The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

Such frights will come and go.

Then there'll be one that won't. One that won't go.

But for now, the corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room again for tiffs and trivialities. No more hard edges on the days, no sense of fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of tiny and relentless insects. Back to where no great change seems to be promised beyond the change of seasons. Some raggedness, carelessness, even casual possibility of boredom again in the reaches of earth and sky.

And Alice wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. In "What Do You Want to Know For?," the narrator--here, clearly a stand-in for Munro herself--undergoes a mammogram that reveals a lump in her breast. She prepares for the biopsy, and perhaps worse, but it's postponed twice, until the doctor responsible tells her that the lump has always been there, on every mammogram she's received, and it hasn't grown or changed. It's not worth cutting out. Routine accretes again around her life, which was briefly opened up into frightening possibilities, but as she writes, one day there will be a fright that doesn't go away. They're sobering words, one year after Munro's death, after the fright that did not go. And of course they are made more complicated by the revelation of Munro's complicity with the ongoing sexual abuse of her daughter. but not, I think, invalidated. Munro seems to have lied for a long time about her life, but in her stories, what she wrote had a way of being deeply true. So it's with a mix of sadness and relief that I can say there are no more Alice Munro stories left for me to read.

The View from Castle Rock may be Munro's most personal collection, even moreso than the autobiographical "Finale" that closes out Dear Life. The long first section, titled "No Advantages," is a history of Munro's Scottish family, which emigrated to Canada and the United States after the Highland Clearances in the 18th century. The title image of the book comes from one of those ancestors, who, as a little kid, was taken up a prominent hill in Edinburgh and jokingly told by his father that the body of water across the bay--really, Firth--was America. It must have seemed so close, so full of promise and threat, and it must have felt a little like fate, too, because that ancestor did become an emigrant, to the real America. These stories are fascinating and rich, although I had trouble keeping the different Williams and Andrews apart, and drawn from life as they are, they resist a kind of completeness that Munro's stories do, I think, typically possess. They are more ragged, diffuse. I loved the moment when a young boy, walking from Canada to the United States, sneaks his baby sister away from his mother and hides her in a shed, then blames the disappearance on an Indian servant they left back in Canada. (Suspicions of Indian magic make this a persuasive accusation.) The little girl is found, and the boy is never blamed, and so there is no hammer fall of the kind that Munro usually doesn't shy away from. Instead, the moment is another thread in a tapestry of immigrant life, the fabric from which the writer herself is woven.

From there, the stories move down the generations. Familiar images come back again. There's Munro's father, with his silver fox farm. There's her mother, who falls prey to a debilitating disease. We've heard these stories before, in The Lives of Girls and Women and elsewhere. But Munro had such a knack for making the same story seem new each time. She changes the name of the Ontario town--here, it's Blyth--and somehow, that's all it takes, for the story to be revived and refreshed. And of course, we get aspects of these lives we've never seen before, like the introduction of her father's new wife, a foolish and insensitive woman with the improbably name of Irlma. To what extent do the old stories develop and explain the new? Is it about historical contingency only, the obvious fact that, had these people not emigrated to Canada, there would be no Alice Munro? Or is it something else, about the way the old Laidlaws (Munro's maiden name) carved out a new home for themselves so far from Scotland, something we must always do for ourselves, no matter how far from our parents' doorstep we get? There is no permanence, of course. The lump in the breast reminds us of that. We fashion home for ourselves out of what's at hand, and even then, it's only for a little while.

I'll really miss reading a Munro story for the first time. At this moment, it's a hard thing to talk about her writing as writing. It might be nice to take a break from her for a year or two. But I can't imagine never returning to these stories again, and I do plan to come back to them someday. They'll be tinged with a double sadness--dismay or disgust on top of the lack of newness--but they are too much of home for me, too, to be left totally behind.

