Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson

Now the hours of darkness were as many as the hours of daylight; the sun passed through the constellation of the scales; and September's moon waned to a thin ghost of itself. And as the tides poured through the inlet race into the harbor, creaming with white ripplings over the rocks, and lapsed again to the sea from which they  came, they carried away day after day more of the small fish of the harbor. So there came a night when the flood tide stirred in the young mackerel Scomber a strange uneasiness, and on that night the ebb tide, running to the sea, drew him with it. With him went many of the young mackerel who had spent the late summer in the harbor, a school of several hundred cleanly molded young fish each longer than a man's hand. Now they had left behind the pleasant life of the harbor; until death should claim them their world would be open sea.

The ocean can be unsettling to human beings: an unindividuated sheet of water, rolling over the entire world. Yet the featureless surface of the ocean belies an entire world, with regions, ecosystems, communities, conflicts. Rachel Carson, perhaps best known today as the woman who successfully led the effort to ban DDT, was a great advocate for the natural world, and Under the Sea Wind shows why: not only did she have a compendious knowledge of the sea, its forests and creatures, but the skill of language that brings such a place alive to us, who find it otherwise strange and difficult to imagine. Under the Sea Wind tracks the life of the oceans between Cape Cod and the Virginia capes over the course of a single year, following the fish, birds, jellyfish, whales, and plankton that live and die there.

There are a couple things I found really impressive about Under the Sea Wind. First is Carson's skill in keeping the "story," such as it is, going, without it feeling tedious or repetitive. Though the book reveals how diverse the sea really is, let's be honest, there's only so many ways you can write that animal A tried to eat animal B but then ended up being eaten by animal C. But Carson's language keeps the cyclical processes of ocean life seeming fresh and new, turning them into the stuff that literature is made of: ambition, conflict, wandering.

The second thing is the tightrope of anthropomorphism that Carson walks throughout the book. There are humans in her picture of sea life--to ignore them would be dishonest, given the impact of the fishing industry, for example, on the enormous schools of mackerel that move off the capes--but they are just one species in a whole panorama. A bolder choice is the way she gives individual animals names--often taken from their Latinate genus or species name--to turn them into a kind of character, elevating them above the others of their species. Each section has a protagonist of sorts: Rhynchops, the black skimmer, Scomber, the plucky young mackerel trying to make his way in a dangerous world, Anguilla, the eel who begins to feel a mysterious pull to return from North America's rivers to the depths of the sea from which she has long been absent, there to breed and die. (I especially appreciated how this section complements Patrik Svensson's Book of Eels, which explores the persistent and still unsolved mystery of how eels reproduce.) Carson avoids making these animals too human; they never become "Under the Sea" style cartoons. But she does manage to bring their emotions up to a recognizably human level, and find a parallel between the kind of fear, wonder, or desire a fish might feel with that of a human being.

On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera

Almost all general histories of the lighthouse begin with Alexandria, or before--from the times of the beacons of the Celts--passing through the Tower of Hercules and the earliest medieval lighthouses in France, England, Italy, Spain, and China to the proliferation of lighthouses brought about by Fresnel in nineteenth-century France, and then the most modern ones of the twentieth century. In a few years, this history might include references to the last lighthouses, when GPS and computers have put an end to the need for them. I wonder if one day they will all be decommissioned, and if they will then return to being temples of fire dedicated to the sea, fetishes of the superstitious and seekers of esoteric knowledge, who will keep alive the legends of shipwrecks, lighthouse keepers, and the ghosts that surround them. Or if they will be (as seems their destiny) turned into hotels, museums, relics, for the amusement of millionaires, retired folk, archaeologists, historians, and the curious. Divested of their function, they are collectible objects. They now also have that attractive quality of ruins and decay. For melancholics, they are all the more beautiful.

When will the last boat arrive safely to port thanks to the beams of a lighthouse? Who will be the last lighthouse keeper in the world? Or could it be that the relationship between humans and the sea is so primordial that there will always be someone to switch on--using a button or some other future technology--a light for ships in distress or fishermen? Or perhaps they will shine out as temples or memorials to the thousands of people who lie at the bottom of the sea.

What does it mean to "collect" lighthouses? "Obsession," Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera writes, "is a form of mental collection." Traveling around to see lighthouses, and add them to one's mental collection, is "an attempt to satisfy the vain desire to possess with an immaterial, intangible form of possession, not unlike what one might feel toward a loved one." For Barrera, the attractions of lighthouses are many: they are stolid, impregnable, unchanging when compared with the changeable sea; they represent a kind of immutability of emotion or identity that is, for an anxious or adrift person, something to aspire to. Visiting the Blackwell Light on Manhattan's Roosevelt Island, Barrera imagines that she is "slowly transforming into a sealed tower." "I feel so sane," she writes, "that I must be losing my sanity."

