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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.

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LIGHT INTO BODIES, poems by Nancy Chen Long, reviewed by Trish Hopkinson

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LIGHT INTO BODIES
by Nancy Chen Long
The University of Tampa Press, 99 pages

reviewed by Trish Hopkinson

The poetry of Light into Bodies begins and ends with a theme of identity while its pages flutter with the imagery of egrets, pigeons, swans, and starlings. Nancy Chen Long presents the complexity of exploring identity from multiple perspectives—from the viewpoint of a mathematician, from a child whose mother repeatedly becomes the property of other men by the “generosity” of her own father, to a daughter’s experiences growing up in a multi-cultural home and discovering the nuances of relationships in adulthood. The poems stitch together an intricate lace of childhood memories, family stories, myth, and Asian-American experience with a thread of women’s issues intertwined throughout, each conflict woven within the next to create the speaker’s complicated identity.

Light into Bodies was published by University of Tampa Press as the winner of their 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. The press was founded in 1952 and launched its literary journal UT Poetry Review in 1964, which evolved into Tampa Review in 1988. The book’s perfect-bound, matte cover features a beautiful photograph also taken by Chen Long, who collaborated with the press for the cover design.

This collection is the first full-length book of poems by Chen Long, as well recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. In addition, she has a published chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013) and her poetry has appeared in many literary magazines and journals, including Ninth Letter, Crab Orchard Review, Zone 3, Briar Cliff Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Bat City Review, the Anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers, and elsewhere.

The poems within are personal—to the point of memoir in their detailed narratives, but also rich in imagery and lyrical language. In “Saving My Mother” readers are drawn into the family background of the speaker, her mother’s patriarchal and abusive upbringing, as well as her mother’s strength and resistance: “. . . My father was good for / giving, my mother would say, so generous with his property, / which is how she repeatedly came to be the property / of another man.” The poem continues in a later stanza: “When she refused to work, the man himself would occasionally / return her, the way one might return // a defective plough.”

There’s an undertone of feminism in several of the poems. These lines from “Handiwork, or My Mother, Had She Not Married My Father” are particularly striking:

I’d pretend she’d have other options

for escape as she mulled over
her sister’s dislocated jaw, ribs cracked
at the hands of their father
for loving a man not of his choosing.

The narratives cover a broad timeline—from the mother’s childhood, to the speaker’s own during the Vietnam war, and into then into adult life with more modern references, such as using the verb google and all the idiosyncrasies of travel in the poem “Gonga.” Chen Long effortlessly provides a variety of forms mixed in with free verse, such as prose poems, haibun (a combination of a prose poem followed by a haiku), and tanka. Some of these poems are lighthearted, almost humorous, like “How She First Discovered Sex” with its surprising twist on childhood ritual or “What Some Things Are Worth According to Her Grandfather” which cleverly ties together a listing of common American clichés in a rather rhythmic way.

Other poems reach deeply into the need to escape, even contemplate death, while some find a different way to escape via surrealistic daydreams. For example, in the poem “Hold on Lightly” Chen Long writes:

. . . At her first job,
as a waitress, trays fell

and tumblers tumbled.
Even today, her grip

on reality—
feather-light. You can pull

it away from her
with the softest tug.

Nancy Chen Long

There seems to be not only the seeking of identity, but also a longing or searching for home throughout the collection along with a common theme of stunning imagery of birds. In “Murmuration,” the speaker seems to see her own complexity in the starlings as the prose poem ends vividly:

One lands so close, a bird about nine-inches long. After all the black, my eyes are startled by such color: a yellow-tipped beak, an eerie green that shimmers off of feathers soft around the head and throat, an opaling-purple sheen along the body, torso-feathers dipped in white, wing-feathers outlined in bronze—and those legs, those very sturdy red legs.

The poem pairs well with the opposing page and the surrealism of “Wingspan,” in which we seem to catch a meta-glimpse of Chen Long herself, as the speaker describes how “a pigeon will mistake me / for an electrical wire, perch long enough // for me to seize its spindly feathers, / attach a message, set it free.” I’d like to think of those messages as the very poems that grace the pages of this beautifully finished book.

I enjoyed every moment I spent with these poems on a not-too-hot August afternoon in the shade of backyard trees with sounds of birds and wildlife as the soundtrack. Chen Long’s poems are of history and myth, feminists and patriarchs, family and childhood, and the flight and wingspan of poetry itself.

A Pushcart-nominated poet, Trish Hopkinson has been published in several anthologies and journals, including Stirring, Pretty Owl Poetry, and The Penn Review; and her third chapbook Footnote was published by Lithic Press in 2017. Hopkinson is co-founder of a regional poetry group, Rock Canyon Poets, and Editor-in-Chief of the group’s annual poetry anthology entitled Orogeny. You can follow Hopkinson on her blog where she shares information on how to write, publish, and participate in the greater poetry community at http://trishhopkinson.com/.

 

You may also enjoy: 

HEMMING FLAMES, poems by Patricia Colleen Murphy, reviewed by Claire Oleson

Grant Clauser interviews poet JERICHO BROWN

 

COLLUSION: SECRET MEETINGS, DIRTY MONEY, AND HOW RUSSIA HELPED DONALD TRUMP WIN, nonfiction by Luke Harding, reviewed by Susan Sheu

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COLLUSION: SECRET MEETINGS, DIRTY MONEY, AND HOW RUSSIA HELPED DONALD TRUMP WIN
by Luke Harding
Vintage Books, 354 pages

reviewed by Susan Sheu

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
— from an unclassified report by the CIA, FBI, and NSA, January 2017, in Collusion by Luke Harding

To live in the current political environment and try to make sense of it—and to have hope for a democratic future—requires stamina, a focused mind, and a stomach for weeding through fake news and whataboutism to settle on the most pertinent, verifiable facts. This is complicated by the fact that the journalists we rely on are both reporting news and defending themselves online against rhetorical and sometimes physical threats from Donald Trump and his supporters, some who are real people and some who are bots and trolls deployed from other countries.

Following the news has come to feel like the classic sci-fi book Ender’s Game, where players in warlike videogame discover they are actually soldiers fighting a real war, remotely. Both Rachel Maddow, Rhodes Scholar and now MSNBC network commentator, and veteran progressive writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, use the phrase “build a wall chart” to describe the complex web of Russian post-Soviet spies, oligarchs, criminals, and the network of shell corporations and money that link them to key American business people and, now that Trump is president, government workers.

If these two keen political observers need a wall chart to keep the players straight, the rest of us need a wall chart, an appendix, and a Virgil-like guide to remind us who’s who and redirect us when our attention flags or our minds get lost in the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, banks, corporations, and the jumble of Russian and former Eastern bloc names. Fortunately, Luke Harding, a British journalist, has written an expertly researched book to lead us through the labyrinth.

Reading Harding’s new book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, published in mid-November by Vintage Books, gives the sense that we are living in a John Le Carre novel where we are not certain that the West won the Cold War or that the Cold War ever ended. Collusion is a deep dive into the coverage of the administration and the crisscrossing lines of Russian money and influence. Harding is an award-winning journalist who lived in Russia from 2007 to 2011 as The Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief, until the Kremlin ordered him to leave the country, the first such expulsion of a Western journalist since the Cold War. His recent articles in The Guardian are largely responsible for the average political news junkie’s knowledge about Trump campaign and administration ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin. His meetings with Christopher Steele, the British former spy, Russia expert, and now freelance intelligence agent who wrote the Steele Dossier, also inform the narrative. Steele, Harding tells us, believes the dossier he researched and wrote from 2014 to 2016 on Trump’s Russian ties is “70 to 90 percent accurate.”

If these two keen political observers need a wall chart to keep the players straight, the rest of us need a wall chart, an appendix, and a Virgil-like guide to remind us who’s who and redirect us when our attention flags or our minds get lost in the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, banks, corporations, and the jumble of Russian and former Eastern bloc names.

Using Steele’s work and his own investigation, Harding is tackling a subject that is at least one order of magnitude more complex than the Watergate corruption scandal in Richard Nixon’s campaign and administration. His subject and style recall Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men, or the 1976 film adaptation, which was seminal to a generation’s understanding the depth of lies, corruption, resentment, and revenge, that were ultimately responsible for Nixon’s rise to the presidency, as well as the leaks and law enforcement that led to Nixon’s fall. Harding seems to have a similar goal in Collusion. While our media era seems to be dominated by hot takes, shallow analysis, opinions, and trolling, Harding’s work is thorough, engaging, and one would hope a benchmark for a higher standard for journalism than what Americans consumed in the election cycle of 2015 and 2016.

In October, just before Harding’s book went to press, the FBI indicted Paul Manafort, formerly Trump campaign manager, and his business partner Rick Gates. They are now awaiting trial under house arrest. Earlier this summer FBI arrested former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, who is now cooperating with the investigation.

I have updated this essay every day for the last two weeks, trying to stay ahead of the quicksand of breaking news about Russia’s ties to Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and I am pretty certain that it will be out of date by the time you read it. In the time since I’ve finished reading Harding’s book and begun writing this essay, Michael Flynn, who served for three weeks as Trump’s National Security Advisor, has pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI and has agreed to cooperate with its investigation. Most intelligence and legal experts believe the light charge against Flynn is evidence of Mueller’s strategy to get him to cooperate in the case against other Trump administration officials, including Jared Kushner and Donald Trump, Jr. Writing in the Atlantic in mid-November, Julia Ioffe revealed a leaked email correspondence in 2016 between Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Donald Trump, Jr., discussing the possibility of collaborating to share espionage for political favors. Robert Mueller, who leads the special investigation, has subpoenaed Donald Trump and Kushner’s financial transactions with Deutsche Bank.

Luke Harding

The Frankfurt-based financial institution has been implicated since the 2008 financial crisis in international money laundering, including for the Russian government and its oligarchs. News broke a couple of days ago that K.T. MacFarland, Flynn’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, now says she has no recollection of her boss’s contacts with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, despite having sent emails arranging the two men’s correspondence. Paul Manafort violated the terms of his bail by ghostwriting an op-ed with a member of Russian intelligence, in an attempt to influence public opinion about his political work on behalf of Russia in Ukraine. Manafort’s previous agreement with the FBI is now void. A Republican Party delegate from Texas confirmed that Trump’s only contribution to the GOP Convention platform in 2016 was to demand that the United States scale back its assistance to Ukraine against Russian military aggression and political interference. In what seems almost like an aside, in the last couple of days there have been news reports of a conservative operative reaching out to Trump campaign member Rick Dearborn and now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to arrange back-channel meetings between Trump’s and Putin’s advisors at the National Rifle Association’s meeting in 2016. And this morning, as I write this draft, news is breaking that Flynn was texting on Trump’s inauguration day in January 2017 to broker deals to “rip up” American sanctions against Russia and to build Russian-backed nuclear plants in the Middle East. On many days, the “drip drip drip” that political watchers write to describe the ubiquity of leaks that expose the corruption in the Trump administration seems more like a broken water main.

The phrase other than “drip drip drip” and “build a wall chart” that writers tend to use when writing about the Trump-Russia ties as well as the hidden power structure of all politics is “follow the money,” borrowed from Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation into Nixon’s Watergate crisis. Following the trail of money to Trump, his family, and his associates, according to Harding and other journalists such as David Fahenthold at the Washington Post and many others, leads us to troubling conclusions. How he has used the office of the presidency to enrich himself by promoting his golf courses, chain of Trump hotels, including lucrative new Trump and Kushner family deals in China, and his private club in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, journalists and legal experts argue, almost certainly violates the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution. While Trump might have lied during the campaign about being a billionaire, perhaps after his bankruptcies and uneven record in business being only a multimillionaire, the presidency has given Trump new business opportunities and the promise of greater future wealth.

Others who are opposed to the administration and suspicious of the election take other routes to question its legitimacy. Legal experts opine on whether Trump or his associates might also be guilty of the Logan Act, which prohibits unauthorized citizens from negotiating with a foreign country over a dispute with the United States, which seems to have occurred during the election and prior to the transfer of power at the Trump’s inauguration. Impeachment seems unlikely as long as Republicans control the U.S. Congress. Political analysts question whether members of the Trump administration are guilty of violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits all but the highest members of the executive branch from engaging in some forms of political activity and advocacy, as Kellyanne Conway and Nikki Haley appear to have done recently by supporting conservative candidates through tweets and press statements. Pundits and political observers have watched Trump’s erratic, reactive Twitter feed and press appearances and discussed the likelihood of his cabinet members invoking the 25th Amendment, which designates the procedure for replacing a president in the event of death, resignation, resignation, or removal, presumably due to incompetence or other reasons.