Doting by Henry Green

They started together, fast, for the passage. Once outside, he shouted "in here" throwing open his and Diana's bedroom. There was a bathroom opened out of this, but, because the space was small, a basin with hot and cold water had been fitted by Diana's bed. It was to this that Miss Paynton ran. Turning the hot tap on, she zipped off her skirt, and stood with her fat legs starting out of lace knickers.

"Here, let me" he said, and knelt at her side.

She picked the handkerchief out of his breast pocket, drenched it in that basin, and then, putting her hand inside the skirt she had discarded, she began to rub at the stain.

And it was at this moment Diana entered.

She stood at the door with a completely expressionless face.

"Arthur" she said "when you're done, could you come outside a minute."

In a pivotal scene in Henry Green's Doting, Diana Middleton walks in on her husband kneeling at the feet of 20-year-old Annabel Paynton. Her husband, Arthur, has just knocked over a tureen of coffee onto her dress, and they have scrambled to save it, but of course, that's not what it looks like. But it is what it looks like, because Arthur has just been making out with the girl, who is slightly older than his son, and although the scene is quite comical in its irony, if the coffee had not been spilled, Diana might just as well have walked in on Arthur and Annabel sucking face. It's a great scene, the best in the book, and perhaps the only scene, strictly speaking: mostly, Doting is told entirely in dialogue.

The half-affair between Annabel and Arthur is a pathetic thing, never consummated, and for the most part barely more than a concatenation of middle-aged put-ons and half-rebuffs. Annabel finds Arthur attractive, but admires Diana; mostly she operates by a kind of young person's instinct that's only half-able to really think through the long term implications of her own desires, whatever those might be. She's having a bit of fun, but for Arthur, the affair is a desperate one, even though he deeply loves his wife. Doting, Arthur says to Annabel at one point, is not the same as loving--that is, the kind of relationship that Arthur has with Annabel, obsessive, squalid, horny, is not really even in the same universe as his relationship with his wife. Perhaps that is the way most affairs are conducted, whether it's a truthful statement or no; we love our partners even as we betray them, and need not really feel dissatisfied to be captivated by the allure of someone else.

Diana mostly turns a blind eye, even encourages Arthur in what seem to be his harmless attentions. They set up rules that are as pathetic as the affair itself--no meeting at night, no bringing her to the house--and which of course are immediately broken. Diana, miffed, begins an equally sexless flirtation with Arthur's friend Charles. Arthur, wanting out of a situation of his own making, tries to pawn Annabel off on Charles, a gambit that works too well, leaving both Arthur and Diana dejected. Annabel ends up introducing Charles to her equally young friend, and they fall in love, the end of a chain of infatuations in which Charles and Clare are the only ones who actually end up sleeping together. I don't know if Doting is the best novel Green ever produced, but it's definitely the funniest, and the deflation of every grand affair is part of its charm. All this is brought full circle by the return of the Middleton son Peter, a whinging, juvenile pest who's blind to all the stormy drama that's been going on in his absence, and whose immaturity only underlines how icky the middle-aged men of the novel really are.

The Silk Road by Kathryn Davis

Human beings have always moved from place to place, whether by design or due to the unforeseen, droughts and wars, pestilence and persecution, the Silk Road they traveled on a conduit not merely for precious commodities, for spices and jewels, mirrors and honey, but for everything strange or unknown, a variety of alien gods and ideas, an unbounded universe with nothing outside it, the dung-covered eggs of the silkworm. This was our birthright, this easy assurance that whatever we wanted was ours, both to have and to bestow. We knew nothing about privation and adventure, as Jee Moon liked to remind us. It was common knowledge Nanny had spoiled us rotten.

Kathryn Davis' The Silk Road begins with a yoga class at the end of the world. A set of siblings, known only by professional titles--the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Cook, the Iceman, the Geographer, the Keeper, the Topologist--have arrived here after a long journey on the Silk Road to get away from a rapidly spreading plague. The class is led by Jee Moon, a mysterious figure they've either just met or who has known them all their lives. When someone dies in the yoga class, it's not clear which one it is, but the grief of it complicates the safety of arrival, the safety of the arctic labyrinth.