On Lighthouses is arranged as a series of vignettes, each titled for a different lighthouse Barrera has visited: Yaquina Light in Oregon, Tapia Lighthouse in Spain, Goury Lighthouse in Normandy, Jeffrey's Hook--otherwise known as the Little Red Lighthouse--and Blackwell Light in Manhattan, Montauk Point at the end of Long Island. Each vignette mixes memoir, history, literature, and reflection in a way that reminded me of Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, though that book has the careful organization of an academic, and of someone who's come through the existential crisis explored in the book with a kind of resolution. On Lighthouses, by contrast, offers little change, much less resolution: whatever it is that Barrera grapples with, the limits are endemic to her methods--she writes eloquently, for example, about coming to terms with the many lighthouses she'll never "collect."

This book struck a chord with me because I'm a lighthouse-collector, too. I'm writing this from Ocracoke Island in North Carolina's Outer Banks, a short bike ride from a 200-year old lighthouse, a squat brick tower painted bright white, that is the second oldest in operation in the country. When I drive back to New York later this week, several other lighthouses will mark the stations of the journey: the barber-pole light at Cape Hatteras, the country's tallest, the striped light on Bodie Island, the distant tip of Cape Henry across Chesapeake Bay. Barrera's exploration of why she travels to these lighthouses seems right to me: they are discrete and countable, but inexhaustible; their verticality and commanding presence makes them visibly striking, even comforting; and their age makes one feel connected to history, to others. In reading about the New York-area lights, I felt the comforting presence of a fellow traveler, though what Barrera writes about the isolation of lighthouses, and the separation from the world one achieves by identification with them, struck me, too. (I can only assume that Barrera has yet to visit the lighthouses of the Outer Banks, and that once she makes the road trip a second volume is forthcoming.)

"When I visit lighthouses," Barrera writes, "when I read or write about lighthouses, I leave myself behind." This hardly seems true; it isn't true, only an expression of an attempted self-negation. But it's also true, I think, in the sense that the lighthouses, as with many places of great historical importance, invite us to enter into another understanding of time and place, one less shackled by the here and now. It leads Barrera to communion with Robert Louis Stevenson, whose grandfather built the first lighthouses along the dangerous Scottish coast, to Poe, Meville, Verne, and obviously Woolf, and to the lives of the many keepers who sacrificed their selves and sanity to protect the coasts. Even to the first lighthouse-builders, who kept towers of fire to propitiate the gods. As technology progresses and the need for lighthouses diminish, these layers of history become ever more important. Lighthouses become less utilitarian but more meaningful, landmarks on a geography of time and spirit.

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

I had expected to see the town of my mother's memories, of her nostalgia--nostalgia laced with sighs. She had lived her lifetime sighing about Comala, about going back. But she never had. Now I had come in her place. I was seeing things through her eyes, as she had seen them. She had given me her eyes to see. Just as you pass the gate of Los Colimotes there's a beautiful view of a green plain tinged with the yellow of ripe corn. From there you can see Comala, turning the earth white, and lighting it at night. Her voice was secret, muffled, as if she were talking to herself... Mother.

"And why are you going to Comala, if you don't mind my asking?" I heard the man say.

"I've come to see my father," I replied.

Juan Preciado makes his way to the town of Comala at the behest of his mother, who has just died. She has told him that he will find his father there, Pedro Paramo. Juan is aided by a horseman named Abundio, and takes shelter in the house of a woman named Eduviges. Eduviges is shocked to hear that it is Abundio who has guided him, because Abundio is dead. But then, of course, Eduviges turns out to be dead, too. Everyone in Comala is dead: it's a town full of ghosts. Some seem to know it, and others not, but each gives Juan a piece of the story of his father, Pedro Paramo. Some appear as visions, and some as voices; they speak to each other as well as to him, and soon it seems they even claim him, too, as one of the dead.

Being dead, ghosts have a poor sense of chronology. The story of Pedro Paramo unfolds with little regard to the order of the action, and one often finds oneself trying to remember who in the story is dead, and who is yet to die. (Does this part come after the death of the priest, Father Renteria? No, here he comes to administer last rites...) But when taken as a whole, the story becomes one of power and seduction: Pedro, the wealthy haciendero who takes over the land of Comala bit by bit, by violence and extortion. The murder of his father, and Pedro's bloody revenge; the death of his son--a vicious rapist--thrown from a horse. And of course, Pedro's many women, some of whom are seduced by his wealth, and some who really lust for him, and the one woman he truly loved, the doomed Susana. As Pedro's son, Juan fits into this story, too, but somehow over the course of the book he seems to fade away, becoming as ghostly as his interlocutors, and eventually being absorbed wholesale into the story of his father and disappearing.