But Harding and others investigating Trump’s long history of Russia clients and associates are following a different but related trail. As Harding points out, the three-decade-long kompromat file on Trump that likely exists in a KGB vault in Moscow, the long trail of suspicious and illogical real estate transactions between Russian tycoons and the Trump Organization, the vast Deutsche Bank loans to Trump in 2008, and the undisclosed financial dealings that Trump’s missing tax returns are hiding, all point to a file cabinet of potential blackmail material on Trump:

Together, these factors appeared to place Trump under some sort of obligation. One possible manifestation of this was the president’s courting of Putin in Hamburg. Another was the composition of his campaign team and government, especially in its first iteration. Wherever you looked there was a Russian trace. Trump’s pick for secretary of state? Rex Tillerson, a figure known and trusted in Moscow, and recipient of the Order of Friendship. National security adviser? Michael Flynn, Putin’s dinner companion and a beneficiary of undeclared Russian fees. Campaign manager? Paul Manafort, longtime confidant to ex-Soviet oligarchs. Foreign policy adviser? Carter Page, an alleged Moscow asset who gave documents to Putin’s spies. Commerce secretary? Wilbur Ross, an entrepreneur with Russia-connected investments. Personal lawyer? Michael Cohen, who sent emails to Putin’s press secretary. Business partner? Felix Sater, son of a Russian American mafia boss. And other personalities too. It was almost as if Putin had played a role in naming Trump’s cabinet.

Who Trump is financially beholden to abroad, whether in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, or Russia, matters because it affects the security and sovereignty of the United States. As detailed in early November leaks of international financial documents, called “the Paradise Papers,” the links connecting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s family to U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and other members of Trump’s team may explain some of the Mafioso-style opacity and quid pro quo demands between the United States and Russia.

Following the international money highlights several facts. First, while it is widely understood that among all of the Russian oligarchs, the most powerful and likely the richest is Putin, who was a KGB Lieutenant Colonel and FSB chief prior to becoming the Russian president and prime minister. Like Trump, who runs some of his business holdings through his children and son-in-law Jared Kushner, it appears that Putin’s wealth may hide behind his son-in-law, who controls Sibur, a Russian gas and petrochemical company. Sibur is a client of Navigator Holdings, a shipping company partly owned by Wilbur Ross. Both are part of the network of real and shell corporations that run through the Bank of Cyprus, which also has deep connections to Wilbur Ross and Deutsche Bank, and is known by intelligence and law enforcement agencies as an effective money laundering institution for Russian billionaires and others with shared financial interests.

The class and money structure Putin has put in place since assuming the presidency in 2000 recollects the court of Louis XIV of France, where concentric circles of wealthy and powerful nobility live in varying degrees of opulence around one man who is the strongest and richest of them all. As with Louis XIV’s famous dictum, “l’etat, c’est moi,” Putin is the law. The oligarchs and the upper classes are content provided their wealth remains intact. But Russia’s finances are insecure, perhaps because mafia-like corruption and opaque accounting is the ubiquitous dark matter of their economy. If the economy falters, Harding argues, the wealthy will become disloyal. Their abandonment could lead to a popular uprising that would threaten Putin’s power. As Harding writes:

What terrified Russian leadership was that a depressed economy could lead to hunger and discontent. This might spread among Putin’s conservative base and spark into something bigger and less containable. The specter was mass revolt.

The second financial and legal fact is the Magnitsky Act, passed in a bipartisan effort by the United States Congress in 2012. By design, it harms Russia’s economy and angers Putin because it imposes sanctions in retaliation for the imprisonment and death of a Russian accountant. Here is where it becomes obvious that we need a wall chart, or at least a very clear head. It is easy to lose the thread of why the death of a tax accountant in Russian should matter to a farmer in Iowa or a student in California. Sergei Magnitsky died in 2009 under suspicious circumstances, likely torture and lack of medical care, after he was imprisoned for investigating Russian officials for tax fraud. Under President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the United States sought to enforce norms of democracy on a country that wasn’t acting as though it wanted to be recognized as such. The law and its extension in 2016 is designed to penalize global human rights abuses by denying 18 of the wealthiest Russian oligarchs access to the American banking system. Following the sanctions, Putin banned Americans from adopting Russian children, which has provided the Trump’s administration with code words to discuss “Russian adoptions” as a convenient cover to America turning a blind eye to human rights violations and financial malfeasance.

The third financial event to consider is that President Trump was forced to renew Russian sanctions in 2017 after a nearly unanimous Congressional vote cut off Russian access to the lucrative American credit market. However, despite the Congressional vote in August, as of October the Trump administration is delaying enforcing the sanctions, trying to render them moot despite bipartisan pressure from Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Ben Cardin. As of last month, the United States owed China $1.2 trillion, or 30 percent of the debt the United States owed to foreign countries. Provided the Russian sanctions remain in place, America will be borrowing more from China rather than Russia. If we believe that Russians helped engineer Trump’s success in the Republican primary and then manipulated social media to suppress votes, leaked Democratic emails including Hillary Clinton’s, and possibly tampered with votes, all in order to secure an ideal Manchurian Candidate to enrich Russia while also enriching himself in the model of a tin pot dictator, then we would conclude that Putin is not getting a good return on his investment:

For Vladimir Putin, this was a profound setback. The Kremlin’s campaign to help Trump win the White House had a primary goal. That was to bring about an end to America’s economic embargo. (The secondary aim was to shove a finger in the United States’ preexisting social and ideological wounds. This had succeeded well enough.)

Observing who will benefit from these unlikely alliances and following the money is key to understanding why so many conservative American tribalists like Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Devin Nunes of California and Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin are choosing party over country and joining forces with a Russian-backed president and advisors. While extremist social and religious conservatives like Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate Roy Moore have stated their admiration for Vladimir Putin because of his repression of homosexuality and gay marriage in Russia, for many Republican politicians it comes down to how they supplement their civil servant salaries. Money from their donors, familiar conservative American kingmakers such as the Koch Brothers and Robert and Rebekah Mercer, will cease to flow into the Republican lawmakers reelection funds if the American judiciary is not packed with conservative Constitutional originalist judges, if taxes are not slashed and the size of government isn’t reduced to almost nothing, if spending on education, health care, and public services isn’t dwarfed, and legal protections for minorities eliminated. Money, and the power it confers, have put us into this situation.

While Putin and other powerful Russians are motivated by money, the sense from Harding’s book is that they are also motivated by cultural pride. Harding notes that, all of the Russian strongmen who have ruled since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, regardless of their stated politics, have revered Russian culture perhaps above ideology. Christopher Steele, one of the first Westerners to visit formerly forbidden sites after the fall of communism, found in Stalin’s secret bunker not homages to Lenin or Marx but instead an imperial portrait of Peter the Great. According to a Guardian interview in 2014 with a hacker from the secretive Russian mercenary group Shaltai-Boltai (also known as Humpty Dumpty), “Putin is a genuine patriot who believed that his rule was in Russia’s best interests” and “really is like a tsar.” As a KGB spy under Communism who served in East Germany, Putin viewed the dissolution of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.” It makes sense, then, that in Putin’s incursions into Ukraine as well as Georgia and his actions to weaken NATO, the European Union, and the United States, he seeks to rebuild a Russian empire.

While Putin and other powerful Russians are motivated by money, the sense from Harding’s book is that they are also motivated by cultural pride. Harding notes that, all of the Russian strongmen who have ruled since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, regardless of their stated politics, have revered Russian culture perhaps above ideology.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not only threatened his country’s position and stability, but also humiliated Putin by pointing out that Russia is an autocracy where the rule of law means little. It makes sense then that the damage Putin would seek to inflict would not be limited to money but also to expose the underlying hypocrisy of an imperfect but stable Western democracy trying to impose its value system on an ancient culture. Russians influencing the election through social media demonstrated that their strategists knew us better than we knew ourselves. Harding writes that borderless hackers like Wikileaks and Shaltai-Boltai, were like “privateers” in a “cyber world [that] looked like the high seas of long ago,” selling their services to the highest bidder while proclaiming their “authenticity” and commitment higher principles of transparency. The US joint intelligence agencies’ report on January 6, 2017, note that Wikileaks moved its hosting to Moscow in September 2016 and “suggests that Wikileaks had become, in effect, a subbranch of Russian intelligence and its in-house publishing wing” for disseminating hacked data.

That Russian strategists pushing “crooked Hillary” memes and messages on Facebook and Twitter in states like Wisconsin and Michigan could influence voters showed that they had a deep understanding of the resentments that divide urban from rural and educated from less educated voters. General Mike Hayden, a former CIA and NSA director, says the Russians used “weaponized data” and “shoved it into U.S. space.” The military targets our loyalties and our sentiments, making the attacks more insidious. Russian troll farms pumped out nonstop tweets and posts and created Facebook groups that purported to be Black Lives Matter groups, or anti-Black Lives Matter groups, or Muslim activist groups, or nativist Texans who wanted Muslims out. It was as though the antagonists knew exactly what recipe was needed to recreate a divisive, Tower of Babel environment that would confuse low-information voters and inhibit any rational thought or discourse.

This recipe to deepen existing social divides seemed to be a natural extension of the outrage pedaled by rightwing strategists, beginning with Nixon’s “dirty trickster” Roger Stone and Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The propaganda packaged by Fox News and its descendants as journalism—such as Breitbart, InfoWars, and Project Veritas not only draws viewers with free time and a penchant for resentment and conspiracy theories—but also increasingly serves as a rightwing Greek chorus of outrage and a source of policy ideas. Now that Trump is president, Fox and Breitbart’s chief Steve Bannon are increasingly playing the role of official state media. Stone still works as a lobbyist and general force of chaos in Washington. He and his longtime lobbyist partner Paul Manafort came up with the hardball negative presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

After Washington, D.C., Manafort took his talents to the former Soviet Union. Beginning in the 1990s, Manafort worked for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch whose mafia ties prohibit him from obtaining an American visa. Deripaska supported Ukrainian candidate and former prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, who won the presidency in 2010 after a humiliating defeat and attempt to steal the election in 2004. Manafort’s job was to rehabilitate Yanukovych’s image among Ukrainians and encourage their trust, ending in a victory. Upon winning, Yanukovych promptly began to reverse fledgling democratic gains, crushing the press, courts, parliament, and other institutions under his thuggish control. He and his family quickly amassed a fortune from Russian loans. He began persecuting the more urbane and educated Ukrainians, and jailed his more progressive female political opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko.

Working to polish Yanukovych’s image and manage his campaign in Ukraine earned Manafort $12.7 million, recorded in mafia-like secret ledgers and discovered in August 2016. Yanukovych was deposed in 2014 and fled Ukraine, stealing vast sums of money. The social uprising that helped to depose Yanukovych was followed by Russian military incursions. Manafort appears to have taken his payment and moved his operations back to the United States, where he soon would serve a similar candidate’s campaign. Like the campaign in Ukraine and his previous American work, he would seek to sow division and confusion among rival cultural factions as a political strategy and hope for the same victory.

The news and political landscape changes so rapidly and the ground underneath us seems to shift with every news alert about the latest unhinged presidential tweet threatening the press or North Korea or judicial decision to overrule a ban or uphold an executive order. News about Russia and Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump’s financial is shuffled in with reports of ICE raiding Latino neighborhoods, New York Times profiles of ordinary white supremacists, protests about Confederate statues, the dismantling of the State Department and national parks, sexual predators in politics and media, threats to remove legal protections for LGBTQ people, the disastrous attacks on American healthcare and system of taxation, it is hard to see what if any connection exists between all of these reports of destruction. Our attention spans are worn thin by our social media feeds, the breaking news alerts on our phones, and the shock and awe pace of this administration’s attempt to overturn any remains of Enlightenment liberalism and the Obama legacy.

It is hard not to contemplate the array of news about Russia, the long, secretive relationships Trump, Rex Tillerson, Wilbur Ross, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and even the ridiculous Cater Page have enjoyed with Putin and major Russian oligarchs and government officials, and wonder why these men as well as many elected leaders of the American conservative party would be in such thralldom to a foreign country that many Westerners including our allies in Europe view as a hostile dictatorship, that was long our arch-enemy. In the last two years, it was also hard to watch despairing and anxious members of American society, the much written-about “white working class” as well as those who might identify as working class but are in fact earning high median incomes, choose a furious, flashy millionaire as their spokesman. Now that we are on the brink of passing a ruinous Republican tax bill that will only benefit the richest members of society and penalize everyone else, it is hard to watch the unraveling of election-year populism into a permanent redistribution of money to the oligarchs—not just the American oligarchs but also the Russian oligarchs and those whose nationality defines them less than their investment portfolios and their preferred vacation spots. It is as though we were watching the last chapter of George Orwell’s 1946 classic novel Animal Farm unfold, when Napoleon and the other pigs joined with the animals’ former enemies, the human farmers, and complimented one another on how well they starved their citizens to enrich themselves:

“If you have your lower animals to contend with,” [Mr. Pilkington] said, ‘we have our lower classes!” This bon mot set the table in a roar; and Mr. Pilkington once again congratulated the pigs on the low rations, the long working hours, and the general absence of pampering which he had observed on Animal Farm.