The Silk Road is as close to Joy Williams' Harrow as anything else I've read. It operates at a high level of abstraction, in a world of myth and symbol rather than a world of logic or causality. Images of the quote-unquote normal word peek in, especially in flashbacks of the sibling's childhood in suburbia, but the Silk Road on which they walk is more like the Camino de Santiago, or the Stations of the Cross, a journey whose meaning unfolds as they walk it. The siblings enter a dreamy hospital, where one of them is seductively drawn further into the darkened rooms; is this a metaphor for death, loss, grief? Is it not enough that death haunts the end of things, does it have to haunt the journey, too?

Like Harrow (an unfair comparison, The Silk Road came first), cataclysm and disaster are what seem to have loosed the world from the grip of realism. For Williams, it's always ecological disaster; for Davis, it's a recurrence of the bubonic plague, complete with fleas, that gives the events of the novel, such as they are, a kind of medieval flair. (About six months after its publication, the first cruise ships were being quarantined after the appearance of a novel virus thought to have originated in China.) As the siblings flee, they must let go of their ideas about the world, just as they must let go of their ideas about themselves. Their titles cease to have any meaning (though it's not clear to what extent they ever did) as the journey across the Silk Road transforms them:

The thing is, he wasn't himself or what he thought of as himself, just as the farther we walked along the trail the less we knew of what we thought of as ourselves. It was disconcerting, our titles having been so deeply imprinted in us to become identities. The Cook hadn't cooked anything in a long time; the Iceman had abandoned his quest for permafrost. If the Archivist was going to turn into something like a fish, no one was going to find it strange. It was all right, as long as he eluded the lure.

I was bowled over by Davis' novel Labrador when I read it five years ago. I've been chasing that high ever since, and the results have been a couple of pretty good novels (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf and Versailles) and a couple that didn't really work (The Thin Place and The Walking Tour). The Silk Road is somewhere in the middle, but I haven't done it any favors by comparing it to Harrow, which strikes the balance between the real world and the symbolic one more effectively, in my opinion. But then again, it's one of Davis' strengths that the symbols and images of her novels often seem not to cohere into something usual or expected. That Davis can make you care about these characters, whose identities are so surface-level--and to open them up so the surface can be punctured--is really an achievement.

The Burnt Ones by Patrick White

At first it was impossible to believe their personal lives could be reduced by a shuffle of history, which is what happened, monetarily at least, on the deck of the destroyer, after the sack of their city. Because it had been personally theirs, which was now burning by bursts, and in long, funneling socks of smoke, and reflections of slow, oily light. As he ran looking for that other part of him which was lost, he gashed his shin on a companionway. But he did not know. Calling her name. None of that rabble of sufferers--wet, dry, singed, bleeding, deformed by the agony of their first historic situation--none of them knew any more, as they stood in their fashionable rags and watched their city burn.

My favorite story in Patrick White's collection The Burnt Ones is "Down at the Dump." Set in the suburban Sydney town of Sarsparilla, it tells the story of two young people finding an unexpected connection. One, a young girl, is at the cemetery for the funeral of her eccentric aunt. The other, a boy, is from a family of poor bogans who go searching for things to sell in the dump. It just happens that the cemetery and the dump are right next to each other, separated by only a fence, across which the two teens meet and connect, or not quite, and then over which they start making out. It's a perfect Patrick White story, about the rottenness and spoil beneath suburban gentility. There's a fantastic moment when the spirit of the dead aunt looks out over her mourners, symbolically mixing the spiritual realm with literal trash. And there may be no more setting where White is more at home than the dump, which he describes in his characteristic way: "At the last dip before the cemetery a disembowelled mattress from the dump had begun to writhe across the road. It looked like a kind of monster from out of the depths of somebody's mind, the part a decent person ignored."