It was interesting to read this book shortly after Carlos Fuentes' The Old Gringo; both touch on the revolution of Pancho Villa in Romantic and expressionist ways, though the books are wildly different. Don Pedro is exactly the kind of haciendero that Fuentes' General Arroyo despises, though he manages to buy off the Villistas by offering them provisions and support. The dangers in Pedro Paramo are metaphysical--death, memory, madness--rather than political. Yet both capture the way power relies on, is created by, great violence, and the way many lives can be swallowed up by the greed and malice of few men.

I'm not sure what to make of Pedro Paramo. It's a book that seems somehow both entirely haphazard and entirely minimalist, something hewn down to its most basic parts. It is lyrical and elegiac, and rejects straightforward kinds of storytelling for a patchwork method that reminds me the way a blurred image might come slowly into view. Latin American magic realists and surrealists seem to have loved it, and one can see how it plays an outsized influence on the Spanish language literature that emerges in the following few decades, Fuentes included. And it's really like no other book in the world, which seems to me one of the highest forms of praise you can give to a book. 

Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin

"You never use color?"

"I don't see the point."

I frowned, dubious. Sokcho was so colorful. He pointed to a scene of a snowy mountaintop with the sun high overhead. A few lines showing the outlines of the rocks, that was all. The rest of the page was blank.

"What matters is the light. It shapes what you see."

Looking again, I realized I didn't see the ink. All I saw was the white space between lines, the light absorbed by the paper, the snow bursting off the page, real enough to touch. Like a Chinese ideogram. I scanned other panels. The frames seemed to distort and blur, as though the main character was struggling to break free of their confines. Time expanded.

The narrator of Elisa Shua Dusapin's Winter in Sokcho lives in a resort town near the border between North and South Korea. During the summer, it bustles with people, but during the winter, it begins to show its seedier, emptier side. The narrator works at a hotel where her only patrons are Seoul residents who come to recover from their plastic surgeries in hiding--something her boyfriend, too, plans to do, and encourages her to do as well. This grim but routine life is interrupted when a French graphic novelist arrives at the hotel, considering setting his next work in Sokcho, but mostly looking for peace and quiet. In the night, the narrator sees him working at his graphic novel, a wordless epic in black-and-white, which he effaces with ink over and over again. Sometimes he even eats the pages. She finds herself drawn to him, both repelled by and attracted to the attention of his artist's eye, and agrees to show him around the empty tourist sites of Sokcho.

Winter in Sokcho is, in part, a novel about seeing: the narrator balks at others' (notably Korean?) obsession with plastic surgery, but again and again when her mother trains a judgmental eye on her and calls her thin, she eats until she's sick. She takes the graphic novelist, Yan Kerrand, to places that only tourists care about--like a viewpoint in the DMZ--but through his eyes she begins to see Sokcho in a new way, as an outsider might. At first she has trouble explaining her attraction to him, but eventually she realizes that she yearns for him to draw her, wanting to be seen by him, or anyone. The ambivalence with which she regards him expresses how difficult--but necessary--it is to be seen and known by another. His attraction to her is less explained; she seems as magnetic to him as he is to her, but what is it other than her willingness to show him around?

Kerrand is something of a cipher in the book, a mute and unappealing figure whose creative expression is marked by being wordless, colorless, and infrequent. (One of the strangest things about Winter in Sokcho, actually, is that a traditional novel about a graphic novelist seems by nature half-articulate, like something narrated from behind a curtain.) Honestly, neither of the characters seemed very appealing to me, both of whose main characteristics seem to be inarticulateness and driftlessness. The novella fails to come to a resolution when one is badly needed, I think, to justify its slightness and aloofness. It's a novella about new ways of seeing, but what's seen, in the end?

The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes

The mountains rose like worn, dark-skinned fists and the old man imagined the body of Mexico as a gigantic corpse with bones of silver, eyes of gold, flesh of stone, and balls hard as copper.

The mountains were the fists. He was going to pry them open, one after the other, hoping that sooner or later, like an ant scurrying along the furrowed palm, he would find what he was after.

Writer and satirist Ambrose Bierce traveled to Mexico at age 71 to witness first-hand the rebellion of Pancho Villa. He sent back a couple of dispatches, and then he disappeared forever. To this day no one knows for sure what happened to him. Carlos Fuentes' novel The Old Gringo is an imagined rendition of Bierce's journey that fills in the gaps, from his crossing of the border at El Paso to his death at the hands of a tempestuous general in Villa's army.