It is easy to see why Trump admires leaders such as Putin and Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines. One of these strongmen is the kind of leader that the United States could end up with next time, if we are not willing to heal our democracy at a root level—a much smarter Trump with greater self-control, with the same dictator’s primal instinct to suppress all opposition, consolidate all wealth and power, and guard his rule until he passes leadership on to a chosen successor or family member.

It is hard not to contemplate the array of news about Russia, the long, secretive relationships Trump, Rex Tillerson, Wilbur Ross, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and even the ridiculous Cater Page have enjoyed with Putin and major Russian oligarchs and government officials, and wonder why these men as well as many elected leaders of the American conservative party would be in such thralldom to a foreign country that many Westerners including our allies in Europe view as a hostile dictatorship, that was long our arch-enemy.

In describing the web of money, corporations, and millionaires and billionaires, Harding writes that beginning in the 1980s with Trump Tower’s popularity among wealthy Russian immigrants, including criminals, the Trump Organization has effectively served as a means of Russian money laundering for the last four decades. So, the overall question of the American election of 2016—examining the ties between Russian and American billionaires and millionaires including Trump and many of his associates—requires us to ask: is this just a case of many mutual common interests coinciding, or part of a more nefarious scheme using both money and cultural pride to undermine America’s closely held myth of an egalitarian democracy and realign world power? Is this Putin taking advantage of Trump’s ignorance, amorality, and lack of national and personal allegiance beyond family to plunder American money, ego, and reputation to settle a score? Or is this the convergence of two authoritarian, nationalistic gangsters’ interests, to enrich themselves and their closest loyalists at the expense of everyone else?

Keep following the money, Harding strongly advises.

Susan Sheu lives in Los Angeles and received the 2017 Bennington Prize in Nonfiction for her memoir-in-progress, The Rag and Bone Man.

THE SCIENCE OF UNVANISHING OBJECTS, poems by Chloe N. Clark, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

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THE SCIENCE OF UNVANISHING OBJECTS
by Chloe N. Clark
Finishing Line Press (forthcoming 2018)

reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

Completely mundane happenings take on significant meaning in Chloe N. Clark’s The Science of Unvanishing Objects. Everyday things like butterflies, telephones, and mirrors assume a role beyond their normal functions. Likewise, ordinary events such as conversations between strangers and seeing a lover naked for the first time become catalysts for a deeper understanding of the universe. Through her explorations, Clark repeatedly returns to loss, a major motif in this collection, which is amplified by recurring narratives centered on missing women.

The Science of Unvanishing Objects opens with a poem about a girl who has disappeared. Each line completes the title “Missing Girl Found—” as a newspaper article might break the news to its engrossed readership. In the first outcome, the girl in question is found simply “dead.” In another, she is found “to be the last goddamn straw to a woman who moves away because the town is turning, changing, becoming some place unrecognizable.” And in one more, the missing girl is found “to be missed.” These outcomes are visually presented on the page in a shape that resembles a deep well, or a rabbit hole—where the vanished go to become old news. This acerbic beginning sets the tone early and establishes a major theme for this chapbook: the weight of what’s gone.

With “The Detective, Years After,” Clark continues her exploration into the void left by women who are no longer with us; this time she focuses specifically on women who have been abducted and possibly murdered. The poem, as the title suggests, is told from the perspective of the investigator who had been tasked with finding them. The detective’s account opens:

Missing women often appear
to me in dreams, always asking

the same questions: why it was her
that I had found instead of them,
why she was the one brought home.

The detective is haunted by these unfound women. Guilt-ridden, he (assuming that this detective is male) doesn’t know how to tell their ghosts that he gave up, stopped looking for them. He says he’s sorry, but one cannot help but wonder if the detective abandoned certain searches because some lives are more valuable than others, as anyone who watches the news or reads true crime knows.

Clark’s book also adopts, at times, the point of view of those who long to vanish, who wish to be free of this treacherous plane. In her poem “The Double Dark Theory of Our Universe,” the narrator asserts that not everything is meant to be, that most events in life are “only coincidences.” Even one’s love life, perhaps especially one’s love life, is not as sacred as some may believe it to be. Clark’s narrator recollects the last time she saw the lover to whom this poem is directed: “you said in another life / we would be happy. And I said / in another life we would be // free from one another’s ghosts.” While she may not yearn for the end of her literal life, this speaker does wish to shuffle off the mortal coil that is lost love, which has consumed her as black holes will “swallow all the stars in their / path.”

A poem entitled “Missing Girls, Continued” concludes the chapbook. It tells the story of a girl whose best friend has disappeared. The narrator details her friend’s “emptied / out eyes” that reveal the inside of her head “all the way to the back / of her skull.” She wonders where her friend keeps her memories now that she no longer has eyes or a temporal lobe. She then recounts a moment from their childhood, in the form of a dream, wherein they looked up at the night sky. As the shooting stars soar, they “forget to make wishes, too busy / thinking of how the stars must have / names, we just don’t know how / to say them.” This calls to mind all the, largely nonwhite, missing girls whose names may be too difficult for evening news anchors to say, or for police officers to utter while investigating—cases that ultimately go cold and stay cold.

The poems of The Science of Unvanishing Objects are challenging yet approachable—a mix of verse and prose, expertly arranged on each page to evoke both visceral and cerebral reactions. On one level, Clark examines the bigger questions about our universe while on another level, oftentimes within the same poem, she shines a light on our problematic cultural landscape—specifically the treatment and representation of women by the media, by the justice system, and by the world at large.

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 writes fiction and criticism. His work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, The Fiction Pool, and elsewhere. Twitter: @BrandonStanwyck.

 

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.

 

You may also enjoy: 

THE YOUNG BRIDE, a novel by Alessandro Baricco, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

THE BIRDS, a novel by Tarjei Vesaas, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

 

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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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.

CHEESUS WAS HERE, a young adult novel by J.C. Davis, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

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CHEESUS WAS HERE
by J.C. Davis
Sky Pony Press, 242 pages

reviewed by Kristie Gadson

In the small town of Clemency, Texas Sunday morning worship is even more important than Friday night football. With a population of 1,236 and only two churches in town, everyone looks forward to putting on their Sunday best and lifting the Lord’s name on high.

That is, everyone except Delaney Delgado, the main character in J.C. Davis’ debut novel, who chooses to spend her Sundays working at the local gas station. Her sanctuary lies behind the cashier’s counter where she’s free to observe the spectacle without having to engage in any of it. However, when her coworker discovers the face of baby Jesus on a wheel of Babybel cheese, Clemency goes into a frenzy of miraculous proportions.

Word travels fast in a small town, and it isn’t long until news of baby Cheesus spreads like wildfire. Del watches in horror as her quiet life becomes an uproar, with classmates and citizens claiming they were healed after they gazed upon the blessed wheel of cheese. How anyone could believe in miracles—or God for that matter—is beyond her; but matters get worse when someone discovers an image of Jesus on the drive-through windowpane of the nearby McDonald’s. Once the local news stations broadcast that Clemency is the Town of Miracles, visitors from all over flock into town to see baby Cheesus and McJesus. With sharp, unyielding prose Davis follows Del as she embarks on a journey to debunk these so-called “miracles” that come to plague her life.

Del wasn’t always a non-believer. She used to go to church, take communion, and pray every day like a good little Christian girl. It wasn’t until the death of her sister, Claire, when she decided that she wanted nothing to do with God or his overzealous fan club.

I believed, one hundred percent, that God was watching over me and my family. When my sister died, that was pretty much it for me and God. Clearly he didn’t have my back, why should I have his?

Of course, it’s hard for Del to maintain or voice her lack of faith when everyone around her is a firm believer, including her family and, especially, Gabe, her best friend and the son of Holy Cross’ pastor. Her skepticism, concerns, and disbelief are dismissed with talk of God’s love, grace, and mercy—the very things she felt were absent when her sister was dying of cancer. Armed with her personal brand of cynicism Del chooses, instead, to ground herself in reality, and the reality is this: her mother never speaks to her, her brother pays her no attention, her father moved to a different state, and her little sister died a slow, miserable death. No amount of churchgoing or prayer persuaded God to spare her now-broken family.

Part of me doesn’t want to believe in God anymore. The larger part, though, needs God to be real if only so I can blame him for Claire’s death.

Davis symbolizes Del’s lack of faith through her love of photography, a device that allows readers to confront Del’s truths. With her Polaroid camera in hand, she sets out to capture the snippets of life around her, each photo revealing the world as it is, in that moment in time. Polaroids leave no room for speculation – what you see is what you get, either something is there or it isn’t. It’s these tidbits of truth that Del finds comfort in, the pieces of her life she can make sense of.

A Polaroid camera’s a kind of truth you can’t find anywhere else. You press a button, and a minute later you’re holding a small piece of the world

With her trusty camera and a reluctant Gabe by her side, Del sets out to find who’s responsible for the miracles. With baby Cheesus locked within the walls of St. Andrew’s she starts with the image of Jesus on McDonald’s drive-through window. Despite the throng of visitors blocking her way Del manages to snap a few pictures and draws the attention of a local news crew, who asks her to share her opinions on the religious symbols favoring her hometown. Fueled by her frustration she states, unapologetically, that the miracles are a hoax and that someone—not God—is behind all of it. Once the interview is broadcast on national television Del finds herself at odds with everyone in Clemency, even her family.

At a steady narrative pace, Del’s search for the miracle maker unfolds, and the reader is exposed to Davis’ subtle use of dramatic irony: Del is no different than the people of Clemency, the people who choose to believe. The investigation serves as her own way of finding answers in her troubled life, much like those who attend church seeking answers of their own. Del displays a deep desire to make sense of the world around her, a feeling many of us share.

In this way, Davis invites us to seriously think about the complex intertwining of truth and ideals.

JC Davis

Del operates in truth, but it’s the truth about Claire’s death that exacerbates her grief and prolongs her pain. Gabe, her family, and the rest of Clemency operate through ideals, yet these ideals mask the painful parts of life without addressing them in a constructive way. Davis carefully presents these themes so the reader comes to realize that neither way of thinking is completely right or wrong. The truth, though devastatingly harsh, keeps people grounded and puts things in perspective while ideals, though ultimately unattainable, give hope and help people aspire to achieve something greater. Without being overly didactic or heavy-handed, Davis lays these concepts out for readers to draw their own conclusions. These complex themes are woven seamlessly throughout a riveting first-person narrative. It’s as if Davis has found a way to tap into the reader’s psyche, if only for a moment, to plant the seeds of thought to sprout and grow on their own.

Despite Del’s deep-rooted pessimism, she’s still an easy-to-relate-to, even likable, character. Readers who struggle with their faith can find themselves in Delaney. They’ll share her cynicism, her questions, and her feelings of being betrayed and abandoned by God. However, Del’s story is one that all readers can relate to, whether they believe in God, don’t know what to believe, or don’t believe at all. Davis doesn’t present a black and white story about religion being either good or bad; instead, she gives us a narrative about the gray, blurry lines we cross as we try to make sense of life, what it means, and how complicated it can be.

When Del discovers the truth behind the miracles she realizes that she isn’t prepared for what comes next. The answers she desperately wants turn out to be too jarring for her to comprehend, leaving her worse off than before. Despite the hopelessness she feels and the uncertainty that lies before her, Del comes to understand that having the tiniest bit of faith, even in oneself, can make things better. Or, in Del’s words,

I’m not sure about anything else in this world: God, tomorrow, why awful things happen. But I’m sure about Gabe and he’s right, I’m going to be okay.

Kristie-GadsonKristie Gadson is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor’s in English. But, formalities aside, she knew that children’s books would become her passion when she found herself sneaking into the children’s section of Barnes & Noble well after she turned eighteen. She is a strong advocate for diverse children’s books, and writes diverse children’s book reviews on her blog The Black Sheep Book Review.

I’M THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY, a memoir by Andrea Jarrell, reviewed by Helen Armstrong

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I’M THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY
by Andrea Jarrell
She Writes Press, 153 pages

reviewed by Helen Armstrong

Do you catch yourself peering into other people’s windows at night? Perhaps you were driving by in the dark and wanted to catch a glimpse of how other people live. Do they sit down to eat together? What are they watching on the TV? The drive-by look is a quick wondering that’s satiated by seeing that they, too, are watching the football game, which you’re going home to watch. You must be normal, because they’re normal, because you don’t know about their dysfunctions.