About half the stories are set in Sarsparilla, about another half are set in Greece or are about ex-pat Greeks. The title The Burnt Ones refers to the Burning of Smyrna, a moment in which the Turkish regime set a massive fire to the Greek quarter of what is modern Izmir, killing tens of thousands. Nearly all of the Greeks in the novel experienced this, and it colors their experience of their new homes, whether in Greece, Australia, or America, and the immediacy of its horrors contrasts with the petty psychodramas of the collection's suburban Australians. Yet, we see too how easily the Greeks, having fled this "shuffle of history," are re-subsumed into polite schemata of respectability and repression. (White writes often about Greece and Greeks, presumably inspired by his longtime partner, a Greek named Manoly Lascaris.) My favorite of these stories was "Being Kind to Titina," about a boy who tortures an awkward young girl whom he has been instructed to be kind to. She grows up and, of course, turns out to be hot, and though she only remembers him as being kind, his own cruelty tortures and keeps him from being with her. It's a story that reminds you that White can be funny:

But Titina stuck. She stuck to me. It was as if Titina had been told. And once in the garden of our house at Schutz, after showing her my collection of insects, I became desperate. I took Titina's blue bead, and stuck it up her left nostril.

'Titina,' I cried, 'the holes of your nose are so big I'd expect to see your brain -- if you had any,' I shouted, 'inside.'

But Titina Stavridi only smiled, and sneezed the bead in to her hand.

Other stories I liked: "A Cheery Soul," about a woman who annoys everyone she comes in contact with; "Clay," about a boy whose mother worries about him being unusual--a bourgeois anxiety, of course, but then he turns out to be legitimately mad. And I especially liked "Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover," about a young female door-to-door salesman who chucks everything for a slovenly Bulgarian she meets on her route, and who turns out to have a huge fetish for being whipped. I didn't think it was as strong, generally, as his other story collection The Cockatoos, though it's been many years since I've read that one. Sadly, I can see my stock of White's books dwindling--three leftover stories, a half-finished novel, and his memoirs are all I have left. 

A Fairly Good Time by Mavis Gallant

All her private dialogues were furnished with scraps of prose recited out of context, like the disparate chairs, carpets and lamps adrift in her apartment. She carried her notions of conversation into active life and felt as if she had been invited to act in a play without having been told the name of it. No one had ever mentioned who the author was or if the action was supposed to be sad or hilarious. She came on stage wondering whether the plot was gently falling apart or rushing onward toward a solution. Cues went unheeded and unrecognized, and she annoyed the other players by bringing in lines from any other piece she happened to recall.

Shirley Perrigny--formerly Shirley Norrington, then Shirley Higgins--is a Canadian living in Paris. Her first husband, Peter, died on their honeymoon in Italy, leaving her to drift toward France, where she married a journalist named Philippe. Philippe has left her, it seems, or half-left her; he has disappeared. Excuses seem to proliferate from the shadows--he's on assignment, he's visiting his family, he's sick with hepatitis--but each one is buttressed with the caveat that he's not to be contacted. Left adrift, Shirley searches for a sense of identity in the wake of these personal disasters. She makes friends with a desperate young mother named Claudie, and becomes reluctantly ingratiated with her family; Claudie sees in the slightly older Shirley someone who has her life together, which we know is the opposite of the truth. But Shirley's chief personality trait seems to be her need to care for others, which may be, as Philippe and others see it, a kind of self-abnegation that prevents Shirley from really becoming.

A Fairly Good Time is an example of a small but recognizable mid-century micro-genre: the North American girl in Europe. Mostly, as in Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, it's an American girl, but the Canadian Shirley is constantly being taken for an American anyway. Philippe, and many of the other locals, find many reasons to look down on Shirley; they take her personal idiosyncrasies to be examples of North American uncouthness, and they elevate small differences to the level of barbarism. It's really not a book that makes the French come out very well. But even among these, Shirley finds ways to  connect with people, even despite herself, and perhaps it is her outsider's perspective that makes her so invaluable to an unsettled soul like Claudie. Shirley, too, is adrift, but her adriftness has taken her far away from home, something that the too-young mother Claudie can only see and admire.