The old gringo, as he's called--the novel doesn't name him until a couple pages from the end--comes to Mexico because he wants to die. Having suffered the deaths of his two sons, one by suicide, and estrangement from his daughter, having become disillusioned with his satire and the journalism he performed at the behest of William Randolph Hearst, the old gringo has finished living. He insinuates himself into the company of General Tomas Arroyo, who has taken over the hacienda where he was born and chased away the wealthy landowners that brutalized him and the other peasant workers. Volunteering his services, he finds not the death he is looking for, but an unsought honor: his lack of a fear of death makes him the bravest man on the battlefield, and his experiences in the Civil War (they call him "Indiana General") make him invaluable. He convinces Arroyo to let him stay by shooting a clean hole through a peso.

Fuentes writes: "[E]ach of us has a secret frontier within him, and that is the most difficult frontier to cross because each of us hopes to find himself alone there, but finds only that he is more than ever in the company of others." For the old gringo, crossing into Mexico is crossing that inner frontier, not into exile and death, but toward a new version of himself, one where he can make new associations, new relationships. The novel is structured in a triangle, linking the old gringo with Arroyo and Harriet Winslow, a white American schoolteacher hired by the fleeing Miranda family to teach their children, and who has been stranded in the occupied hacienda. Harriet is convinced that she must not forsake the duty of her position--she's been paid in advance--and tries to educate and civilize the peasant men and women of the hacienda.

The old gringo's attitude toward Harriet vacillates between the lustful and the paternal; sometimes he looks at her and Arroyo and sees them as a son and daughter. Harriet, for her part, sees the old gringo as a substitute for her father, who ran off to live with a woman in Cuba, though she tells everyone he died there, his body lost and his grave at Arlington empty. The relationships between the three are amorphous and shifting, symbolically incestuous; if they are the old gringo's children, how does one read Arroyo's demand that a not-unwilling Harriet sleep with him to save the old gringo's life? There is something in this that connects to the fervor of Villa's revolution, and the way that old relationships in Mexico have begun to crumble and must be remade; the Mexican Fuentes is most convincing, I thought, when describing the suffering of Arroyo's ragtag bunch, and their passionate hope that the brutal hacienda system is close to destruction. In this way they reconstitute themselves--much is made of the symbolism of the hacienda ballroom, the only room which Arroyo leaves standing, which is lined with mirrors where the men, who have only seen their reflections in rivers and cisterns, can see themselves for the first time.

The Old Gringo was written at a level of abstraction I found grating. In its most literal elements--the description of the landscape, of Bierce riding into battle, the ruined hacienda and the stranded railcar in which Arroyo makes his camp--Fuentes' writing is fantastic. But I found the emotional and mental states of the characters overwrought in a Romantic way, untethered from the immediacy of the action: why does the old gringo regard Harriet as his daughter? How and why is she so attached to him? These questions have answers in the symbology and narrative structure of the story--he's the father in the empty tomb, which is literally what he becomes in the book's closing turns--but not narrative ones, or ones that get crowded out by time shifts and rhetorical questions. I suspect this is a book that gets better the second or third time you read it; it's certainly rich, and powerfully unique. I think I might try it again one day--maybe when I'm 71 and looking for another frontier to cross.

The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (trans. Brian Browne Walker)

Thirty spokes meet in a hollowed-out wheel;
the wheel won't work without the hole.
A vessel is molded form solid clay;
its inner emptiness makes it useful.
To make a room, you have to cut doors and windows;
without openings, a place isn't livable.
To make use of what is here,
you must make use of what is not.

I first read the Tao in 2008, after which I wrote what is easily the most embarrassing review on this entire blog. Lines like "[t]he lifestyle the Tao seems to suggest is one of letting the world pass you by, refusing to be either happy or sad about anything that happens because it's all transitory and pointless" abound; clearly what the world needed was a review of one of its oldest religious texts by a 24-year-old religious tourist who needed something short to read.

Now, at 38(!) and hopefully wiser, I was planning to delete the review when Chris recommended I reread and re-review the Tao. I'd been planning to read it again for some time, so I did, and what a different a decade makes. In the intervening 12 years, I've completely reworked my own faith and become an amateur but ardent reader of philosophical and theological texts. The Tao this felt wise, relevant, sometimes mystifying, but never passive or pointless. The interplay of the various verses(?) in the Tao is essential and instructive, and most of the issues I had on a first reading would've been resolved if I'd approached the text carefully and thoughtfully.

