starts to find his voice as a writer and finally Kobek’s scathing critique has another outlet. The greatest hits are when Baby is given to comment on the politics of his time, which he describes as “A world in which the zombified corpse of Ronald Reagan embraces profound and systemic industry deregulation and is followed into the presidency by Bill Clinton, a back slapping Southern politician who never saw a civil protection that he didn’t detest;” and on art, as when he reminisces on Andy Warhol: “he was a beacon for America’s fucked-up and alienated and gay kids. He transformed himself into a living idea like a Tibetan tulpa, an image that self-replicated across the whole culture. But the thing about Andy, the inexplicable thing, is that in addition to being a media superstar, he was the greatest American artist of the twentieth century. I’ll defend that position to death.”

The author himself has also experienced some reconciliation with his past through the publication of this novel. Last year, he told Chelsea Hodson at Literary Hub, “There’s btw, there’s I Hate the Internet, and there’s an unpublished manuscript called The Future Won’t Be Long. They’re all part of an unofficially series—the American Decadence series—which spans from 1986 until 2013.” While I Hate the Internet was written after The Future Won’t Be Long, it’s clear that the reverse order of publication gave the author the chance to see this earlier work with new eyes. In the penultimate chapter, when Baby admits he and Adeline “were only another group of rich white people on drugs,” it sounds more authorial, an apology, and a moment of exegesis. Soon enough, in that chapter told by Baby, a different narrative voice takes over, seemingly Kobek himself. It is a post-I Hate the Internet Kobek voice. The new voice delivers a long rant with each sentence considering the different things fiction never addresses, such as “the way that free speech is the booby prize of democracy” and “the way the concept of intelligence was devised by men to exclude women.” It is at once a jarring and brilliant piece of writing that takes the reader out of the narrative, but thematically rounding it all out and giving the author a chance to stand in the same place of retrospect and reconciliation as his characters. Nostalgia gives way to growth.

The Future Won’t Be Long pulls no punches depicting cultural producers toiling in the fields, working with anything at their disposal, all to catch that budding glimmer of inspiration making it all feel worth it before the ghastly reality of the marketplace comes to bear. We feel the truth in the work and that feeling is evidenced by a career reaching a well-earned future.

Jordan A. Rothacker is a poet, essayist, and novelist who lives in Athens, GA where he received an MA in Religion and a PhD in Comparative Literature. His books are The Pit, and No Other Stories (Black Hill Press, 2015), And Wind Will Wash Away (Deeds, 2016), and the meta-text My Shadow Book by Maawaam (Spaceboy Books, 2017).

 

 

 

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ISLAND OF POINT NEMO, a novel by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, reviewed by Rachel R. Taube

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ISLAND OF POINT NEMO
by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
translated from the French by Hannah Chute
Open Letter Books, 450 pages

reviewed by Rachel  R. Taube

Island of Point Nemo is a fast-moving adventure story featuring murderers, romance, and preternatural turns. But dig further into those turns, and the novel is ultimately a eulogy to books, both as physical objects and as containers for fiction. Written by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès and newly translated from French by Hannah Chute, Island of Point Nemo features suspenseful plotlines that intertwine in such a way as to make the reader question the natures of fiction, reality, and history.

This is Blas de Roblès’ ninth book and his second to be published in English. The philosophy-professor-turned-novelist’s prize-winning first book to appear in English, Where Tigers Are at Home, arrived relatively quietly in the U.S., but received positive reviews from Kirkus and NPR, which praised it as “a challenge to readers who want their fiction to offer a quick pay-off.” Island of Point Nemo, too, rewards patience, and despite some failings of tone, it is an unpredictable ride that successfully plays with form to develop its themes.

The primary plotline is an odyssey in the tradition of Jules Verne and Conan Doyle, featuring characters inspired by Captain Nemo and Sherlock Holmes. As the protagonists solve the mystery of a stolen diamond, they encounter helpful princes and scientists, murderous eunuchs, roving armies, and circus freaks that lead them around the world and to its most isolated corner, Point Nemo. A secondary plotline features an ereader factory, B@bil Books, run by the despicable Monsieur Wang, who loves profit and cares little for literature. Subsidiary storylines follow the romantic lives of several of his employees.

Island of Point Nemo’s greatest strength is its willingness to play with the idea of fiction itself. The book comes into its own in the last third, as the various plotlines begin to overlap—briefly—and influence each other. “Reality” blurs, and Blas de Roblès leans into the idea that one of his characters puts forth: “There is no reality that is not rooted in some prior fiction.” Events in one plotline reappear as fictional stories in another. Literary references are plentiful, and familiar characters occasionally emerge to interact with our detectives. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Sherlock Holmes, Moby Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo, and others provide liberal fodder for characters, settings, and plot. As one character asserts, “If you think about it, every book is the anagram of another.”

Time, too, is in flux, and we readers are like the characters who ride a mysterious train, “passengers of this moving Babel [that] drifted haphazardly through suspended time.” Timelines seem to begin after they end, like a snake that eats its tail. The stories of the detectives and the ebook factory fit together like Russian nesting dolls, only you can’t figure out which doll is the bigger one. As the reader, there’s a pleasure in finding and untangling these intersections, in beginning to understand what all these stories have to do with one another.

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

Throughout, Blas de Roblès often aims to be both fun and funny, and most storylines share a bawdy tone. The adventures are grand, and the over-the-top characters lend a sense that anything can happen next. However, in the service of his humor and his desire for unpredictability, Blas de Roblès also employs a great deal of sexual violence. Monsieur Wang’s abuse of his employees includes watching them on hidden cameras and forcing one woman to undress in front of him; the HR director, catching him masturbating to a video, plans revenge. A woman convinces a sailor to have sex with her and then cries rape, one of the detectives believes, to test the anti-rape device she invented. A prostitute is forced to have a secret code tattooed on her anus, which she must continually show to visitors by penetrating herself with a mirrored device. If these images startle here, they do so equally in the book. One has the impression that Blas de Roblès intends for them to be at least as comedic as they are uncomfortable. Violence, sex, and crudeness can of course be compelling and even funny subjects, but I found these scenes neither humorous nor carefully handled. Ultimately, they lacked empathy, and this detracted from the other, better-explored themes.

The book’s greatest empathy, instead, is for physical books. Blas de Roblès and his characters have an abiding love and deep nostalgia for “real” books, which, in at least one plotline, have been completely replaced by ebooks. When one character discovers a secret library, the author describes it as something rare and beautiful, to be protected. In one particularly enjoyable set of chapters, Blas de Roblès recalls the men and women who used to be employed in cigar factories to read aloud to the workers, to keep them entertained. Storytelling for them is power.

In this world, ebooks, on the other hand, are fragile and untrustworthy. Throughout, ereaders break or malfunction or get hacked. They are also inherently corporate and capitalist, in contrast with the seemingly natural magic of paper books. Monsieur Wang thinks, “The important thing was not even that they purchase the most recent ebooks, but that over and over they buy the possibility of purchasing them.” Blas de Roblès’ concern is one familiar to anyone who follows publishing news: that the people behind ebooks are out to destroy “real” books, and that paper books could disappear. Perhaps this is a more compelling line of reasoning in France, for years a European holdout on ebook adoption that has only recently experienced a jump in ebook sales. But the lesson feels a few years out of date from a U.S. perspective, especially for this avid Kindle user. We know that ebooks aren’t replacing real books, that ereader purchases have slowed and paper book sales have evened out. Rather than denying us access to literature, digitization of libraries has democratized publishing and allowed for more public access to books and historical documents than ever before (though not without raising issues of copyright)—further intermingling our reality with the vastness of real and fictional pasts. Blas de Roblès’ concerns may be romantic (don’t we all love the smell and feel of a bound book, still?), but they ring hollow, even within the reality of his novel.

One notes that Island of Point Nemo is not currently available for purchase in ebook form.

Rachel-TaubeRachel R. Taube is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at UNC Wilmington. She has been an Electric Literature-Catapult Scholarship recipient and a Tent Creative Writing Fellow, and she holds a masters in Creative Writing and Gender Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. You can find her fiction in Storychord and Apiary Magazine. Follow her on Twitter at @racheltaube.

 

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INSURRECTIONS, stories by Rion Amilcar Scott, reviewed by William Morris

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INSURRECTIONS
by Rion Amilcar Scott
University of Kentucky Press, 191 Pages

reviewed by William Morris

Welcome to Cross River!

The stories in Rion Amilcar Scott’s debut collection, Insurrections, are set in Cross River, Maryland, a small East Coast city you won’t find on any map. The city itself is a work of fiction, but the lives of its inhabitants feel startlingly real. Among the Cross Riverians—or Riverbabies, depending on who you ask—included in this collection are a suicidal father, an old man known as the slapsmith, and a pair of brothers separated by the constantly flooding Cross River, which gives the city its name and divides it into the affluent Northside and impoverished Southside.

North/south, eloquent/colloquial, holy/profane: these dualities are brought to life throughout Insurrections, winner of the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. In their citation for awarding the collection, the judges describe Scott’s writing as: “hard, humane stories, free of grandstanding yet full of grace, that loom in the mind long after reading.” And the judges are correct. These stories are at times hard, filled with moments of violence and helplessness. But they are also humane, alive with innocence and beauty where it’s least expected.

One of the darker stories is “A Friendly Game,” which begins with Casey and Kwayku, two boys who play basketball and make fun of an apparently crazy woman, calling her “Lady MacBeard.” Casey is quiet and awkward. Kwayku is an athletic jokester with loads of pubescent sexual energy. But Casey has one thing Kwayku lacks: a girlfriend.

Jealousy, Casey is sure, is the reason for all of Kwayku’s mocking, because Marcy is Casey’s girlfriend, “ass and all.” But Kwayku’s jokes go too far: first he calls Lady MacBeard Casey’s mother; then, during a heated game, he says, “Watch, man, I’m gonna fuck your girl. What you think about that?” Casey tries to stay levelheaded throughout the story, trusting that Kwayku’s words are hollow, but is finally pushed too far when, in their final game, Kwayku describes the things he claims to have done to Marcy when Casey wasn’t around. After all the insults and harassment, he can take no more. But Casey’s outburst is misdirected; rather than swinging at Kwayku, he takes a large rock and hurls it at Lady MacBeard, “striking the top of her forehead” and knocking her out. And then:

Casey looked into Kwayku’s face, hoping to see something other than what he saw: a stare of revulsion and pain. It looked like a fright mask, forever molded into an expression of rubbery distress. And Casey couldn’t help it, or even explain it, but it brought him laughter. He laughed like hell until burning water spilled from his eyes onto his cheeks.

By the end of the story, Casey has lost his stolid exterior. He’s been sympathetic throughout, taking Kwayku’s abuse without retaliation, but the hard truth of the story is that we often hold in our torment until it’s too late, then take it out on the wrong person. The burning tears spilling from Casey’s eyes are a bitter reminder that doing the wrong thing feels vindicating when you’ve suffered so much wrong yourself.

Rion Amilcar Scott

But Scott also shows us the small ways that life is beautiful. An unemployed father teaches his eleven-year-old daughter to play chess in “202 Checkmates.” One of her first lessons: “Chess is like real life. The white pieces go first so they got an advantage over the black pieces.” The father shows himself capable of joking and intimacy over the chessboard, something unusual in their home. Her father goes on to crush her in game after game, the daughter tallying her losses vigilantly throughout the story, her respect for her father’s skill mounting.

Despite losing once, then 57 times, then 201 times, she always remembers that “if a pawn makes it to the other side [of the board] it becomes a queen.” She never forgets the image of “a little pawn magically blossoming into royalty on that last square.” She says: “It became something I longed to see. Sometimes when all was lost, I’d just inch a pawn forward, but the piece never made it.” She holds on to this hope of her pawn becoming a queen, just as many of Scott’s characters hold on to the thing they long for as the world throws stones at their heads.

Over the course of these many losses, the daughter has improved. She’s been visiting a nearby park, where players congregate around boards to play chess in public, and learning new strategies from these strangers. In their 202nd game, the daughter’s newly acquired skill gives her father something to sweat over. She’s moving in ways he’s never seen, and it’s clear he’s worried about the game. This is how she describes the moment when she has her father, for the first time, close to checkmate:

I imagined my father’s mind racing, cataloging everything that had ever tumbled down around him. I put my hand on a bishop, my would be assassin, and thought of my father’s heights when he won, how he galloped around. The depths of his despair at losing, I expected, would be equal to the peaks. He’d mope about, his face fallen and miserable, his posture stooped as if his back ached. I took my hand from the piece and leaned back in deliberation.

Although she slyly lets her father take the game, the daughter finally gets a pawn across the board and becomes a queen. Her kindness, in not defeating her father at his own game, is repaid with a brief moment of grace, the blossoming she’s waited for all along.

There are many other moving stories in Scott’s collection, most of which were originally published in literary magazines before the book’s release. Insurrections is an invitation into the inner lives of people in hard circumstances, but it is also a highly imaginative collection. One of the more unusual stories, “Party Animal: The Strange and Savage Case of a Once Erudite and Eloquent Young Man,” uses footnotes to cleverly introduce Reverse Animalism, a disorder that causes functioning members of society to retreat into the wild and abandon civilization. This disorder concerns scholars in Cross River, who fear for the future of the afflicted. Those suffering from Reverse Animalism might be on to something, though. Life in Cross River is often difficult, sometimes cruel, as Scott knows life is for many of us. When Scott’s writing ventures away from strict realism, as in the invented disorder in “Party Animal,” the imagined world he creates captures something intensely real. In each of these thirteen stories, there is surprise and sadness, Scott’s beautiful language and the deepening mythology of Cross River. These stories consistently achieve the level of the best hard, humane fiction.

William-MorrisWilliam Morris is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His work has appeared in print and online, most recently at Sediments Literary Arts Journal, Fiction Southeast, and Red Earth Review. He divides his time between St. Louis and Salt Lake City, and is always reading. He also works as an editor at Natural Bridge. His other areas of interest include cats, coffee, and cryptozoology.

 

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MAP DRAWN BY A SPY, a novel by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, reviewed by reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

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MAP DRAWN BY A SPY
by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
translated by Mark Fried
Archipelago Books, 240 pages

reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

Posthumous novels are both a joy and, sometimes, a let-down. Left behind by an author whose polished work stands as a testament to the full capacity of his or her mind, the words on the page surface at first like an extension from the past. This one last bit of evidence left for us to find. The posthumous novel should be examined and praised as a rare object—hidden in a vault, locked in an old suitcase, tucked into an envelope—and given a small bit of license for being not quite the full body of work its author intended.

At least, this is how I will approach and critique Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s third posthumous novel Map Drawn By a Spy. This book is a psuedo-memoir, a recounting of the several months Infante spent trapped in post-revolution Cuba. He was born in 1929 to Communist parents who moved the family to Havana in 1941. Infante was a supporter of the revolution and even knew Fidel Castro when he was a thug in the UIR (Unión Insurrecional Revolucionaria). Later, Infante was named cultural attaché to the Cuban embassy in Brussels. He wrote short stories, edited a literary supplement for a Cuban newspaper (that was later shut down by the government), and wrote film criticism under the pseudonym “G. Caín.”

In 1965, while working in Brussels as cultural attaché he received a phone call that his mother was dying in Cuba. He flew to Cuba, attended her funeral (his mother had died of an untreated ear infection), and within a week, hoped to return to Brussels with his two daughters. The night of his intended departure he was detained at the airport and ordered to return to the Foreign Ministry. The week turned into two, then a month, and eventually, after finagling a transit visa to Spain for the debut of his novel Three Trapped Tigers, Infante left Cuba for the last time on October 3, 1965. He tried to remain in Spain, but was ultimately exiled to the United Kingdom. He lived in London, became a British citizen, and remained there until his death on February 21, 2005 at age 75.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Map Drawn By a Spy takes place during those months Infante was detained in his homeland. It is a narrative about an unnamed Cuban native and diplomat (the author loosely disguising himself) who returns home to Cuba for his mother’s funeral and is detained for four months before he can leave and return to Europe. The revolution is just beginning to transform Cuba into a kind of prison state. Everyone is either watching or being watched. You are either a revolutionary (and therefore loyal to the government) or a counter-revolutionary (and probably subverting the government and the revolution in some way—perhaps intellectually, politically, or in terms of sexual orientation). Everything is rationed. Everyone is supposed to follow the rules, the expectations—of gender, class, government hierarchy. And the rationale is clear: everything within the state of Cuba is being slowly consumed by the dictatorial power of one person, Fidel Castro.

In a 2000 interview with Oscar Hijuelos for BOMB magazine, Hijuelos asked Infante about his relationship with Castro. Infante recalled one of Castro’s early televised speeches in which he claimed the revolution would not “be like Saturn and it won’t devour its children” (a reference to Roman mythology in which Saturn cannibalizes his offspring to secure his own supremacy). Infante retorted: “But it will devour its grandchildren instead.” He went on to explain to Hijuelos:

It was pathetic but it was also prophetic. Saying things like that contributed to the banning of the magazine [Revolución] some time later in 1961. Enough was enough when [Castro] closed the magazine and announced his Stalinist credo: “With the Revolution everything, against the Revolution nothing.” And it was only for him to decide when and who were against or in favor of his Revolution. It took me years to extricate myself because you don’t leave your country as if leaving the party—which was over anyway.

In much the same way that Infante was slowly hunted and persecuted by Castro, the unnamed protagonist of Map Drawn By a Spy is also detained and pursued by a bureaucratic system designed to entrap dissenters and punish counter-revolutionaries. After several attempts to meet with Raúl Roa, the minister of foreign relations, or Arnold Rodríguez, vice-minister, so that he could somehow resume his trip to Brussels, the unnamed protagonist realizes he is being punished:

The incident made him finally accept that Roa would not see him, that Arnold’s call to the airport about an interview with the minister was an excuse as patently false as the one they had given the Swiss ambassador. But if that was the case, why had Roa’s name and an interview with him been offered as justification for aborting his trip? Besides, why had they waited until precisely the very last moment to block his return to Brussels? Who, if not Roa, had been behind it?

And like Infante, the unnamed protagonist is also heavily burdened by the loss of his country:

Finding himself face to face again with what Lisandro Otero would call revolutionary reality, the odd incongruity hit him: he was in his own country, but somehow his country was not his country; an imperceptible mutation had changed people and things into their mirror image; everyone and everything was there, but they weren’t themselves, Cuba was not Cuba.

Much of Infante’s novel/memoir (only Infante himself could tell how much of it is fictionalized) concerns the loss of his homeland as a betrayal of the ideals which he first believed were necessary for the success of the revolution—freedom from Batista’s oppressive military regime, independence from overpowering colonizing powers like the United States, and a new license for freedom of expression. But gradually the revolution becomes swept up in its own hypocrisy and both Infante and the unnamed protagonist understand he cannot be a true writer if he is not allowed full range of expression:

In the interview he addressed the dilemma of the revolutionary writer, saying that for a truly revolutionary writer the Revolution itself offered solutions. What’s more, he promised to devote all his future works to revolutionary literature—not to a literature that was revolutionary but to literature of the Revolution. In answering the questions, he knew he had no intention of writing such books. He believed politics and literature were locked in a lifelong battle and he had already made his choice, a decision he would not renounce.

But for all the subversive and dissenting criticism Infante scatters throughout the book, this novel is also filled with plenty of banality. The seemingly incessant waiting and lack of work or useful pursuits gives Infante plenty of license to womanize and (presumably) forget to call the wife he left back in Brussels. There is a side to this book more concerned with name-dropping (in fact, the end of the book also includes a handy glossary of all the people Infante met during his time in Cuba) and perhaps self-assurance of his own importance. It is, at times, entirely distracting from the direction of the story, but then again I’m not sure Infante intended the novel to be read widely, or even if he intended for the novel to have a specific direction. In fact, the title Map Drawn By a Spy, is more a romantic phrase than an indication of the life of the protagonist (it is referenced late in the book when the unnamed protagonist meets Alejo Carpentier, another Cuban novelist, who has a map drawn by an English spy hanging on his office wall; it is also referenced in an epigraph from Infante’s own novel View of Dawn in the Tropics).

At the end of their interview, Hijuelos asked Cabrera Infante about his legacy and whether he was interested in being remembered in a hundred years. Cabrera Infante coyly deflected:

I am convinced that in a hundred years time the only writing remembered in Spanish will be Borges. I told him so at our last dinner at the Brown’s Hotel, telling him he shouldn’t worry about getting or not getting the Noble Prize. I then added, “Of course you’re not interested in the money from the prize.” And he smiled and said, a sudden Argentine: “No crea, no crea.”

Another instance of name-dropping, perhaps, but Infante’s voice of dissent defined his career as a writer and a critic. He would not allow the revolution to swallow him whole and, perhaps to mourn the demise of his country and the consequences of the revolution, he wrote a chronicle of the last time he spent in his homeland.

Jacqueline-KharoufJacqueline Kharouf has an MFA in creative writing, fiction, from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Harpoon Review, Matchbook Literary Magazine, Gingerbread House, The Examined Life Journal, Shout Out UK, South Dakota Review, Fiction Vortex, Otis Nebula, NANO Fiction, and Numéro Cinq Magazine. In 2011, she won third place in H.O.W. Journal’s Fiction contest, judged by Mary Gaitskill. Jacqueline blogs at jacquelinekharouf.wordpress.com; tweets @writejacqueline; and hopes you “like” her Facebook page “Jacqueline Kharouf, writer.”

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NOTES OF A CROCODILE, a novel by Qiu Miaojin, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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NOTES OF A CROCODILE
by Qiu Miaojin
translated by Bonnie Huie
New York Review Books, 242 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

“Even if this book is neither popular nor serious, at least it’s sensational,” claims Lazi, the narrator of Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile. “It’s about getting a diploma and writing.”

Lazi is a clever satirist though, so don’t take her at her word. As it turns out, Notes of a Crocodile was both popular and sensational in Taiwan, Qiu’s native country. Lazi does get a diploma and she writes quite a bit, but it’s hardly prosaic. Notes of a Crocodile is Lazi’s coming of age story as a lesbian at a university in the years following the collapse of Taiwan’s martial regime. In the novel, Lazi grapples with a series of relationships that teach her what self-inquiry and liberation are, how to navigate the gender labels that have warped her, and how to stop warping herself and her close relationships with her own fear and self-loathing.

Lazi’s reflections are dated from the late 1980s, emphasizing the sudden public emergence of queer communities—and other Taiwanese communities oppressed under almost four decades of martial law—during those years. The literary scene of 1990s Taiwan experienced a glasnost-style explosion of experimental literature and openness to new social theory. One unexpected result of this was that queer literature moved easily into the mainstream. Notes of a Crocodile, first published in Chinese in 1994 and now available in English translated by Bonnie Huie, was considered a significant literary arrival for the Taiwanese queer community. While it wasn’t Taiwan’s first popular piece of “gay literature,” it was an engaging and exceptionally popular book that established Qiu as a cult figure in queer literary circles for its treatment of sexuality and identity, and earned her mainstream attention for its experimental structure. The book was popular enough that the main character’s name, Lazi, became a slang term for “lesbian.”

The novel’s unique historical context is important to Lazi’s story, and to Qiu’s background as a writer, but part of the novel’s context is also that Qiu, an open lesbian, took her own life in 1995, at age 26. Just before her death she wrote a second novel, Last Words from Montmartre, available in an English translation by Ari Larissa Heinrich, and described by Heinrich in an interview, at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, as an “experimental suicide memoir.” Like Notes from a Crocodile, Last Words from Montmartre also features a lesbian narrator; in both texts the narrator’s biography is similar to Qiu, but the character is also fictionalized extensively. Qiu’s death has meant that the two novels are examined extensively for clues as to why she took her own life, but Heinrich cautions anyone from drawing conclusions, pointing out that Qiu’s family and friends have remained very quiet on that issue.

Qiu Miaojin

Notes of a Crocodile would have been oddly predictive when Qiu first wrote it. Lazi seems to have her finger on the precise gender-centric issues and anxieties that our culture is presently addressing. During one conversation with friends, Lazi suggests, “Hey, we should form a gender-free society and monopolize all the public restrooms!” The proposition is meant to be fantastical and comic, but most of Lazi’s “fantastical” ideas are connected to her very real and very universal struggle to “join the rest of humanity” by having transparent relationships, where she can be honest with herself and others. As Lazi realizes, the only way to enjoy real friendship and love “was to gradually reveal my secret. I would begin to construct my internal blueprint. There was no other way I could go on. For me, it was a matter of life and death, and of pain.”

But, just as Lazi gets serious, Qiu introduces: a talking crocodile.

Qiu inserts chapters featuring the comical adventures of several crocodiles—who usually wear “human suits” when they venture among humanity—throughout Lazi’s “notebooks,” her collection of letters and recollections about her years at a university in Taipei.

The first time the reader meets the crocodiles, two of them are visiting a Lacoste shop (the crocodile label) and admiring the clothes, particularly a mink coat. But they cannot ask to try it on, because that would involve removing their own coats, and then they would be exposed as crocodiles.

Much better to just stroke the mink coat and imagine wearing it.

Meanwhile, rumors of crocodiles circulate, and the tabloids print stories. It is rumored that the college age population has been infiltrated by crocodiles, while the older crowd purchases the tabloids and watches the news for any mention of them.

“What was everyone after, anyhow?” wonder the crocodiles. “If that many people secretly liked them, that’d be totally embarrassing.”

The crocodiles are Qiu’s clever and engaging metaphor for queerness. They hide from the media (which seems to be talking about them a lot), go grocery shopping, take baths, have gatherings where they can admire each other’s human suits, and sometimes they try to go on television and talk about themselves. Even though the crocodiles spend most of their time trying to mask their identity or at least down play it, their short moments of comedic focalization satirize straight perceptions of queerness and queer attempts at blending in, while appealing to the universal human problem of performance and impersonation: when we fail to accept ourselves and choose to wear masks, we become some other strange animal, and give up the possibility of being known by others. As Lazi learns, other people cannot really love her without knowing her. The performance separates the crocodiles from the human company that they crave, just as Lazi realizes that her “secret” is separating her from the people who would love her.