Reading Andrea Jarrell’s memoir felt like I was squatting in the bushes outside of her house, fingers perched on the windowsill, watching and listening as her life unfolded, taking comfort in her family’s dysfunctions which mirrored my own in asymmetric ways. Being from a dysfunctional family myself, I take some sick comfort from seeing crying children in grocery stores, their mothers looking like they’ve reached their wits’ end. I thrive on overhearing family fights in restaurants, because for so long, it was my family who were making heads turn. Once, at a rest stop in Delaware, my younger brother pelted my mother and I with chicken nuggets from the booth across the aisle while my father yelled at him, and ultimately, dragged him from the McDonald’s. I suspect most of our families are dysfunctional, and it’s the job of our adult selves to use all of that dysfunctional material we’re sitting on to become something good. That, or we allow the cycle to repeat. But how does one heal from childhood? How does one become better than our parents? These are central questions in Andrea Jarrell’s haunting memoir I’m the One Who Got Away.

In 2012, The New York Times published an essay, “A Measure of Desire,” by Jarrell in the newspaper’s Modern Love column. Unflinchingly honest, Jarrell stripped off her clothes and stood, naked, before the jury. The essay begins, “We moved from Los Angeles to Maine with four years of sobriety under our belts, a 2-year-old daughter and another baby on the way.” Here she captivated readers with her strong, simple language. “By Christmas,” she says, “we placed single candles in each window instead of stringing colored lights the way we would have back in L.A., and I gave birth in an ice storm.”

The essay dives into both her sex life and her relationship with her husband. She describes jealousy, looking at women in town and choosing “replacement” wives, women she feels would be better for her husband than her. “In my new L. L. Bean sweaters and loafers, I began to feel around in the darkness of our relationship, wondering if my husband was still there, wondering what kind of job I would get if he left me and knowing that if he did, I would end up living with my mother.” After jealousy comes Jarrell’s decision to reclaim her own desire and to see herself as worthy of her husband. This essay would become one of the final chapters in the book.

Several chapters, in fact, were published prior to being bound together into a memoir. Cleaver Magazine published the third chapter, “Miracle Mile,” in 2013. A sweltering look at summer in Los Angeles and the relationship between mother and daughter, at the heart of the piece lies a shocking moment that Jarrell and her mother witness. A woman on the street is being taunted by young boys, and she chooses to lift her skirt at them. The moment shocks both Jarrell and her mother: “I saw what [the boy] saw—the woman’s dark pubic hair beneath her lifted skirt—a grownup eyeful he had not bargained on,” she writes. Other chapters were previously published as well, in publications including Full Grown People, Memoir Journal, and Motherwell Magazine. Jarrell wrote an essay for Cleaver about the process of turning short fiction into a memoir: “Becoming an Outlaw, Or: How My Short Fiction Became a Memoir.” She explains that she didn’t start out writing memoir, but instead, writing short stories, freezing moments of her life and fictionalizing them.

Andrea Jarrell

Inspired by Jo Ann Beard’s Boys of My Youth, a nonfiction collection of stories, she began to write “lyrical essay[s] crafted entirely from life.” Once she began to collect and string these stories together as memoir, she started to ask her mother questions. After one of them, her mother replied, “This book is about your life—right?” Jarrell writes, “By then, I knew that my parents’ story might be an embedded folktale within mine, but not my memoir’s dramatic trigger.”

I’m the One That Got Away begins with a haunting story of one of Jarrell’s neighbors, Susannah, a single mother, who is killed by a man she’s been seeing. The murder hits close to home for Jarrell, and she realizes that she’s been peering through Susannah’s window herself, horrified by the similarities, wishing for a better life for her neighbor than her mother was granted. Susannah’s story ends with death, and from here, Jarrell allows readers to pivot—now it’s her window we peer through, watching her story unfold slowly. She tells us the story of her parents, and we see echoes of Susannah in Jarrell’s mother.

Jarrell’s parents met when her mother was sixteen, and her father Nick was twenty. She traded in her college scholarships for an engagement ring. She would have become a photojournalist or graphic designer, but instead married the Southern charmer at age seventeen. Nick had dreams of being a movie star, and moved her from her small town in Colorado to Texas, where they were engulfed by a group of family and friends of his. She had left all of her ties in Colorado. He then got a job selling advertising for the Las Vegas Sun, so they moved again.

A charming alcoholic prone to rage, Nick slept with a gun under his pillow. In Las Vegas he began to rub elbows with Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and Lindsay Crosby. This is where the story turns familiar—it smacks of Harvey Weinstein, of Bill Cosby, of Casey Affleck. The men who run our entertainment industry while committing horrendous acts of sexual harassment and assault, and all of their friends who look the other way. Perhaps one of the most chilling aspects of the book is its timeliness. As women swarm the Internet and bravely write that they, too, have experienced sexual harassment and assault, we’ve begun to catch a glimpse of just how massive this problem is. Like an iceberg we weren’t able to see until it’s scraped the hull of our ship, we now have a sense of the magnitude of it—but can we ever heal?

Reading Jarrell’s story may make readers think of their own experiences with abuse, or even sexual harassment. It reminded me of the time a boy felt my boobs in front of my boyfriend, and my boyfriend did nothing. Or being forced to console him when he felt he was being a bad boyfriend, instead of agreeing that it was wrong to tell me he was going to fuck his neighbor while I was away on vacation. These experiences are reflected back at us by all of the people sharing their own stories similar to, and worse than, our own.

Jarrell writes about Nick’s twenty-second birthday. Several friends come to Vegas from Texas to celebrate, and the whole night, Nick keeps a close watch on his wife. When a friend holds out a chair for her, he’s there in an instant, telling the other man smoothly, “Thanks so much for keeping an eye out for her.” The situation escalates from there, with Nick trying to get the friend to agree that his wife is attractive, and the friend agreeing, only to have it nearly come to blows. The scene embarrassed his wife in front of everyone and ensured that none of his friends would speak to or show her kindness for the rest of the night.

She covered her black eyes with makeup, got a job at a casino, and made a life for herself alongside Nick. It was only once she became pregnant that she began to formulate a plan to leave him, to protect both herself and her baby.

She escaped, and this is the beginning of Andrea’s story. In vignettes, she tells us of her and her mother’s trips across Europe, of her childhood in Los Angeles, of Nick’s return into their lives, of her own loves, failures, and successes. She talks about her marriage, too. “[My husband] would not love me unconditionally—and he didn’t expect me to love him that way either,” she writes. “We would need to try, day by day, to be people worthy of each other’s love.” Here Jarrell pivots from her younger self who begins the book, shocked by the death of a neighbor that mirrors so well the path of her own mother’s life but with a gunshot ending, to the more confident Jarrell that narrates the end. When she writes about finally reclaiming her desire, she says, “It was where we skated on a frozen lake without falling through and dove into its liquid depths when the leafy summer arrived. I know it was there that I finally realized my husband, my babies, and those dormer windows were truly mine.” The book is a purge, a healing process, Jarrell’s own #metoo.

The scenes hang before you, just out of reach, because you are always aware that this is not your story. You’re peering through the window. When you put the book down, the lights are turned off in the house, and you can see your own reflection in the window. You see, perhaps, your own Nick, or memories of him. But this time, you do it with Jarrell and her mother by your side. You remember that you aren’t alone, that women all around you have felt this particularly bitter sting. You think of Susannah, of Jarrell, of her mother. You think of the women of Hollywood who are silent no longer. You go on, because they did.

Helen Armstrong is a senior at Arcadia University. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of the online lifestyle magazine, Loco Mag. She loves to travel and enjoys writing fiction and poetry, mostly about sexuality and feminism. Her work appears in Catfish Creek and Quiddity. Follow her on twitter @helenkarmstrong.

 

You may also enjoy:

A Conversation with Andrea Jarrell, author of I’M THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY, by Elizabeth Mosier

BECOMING AN OUTLAW Or: How My Short Fiction Became a Memoir, a craft essay by Andrea Jarrell

ON THE MIRACLE MILE by Andrea Jarrell

LOST by Andrea Jarrell

 

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.

 

You may also like:

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.

 

 

You may also enjoy:

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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PLAINSPEAK, WY, poems by Joanna Doxey, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S KINDRED: A GRAPHIC NOVEL ADAPTATION by Damian Duffy and John Jennings reviewed by Brian Burmeister

HOW WE SPEAK TO ONE ANOTHER: AN ESSAY DAILY READER, edited by Ander Monson & Craig Reinbold, reviewed by David Grandouiller

 

BONE CONFETTI, poems by Muriel Leung, reviewed by Marilynn Eguchi

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BONE CONFETTI
by Muriel Leung
Noemi Press

reviewed by Marilynn Eguchi

Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti is an open door into a house of mourning; an exceptional look into the aftermath of loss, and in turn, an examination of what it is to love someone. A challenging collection of lyric and prose poems, the poet manipulates the space where words are carefully placed and the space where there is nothing. The theme of the book is grief, and it is palpable. It is disorienting and enveloping, but manages to avoid being overly sentimental, allowing it to be both intimate and universal. The poet stated in an interview that “applying the role of politics to the personal grief of loss was very important work to do . . . It became a way of understanding this loss as tied to a history that’s larger than me.”

The book is broken into four segments: In Absentia Land: A Romance, In Absentia Land: A Funeral, In Absentia Land: A Wedding, and In Absentia Land: An Epilogue, each exploring loss with individual focus on aspects of what is left in its wake. Collectively and thematically, the poems evoke the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus, only once referenced directly early on in part three (A Wedding), “So watch me closely through the narrow gates/ of after-world hell.”  Tied to the story of Orpheus, each segment addresses an aspect of the loss, the death, the isolation, the hope, and the aftermath of losing a loved one. Each section begins with a prose poem (excluding the Epilogue) and one poem, “Mourn You Better,” spreads over pages and continues throughout each segment, acting as a ligament or tendon that connects each bone. Some pages contain only a couplet, a breadcrumb of sensation. In this poem, the poet transforms space into time. While many of the poems throughout the book are dense, and give a sense of urgency, “Mourn You Better” slows down the world, if for only a moment. “The bones go clacking up the chimney. Time used to / mean, Let us be better to each other in the now. Today it means—” and she breaks, continuing on the next page;

Don’t wear red on your wedding day.
Suck salt off your thumb.
Don’t cry.
Go on. Live without me.

“Mourn You Better” stretches the flesh of the book, reminding the reader to love in the present without fear or shame.

In part one In Absentia Land: A Romance, death is still fresh. The speaker deals with a grief that is here and now. She touches on the benevolent gestures made to those who have lost loved ones, and the silent acceptance that they are simply gestures, impotent charades. The poet concludes this section, “This is how I / want to love you—mouth full of cyanide kelp and the words that soot. / By way of book and bone, we opt to mimic-pray.” The speaker moves through the motions of life after, ghost-life without meaning; a lost heart. “I am making an inventory of all things. The body pulp in mason jars. / Something of consequence. An ash of you.” she says, continuing on to speak of red specters who bring flowers that turn to smoke. “You appreciate the gesture, pour them tea. No one talks about / what they have lost,” she concludes. The poet addresses the well-intended, but unwelcome pretenses of outsiders, the pain and frustration of potential, and the mercy of silence. Her language is disjointed; sentences do not flow as cohesive thoughts but disorient and dazzle the reader. These are poems full of clear and sharp pains that exist in the constant fog that one experiences after a major loss.

“Absentia land: A Funeral” deals with death and the isolation the survivors are left in. The first poem of the section starts, “When I pluck the marbles from my eyes, you are wholly vanished.” In A Funeral, the language is corporeal, looking at death from both a physical and pragmatic standpoint. It is done and cannot be undone. “Evacuate the bones, / let the skin hang dry. A pale flag upon a once body. Uninhabited. / What stillness will love you now: nobody, no one, nothing.” Her words are haunting and echo of florescent solitude. It is about the fear of forgetting and moving forward and away from the companionship she once had.

In A Wedding, she deals directly with death and companionship, and evokes the hope that when the survivor dies, they can be together in death. “I take her hand and pulse hard / into the forever-morgue. My darling, / I will go wherever you go.” This is not a boisterous hope, but one full of longing and anguish. The language in A Wedding also has the same corporeal quality that a funeral has, but introduces sexuality alongside the idea of physical death. She revels in sensory imagery, focusing specifically on touch, and does so masterfully. “Touch me in the flint of a blank corridor when / the world heaves into many bends—let it funnel into fever.” She concludes the final portion of “Mourn You Better” very simply— “Only sometimes do I think of the way you touch.” The statement is so simple, and yet I feel the stones it creates in my belly and my throat, so full of significance and heavy with ache. It also serves as a perfect segue into the following poem, in which she discusses touch in more depth, its sanctity and the effects that it holds over us. I found frequently in these first three sections that the poems did not go to the part of my brain that thinks, but the part that feels. In contrast, An Epilogue, her final chapter, is both the shortest and the most removed.