Taken as a whole, the Tao presents a view of the world, and a way of being in it, that seems immensely practical, if sometimes difficult. It emphasizes engagement and radical resistance not by being alienated but by being detached and refusing to absolutize the systems and labels we create to justify our lives. In 2008, I objected to this:

Throw away holiness and wisdom,
and people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won't be any thieves.

But reading the text again, it's hard to understand why I couldn't see the clear couplings with verses like this, which could've been written in 1982, 1996, or 2016:

When people lose sight of the Tao,
codes of morality and justice are created.
When cleverness and strategies are in use,
hypocrites are everywhere.
When families forego natural harmony,
parents becomes pious and children become dutiful.
When the nation is reigned by darkness,
patriotic advisors abound.

There's still plenty I don't understand; the Tao has inspired meditation and exegesis for centuries. But I was heartened to be able to see the wisdom, even if my context obscures my view. In Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal describes a vision of Jesus and Lao Tzu appearing before him. Jesus is the young rabble-rouser, bursting with revolution and dreams; Tzu, ancient, has had those illusions stripped away and emanates an essential solidity, an awareness of the world as it is, not as a dream of what could be. Tzu's detachment isn't read as passivity but rather a radical acceptance that rejects physical and metaphysical violence in interest of self-divestment, to ends greater than one's own self or causes. As such, he finds peace in chaos:

The sage is as chaotic a muddy torrent.
Why "chaotic as a muddy torrent?"
Because clarity is learned by being
patient in the presence of chaos.
Tolorating disarray, remaining at rest,
gradually one learns to allows the muddy water
to settle and proper responses to reveal themselves.

Makes sense to me.

Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire by William T. Kavanaugh

I actually bought this book thinking it was written by John F. Kavanaugh, who wrote the excellent Following Christ in a Consumer Society. I was wrong (the last names aren't even spelled the same) but I think the mistake was understandable, given the similar themes and titles. But where John comes at consumerism from the perspective of idolatry and aggregation of goods, William takes almost the opposite tack: the thrust of his argument is that American consumerism isn't really about hoarding--rather it's about the process of consumption itself. I was frequently reminded of the old Christmas bromide that the wait for the gifts is better than opening them:

In consumer culture, we plunge ever more deeply into the world of things. Dissatisfaction and fulfillment cease to be opposites, for pleasure is not in possessing objects, but in their pursuit. The dynamic is not that of inordiate attachment to material things, but an irony and detatchment from all things.

This isn't a healthy detatchment as is taught in ascetic Christianity and Buddhism. Rather it's a detatchment more akin to Marx's alienation--we are alienated from the products (and people) we consume because we lack a real desire to possess the object at all. Far from being a people that keep things forever, Americans are instead increasingly familiar with the idea of planned obsolescence and disposability. And even if corporations weren't in on the grift, who really wants to be using last year's iPhone?

Kavanaugh structures the book around four paradoxical  concepts undergirding consumerism: freedom/unfreedom, detatchment/attachment, global/local, and scarcity/abundance. Each one is treated in a few pages and is then contrasted with a spiritual practice or theological concept: positive freedom via Augustine,  Christian community, Balthassar's "concrete universal", and the Eucharist.

Every chapter is worthwhile: Augustine's concepts of  "freedom to" counterpoints beautifully with Thomas Friedman's "freedom from"; persistent Christian community as an antidote to the consume/replace cycle of consumerism; the Eucharist as a model of abundance (one is reminded of Gerald Manly Hopkins "for all this nature is never spent"). The only contrast that didn't fully work for me was the "concrete universal", which I suspect I didn't fully understand. But that chapter also introduced a concept that I know I'll be thinking about for some times, that most attempts to globalize things--products, "diversity", religion--are actually a way of homogenizing them and stripping them of what is unique:

The mobility and universalization of transnational corporations has had a profound effect on culture. It is possible to drive from one coast of the United States to the other and eat the same food, stay at the same motel, shop at the same mall, hear the same music on the radio, hear the news delivered in the same accent, see the same cars, see the same clothes, and hear the same narrow range of political opinions all the way from Florida to Oregon, from California to Maine... I have heard "Disco Duck" in Yugoslavia and eaten at a Pizza Hut in Chile.

A diversity program where the skin tones are different but the culture stays the same; religions where a God of some sort is a constant but truth claims must be restricted to the most anodyne and agreeable, and steakhouses with identical menus but different copyrighted names for the dishes: as Hank Hill would say, "you're not making [the world] better, you're making [the world] worse. Ultimately such flattening erases any edges that can be picked at to escape the suffocating homogeneity of the modern world, and with no loose ends to pull, what is there to do but consume, replace, consume?