We learn almost nothing about Lazi’s family of origin or her childhood, except that she has always known she cares for girls. During her freshman year, she falls in love with an older student, Shui Ling; the relationship is passionate but problematic, bringing out the worst in both women. Her second relationship, again with an older woman, is also ill-fated, but it’s through these two experiences that Lazi achieves an admirable degree of self-awareness and moves beyond fantastical, passionate ideals of love to a reality in which she can “confront the meaning of every great love that has shattered.” Her shard-by-shard self-inquiry is a formidable attempt at liberation from her destructive patterns.

Qui has created a panoply of colorful characters around Lazi. These include Meng Sheng, a rich kid with a violent streak, his co-dependent sometimes-lover Chu Kuang, Tun-Tun, a brilliant and musically gifted woman, and Zhi Rou, Tun-Tun’s artistic girlfriend. Seen only from Lazi’s perspective, we can enjoy Lazi’s humorous and sometimes caustic recollections, but we miss out on knowing these characters’ deeper motivations, or how they really see Lazi. With the short-sightedness of youth, Lazi records that many of the important images from her university years have accumulated “a weight I never expected,” and so at the time “I never did say goodbye or thank you to all the people in those images. With a stiff upper lip, I stood back and watched as they slipped out of my life.”

This isn’t a crusade novel, or fiction that lectures about gender and sexuality; nor does Lazi wallow in her outsider status or embrace a victim’s stance toward the world. Her growth as a character is satisfying, and Qiu knows how to engage the reader with Lazi’s failures as well as her epiphanies. While Notes of a Crocodile presents itself as a “school novel,” it is not location-driven the way school novels like Prep (Curtis Sittenfeld) or The Secret History (Donna Tartt) are. Instead, I was reminded of the angsty drama of J.D. Salinger, the episodic and tongue-in-cheek experiments of Kurt Vonnegut, and the persistent cultural exegesis through literary and film references of David Foster Wallace, more than I was of other coming-of-age-at-school tales.

There is no way to know the degree to which a loved book influences the larger culture. We like to believe in the activist value of art; Lazi seems to understand that great love and great art is revolutionary, maybe political; one of the crocodiles certainly hopes so, as he attempts to go on television and sing for us. Taiwan has led Asia as the country most accepting of the queer community: the Taiwanese courts became the first Asian court system to recognize same-sex marriage, in May 2017, the same month that this English translation of Notes of a Crocodile came out. That’s a serendipitous connection, but nevertheless it seems to honor Qiu. In the City Lights interview, Heinrich points out that Notes of a Crocodile made Qiu “a household name of sorts in Taiwan—she’s even taught in high schools.” That kind of attention would certainly have aided the cause of the singing crocodile who wanted some attention, but Heinrich suggests that it might also have been disruptive for the introverted Qiu. We’re left to wonder what Qiu’s comments might have been on her book’s cultural influence and the legal acceptance of same-sex marriage.

Lazi argues that mapping secrets and pain can be a matter of life and death, and Qiu’s suicide seems to attest to that. Considering the stresses of our present age, where identities and ideologies are masking and unmasking, the intrapersonal mapping of identity is even more significant for artists that would influence culture. That might be another way that Notes of a Crocodile is oddly predictive; or, its tendency to speak so clearly to our global present might mean that Lazi—and Qiu’s—struggle for self-identification is timeless. In either case, Notes of a Crocodile is an important addition to literature that addresses identity and sexuality, as well as a significant stylistic legacy from a writer prematurely lost.

Ryan Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University, and an M.A.T. from Clayton State University. She is currently an instructional designer and researcher. Her most recent instructional design project is the development of a class in writing and qualitative research methods at Georgia State University, where she is also a doctoral student. Her most recent publication is an upcoming book chapter on populism in young adult novels. She lives and works in the Atlanta area.

The Apostle Killer, a novel by Richard Beard, reviewed by Ansel Shipley

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The Apostle Killer
by Richard Beard
Melville House, 331 pages

 reviewed by Ansel Shipley

Jesus is the enemy in The Apostle Killer: a socialist anti-establishment religious extremist. In the novel, Richard Beard creates a world that melds both the superstitious past, in which a self-described Messiah could amass a frighteningly large following, and the skeptical present that labels such men religious extremists and terrorists. “With Jesus, the trickery is without end. If he feigned his death he was extending a pattern that started with the miracles because what you see, with Jesus, is rarely what you get.”

The protagonist, Cassius Gallio, is a counterinsurgency agent, a “Speculator” tasked with stamping out superstition and political threats to Rome’s control over Jerusalem. As a young man, Gallio found himself assigned to disprove Jesus’s miraculous resurrection and quickly became embroiled in a twisted web of uncertainty and dangerous machinations. A series of dead-ends and Judas’s suicide (which Gallio is convinced was a hit performed on Jesus’s orders) results in Gallio being sent to Moldova in career exile. After his old partner Valeria, now a major mover-and-shaker in Rome, reopens the case against Jesus, Gallio returns to Jerusalem to prove once and for all that Jesus’s resurrection was a scam. Richard Beard is no stranger to religious fiction: similar to The Apostle Killer, his novel Lazarus is Dead approaches a core Christian myth and reimagines it, attempting to depict the life of Lazarus and his lifelong relationship with Jesus. The Apostle Killer marks a shift in Beard’s stylistic focus. While many of his early novels could be described best as literary or realistic fiction, this novel is squarely detective fiction.

Beard doesn’t skimp on the old-world gore as each Apostle meets his demise in increasingly brutal ways (Philip has a rope threaded through his hamstrings and is crucified upside-down, and Simon is sawn in half with a chainsaw). The novel is framed around each of these violent deaths; each chapter’s title consists of the apostle’s name and how he met his end: Chapter One is “Judas ‘burst asunder,’” for example, and Chapter Eight is “Bartholomew ‘skinned alive.’” This technique ensured that this reader began each chapter with a degree of trepidation, eager to see how each apostle met his horrific end, but also mildly disturbed by Beard’s graphic depictions of gore and violence.

The setting of The Apostle Killer manages to evoke both ancient Damascus and Jerusalem and the modern Middle East, blending CCTV, air travel, and cell phones with horse drawn carts and the Roman Circus. While surveying his surroundings upon his return to Jerusalem, Gallio thinks, “Car bomb…a sign of the times. The leaves are back on the trees so the blast happened at least a year ago, but in Jerusalem past and present coexist. Possibly the future too.”

Richard Beard

Beard’s writing elevates this conventional plot however. His clipped sentences and blunt observational narration feels hardened by age and regret. The tight prose remains engaging even through the center of the novel when the plot begins to lose steam, ensuring that the reader won’t lose to much interest. The unusual depiction of Jesus proves to be The Apostle Killer’s strongest asset. Throughout the novel, Gallio ruminates on the strangely slippery nature of Jesus, how despite having an intimate knowledge of Him he can’t remember what he truly looked like: “when the face is moving, it is him, recognizably a cult leader with a fanatical following. On pause, however, the stilled image never accurately captures the living individual Gallio would recognize.” Beard returns to the idea of Jesus being unrecognizable many times throughout his novel: Gallio is unable to adequately recall his face for an APB, so he uses an apostle’s likeness instead (since they all looked basically the same). Every person asked to describe Jesus remembers him looking differently, and somehow every famous painting depicting Jesus is just as accurate and just as unique as the next.

While the individual beats of the story don’t fall flat, they often feel formulaic. In many ways, The Apostle Killer is a fairly straightforward crime thriller, elevated by strong writing and a unique plot. Cassius Gallio is the hard-bitten investigator exhausted and washed up from a decade of exile; his marriage has failed and his ex-wife and daughter now live with one of his old colleagues; he struggles with his lust for his younger female partner. Gallio’s affair with said partner (who is married with two children) often felt less like an integral part of The Apostle Killer’s story and more like something Beard included because detective novels almost always have immoral affairs.

The handling of Jesus and the depiction of Christianity as a dangerous and unsettling cult that only over time has been shaped into something that is palatable and has mass appeal is The Apostle Killer’s most effective idea. The novel is otherwise a fun and engaging crime thriller and its consistent dips into old-world brutality kept me engaged through the end. While the narrative lull in the middle may run the risk of losing serious fans of crime thrillers, I remained interested and excited until the novel’s mostly satisfying conclusion.

Ansel Shipley is a graduate of SUNY Purchase college with a degree in literature. While there he was the senior literary editor of the student-run art and literature publication Submissions Magazine. He currently lives in Brooklyn where he writes freelance critical reviews and volunteers at Hullabaloo Books.

 

 

 

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GOING DARK, stories by Dennis Must, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

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GOING DARK
by Dennis Must
Coffeetown Press, 167 pages

reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

An aging and dying actor, a blank slate, a forgotten man. This is the first narrator the reader meets in Dennis Must’s 2016 collection of seventeen short stories, Going Dark. The narrator of the title story, though a nobody, shares much in common with the other narrators and characters of the stories that follow in the collection. Indeed, throughout the collection, Must’s characters wrestle with important questions about identity, sanity, and morality, as their lives are colored by the particular details of their lives: their cars, the music they listen to, and their work. . The reason the first narrator, the actor, considers himself a nobody is that his identity is simply that of every character he has ever played. His own identity is simply lost.

The characters in this collection have done everything from acting to working the night shift in a college town’s only hotel to working as a night watchman in the local steel mill. They seem to be reflections on Must himself, who has co-founded a commercial real estate firm, taught school, worked as a cabinetmaker, short-order cook, lightning rod installer, florist, bartender, and bellhop. Additionally, he spent some time working in a glass factory and steel mill as well as in construction and on a railroad. The book luxuriates in this richness as Must describes people from all walks of life trying to grapple with whatever stage of life they find themselves in at that moment.

For example, in the title story, “Going Dark,” the narrator first tries to respond to basic questions that he might be asked: “Where do you live?” and “How many children do you have?” “And your wife—who is she?” But in answering these questions, the narrator, the dying actor, begins to grapple with an essential question that come at that stage of life: “What is there to be afraid of?” For the narrator, all of the roles he has formerly performed and the way that those roles—those people inside him—demand attention, wanting to continue existing is “[t]he source of [his] deep anguish.”

Dennis Must

Many of the protagonists in the collection, some of whom appear in multiple stories, seem to be asking themselves “who am I?” For the dying actor “who am I?” is a hard question after playing so many roles and struggling desperately to create a singular identity as life winds down. The young narrator of the story “Marine Band,” Ethan, must ask himself if he has only been pretending to be someone else. When Ethan was a child a young soldier, Chester, played the harmonica, and when he died at war, Chester’s mother gave Ethan Chester’s harmonica. After performing for his fifth grade class, Ethan “[feels] ashamed” and “like a paper solider.” For Ethan, “[Chester] was the star,” and Ethan was only pretending. Ethan is also the narrator of the final story, “The Joining.” Here, he must decide at a young age if he will turn away from the destiny of a high school aptitude test to become a mortician, even once the opportunity to become a mortician presents itself, or continue on as a night watchman, a job he xxxx.. Wrapped up in that question is another question of what it must mean if his brother’s “fate was actually [his]?” His brother, Jeremiah, had the opportunity to become a mortician after falling in love with the town mortician’s daughter. But for Ethan, he believes that “[Jeremiah] was going to be punished for something [he’d] reneged on[.]”

From the beginning, Must keeps probing the difference between reality and fiction. Just what is real? In “Going Dark,” the narrator says to his conscience, “I have to see you, to look you in the eyes, if I’m to believe you’re for real.” In “Houseguest,” the main character, Edgar, wonders “if somehow watching [a phantom woman] will cause [her] to melt away, to evaporate.” All along in this story Edgar struggles to determine if this woman is really there in the house with him. What is real and what isn’t? In a story that seems to allude to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, Must explores the line between sanity and madness. Instead of a suffering from paranoia developed from guilt as in the narrator of Poe’s story, Edgar’s madness develops by first making up a backstory for himself that might satisfy the neighbors. He, then, dreams about hearing “the former tenant’s heart beating in the upstairs bedroom” before finding a photograph of a naked woman he begins to believe is living with him. From then on, it is no longer the ticking of a timepiece or the former tenant’s heart. It is the sounds of a piano or “a woman’s voice singing a Cole Porter medley.” Edgar hums classical works by the likes of Debussy and Ravel on his walks, but the voice he hears is singing a Cole Porter medley; he’s hearing jazz. Maybe that’s another clue about Edgar’s state of mind—what he hums and what he hears at night do not match.

With this line between reality and fiction, sanity and insanity, should the reader trust these narrators? There is no doubt that they struggle with ordinary imperfections. Perhaps, it is Must’s insistence on never totally masking these imperfections that makes the narrators deserving of the reader’s trust. After all, by revealing the narrators’ struggles and imperfections, Must makes them more relatable and believable. Even “Houseguest,” told in the third person, is told both by the third person narrator and in italics by Edgar himself. Who should the reader believe? Are they really even different narrators in the first place?

Must’s prose is poetic. In the last line of “Going Dark,” Must writes, describing what the end of the narrator’s life will look like, “And bystanders will drop jeweled rings and eyeglasses in his wake.” The crisp prose allows his counterintuitively to blur reality. For example, in “Boys,” the reader must repeatedly ask herself what is really going on in the bathroom where the former resident of the apartment had died. But Must makes sure that the reader is grounded in a real place with sentences that tell the reader concrete and specific details like “[t]he radio’s playing New Orleans” and “[the house] sat across from Hollyhock Avenue Grade School with an oak swing hanging by link chain from the porch ceiling, a garage whose walls were covered with license plates from every state in the Union, and a tiled bathroom [. . .] all white.” Even when the narrators and characters grapple with their identity, madness, or simply doing the right thing, Must uses his prose to ground his reader. In fact, his use of prose expertly highlights the split between what is real and what is not by combining poetic prose with crisp, concrete prose.

Taken together, Must’s collection is a perceptive exploration of very real parts of life—childhood, marriage, employment, old age, and death, to name several—that reveals how even ordinary and prosaic aspects of life can be full of anguish and can lead to mental deterioration. In the story “Wartime Stockings,” the narrator, James, must confront the darker aspects of his mother’s life upon finding her partially dressed “with her head resting on a cast-iron burner used for summer canning” and the “gas jets wide open.” He realizes that “[t]he dark chapter was hers alone” and that he “only was privy to its halcyon pages.” James concludes, though, by wondering “if somehow [he] should have understood.” Maybe he should not have missed his mother’s anguish. In this collection, Must ensures that his reader will not make the same mistake. We must not overlook the anguish that accompanies even the most ordinary aspects of life.

Ashlee Paxton-Turner

Ashlee Paxton-Turner is a native of Williamsburg, Virginia and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was an English major with a concentration in creative writing. A former Teach For America corps member, who taught high school mathematics teacher in rural North Carolina, Ashlee is now a law student at Duke University.

 

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LATE FAME, a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

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LATE FAME
by Arthur Schnitzler
translated by Alexander Starritt
New York Review Books, 136 Pages

reviewed by Robert Sorrell

Herr Eduard Saxberger lives in a pleasant apartment overlooking the Vienna Woods. Each night after spending the day in his civil service office, he eats at his usual restaurant where he interacts little with his companions beyond small talk and basic requests, and goes for a walk. His life is stable, if a bit empty. But one day a young man named Wolfgang Meier appears at the door, clutching a copy of the Wanderings, poems by Eduard Saxberger, and the somewhat bumbling, bourgeois civil servant is thrown back into a past he hardly remembers.

“You’ve read my Wanderings?” Saxberger exclaims, “People still read my Wanderings?”
“People might not read them any more,” rejoins Meier, “but we read them.”

And so begins, Late Fame, Arthur Schnitzler’s satire of Fin de Siecle Vienna, published in the U.S. for the first time more than a century after it was written. Just barely hitting the hundred page mark, Late Fame is short, even for a novella, but Schnitzler’s writing is powerful in its simplicity. Characters and images are pinned up like butterflies on a cork board. Alexander Starritt’s translation from the German is clear and graceful as well, retaining some of the ineffable air of Germanic grammar, commas cutting and stitching together clauses with a clear precision. Take Saxberger’s meditation, after spending some time with the small group of artists and intellectuals that Meier introduces him to: “And it seemed to him that he belonged among these people. As if much of what they said of themselves was also true of him and as if he, too, still had battles to fight as they did.”

Much of the novella takes place in the shadow of this group, “Enthusiasm,” into whose clutches Meier slowly draws Saxberger. The group meets each night in a coffeehouse, where they label anyone who’s had success as a sell-out while paradoxically bemoaning the fact that the public pays no attention to them. There is much bickering and gossip and name calling, and no writing of any kind. In fact, very few of them ever seem to produce, except a small, timid man named Winder who is ridiculed for the fact that he likes to write all sorts of things and seems to have little trouble forcing himself to sit down and do it.

At one point, Saxberger asks why they are calling a certain table “talentless,” and he receives this droll response which perfectly sums up the whole group: “‘Talentless,’ interjected Meier in his calm way, ‘is what we generally call those who sit at different tables from us.’”

These moments in the coffeehouse prove that Late Fame’s real targets are not the aristocrats or social values lambasted in English satires like Vanity Fair, and works by Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, and later Evelyn Waugh. Instead Late Fame zeroes in on the posturing hacks, the (mainly) men who call themselves artists and wear all the trappings of the title, but do none of the work. As Saxberger admits to himself once he’s gotten to know Enthusiasm better, “They assuredly had a tremendous amount of talent between them; work, however, was something they actually did very little of.”

◊

Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler, as the back of any copy of his books will tell you, was part of a Viennese circle of intellectuals and artists that included Sigmund Freud and the writer Stefan Zweig, whose memoirs provided much of the source material and inspiration for Wes Anderson’s recent film Grand Budapest Hotel. The story of Late Fame’s manuscript itself wouldn’t be out of place in one of Anderson’s kaleodoscopic plots. Finished in Vienna in the early 20th century, the manuscript sat in an archive until 1938, managing to survive previous attempts by the Nazis to burn Schnitzler’s work (along with Freud and Zweig, Schnitzler was Jewish).

The novella wasn’t published, even in the original German, until 2014. There is a bizarre coincidence between the subject and title of the novella and its arc through history that is hard to miss. And there are other overlaps between Late Fame and the real world. Much like the characters in Late Fame, Schnitzler, Freud, Zweig, and their group met often in a coffeehouse to discuss their practice and trade ideas. Freud was supposedly quite taken with much of Schnitzler’s work, which is frank in its depictions of sexuality to the point of being scandalous. One of his plays, Reigen, explores the moments right before and after 10 couples have sex. His novella Dream Story was also the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut, an erotic drama starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Yet desire works in a different way in Late Fame. While Enthusiasm is mainly made up of young-ish, headstrong men, there is one woman, an actress who is always referred to as Fräulein Gasteiner. Gasteiner becomes one of Saxberger’s loudest champions, lauding the Wanderings and their poet in a loud voice whenever given the chance, providing another driving force for Saxberger’s ballooning ego. Gasteiner is one of the main proponents of putting on a salon night for the group to introduce Vienna to Enthusiasm’s work, and simply insists that Saxberger’s work must be on the program. She comes by his apartment to check on his progress and makes proclamations like “Truly, this is a poet’s study,” in a dramatic voice. Their gazes and touches linger. But the sexual undercurrents are always misdirected and it’s never clear where the line is between sexual desire and desire for fame, power, and attention.

Late Fame’s approach to its titular subject reminded me of the recent case of Vivian Maier, the Chicago nanny and amateur photographer whose street photography, rediscovered in a storage unit, recently spawned a whole cottage industry of books, documentaries, and gallery shows. The photographs, made by a woman who had died years earlier with no direct descendants, were latched onto by new owners who rode to fame on Maier’s coattails, or at least attempted to (the owner of a majority of her negatives, John Maloof, was nominated for an Oscar in 2015 but didn’t win). No doubt the group Enthusiasm hoped they had found their Vivian Maier in Eduard Saxberger. “For today’s generation,” Wolfgang Meier tells Saxberger soon after meeting him, “the Wanderings are the work of a newcomer—because no one knows them.”

After the salon evening (spoiler alert) goes horribly, Saxberger begins to wonder if he was happier before this all happened. Before Meier and his rediscovery of the Wanderings, and the salon and Fräulein Gasteiner. In Late Fame it turns out that there are two kinds of “artists,” those who love to create, and those who love the idea of being an artist. After the salon, Saxberger isn’t sure he wants to be either.

At the center of Late Fame is a question of utility: what (and perhaps whom) is art for? As pretentious as the question may sound, Schnitzler means it quite honestly and simply. The members of Enthusiasm use art for their own self-promotion, Saxberger doesn’t know what to do with it, and no one, really, seems to benefit from it. At the end of the novella, Saxberger mentions to a young writer, “‘Let’s make a deal,’ … ‘You don’t need to read my poems and in exchange I won’t read yours either.’” It’s comforting to think that great art will become famous on it’s own merit, as if it can somehow float to the surface without learning to swim. But sometimes, like Vivian Maier’s photography or Arthur Schnitzler’s little gem of a novella, it sits in a closet for years before being taken out and admired anew. Late Fame, it turns out, is for all of us who ruminate over art, who wonder what purpose it serves, and why, for reasons good or bad, we keep making it.

robert-sorrellRobert Sorrell is a writer and photographer living in Philadelphia. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago’s English program and has a piece of narrative nonfiction forthcoming from Mosaic Art & Literary Journal.

 

 

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FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF FOR WRITERS When Dealing with Negative Feedback, a craft essay by Floyd Cheung

 

THE BURNING GIRL, a novel by Claire Messud, reviewed by Amanda Klute

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THE BURNING GIRL
by Claire Messud
W.W. Norton & Company, 247 pages

reviewed by Amanda Klute

Hindsight never fails in providing a comprehensive scope of recently-felt chaos—this is the key narrative tool Claire Messud employs in her intimate coming-of-age novel, The Burning Girl. The Burning Girl offers deep insight into a seemingly minuscule and ordinary loss of two young Massachusetts girls, and quietly probes us to ponder the necessity, ridicule, and unfairness that results from a society prizing itself on the lack of innocence as means of survival.

Though the book is a work of fiction, it could just as well be one of creative non-fiction, or an authentic “true story,” as it addresses how many young children first experience loss: the end of a friendship. Through the unity and dissention of these two diverse, modern-day teenage girls, Messud leads us to question pre-existing philosophies of “innocence lost is experience gained.” “Can’t you see I’m contaminated? Can’t you see the grown-up dirt all over me?” asks Messud’s narrator, seventeen-year-old Julia Robinson, lamenting why she is not allowed to indulge in childish whims.

Here, I believe, Messud subtly points an accusing finger to contemporary notions of expected feminine maturity. Why must innocence be irrevocably lost? In our current climate of political turmoil, action franchises, and technological gratification, Burning Girl offers us a quiet investigation into the “how” and “why” a cord between two young girls was forcibly severed.

If Julia is the observer of The Burning Girl, her former friend, Cassie Burnes, is the observed. The novel recounts the quiet and sudden disintegration of their friendship. An upcoming senior in high school, Julia pieces together the theories and motives of her once-best-friend’s eventual disappearance from the small town of Royston, Massachusetts that was once their congenial playground. The novel is split into three parts: the first details the final summer of their friendship before progressing as high school freshman, the second presents the split that occurred as they entered high school, and the third and final section explores the nature of Cassie’s demise and ultimate disappearance from Julia’s life. Narrated like an old wives’ tale spread throughout a village, or a ghost story to be whispered and maliciously exaggerated, the loss of Cassie’s virtue is more or less public opinion and speculation that her oldest friend intends to correct.

Claire Messud

Claire Messud is the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor’s Children (2006), and, more recently, The Woman Upstairs (2013). She is married to the English-American literary critic James Wood, of the New Yorker, and the two have been acclaimed as “the first couple of American fiction.” She thinks of her work as devoid of a genre, claiming her novels belong to “the kind that’s no kind.” Messud completed undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale and Cambridge, and her debut novel, When The World Was Steady, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1995. She teaches creative writing at a variety of universities along the east coast, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters has recognized her with the Strauss Living Award and the Addison Metcalf Award. Messud is also a fellow at the Berlin Institute of Advanced Study.

Unfortunately, the disappointment of The Burning Girl lies in its language, which is generally unspectacular, with a few surprising gems along the way. Comma heavy and abundantly overwritten, the narrator’s stream-of-consciousness tells me I’m gathering my information from a young female who is not fully adept at storytelling yet. In one such example, Julia notes, “seventh grade is differently difficult for each person.” The clumsy phrase “differently difficult” pulled my focus from the story; this became a recurring theme in my reading. Though written as a flashback, the Julia’s maturity is elided, making the book feel sentimental, and turning Cassie into a pitiful martyr of her woebegone innocence. The narrator is (convincingly) overwhelmed with remorse, but this tone drips with every word Messud writes, blocking the reader from truly connecting with the characters. While credible, it does not make an enjoyable read.

You’d never think it. …in the same way that he [Goya] was in seventh grade art class for me, and the French Revolution was in ninth grade history, and who was going to make that connection? That’s sort of what happened with Cassie and me. I guess I was Goya, just doing my thing, and she was the French Revolution.

Here, The Burning Girl perfectly illustrates how the loss of a friendship can correlate with the loss of virtue, and severely alter and distinguish the paths of two young women. I personally find a novel is only as good as its ending, and Messud offers us one consistent with her themes of disillusionment. “The happy ending is no ending,” states Julia, reflecting on the lost friendship. “Nobody particularly wants the happy ending when they care more about the story than the person.”

Amanda Klute holds a Bachelor of Arts from Washington College in English Literature and Theatre. In addition to her internship at Cleaver Magazine, she has worked and written for The Summerset Review, The Collegian, and is an avid member of JASNA’s newsletter, Bits and Scraps. She is currently located on the East Coast and is a freelance writer and director.