I've only read Gallant's short stories, and I love them, but I think that here, in a novel, the strengths that make her such a good short story writer work against her. Gallant's stories are rich and overfilled; they effortlessly give a sense of whole worlds that exist outside of the margins of the page. As a novel, it feels overstuffed; characters who might have made a strong singular impression, like Shirley's malicious landlady Madame Roux, end up overextended and obscure. Interestingly, I recognized the story of Shirley's first husband's death as being cribbed from one of her stories that, if I recall correctly, is anthologized in two of the collections I read. In that story, too, the young window drifts into the first harbor she can find, a lover and his family who turn out to be somewhat sinister.

This NYRB edition of A Fairly Good Time includes another of Gallant's novels (maybe the only other one, but I'm not looking it up; don't quote me), Green Water, Green Sky. This novel--really, a novella--is about Flor, another Canadian in Europe (as Gallant herself was), undergoing the slow dissolution of her mental health. Flor's story is told mostly through the eyes of the people at the edges of her life, some intimate and others quite incidental: her mother, her Jewish husband Bob Harris, her cousin George, an artist and hanger-on named Wishart. This method is strange, and it felt to me like the novel keeps us from looking directly at Flor. It's too disparate, too imbalanced, to work with any kind of wholeness or singleness, though perhaps the fragmentation is much the point. And yet, a long scene where Flor, abandoned by her mother and others, cloisters herself within her flat and begins to break down completely, shows Gallant, like nothing else in either novel does, at the height of her talents.

Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather and Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor

He happened to be engaged in work of public utility, but he was not willing to become what is called a public man. He found himself living exactly the kind of life he he had determined to escape. What, he asked himself, did he want with these genial honors and substantial comforts? Hardships and difficulties he had carried lightly; overwork had not exhausted him; but this dead calm of middle life which confronted him, -- of that he was afraid. He was not ready for it. It was like being buried alive.

Bartley Alexander is a renowned builder of bridges. He's hard at work on a bridge in Canada that will be the world's longest cantilever bridge, and his reputation has made him a public figure of know-how and enterprise. He's married to an elegant, pragmatic woman named Winifred, but on a trip to London, he reconnects with a spirited Irish actress named Hilda, whom he threw over to marry his now-wife. Meeting her again reignites his passion, and soon they are in the throws of a love affair that sunders Bartley's personality between the private and the public, and threatens to destroy him.

Alexander's Bridge was Cather's first novel. It was followed less than a year later by a masterpiece, O Pioneers!; Alexander's Bridge is not a masterpiece. It wears its debt to Henry James openly on its sleeve, but Cather was never a very Jamesian writer. James might have worked out the psychology of Bartley's affair to the most minute detail, but Cather's writing is all wrong for intricacy. Her characters are too plainspoken, to us and to themselves; there's not many shades of sentiment or feeling. Cather tends to say one thing and to say it well. It's perhaps unfair to think of it this way, but it's why she's so much more talented at capturing the life of a Nebraska homesteader, whose life, like her prose, is made up of the most simple things in delicate and meaningful arrangement. The Boston-to-London life of Bartley Alexander makes more room for a Jamesian artifice that Cather seems to think she's interested in, but isn't.

The novel ends--spoiler--with the collapse of the record-breaking bridge in Canada. Bartley has had to skimp on materials to meet the cost demands of his benefactors, but there's no way to test whether they'll hold until the bridge is built. They don't, and Bartley is drowned in the collapse of his greatest achievement. This ending really is beneath the writer that Cather would become: pointedly symbolic, but not really integrated with character or plot. The bridge collapses because Bartley collapses, riven by his double life, but this image is too easy and too predictable to really work.

That the novel of manners was not her metier she had to learn the hard way, by writing one. Alexander's Bridge is a case of borrowed finery, as she felt almost immediately on its completion. Still, reading it today one fids much to admire in the book's tragic love triangle.... One cannot help suspecting Cather was here expressing the divided state of her own personal life, split as it was between two women, Isabelle and Edith. This cannot be demonstrated; I only propose it here as a possibility.