The most effective theological move in the book is the Eucharist--the infinite yet distinct body of Christ--as a model of abundance, one that doesn't simply state that abundance is an achievable state for some but actually overthrows the idea of scarcity altogether. I was strongly persuaded by the argument that Kavanaugh puts forth, that scarcity is manufactured to produce need and stimulate the borderline-metaphysical market:

It is not simply that the market encourages an erotic attachment toward things, not persons. It is that the market story establishes a fundamentally individualistic view of the human person. The idea of scarcity  assumes that the normal condition for the communication of goods it through trade: to get something, one must  relinquish someting else. The idea of scarcity implies that goods are not held in common, that the consumption of goods is essentially a private experience. The idea of scarcity establishes the view that no one has enough.

"The idea of scarcity establishes the view that no one has enough." What a powerful statement, and what an indictment of a nation where most of the populace lay claim to "life more abundant" while simultaneously affirming the sacred nature of  commerce, the divine right of billionaire oligarchs, the destruction of the literal planet to drive endless growth (but only for the few) and the essential rightness of a world where millions starve while we consume more and more and more.

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

In the year I turned fifteen, I felt more unhappy than I had ever imagined anyone could be. It wasn't the unhappiness of wanting a new dress, or the unhappiness of wanting to go to cinema on a Sunday afternoon and not being allowed to do so, or the unhappiness of being unable to solve some mystery in geometry, or the unhappiness at causing my dearest friend, Gwen, some pain. My unhappiness was something deep inside me, and when I closed my eyes I could even see it. It sat somewhere--maybe in my belly, maybe in my heart; I could not exactly tell--and it took the shape of a small black ball, all wrapped up in cobwebs. I would look at it and look at it until I had burned the cobwebs away, and then I would see that the ball was no bigger than a thimble, even though it weighed worlds. At that moment, just when I saw its size and felt its weight, I was beyond tears. I could only just sit and look at myself, feeling like the oldest person who had ever lived and who had not learned a single thing. After I had sat this way for a while, to distract myself I would count my toes; always it came out the same--I had ten of them.

Annie John is a young girl coming of age on the island of Antigua. As a child she clings to her mother, but as she grows older, as they often do, tensions flare. Annie goes to school, where she becomes gifted, popular, and smug; she grows close to a girlfriend named Gwen, and though Annie does not perhaps have the vocabulary to articulate it, we understand her ardor for Gwen is romantic, and then, as puberty continues its march, sexual. Annie grows rebellious; stealing things and hiding them under the house--setting up a comic and intense moment when her mother crawls beneath the house to root out her stash of illicit marbles--doing things to flout her mother simply because she can. She briefly drops Gwen for the companionship of a "wild" girl who doesn't seem to bathe, and though she barely understands her own attraction to her, we can see that it stems from the same impulse as the stealing and the marbles, the desire to have what is unorthodox, outside the limits one's parents have drawn around their existence.

Annie John is separated into titled sections that work both on their own, as short stories, and as pieces of the larger whole. The first, "Figures in the Distance," begins with the line: "For a short while during the year I was ten, I thought only people I did not know died." Young Annie yearns to see death, which, though she lives across from the cemetery, has been invisible to her. She goes to funerals uninvited; she is overjoyed when a girl in her class she doesn't know very well kicks the bucket. There's something counterintuitive, yet perfect, about this beginning: a coming of age book that begins with death. It makes sense, doesn't it, the thought that a process of growing up begins with the first understanding that the process leads toward this particular end? Understanding death, after all, is the shedding of our very first kind of innocence.

One thing that Annie John does very well is depict the way that coming of age is a process of separating oneself from one's parents. Annie's father is a rather distant figure, much older than her mother, and who seems to live a life aloof in his workshop rather than at home. Annie grows up both with and against the figure of her mother; she describes her first sense of separation, or disidentification, when her mother scolds Annie for desiring a dress made of the same pattern as her own. Eventually, she tells Annie, she'll need to become a person of her own rather than an imitation of her, but these are words that will rebound her. As she grows and becomes more headstrong, Annie finds herself hating her mother. What Annie John understands, I think, is that this loathing comes from something other than a place of reason. Yes, her mother can be strict, but more often she is loving. It isn't enough--becoming an adult means revolting, in a way that is secretive and inscrutable even to us, against the people who gave us life, and who hang over us with their obligations of honor and love. Annie John treats this with an attitude that's neither overly cynical nor overly sentimental. Though Annie comes to a kind of partial reconciliation with her mother, she still ends the book by embarking on a steamer headed to England, a place where she can get away from her mother once and for all, and create a new self.

Last year I made a resolution to read more widely from international fiction. Before this I'd never read a book or a novelist from Antigua & Barbuda--now my list of countries read is up to 56.