 

You may also enjoy:

THE LONG DRY, a novel by Cynan Jones, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

THE GERMAN GIRL, a novel by Armando Lucas Correa, reviewed by Kellie Carle

MIKHAIL AND MARGARITA, a novel by Julie Lekstrom Himes, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader 

THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES, a novel by Catherynne M. Valente, reviewed by Ansel Shipley

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THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES
by Catherynne M. Valente
Saga Press, 147 pages

reviewed by Ansel Shipley

Catherynne M. Valente’s most recent novel, The Refrigerator Monologues, exists in an odd space between novel and what could be called a pseudo-parable. Valente’s six protagonists and her interconnected narratives clearly parallel famous female comic book characters and their narrative arcs. Each of them, in fact, exhibits numerous traits that link her to a specific DC or Marvel property, ensuring that nothing is lost on the reader.

The goal then of the novel is not to tell a unique story, but to point out the flaws of another medium’s storytelling, such as when a character—clearly playing off supervillain Harley Quinn—remarks that “Grimdark” (Valente’s Batman parallel) is motivated by nothing more than “some seriously freshman poli-sci haiku that sounds super deep and means jack except that a rich man’s going to make a poor man bleed.” This stylistic choice has both benefits and drawbacks: while the writing often feels pedantic and obvious, Valente’s goal is to point to a very specific trend in comics, and superhero comics, as a rule, lack subtlety.

Having written an extensive library of novels, short fiction, poetry and non-fiction, Valente is far from a newcomer to feminist writing. She received the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Lambda Award for GLBT Science Fiction or Fantasy. The briefness of The Refrigerator Monologues shows that her goal when writing was not to craft a detailed world or write deeply engaging prose but to make a critical point in an enjoyable and effective manner. The novel becomes almost a thesis through fiction, establishing and following a clearly outlined argument and with each of the six stories depicting a new example affirming her position.

In general, this technique works. Each story is individually engaging, and Valente manages to link them all together satisfyingly while making powerful and cogent commentary on the misogynistic treatment of female characters in comic books. The first five protagonists are clearly drawn from characters created in the 1980s and 1990s, when comics were notably aggressive in their misogyny: the first, “Paige Embry is Dead,” references Gwen Stacy’s involvement in Peter Parker’s powers and her eventual death; the second, “The Heat Death of Julia Ash,” acts as a commentary on the treatment of Jean Grey’s Phoenix Saga, where it was revealed that Professor X, worried that Grey would become unstable and dangerous, placed psychic bindings in her mind to contain her powers.

This plot became both an iconic part of the X-Men mythos and a clear example of the way female comic characters were stripped of their powers “for their own good.” As Julia Ash becomes more and more powerful, she remarks, “they turned on me, eventually. Oh, they were so concerned, my boys. Only for my own good, only because they were so worried about my delicate constitution!” This passage represents the best of Valente’s criticism: instead of making a direct indictment of comic book plotting, she blends her anger at ingrained predatory misogyny into the narrative.

Catherynne M. Valente

The Gwen Stacy narrative most recently depicted in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man depicted her as an Oscorp employee whose actions led to Peter Parker’s superpowers. 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 revealed her death, a tragic plummet ending with the snapping of her neck. Valente employs the bones of this story almost beat-for-beat in “Paige Embry is Dead” to powerful effect. Many people consider Gwen Stacy’s death to have marked the end of the “Silver Age” of comics, as comic books began to move in a more mature direction; characters could die brutally, and superheroes could truly fail. Valente’s choice to begin The Refrigerator Monologues with a critical homage to this classic story speaks to her deep understanding of the comic medium. The novel follows an extremely effective trajectory and the plot and distinctive characterization between the sections ensures that the six stories are impactful both individually and as a combined work.

Valente suffers from a tendency to over-explain, however, leaving nothing to be inferred from her stories. Her characters repeatedly break the fourth wall to make a declamation against the terrible treatment they have experienced at the hands of the world. Near the end of “The Heat Death of Julia Ash,” Ash states, “It’s a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you’re the protagonist, but really, you’re just backstory. The boys shrug and go on, they fight and blow things up […] and eventually you’re just a story your high school boyfriend tells the kid he had with his new wife.” The argument Valente makes here is important and certainly in need of greater recognition and investigation, but her ham-handed exposition can become tiring, particularly in the second half of the novel as the frequency of her explicit commentary increases.

The final story, “Happy Birthday, Samantha Dane,” proves to be the most effective argument in the novel. Unlike the first five protagonists, Valente uses Samantha Dane not as a specific parallel but instead as an example of how contemporary comics treat female characters. Over the past decade, Marvel Comics (and, to a lesser extent, DC Comics) has made a concerted effort to diversify their superhero line-ups: a female Thor, an Afro-Hispanic Spider-Man, a Muslim Ms. Marvel, a gay Iceman, etc. While these actions are commendable, Valente argues that there remains deep-seated misogyny within the comic world. “Happy Birthday, Samantha Dane” depicts a new, hip, young superhero team called “Avant Garde,” whose superhero identities and powers are vaguely related to art.

The girlfriend of an Avant Garde member—the titular Samantha Dane—is eventually murdered, stripped naked, and crammed into a refrigerator. Valente demonstrates that even though this diverse superhero team includes male and female superheroes on equal footing, the women in the periphery are just as disposable as women in comics have always been. Samantha Dane remarks, “I belong in the refrigerator. Because the truth is, I’m just food for a superhero. He’ll eat up my death and get the energy he needs to become a legend.”

While Valente’s overt exposition can be blunt and poorly integrated at times, there is no denying it is deeply effective. She forces her readers to see the prevailing misogyny in comics and how despite a great deal of lip-service to progressivism, comic book stories are still brutalizing women to give their male protagonists a little extra motivation.

Ansel Shipley is a graduate of SUNY Purchase college with a degree in literature. While there he was the senior literary editor of the student-run art and literature publication Submissions Magazine. He currently lives in Brooklyn where he writes freelance critical reviews and volunteers at Hullabaloo Books.

 

 

 

You may also like:

FINGERPRINTS OF PREVIOUS OWNERS, a novel by Rebecca Entel, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

MIKHAIL AND MARGARITA, a novel by Julie Lekstrom Himes, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader 

BARDO OR NOT BARDO, a novel by Antoine Volodine, reviewed by Amada Klute

 

FINGERPRINTS OF PREVIOUS OWNERS, a novel by Rebecca Entel, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

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FINGERPRINTS OF PREVIOUS OWNERS
by Rebecca Entel
The Unnamed Press, 209 pages

reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

“The narrator of this book is a Caribbean woman. You may have noticed that the writer of this book is not,” Rebecca Entel notes in a preface to Fingerprints of Previous Owners, her novel set at a resort built on the nettle-choked ruins of a former slave plantation. Alluding to her research and credentials as a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, Entel does more than attempt to deflect criticism for cultural appropriation. She declares her investment in this story, as well as her intention to free her characters from a colonial narrative frame.

She begins with Myrna Burre. Entel endorses Myrna’s authority by locating the story’s point of view in this islander who’d “never arrived here from anywhere.” When we meet her in the novel’s opening lines, she and the other “A-Y-S” staff (At Your Service, pronounced “eeeeyes”) are gathered on the beach, wearing white sheets over their uniforms, to perform a compulsory pantomime of a native welcoming ceremony for tourists who are aboard a boat named, with casual tactlessness, The Pinta. (Their baggage is brought by The Nina.) “A team of people with the name of the resort scripted across their chests would appear, arrange its bodies as prosthetics for whatever they needed to do,” Myrna reports, indicting by defamiliarizing this arrival ritual, in which a staffer playing Columbus distributes “coins of small value” for the tourists to trade for necklaces and candy.

As “one of the maids they heard but didn’t see” sweeping crabs from the pool deck with her wire broom, Myrna is perfectly positioned to scrutinize the fictional island called “Furnace” (a corruption of Ferdinand and Isabella) by paying guests, and “Cruffey” by residents (many of whom, including Myrna’s mother, share the surname). Publicly, she sticks to the scripted bland descriptions of buffet meals and perfect weather and a Jamboree featuring “our local steel drum band and native women selling native crafts”). But privately, she makes us privy to fraud she detects: the “local” band playing “Trinidadian songs on Floridian-Jamaican drums,” the hour-earlier tourist time zone, a tromp l’oeil coral reef painted on the pool floor, the “native” label that doesn’t fit anyone she knows.

Rebecca Entel

Clearly, Entel has done her research. Details like these, revealing the resort’s flimsy façade—“the brand-new strapped over everything like duct tape”—and the subservient stance of employees laboring in a service economy, ring true to my work as a maid at a Spanish colonial-style resort in Arizona. Where she exaggerates—for ironic, if not comic, effect—she exposes visceral truths. Her credibility is evident in choices she makes to craft this story. By amplifying the dissonance between the island’s different versions—seen and unseen, mythological and historical—Myrna’s point of view compels the plot to pursue what’s hidden: Cruffey Island’s past, which is to say her ancestors’.

Myrna’s life—and livelihood—hinges on this hidden history. “Say the word estate at work and look down at your palm for your firing papers,” she warns, addressing the erasure at the root of this story. The Cruffey Plantation is lost to history: missing from the resort map, an inland life forgotten or unspoken by the elders. But even before the plantation, Myrna notes, the island’s identity was misplaced by the official archipelago map depicting their home as “a dot named twice, neither time by us.” If one purpose of a map is to lay claim to the truth, this map that decorates the Furnace Island guestrooms robs the islanders of agency, casting Myrna’s family and friends as inhabitants of one of many “scattered seeds floating away from the finger of Florida, that imperative pillar to our point of exclamation.”

Without facts or artifacts to anchor her, Myrna is at sea, her future uncertain. Her college plans derailed by the need to support her mother (mute with grief after her husband’s death and son Troy’s relocation to “the capital”), she goes “inland, back in time, instead.” She searches for tangible proof of her ancestors’ existence in the stones erupting through the soil—“stones my ancestors…had quarried and carried and packed in place, like planting gravestones.” This digging and accounting echoes the work of her deceased father, the island’s dentist, who remembered his patients by counting their pulled teeth, “all the holes on the island.”

And so Myrna’s second, secret, shift begins, as she slashes blindly through the thorny haulback with a machete, looking for the abandoned plantation’s foundation walls. This physical labor is sticky, dusty, bruising, and stinging. It rivets the reader to her actions with sensory detail, as she excavates, like her father once did, to “find where the pain was coming from…and to dig out the source of it.” Feeling her way, Myrna makes a mental map of the estate to match the one she’s discovered in a copy of The Cruffey Plantation Journal 1833, stolen from a visiting tourist’s room. In a perfectly plotted scene, Myrna finally enters the estate through the kitchen—literally, a “place of fire, of food, of sustenance, of labor” and symbolically, the place where race, gender, and social class intersect—and finds a tangible link to the written record of a one-armed enslaved woman named Tildy.

The stolen journal’s owner is Jasmine Manion, an African-American woman from Wisconsin who owns the consignment shop where the old book turned up. Jasmine has hired Myrna’s cousin Lionel to give her an unofficial tour of the other side of “paradise”: Junkful Beach, called “Scruffy” by the kids, “mangy with brush, shore scalloped with choppy water, and flotsam she wouldn’t believe washing ashore from across the Atlantic.” Jasmine’s part in the novel’s unsettling climax, which I won’t spoil, is just one example of the way Entel keeps digging for complexity, through the ways in which her characters’ roles and lives intersect.

Entel makes great use of the landscape as a psychological setting, from the thorny inland concealing truth to the wind-torn, trash-filled shore that residents scour, feeling “lucky to collect the junk.” Writing against a gendered tradition of travel narrative in which men pose as conquerors and women journey to self-discovery, she ties Myrna’s personal quest to a larger story, expanding her vision with a series of first-person “bench stories” that fill narrative holes as they accrue on a story-telling site built from the estate’s “took apart walls.”

Poet Derek Walcott proposes, in his illuminating essay “Isla Incognita,” that, in order to see clearly, we must “proceed backward from knowing, from all the stories [we’ve] been told about islands.” Both in spirit and in its structure, Fingerprints of Previous Owners follows this profound advice to rediscover the island of the author’s—and the reader’s—invention. Of course, the prickly political question of who gets to write what will not, and should not, be settled by Entel’s sincerity. And you may have noticed that the reviewer of this book is not a Caribbean woman, either. But in my view, Entel’s novel is brilliant. Through a series of strategic narrative choices, she both inhabits and interrogates the island she created, demonstrating how fiction can expand a reader’s empathy and, even, a writer’s authority.

Elizabeth-MosierElizabeth Mosier is a novelist and essayist. Her reviews have appeared most recently in The Philadelphia Inquirer and Cleaver. Her essay “Believers” was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015, Read more at www.ElizabethMosier.com.

 

 

 

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SWIMMING LESSONS, a novel by Claire Fuller, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

THE LONG DRY, a novel by Cynan Jones, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

TRYSTING, fiction by Emmanuelle Pagano, reviewed by Rachel R. Taube

 

MIKHAIL AND MARGARITA, a novel by Julie Lekstrom Himes, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader 

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MIKHAIL AND MARGARITA
by Julie Lekstrom Himes
Europa Editions, 336 pages

Reviewed by Ryan K. Strader 

Today’s Moscow has plenty for tourists who are fans of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov: museums, character statues, and guided city tours dedicated to the 20th century writer and his work, especially his most famous novel, The Master and Margarita. In 2002, I was a college student studying in Russia and Bulgakov tourism had not yet exploded; those of us with a resolute affection for all things Bulgakov had to be content to walk around Patriarch’s Ponds, a park that figures prominently in The Master and Margarita, and imagine the characters sauntering over to join us on a park bench.

I used to do just that: sitting on a bench, I would imagine Professor Woland walking by and joining me, accompanied by Korovyov in his ugly trousers and Behemoth, the large cat who walks upright and carries a pistol. Professor Woland is, of all things, the devil, incarnate as a learned magician. Korovyov and Behemoth are his demonic minions. Perhaps the naked witch Hella would join us next on the bench…  

In The Master and Margarita this unholy group easily wreaks havoc on a Moscow that denies the existence of devil or Christ, evil or good, and trusts only in the moral compass of Soviet bureaucracy. The “Master” of Bulgakov’s title is, of course, a writer, a satirist who recognizes Satan easily when he arrives in Moscow disguised as a professor. As a result of his clear sightedness, the Master has been censored out of publication in the name of Soviet decency.

I was only 20 years old at the time of these imagined Woland encounters in Moscow, but the question at the heart of my engagement with Bulgakov’s novel was about what my young self might decide to believe about good and evil and love: Would I insist, as the Muscovites of Bulgakov’s story did, that the devil wasn’t real, even if I saw him? How does one recognize Satan strolling around a park, anyway? What are the telltale signs?

And of course, some very pressing questions to a romantic-minded young woman studying Bulgakov’s works: Who the devil was the real Margarita, anyway? What about her inspired Bulgakov? What kind of private risks might she really have taken to protect Mikhail’s work?  Would she make a pact with the devil, if she met him? Might she, in the USSR of the 1930s, a country tense with purges and arrests, very well have met some satanic fiends? 

Julie Lekstrom Himes

Julie Lekstrom Himes’ novel, Mikhail and Margarita, imagines the love affair that might have inspired The Master and Margarita. This is Himes’ first novel, following the publication of several short stories and essays. Himes is a physician in Massachusetts; interestingly, Bulgakov was also a physician. In an interview with the literary website Eye 94, Himes describes reading Bulgakov’s collection A Country Doctor’s Notebook (reflections on his early years as a doctor) and identifying with “the fear and regret and self-questioning” of a young doctor. Identifying with Bulgakov’s “voice” as a doctor encouraged Himes to try writing from his perspective, to imagine what compelled him to write one of the canonical Russian texts of the 20th century.

Like Bulgakov, Himes mixes genres easily and engagingly, meshing history, fiction and romance. While Bulgakov wrestled with the issue of Russia’s moral ambiguity and tackled the existence of Jesus Christ, Satan, and the histories we use to define good and evil, Himes’ story is motivated by the earthier questions: What had happened earlier in the day, the very first time Bulgakov sat down to write a story about the Master and the devil in Moscow? What kind of woman would have drawn Margarita from Bulgakov’s imagination? Himes pulls the existential wrestling of Bulgakov down to earth, to the story of Mikhail, a playwright, who is drawn to the secretive and generous Margarita, a young woman who habitually develops romantic attachments to writers.

Himes opens her story in 1933, with Mikhail and the poet Osip Mandelstam sharing dinner at a restaurant. It is a seemingly mundane evening, with Mikhail failing to attend to everything the politically disgruntled Osip says. “Only in this country is poetry respected,” Osip declares. “There’s no place where more people are killed for it.” Osip’s comments presage his coming arrest and sentence to internal exile, as a result of his irreverent poetry about Stalin. Mikhail is unable to intervene on his friend’s behalf; grief at losing Osip brings Mikhail together with Osip’s young ex-lover, the lovely Margarita Nikolayevna.

In Osip and Mikhail’s circle of friends, Himes depicts numerous writers and artists of that time, including the director Stanislawski, and the poet Anna Akhmatova. Himes is skilled in developing her characters not as historical cameos but as very human beings trying to balance their consciences against the harsh demands of censors, all while lacking the moral advantage of our historical hindsight. Osip’s friends wonder if he might have done something to deserve arrest—surely there is some reason for what is happening?—and Mikhail fears for his own publication future even as he is desperate to help his imprisoned friend. These are not model dissidents or trained activists, but artists dazedly struggling to understand government betrayal.  Margarita’s affection for Mikhail is founded on how he responds to Osip’s arrest: “I think what you’re doing is—well, it’s brave. You’re not pretending that there wasn’t a crime committed here.” Margarita has faith that speaking the truth is a powerful and meaningful act, and this faith is the foundation of her attraction to writers in general and Mikhail in particular.

Mikhail is chosen to draft a letter to the government arguing for Mandelstam’s release. In the letter, he argues that, “Writers by their nature love their country but if their countrymen no longer have affection for them, then perhaps the better answer is to allow them to emigrate.”  Stretched between his national identity and his role as a writer, Mikhail cannot shake the conviction that writers belong to their country and their country needs them. He doesn’t want to emigrate; the suggestion is made to highlight how badly Russia needs its writers. This concern with the relationship between writers and their country is a peculiarly Russian theme.  The task of a country’s writers is to define those words that frame the social experience: imagination, individuality. Such words describe the concepts by which human beings know themselves, and are the foundation for thinking about national and individual identity. (For this reason, Mikhail Bulgakov, writing to Stalin in 1930, describes himself as a “satirist” and asks, “Am I thinkable in the USSR?” The question assumes a correlation between his identity as a Russian writer and the Russian public’s imagination.) In Himes’ novel, this tension between national and artistic identity is maintained by the alternating choices Mikhail and Margarita make that affect each other and Mikhail’s future as a writer. Mikhail wavers between Margarita’s belief in his truthfulness and his need to preserve his reputation; he likes being a well known playwright. “To disappear is my freedom; for you, my dearest, it would be your prison,” chides Margarita.

The story is dramatically complicated when Ilya Ivanovich, a powerful member of the secret police, also falls for Margarita. None of Himes’ characters are one-dimensional; Ilya is conflicted by his own capacity to destroy others and his desire to protect Margarita. When Margarita is questioned for her association with writers and sent to a labor camp, both men must try to save her. Margarita’s negotiation between Mikhail, the man she loves and the writer she wants to protects, and Ilya, the man who has power over Mikhail, provides the Faustian drama for the novel.

Himes claims Goethe, Marlowe, and Bulgakov, of course, as her literary progenitors. I am strongly reminded of the dissident novelist Vassily Aksyonov, as well. This influence is particularly legible in Himes’ description of the fictional meetings between Mikhail and Stalin. Stalin is believably narcissistic, powerful and childish, by turns. He has Mikhail brought to him in a garage where he is working on a convertible, with sleeves rolled up and grease on his hands. He urges Mikhail to go for a ride in the convertible with him, and enjoys explaining mechanical particulars of the engines. To Mikhail he says:

“You getting this, Playwright? It’s a matter of how we push the earth away.” He nodded. It was he who moved the world; he liked that idea. “You know nothing of cars do you? You’ve heard of Piaquin? The painter? No? Well you won’t now, either, I suppose. Piaquin was like you.”

And yet, Stalin likes Mikhail’s plays: “You make me feel smart,” he explains to the nervous and distressed Mikhail. Just as in real life, Stalin’s capriciousness could mean inexplicable protection.

Each year another author produces a work of fiction that explores the story of an iconic text or writer, albeit rarely one that addresses a Russian text or writer. Mikhail and Margarita is unique because it deals with a text that is not widely read in America, but is undeniably iconic in Russia. It is a work of “historical invention,” because it is both a carefully researched historical portrayal of the social circumstances under which Bulgakov wrote, and it is a fictional romance. Of works in this genre, Himes’ novel is less in the mode of those, like The Meursault Investigation (by Kamel Daoud), which re-tell a canonical story from a new perspective, and more like The Secret of Costaguana (Juan Gabriel Vasquez), which speculates on the origins of a Joseph Conrad novel.

Himes’ novel is lovely and stands on its own for a reader who has no prior experience with Bulgakov’s work or Russian literature. But for the reader who is familiar Himes has woven in references and details that are delightful: Ilya purchasing warm apricot juice for Margarita, or Bulgakov’s observation of Margarita standing by a window as if “she might actually fly from it, revealing herself to be an entirely different creature than the one he knew.” Such details evoke the atmosphere of The Master and Margarita, but in Himes story none of them are incidental, they each carry their own meaning for Mikhail and Margarita. I recognize Himes’ book as both a compelling work in its own right, and a love letter to Bulgakov’s novel.

Ryan Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University, and an M.A.T. from Clayton State University. She is currently an instructional designer and researcher. Her most recent instructional design project is the development of a class in writing and qualitative research methods at Georgia State University, where she is also a doctoral student. Her most recent publication is an upcoming book chapter on populism in young adult novels. She lives and works in the Atlanta area.

 

 

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EXPOSURE, short stories by Katy Resch George, reviewed by Rebecca Entel

THE GERMAN GIRL, a novel by Armando Lucas Correa, reviewed by Kellie Carle

TRYSTING, fiction by Emmanuelle Pagano, reviewed by Rachel R. Taube

 

BARDO OR NOT BARDO, a novel by Antoine Volodine, reviewed by Amada Klute

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BARDO OR NOT BARDO
by Antoine Volodine
translated from French by J.T. Mahany
Open Letter Books, 163 pages

reviewed by Amanda Klute

Take the existential universe of Jean-Paul Sartre and pull his pants down around his ankles—this is the paradoxical narrative met with in French comedic novelist Antoine Volodine’s Bardo or Not Bardo. Volodine’s blunt, absurdist style illustrates a marriage between the profound and the comedic, using humor as a weapon to further investigate humanity’s most unanswerable questions. 

Bardo or Not Bardo greets its audience with death—a formality granting access to the real meat of the novel: the “Bardo,” a Tibetan afterlife where Volodine’s characters are required, through heavy influence and persistent guidance, to navigate this purgatory-of-sorts for seven weeks. Once the forty-nine days are complete, they are forced to choose between rebirth or religious sacrifice: they can be reincarnated as either human or animal, continuing the cycle of life and death, or they can be abolished from suffering and become Buddha. Reminiscent of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Volodine’s characters, through seven vignettes tracking from death through the afterlife, consistently waste their freedom and their opportunities at enlightenment even while aided by the teachings from the Bardo Thodol, or the Tibetan “Book of the Dead.” Each vignette reads as its own separate story, only tied to its former or predecessor through themes of fatality and rebirth. The characters only matter as vessels for Volodine’s experiment; his ultimate motive within Bardo to is to wholly explore what hilarity occurs when humanity is confronted with its own mortality.

If, like me, you are not regularly inclined to existential philosophy or absurdist humor, I’d encourage you to ignore your predispositions when approaching Bardo or Not Bardo (after all, the book won the inaugural people’s choice Albertine Prize for French fiction). Volodine erases our partisan ideals of religious afterlife and illustrates, through vivid absurdist imagery, how humanity’s real tragedy lies in our stupidity. “It’s sad,” says Yasar, the bartender of the afterlife’s ‘Bardo Bar,’ “thinking about clowns who can’t make anyone laugh.” Death, afterlife,  ascension to heaven, reincarnation is not romanticized here, but rather in Volodine’s hand becomes hilariously flawed, as characters wander aimlessly, selfishly, defiantly against their religious teachings to a fate of monkey reincarnation, creating an isolation shelter inside a sand dune, or simply choosing a life of narcolepsy. Their fortune is wasted, their “path to knowledge” ignored as Volodine creates a striking parallel between the insignificant priorities of the living and, likewise, the dead, demonstrating humanity’s existence a crude cycle of self-fulfilling hysteria.

Antoine Volodine

“Antoine Volodine” is the predominant pseudonym used by a popular French comedic novelist credited with twenty published novels, including Post Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, and Minor Angels (for which he won the Prix de Livre Inter and Prix Wepler prizes in 2000). The majority of his works are set in a post-apocalypse, where radicals and fools of the “post-exoticism” movement have all been arrested for their non-conformity and subversive attitudes. Volodine also publishes under the pseudonyms “Lutz Bassmann”: We Monks & Soldiers, and “Manuela Draeger”: In the Time of the Blue Ball, among others—while also being an active literary translator of Russian to French fiction. Bardo or Not Bardo was translated by J.T. Mahony, an American MFA student at the University of Arkansas, who has translated other Volodine works prior. 

Struck by Volodine’s command of language, I found myself captivated by his sharp authority of wit and profound philosophical questioning, everything pondered but nothing answered, revealing life, death, rebirth and afterlife to be just as absurd as reading recipes from a Tibetan cookbook to a murder victim. As these characters move toward enlightenment, they find their own success thwarted by a fear of failure, and thus condemning their fate like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Take Volodine’s sixth vignette, “Dadokin,” where the title character and a fellow Bardo ghost, Schmollowski, meet up along their journey to a new life. During their time together in the Bardo, Dadokin begins to reveal his insecurities to Schmollowski as they approach their ever cryptic fates.