In his biography of Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas, Benjamin Taylor describes Alexander's Bridge as a failure that Cather was aware of. She was pushing forty; to have her first novel as an artistic failure might have scared her off forever. Thank God she kept on writing and produced O Pioneers!. Taylor's book marches dutifully through Cather's life from book to book and story to story, and its clear that the author is a passionate fan who loves the texts about which he's writing. The book--which is very short for a biography--lingers most leisurely when discussing the books themselves. Much of the book is taken up with unpacking the tone and quality of the books' reviews--which were deemed a success, which a failure, etc., etc.

All that, I thought, comes at the cost of never really dipping too far past the surface of Cather's life. We get the fascinating tidbit, which I did not know, that Cather's lifelong "companion" Edith Lewis was actually her second love, after a woman named Isabelle McClung who broke Cather's heart by marrying. What her compensatory relationship with Edith was like is barely touched upon here. Perhaps there's little way to know what went on in this "Boston marriage," but Cather and her writing are too much the focus here to really admit anyone else. Like Cather's novels, the biography is made up of simple stuff delicately arranged, but like all homages and imitations, it pales against the quality of the master.

Chasing Homer by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

I lost this book somewhere after finishing it. It's an appropriate fate, maybe. The narrator of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Chasing Homer is constantly trying to disappear. We know nothing about him, not his name or nationality or age; all we know is that he's being chased. We don't know who's chasing him; he doesn't even seem to know who's chasing him, or even what they look like. He only knows that if they find him, they will kill him brutally. It seems beside the point to ask whether these pursuers are real, because it's a question with no relevance to the fear and panic that are the subject of the book. The narrator can't even stop to determine whether they are real. He must keep moving at all times. Time narrows; for him there is only the present moment, and the self narrows too, down to its barest and most animal elements.

The narrator moves vaguely south through Europe. He boards ferries that travel along the Adriatic coast. (It's not hard to imagine him moving due southwest from Krasznahorkai's native Hungary.) On one such ferry, he overhears a local berating a Japanese tourist couple about visiting a beautiful and secluded island. The local whips out a copy of The Odyssey and begins reading. This island, we quickly intuit, is supposedly the island of Calypso, where Odysseus himself was waylaid for years before his final push home to Ithaca. The narrator decides desperately to make his way there, imagining that Calypso's island might be his last chance to shake his pursuers. There's a funny reversal here. For Odysseus, Calypso's island was a trap, a distraction that kept him from getting home, but the narrator of Chasing Homer has no home. To be eternally waylaid, suspended, is the best he can imagine. The island represents, perhaps, the pause in the plot, the interruption of the forward motion of events that leads inexorably to death.

I thought this was fine. It struck me as very Beckett. It's the kind of book that seeks to capture a very singular feeling, and it does that very well. It eschews the realistic-literary belief that feelings should be incarnated in specific stories. At the same time, like the best of the "brodernist" writers, it winks at genre fiction tropes that have already become a little outdated. Chasing Homer is a kind of thriller, pared down to its barest essence--just as the narrator is pared down to his barest essence. It's a multimedia project that's interspersed with illustrations by artist Max Neumann. These illustrations are sketchy and flat, made of half-erased pencil lines and fields of thick black that capture the novel's reduction of the human. It's accompanied, too, by a music score by Miklos Szilveszter accessed by QR code that I haven't listened to because I lost the book. I thought the illustrations were also fine.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Panic jumped down on Geryon at three a.m. He stood at the window of his hotel room
Empty street below gave back nothing of self.
Cars nested along the curb on their shadows. Buildings leaned back out of the street.
Little rackety wind went by.
Moon gone. Sky shut. Night had delved deep. Somewhere (he thought) beneath
this strip of sleeping pavement
the enormous solid globe is spinning on its way--pistons thumping, lava pouring
from shelf to shelf,
evidence and time lignifying into their traces. At what point does one say of a man
that he has become unreal?