An Epilogue consists of two poems, both of which spoke to my eyes. They describe what appears to be the end of times. Whether we are meant to understand them as literal or esoteric or political, I’m unsure; either way, it is effective. Leung’s writing is breathtaking and evocative. She finishes her final poem, “Memory frayed, everything frayed. / No longer a viable space for feeling but then came the mourn. / See city so lovely and lonely in its after-after—just a little bit touched.”

There were moments in reading Leung’s poems that I felt choked, not by a hand around my throat but by delicate fingers closing off breath in my lungs, leaving a pressure in my chest, an abyss that can only remain as it is. This is what her poems in Bone Confetti do, they present the absence, a wound that was torn open by loss, a wound that will always be present no matter how many remedies one may find to attempt fill the hole. These are the words of an individual mourning and in love, and the pain is in each word of every poem, unresolved, even in those where hope is present.

Marilynn Eguchi studies creative writing and biology in Chicago. She is the winner of Truman College’s English Department Literature Award. She plays cello in a comedy band and writes and performs stand-up comedy. She spends her free time learning and practicing Brazilian Jiu-jitsu.

 

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AFTERGLOW by Eileen Myles and THE STRANGERS AMONG US by Caroline Picard, reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker

FLOWER WARS, poems by Nico Amador, reviewed by Claire Oleson

 

AFTERGLOW by Eileen Myles and THE STRANGERS AMONG US by Caroline Picard, reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker

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Like Cats and Dogs, the Intimate Other
 
AFTERGLOW
by Eileen Myles
Grove Press, 224 pages

THE STRANGERS AMONG US
by Caroline Picard
Astrophil Press, 84 pages

reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker

Dog people and cat people often like to stake their identities on the idea that they are starkly different from one another, but are they really so different? Regardless of species, a pet’s companion is a certain type of person who probably prefers their dog or cat to other people. In two recent books, by Eileen Myles and Caroline Picard, a dog person and a cat person, respectively, confess the closeness they feel to their pets while also marveling at the strangeness of intimacy with another kind of being. Reading both of these books together becomes a chance to deeply explore the intimate otherness of animal companionship. They live amongst us, but are they with us?

Myles has become a bit of a public figure recently with appearances in the Amazon original program, Transparent, a show that also features their (Myles’ preferred pronoun) poetry. With this new book, Afterglow (Grove/Atlantic, 2017), Myles is as provocative as ever. The subtitle of Afterglow is “a dog memoir” and in it Myles focuses on Rosie, a pit bull who was Myles’ closest companion from 1990 to 2006. The twenty chapters feature the poetic prose we’ve come to expect from Myles’ narrative work but they have a wide range: a mysterious letter from Rosie’s lawyer; a lecture on the etymology of the name Aphrodite; the script of a puppet talk show where Rosie is interviewed; scenes of Myles’ family in Ireland; and even a chapter of direct address from Rosie herself. Images are interspersed to punctuate the prose and add another element to the kaleidoscope of Afterglow. It is a book playfully conscious of being a book and joyfully weaves the reader into its fabric.

Eileen Myles

For Myles, Rosie is the ultimate other. Frequently they use the word “dog” in place of the word “god,” and Myles explains this in the third chapter, “My Dog/My God.” In the last year of Rosie’s life she started having mysterious fits that led to uncontrolled urination. “One evening I was feeling a little extra naked after describing the ritual of mopping her piss and I thought that’s it. She’s god. And I felt so calm. I’ve found god now. My God—My Dog,” Myles writes. Later in this chapter they explain, “In fact I’m writing this book to keep talking to her.” And Myles does talk to her and even for her and through her, wrestling with where the individual identity of Rosie exists separate from Myles’ own. At the end of a chapter, “Goodnight Sweet Queen,” in which Myles catalogs all of Rosie’s belongings left after Rosie is put down, Myles writes directly to Rosie, “I suppose I could’ve imagined you loved me then but I only knew you loved me because I saw you in my way and I was listening. And you simply were. I loved you for that. For being who else was in my life no matter what.” Rosie is the ultimate other and she is also just other.

Eileen Myles wanted a dog as a child but was denied by her parents (other than one night with a puppy which was returned the next day after whining all night). Struggling with identity as a child, between a male and female sibling, Myles describes the situation and where a dog would fit: “this inbetweenness, this aloneness, hear it now, is holy. I begged my parents for an animal to be an army with me.” God, place-holder, comrade-at-arms, even reincarnation of they’re father, Myles admits, “all of Rosie was a meeting place.”

“The writer spends her life reducing her own existence to that of a ghost,” Rosie tells Eileen in a late chapter called, “A Dog’s Journey,” told solely from the point of view of Rosie seven years after her death. Afterglow is a dog memoir, and it is a dog’s memoir, and yet it is all Myles taking responsibility for the otherness of Rosie.

Caroline Picard

Picard’s The Strangers Among Us (Astrophil Press, 2017) is a slimmer book, more of a long essay. She provides a very different contemplative approach that turns out to be a perfect pairing with Myles’ visceral language. Her cat/human relationship helps us understand Myles’ dog/human relationship and vice versa. Picard is a visual artist, curator, writer, and co-director of non-profit publishing house and art producer, The Green Lantern Press. In The Strangers Among Us Picard contemplates her cat, Little Grey, who at the point of writing, Picard had been cohabitating with for nine years. Little Grey likes to stare at Picard while knocking over glasses of water before scampering away. Is this humor, intentional rebellion, or a random action with no meaning? To answer this, the author begins by looking at Leopold Bloom’s first chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses where Bloom converses with his cat. He ponders how the cat sees him and “conceives the faintest glimmer of himself in her eyes and, not surprisingly, the result is unnerving.”

Picard then connects this with Jacque Derrida’s work, The Animal That Therefore I Am, and how “naked” Derrida feels when seen by his cat. This seems to be the same nakedness that Myles feels when she describes her ritual of cleaning up Rosie’s urine. In engaging an other as extreme as being from another species but as intimate as a house pet can be, we experience a depth of nakedness in that reflexive interaction. Derrida also asks, “cannot this cat also be, deep within her eyes, my primary mirror?”

The eyes of this other for Derrida, this “bottomless gaze” as he calls it, offers to his sight “the abysmal limit of the human.” However for Picard this realization and connection has benefits towards greater intimacy. She tells us, “By admitting one cat, we feel a greater throng of others. We must acknowledge the strange porous bounds of out own selves.”

Picard skews to the academic while Myles to the emotional, but both are philosophical. They investigate how we live our lives with an animal in our space, participating in communication and communion. Both love their respective pet and both devote much of their inquiry to how much that love is reciprocated. For all of their differences—style, species, method of inquiry—they both come down to the same observation that could be simply conveyed as: this is kind of weird, right? It is that mystery of the intimate other that electrically charges both books. For a non-animal person the mystery of this mystery might make for a fascinating read into a world and set of relations that is totally alien. For an animal person, be it cat or be it dog (and I guess we could open the distinction up to other more exotic species), Afterglow and The Strangers Among Us give words for the something we have all felt nuzzling against us.

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

 

IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS, a graphic novel by Kristen Radtke, reviewed by Jenny Blair

 

 

 

 

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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THE TOPLESS WIDOW OF HERKIMER STREET, stories by Jacob M. Appel, reviewed by Odette Moolten

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

 

THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK reviewed by Robert Sorrell

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THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK
by Elizabeth Hardwick
edited by Darryl Pinckney
New York Review Books, 640 Pages

reviewed by Robert Sorrell

Reviewing Elizabeth Hardwick’s new collection of essays is a task to strike fear into the heart of even the most headstrong literary critic. Biographer of Melville, co-founder of the New York Review of Books, and noted sharp tongue, Elizabeth Hardwick cast a long shadow in the literary world of the twentieth century. Darryl Pinckney introduces Hardwick in this volume as a New York intellectual firebrand, an avant-garde thinker with an acerbic writing style, and a cutting, devastatingly smart critic who employed a withering gaze.

Would-be reviewers, if not scared off by Hardwick’s biography, will encounter an essay in the book’s first hundred pages, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” which is destined to have some effect on their confidence. If reading that piece is not sufficient, the reviewer will then bump into a piece on a Hemingway biography that begins, “Carlos Baker’s biography of Ernest Hemingway is bad news.” To be blunt, Hardwick, a writer of fiction herself in addition to criticism and biography, does not go easy on writers.

The task of reviewing her new collection, once sufficiently convinced of my own opinions, is still not an easy one. The collection covers fifty years of writing, from 1953 to 2003, and while its only real foray into a topic other than literature is a group of essays on key moments in the Civil Rights movement and the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, Hardwick still manages to touch on a great many subjects. Boston, Henry James, the state of New York and Washington, DC in the 1960s, overlooked novelists, overrated novelists, and many other novelists in-between.

The collection begins with Hardwick’s writings from the 1950s, essays that feel so old-fashioned it’s hard to believe they’re less than a century old. Wordy, overly complex, and a bit pretentious (frequent use of the “royal we”), Hardwick’s prose style in these pieces combines with rather stuffy, traditional content to create something nearly Victorian. In an early piece on the letters of Sherwood Anderson, Edna Millay, and Hart Crane, she writes:

Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing form of communication. In them we expect to find the charmer at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances. Yet, this is not quite true. Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose.

Hardwick’s writing in these first pages, though at times dry, shows a wily intellect and a certain creativity in word choice and sentence form that will blossom in later decades. As I read on, I found it difficult to put down a book that, in its earlier pages, I had had trouble forcing myself to pick up.

One of the bizarre pleasures of reading this collection of essays is the sheer sense of time it evokes. Tracking Hardwick’s content, and voice, through the second half of the twentieth century is an oddly satisfying task. To read her early essays on Boston or George Eliot, and later arrive at her essays on Joan Didion and Truman Capote that take on the lucid style and deadpan endings favored in our era of journalism and criticism (the last line of her essay on Didion: “She is saying that Bellevue Avenue in Newport is not what the west was won for.” Even a preposition at the end of the sentence!), is breathtaking. It is like watching history on fast-forward. And while this is a slippery term, Hardwick is an illuminative, at times perhaps great, writer. What do I mean by this? Simply that each essay brings a new epiphany, a new moment of strangeness. Mayor Daley’s institution of a police state during the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention is “a mode always available to the mood of tyranny.” On New York she writes, “Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point.” The crowd at a rock concert becomes a “huge clot of dazed swayings, fatuous smilings, empty nightmares.” And her writing champions a slow approach. Certain sentences and paragraphs merit re-reading and can stand up to prolonged inspection. The essay on Didion opens:

Joan Didion’s novels are a carefully designed frieze of the fracture and splinter in her characters’ comprehension of the world. To design a structure for the fadings and erasures of experience is an aesthetic challenge she tries to meet in a striking manner: the placement of sentences on the page, abrupt closures rather like hanging up the phone without notice, and an ear for rhythms and tags of current speech that is altogether remarkable.

While her writing may not always be the pinnacle of clear, straight-forward prose, it is something to behold in itself, especially as, in the later essays some of the anachronisms (using “he” when talking abstractly about a person, eschewing more “feminine” writers, etc.) disappear and her tone becomes more immediate. It is also delightful to see her sharp wit poke through the calm facade of an essay, which happens when she describes the disconnect between protesters and those in power during the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. “There is a pathos and humor in all this, like a dinosaur choking on bubble gum. A fearful gap, not only in generations, but in common sense, in ordinary understanding of the world about us, has opened up. And how can we face this, except with dread?”

Elizabeth Hardwick

As you read through the decades, Hardwick also seems to become a more humanistic writer, and, if not a more optimistic one, than at least a more nuanced one. There are fewer screeds along the lines of “The Decline of Book Reviewing” and more pieces that investigate and try to capture something unique in a writer or a cultural moment. Simply put, as she continued writing, it seemed as if Hardwick became less interested in seeming smart and more interested in writing thoughtful, emotionally intelligent pieces that smart people might like to read. Part of this change seems to coincide with an increased sensitivity to specificity. Her interest shifts from “Art” to the people who make it, the cities where they live, the people who read it. These pieces are not theses but thoughtful asides and anecdotes, musings from the mind of a deeply intelligent and thoughtful writer.

Even in her later pieces, though, Hardwick is a fairly traditional critic. It’s hard to believe that Hardwick was writing about Ernest Hemingway, Bartleby the Scrivener, and William Faulkner in the same city at the same time as Susan Sontag was writing about the phenomenon of camp, contemporary art, and the French New Wave. The trend continues into the latter years of the century. One of Hardwick’s essays from 1999 on the landscapes of fiction starts with Wuthering Heights then moves on to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Dickens, dips its toe into the twentieth century with The Great Gatsby, mentions, in one sentence, the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, and then settles back into Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser. Hardwick is not a critic who is overly interested in the new, and in some ways that makes her a strange character, perhaps closer to an academic.