This horrible wait they’re imposing on us…The walk to the wombs…Waiting to be reincarnated…What if they make a mistake? What if they put me in a bad fetus, huh? If I end up in the body of a spider, for example? I hate spiders…Schmollowski, you won’t let me fall, will you? You’ll squish me right away, right?

Volodine concludes the sixth vignette not by revealing the particulars of Dadokin’s fate, but leaving his audience on a cliffhanger as Dadokin begs for death by “squishing.” We know not whether Dadokin’s fate truly was what he feared, but nevertheless understand Volodine’s intent to illustrate how we as a collective species are, more often than not, our own worst enemy.

The novel’s “vignette” style is not particularly suited for a single reading, in one sitting—but rather consumed in small doses. With each vignette, Volodine increases his expositional language, interrupting the overall flow of the novel, but requiring the complete attention of his reader at all times. Volodine’s writing, not dense, but persistent, peels back layer after layer patiently. Consider this excerpt from the second chapter of Bardo, where Volodine distinctly exercises his subtle skill at questioning life’s purpose through the veil of comedy:

And do you know how you yourself would react? In this situation, in the dark, in fear… What would you choose? Dissolution, or reincarnation? Nothing forever more, or a new life of suffering? For example in a frightening and despicable body? As a baboon, a chicken? A powerful mafioso? 

His humor can be missed if not read carefully, and most of his subtle wit and absurdity is found between the lines, rather than in his plot.

The “post-exoticism” movement is Volodine’s self-created genre that is fleshed out further in his novel, Post Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven; the genre effects radicalization and change of previous narrative structures to introduce new literary elements of an absurd nature, from plot to created language. It details images of jail cells and interrogations, afterlife and listlessness, revolution and disillusionment, and human depravity. Not what many would imagine a comedy to consist of, and yet Volodine’s mastery of the “post-exoticism” craft makes philosophy a digestible and enjoyable read. His style is entirely authentic, devoid of any accepted pretext in style or plot as he has created not just a narrative, but a literary atmosphere entirely from his own cosmos. Honesty is best served on a platter of bowel indigestion, irrational fear of spiders, and one horribly grotesque theater performance. Our fear and paranoia of death (and what may follow) is inspected by Volodine in Bardo or Not Bardo, a large child with a magnifying glass—and we the ants, chasing after our own tail.

Amanda Klute holds a Bachelor of Arts from Washington College in English Literature and Theatre. In addition to her internship at Cleaver Magazine, she has worked and written for The Summerset Review, The Collegian, and is an avid member of JASNA’s newsletter, Bits and Scraps. She is currently located on the East Coast and is a freelance writer and director.

EXPOSURE, short stories by Katy Resch George, reviewed by Rebecca Entel

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EXPOSURE
by Katy Resch George
Kore Press, 168 pages

reviewed by Rebecca Entel

The cover of Exposure, a short story collection by Katy Resch George, hints at the kind of stories you’ll find inside. The photograph of a topless woman on a beach with her arms tugged behind her is both intimate and distant, the woman exposed but also obscured by the translucent type of the title and, in the repeated image, wrapped around the spine of the book, also underneath type. The woman’s expression is blocked by George’s name on the spine and, on the front cover, hard to make out. Is she scowling at the camera? Pondering something beyond it? Seductive, angry, unsure? George’s female characters, especially, are exposed and obscured in this intriguing book.

Exposure begins with the title piece, a short-short story that introduces us to both intimacy and estrangement. Like most of the other short-short stories in the collection, we don’t learn the characters’ names, and the writing achieves tension in how it pulls us in and holds us back. This is form and theme, both. In the short-short (three pages) “Exposure,” a removed third-person narrator takes us through a quick chain of associations. The story begins as a man is dying alone after slipping on his way home from a New Year’s Eve party. In the next paragraph, we learn his name from a local news anchor who reports the story. Not quite understanding his own reaction to the death, and wondering if it is triggering a memory long buried, the anchor contacts his sister. And then the sister becomes the focus for the remaining paragraphs. Alone at a movie, she remembers a long-ago boyfriend with the same last name as the deceased man and also notices a couple holding hands. “To hold hands in a theater,” she thinks, “is to say I am watching this movie, but I am also in this life that I share with this person; I bring this life with me wherever I go.” The story works well as an introduction to a collection that shows both intimacy and isolation—and the past associations we bring into any present setting.

Katie Resch George

The distance that resonates thematically in the opening piece does not seem as effective in some of the other shorter pieces. But in the longer stories, where we learn much more about all that life the characters bring with them to each layered moment, her writing is most memorable.

The longer stories are about a high school student’s reaction to an acquaintance’s death; a teacher dealing (or not) with the loss of a child; an adolescent’s discomforts with her own body and others’ and the cryptic relationship she observes between her mother and the neighbor; a mother’s concerns about her teenaged daughter’s sexuality brewing alongside the indignities of middle-aged dating; a father taking his two thirty-ish daughters to Disney World to try to rectify past failures. In each of these pieces, George displays some of the same skills as in “Exposure”: giving us glimpses of a character’s past intruding on the present and a sharp eye for when to cut away from a finely-wrought scene.

In “Adult Daughters,” as the belated Disney trip unravels, so does the narrator’s social work career as she tries to manage via cell phone an escalating situation with a foster case. Like those personal lives brought into the movie theater, each character’s pains and foibles come along to the theme park, and we witness it all through the imperfect lens of the narrator, who, personally and professionally, misjudges every urgency. This story in particular has a depth of character and conflict on par with any novel:

My fingertips tingled, so I traced my index finger along my eyebrows, down the length of my nose, around my lips. I had forgotten that my mother had done this to Rebecca and me with a cotton swab when we were very little.

“What are you doing?” Rebecca asked.

For a second, I thought to tell her about our mother. But it felt so good, the light touch on my face. It was a memory I didn’t want my sister to trash.

“Meditating,” I said, and felt the bench vibrate slightly as my phone began to ring. I withdrew it from my bag to see a familiar incoming number: Leonard, my boss, probably calling to say my lax practices meant Human Services had a hearing in its future, possibly a settlement to pay. Maybe Irina would get to Ukraine after all. I silenced the ringer.

Rebecca pointed across the moat. “Dad’s up!”

Dad had made it through the crowd of parents and children and stood before Cinderella, trying, it appeared, to figure out how to capture a shot of them together. He stood beside her and held the camera out, arm’s distance. But Cinderella slinked away. She shook her head, fanned her hands daintily before her face. “No, no,” she appeared to be saying. Dad tried again, and again Cinderella slipped away, not bothering with the bashful gestures. She moved on to the next ring of children.

“Adult Daughters” is a story not soon forgotten (and neither is the book’s final image, which I won’t give away here). One of the story’s characters presciently tells the narrator, “‘I can’t explain what you don’t see’”—but George certainly can. Exposure gives us a lot to see and ponder and also speaks for the significance of small, independent publishing houses like Kore Press.

Rebecca Entel’s short stories have appeared in such journals as Guernica, Joyland, and Cleaver. Her first novel Fingerprints of Previous Owners was published in June 2017 from Unnamed Press. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, where she teaches courses in creative writing, multicultural American literature, Caribbean literature, and the literature of social justice.

THE GERMAN GIRL, a novel by Armando Lucas Correa, reviewed by Kellie Carle

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THE GERMAN GIRL
by Armando Lucas Correa
translated by Nick Caistor
Atria Books, 360 pages

reviewed by Kellie Carle

“Today I’m going to find out who I am.”

This declaration from Armando Lucas Correa’s debut novel The German Girl frames the journey of one of Correa’s characters, Anna Rosen. The journey leads her to her great-aunt, Hannah Rosenthal, Correa’s second narrator. Hannah’s story reveals the strength and perseverance necessary in order to survive as her family joins other Jewish refugees headed to Cuba on the SS St. Louis to escape Nazi-occupied Germany. Anna learns from Hannah’s stories, gaining a better understanding of her aunt’s seclusion in Cuba, and of her father who died before she was born. Broken into four parts, the novel explores how these two lives converge. Anna and Hannah, both, tell their own stories as they experiences loss and come face-to-face with obstacles that will force them to face their weaknesses and recognize their strengths.

The editor of the top-selling Hispanic magazine in the United States, People en Español, Correa is an award-winning journalist. He wrote The German Girl originally in Spanish under the title La Niña Alemana.

The German Girl permits readers to enter the minds of two twelve-year-old girls as their lives are shaped by the tragedies of the SS St. Louis and 9/11. Correa expertly combines fact with fiction, as he constructs and then deconstructs the lives of two young girls. He also illustrates the importance a family’s history and the need to pass down history through the generations. The story of the contemporary girl, Anna, is imbedded (as is her name) in Hannah’s and though this is the conceit of the novel, it is also a weakness.

Anna does not receive the same treatment and attention as Hannah and her arc depends on Hannah’s story coming to fruition. Until that occurs, Anna feels like a device invented to get to Hannah’s arguably more interesting life.

The novel immediately transports readers to 1939 Berlin, where Hannah decides that she will kill her parents in fear that they are trying to abandon her to the Nazis. History alerts readers of the impending events of the Holocaust but Correa focuses on the impact of fear and how Hannah, who is “almost twelve years old,” struggles to make sense of a world where a neighbor, once her playmate, now refers to her as “impure.”

Besides her mother, the only consistent figure in her life is her best friend, Leo. Correa alters the construction of his prose whenever Leo is present, deviating from concise and observant to  elaborate and longwinded phrasing to match Hannah’s difficulty in keeping up with her best friend.

Leo was a passionate person. He didn’t walk, he ran, always in a hurry, with a goal to reach, something to show me that I shouldn’t miss. He also visited various neighborhoods, trying to figure out what was happening in this city of ours, which was falling apart bit by bit. Occasionally he mingled with the Ogres marching and shouting the streets with their flags, but I never dared to join him.

In this way, the author reminds the reader that this is a historical novel, not a textbook, based on true events. Leo’s passion is balanced with a sense of urgency, his need to constantly be on the move matched with the setting of dilapidated buildings and a fear of the other. I found myself re-reading these passages, ensuring that I did not miss anything in Leo’s energetic presence on the page, often times trying to catch my breath, much like Hannah, in my attempts to keep up with him as I too allowed him to show me things I should not miss.

Armando Lucas Correa

Hannah and Leo refer to the Nazi party and its members as “Ogres,” as they convey a youthful understanding of the monsters who control the world around them. Cast out by her friends and neighbors who view her as disgusting, the term translates the fear that triggers Hannah’s decision on the first page. She would rather kill her parents than be abandoned and sacrificed to the Nazi monsters.

She does not kill her parents. Instead, after Hannah and her family are forced from their home after her father’s brief imprisonment, they set sail on the now infamous SS St. Louis with several other Jewish refugees in hopes of finding relief in Cuba before possibly settling in New York. Correa combines fact with fiction, weaving the tragic true story of the passengers aboard the SS St. Louis into his novel. On Saturday, May 13, 1939, several hundred Jews boarded the St. Louis, a German ship, as a last hope of escaping Nazi Germany. The original plan was to take these refugees to Cuba where they would wait until they were allowed to enter the United States. However, under pressure from the Nazis, Cuba’s director of immigration passed a decree that forbid any more refugees from entering the country. The passengers on the St. Louis became pawns of Nazi and Cuban scheming and eventually the ship was forced to leave Havana. In the days that followed, the ship sailed along the U.S. coast, but American officials denied it entry and the ship and its passengers were forced back to Germany, where most were sent to death.

Correa juxtaposes Hannah’s story with Anna’s. Anna’s father was killed during the events of 9/11 while her mother was still pregnant with her, leaving her with a desire to discover the type of man her father was, unaware of his past or what remains of his family.

Then a package arrives that jolts Anna’s story and gives life to this part of the novel. The sender is revealed to be the almost eighty-seven year old Hannah. From this point on the book gathers momentum as one learns how her father spent his childhood while the other confronts how her father met his demise. At this point in the novel, Correa ventures away from splitting his characters’ points of view equally and focuses on Hannah. Anna’s plot line becomes overshadowed by the intricate details Correa provides regarding what became of Hannah between the ages of twelve and eighty-seven.

Correa displays his extraordinary talent in depicting his young characters while embedding the truth of the St. Louis within this novel as a way for his audience to gain a better understanding of the forgotten passengers on the ship who sought relief from their tormentors but were turned away. Many survivors, however, are unable to speak and are haunted by the memories of those they watched sail away and never heard from again. In one of these instances, Anna and her mother meet a woman who traveled on the St. Louis along with Hannah. However, the elderly woman is unable to remember Hannah and is reluctant to relive her painful past. In response Anna redoubles her effort. “I don’t want to end up feeling the same guilt toward him,” she says, seeking her father’s story through her great-grandmother’s.

I’m only nearly twelve! At my age, you still want your parents around. Shouting at you, refusing to let you play when you want to, giving you orders and lectures when you don’t behave.

Hannah is able to have what Anna cannot during part two of the novel. While aboard the St. Louis her father and mother resume their roles as parents instead of outcasts trying to smuggle themselves out of Germany while she enjoys lavish parties, discovers she is going to be a big sister, is reunited with Leo, and is once again left to explore her surroundings free of the watchful eyes of the Ogres. Correa incorporates correspondence between passengers on the St. Louis with Cuban and, eventually, American officials who state that they can no longer accept the refugees. With an eye to the present refugee crisis, he reminds us of the story of the St. Louis.

As the ship makes its way to Cuba despite being told there is no room, the refugees become desperate, formulating ways to ensure that they will not have to return to their home countries and face the “Ogres” that have invaded their homes. Hannah is left to wonder what will become of her family should the Rosenthals be allowed to disembark once the ship reaches Cuba’s shores. And, if permitted to leave, she fears she will be separated from Leo, Correa growing their strong bond into that of a first love during their short period of calm.

However, when they reach Cuba, Hannah is not only separated from her beloved Leo but from her father as well. Even though readers are provided with a sense of hope, the promise that Anna will meet Hannah, this hope is brought into sharp contrast with the characters’ sense of loss. By part two of the novel, both have lost their fathers. Correa again illustrates his young characters’ understanding of the world around them. As Hannah and her mother are forced off the ship, she struggles to steal one last glance at her relatives as they drift farther away from her.

The Ogres had snatched my Papa from me. The Cuban Ogres. I couldn’t kiss him. I couldn’t say good-bye to him, or Leo, or the captain.

Hannah and Anna suffer from the loss of their fathers, a fact that strengthens their bond once they meet. After becoming separated from her father, Hannah and her mother decide to stop speaking German and accept that the Cuban people will only ever see them as “Pollacks.” However, after Anna’s arrival, Correa resumes the split point-of-view technique. Hannah sees a lot of her younger self in her great-niece, launching her into a past she would rather forget. Anna becomes fascinated by the secrets that haunt her great-aunt and the rumors that her Cuban neighbors whisper about her. While Anna delights in the fact that she is named after such a mysterious woman, Hannah forces herself to reflect on her, finding comfort in what she has gained such as Anna’s father, who left her with someone to carry on their family name outside of Cuba.

Kellie Carle earned her BA from Old Dominion University in Virginia, MA from West Chester University in Pennsylvania, and MFA from Spalding University’s Low-Residency program in Kentucky. When she is not exploring the realms of speculative, jazz, and historical fiction, Kellie avidly pursues misspelled words, botched plot lines, and rudimentary characters. Her work can be found in Pennyshorts, Sick Lit. Magazine, and Phindie. To learn more, please visit her website at kelliecarle.com.

TRYSTING, fiction by Emmanuelle Pagano, reviewed by Rachel R. Taube

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TRYSTING
by Emmanuelle Pagano
translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis
Two Lines Press, 154 pages

reviewed by Rachel R. Taube

Emmanuelle Pagano’s Trysting is an intimate romance among hundreds. This book of fictional fragments, each in the first person, features character after character—most of indeterminate gender, age, and history—falling in and out of love. The self-contained pieces range from one sentence meditations to several hundred word flash fictions. The shortest of these could be writing prompts, while others read as prose poems. Reading Trysting can, in fact, be like reading a book of poetry, and it benefits from slow, thoughtful study. You could linger over any one piece, reread it and taste the rhythm, the carefully chosen words.

The deliberate and emotionally dense Trysting is representative of the kind of writing that earned Pagano the European Union Prize for Literature and translation into a dozen languages. But this is the first time Pagano has been published in English, and Jennifer Higgins’ and Sophie Lewis’ interpretation is a piece of art in its own right. Though they lose some nuances of expression and must forfeit some of the clarity of the French, Higgins and Lewis successfully reimagine the poetry and intensity of the original.

Some turns of phrase will make you sigh with the romance of them. A woman in one story “caught hold of a big, bright yellow balloon, pressed the opening to my lips, and let it deflate slowly, breathing in his air.” Simple clothes become “cloth for her body: cotton, wool, silk, nylon, linen, anything; it’s all thigh cloth or knee cloth, wrist, neck, or stomach cloth.” Other images hit your chest with the sadness of love dissolving. One narrator never washes his windows after his girlfriend leaves him because the “marks of her palms and fingertips are still on the windows, clearly visible when I put my mouth close and exhale, when I bring them out with my breath.”

The book is also undeniably playful. Characters laugh together in embarrassment. They have sweet nicknames for each others’ habits: a man calls the little grease bumps in his wife’s hair “cherries.” Another takes loving photographs of his partner’s nail clippings. Some stories veer into the surreal, like the one about the man who “would die regularly, every two or three years” and then revive with scars, traces of his violent deaths. Or the story about the character who stretches a string from the hospital bed of a deceased lover to their bed at home “in order to catch his soul.”

Though the stories are not divided into sections, and I can find no overall story arc or plot, themes reveal themselves. Wanting is expressed in music: a woman loves an accordionist who “[t]o make music […] was embracing the air, welcoming the empty space […] I found myself filling that hollow, those great bellows, his musician chest.” For a former lover, “My memory of him is the stretched skin of a drum. At the slightest touch, it vibrates and resounds.” Another musician complains that his crush, who lives upstairs, and her boyfriend “always screw to the same rhythm […] same tessitura, same component parts.”

I list these scenes to give the reader a sense of the suffocating nature of Pagano’s book. Emotions pile up, rocky and unstable. This, combined with the fragmented form, make Trysting a book of chapter endings. There are so many last sentences, each a moment or revelation or turn of phrase to be pondered, that the book begins to feel overwrought.

Emmanuelle Pagano

At the same time, because each piece is in the first person, the narrators begin to blur together from one story to the next. The female point of view in one story bleeds into the next. The narrator’s gender is rarely clear, so that we don’t know if the relationships are heterosexual or homosexual or meant to represent something else. This effect seems intentional, and as I got farther into the book, I began to see it as an exercise in exploring queerness. We can’t identify a gender, and it doesn’t matter. Interestingly, though, this doesn’t quite align with the reading of the book in its original French. In French, gender is more visible in the language. Adjectives often reveal the gender of the noun they describe, as do certain verbs, with an additional “e” at the end if the noun they are describing is female. A narrator that describes him or herself commits to one gender. Because this isn’t the case in English, the translation affects something that the original could not: it obstructs heteronormativity by making it impossible to identify most narrators’ genders.

The English title of the book, Trysting, is also vastly different than the French title, Nouons-nous. The latter more literally means, “let us bind ourselves together.” The verb “nouer” can describe how a plot comes together or how fingers intertwine when two people hold hands. It can be translated as “to build,” “to develop,” or “to knot.” The letters in Nouons-nous seem to be tangled together themselves, and the phrase has an alliteration and internal rhyme that presage the poetry of the book. The title change also denies the reader the rewarding moment of discovering the title within the text. In the original French, the verb nouer can be found in the third story. A teenage boy, disallowed from seeing the girl he loves, visits the girl’s parents’ carefully arranged orchard in the middle of the night. To get his revenge, he and his friends pick every fruit and “attach” (the verb nouer) their stalks to the branches of other trees, swapping them so that apples hang from pear trees and cherries from fig trees. In this context, the titular verb becomes a reference to things both deceptive and playful, young love won and denied and reclaimed. In French, the title is an active verb, both a command and an invitation to the reader: come bind yourself with us. Come play.

Rachel-TaubeRachel Taube works and writes in New York. She has been an Electric Literature-Catapult Scholarship recipient and a Tent Creative Writing Fellow, and she holds a masters in Creative Writing and Gender Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. You can find her fiction in Storychord and Apiary Magazine. Follow her on Twitter at @racheltaube.

 

You may also enjoy:

ROMEO AND JULIET IN PALESTINE: TEACHING UNDER OCCUPATION, a memoir by Tom Sperlinger, reviewed by Beth Johnston

NAPOLEON’S LAST ISLAND, a novel by Thomas Keneally, reviewed by Nokware Knight

CHILD’S PLAY: How Creative Play Helped Unlock My Nonfiction Writing, a craft essay by Megan Culhane Galbraith

 

NAPOLEON’S LAST ISLAND, a novel by Thomas Keneally, reviewed by Nokware Knight

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NAPOLEON’S LAST ISLAND
by Thomas Keneally
Simon and Schuster, 423 pages

reviewed by Nokware Knight

Napoleon’s Last Island takes place on five-by-ten-mile island of St. Helena, where Napoleon Bonaparte, the infamous conqueror of nations, was exiled after being captured by the British. Napoleon’s actions may have warranted him jail or the guillotine, but, as this fictional account tells it, he requested consideration for asylum in the British countryside, and was left on the island while his captors decided what to do with him. St. Helena was chosen because in part it was far from anything important, “halfway between Europe, Africa, and South America. This is the deepest pocket they could find to put the Universal Demon in.”

Based on the synopsis (conquered conqueror stuck on island hesitantly befriends by young native girl) and artwork (an ocean crashing into the bottom of seaside cliffs) on the book jacket, I expected in part to read the account of an aged, brooding, and isolated man pacing away his final days on an isolated rock, sometimes tolerant of, sometimes avoidant, sometimes thankful for his friendship with a young girl who lives there. For better, and for worse, I found something else.

While Napoleon plays a significant role in the story, the book centers around and is narrated by a fictionalized Betsy Balcome, who inhabited the island as a young girl while Napoleon was held there, and later published her accounts in a book, Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon. Napoleon’s Last Island was written by Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s Ark (the basis for the movie Shindler’s List) and more than 30 other books, mostly historical novels. Keneally shows through Betsy, and a select few other characters, that he is particularly deft in developing an individual voice, and injecting humor wherever he can. “I was careful to sit in chapel by the sort of girl who in somber situations could be set off into hilarity by a mere dig in the ribs,” recalls Betsy. “I was a watchful rebel,”

took what I could, and for the rest, kept myself warm with contempt. I did not evade complete censure and was frequently asked why I was not more like [my sister]. The question seemed to cause her more pain than me.

But Keneally’s narrative structure often plays against this precise characterization. Throughout much of the book he pairs characters, bashing them against each other until something sticks. This makes the characters feel interchangeable and nondescript.

Thomas Keneally

All this, however, helps shine the clearest light on Betsy. She’s the most interesting thing in the book because she is so confidently, defiantly, and consistently a young woman of her own, regardless of circumstance, among flighty adults who make big concerns of small matters just so the reader can notice they exist. Betsy is young, sharp of mind, frank of mouth, unusually aware for her age (though sometimes inaccurately so), feels herself less than no one, and is quick to slight anyone who she feels aims to reduce her. Not surprisingly this piques her father. “You see,” he says to her, “you always exact a price. You never bend your stiff neck. Do you think God is amused by your style of obduracy? Where does it come from? It is not a thing of our family!”

Early on in the book, this sort of bristle makes for an engaging read. In this spirit, Betsy and Napoleon commonly trade humorous tit-for-tat dialogue that the young girl takes far more seriously than her seasoned counterpart. She’s confident enough to give the deposed king her view on his lost Russian campaign, and the invasion of Moscow in particular:

“What I’ve been told,” I said to him in a literal way, “was that it was the Russians who burned it down to get rid of you, sir.”

My father and the admiral chocked on some sort of laughter. The man wagged his finger but with a wide, alien smile.

Jane looked terrified. Huge combustions and had been evoked and it was as if The Briars were not safe from them. I had found my voice with this creature, meanwhile, and I resolved not to be treated with the kind of sport he clearly saw me as good for.

But this sort of low stakes verbal sparring soon becomes the default mode of interaction among the novel’s characters. Less than one-quarter of the way through the book, all that flowery tongue-in-cheek prose begins to feel taxing. Beyond dialogue, keen and sweeping descriptions of little consequence seem to take up space in service of themselves rather than the story. Midway through, Napoleon’s Last Island still feels shallow.

The reader who manages to get through the second hundred or so pages will find reward in the arrival of an insecure and ambitious new governor who goes out of his way to make life hell for Napoleon. God bless the prick. He raises the stakes and re-centers the book, giving it newfound purpose and permission to evolve beyond trivial clutter. In fact, a passage describing the villain could almost serve as a metaphor for much of the book up to this point:

And there’s one great thing about that Fiend fellow. He tends to be satisfied as long as you give him plenty of details. He’s more interested in knowing not so much whether the Emperor ate boiled eggs for breakfast than whether they are soft- or hard- boiled, as if their condition is somehow an omen for him.

At first, the conflict between the governor and Napoleon is relegated to the grown-ups. But, eventually, and in a short matter of successions, Betsy becomes a political pawn, is confronted on her brashness, and runs into a hilarious conundrum were she and the reader “encountered a scene so undue, so crowded with people who had burst the limits of my knowledge of them.” If only things had been this interesting earlier on. Here, Keneally builds gripping context out of all the boorish cuteness readers were forced to suffer through earlier. Two continents away, a few power shifts after, and a whole new life removed from the island, we’ve made our way with what seems like another story altogether, nearly powerful and provocative enough to redeem the book.

nokware-nightNokware Knight is a bibliophile who believes that one’s best days are made of good music, good food, good people, and new places. He hopes to one day travel as much as he reads and believes that a life well lived makes it hard to distinguish the difference between the details of a good journey and a great book.