Geryon is a terrible red monster of myth, who was killed by Herakles in one of his famous labors. In Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, he's also a young gay man, growing up with a mother who loves him but who cannot protect him from the sexual predations of his brother. Herakles--whom we know is Geryon's murderer--becomes, in Carson's telling, a charismatic young lover who will end up breaking Geryon's heart. All this is told in a "novel of verse," in a loping alternation of short and long lines that seems something like an awkward gait, perhaps the discomfortable rhythm of a young man who feels he is a monster.

Carson puts Geryon on a backpacking trip to South America, where he reconnects with Herakles in Buenos Aires, along with a kinder and more insightful man named Ancash, a Quechua-speaking Peruvian who forms a third point in this new love triangle. Together, the trio go off to Peru and the town of the flank of the volcano where Ancash is from. It's strongly suggested that Geryon's red skin makes him an associate of the volcano, perhaps even that a volcano somewhere in history or time has produced his red skin, and Carson quotes liberally from some of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, where she uses the volcano as a metaphor for the kind of rich inner turmoil that marks the human condition. Maybe that's it; maybe Geryon wears his turmoil on the outside. Maybe we all feel we wear our turmoil on the outside from time to time. I was expecting the story to end like the myth, with the literal death by Geryon at the hands of Herakles, but the ending is much more ambiguous, with the trio stopping to witness a bakery built into the side of the volcano to use the natural heat. Geryon is slain, perhaps, but not in the way we were expecting, and not in the way that the ancient Greek Stesichorus wrote.

Honestly, I thought this was fine. I thought the slippage between the monster and the man was well-done, but not exactly all that illuminating. The doubling up between realism and myth felt to me like an attempt to make a whole out of two two-spare parts, as did the doubling up between the narrative and the poetry, neither of which felt wholly convincing or wholly successful to me. Perhaps a more patient study would reveal more; after all, we're not really acculturated for novels in verse anymore, and that Carson made a popular work out of one in our day and age really is something of a miracle. 

The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

There was something wrong about these people. But perhaps, just as it is true of my love, they could not go on living except in the way that they do. If it is true that man, once born into the world, must somehow live out his life, perhaps the appearance that people make in order to go through with it, even if it is as ugly as their appearance, should not be despised. To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense undertaking before which one can only gasp in apprehension.

Japan, just after the end of the second World War. Kazuko is a young aristocrat in a world where the aristocracy has lost all meaning and prestige. Her father has recently collapsed and died, and her mother is increasingly ill. They are forced to move from Tokyo to the countryside, as if disappearing into the  wilderness. Her mother, though she retains in Kazuko's eyes the qualities of bearing and gentility that once marked the upper classes, seems to belong to yesterday's world, and her illness is a token of that world's vanishing. Meanwhile, her brother Naoji--their mother's favorite--reacts to the diminishment of the family's prestige by getting into alcohol and drugs. It's not that they are ashamed, really, only that each of them--Kazuko, mother, Naoji--feels increasingly ancillary in this Japan, which is already itself so transformed and diminished from what it had been.

Kazuko clings to her mother, desperate to keep the family intact as well as she can. At the same time, she has become obsessed with a dissolute artist and friend of her brother's named Uehara. Uehara is from another class entirely, and her relation to him is not so different from Naoji's; both attach themselves to the world that Uehara represents because they want to flee their own. More accurately, perhaps, Kazuko wishes to betray her class; by choosing Uehara, she turns her back on a life that only promises for her further vanishing and death. Her letters to Uehara go mostly unanswered until she hunts him down and spends a wholly unsatisfying, even repulsive, night with him. In her letters, she calls him "M. C."--my child, my comedian, even my Chekhov. Interestingly, Kazuko's cultural references all seem to be quite Western. She loves Chekhov and Shakespeare; she knows her Bible inside and out. Is it a sign of outwardness, of the noble class searching outside the world that has given it power and prestige for an intact culture? Or is it a sign of a cultural exchange that belongs to an older period, and was obliterated by the rise of Japanese nationalism and the war?