Critics as, however you slice it, arbiters of taste, occupy a complicated space in the artistic world of today. In a vision of the arts as more inclusive, as well as more expansive, it’s unclear what role critics will play in this future. And yet, out of this chimera—half novelist, half journalist, feeding off the scraps of “high art”—occasionally comes something beautiful and insightful, something that is worthwhile not because it is necessarily “correct” about a work, but because it reminds us how vital art can be to people. Hardwick was dedicated to this idea, and her life’s work was proving that writing about art could be, in itself, a kind of art. In “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” she notes, “Book reviewing is a form of writing.” And in that simple sentence there is a manifesto.

Hardwick was a unique critic and writer because she treated the task of reviewing a book, or writing about themes in literature or culture, as an undertaking worthy of her full attention. Perhaps the best proof of this attitude is her language. Hardwick brings a linguistic verve and creativity to her essays rarely seen in non-fiction writing. Words are created, or used in ways that bend their meaning (the concert crowd, for example, as “a huge clot of dazed swayings”), and in the great American tradition, her highfalutin prose is occasionally peppered with a dash of slang or casual usage (The word “gossipy” and the phrase “vicious, villainous, vituperative,” both appear in the first sentence of an essay on Truman Capote). She was, as Darryl Pinckney mentions in the introduction, “what used to be called a writer’s writer,” but not because she was exclusionary. She simply cared more than most people about the power of language, and she wasn’t about to apologize for that.

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 enjoy:

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

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

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

 

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.

 

You may also enjoy:

AND WIND WILL WASH AWAY, a novel by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by William Morris

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

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

 

THE BEST WE COULD DO: AN ILLUSTRATED MEMOIR by Thi Bui reviewed by Jenny Blair

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THE BEST WE COULD DO: AN ILLUSTRATED MEMOIR
by Thi Bui
Abrams ComicArts, 330 pages

reviewed by Jenny Blair

The Best We Could Do begins with birth. Thi Bui is a first-time mother in California, and her own mother–despite having flown across the country to be there–has quietly excused herself from the delivery room.

Má has her reasons, as it happens. Their names are Quyên and Thảo, and they haunt mother and daughter in this wistful, level-headed masterpiece of a family memoir. The Best We Could Do traces the journey of Bui’s family, escapees from South Vietnam and migrants to the United States.

It’s an important book. As Thu-Huong Ha points out, 1970s US opposition to Vietnamese refugees rivaled the opposition to Syrian refugees today, of whom there are five million and counting. And then there are South Sudanese, Somalis, Afghans, Houstonians, Puerto Ricans, and countless more. It has never been more crucial to understand and join in solidarity with people driven from their homes, perhaps never to return.

Broken in many ways long before they arrive in their new country, Bui’s family stoops under the weight of memory as they build new lives. As the heavy responsibility for her new son hits Bui, “a wave of empathy for my mother washes over me.” She rides that wave across the Pacific and back to her parents’ own childhoods, and comes full circle to acceptance of her family’s pain and to hope for her own son.

Thi Bui

As Bui teeters between child- and motherhood, she decides to try to get closer to her parents. But that is no easy task. There persists between the generations “a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.” Its depths lie in the Việt Nam the family left in 1978. Through her parents’ memories and stories, and with every elegant accent and circumflex of her family’s mother tongue fully respected, Bui goes “seeking an origin story that will set everything right.”

Why does her father, Bố, raise his children at home in San Diego, jobless, a silent, brooding figure smoking a cigarette, occasionally exploding in anger, telling the children terrifying ghost stories? His “wounds beneath wounds,” she later learns, include famine in 1940s Indochina, a sucker-kick by his own father, hiding alone as the French massacre his village in a dugout accessible only by diving underwater. All this before the age of 8.

“Afraid of my father, craving safety and comfort, I had no idea that the terror I felt was only the long shadow of his own,” Bui writes.

Her mother, on the other hand, had a privileged childhood as the daughter of an engineer, attending French schools and attended by servants. She has a gradual nationalist awakening, teaching herself to read Vietnamese, visiting a servant’s family in the country, then learning about her country’s recent history under the French and eventually refusing to speak French outside of school. In the US, it is she who takes the low-paid job on offer, and she who eventually leaves her husband.

The book is a gripping pocket history of the Vietnam War and the French colonial exploitation that preceded it–the reader learns, among other things, the backstory behind Eddie Adams’ famous photo of a street execution–but also a rare glimpse at the country itself in the decades before and during. Young Bố teaches himself to swim in a human-made neighborhood pond brimming with fish and shrimp, eats French baguettes and chocolate ice cream and eventually studies French literature. Then he witnesses the brutality and mass killings of the 1950s regime in the communist north before escaping to Sài Gòn. There, he does his best James Dean imitation as he dreams of a new life in Paris. Bố and Má meet in teachers’ college there; she marries him, thinking he is about to die of what is probably tuberculosis. But he survives.

Bui’s art is gorgeous. Her line work is simple and utterly expressive, and with simple black-and-white washes accented by a pale orange, she conveys every emotion with understated power, from Bố’s sadness and shame when a San Diego bigot spits in his face, to Bui’s own nervousness and hope when she dares to tell Má she’s living with her boyfriend.

Each sibling’s birth story is honored in the telling. Má gives birth to her son Tâm in a Malaysian refugee camp. We see Thảo’s death before birth and Quyên’s from what may have been malnutrition. Sister Bích arrives in Sài Gòn two weeks before the Tet Offensive, and Bui herself just three months before South Vietnam lost the war.

Then, after years of fear, deprivation, and surveillance, comes the family’s escape, to which no summary can do justice. Statistics can’t, either. An initial wave of 130,000 mostly educated and connected asylum-seekers left Vietnam for the US in 1975, and another, 2 million strong, in 1978. Many of the latter were “boat people” like Bui’s family, and hundreds of thousands ended up in the United States, where they often met with xenophobia, as did Bui’s family.

The experience makes up part of Bui’s inheritance, what she calls her refugee reflex–“the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to RUN when the shit hits the fan.” As, one night in their apartment complex, thanks to cigarettes and oxygen tanks, it did.

For those who lose a country, the disorientation and the tiring need to balance on a new edge never quite recedes. The task of starting over is in some ways impossible. But Bui comes to feel boundless gratitude to her family. For her own son, “a new life, bound with mine quite by coincidence,” Bui sees freedom ahead. May he be as rooted as he wishes to be.

Jenny Blair writes about science, medicine, and other neat things. Formerly an emergency physician, she practiced in ERs large and small and taught young physicians with an NGO in Indonesia before switching to full-time writing and editing. Her passions include cartooning and graphic novels, permaculture, and improv comedy, as well as the importance of place. She is a fan of alternative housing and kinship models, and makes her home in the Northeast

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.

 

 

You may also enjoy:

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

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

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

 

 

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

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THE MADELEINE PROJECT
by Clara Beaudoux
translated by Alison Anderson
New Vessel Press, 285 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

In 2013, a young journalist named Clara Beaudoux moves into a Paris apartment. The previous tenant, a woman named Madeleine, lived there for 20 years before passing away in her nineties. Strangely, Madeleine’s things have not been removed from the cellar. “All I had to do was open a door, the door to my cellar, for the adventure to begin,” writes Beaudoux.

At first, the nature of Beaudoux’s adventure is journalistic and intellectual: curious about who Madeleine is and why she has left a room full of old memorabilia, Beaudoux decides to go through Madeleine’s items on Twitter—as she opens each box, she tweets its contents. Dishes, jewelry, old mattresses, mysterious little gadgets that have been tucked away in envelopes for decades emerge in tweeted photos, with 140 character captions:

“I could see right away that Madeleine seemed to be well organized. She kept back issues of Historia.” (2 Nov. 2015)

“I think Madeleine must have inherited her parents’ things too, like these coal coupons.” (2 Nov. 2015)

“There are vast quantities of photographs in these suitcases, I’m a bit overwhelmed, is this Madeleine?” (3 Nov. 2015)

“A little announcement, with black edges. I’d seen his name the day before on a business card in this suitcase.” (6 Nov. 2015)

But this journey quickly becomes something else. Madeleine has left behind history that few of us bother to keep, either because we are too foolish to understand the significance of the historical events marking our lives, or because we fail to create meaningful, tangible records in these days of Twitter and email, or perhaps because we would rather let go of painful images, painful words or traumatic histories. Somehow none of these usual reasons inhibited Madeleine, as Beaudoux discovers: Madeleine has left behind suitcases of postcards, pressed flowers, photos, her family records dating back generations, and letters from loved ones lost in World War II.

For Beaudoux, a Paris-based journalist for the France Info news network —and for lucky readers—the weighty reality of the gift that Madeleine has left us is overwhelming.

Clara Beaudoux

First published in France in 2016 and now available in English translated by Alison Anderson, The Madeleine Project is a compilation of Beaudoux’s tweets, complete with her growing sense of discovery and familiarity with Madeleine. Born in 1915, Madeleine watched World War II claim relatives and friends, and then spent her entire working life as a teacher in an elementary school. She never married and did not have children; instead, Beaudoux relies on the recollections of a godson and neighbors, along with the photos and letters from the cellar, to partially piece together Madeleine’s story. This is a book that makes connections: between generations, between hand written letters from decades ago and the digital age genre of the tweet, between an era that feels lost to us and our daily reality, between our view of history as impersonal, and our sense of each individual’s history, between the notion of history as scholarly and Twitter as mundane, between the graphic novel and the biography.

“We should always study history in this way: it should always be incarnated. After all, insignificant people too have made History, not just the great men that history books talk about,” writes Beaudoux. The project of recovering Madeleine’s story raises questions about our contemporary disconnection from history: our world is indelibly marked by the historical events of Madeleine’s youth, but it is difficult to feel the import of that history personally. To experience Madeleine’s letters is to be reminded (or perhaps to be taught) that each life is shaped by the history of its moment, and that our own historical circumstances are shaping our choices, our words, and our relationships, just as Madeleine’s shaped hers. And, of course, it reminds us of the shared nature of history-making: Madeleine’s story quickly becomes Beaudoux’s story.

The surprise connections between two women living almost 100 years apart is one of the poignant and tender parts of The Madeleine Project. “What did ‘happy’ mean for a young woman of 25 in 1940?” wonders Beaudoux, herself not much older than Madeleine would have been when writing letters to family while Europe was at war. Beaudoux often records her questions and thoughts in ways that emphasize the bonds between strangers, and our need to emphasize communal affection in times of distress. “I no longer look at the old ladies in the neighborhood the same,” observes Beaudoux. When the November 2015 Paris attacks interrupt Beaudoux’s life, she recalls a line from one of Madeleine’s war-time letters: “It’s such a comfort to love each other so well, dear boy, especially now.” Madeleine “was referring to the Second World War, and that’s what I felt in 2015,” records Beaudoux. This widening of our perception to include connection with those around us—especially those who may be different from us—may be the greatest gift that The Madeleine Project gives us, and it is ironic that it comes through Twitter, a medium that often seems to reinforce differences.

The Madeleine Project is the first half of Beaudoux’s cellar investigations and interviews. This partial view might be frustrating for a reader who is invested in Beaudoux’s personal journey or the emerging facticity of Madeleine’s life. There is little of Madeleine’s own language available through Beaudoux’s tweets: the reader has to rely on Beaudoux’s 140 character description of a letter’s contents. At times I wanted answers to specific questions about Madeleine (or her stuff—what was that strange object in the picture on page 18, anyway?) and the end of the Project came far too soon, to me. In many respects, looking for a person who has passed away is bound to end with some disappointment and sense of futility, like Patrick Modiano looking for another Parisian of that era, Dora Bruder. As a reader, I felt as if an interesting conversation had been cut short. But that is because this is not a fiction story, where all the questions are resolved at the end—The Madeleine Project is about a real woman who is gone, and a real woman who is still living her own story and searching for information about Madeleine. Answers are not forthcoming for all of our questions about her. If I feel distress at not being able to ask Madeleine questions and understand her better, Beaudoux seems to feel that she is mourning a lost friend: “And I put it all back as it was, as carefully as I can.  As if you might come back to get everything.”

Fortunately for us, Beaudoux has not stopped searching for Madeleine. She has continued to tweet (in French, @clarabdx) about her project, and hopefully those further adventures will soon arrive in translation, as well.

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.

 

 

You may also enjoy:

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

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

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

 

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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IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS, a graphic novel by Kristen Radtke, reviewed by Jenny Blair

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IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS
by Kristen Radtke
Pantheon Books, 288 pages

reviewed by Jenny Blair

If we felt attached to and invested in the ground beneath our feet, how would the world be different? What’s the difference between feeling rooted in a place and feeling stuck there? And how is one to face the facts of geographic and human impermanence?