 

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SHOT-BLUE, a novel by Jesse Ruddock, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

SOVIET DAUGHTER: A GRAPHIC REVOLUTION by Julia Alekseyeva reviewed by Jenny Blair

 

LILLI DE JONG, a novel by Janet Benton, reviewed by Joanne Green

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LILLI DE JONG
by Janet Benton
Nan A. Talese, 352 pages

reviewed by Joanne Green

“When I write, I forget that I don’t belong to myself.” So observes Lilli de Jong, whose journal entries narrate Janet Benton’s impressive debut novel, set in the 1880s. Lilli is as spirited and determined as Jane Eyre, as sensible as Elinor Dashwood, and as downtrodden as Little Nell. Yet on the subjects of reproductive rights, affordable day care, and the cost of motherhood for women the book speaks directly to readers, today.

Pregnant, abandoned by her fiancé, and dismissed from her Quaker home and teaching position, Lilli finds shelter in the Philadelphia Haven for Women and Infants. Benton picks up where Dickens left off, and, in the form of entries in Lilli’s diary, describes both the multitude of these unwed mothers and the lack of assistance or sympathy for them. These unfortunates include a maid taken advantage of by her master, a daughter raped by her father, and those like Lilli, “female and unlucky…and a near idiot in the ways of amorous men.” The well-meaning Haven offers these women a chance to “return from disgrace by giving up her offspring and denying its existence ever after.”

With the passion of Jane Eyre, Lilli is thunderstruck with love when her infant, Charlotte, is put in her arms. But unlike a Victorian love story, this love of a mother for her child is at the novel’s center. “The doctor cut the fleshly cord that connects us, but an invisible one has taken its place…that can be neither cut nor broken,” Lilli asserts in a journal entry. When the Haven’s superintendent advises, “It is best to consider the baby like a tooth that must be extracted,” Lilli understands the baby’s survival depends on this tie that can’t be broken. She records closely observed details of the newborn’s smell and feel, and both the overwhelming work required to care for the young infant and the power of a mother’s love. The novel reveals the difficult road Lilli travels to keep Charlotte and to stay alive.

The choice of Lilli as a narrator provides much of the novel’s modern feel. As a Quaker, Lilli questions society’s norms, and listens to “the light within.” She writes, “I’d been taught not to conform to the world as it is…but to live instead as if the world were what it ought to be.” Lilli’s voice is in the Friends’ plain speech, addressing others as thee and thy, and avoiding the use of titles. The Quaker language places the story firmly in the 1800s, despite the modernity of Lilli’s thoughts, a delicate balance for the writer of historical fiction that Benton artfully maintains.

The other women Lilli meets in the story provide insight into the narrow options available to all women at the time. Lilli becomes a wet nurse for a well-to-do family, the Burnhams.  Although Clementina Burnham enjoys considerable freedom from the burdens of motherhood, she is also limited in realizing her ambitions, and jealous of Lilli’s connection to her son. Others from the Haven are crushed by shame. The maiden ladies who run the shelter are impoverished by their own gentility and lack understanding of the powerful love between mother and child.

Janet Benton

As a Quaker, Lilli received an education, uncommon for a woman of her time. Reading John Stuart Mill in the Burnham’s library gives her deep insight into the limitations motherhood imposes. “‘We can pursue our true wants,’ Lilli reads, ‘only when doing so harms no one to whom we are obliged.’” Obligated to her infant Charlotte, Lilli finds freedom only when writing in her journal, a sentiment as modern as Virginia Woolf. “When I write,” she says, “I forget that I don’t belong to myself.” Lilli’s education ultimately leads her to independence and survival.

But independence comes at a cost. At a time when cow’s milk was not a safe alternative for infants, childcare is dangerous and expensive. The details of childcare is one the novel’s grim fascinations (the author indicates in the book’s acknowledgments that Janet Golden’s A Social History of Wet Nursing in America provided both inspiration and information). Babies would suck on rags soaked in sugar water and laudanum, Benton observes, “bound to a board and placed on the highest shelf…to keep away the rats that do eat children.”

Benton, who has worked on documentary film and is an exhaustive researcher, provides a glorious, if dark, portrait of 19th century Philadelphia. She takes Lilli to the Old Blockley Children’s Asylum, to Broad Street Station (the largest rail terminal at the time in the nation), to a skating pond in the Wissahickon Park, and to the Burnham’s luxurious summer home in the suburb of Germantown. These details vividly invoke the past, while Lilli’s fresh passion and insight give the book a voice that is lively and modern. Lilli de Jong is beautifully written and completely absorbing.

Joanne Green lives and writes in Philadelphia. She is the author of Peach (Gemma Media).

 

 

 

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FAMILY LEXICON, a novel by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Jenny McPhee, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

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FAMILY LEXICON
by Natalia Ginzburg
translated by Jenny McPhee
New York Review Books, 224 Pages

reviewed by Robert Sorrell

Right before falling asleep, my father becomes totally incoherent. If you speak to him, he will respond with words, they just won’t make any sense. Neither will he have any memory of your conversation. (He passed this trait on to me; often to my detriment, I employ it regularly.) Once, when my dad had floated off into this near-unconscious state, he started talking about the Secret Service. From that point on, to spout these nocturnal babblings has become known in my family as “Secret Servicing.”

Families, social groups, and even workplaces often have phrases and words just like these. “Inside jokes” is a common term for some of them, but not all fall neatly into this category. For many of these words and phrases, a new definition or usage, with nuance beyond the punchline, has been created for a small group of people. This idea is the cornerstone of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon.

Now in a new translation by Jenny McPhee (and with a new English title), Family Lexicon is Natalia Ginzburg’s Strega Prize winning memoir/novel of life in Italy before, during, and after World War II, Lessico famigliare, first published in 1963. Ginzburg is known mainly in this country for being a “writer’s writer,” a phrase which is often used to compensate for an author’s lack of fame. But in Ginzburg’s case, perhaps there’s a bit more to it; her essays are often assigned on writing workshop syllabi alongside favorites like Joan Didion, James Baldwin, and George Orwell. A quick Internet search for  “Natalia Ginzburg” and “syllabus” turns up countless options. In fact, it was in a creative writing class where I was first introduced to her work, the devastatingly simple essay “He and I.”

The essay begins, “He always feels hot. I always feel cold. In the summer when it really is hot he does nothing but complain about how hot he feels. He is irritated if he sees me put a jumper on in the evening. He speaks several languages well; I do not speak any well.” Ginzburg continues this way for a few paragraphs. Yet somehow out of these clichés and simple sentences, Ginzburg draws a complicated portrait of a relationship. As in Family Lexicon, the way Ginzburg is treated by men is disturbing. And in her exacting narration, it’s never clear whether if the relationship produces much love.

But as simple as much of Ginzburg’s prose may be, she has a great ability to slip in poetic sentences or paragraphs that cut straight to the emotions of a piece. She writes later, in Dick Davis’ English translation of “He and I,” of her first meetings with her husband (“he”), the intellectual Gabriele Baldini:

If I remind him of that walk along the Via Nazionale he says he remembers it, but I know he is lying and that he remembers nothing; and I sometimes ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost twenty years ago on the Via Nazionale, two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk; so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.

Natalia Ginzburg

Ginzburg is often lauded for her prose’s “artlessness,” a trait which makes her ever more fashionable in creative writing circles given the current fetishization of “spare” writing, prose without an extra comma, or god forbid, an adverb. It is true that Ginzburg’s prose is, for the most part, quite spare, and in her nonfiction it is remarkable how little she shares about herself. She serves, most often, as narrator, not protagonist, of her essays. Her own personal thoughts, actions, or words don’t intrude on the narrative of Family Lexicon until around page 120, and she only uses one sentence to tell readers of her courtship and marriage to Leone Ginzburg. And yet, despite this extreme simplicity and her almost monotone narration, as in “He and I,” every now and then she slips in moments of reflection. This is particularly true of her writing on the war. World War II remains in the shadows for most of the work but in moments it appears, as in this paragraph right above a conversation between Natalia and her brother about whether they feel more or less rich now that they are married. She writes:

For years now, Turin was full of German Jews who’d fled Germany. Some of them were even assistants in my father’s laboratory. They were people without a country. Maybe, soon, we too would be without a country, forced to move from one country to another, from one police station to the next, without work or roots or family or homes.

Ginzburg intersperses little paragraphs and sentences like this throughout the book, and they are in part what allow her to do so much with so little. She doesn’t reflect much, but when she does, she makes sure it counts.

In Family Lexicon, Ginzburg also proves to have been a keen observer from a young age. The work (which has alternately been called a memoir, a novel, and an autobiographical novel but, for all intents and purposes is “true”) covers around thirty years of Ginzburg’s life, from her childhood in Turin in the 1920s and 30s, through her first marriage to anti-fascist Leone Ginzburg, through Italy’s reconstruction and reorganization after the end of World War II. Along the way, the story of the Levis (Natalia’s parent’s name and hers until her first marriage) and their wide circle of acquaintances and friends is narrated chronologically, with the “family sayings” acting almost as mantras throughout the work.

These sayings are part of what must’ve made Family Lexicon a particularly difficult book to translate, and are certainly part of what makes it an odd book to read in translation. Many of the sayings consist of puns, plays on the way a word is spelled or sounds (the Levis say “lend gear” for “lend an ear”), and silly or nonsense words. In Jenny McPhee’s translation a choice selection of these come across as “nitwittery,” “dribble drabble,” and “doodledums” (as well as the word “taradiddling” which to many readers, myself included, may seem to be a made up, but is not). Many come out of the mouth of Ginsburg’s father, Giuseppe Levi, a man who looms large in Family Lexicon and contributes more than his fair share to the long list of family words and phrases, one of his personal favorites being “Jackass!”

Giuseppe is a bit of a tyrant, a contrarian with the loud mouth and strong hand to ensure that he is heard over all others. He is constantly criticizing his children and his wife, Natalia’s mother, Lidia. He is also resistant to almost any idea had by someone else. After one of his sons Alberto becomes a doctor and Lidia says she should visit his office for some ailment, Giuseppe says things like, “Do you think that klutz Alberto knows anything? … I’ll give you a pill!” Late in the book he is asked to hold a political rally since he is running for office. He was told he only had to lead one rally and could say whatever he liked. A prominent biologist, he decides to spend the entire speech talking about science. The crowd is totally bewildered until at one point, Ginzburg reveals, he “happened to mention Mussolini and the fact that he usually referred to him as the ‘Jackass from Predappio.’ The audience erupted into resounding applause and my father looked around him, now stupefied himself.”

An equally idiosyncratic moment occurs during an air raid, when Lidia begs Giuseppe to come down to the cellar. “‘Nitwitteries,’” he replies, “‘If the building collapses, the cellar will certainly collapse too! The cellar is hardly safe! This is an utter nitwittery!’”

This moment is an accurate portrayal of their relationship, which is both combative and oddly loving. The book’s great mystery, as discussed in Peg Boyer’s afterword in this edition, is how Giuseppe becomes in many ways the story’s hero. Toward the book’s end, his sheer exuberance and energy overcome his despotic tendencies, making his outbursts oddly endearing. Yet while Giuseppe is an intoxicating character, I think Boyer and others don’t give credit to Lidia and the other members of the Levi family who are occasionally pushed off the page by Giuseppe’s loud voice or strong arm. They are, nonetheless, what gives the story its texture and its unexpected insights. Giuseppe is a cartoon; Lidia is a person. Lidia is also the source of much of the text’s joy. While Giuseppe is busy giving his opinions (usually negative) on anything he sees, Lidia sings made-up songs like the family favorite, “I am Don Carlos Tadrid, and I’m a student in Madrid!” And left untouched in the Giuseppe-friendly afterword is the strange fact that a prominent anti-fascist led his family in such a (there’s no other word for it) fascist way.

In McPhee’s translation, Giuseppe’s rantings, Lidia’s songs and jokes, and the rest of the Levi family’s sayings are vivid and entertaining. The characters leap off the page in 3-D, making the experience of reading Family Lexicon far more enjoyable than what one might expect of a memoir about the life of a family of Italian Jews under fascism and German occupation. This new edition also comes with extensive notes, which anyone without an encyclopedic knowledge of Italian political and cultural figures of the time will find very useful. It is also useful in explaining some of the more uncomfortable word choices, particularly the word “negro.” Giuseppe throws this word constantly at his children at his wife, at strangers, and its use is frankly alarming in the work. (Past translations have taken steps to avoid this particular word, rephrasing it as “yahoos”–Woolf’s 1997 translation entitled The Things We Used to Say–or using the Italian “negrigura”–D.M. Low’s 1967 translation, Family Sayings–in Italics.) McPhee explains her choice in the endnotes, noting that while “negro” and “negrigura” were commonly used in the Judeo-Italian Venetian dialect Ginzburg’s father absorbed as a child, and that according to the director of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies, Shaul Bassi, the words “never had overtly racial content,” Ginzburg “was very aware of the words’ racial significance,” and McPhee didn’t want to lose any of this potential meaning. McPhee took a similar approach with the title. Originally titled Lessico famigliare, the work has previously been translated as Family Sayings or The Things We Used to Say. McPhee’s title, Family Lexicon, has a certain technicality to it, but it also manages to capture the simplicity of the original while squeezing a bit more meaning into those two words.

This characteristic gives the text a somewhat academic feel in its approach to language and its extensive notation, but the tone and character of McPhee’s prose is airy and crystal clear, just like Ginzburg’s, or at least, just like translations of Ginzburg’s work I’ve read by other translators. And this is good because Family Lexicon is a deeply funny, charming, and human work. There is hardship, plenty of it—Natalia’s first husband, Leone Ginzburg is tortured to death by Nazis towards the end of World War II—but at its core Family Lexicon is written with the kind of humor and deep humanity that could only be mustered about such topics by someone who’d actually lived through them.

Early in Family Lexicon Ginzburg writes, “If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past.” Family Lexicon brings the reader inside the family, teaching us this personal Latin. What Ginzburg achieves in the work is not necessarily a triumph of pathos or empathy, or even one of intellect. She simply allows us to feel that we are part of an experience. She welcomes us into her family, through language. And yet, at the same moment, this closeness is mitigated by the fact that we are reading in English. Don’t get me wrong, I deeply enjoyed McPhee’s new translation. But maybe one day I’ll learn Italian, so that maybe I too can speak out and be recognized as part of the family.

robert-sorrellRobert Sorrell is a writer and photographer living in Philadelphia. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago’s English program and has a piece of narrative nonfiction forthcoming from Mosaic Art & Literary Journal.

 

 

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TYPEWRITERS, BOMBS, JELLYFISH: ESSAYS by Tom McCarthy reviewed by William Morris

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TYPEWRITERS, BOMBS, JELLYFISH: ESSAYS
by Tom McCarthy
New York Review Books, 288 Pages

reviewed by William Morris

I am writing this on Monday May 8, 2017, the night before Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays, a collection of the work of British writer Tom McCarthy, will be published. I checked my watch to be sure of the date, and found that it’s a day off. It claims today is the 7th. This small discrepancy is hardly worth noting, except as it pertains to McCarthy’s obsessive treatment of time in these essays. Time is an illusive business, a difficult thing to pin down, as it’s always moving out from under us. For McCarthy, time is a series of refrains and repetitions, arrests and elisions, and he turns to it again and again in this collection.

McCarthy originally published or presented these essays as lectures, introductions to books, or accompaniments to art installations during the last decade-and-a-half. Readers may know McCarthy better from his novels (Satin Island, Remainder, C), in which case they won’t be surprised by the literary and philosophical topics covered in these essays. In “Get Real, or What Jellyfish Have to Tell Us About Literature,” for example, McCarthy writes about J.G. Ballard’s Crash, in which the protagonist orchestrates car crashes for his entertainment; McCarthy’s own debut, Remainder, is about a man who suffers an injury, then uses his settlement money to re-enact this accident time after time. In both, there is the act of recreating something violent and real, as McCarthy says: “a real that’s linked to repetition.”

In the essay “Get Real,” McCarthy argues that our idea of realism as a genre is flawed. He suggests that most profound kind of realism would be created not by semblance, but by showing how authenticity manifests itself in our lives through violence or mishap, much as Ballard’s and his own protagonists create reality through car crashes and other accidents. The most real moment, he argues, is when the matador is gored during a bullfight. He means:

a real of the type that I suggest we should embrace and celebrate punctures the screen or strip of film, destroying it; a real that happens, or forever threatens to do so, not as a result of the artist ‘getting it right’ or overcoming inauthenticity, but rather as a radical and disastrous eruption within the always-and-irremediably inauthentic; a traumatic real.

In “Recessional, or the Time of the Hammer” (yes, the time of the hammer is a reference to MC Hammer—“Stop! Hammertime.”), McCarthy writes primarily of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, in which the protagonist goes to visit a sick friend “at the sanatorium for three weeks; but, himself diagnosed with TB on arrival, is held up there for seven years.” McCarthy describes time in Mann’s novel as “a complex, spring-like structure […] stretching and contracting such that quite separate moments touch or get embedded one within the other.”

This collection itself is “a complex, spring-like structure” filled with literary and cultural references that recur throughout, often becoming “embedded one within the other.” How else to explain McCarthy’s transitions between Thomas Pynchon and MC Hammer, Don DeLillo and Zinedine Zidane? And stretched throughout the book, an almost constant stream of Mallarmé. There are essays on the weather in London, Kafka’s letters, David Lynch, and J.G. Ballard, making Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish an unceasingly eclectic collection.

Tom McCarthy

My initial encounter with McCarthy was his latest novel, Satin Island, about a man trying to write a report that would cover the entire zeitgeist, the spirit of his time. Despite this hefty task, the protagonist does very little. He watches television, sleeps with a woman, and takes a ferry. I was fascinated by this short novel’s lack of action, the way the narrator’s thoughts about parachuting and oil spills swelled to fill the voids left by his inactivity. Reading his essays, I see a template for some of McCarthy’s concerns in his own fiction. Consider two essays on French literature “The Geometry of the Pressant” and “Stabbing the Olive: Jean-Phillipe Toussaint.” In these pieces McCarthy discusses works from the nouveau roman genre—the new novel. I’ve read none of these books, and have at best a peripheral understanding of their style and concerns, but in McCarthy’s descriptions I feel compelled to read them; I sense a family resemblance between Tom McCarthy and his subjects. He writes, about The Bathroom by Toussaint:

When the hero, in a willed narrative refusal to go out into the world and make something happen, takes to his bathroom and decides to stay there, he luxuriates in the tub’s parallel sides and in the patterns formed by towel-rails and washing wire;

and of La Télévision, whose narrator:

decides at the novel’s outset to stop watching television completely—which of course makes him obsessed with it. Staring for hours at his extinguished set, he reads the TV listings, or looks out of his window at the banked rows of his neighbors’ screens changing the color of the night as they ‘flood’ space.

I see in these descriptions a map of McCarthy’s fiction-writing mind and, more importantly, a philosophy of what it means for fiction to be authentically real. For writers in the nouveau roman style, and for McCarthy, reality is the collision of the will and the world. Toussaint’s heroes enact their will through refusal. They reject the tedium of inauthentic daily life. “The only escape route,” McCarthy writes, “from this [present moment], from its simultaneity, its loops and repetitions, would be violence.” The “irremediably inauthentic” must be punctured with violence to escape life’s ennui.

The essays also offer a summer’s worth of recommended readings. Do you have to be as well-read as Tom McCarthy to enjoy this collection? Not at all. His introduction to Tristram Shandy, if you’ve never read Laurence Sterne’s wild eighteenth-century opus, will make you want to. The essay on Gerhard Richter sent me on a long Internet browse of his work. I’ve never read Toussaint or Robbe-Grillet, but I will soon. In fact, immediately after reading “The Prosthetic Imagination of David Lynch,” I convinced my roommates to watch Blue Velvet. The opening scene of Blue Velvet is perfectly tuned to McCarthy’s sense of reality: soft music, the fireman’s neighborly wave as his truck rolls through town, children walking safely to school under care of a crossing guard; an idyllic moment the viewer might expect to go on into infinity, and then the kink in the hose, the father’s abrupt heart attack. Here is the intrusion of violence, the real puncturing the banal, and then the moment passes.

From David Lynch, naturally McCarthy follows the string to the Japanese artist On Kawara. The following is from the opening of an essay near the end of the collection, about Kawara’s work:

Try to say now. I mean, now: try to say it. Not just to say it, but to mean it too. To truly mean it: mean it in the sense of it being true. It’s just not possible. No sooner has the word been formed […] than it’s already late and, in its lateness, false: as its sound rises to your ears, it’s not now anymore.

The essay, titled “18 Semiconnected Thoughts on Michel de Certeau, On Kawara, Fly Fishing, and Various Other Things,” discusses Kawara’s renowned series of paintings, each of which are of the day’s date, “in the notational shorthand of a host of languages. OCT.15, 1973. 6 MRT.1991. 1 MAR.1969.” Beginning this essay with a rumination on the impossibility of now seems fitting for a discussion of an artist so interested in capturing a series of dates. It also seems appropriate, coming from McCarthy, whose other essays have focused on time in MC Hammer, Thomas Mann, Tristram Shandy, and other works.

This brings us back to my watch with its wrong date, and my writing this review the night before the collection is published. How can I say I am writing this with any certainty when, by the time I’ve struck the keys, the act of writing has become past? And if I don’t finish writing by the end of this evening should I follow Kawara’s example, as McCarthy suggests: “If On Kawara hasn’t finished one [painting] by midnight, he destroys it, since it’s no longer a painting of Today.” I think Tom McCarthy would take issue with my certainty that I am writing this now.

Yet a look at the page of sources at the back of the book leaves me unsure. The last essay (“Kathy Acker’s Infidel Heteroglossia”) “was delivered as a lecture at the Center for Fiction, New York, May 9, 2017.” I check my watch again. It says it’s May 7, which means it’s in fact May 8. If today is the 8th, how was this essay delivered as a lecture on the 9th? This, of course, is an experience I won’t share with most readers, who will encounter the book after its publication. For most, this is a non-issue. And yet, in my pre-May 9 reading, this claim seems monumental. Just think: McCarthy writes about On Kawara’s paintings, the impossibility of capturing Today or now, and in the advance issue of his collection, claims he has delivered a lecture in the future. He is surely a master of puncturing time.

William-MorrisWilliam Morris is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His work has appeared in print and online, most recently at Sediments Literary Arts Journal, Fiction Southeast, and Red Earth Review. He divides his time between St. Louis and Salt Lake City, and is always reading. He also works as an editor at Natural Bridge. His other areas of interest include cats, coffee, and cryptozoology.

 

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ATLANTIC HOTEL, a novel by João Gilberto Noll, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

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ATLANTIC HOTEL
by João Gilberto Noll
translated by Adam Morris
Two Lines Press, 138 pages

reviewed by Robert Sorrell

“Love. Call me Love, the Word Incarnate.”

This is the closest that readers get to a name for the protagonist and narrator of João Gilberto Noll’s strange little book, Atlantic Hotel, recently translated into English by Adam Morris. The novel is set in Brazil in the 1980s, and over the course of the book, the unnamed narrator embarks on a beguiling and pointless quest through the country. At different points he will seem to be—or perhaps will be—an actor, a priest, an alcoholic, an invalid. Along the way, Noll will shade his experiences with touches of Don Quixote and Odysseus, hints of The Stranger and a taste of the pantomime and absurdity of Fellini’s early 1960s films (Noll’s unnamed narrator a believable stand-in for the existentially angsty characters usually played by Marcello Mastroianni).

And yet for all the interesting things that could be said about Atlantic Hotel, this review is written in shadow. On March 29, 2017, just a little over a month before the release of the new English translation of Atlantic Hotel, João Gilberto Noll passed away in his home city of Porto Alegre. He was 70 years old. He left behind nearly twenty books and a legacy that stretches from his home country of Brazil to Germany, the United States, Italy, and the UK—all places where he held teaching positions or residencies—and into the many other countries where his work has been published in its original Portuguese and in translation.

As the Center for the Art of Translation, where Two Lines Press is housed, noted in a brief article on his death, Noll was simultaneously an international author and one deeply steeped in his native Brazil. Many of his novels, such as Atlantic Hotel, one of his most famous, are set in Brazil, and rarely the Brazil of the upper classes, or of Copacabana Beach, rich tourists, and ex-pats. Instead, his integration of “lower class” language and characters has made some of his work controversial among critics in Brazil, but it’s also in part what has made his work so compelling.

Atlantic Hotel is no exception. The middle aged male narrator spends the book wandering Brazil from city to city, encountering strange individuals, visiting dive bars, having sex, and overcoming a series of obstacles, like Odysseus on his way back to Ithaca. Except, as far as the reader can tell, the narrator has no Ithaca, no Penelope, and no suitors to defeat. He is a hero without a quest. And, it would seem, without much of a moral compass. Without really any kind of compass.

João-Gilberto-Noll

The experience of reading Atlantic Hotel is a bit like flipping between a very literary, sparse short story and well-written genre fiction. The characters have a hint of the cartoonish about them. Take this bit of narration, “Nelson spoke in enigmas. But all the words he was saying, the house, it all seemed to me like something out of an old film.” I can almost hear Bogey’s voice reading these lines in voiceover, while on screen he walks through the fog filled streets of an ambiguous city. But somehow, the campy quality, the cliché, manages to come off as smart and sleek. The narrator, I feel, is a bit too smart for his own good. He makes the lurid, bizarre world he traverses feel symbolic and satiric instead of hackneyed.

And like many works of mystery and noir fictions, sex and the possibility of sexual violence, haunt nearly every page of Atlantic Hotel. As in a Henry Miller novel, the sex is described in explicit detail, but in a way that is not necessarily erotic. In fact it is often transactional, as in this early passage: “As soon as I had her undressed, she got down on all fours atop the dirty green carpet immediately. I kneeled behind her. My mission: to mount from outside her field of vision. No touching above the waist, just anonymous haunches seeking each other out pathetically.”