The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott

Then, I lamented to myself, if your judgment is poor you fall in love with those who could not possibly love you. If romance of the past has done you any harm, you will not be able to hold on to love when you do attain it; your grasp of it will be out of alignment. Or pity or self-pity may have blunted your hand so that it makes no mark. Back you fly to your perch, ashamed as well as frustrated. Life is almost all perch. There is no nest; and no one is with you, on exactly the same rock or out on the same limb.

An unsuccessful American writer, Alwyn Tower, is visiting his cousin Alexandra at her house in France. Without warning, two additional visitors arrive, an Irish couple named Larry and Madeleine Cullen. Alwyn takes an immediate interest in this mercurial pair, who seem fairly unhappy with each other. Larry is a large and oafish man who resents his wife's many passions; we learn over the course of an abortive dinner that they have no fixed abode, but travel around indulging in Madeleine's interests, one of which seems to be funding violent Irish rebels. Another is the peregrine falcon--a pilgrim hawk, in the terminology of the time--that sits on her arm.

Alwyn is as fascinated by the bird, whose name is Lucy, as he is by the Cullens. He watches intently as the bird struggles against the jessups that keep it tied to her wrist, as it's hooded to keep it from seeing, as it feeds on half a pigeon provided by Alex's servant. Larry, for one, openly hates the bird, and after a drinking binge, Alwyn watches as he sneaks out into the garden and cuts its leash as it feeds, hoping, perhaps, it will fly away forever. (Seeing Larry flash a pocketknife, Alwyn thinks he is about to witness bird murder.) Alwyn, with a writer's eye for detail, sees the way in which Lucy has become the focal point for the stresses and tensions that lie beneath the surface of the Cullens' marriage.

In his introduction to the book, novelist Michael Cunningham unpacks the way the bird acts as symbol of wildness and captivity, the way that the Cullens have domesticated each other in violation, perhaps, of some natural inclination or passion that is caged by the orthodoxies of marriage and polite society. To me, though, The Pilgrim Hawk is a book about the folly of symbolism and the failure of analogy. No sooner does Alwyn make one "reading" of the falcon, and thus of the Cullens, than he is surprised by some unseen facet of their character he'd yet to notice. But the bird is only a bird, it does what birds do, and its nature is wholly unconnected to the character of its owners. As Alwyn makes more and more writerly judgments, it seems to me that his whole project--an investigation into this mysterious couple, which seems borne out of boredom more than anything else--is suspect, and that true knowledge of people is, if not impossible, difficult and painstaking to obtain. The bird can't really act as a key. It acts as a bird.

My February project is to read only short books--books under 200 pages. The Pilgrim Hawk is barely a novel; maybe it stretches the definition of a novella. Though it ends with a bit of flash, and skirts the possibility of violence, it's really not much more than an amusing anecdote. I found myself interested, like Alwyn, in the bird, but not so much in the couple, whose eccentricities and conflicts are, by the very nature of the book, occluded from view. 

Hoarders by Kate Durbin

The hoarding got worse when I got stressed, when I was going through a marital separation I got emotionally attached to some stuff and I wouldn't let anybody throw away black funeral dress

When things are good I save the vacuum cleaner dust rows of jars and bottles with handwritten labels, all filled with dust

When things are going bad, I have this good moment set in time that I can sprinkle around, and it shifts the energy back to good mason jar filled with dust, labeled CHRISTMAS 2004

Kate Durbin's Hoarders presents fifteen character sketches, all of people who have appeared on the A&E program Hoarders. Each sketch is comprised of only two elements: lines spoken by the hoarder, and images of what is hoarded, sometimes complemented by images of the hoarder themselves. What sets the sketches apart is the way these two elements are combined, smashed together into a single line of poetry or something like it. Often Durbin will chop off the end of the line and let the item fill the gap, as if suggesting that the stuff is a kind of expression, filling in where words fail the hoarders, capturing the deep longings that drive them to hoard and which cannot in any other fashion be expressed. Sometimes this method results in brittle humor ("My daughter came in and said if you don't fix this I'm going to call the authorities, put grandma in pink Barbie lunch pail") and sometimes in deep pathos ("My hoarding has caused a terrible rift between me and my American Girl doll with a destroyed face").

With these scanty tools, it's impressive how Hoarders manages to produce in each sketch a unique portrait; the hoarders emerge as quite different from one another, both in their methods and their justifications. Noah and Allie are a couple whose co-dependence and bibliomania have filled their house with thousands of books; Chuck hoards his own paintings of his wife who left him; Gary hoards plants because "When I see things grow, I feel like God." Some of the sketches are incredibly unsettling, like that of Alice, unable to care for the dozens of cats she takes in--Durbin's camera pans to a kitten's corpse--or Hannah, whose apartment is literally covered in shit.