These are among the questions Kristen Radtke explores in her lonely, restless memoir Imagine Wanting Only This. The book blends stories of abandoned ruins and disaster locations with personal memories of death in the family, inherited heart disease, and the author’s search for love and belonging. It is an attempt to come to terms with the impermanence of human works, and of humans themselves.

Though the book is inviting, its wealth of detail and many digressions sometimes illustrate and sometimes crowd out larger themes. The author never fully comes to terms with her own obsessions, making the reader wish she had marinated her ideas a little longer. The drawing is skillful but flat. And the language is sometimes confusing. Despite these frustrations, Imagine Wanting Only This remains compelling and sometimes transcendent.

Ruined places make up the backbone of the book. Radtke is fascinated by them, as are many of us. We’ve all clicked on “ruin porn”: photographs of Chernobyl, Detroit, ghost towns of the West. Decaying buildings are a potent metaphor of death—and attachment to place as well as grief at the loss of place are deeply felt needs we scarcely have language for. Radtke is at her best when she explores those needs, when she delves into what it means to really be somewhere, and how a specific place—especially if it’s abandoned—can make us feel a specific way.

Early in the book, we visit Gary, Indiana, where the awed author and her boyfriend explore the crumbling city center as young Chicago art students. (I bristled when Radtke’s younger self calls the city “almost completely abandoned,” a description Gary’s eighty-plus thousand residents would dispute.) Next come reminiscences of art school and a carefree existence in a shabby Chicago apartment. A series of near-compulsive travels bring Radtke to military ruins in the Philippines, a series of Southeast Asian countries, Italy, Iowa, Iceland, Kentucky, and, at last, New York City. She is fearful of getting stuck in place, yet the reader senses a longing to be rooted, too.
“It felt like I had to see everything, as if it was the only way my life would count or matter. I didn’t care where we were going as long as it was someplace new,” she writes.

Clicking on photos of ruined places, Radtke muses, “It was just unreal that so much of the world could be empty like that….Since Gary I’d been consumed by the question of how something that is can become, very quickly, something that isn’t.

In Louisville, Kentucky, Radtke gets at something interesting—placelessness—when she describes the state as “full of interstates where I took exit after exit to get to more interstate.” Hinting at the unnameable pain many of us feel upon seeing desecrated nature, she describes not wanting the Ohio River even to exist because it is “brown and thick and full of trash.”

Radtke discovers she has an ancestor who played a role in the horrific Peshtigo, Wisconsin firestorm of 1871. She follows a fascinating history and analysis of the fire with an account of  how World War II tacticians worked to reproduce its conditions in firebombing Germany and Japan. Then it’s on to the Dugway sheep incident, in which thousands of sheep lay down and died on an army proving ground. Once again, she is fascinated with physical ruins, detailing the buildings the Army built for test-bombing: their dormered attics, their lack of plumbing, their tongue-and-groove floors, and their 18 pieces of furniture each.

She herself wonders why this research matters to her.

The fire happened, and the bombs that made more fire happened, too….And when you love and then cannot continue that loving? And when the walls of a heart designed for protection turn in on themselves? What can be made of the spaces that we cannot witness?

Radtke has a better reason than many of us to dwell on the riddle of destruction and decay. A genetic form of heart disease kills Radtke’s beloved young uncle. She appears to have inherited it as well, and she frequently treats the disease and ruined places as metaphors for each other. Yet it’s never very clear how she feels about the condition, nor how it turns out for her; nor whether her reticence is related to self-neglect, a desire for privacy, or perhaps a mild version of the disease.

The book’s most hair-raising and powerful moment comes as Radtke visits Iceland, led there by a documentary about the island of Heimaey, whose residents evacuated in 1973 during a volcanic eruption. She ponders the Icelandic filmmaker, who left Heimaey and returned forty years later. She ponders a photographer back in Gary who died, hit by a train, as he captured it on film, part of a long-term project to photograph the struggling town. And she considers how some people wander restlessly, others move when necessary, and still others remain in one place without ever feeling stuck.

It is then that she looks around Iceland and thinks, Imagine wanting only this. What does it mean to be so rooted to a place, even if that place is troubled, decaying Gary, Indiana, or volcano-stricken Heimaey? How might that feel? If we knew, we might take better care of our lands, our cities, our rivers. It may be the question of our time.

Jenny Blair writes about science, medicine, and other neat things. Formerly an emergency physician, she practiced in ERs large and small and taught young physicians with an NGO in Indonesia before switching to full-time writing and editing. Her passions include cartooning and graphic novels, permaculture, and improv comedy, as well as the importance of place. As a fan of alternative housing and kinship models, she makes her home in Michigan with several friends.

 

 

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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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FLOWER WARS, poems by Nico Amador, reviewed by Claire Oleson

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FLOWER WARS
by Nico Amador
Newfound, 35 pages

reviewed by Claire Oleson

Like a scene is set to music, a vision of the body is set to language in Nico Amador’s poetry collection Flower Wars. In this book, biology is boiled into word, punctuation, metaphor, and syllable, leaving the reader’s understanding of physicality and the human inhabitance of flesh up to a new breed of interpretation— that of one on the page. Moving between prose poems and lineated pieces, Amador addresses hair, gender, Pablo Neruda, shifting personal identities, hummingbirds, and so much more as a central narrative through-line begins to surface between stanzas.

The opening poem of Flower Wars, “Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair,” borrows its title from a Frida Kahlo painting and begins with the statement “There is the dream of exposure and then there is the act of it—” immediately drawing a boundary between rumination and action and perhaps also putting the poem itself, as a form that works an invitation to thought, into question. The reader, if familiar with Kahlo’s painting, can call to mind the image of Frida in a suit and bearing a short, traditionally masculine-coded haircut. The image and the painting are stationary, not unlike Amador’s poem on the page, however, the lines which detail the process of actually cutting hair: “I went knifing through” and before that, “I cleared the trails of my scalp” re-invoke the process and the action which sit tucked behind the result— the short haircut. This layering, emphasized by the poem’s final line “my hair, now metaphor, is meaningless” invite the reader to both understand the cut as an act of self-authorship and autobiography as well as something which perhaps finds its relief by lapsing into a still image, in rejoining the body, and coming to abandon overt symbology to sink back into an element of someone’s personhood.

As the collection opens with a piece that casts the self as something capable of being authored and created rather than being static or inherently given, so too does it continue to reinforce this concept with different language as it progresses. For instance, the poem “Elegy for Two” opens:

You left me a name I could use on men I want to take home at night, a name of raw honey.

Nico Amador

Nico Amador

This beginning sentence suggests a sense of a created self, but one made and shaped by something outside of the self’s own body, a tool given by a “you” for an “I” to use in self-address and introduction to others for a specific aim. The name is thereby contextualized in a narrow set of parameters, and, even better, is omitted from the reader except in its being described as a floral-dependent and created sugar. Here, these occlusions both show and curtain the self which the poem is describing. We are given an outline that both asks and answers questions about this poem’s speaker. The piece concludes: “We are citizens/ of the countries we imagine. We make our homes in the dark.” A set of lines which might work to communicate that an occlusion and a lack of clarity can be a place to keep both a name and a body; that neither a sharp diagram of name nor anatomy is required to believe that a person has been here and inhabited this space, these words, and that sugar.

In “Before Surgery,” the collection arrives at a significant place in its possible plot, a vantage point from which the reader can see and comprehend the sense that a reoccurring narrator is occupying the lines and will resurface later, near the collection’s end, to detail an aftermath of this referenced surgery. “Before Surgery” describes a speaker’s time spent in anticipation of a gender-reassignment operation. It’s third stanza reads:

Everything feels disposable—
these cups, the shortening distance
between us, that shirt you’ve taken off
and added to the pile of things we’ve left
behind. It rises slowly, like a mountain.

These lines impart both a sense of rising suspense and importance— the construction of something built from refuse, as well as something ultimately casual and day-to-day about it all. Yes, we are given a mountain and the knowledge that something “big” is on its way, but that mountain is also made of objects like thrown-off shirts and presumably other interesting but mundane moments of human life. This coexistence between height and banality expertly brings the reader into the possible reading that something like a gender-reassignment surgery can both be massive and minuscule, necessary and a choice, life-changing and shockingly day-to-day, without either side of ascribed values endangering the validity of the other. The piece ends:

Boy, you say, boy.

You don’t have to go to the hospital.

While these final lines may at first appear to contradict this piece’s title and the later poem which discusses about the procedure’s results, I’d argue that they instead offer the reader an understanding that a body and a gender do not ultimately determine one another, that all cells are constantly up to interpretation and re-imagining, and that a lack of requirement in this instance does not have to delete or diminish a present desire. Amador is able to show us that a boy is a boy before both before and after a knife (or scissors).

“What Changed, Exactly” is the second-to-last poem of the book and revisits the idea that unknowing and inexactitude can be a possible site for a true sense of identity and meaning. The speaker describes a friend as being “alive/ in his own story/ and that story/ is not a book.” Once more, a lack of stillness, precision, and containment does not diminish, but in fact, reinforces a sense of life and personhood. The poem’s persona goes on to say “We’ve hardly ceased/ being ourselves./ We’re already new.” communicating both an understanding and a distinct inability to understand or keep track of one’s own humanity; the speaker knows they, and we all, are

moving, but where, how, and when are not decipherable until they can be read back later in recollection. The poem’s final stanza, as if in answer to its title, lands softly:

……….I grew a beard,
I might say.
……….I wore tighter pants.

The mundane is a surprise here, but one the reader may have anticipated. We are shown again how the dramatic feeds into the day-to-day and vice versa, that sex, body, and gender may have relationships but do not answer one another concretely, and that living is a way of being unable to read and know yourself absolutely in every moment. In Nico Amador’s Flower Wars, the lines of poetry are full of flesh and voice, both of which are sure of their uncertainty and masterfully show the reader that, if we would trust an author to write their own poem, we should absolutely trust someone with reordering, preserving, mangling, and or perfecting the syllables of their own humanity. If you are a person and or a body, Flower Wars is relevant and vital reading.

claire-olesonCleaver Poetry Reviews Editor Claire Oleson is a student and writer hailing from Grand Rapids Michigan. She’s currently studying English and Creative Writing at Kenyon College. She’s an avid fan of books, bread, and trying to win the hearts of all felines, regardless of how cantankerous they may be. Her work has been published by the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, Siblíní Art and Literature journal, Newfound Journal, NEAT Magazine, Werkloos Magazine, and Bridge Eight Magazine, among others. Contact her by email. 

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THE LOVERS’ PHRASEBOOK, poems by Jordi Alonso, reviewed by Claire Oleson

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

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

 

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

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

 

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.

 

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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 

PLAINSPEAK, WY, poems by Joanna Doxey, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

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PLAINSPEAK, WY
by Joanna Doxey
Platypus Press, 80 pages

reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

Glaciers, a recurring and defining symbol in Joanna Doxey’s Plainspeak, WY, are unique natural marvels. Unlike other phenomena commonly found in nature, such as mountains or canyons, glaciers travel. Propelled in large part by their own titanic mass, these mobile accumulations of ice and snow slide—albeit very gradually—across great distances. Over long periods of time, they strip the land beneath them of loose soil and rock fragments, then carry these bits of terrain with them, as added weight, to faraway lands. When glaciers finally cross into the warmer climes of lower latitudes, they steadily erode and melt, thrusting polar water and geologic debris upon a new home. The glaciers that once graced the American northwest, for example, have vanished and are now a cold memory, but as Doxey says, the “land is a memory of wind without wind,” for although they are gone, those arctic leviathans undoubtedly have left their baggage behind.

In order to incarnate the scars she shares with Wyoming, Doxey lends her voice to the topography of the title state—formed by the long-absent glaciers that sculpted the land—so as to parallel mindset and setting. She draws us in, sweeps us away in a gust of meadow wind, and leads us through the geographical history of the region. By becoming one with the dirt, Doxey invites her readers on an excavation of not simply the land but also of herself, to study a broken heart that has been layered and molded by time and the cold ice of a snuffed flame. She stresses that “glaciers in their absence shape a land that holds their memory,” as a transfigured heart will likewise insist upon maintaining its transformed state after the departure of a rootless lover—though it’s important to bear in mind that “[s]igns of erosion are not erosion,” that what seems marred may not necessarily be ruined, merely rewritten.

Doxey sometimes arranges the words on the page in a manner that appears scattered, and in doing so visually maps the ordered layers of the heartland (as well as the icy sheets of the vanished glaciers) that she draws upon for inspiration. Thus, while reading, the reader must dig, so to speak—from top to bottom, from left to right—to unearth the somewhat concealed meanings within the text. The unusual spacing between words in the same line, for example, imitates the “air bubbles that tell of ages past, ages before humans.” The poems told in a more standard verse style have a tendency to embody the thawing and falling of the ice, because, after all, “to write about a history of ice it must melt.”