At times, Noll’s sex scenes verge on a terrible cliché: using sex to show a character’s “depravity,” and this is one of the most disappointing aspects of Atlantic Hotel. The other is the way that Noll handles the women involved in these sexual acts. Women seem to exist in the novel, or at least in the narrator’s mind, solely for sexual purposes. And in that way, it doesn’t seem like Noll, or his narrator, have come very far from the hardboiled stories of heartless men and buxom dames with which Atlantic Hotel has a strange kinship.

And yet, there is something light, almost effervescent, which hovers above the narrator and gives him just enough anxiety, just enough quirk, to complicate the story. The only other recurring appearance of a woman is in the narrator’s dreams, where he is often a woman. Of one such dream, he recalls, “Sitting atop some dunes … I was a woman from the twenties. But unlike the films of that era, nothing was in black and white. Almost everything was a shade of gold, but with pink splotches.” In the back of a cab, he apologizes to the driver. What for? the driver asks. “For being who I am,” he replies. The narrator’s sadness and humility make his wide-eyed, in-the-moment narration more compelling than it might be otherwise. It is the narrator’s perceived innocence—an innocence that the reader can tell is not wholly truthful—that allows the mystery in Atlantic Hotel to feel like it has some structure beneath it. Noll tells us next to nothing about the narrator’s past, but just gives us enough of a hint to convince us that he has one.

Atlantic Hotel, at its very core, was a book that intrigued me, and that, in unexpected ways, made me care about it, even though I’m not sure I would say I liked it. It reminded me of a comment that Roger Ebert made about director Werner Herzog, “He has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular.”

And while Atlantic Hotel is far from a failure, it is the kind of book that is unique enough, bizarre enough, that the words “good” and “bad” don’t seem to apply. Reading Atlantic Hotel gave me the sense that I would be willing to follow Noll to all sorts of possibly unsuccessful places. Because even if I wouldn’t entirely enjoy the experience, he’d make it worth my time. He will be missed.

robert-sorrellRobert Sorrell is a writer and photographer living in Philadelphia. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago’s English program and has a piece of narrative nonfiction forthcoming from Mosaic Art & Literary Journal.

 

 

You may also like:

QUIET CREATURE ON THE CORNER, a novel by João Gilberto Noll, reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

SHOT-BLUE, a novel by Jesse Ruddock, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

THESE ARE THE NAMES, a novel by Tommy Wieringa reviewed by Robert Sorrell

 

THE LONG DRY, a novel by Cynan Jones, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

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THE LONG DRY
by Cynan Jones
Coffee House Press, 117 pages

reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

We are in a Welsh farm. A cow goes missing. Gareth, the owner, spends the day searching for it. It is during days like these and it is in stories like these, of a Welsh farmer searching his property for a pregnant cow while his wife, Kate, stays in bed with a migraine, that we gain greater insight into what life is. We don’t need a great story line or a long adventure to be able to understand the nature of a person. We just need to be privy to their wandering thoughts as they find things to do with themselves on a warm, dry day.

Cynan Jones is a Welsh author who has written several other short novels to acclaim in the U.K. and, in the past three years, in the U.S. He portrays the heartbreak and simplicity of ordinary Welsh people. The Long Dry is his first novel, published in 2006, and now due to Jones’s American readership, being published in the U.S. As in Everything I Found on the Beach (discussed in an essay on these pages by reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin) and The Dig, the language and plot of The Long Dry are as sparse and dry as the landscape being depicted and yet they convey an emotional power I have rarely felt in other books:

Gareth passes the car where his son used to play so much. He has to go back and tell his wife he loves her. For a second he sees the car as if it was new—the times they went for picnics in it—rising from the brambles, and only seconds later does his sense fill in the mouse droppings, and spiders, and the thick dust that is on the windows now.

The story is told largely from Gareth’s third person personal perspective as he searches for the cow, and Kate, who, upset with her husband, has closed herself in her room with one of her not-infrequent migraines. At times, the point of view shifts to other characters, notably the cow itself as it goes wandering crazily and pregnant through the bogs, and also two unnamed boys who while on a walk make the difficult, uncomfortable decision of violently putting a rabbit out of its misery.

One of the points Jones makes through this medley of uneven perspectives is the incompleteness of a story told by only one character. The inclusion of the two young boys points most directly to this: their segment comes right after Jones describes Gareth walking past the dead rabbit, crushed under bits of concrete. Gareth stares at it, and “it infuriates him that men are capable of such articulate cruelty.” In the boys’ passage that follows, Jones reveals how the killing of the rabbit was an act of compassion, how it pained the boys to do it, the older one realizing “he had to hurt the rabbit and in him was the horrible slow panic of knowing something like this.” Not only does the older boy feel compassion for the rabbit, but also for his younger brother, who is having to witness such an act. Thus Gareth goes on with his day having witnessed what he thinks of as an example of human cruelty, whereas the reader comes out touched by the strength of the two young boys.

Cynan Jones

This is not the only instance of dramatic irony, in which the reader has not only more information than the characters with which to condition her perception of the story, but also the ability to see how greatly incomplete information influences a character’s perspective. One of the greatest sources of unspoken tension relates to the uneasiness in the relationship between Gareth and Kate. They hardly speak to each other throughout the novel—there is not much dialogue anyway—but their thoughts are weighed down by the worry that their relationship is fraying at the seams, as well as by the guilt they endure in having contributed to it. Feeling that she has changed from the carefree woman that he fell in love with, Gareth is largely frustrated with Kate (he believes the change is due to a series of miscarriages she had), and yet angry with himself for viewing her as weak and angry. One gets the sense that he does not truly love Kate anymore, but stays with her because of the convenience of habit. As he walks through the fields, he tells himself, “I must never forget how perfectly built she is […] She is changing now, but it does not matter.” The need he has to repeat these facts to himself, and to try and convince himself that her changes are not for the worst, reveal the difficulty he has in doing so.

Kate instead feels pinned down by a more direct guilt produced by the event that has caused a change in her: a one-time encounter with a farmhand in one of the farm’s barns. After the encounter the migraines appeared and she began cutting herself, and now though partly recovered she allows herself to indulge in her weaknesses, flitting off to her room when she feels the migraines come on, leaving her daughter Emmy to deal with the vet, come over to put down the dog. Jones reveals the disconnect that has opened between Gareth and Kate when Gareth decides he will tell Kate he loves her just how she is as she screams at him because a cow has started giving birth while he has been away. Warm aspirations and feelings that are entertained while each is alone shatter when the couple confronts each other.

The problem, Gareth decides at one point, is that “we live too long […] We’re expected to love too much and too long.” He feels this as he realises he is looking ahead to thirty more years with Kate. Jones does not make the same mistake with his novel, which manages to pack all this tension and emotion in a surprisingly short amount of space. The structure of the novel is quite unusual, as it is diced under different headings that all deal with diverse aspects of the farm and the characters’ lives: “Ducks,” “The Farmhand,” “The Vet.” Through all of these sections, however, run the same themes and the same general plot line: the search for the cow. The clear temporal progression of the story—through the narrative, or telling of the story dips from past to present to future easily—calms the otherwise fragmentary nature of the telling that suggests the fragmentation of thought, memory, and life itself; for it reminds us that ultimately we are all subject to the continuous, regular march of time, even when our emotion and thoughts are shaped in other non-linear ways. The structure of the story, and the way it is clumped around certain, always concrete, events and figures, prevents the prose from being flooded by excessive streams-of-consciousness.

But stream-of-consciousness, with the thoughts of the character in question shaping the events and narrative, feels natural in this format. This is most notable when the story is told from the cow’s perspective: “She kept walking in the sun and grubbed the hedge here and there because now the flies were driving her silly, landing on her face all the time, and the cow was very thirsty.” However the switch into another consciousness is never complete, as would happen with Virginia Woolf: there remains always the overriding presence of the third person narrator, who not only maintains a consistent sparse style throughout, but also slips details into the ruminations of characters that they would not know, such as when the cow thinks that “she hadn’t liked the bog, which for a long time had been full of hide-behinds, which were brought across from the lumber camps of Wisconsin and which Gareth’s father had learned about from the American troops he served with.” Most of all, though, there is the way in which the third person narrator has structured the story into sections with headings, flying in the face of a more fluid depiction of consciousness and rather purposefully crafting the story, bringing these lives into being as if they were part of an intricate puzzle that can be gradually understood the more pieces the reader assembles.

The most tragic moment of the story, and a great instance of dramatic irony, relates to the sudden knowledge, revealed slightly more than halfway through the book, the reader gains of what will happen in the future. I will not ruin it here, although I will say that half the tragedy for me was not the future events themselves—amply tragic already—but the matter-of-fact way in which they surprise you; and then the way in which the rest of the novel seems cruel for the characters who, unsuspecting, are slowly traveling towards this future. The greatest irony is when Gavin thinks back on the tragedies that befell his father and envies him. He imagines “that perhaps a crisis would cure them too—would push away the tiny problems that were damaging them like splinters.” The reader can hope so, too—although the nature of the tragedy to come makes it seem unlikely that it will do anything but hurt. Yet in this rumination the reader is met with the crushing naiveté we all have towards our own lives, unable to see, because of our limited perspectives and temporal restrictions, the greater picture.

The past, like the future, is one of the greatest players on the largely empty landscape that is the present. The role of memory, Jones suggests, as the search for the cow and the simple stream of sentences lumber on, is double-edged. There is the one side of it that inevitably resurfaces, undesired, as one continues through the mundanity of life. This is the side that replays Kate’s liaison with the farmhand in her mind as she lies in bed, or that reminds Gareth painfully of how carefree and barefoot Kate used to be. There is also another side, however, one that is actively sought out, exemplified by the diaries of his father that Gareth reads before going to sleep. Gareth himself is conscious early enough in the novel of why he reads them: “To bring some sound into the stillness.” This is a sentiment that is expressed more completely later with Gareth’s musings on the huge length of life. Gareth and Kate care for each other, Gareth cares deeply for the farm, but they have lost all passion and excitement. It feels sometimes that they do what they do simply because they must do something. Herein lies the small, insidious tragedy of the story: that life seems to produce an excess of pain over pleasure. The characters mull over the various tensions they feel throughout the day and although there are certainly moments of pleasure—for instance, Gareth’s love for his daughter Emmy—there is a pervading sense of life being lived out of habit and not desire.

Ultimately this is a beautiful little novel that leaves the reader reeling with the powerful emotions it manages to render in such a short space and with such sparse language. The simple storyline also gives leave for musings over possible symbolism. For example, what does the cow represent? Of course it could represent nothing in particular, simply a lost cow, one of the millions of small reasons we give ourselves to keep living purposefully each day.

What about the long dry? The last sentence of the novel is: “‘It’s raining,’ [Gavin] says, and [Kate] can hardly hear him.” The reason she can hardly hear him is because she’s crying softly, it having hit her how good and brave and strong of a person her husband is. It seems tempting to say then that this long dry refers not only to the weather, but to the tension in the relationship between Gavin and Kate, and the end of the novel suggests that both of those can be brought to a close. However Jones does not supply this interpretation without offering a layer of ambiguity. Although Kate is suddenly overtaken with strong affection for her husband, there still seems to be the problem of miscommunication, of disconnection, that was present throughout the novel, as when Gavin himself was overtaken by love. Then there is the knowledge of the future that haunts the reader and prevents her from seeing the last page as the end of the story. The novel fittingly ends when the long dry ends, but it may be because choosing an ending based on the lives of its characters is too impossible a task. The cow has been found, the rain has come; the rest—the emotions, the difficulties of the characters—have no such easy finish.

Melanie-ErspamerMelanie Erspamer studies English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She is half-Italian and half-American and has lived most of her life near Boston. Her work has been published in The Purple Breakfast Review, Nomad Magazine and Unknown Magazine, and her one-act play was performed at the University of Edinburgh. With her sister, she also has been running an anonymous literary magazine based in bathroom stalls, called Bathruminations.

You may also like:

THE USES OF NATURE: DISTANT LIGHT by Antonio Moresco, HALF-EARTH by Edward O. Wilson, EVERYTHING I FOUND ON THE BEACH by Cynan Jones, and HILL by Jean Giono, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

LIKE DEATH, a novel by Guy de Maupassant, reviewed by Derek M. Brown

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LIKE DEATH
by Guy de Maupassant
translated by Richard Howard
NYRB, 240 pages

reviewed by Derek M. Brown

When the modern short story is subjected to the ivory tower equivalent of a paternity test, Maupassant’s culpability is often presumed to be as great as Chekhov’s. Their works featured extensive observations and detailed characterizations that emboldened their literary progeny to think more in terms of character than plot—thus facilitating the bridge from realism and naturalism to modernism. Yet Maupassant’s contributions have been increasingly obscured by Chekhov’s.

Among English speakers, Maupassant—Flaubert’s onetime protégé—is most widely known for “The Necklace.” Noted for its social commentary and characteristic dénouement, “The Necklace” has long been available to audiences outside of France. His novels, however, have escaped such treatment and failed to reach a substantial English readership. Recent translations commissioned by New York Review Books may prompt a shift.

With Like Death, Richard Howard—poet, critic, essayist, and professor at Columbia University—offers a rendering of Maupassant’s Fort comme la mort that, I can only presume, retains all of the lyrical richness of the original, published in 1889. It also offers startling insight into the extent of Maupassant’s influence, which can be found in some of the 20th century’s most seminal works.

Like bookends that support the beginning and end of the 20th century—and rank among the period’s definitive modernist and postmodernist titles, respectively—Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913) and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) contain passages that illustrate the nature and breadth of Maupassant’s impact.

In Swann’s Way, the scent of a pastry—a madeleine, specifically—famously stirs the narrator’s memory as he observes the changes taking place within himself:

Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind.

Almost 25 years before, in Like Death, Maupassant had suggested this same sequence—a memory triggered by a sensory event:

Bertin felt memories awakening within him… Of varying nature, they rose so rapidly and so simultaneously that he experienced the sensation of a hand stirring the vase of his memory… He tried to find what caused this upsurge of his old life… There was always a reason for these sudden evocations, a simple and material cause, an odor perhaps, often a fragrance.

Nearing the end of the 20th century, Maupassant returns—now as a gift to David Foster Wallace. Quoting is a particular gesture of postmodernism, and Wallace’s work is rife with such seemingly gleeful appropriations. In Infinite Jest, he transforms this, from Like Death:

In the silence of the night she listened to the pendulum of her clock, which with its regular and monotonous ticking seemed to whisper ça va, ça va, ça va.

to:

I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over.

Guy de Maupassant

Joyce, too, is said to have borrowed from Maupassant. While he undoubtedly named the technique known as the epiphany (steeped as he was in Catholic nomenclature), the moments of profound insight, which figure so prominently in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are often found in the works of Maupassant and are thought to have originated in his pages. Maupassant’s extraordinary influence on 20th century literature should guarantee his work will continue to feel vital to the contemporary reader. And, indeed, it does.

In Like Death, Maupassant’s protagonist—artist Olivier Bertin—has been coddled by the aristocracy since completing his celebrated painting Cleopatra while “virtually in his teens.” He is the most sought after painter in Paris and is never at a loss for prominent sitters. In one of the many salons he frequents, he observes a lady in mourning—the Countess de Guilleroy, wife to a successful, conservative politician. After making it known that he would like her to sit for a portrait, she readily obliges and their sessions result in an affair that lasts over a decade.

As they age, they do so gracefully. Bertin has a full head of thick, white hair, and lifts weights to maintain his muscular physique; the countess, approaching middle age, possesses a “vividness that gives forty-year-old flesh the savor of ripeness…”

While Bertin’s love for the countess does not diminish, he becomes disillusioned with the “turbid and restless undertow” of la vie parisienne and struggles to find inspiration for his works. But even as the artist remains uninspired, the language and imagery of this novel do not. Benumbed by cigarettes and deliberating over his next sketch, Bertin may disregard the “swallows streaking across the space overhead like an incessant flight of arrows…,” but the reader will not fail to savor such descriptions.

Richard Howard

Bertin is only restored when the countess’ daughter, Annette—whom he has not seen in three years—returns from the country to make her debut in society. Annette resembles her mother so completely that their juxtaposition produces in his mind the impression “of two bodies created successively of the same flesh, of the same woman perpetuated, rejuvenated, having become once more what she had been.” Bertin’s affection for the daughter eventually arouses the countess’ suspicions, but he maintains his adoration is merely the product of his love for the mother. When a sudden death results in a scene of mourning similar to the one that precipitated his affair with the countess, the daughter becomes the lady in black—the one whose portrait Bertin is desperate to complete.

Maupassant weaves numerous philosophical distillations into this narrative. Often delivered in smoke filled drawing rooms, these reflections continue to remain au courant—particularly in this, our current age of mindfulness. For instance:   

One refuses to understand such a man because one always attributes to others one’s own way of thinking and assumes the likelihood of behavior similar to one’s own in a similar situation.

Or, as adherents of neuro-linguistic programming might say, “perception is projection.”

Yet some of the most poignant and incisive observations are those regarding the nature of love—particularly as subjected to the influence of time. For Bertin, this experience is conflated with his increasing marginalization as an artist. The panegyrics that once greeted him in the pages of Le Figaro are now reserved for newcomers, artists whose exaggerated styles and doctrines leave him frustrated and perplexed. The countess’s daughter too furthers his sense of exile by embodying the youth that begins to flower around him and mark his impermanence:

Here was a pretty little new person, ready for chances and for love, ignored and ignoring, who sailed out of port like a new vessel, even as her mother was returning, having traversed existence, having loved!

The countess ultimately challenges Bertin’s conception of love by making a distinction between his love for her and what she can offer him. While she acknowledges that he loves her capacity to satisfy the “wants of [his] heart” without causing him any pain, he has nevertheless failed to lover her:

In me you love so many things—my beauty, which is fading, my devotion…the opinion the world has of me, the opinion I have of you in my heart—but that’s not me, that’s nothing of myself. Can’t you understand that?

As the aging lovers endure their own, private torments and attempt to reconcile themselves to the disparate effects of time and the growing sense of irrelevance it produces, the countess—having given herself completely—finally acknowledges the source of their grief in conceding, “It’s the fault of our hearts that have not grown old.”

This third translation by the NYRB imprint of a longer Maupassant work is as relevant as it is overdue. Maupassant’s inquiry into time and the nature of love will no doubt resonate with a great many, as his influence persists.

Derek M. Brown holds a B.A. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University and lives in New York City.

WAYWARD HEROES, a novel by Halldór Laxness, reviewed by Tyson Duffy

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WAYWARD HEROES
by Halldór Laxness
translated by Philip Roughton
Archipelago Books, 466 pages

reviewed by Tyson Duffy

The Slighted, the Neglected, the Sufferers of Injustice, and Sheep

Certain great writers fade from the American memory like condensation from a windowpane. The Icelandic novelist Halldor Laxness—he was once all the rage here—is one. He was considered something of an upstart, a genius, a social novelist, a fellow traveler of Upton Sinclair and Bertolt Brecht, and he often journeyed between Europe and America. A Marxist-Stalinist who was very critical of America, he was once important enough to attract the personal ire of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who worked hard to impoverish Laxness by attempting to confiscate profits from his U.S. book sales, which were considerable.

Laxness’ major novel, Independent People—a long, dense, and brilliantly strange book that one admiring critic playfully summed up as being a book about “Sheep”—was an enormous hit in America even by today’s standards. In the 1950s, he finally disavowed Stalinism after the pogroms in Europe and later he dabbled in Taoism and Catholicism. Another well-known novel is The Atom Station, in which he satirizes the U.S. and NATO for occupying Iceland and seeking to build a military base in Keflavik. Probably around this time (the late 1940s), politicized American readers began to turn away from the deeply reflective Nordic bard who wrote about sheep; but then, in the wake of considerable controversy, he won the Nobel Prize in 1955. He was immortalized. In his Nobel speech, he spoke gently of the influence of his grandmother and

the moral principles she instilled in me: never to harm a living creature; throughout my life, to place the poor, the humble, the meek of this world above all others; never to forget those who were slighted or neglected or who had suffered injustice, because it was they who, above all, deserved our love and respect, in Iceland or anywhere in the world.

I recount this background here because I’ve found that in light of Laxness’ political history, critics tend to brandish political interpretations of his novels as though there were no other way to approach him. Surely, politics can be as much a part of literature as it is of life. And The Atom Station was certainly an overt commentary on American postwar power projection. But Wayward Heroes, the book at hand, is not a geopolitical novel about the Cold War balance of power. I would add, somewhat timidly, that the tome could not properly be called a novel, either.

I loved it by the end—absolutely became addicted to it—but, just so you have fair warning, here’s how it begins, as if, indeed, fog returning to the window glass:

Two are the heroes from Vestfirðir that have gained the greatest renown: Þorgeir Hávarsson and Þormóður Bessason, sworn brothers, of whom, as we might expect, much is told in Ísafjarðardjúp, where they grew up, as well as in the Jökulfirðir and Hornstrandir.

The book goes on like that for 466 pages. Unpronouncible place-names, references to ancient myths unknown to anyone innocent of the Poetic Edda, and tough, straightforward, comma-spliced, driving sentences march you through the icy pastures of Scandinavia, up to Innuit country, then on to medieval England and Europe, and back around again. Laxness is an acquired taste, you could say—one that a writer no less important and highly esteemed than Jane Smiley took on with relish—but once you have the flavor rolling around in your mouth, and you come to understand its sweetness, you crave it. By the end, the nearly five hundred pages were, for me, not enough.

Halldór Laxness

The book cannot be properly thought of as a novel because it’s clear that Laxness intended it to be a retelling of one of the Icelandic myths, The Saga of the Sworn Brothers (the Fóstbrœðra saga). As the old story goes, two preteen warriors, one who as Cormac McCarthy would say has “already a taste for mindless violence” and the other a “skald” with a taste for heroic poems (called “lays”), unite in their desire for booty and triumph and take off to see the world. They are quickly split apart in a humorous situation soaked in pathos (empathetic poet Þormóður saves proud bloodthirsty Þorgeir’s life, and he is none too pleased about it), and the book goes on to recount their separate adventures.

As is tradition in the telling of a saga, the narrative often splits off to follow, say, Olaf the Stout of Vestfold for many chapters, or King Æthelred the Unready, and there is much reference to how the often magical-realist events are, of course, entirely historically accurate—don’t doubt it!—since they are taken from very, very old books (“Most sources say …” “Gotland books tell of how …” “Learned men have often noted …”). Laxness does this kind of thing with a smirk, following closely the traditional saga format while casting the patina of gentle, almost invisible satire of an educated Modern over his utilitarian sentences.

There is much that is humorous here but, like all real humor, the laughs stand foursquare on a foundation of heart-wrenching pathos. Another critic informs us that the original Icelandic title of Wayward Heroes can be translated into English more literally as, simply, “Heroica.” This title is more apt. The book, as Laxness has conceived of it, is not really about the titular heroes, but rather a commentary on so-called heroism itself; the true focus of the book is someone else altogether—that someone whom Laxness’ grandmother felt needed to be placed above all others: the peasant. The commoners. The sufferers of injustice. The sheep.

Those subjected to the jackboot of heroism are everywhere struggling against the incursions of these so-called heroes, rebelling, spitting back, loving each other, taking in the sick, and appreciating poetry. Take just one speech as evidence, given by Kolbakur, the Irish slave attached to one of the love interests of Þormóður, who, when asked by the girl why he does not cry since he is a slave, replies:

“I do not cry because heroes and skalds burned down my house; because they slew my father in this field and thrust a spear through my grandfather, just a frail old man. My grandmother was on her knees praising her beloved friend, the blessed Columbkille, when a man bashed in her skull with a blow from an ax. That is why I do not cry. Then they took my infant brother, unwound his waddling clothes, and tossed him naked between them on their spear points. My mother and my young sister, they dragged wailing to their ship. And that is why, young woman, I do not cry.”

The suffering of ordinary people represents the emotional heart of the book. All throughout it, as our heroes and their kings (whether Christian, pagan, or otherwise) wreak often funny but always bloody havoc across northern Europe, the common people emerge as not just victims but the only truly moral force in the ancient world. Toward the end, Laxness ties this tendency of the ethical rabble to the origins of Iceland as a nation:

The ragamuffin says: “It cannot be denied that when Harald Tanglehair set Norway aflame, we betook ourselves west and made ourselves Icelanders. This we did because we had no desire to associate with men who allow themselves to do battle and murder for money. We took no possessions from Norway apart from the lore of the skalds, warriors, ideals, and tales of ancient kings.”

This is, more or less, historically accurate. When Norway was at the top of the heap all those centuries ago, they waged bloody war on any innocent land lying around. The original Icelanders, the story goes, fled to a difficult, undesirable landscape of ice and rock in order to live in peace. There, while tending sheep and living under the midnight sun, they composed a range of myths and folklore in the form of poetic sagas that has become central to global literary history. So much for you warriors and your heroics. We, the People, have our skalds and our lays.

Is that a political statement? Partly. But is it geopolitical, having to do with Cold War antipathies and Marxism? No. The book’s central concern is the basically moral heart of community life, the essentially destructive force that is humanity, and the ways in which history retards our language, our connection with beauty. Religion, war, tradition, these are all ruthlessly poked fun at here. What survives, Laxness seems to say, should be poetry, art, love, brotherhood. But in the end, not even these find a place, since they have been perverted by power and bloodlust and greed. In the poignant final lines of the book, when King Olaf asks the poor poet to recite to him that great poetic song of warrior-heroes, the defeated and bedraggled skald, wandering off, replies only: “I can no longer recall that lay.”

Tyson Duffy is a writer, editor, teacher, and translator. He’s a former Fulbright Fellow and a current fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center Writers’ Institute. His most recent fiction appears in the Carolina Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife in New York City.