When--spoiler alert--Kazuko's mother dies of tuberculosis, everything falls apart. Naoji commits suicide, writing to Kazuko that his love for his mother was the only thing keeping him from doing it before. (His love for Kazuko, we understand, is not quite strong enough--or, rather, Naoji correctly intuits that Kazuko is strong enough, if only by bare inches, not to follow him into the grave.) Interestingly, this reflects something that Kazuko's mother had said after the death of her father and the retreat into the countryside: if not for Kazuko and Naoji, she simply would have stayed put, and died. It's easy to imagine the fragile family as a house of cards, where the removal of one sends the whole edifice tumbling. The title, The Setting Sun, is clearly in ironic contrast to Japan's identity as the "Land of the  Rising Sun," and it captures quite painfully an entire generation and class who feel at the very end of existence, for whom there is no tomorrow. Kazuko finds a small bit of hope in reading the writings of Rosa Luxemburg--again, looking to the West--whose fervor for revolution get mixed up with her attempt to ingratiate herself with Uehara. We get the sense that revolution and renewal are not to be found there--but neither, I think, does the book close the door on them completely. Whatever hope there is in the novel didn't keep Dazai from committing suicide a few years after the book's publication.

To Hell With Poets by Baqytgul Sarmekova

She put the pieces of dry dung into the sack, brought it to the house, opened the wood stove door, and emptied the sack into the firebox. My siblings and I had gathered the dung over the summer, often getting into fights with other kids. There was a story behind each piece of that dung. That thin whitish piece, dipped in diesel to make it ignite at once, had been produced by the cow with a broken horn that belonged to our neighbor Qambar. After finding old Qambar's cow eating the hay saved for our own cows, I chased it away, telling, "Botflies on you and blackleg too!" and every other curse I knew. When the wet flop she'd dropped as she walked away dried up in the sun, I picked it up and placed it against the wall of our cow pen. Yes, each piece of dung had a story like that.

In "The Black Colt," the story that opens Kazakh writer Baqytgul Sarmekova's collection To Hell With Poets, a man arranges a wedding for a longtime local bachelor, for which he is paid a fine black horse. He's never owned a horse before, but it becomes his pride and joy; no longer does he care for his many cows. But when the bachelor dies before the wedding, his brother comes to reclaim the horse. When the man demands the cost he paid in keeping the horse, he's paid by the brother--in horse feed. It's these little ironies, the kind that might happen all over the auls of the Kazakh steppe outside of where most literary eyes can see, that are the subject of To Hell With Poets.

An aul is a kind of fortified hillside village, as I understand it. Sarmekova's collection, which is more a collection of character sketches or vignettes than a collection of short stories, I think, goes back and forth from the aul to the city, whether Almaty or Astana, and the tension between the two is often at the book's center. The title story is about a naive young girl from the aul who dreams of being a poet (her poem is pretty good: "There's life in you, hard-shell egg. / Make the most of it. / In a moment, I'll smash you to pieces. / I'll have you over easy.") and who becomes caught in the whirlwind attentions of an older male poet from the city. Their tryst disillusions her from pursuing poetry; in a post-script, she has become a successful urban woman when she recognizes the former poet as her taxi-driver. The despair, the sense of inadequacy--which, it must be said, cannot entirely be blamed on the poet in the first story, whose attentions seemed genuine enough--are flipped around. The poet-taxi-driver looks at the now elegant woman, who is flipping him off, and thinks, "How could a fingernail be this long? Bright-red, as though dipped in blood, and pointed like a spear, the fingernail seemed to pierce his heart."

Overall, both book and stories have a slightness that prevents them from being truly memorable. But I appreciate the way they never try to do too much; "The Black Colt" is, even with its simple one-two-three plot, the most complex of them. Taken together, they offer a really fascinating glimpse into the tensions and contradictions of modern life in Kazakhstan. Which, by the way: with the addition of Kazakhstan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 104! I have to say, I really appreciate the work of Tilted Axis Press, which goes to such lengths to find translated literature from places not usually represented on American bookshelves.