When she is not deciding how to stack individual words and phrases, she is making a conscious choice whether to place a poem—as a whole—at the top, bottom, or in the middle of each page. Many, naturally, start at the top of the page, but the few pieces found at the bottom have a tendency to evoke the deep-down personal musings of the soil and what can be buried under ground—and what all that represents: things left behind, things forgotten. Several more of Doxey’s poems, however, open in the middle of the page. These particular pieces lend themselves to matters of the human condition: ruminations on how hearts, like glaciers, carry reminders of the past and are so burdened with the auxiliary load of that history. For instance, Doxey details such “libraries of cold” with a meaty block of prose on one page in order to contrast with the subsequent page, which is nearly blank, save for the three little words “I miss you” surrounded by emptiness. Nevertheless, for glaciers, weight is power—and Doxey’s weight lies within her words.

“For what it’s worth, I am layered / in words / but cannot speak,” she writes. Like stones from various landscapes that encrust the same glacier, certain words attach themselves to one’s self. Doxey dreads the corrosion of her own dear, “sacred” words, especially the ones close to her heart, as she knows that words have a history, a lifespan; they emerge, then develop, and then eventually dissolve. When a word moves from one of these stages to another, it undergoes a change in its own significance. Overutilization, in general, expedites such shifts—shifts toward a rhetorical melting, for words lose their solidity through simple overindulgence. Therefore, Doxey needs “new words / or none at all” that sing because once the temporal significance is hollowed out, what remains is only “a husk of a word.” And since frequently-uttered words possess the least power, she thus confesses, “I worry when this is done I will have overused all the words I love.” To keep the language of her heart whole, Doxey must hold on to her words whenever possible, or else they too will vanish, as Wyoming’s glaciers have, and she will have nothing but immense silence.

Plainspeak, WY is impressive in its attention to detail and draws clear connections from matters of the earth to matters of the soul—and back again, repeatedly. The poet’s central obsession is depicted, in fact, somewhat subtly, on the cover of the book as a topographical map. Atop a cool, arctic blue, several thin black contour lines unevenly work their way around one another and connect to make shaky targets that reveal the gradual shifts in Wyoming’s terrain, formed largely, of course, by the glaciers that have so ensnared Doxey’s imagination. Plainspeak, WY, ultimately, is about the inevitable erosion of the human heart, as mirrored by the slowly eroding landscape of the northwestern United States. Although the sections that divide up the collection are titled, the individual pieces are not. Each unnamed poem could easily stand on its own and pack a substantial punch, but when strung together—free of the inadvertent barriers that separate titles can create—they form a lyrical narrative of monumental scale.

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 short stories. His fiction has recently appeared in Corvus Review.

 

 

 

You may also enjoy:

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

LIES I TELL MY STUDENTS, a creative nonfiction craft essay by Liz Stephens

YOUNG WARRIOR ON HORSEBACK, a poem by Kaitlin LaMoine Martin, featured on Life As Activism

 

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.

 

 

 

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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 

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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.

 

 

 

You may also enjoy:

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.

 

 

You may also enjoy:

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.

 

You may also enjoy:

COBALT BLUE, a novel by Sachin Kundalkar, reviewed by Nokware Knight

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).

 

 

 

You may also like:

HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD, an anthology for young readers edited by Kelly Jensen, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

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

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

 

 

HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD, an anthology for young readers edited by Kelly Jensen, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

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HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD
edited by Kelly Jensen
Algonquin Young Readers, 218 pages

reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Feminism. It’s an ideology that has long been approached with trepidation, met with both skepticism and controversy. There have been countless articles, papers, films, and books exploring and defining the concept. However, Here We Are is more than a series of essays on feminism. It’s a collection of stories, blog posts, comics, drawings, and interviews featuring an array of different voices – each more unique than the last – describing what feminism means and how it plays a role in our lives. Each page encourages readers to think about how they, as individuals, can relate to a belief that strives to unite us as a whole.

“The people and the world around us shape our individual path to feminism…The journey is always changing, always shifting, and influenced by our own experiences and perspectives.”

The book is structured like a scrapbook, having a combination of calligraphy, designs, and doodles drawn across the pages, accenting each chapter. Not only is this visually appealing, it creates a sense of comfort that softens the intensity of the subject matter. Through its playful design Here We Are creates an atmosphere that fosters openness and spares judgement – in a way, the book itself functions as a safe space where readers can embark their own experience.

Kelly Jensen

Forty-four voices all come together to share their perspectives on multiple aspects of feminism: what it means to them, how they came to accept it, how they identify with it, and how they advocate for it. However, what sets this book apart from the rest is its inclusion of a kaleidoscope of narratives that show “…the truth about feminists: they come in all shapes, sizes, and colors.” It succeeds in offering an intersectional view on feminism by including the stories of men, disabled women, both transgender men and women, and women of color.

In Matt Nathanson’s essay “Privilege” he expresses his frustrations about benefitting from a system that devalues not only women, but those who don’t fit into the category of “white” and “male”. He takes issue with the fact that his daughter, while acknowledging that she also has privilege, has “a set of hurdles in place that [he] never had…she is heading out into a game that is fixed.”

Angie Manfredi’s “The Big Blue Ocean and My Big Fat Body” explores the negative effects of body shaming and how society views body type as a standard of worth. Through feminism she came to accept that being fat doesn’t mean that anyone isn’t deserving of love or acceptance.

Amandla Stenberg’s “Don’s Cash Crop My Cornrows” looks into the damages done by the appropriation of black culture, specifically when it comes to black hair. She points out how hairstyles like cornrows, originally used to keep black hair neat and away from the elements, were ridiculed and seen as “ghetto” on black people but were later seen on high-fashion runways and music videos, rebranded as “urban” because they were worn by white models and musicians. She begs the question “what would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?”

Kaye Mizra’s “Faith and the Feminist” reveals the politics surrounding a Muslim woman’s decision to wear her hijab, how cultures with a lack of understanding feel the need to label the practices of other cultures “backward” or calling their women “oppressed.” Mizra comes to terms with her personal choice and how the right to choose is indeed a feminist act.

Through exploring their vulnerability, struggles, and triumphs the book offers a more human view of feminism through the lens of these individuals and their personal circumstances.

As I poured over the pages, connecting with every image, essay, and story, I found pieces of myself scattered throughout the book. I saw my desire for inclusion in Brandy Colbert’s “In search of Sisterhood.” I relived my gender-normed past in Sarah McCarry’s “Girl Lessons.” My activism was re-ignited in Mia and Michaela DePrinces’ “Feminism is as Feminism Does.” Although my experiences are my own, I believe that any reader who picks up this book will develop a personal connection to, at least, one of these stories. Readers can challenge and expound upon their current views of feminism, allowing them to add to the ever growing, ever shifting dynamic.

Here We Are shows that feminism isn’t a monolith. It’s a collection of experiences, stories, and narratives that contribute to the betterment of all. This collection succeeds in getting the conversation started and it’s left up to the reader to finish it.

Kristie-GadsonKristie Gadson is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor’s in English. But, formalities aside, she knew that children’s books would become her passion when she found herself sneaking into the children’s section of Barnes & Noble well after she turned eighteen. She is a strong advocate for diverse children’s books, and writes diverse children’s book reviews on her blog The Black Sheep Book Review.

 

You may also enjoy:

RANI PATEL IN FULL EFFECT, a young adult novel by Sonia Patel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

LOCAL GIRL SWEPT AWAY, a young adult novel by Ellen Wittlinger, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA, a young adult novel by Laura Moe, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

 

 

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

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ROMEO AND JULIET IN PALESTINE: TEACHING UNDER OCCUPATION
by Tom Sperlinger
Zero Books, 144 pages

reviewed by Beth Johnston

Trust the Brits to find the humor in anything. Tom Sperlinger’s Romeo and Juliet in Palestine, a brief memoir of a semester the author spent as a visiting professor of English literature at Al Quds University in Abu Dis in the West Bank, deploys wry wit to combat the absurdities of living and teaching in a place of controlled chaos. Take this retelling of an exchange between Sperlinger and a security guard at an Israeli checkpoint:

“Are you Jewish?”
“My father’s Jewish.”
“And your mother?” . . .
“She’s Christian,” I replied.
“Where is she from?”
“Belfast.”
“Why did your father marry her?”

I didn’t think this was a question I could answer.

At Al Quds University, Sperlinger’s students remain dubious about the benefits of the courses he offers; they want to learn the English language, but feel profoundly disconnected from English literature. On one of his first days at the office, Sperlinger encounters a student who actually likes studying English literature, but doesn’t like the department. “If you were head of the department, what would you change about it?” he asked her. Maybe she would provide valuable insight.

She thought for a second, and then spoke in a deep, even tone. “I would close it,” she said.

This general sense that students and others he encountered in Palestine didn’t know what to make of Sperlinger and his point of view pervades the memoir. When Sperlinger gives a talk at Al Quds, the professor who introduces him, who is not a literary scholar, notes, “I am sure this will be a very interesting talk. I don’t know anything about George Eliot, but I do know she was a Zionist.”

Tom Splerlinger

Sperlinger’s keen feel for the absurd provides much-needed relief in an often grim story. If, like me, you don’t know much about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, this memoir will open your eyes to Palestinians’ perspectives on the conflict. Sperlinger, whose grandparents fled Vienna in 1938 to escape the Holocaust, is quietly appalled by what his people on the West Bank endure. As he sees it, “Palestinian lives are disrupted in endless small ways, day to day.” His students face drawn-out commutes to the University (thanks to checkpoints) and constant interruptions of their studies from strikes, protests, and faculty pay freezes. Because various legal regimes maintain jurisdiction over different parts of Jerusalem and the West Bank, some students are effectively divided from family, friends, and even lovers. And because of a strange technicality in how Israel accredits Palestinian universities, Al-Quds degrees are worthless in Jerusalem. Still, there are much bigger disruptions. In one assignment, Sperlinger asks his students to retell a family story or folk tale and analyze it using the literary techniques the class has been studying. The resulting narratives are chilling for the reader: a grandfather publicly executed for possession of a gun, a seven-year-old killed for throwing rocks, a father used by soldiers as a human shield. When, at one point, a student asks Sperlinger if he’d like to see a picture of her brother and he agrees, she shows him a wanted poster.

Despite the challenges they face—indeed, Sperlinger suggests at points, because of them—the students offer fascinating insights about the texts they read in class. Part of this is surely as a result of Sperlinger’s sensitive and talented teaching. In a conversation about how Shakespeare adapted the Petrarchan sonnet for an English audience, Sperlinger makes the lesson concrete, telling the students, “I want you to imagine that I am a musician. . . . I’m visiting from England, and I have brought this new kind of song with me, which everyone in England is playing. You’re a group of musicians too. But you haven’t heard of this song, and when I play it, you want to start making your own version in Arabic. How would the song change?” He allows his students great freedom of thought, telling them that “they should not take for granted that [Shakespeare’s] works were great or special. Their job, as readers, was to discover whether he seemed like a great writer to them.” And yet the students don’t always (or perhaps even often) do the reading. Sperlinger responds by giving them an excerpt from Malcolm X’s autobiography, where the Civil Rights leader famously explains how reading opened the world for him; then he distributes a French novelist’s “Readers Bill of Rights” and asks the students what they would add or subtract. At times, understandably, he grows frustrated with the students and wonders whether he should be stricter; just at that point, one of his best students explains, “I’ve been at the university for five years. I’ve never been asked to do this before—to come and have opinions, to do the reading only if I want to. . . . It’s just a big change.”

While anecdotes like this one are rich in meaning, the book is sometimes frustrating to the reader. Sperlinger has unusual pacing; sometimes he stretches stories out over a dozen pages, doling out a little bit of information at a time, digressing to another topic, and then spiraling back to something he let drop. This can create a productive sense of foreshadowing. For instance, in the powerful first chapter that gives the book its name, Sperlinger intercuts shreds of ominous violence with his students’ responses to Shakespeare’s tale of two warring houses, to profound effect. Other times, a story simply gets abandoned; the reader waits in vain for a payoff down the line.

More fundamentally, Sperlinger doesn’t have much material to work with; a single semester is not a lot of time to fully understand his students or his environs. Still, Sperlinger wisely refrains from spinning his tale out for longer than it warrants. At 144 pages, this novella-length memoir flies by. And just as Sperlinger arouses his students’ curiosity about literature, he whets ours for a greater understanding of a people whose oppression is too often overlooked or misunderstood. More, Sperlinger made me want to read or reread not just Shakespeare but Edward Said, Malcolm X, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper¸” Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” Irish and Palestinian poets, Israeli playwrights—and, indeed, whatever Sperlinger writes next.

Beth-Johnston

Beth Johnston trained as a lawyer before earning an MFA from Bennington College. She has written about books and law for The New Republic, Legal Times, and other publications. She lives in Washington, DC, where she teaches writing at George Washington University.

 

 

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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

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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