SHOT-BLUE, a novel by Jesse Ruddock, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

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SHOT-BLUE
by Jesse Ruddock
Coach House Books, 224 Pages

reviewed by Robert Sorrell

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to see Winter’s Bone author Daniel Woodrell do a reading and Q&A. His performance was about what you might expect for a reclusive writer hailing from the forgotten hillbilly pocket that is the Ozarks, an area of steep hills and spidery lakes in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. He had a funny goatee and spoke with an accent that most people in America probably don’t even know exists, twangy yet somehow refined and oddly beautiful, a bit like his novels. Those novels almost all focus on poor rural people who struggle with drugs, the loss of parents, and deep pain, yet they are shot through with a breathtaking lyricism. He opens Winter’s Bone:

Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.

The influences most frequently associated with Woodrell are Faulkner and the King James’ Bible, but to me his writing sings with the unacknowledged brilliance of hick grandparents, early mornings spent outdoors, and the kind of loneliness that can do weird things to a person. It simply feels like Woodrell is writing without anyone looking over his shoulder, like he might’ve lost touch with the world. He’s one in a long tradition of reclusive novelists and poets who think the best place to write is not a shoebox apartment but a cabin in the woods. This tendency in turn has helped to create a wide body of literature set in just such isolated locations, with characters who either seek this lonely, monastic lifestyle for themselves, or find themselves thrust into it.

Jesse Ruddock

Jesse Ruddock’s first novel, Shot-Blue, is one of those books. The main character is a young boy named Tristan who, through no choice of his own, finds himself in a remote place called Lake Prioleau. Prioleau is an out of the way body of water in an out of the way corner of Canada. More Nova Scotia than Ontario. Shot-Blue takes place entirely on the banks, and in the waters, of Prioleau. By the end of the 200-plus- page novel Tristan traverses the lake many times, visiting the different towns that sparsely populate the banks and islands, but never leaves. He’s not too happy there, but he doesn’t know anywhere else. The lake is his home. The same is true of his mother, Rachel. In the novel’s first few pages, Rachel brings Tristan to the small cabin where she grew up. The cabin is on an island with nothing much else besides trees. Since there are no people on the island, there’s nowhere for her to work, no one for Tristan to talk to, and no place for him to go to school.

As a parenting decision it’s hard to understand, yet Ruddock isn’t interested in helping us figure out her characters. They are, frankly, all mysteries, and that’s the most alluring and frustrating bit of the whole book. Watching Tristan swim in the water near their cabin, Rachel thinks, “I love (him) … His knees were bruised, but he was otherwise perfect, and as if he could hear her thoughts—maybe he could, what did she know—he found her eyes and smiled at her.” As far as parent child conversations go in this novel, this is about as close as it gets to a heart to heart.

The most direct comment the book has on Rachel comes secondhand. A man named Keb whom Rachel has begun sleeping with for extra money is sitting in a bar, feeling sorry for himself because he can’t be with her at that moment: “She was the least sentimental person he’d ever met,” the narrator intones. And yet, reading that sentence—with its alchemical mix of Keb’s perspective and some sort of omniscient narrator—it is hard to know whether to believe it.

Tristan is even more withdrawn than Rachel; his emotions seem unclear to himself, and are even more so to his mother. In the first few pages Rachel lays a hand on his shoulder and reflects, “She’d made this shoulder, but it was even smaller than her idea of it. Did she not know him? Not even his shoulder.”

Tristan is a quiet boy with a slight, androgynous figure and dark black hair that later in the novel he grows into a long ponytail. He doesn’t fight or yell or practice any of the other habits that the Prioleau men use to navigate their lonely world, except rolling and smoking cigarettes. A character later tells him, “You’re the same as everyone. But you think you’re different.”

The difficulty of simply getting to know the characters is in part what gives the whole book the feel of a mystery. That and Ruddock’s ability to feed tiny spoonfuls of information to the reader over hundreds of pages. Yet as the novel progresses, and characters increasingly struggle and fail to share their emotions, it becomes clear that perhaps there will be no conclusion, the mystery will not be revealed in a sudden stroke of genius. And that is both pleasing and disappointing.

Yet, like most literary novels, there is more to enjoy here—or at least more to investigate—than character and plot. Much like Winter’s Bone, Shot-Blue is written in a style that somehow combines an easy-spoken blue collar minimalism with wordplay and lyricism. The oblique, hidden emotions of the characters are balanced in part by the ingenuity and playfulness of Ruddock’s language. She begins the novel:

She hated the narrow dirt mile between their trailer and town. She wanted to erase it the same way she might spit and rub a number off the back of her hand. Rachel didn’t own anything, but it was a lot to carry on soft ground. The mud and gravel road was thawing from the top down. It peeled under her steps like skin off rotten fruit.

The image of the peeling skin is pitch-perfect for the macabre, unexpected, and at times confusing volume that follows the opening page. Like Rachel, the reader is on soft ground, and it’s not always clear when the road will shift beneath our feet.

This is the case when, a third through the book, a jump occurs. Without giving away any more information than you could find on the dust cover, suffice it to say that Rachel is out of the picture. Tristan has aged a few years. The cabin where he and his mother lived is torn down and Tristan must work to support himself. He gets a job at a brand new lodge that caters to a small summer crowd of tourists. With the job, comes an influx of new characters to the novel, the workers who help build and run the place, their families, and those who have come just to earn some extra cash over the summer. Tomasin, a sixteen year old, is sent by her mother for the latter reason.

In keeping with most of the other characters, Tomasin is hard to read. One of her most defining characteristics is her made up use of the word “religious.” The narrator explains, “Religious meant she couldn’t understand and it wasn’t her fault.” Almost every time she interacts with Tristan she calls him “religious.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these two cryptic characters find themselves attracted to each other, and share an odd courtship that, despite their age, reminded me a bit of the childhood romance in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Like the characters in Anderson’s film, Tomasin and Tristan define themselves in stark opposition to those around them, and their quirkiness and (perhaps overly) cutesy names wouldn’t be amiss in one of his films.

It’s never really made clear what Tomasin or Tristan do at the lodge. There are a few scenes of work, for instance when Tristan teaches some city folk how to fly fish, but besides that much of the remainder of the novel occurs outside of working hours, at bonfires and in bunks and staff residences. Tomasin and Tristan chase each other around through the woods, perpetually misreading each other’s intentions and confusing their emotions. There is something beautiful to it, and also something frustrating, which leaves you always wanting a little bit more, from the characters and from the writer.

Toward the end of the novel, Tomasin is swimming in the lake and begins to cry. “She cried,” Ruddock writes, “because nothing had ever felt as it should between her and anyone.” Soon after reading this section, I typed the name “Tomasin” into Google. One result I found listed its meaning as “twin.” The website had little information to back this claim up, and as everywhere else I looked listed it as a variant of “Thomas” I wasn’t sure how much to trust this conclusion. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder if Ruddock had known of this—potentially false—meaning as well. “Nothing had ever felt as it should,” Ruddock writes of Tomasin, yet the same is true of Tristan. They make an odd little family, and I found myself hoping towards the end that they would become closer, share their emotions a bit more, if only because it seemed pointless for them to suffer in isolation. But like all summer stories, everything is brought to a hard stop with the coming of autumn.

While Shot-Blue and Winter’s Bone may share some characteristics, this point is where they diverge. Woodrell’s Ree is a strong willed character who undergoes her own personal odyssey and in the end manages to stave off disaster. Winter’s Bone is a novel about determination, and what can happen when one person puts their body and soul into a task. Shot-Blue on the other hand, is a book that explores how it feels when things don’t happen, when you miss all your chances at redemption and don’t know where to turn. It is a novel about absence—of conversation, of love, of family, of connection—and that’s something special in its own way.

robert-sorrellRobert Sorrell is a writer and photographer living in Philadelphia. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago’s English program and has a piece of narrative nonfiction forthcoming from Mosaic Art & Literary Journal.

THE YEAR OF THE COMET, a novel by Sergei Lebedev, reviewed by Christina Tang-Bernas

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THE YEAR OF THE COMET
by Sergei Lebedev
translated by Antonina W. Bouis
New Vessel Press, 245 pages

reviewed by Christina Tang-Bernas

The unnamed narrator of The Year of the Comet is born the moment an earthquake strikes Moscow. “The earthquake was my first impression of being: the world was revealed to me as instability, shakiness, the wobbliness of foundations.” Therefore, he observes, “My feelings, my ability to feel, were fashioned by that underground blow. I had trouble understanding anything to do with stability, immutability, and firmness, even though I wanted those states I could not achieve; disharmony was closer and more understandable than harmony.”

And so we enter the world of The Year of the Comet, the second novel from Sergei Lebedev. That we begin with an earthquake is fitting for Sergei Lebedev, who worked for years on geological expeditions. Lebedev’s first novel, Oblivion, a critically acclaimed Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2016 also translated by Antonina W. Bouis, similarly explores a strong connection between man and land.

The narrator spends his childhood shuttled between two grandmothers who see him as the legacy of all of their lost loved ones, an amalgamation of parts of long-gone brothers and cousins and husbands. He becomes himself and also not himself. Lebedev’s choice to leave the narrator unnamed underscores a search for identity and purpose that permeates the entire novel and that reflects the dehumanizing influence of the State.

In the wake of the Civil War, famine, and World War II, whole swathes of the narrator’s personal family history are lost, seen only in snatches from photographs and left-behind objects. In the silences of untold stories and missing people, he feels that there are always things being hidden from him, secret signs that will direct his life or give him some deep insight if only he can uncover them. He is constantly searching, bestowing profundity on found objects and words. In the same way, he creates his own stories of his family’s past, trying to situate his place within them and within the Soviet Union. In this construction of history, the narrator reflects, he mirrors the USSR itself:

The USSR, continually editing and reshaping its mythological past, was essentially a matryoshka doll of images and myths that sprouted from one into another; some formed cause-and effect connections, others were pushed aside; inside each construction you could endlessly search for the truth, accepting the legends of the previous era which became the ‘real past’ by virtue of seniority. You could climb into a pit, descending deeper and deeper, without realizing that the entire construction was artificial; that was why you didn’t know where to put the spaces of silence, areas that were forced outside the limits of the Soviet universe.

The formative year, when Haley’s comet returns, comes in 1986. His grandmother shows him a drawing of herself as a little girl with the comet overhead and he asks her when the comet came last, eventually calculating that it came in 1910.

“You’re right,” she said with a smile. “You figured it correctly. World War I started four years later. Back then everyone thought that the comet was an omen of great misfortune, and so it was. Of course, then came the revolution,” Grandmother went on, correcting herself. “And the revolution made people joyful.”

He is shocked to realize that his grandmother existed before 1917, before the October Revolution that led to the creation of the USSR. It is then that he begins to peek outside the temporal and cultural borders that form the USSR.

Sergei Lebedev

It is also 1986 that a serial killer known as “Mister” is on the loose, dumping the bodies of children in places where he should have been noticed. The fact that he is not leads the police to speculate that Mister is unrecognizable because he blends in with the crowd, “a simple good Soviet man.” In the narrator’s imagination, however, this fact becomes magnified. Mister becomes “more Soviet than any Soviet man…an invader from the world beyond who preached the destruction of the Soviet Union, living only for hatred of the USSR.” The narrator becomes convinced that his destiny, his very purpose in life, is to sacrifice himself to Mister, to give the detectives a sign that would lead to his capture, and in doing so, can take his place in history as a hero. “I was delighted by the correspondence of my plan with the Soviet faith in which I was brought up, which considered sacrifice the highest and noblest act.”

When he finally comes face-to-face to Mister, he realizes that Mister is nothing like how he imagined. “The evil was real, my fantasies about the saboteur were not.”

In the aftermath, the narrator is able to look beyond his own made-up stories and begin to face reality as it truly is, as the first rumblings of turmoil tremble across the land. Five years after this formative year, in 1991, would come the collapse of the Soviet Union, as if Haley’s comet bookends the rise and fall of not only the nation, but the corresponding fortunes of the narrator’s family. 

The Year of the Comet is written in dense, descriptive and metaphoric prose, as the eyes of a young boy transform the ordinariness of daily life into the extraordinary. Yet, there are signs throughout this book that it is really written from the perspective of an adult, looking back in time. And so, through the remove of history, and perhaps through clouded lenses, the novel reads almost as if the narrator is moving through a dream. Emotions seem muted, even in passages that address deep turmoil. The reader is told of these moments of angst, but it is related in such a way that the reader observes it, instead of experiencing it. In this way, the novel becomes an almost-nostalgic snapshot of a transitory moment, a remembrance of a lost way of life, before the imminent political upheaval and the inexorable process of aging, of personal change.

While this style of writing fits an adult remembering his coming of age, it sacrifices a sense of urgency. Instead of fear of the unknown, the reader is instead reassured, as if it is the grandmother speaking, that everything will turn out well in the future, not just for the narrator and his family, but for the country of Russia as well.

Christina Tang-Bernas lives in California with her extroverted husband and introverted cat. Her work has appeared in WomenArts Quarterly Journal, Kansas City Voices, and Brevity Magazine. When she isn’t writing, she engages a different part of her brain by copyediting academic manuscripts. Find out more at christinatangbernas.com.

SWIMMING LESSONS, a novel by Claire Fuller, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

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SWIMMING LESSONS
by Claire Fuller
Tin House Books, 368 pages

reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier 

“A book becomes a living thing only when it interacts with a reader,” says writer Gil Coleman, the rogue central character of Claire Fuller’s Swimming Lessons. When he tells a bookshop assistant that “first editions don’t matter,” he seems to argue that access is more important than ownership, that a book’s content is more valuable than the object enclosing the text. But the impulse behind the sentiment is hardly democratic; his words cast light on his unequal marriage to Ingrid, a student he impregnates, derailing her education. Infamous for a single work (the lurid and presumably autobiographical A Man of Pleasure), Gil is oddly less interested in an author’s words than in “the handwritten marginalia and doodles that marked up the pages,” and “the forgotten ephemera used as bookmarks.” By the end of his life, his wife is gone and his library is full of “bits of paper with which he could piece together other people’s lives, other people who had read the same books he held and who had marked their place.” It’s also full of clues to solve a mystery at the center of this skillfully structured and satisfying novel: Where did Ingrid go, and why?

Our Endless Numbered Days, Fuller’s dark and disturbing debut about a young girl enthralled and entrapped by her survivalist father, showcased an artful method of withholding information to create suspense and contribute to an atmosphere of unease. Likewise, in Swimming Lessons, she unsettles readers from the first, irresistible, line: “Gil Coleman looked down from the first-floor window of the bookshop and saw his dead wife standing on the pavement below.” Is Ingrid a ghost? Or is she still alive?

Fuller keeps the full truth hidden until the epilogue, cutting between two stories that suggest alternative outcomes by tracing contradictory versions of the past. In the first version, Gil grieves for his (late? lost?) wife but still hopes she’ll return to him. When he injures himself in a fall from a promenade while chasing a woman he thinks is Ingrid, his daughters, Bohemian artist Flora and her older, more responsible sister Nan, return to their unconventional childhood home (the Swimming Pavilion in a seaside village) to care for him. There, the women reprise familial roles based in their differing beliefs about their mother’s disappearance: Flora is the baby abandoned by a selfish and insufficiently maternal mother; Nan is the bereaved child who had to mother her little sister without much help from their dad.

In the second version, Ingrid’s prolific letters addressed to the “real writer” Gil recount a love story gone sour. She describes her life, from the day she met him to the day she (apparently) drowned, as that of a deserted wife raising two daughters alone, feeling “nostalgia for the life (she) could have had.” Swimming is her only “release from the relentless grind of motherhood.”

Fuller’s eye for idiosyncratic detail makes both versions vivid and convincing. Though initially distracting as a device, a third of the way in it’s clear the letters aren’t merely a means to deliver back-story. Rather, this is a love story told through marginalia. By repeatedly begging the question, Why doesn’t she just talk to him?, Ingrid’s letters circle ever closer to the truth.

Ingrid’s description of cowering with fellow students in Gil’s classroom powerfully establishes her attraction and ambivalence by comparing his rant on Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (“Who gives a fuck about Jackson and her intentions? She’s dead, literally and metaphorically.”) to her father’s verbal abuse. Planted between pages of this particular book in Gil’s collection, Jackson’s mystery ties Ingrid’s story to larger literary themes. Her characters (domestic Constance and worldly Merricat) give context to the conflict between “just a wife” Ingrid and her ambitious sister Louise.

But Ingrid’s letters, inserted in books in Gil’s library, do more than position her in the margins of his life. Their pointed placement in particular volumes weds content to the physical book that bears it. In narrating her life, she reclaims her own authority and challenges Gil’s self-anointment as the Author engaged in his self-conscious retreat from the world. As it turns out, Ingrid is the real writer in their marriage, composing what amounts to an epistolary novel while Gil lives a secret life in his writing room.

Claire Fuller

In Swimming Lessons, Fuller mines a deep vein of material she brilliantly explored in Our Endless Numbered Days: that of a daughter trying to see her parents clearly by discerning the truth between image and reality. Like her father, Flora lives with hope and grief. She’s haunted by a sense memory of her mother leaving the Swimming Pavilion for the last time: “a waft of coconut—the colour of golden honey again, and Ingrid turning and stepping, turning and stepping out into sunlight.” And like her father, she pursues Ingrid’s ghost, in reality and in her imagination, following her mother’s lookalike to the local library, trying to sketch a toy soldier she’s found on the beach but instead drawing her mother from memory.

As an artist, Flora knows “how much could be left out of a drawing while keeping it recognizably human,” and how humans habitually fill in these visual gaps. As Gil’s health crisis reunites her family at the place where her past is shelved, access to new information lets Flora learn to trust her own eyes, to see her lost mother as “more concrete, a real person with thoughts and feelings, decisions to make and an understanding of their consequences.” Reading between the lines, the mystery of her parents’ marriage isn’t solved so much as deepened.

Elizabeth Mosier is a novelist and essayist. Her review of Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days appeared in Cleaver in March, 2015. www.ElizabethMosier.com.

 

 

WE’VE ALREADY GONE THIS FAR, stories by Patrick Dacey, reviewed by Tyson Duffy

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WE’VE ALREADY GONE THIS FAR
by Patrick Dacey
Henry Holt & Co. (hardcover edition)
Picador Trade Paperback, 206 pages
Patrick Dacey’s story “Ballad“, which appears in the collection, was published in Cleaver’s Issue No. 6. 

reviewed by Tyson Duffy

“The priest departs,” wrote Walt Whitman in 1871, “the divine literatus comes.” It’s something of an unspoken article of faith in American thought that without some guiding central dogma—whether literature, Christianity, democracy, ideology, “infopreneurship”—the individual is in danger of slumping forward like a marionette and falling uselessly to the floor. In the nineteenth century, Whitman ushered Protestantism out of the limelight and invited poetry to take its place as the new Dog Star that would shepherd American life toward a revitalized future. For only some—the Romantic poets, mainly—this made great progressive sense.

But these are strange times, a tough era in which to find nourishment for or even acknowledgment of the soul. Both our religious exigencies and our enthusiasm for literature—philosophical twins in parallel pursuit of divine enlightenment—continue, but in a manner that seems to have sapped them of any greater spiritual import. Christian fundamentalist groups aligned themselves this election year with a gold-plated presidential candidate who is a biblical illiterate, while one in a thousand of our humble writers will strike it rich with a million-dollar book contract yet may still find herself on a nationwide book tour of near-empty Barnes & Noble sitting rooms across North America. “The strangeness of life,” as Saul Bellow called it. “What if, for once, one were to yield to it?”

In Patrick Dacey’s first story collection, We’ve Already Gone This Far, available now in hardback and due out from Picador in paperback June 27, we find out what happens when we yield to life’s despiritualized strangeness in the twenty-first century’s overweening atmosphere of hogwild commercialism and ideological rigidity. (His first novel, The Outer Cape (Henry Holt & Co), will debut in hardback on the same date.) Dacey seems to be an interesting character himself in this regard, a bespoke and downtrodden seeker of his own soul adrift in corporatized America. The descriptions he’s given in interviews of a difficult youth and family life, the bouts of poverty he endured as an adult, are evidence of a nature informed largely by pain and wonder. His father was a gambler who went broke repeatedly and thereafter took his son on long door-to-door sales trips. Later, Dacey raised his own son while living hand-to-mouth on hourly wages, after studying under George Saunders and Mary Gaitskill at the Syracuse MFA program. The agony of the peripatetic writer undergoing economic uncertainties comes through strongly in his work; Dacey’s writing often reflects the rawness of material poverty, a certain yearning for inner enrichment or a scatterbrained longing that is as essential to his stories’ characters as their spinal cord.

In the story “Mutatis Mutandis,” for example, over-the-hill Nancy Dwyer submits her body to the vulgarizing scalpel of a television showman/plastic surgeon on The Dr. Jack Show. For her agonies, she does not attain super-model status as she might have hoped, but, far more essentially, a passing familiarity with her own soul.

Patrick Dacey

Likewise, in “Never So Sweet”—among the best stories in the collection—a son watches his father yield to an ill-advised love affair with his dead brother’s girlfriend, Tutti; by the end, Tutti rejects her new beau and returns to an old flame, leaving both father and son behind. But it’s in the company of these confused, two-timing adults that the young son discovers his soul. Amid the domestic sexual intrigue of the father and new girlfriend, the boy finds himself suddenly paralyzed by the midnight adolescent horror “that there is nothing beyond the universe.” The well-meaning Tutti sits him down and brings him back to earth with a long, Zen-like call-and-answer chant: “I am not a boy … I am not a son … I have no eyes, no ears, no mouth, no body…” Neither of them could be aware of it, but the chant she leads him in is an example of what is called apophatic theology, a ritual as old as Greek philosophy: the theory that to describe the Spirit in terms of what it is not (rather than what it might be) brings one to a higher understanding of its essence. The scene is also an almost perfect rendering of the rational mystic philosopher Avicenna’s millennia-old “proof of the soul,” wherein simply to imagine oneself deprived of all five senses, as though trapped in a sensory deprivation tank, was sufficient to prove the existence of the human spirit, an entity as distinct from the body as the baby is from the baby carriage. If the boy in “Never So Sweet” desired a glimpse into his soul—as so many of Dacey’s characters unconsciously do—he finds it not in church nor through the literature of the ancients, but via the ministrations of Tutti, who emerges as a kind of mystic lay philosopher.

It is this sudden attainment of self-knowledge at a stage of life that seems beyond redemption, the resilience of the human spirit in a context of degrading abjection, that Dacey writes about with quirky eloquence. The stories work in patterns of resistance-and-release: confronted with ghastliness, self-deceit, failure, war (in the excellent story “Lost Dog”), or (in the case of a brief coming-of-age story with a too-long title called “To Feel Again the Kind of Love That Hurts Something Terrible”) the possible psychopathy of a beloved son, the characters fight back against their late transformations only to pass, at the last moment, imperceptibly into enlightenment. They’ve already gone this far, in other words, so the final step is almost unconscious. A wise but dim halo glows around their renewed heads by the final paragraph. It’s this kind of mild revelation, or “sudden spiritual manifestation” as James Joyce put it, that makes Dacey’s stories memorable.

A number of reviewers and interviewers commented on the idea that Wequaquet, the invented town where nearly all the stories take place, and the cast of recurring characters from humble Massachusetts precariat classes fully unite the thirteen stories into a “linked set.” Booklist called them “interlocking stories,” and one could even be forgiven for assuming that the collection is in fact a novel, since the jacket copy carefully avoids use of the phrase “short story.” The book design and cover give a gentle impression that what you’re holding in your hands is likely a novel. But I agree with critic William Giraldi who suggests that the “novel-in-stories” is a non-category of literature originally invented by promoters. Even when intended, such as the famous case of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the payoff for linked stories falls far short of that of a novel while never really adding anything new to the concept of the story collection. That certain invented working-class New Englanders (“George Falachi,” “Coach Fennahan,” “Donna Baker”) stroll through some of these stories seems a minor thing with regard to a substantive understanding of the work’s central themes. You will be none the wiser, in other words, for tracing the appearances of names and places throughout, and upon their repeated appearances nothing important or enlightening seems to hinge. The stories were published separately in various magazines over many previous years, so it’s hard to feel truly convinced that they’re weaved together as inseparably as wickerwork. And really, what would we gain if they were? “Each story should rightly achieve its own destination,” writes Giraldi. These stories do exactly that—and isn’t that enough?

Alexis de Tocqueville said, “Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.” In a business culture such as ours, with a literal CEO crackpot as commander-in-chief, who can disagree with Tocqueville now? Dacey’s work is infused with subtle commentary on the “paltry interests” of both ordinary Americans and their landed superior classes. But what burns through, with a gem-like constancy, and will likely remain hot and bright in his future work, is the hunt for the neglected American soul, that throbbing eternal thing that still moils beneath the surface like an underwater turbine. It will never be too late, Dacey seems to say, for your soul to spring to life. In fact, it’s only when it’s too late, as well as too difficult and too unlikely, that it’s prone to reveal itself.

Tyson Duffy is a writer, editor, teacher, and translator. He’s a former Fulbright Fellow and a current fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center Writers’ Institute. His most recent fiction appears in the Carolina Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife in New York City.

A GREATER MUSIC, a novel by Bae Suah, translated by Deborah Smith and reviewed by Justin Goodman

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A GREATER MUSIC
by Bae Suah
translated by Deborah Smith
Open Letter Press, 128 pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

Bae Suah’s newest English-translated work, A Greater Music, describes the Austrian composer Franz Schubert as “a short, fat, shy myopic.” As brutal as this description is of a man who unhappily died before his 32nd year, it seems altogether different in tone when used to describe Bae’s novel itself. Filled with observatory indifference and an almost disembodied airiness, the novel comes across particularly as commentary, and as particularly rebellious. But what’s striking about A Greater Music is that it treats the work of Schubert above the man, treats the novel above the social, giving grandeur to otherwise short, fat, shy myopics. They are breathing things that were trapped in frames ill-suited for their sublimity—short in length, fat with substance, shy about their revelations, and myopic in their attentions, they are beings greater than their comportment can present. Something so heavy has rarely looked so light.

Superficially, A Greater Music comes across like a South Korean variation on Bret Easton Ellis. The story of a bored, well-to-do individual striving to communicate in a world foreign to her—in A Greater Music, the world is more linguistic than social—makes it come across as the work of a writer trying to shock and satirize a socially repressive culture. Indeed, as Gabriel Sylvian, writing in the introduction to an interview with Suah in the literary magazine Three Wise Monkeys, notes,“Korean literature in the 1990s was a kind of renaissance…after decades of Korean writers following the prescribed… ‘roles’ assigned them by society under the dictatorial regimes of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.” But Bae’s openly metaphysical inquiries are strikingly Modernist, in particular her striking response to Sylvian’s political historicization: “I was taken aback at criticisms saying that my literature was a resistance to the 80s literature. That’s because I didn’t know much about 80s writing.” A Greater Music might not make up for its stodginess with any degree of sentiment or humor, but it possesses a sincerity, an ideality, not present in the slow-boil rage of an Easton Ellis novel like American Psycho.

Yet, what one is left with after reading through A Greater Music is a feeling of being underwhelmed. Not because the simple plot—unnamed narrator considers her relationship to her German lovers and friends, the engineer Joachim and the Romantically mysterious language tutor, M—as Modernist literature teaches that the drama of the mind at odds with communicating itself is the greatest of human plots. “If I tried to go into detail,” the narrator says, “even the slightest grammatical error [would open] the door for uncertainty…the shabby rags of my words piling up in a dizzying uncertainty.” The work of translating a novel that itself struggles with possibility of effective translation is not lost in this case.

Bae Suah

In this sense, the truest ancestor of Bae’s work is a writer she has translated into Korean: W.G. Sebald. From him she borrows the essayistic bent, introducing into her fiction an eye that meanders away from the outside world towards an interior thoughtscape. Her 2012 short story, Time in Gray (translated by Chang Chung-hwa and Andrew James Keast), begins, “Without any specific reason, some very trivial moment from out of the past may appear in one’s mind.” Bae’s works attempt to answer “how can an essay [can]…function…as an integral part of novelistic art,” writes literary critic Jung Eun-Kyoung’s in the Afterword to Time in Gray. Unlike Patrick Bateman’s lengthy, cultish reviews in American Psycho, Bae’s exloration serves the aim of exemplifying the mystery of what we take as quotidian. Including our own comprehension.   

This makes Greater Music an interesting choice for Deborah Smith to translate after she earned the Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, a less cerebral, but more melodramatic, novel. English author Tim Parks, known for his criticism of contemporary translation in an essay, “The Dull New Global Novel,” argues that interpreting a translation’s quality is a seemingly impossible task for the reader who isn’t familiar with the texture of the original language. Parks avers, in a New York Review of Books essay, that what’s left to do is to “consider the relationship between content and style in the English translation.”  The best, and only, way to get any sense of quality then—the method Tim Parks uses in his review of The Vegetarian—is to make note of what consistency there is in the work itself. And, additionally, how the author tends to be translated.

Parks approach demands we reflect on another of Suah’s translated works, the 2015 Nowhere To Be Found. Translated by Sora Kim-Russell, Nowhere is a more prosaic approach to narrative, beginning with a memory. “In 1988 I was temping at a university in Gyeonggi Province.” Indeed, it turns out a very trivial moment appeared in the narrator’s mind. Of the three stories—Time in Gray, Nowhere To Be Found, and A Greater Music—this one is plain. It’s the perfect example of Bae applying conventional storytelling methods to her failed romances and intense introspection, even going as far as to unironically end the framed narrative with “that was everything that happened in 1988.” It is also unique in its approach to time, an element that Bae generally destructs through jagged tense changes, except in this instance where, she continues, “[1988] wasn’t so different from 1978, and it wasn’t any more or less memorable in comparison to 1998.” A plain-faced translation to match a planar book.

With all this in mind Smith’s translation of A Greater Music can come across as struggling to convey the ostensible diversity of Bae’s style. It seems caught between the two ideological winds: the unaffected colloquialism of Sora Kim-Russell’s translation of Nowhere to Be Found and the flighty abstraction of Time in Gray. If Bae’s work centers around not just how the personal plays into narratives (represented by essayistic consciousness and acausal leaps in time), but equally the possibility of language to convey this, what is more than itself, it is even more important to understand what makes A Greater Music seem askew. Is it possible that neither Kim-Russell, Chung-hwa, Keast, nor Smith get at Bae Suah in a way appreciable by her new readers?

Just look at a single graceful moment A Greater Music:

We never say “greater death,” death being an absolute value that does not admit comparison. Like one’s hand, which can be flipped to show either the back or the palm, it’s something that can only exist as one of two possibilities. Music is absolute, just like death. Just as “greater death” or “lesser death” is a logical impossibility, so the same can be said of music, which is of the same order as the soul.

This is a full-throated inquiry expressed clearly and in ways that have fallen out of fashion. Then, though, a moment like this fades into passing metaphors like “the shabby rags of my words piling up in a dizzying uncertainty.” It’s hard to not notice just how shabby these rags are in comparison to the elegance of passage above, how devoid of rhythm and aim. The narrator seems too eloquent to use a word as inexact as “shabby,” too poetic to use a mundane phrase like “dizzying uncertainty.” The edges of contemporary style and poetic lyricism grind and screech throughout A Greater Music. As Parks says of The Vegetarian, “Sometimes this mix of the uptight and the colloquial creates an awkwardness at the limits of comprehensibility.”  

Still, it is superficial to see A Greater Music, or anything by Bae Suah, as mere literary rebelliousness, as Sylvian had suggested in his interview with her. At the heart of Bae’s work is the question of living as an authentic self, as an individual, against the banality of social living. After seeing a film in theaters with her friend Sumi, the narrator considers how “the ordinary enjoyment of ordinary people, their means of entertainment, the minutia of their daily lives, had seemed like nothing so much as a terrible injustice.” Her response to this feeling is not hatred of people—symbolized in American Psycho by its relentless indifference to human life—as much as seeing it as “an unbearable celebration of the conventional, a sickening aesthetization of conventional values.” That is to say, what makes Bae’s work rebellious is not that it targets the mores of her society primarily. She targets the very foundations of collective human engagement, as patrons of a film “have a certain collective image instilled in them.” This is the overriding element of a novel ostensibly about a failed romance; it is not ordinary by any means.    

The struggle of authenticity and ordinariness plays out in the translations of her works. Are any of the Baes the true Bae? Consider how some people say washrag and some people say washcloth to refer to the same square piece of fabric. It is easy to consider Deborah Smith’s translation too imbalanced and unself-conscious. But readers of translation (including the translators themselves) should permit some silence to seep into this “shabby rag of words.” As the narrator herself says, “Even after fully mastering a foreign language…your mother tongue still acts as a prison for your consciousness,” a fact exemplified viscerally by her ultimate failure to embrace either Joachim or M fully. Eventually, she leaves both behind to return to a South Korea abundant in crowds, she the only unique individual among them. “Even if you can’t understand,” M says during one of her German lessons, “you can still make me understand.” Who is to say how true this is? One doubts that the narrator, a listener of music in a world of movies, looking for transcendence in uniformity, thinks that this is true of ordinary people.

And so Bae’s goal to find transcendence in, and beyond, the trivial is ultimately going to be lost in translation. That Deborah Smith’s translation can seem confused in style could just as well be an intentional replication of Bae’s own fluctuations. I am not convinced by this, necessarily, but that it stands out to me in any way makes the novel a success in its own ostensible hermetic reasoning. The friend that took the narrator to the movie, Sumi, “could only ever get excited about a given cause if it came packaged with an air of tragedy or altruism.” A Greater Music does not pretend its story is tragic or altruistic. Much like the passage of time and the essay format in Bae’s fiction, her stories just are. An empty room the reader walks into, markings on the walls with no cipher, only to walk out again shortly after.

Schubert is seen nowadays as a pivotal figure between late classical and early romantic music. Neither spiritualist nor formalist. A Greater Music gives the same impression. More than any other novel of Bae’s works that has been translated, it gives the sense of something in media res. With its narrator caught between the German and South Korean social worlds, between the no-nonsense Joachim and philosophical M, and constant muddle of moods, the novel lives up to the doubt it perpetually expresses. By its very questioning, it stands opposed to the seeming permanence of the ordinary. As the narrator murmurs at the end of the novel, “as Peter Handke says, ‘only when I’m writing do I feel that I’ve become myself and am truly at home.’ Where it comes from and where it goes, on that its lips are sealed.” How, after all, can one translate silence?

Justin-GoodanA recent graduate from Purchase College, Justin Goodman is working to establish a career and develop knowledge of the literary scene. His writing has been published in Submissions Magazine and Italics Mine.

HUMAN ACTS, a novel by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith, reviewed by William Morris

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HUMAN ACTS
by Han Kang
translated by Deborah Smith
Hogarth, 224 Pages

reviewed by William Morris

First published in South Korea in 2014, Han Kang’s new novel Human Acts is now available for the first time in the United States. American readers first encountered Kang in 2016, with the translation of her 2007 novel The Vegetarian. This strange, dark, poetic novel, about a woman who decides to stop eating meat after having a horrific nightmare, was met with great acclaim. Translated by Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian went on to win the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. While Human Acts is a rich, powerful novel in its own right, and should be read independently of The Vegetarian, it is often interesting to situate a novel against the writer’s other work.

As The Vegetarian progresses, we learn that the central character, Yeong-hye, is not satisfied with simply avoiding meat. In fact, she’s decided she wants to become a plant, shedding her barbaric humanity for the gentler, more beautiful life of a tree. The strangest thing about The Vegetarian, however, is that none of the novel is told from Yeong-hye’s perspective. Instead, her husband, brother-in-law, and sister narrate the three parts of the book. These characters fit more predictably into their society, living quiet lives, eating meat, and maintaining cultural norms. This creates a feeling of voyeurism for the reader, who is constantly looking at Yeong-hye from a distance, as in the following passage:

More vivid and frightening than any other was the memory of the scream that had erupted from his sister-in-law when the lump of meat approached her lips. After spitting it out, she’d snatched up the fruit knife and glared fiercely at each of her family in turn, her terrified eyes rolling like those of a cornered animal.

Rather than her thoughts and feelings, we get the story through the filter of those who don’t understand her, who see her as selfish, freakish, and mentally unstable. With The Vegearian, Han Kang has given readers an outsider’s perspective on one woman’s act of rebellion against what she sees as a barbaric culture.

Han Kang

In her introduction to Human Acts, Deborah Smith describes the political turmoil of South Korea in 1980, around the time of the Gwangju Uprising. This specific moment becomes the backdrop for the second of Kang’s novels to be published in the United States. Readers unfamiliar with this piece of South Korean history should not be dissuaded from reading the novel. Smith quickly and efficiently describes how one authoritarian regime gave way to another, and how a student rebellion in the city of Gwangju swelled, then was struck down through martial law. The torture, death, and piling of bodies that followed the Uprising is where Human Acts begins.

If The Vegetarian gave an outside view of rebellion, Human Acts achieves the exact opposite. The characters are students and victims and those left to tell their stories. Through a small cast of voices, Kang describes the aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising, and how its survivors manage to live in the following decades. In one chapter, readers meet a young man attending to the bodies of those killed by the military, waiting for families to claim their dead. In another, the spirit of one of the deceased describes the troublesome process of separating from his lifeless body:

If I could escape the sight of our bodies, that festering flesh now fused into a single mass, like the rotting carcass of some many-legged monster. If I could sleep, truly sleep, not this flickering haze of wakefulness. If I could plunge headlong down to the floor of my pitch-dark consciousness.

Han Kang’s novels are brief but cacophonous. What makes them so powerful is how Kang uses a host of voices to reveal the human qualities of seeking escape or solidarity in the face of atrocity. In Human Acts, some chapters are narrated in the second person, putting “you” directly in the action as you read. In other chapters, headings help to guide the reader through shifts in tense and tone, as characters recall the trauma and torture they’ve undergone. No matter the character, though, each voice is distinctly moving.

Human Acts is, among other things, a political novel. It is about authority and power, gender and expression, strength and helplessness. It is a novel about a particular moment in a particular nation’s history. But, like The Vegetarian, this novel is also deeply human, and as such, it is concerned also with what it means to be a person, no matter where you’re from or what you’ve been through. One character—a former prisoner of the state who was viciously assaulted—has been asked to recount his experiences for a professor writing about the Uprising. After recalling for the reader all the unbearable suffering he’s been through, he asks:

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered—is this the essential fate of humankind, one that history has confirmed as inevitable?

The tone of this passage, and of much of the novel, is of overwhelming negativity. Dark, disturbing, disgusting things happen throughout the book. And yet, there are tender moments—memories of a little girl in a classroom, a mother’s love for her son, the surprising connections we make in times of crisis. More than a condemnation of humanity, Han Kang’s Human Acts is a reminder that our lives overlap and intersect in unexpected ways, and that the burden of suffering belongs to no one person, but can be carried by us all.

William-MorrisWilliam Morris is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His work has appeared in print and online, most recently at Sediments Literary Arts Journal, Fiction Southeast, and Red Earth Review. He divides his time between St. Louis and Salt Lake City, and is always reading. He also works as an editor at Natural Bridge. His other areas of interest include cats, coffee, and cryptozoology.

YEAR OF THE RAT, a novel by Marc Anthony Richardson, reviewed by Matthew Jakubowski

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YEAR OF THE RAT
by Marc Anthony Richardson
FC2, University of Alabama Press, 224 pages.

reviewed by Matthew Jakubowski

Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist from Philadelphia and this compact book, his first, which won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovation Fiction, makes for a fine addition to the recent history of experimental prose by writers with ties to Philadelphia—from the late Fran Ross (whose 1974 novel, Oreo, was recently re-issued) to contemporaries like Samuel R. Delany, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Hilary Plum, Caren Beilin, and the West Philadelphia sci-fi collective Metropolarity.

An acute sense of the lethal and vital forces surrounding us seems to infuse the tremendous range of sentences colliding across the novel’s pages. Focused on the body and the anguish of grief, its style has shades of early Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, Sartre’s Nausea, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

The novel’s unnamed narrator is a thirty-five-year-old black artist, a hard-drinking academic and talented, avant garde illustrator disillusioned with his future prospects. Having quit the art academy and now living in Oakland (“the cradle of the Panther,” he calls it, referring to the birthplace of the Black Panther Party), his mother’s poor health draws him back to Philadelphia to care for her at home.

She has suffered a life of physical and emotional trauma, and his love for her is the novel’s emotional core. They are close, to a point that stretches plausibility: early in the book he draws her nude. He’s intimidated by her openness at first. “You hobbled in, wheezing and wearing a slightly knee-back-pained look on the face and a holey nightgown,” he recalls, “the right tit hanging half-out, brown, half-covered with yellow lace as if a giant imperial moth had emerged: you would do anything for your sons and for an artist this shamelessness is an asset, yet for a son it’s an excruciation.”

Studying his mother, intimately aware of how she got each large and small scar, he begins to see not only her life, but the shape of his own, his siblings’, and father’s: “(During) these series of croquis, while hearing what your figureless form has to say, the fear grows thinner and thinner and bit-by-bit your body begins to imbue my own. I will begin to receive, I believe, a slow sense of instruction.” She’s very ill, deep in poverty, and he knows time will soon leave her “cast down by stroke or fall or diabetic coma and left helpless in the hell of my heart.” Facing her death to come, he says, “(I) will feel you I will ache you I will cry you…when your lips are closest to mine, asking for that final favor that release, I can’t say what I would do: my conscience is a sentence.”

In creating “the maternal nude,” he describes his illustrative method: “Stop before perfection. Walk away. For although most realists—imaginary beings obsessed with literalisms for lack of imagination—will commonly agree that the drawing has turned out to be an incongruous mess…it can surface some interesting results, some intersecting symbols.” Disdaining realism, with faith in the results of incongruous elements, this could partially describe Richardson’s technique for the book. The plot and sub-plots are so smudged into the text it’s often tough to tell what’s going on. Chapters swell with old and recent memories, bits of philosophy, sex scenes with men and women, demeaning jobs he’s taken as an artist.

Marc Anthony Richardson

What arises is the intense, abstract sum of visions contained in a black man’s experience amid the chaos of self, undone by the death and imprisonment of loved ones, in an impoverished city he has little reason to love, but cannot help but return to. “Ghettoes and slums are not the same: if everyone is ethnically alike they are ghettoes, if everyone is just basically poor they are slums; we are a ghetto in a slum, you and I,” he says while caring for his mother. Seeing her squalor is painful, and in recalling his days teaching kids art in public school, he lashes out at the monstrous indifference that spawns widespread suffering. “Native Son’s Bigger, Frankenstein’s fiend, on these classical creations, on these wretched visions I mull over whenever I see one of these children of spleen thrust away by foot at birth and abandoned in the shitholes of someone else’s doing, for coupled with their atavistic fears one can almost see into the biological cereal bowls of their bodies, aswarm with hyper-activities and attention-deficiencies.”

The chapters have titles such as “Oceanus Procellarum” and “Mare Frigoris”—names of moon craters, or mares, Latin for seas, from the days when astronomers mistook them for lunar seabeds. Richardson also includes brief academic footnotes when quoting various authors. These nod to the narrator’s academic background, adding a hint of celestial aura around the beauty and violence of our universe, and some factual literary touchstones to the stormy, personal narrative.

The artist listens to tapes of his mother telling their family’s history, which leads to memories of his father, who was abusive. “They’re shouting. He’s ripping into her. He’s crisscrossing her with whore whore whore and she is crying and calling and fighting for me to get out to get out to get the hell out and dart for the door, which I do with her hotly behind—yet as we’re falling down the staircase, breaking plaques, he can barely stand by the bedroom door, crying with an erection and reduced to his domain.”

As literature of grief, the book is strongest when grounded in scenes with the artist’s mother, weakest when he armors up with machismo, ranting about society or his male rival at the academy or trying to win an argument about religion with his brother. He admits he’s at an “interregnum”—recalling fights and funerals, visiting his brother in jail—and feels the whole world may be, too. With only the idea of maybe going back to school, surrounded by so much death, he’s on the verge of becoming a middle-aged male cliché, “I am still this thirty-five-year-old man in his newly bought bed with his feet hanging from the edge, drinking on a mattress with his belly bloated, and who is chafing now against his sheets, embracing two pillows as a patient would his pills.” At this crossroads, he navel-gazes, wondering, “For if we die with our illusions, do we become ghosts?” and “O where is the now? where is the now? I sound like a man in a maze.”

Amid the scenes of death, empathy, abortion, confusion, the talk of sex and prison and grief and disease, the style is favored heavily over character development and structural tension. At times the characters don’t seem truly at risk of feeling all that deeply, or being hurt. This is because the focus is on the artist as he looks steadily backwards. Conveyed in such a rigorous, inventive, abstract manner, the past events offer little surprise, or sense of discovery for the narrator. The conclusion is quite beautiful, after so many frenetic passages and cuts back and forth in time, as a minor motif returns, and Richardson offers an unforgettable and startling refrain of farewell as the artist and his mother are brought close together one last time. Yet the landscape we’ve traversed together to reach this point has become so stylized that it almost feels like a safe, static place, one where the artist doesn’t seem ready to go deeper, beyond the pain of memory, until the very end.

Matthew Jakubowski has written about experimental fiction for The Paris Review Daily, Interfictions, Kirkus Reviews, Music and Literature, gorse, 3:AM Magazine, and more. His short stories are forthcoming from The Brooklyn Rail and Great Jones Street. He lives in West Philadelphia and can be found online @matt_jakubowski.

THESE ARE THE NAMES, a novel by Tommy Wieringa reviewed by Robert Sorrell

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THESE ARE THE NAMES
by Tommy Wieringa
translated by Sam Garrett
Melville House, 231 pages

reviewed by Robert Sorrell

The hero–or perhaps I should say anti-hero–of Dutch author Tommy Wieringa’s new novel, These Are the Names is a 53-year-old police chief named Pontus Beg. Beg lives in a fictional border town called Michailopol, a city ailing in post-Soviet corruption and aimless malaise. Beg has “set up his life as a barrier against pain and discomfort,” Wieringa writes. “Suppressing chaos: washing dishes, maintaining order. What did it matter that one day looked so much like the other that he could not recall a single one; he keeps to the middle equidistant from both bottom and top.”

Beg’s life is governed by habit, by a desire to stay “in the middle.” In order to keep things in line, he creates rules for himself. When he drinks he allows himself four glasses of vodka but never five. Once a month he sleeps with his housekeeper, when she is less likely to become pregnant. He still drives an old service vehicle, refusing to steal a newer car as many of his subordinates have. He lives amidst the corruption of the police force without actively participating in it.

This stasis is interrupted by two events: the discovery of a hidden family past, and the arrival in Michailopol of a group of nameless, undocumented refugees. The first is motivated by the death of Rabbi Herz, a man thought to be the last Jewish person in the city. Searching for someone who can give Herz a proper burial Beg meets Zalman Eder, a rabbi living in a disused synagogue who becomes a spiritual guide of sorts. Throughout the rest of the novel the synagogue becomes a space detached from the rest of the world, almost like the “Green World” of the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a space where characters are freed from the constraints of society in order to explore their own desires. Wieringa describes Beg’s first tour through the empty synagogue:

The high, open space was a hallucination–after the darkness, it was as though the heavens had opened […] Beg walked past the podium in the middle, a cupboard draped with curtains, and the stone steps leading to the platform above it all. He knew nothing of what had been said and done here, in this mysterious world where the memory of a journey thousands of years old was kept alive. This, then, was where that journey ended, and there stood the last traveller, waiting for him to get his fill of looking.

Journeys and travel are a fascination for the author, and the theme is taken up with the group of refugees lost on the steppes. The novel alternates each chapter between Pontus Beg’s daily life in Michailopol, and the painful, slow journey of five men, a woman, and a boy across a barren wilderness. Wieringa weaves the tale of the refugees like a crime novelist, cautiously doling out clues and glimpses of their past, even keeping their names revealed until near the novel’s end when the two previously autonomous storylines meet.

Tommy Wieringa

The group’s arrival in Michailopol doesn’t happen until quite late in the novel, but from the very first chapters Wieringa makes it clear that these two stories have a spiritual, symbolic connection. The most obvious, as Beg learns more and more about the Jewish tradition, is the tale of Moses leading the Jews into the desert where they would wander for 40 years. Yet beyond that, the whole work is also underlain by a feeling of endless search, a sense that there is nothing clear to trust, and no one that the characters can rely on beside themselves. This vacuum is reflected in Beg’s self imposed rules, in his fear that if he doesn’t wash his dishes, or has more than four drinks, chaos will descend. And it’s summed up perfectly by a comment one of the refugees makes to Beg while in police custody. “Once you choose a direction,” he says, “you have to keep following it, otherwise you go completely nuts.”

As police chief, it is Beg’s duty to find out where the refugees came from, uncovering their names and motives for leaving their homes. Yet the refugees have also been malnourished and exposed to the elements for months. Behind their backs, the police compare them to victims of the Holocaust, gaunt figures, lucky to be alive, and so poorly treated that they might not be able to make the recovery back to society. This reentry, a chance almost for rebirth, is another thread that ties Beg’s fate to that of the refugees. He is attracted to the idea of a restart, the fantasy of a clean slate. Standing near the synagogue’s mikveh (a ritual pool), the narrator states:

[Beg] wished he could undress, go down the steps to the bottom of the basin, let his body go under, and cleanse it of the world’s filth. Even the filfth that did not wash off, he would scrub that away, too. A new soul–there, deep in the earth, with this magic water, that kind of thing seemed truly possible. What a pleasant, comforting thought […] to shed his old soul, that tattered, worn thing, and receive a new one in its stead. Who wouldn’t want that? Who would turn down something like that?

The analogues to spiritual rebirth, baptism, and the desire to return to the womb, are all at play in this moment, and if the symbolism seems a bit heavy handed that’s because it is. But Wieringa doesn’t seem to care. Instead of being topical, These Are the Names is metaphorical and symbolic; instead of relying on science it employs mysticism and spirituality; instead of grounding us in time and place it revels in a fictional in-between, a time that could be our own and yet seems not to be. The book is more parable than realist fiction. And though it sounds like a criticism, I don’t mean it to be. In my opinion, the surrealism and mysticism, this sheer bizareness, is the strongest aspect of These Are the Names. It employs the kind of gruesome and bold symbols that might be at home in a Brothers Grimm tale, or, as I can’t help but assume Wieringa was shooting for, the Old Testament. And by the time you’ve reached the novel’s climax, he’s done his groundwork well enough that you’ll forgive an instance (or a few) of hackneyed imagery.

Yet the largest drawback, in my opinion, to These Are the Names, is a problem of representation. On the steppe, the refugees are debased to an excessive level of violence and dehumanization. They turn against each other, let the sick and weak die where they fall, and ultimately commit a brutal attack on the only member in the group who does not share their language and skin color. The balance between attempting to depict hatred and traumatic events which could, and have, occurred in the world, without slipping into cliché and gratuity, not to mention displaying marginalized groups in a unfavorable light, is treacherous. And while I don’t think Wieringa should have turned his novel into an editorial, at times it did feel a little tone deaf towards the very real refugee crisis in Europe, which was approaching fever pitch at the time of the novel’s Dutch release in 2013.

This disconnect is also part of the reason for my ambivalence toward the “timelessness” of Wieringa’s novel. I was haunted and transported by These Are the Names, and the images that Wieringa so deftly sketches are likely to linger in my mind for a long while. But when Wieringa relies so much on timelessness and a connection to ancient peoples and places, it’s hard not to wonder if he could also have said a bit more about this time and this place.

robert-sorrellRobert Sorrell is a writer and photographer living in Philadelphia. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago’s English program and has a piece of narrative nonfiction forthcoming from Mosaic Art & Literary Journal.