But Hoarders allows us to see also the patterns between the sketches. Many of the hoarders talk about unsuccessful relationships, their lives marred by jealousy and cruelty; the stuff they collect begins to seem like an attempt to create an attachment to things that will not abandon them. Many of them speak lucidly about their hoarding, admitting that it has damaged their relationships with other people, that it keeps them close to illness, poverty, danger. They are overwhelmed by their own compulsions, but helpless in the face of them. Many seem like victims of a particular American disease, the need to possess and consume.

The strangest thing about the book, perhaps, is that it's produced from watching a television show, rather than conducting interviews (which is sort of what I thought the case was before I looked it up). It makes one wonder whether the project reflects some of the prurience that seems inherent in the television show. One of the sketches is of Dorothy, from Towanda, Kansas; Dorothy collects videotapes of hundreds and hundreds television shows. The last line of her section is: "I couldn't possibly watch them all if I sat down and started." Reading the whole book in one sitting, like bingeing a whole season of Hoarders, made me wonder if the difference between her and the rest of us is less vast that 

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.

In the early twentieth century, two theories emerged from the world of physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. They are, in very crude and reductive terms, descriptions of what happens to the world at scales that are very large and very small, respectively. Planets curving spacetime, electrons existing in numerous possible states at once. Both of them revolutionized the way we understand the reality in which we live, and many of the same names were involved in developing them both, but they also confronted us with the limits of our own understanding. Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World is a quasi-fictional novel about the geniuses that ushered in these new sciences, and were confronted by these limits.

The first section, "Prussian Blue" is almost entire non-fictional. (In fact, while reading it, I sort of marveled at the assertion on the book's jacket that it combines fact and fiction, assuming that the fiction was extremely well concealed.) This section is about cyanide, a compound that makes up both the brilliant paint color that gives the section its title, and the poisonous gas that the Nazis pumped into the chambers of the concentration camps. It's a meditation on the way that atrocity and progress often go hand in hand, and it slips effortlessly from place to place and moment to moment, finding the hidden connections between unlikely subjects: Fritz Haber, Napoleon Bonaparte, the destruction of the North American bison. "Prussian Blue" sets the tone for the book as a whole, which plays fast--but not loose--with history.

It also sets the tone for the next section, "Schwarzschild's Singularity," about the physicist who discovers the existence of black hole. When he makes his discovery, Schwarzschild is at the German Army's Russian front in World War I, suffering from a crippling autoimmune disorder called pemphigus. Illness and war are burdens that fall on nearly all of the geniuses collected in Labatut's book; Heisenberg, we'll discover, suffers from disfiguring allergies, Schrodinger from tuberculosis that leaves him confined to a sanatorium for years. Like these two, Schwarzschild comes to his discoveries nearly by pure mathematics, rather than experimentation or observation, and like them discovery comes mysteriously, almost as epiphany. And like them, Schwarzschild is haunted by the implications of his discovery. These black holes, if Schwarzschild's calculations are correct, are rapacious voids that crush whatever comes into their path, even light. They are encircled by an invisible line past which annihilation is mathematically certain, and from which not even information can escape; it cannot, in any real sense, be known. For Schwarzschild, the black hole finds its analogs in his open sores, and in visions of Europe heading for cataclysm: 

If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will--millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space--unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually taking place in the Fatherland. Courant tried to appease him; he said that he saw no signs of the apocalypse Schwarszchild feared, and that surely there would be nothing worse than the war they were mired in. He reminded Schwarzschild that the human soul was a greater mystery than any mathematical enigma, and that it was unwise to project the findings of physics into such far-flung realms as psychology. But Schwarzschild was inconsolable. He babbled about a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world, and he lamented that there was nothing to do about it. Because the singularity sent forth no warnings.

The center of the book, however, is the title piece, which tells the story of the figures at the center of the dispute over quantum mechanics: de Broglie, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrodinger. As the book progresses, its fictional elements come to the forefront; the physical and intellectual torments of Heisenberg and Schrodinger seem almost entirely invented. Though these two are rivals, they share the torments of Schwarzschild: the sickness, the fear of war, the fear of the limits that emerge from their calculations. In the sanatorium, Schwarzschild falls in love with a tuberculosis-ridden teenager who shares his passion for Buddhist scripture, and there he devises his famous wave equation to describe the nature of subatomic particles. The wave function is strange; it seems to describe another world, or a number of them, yet Schrodinger remains sure that the subatomic world can be described and predicted just as the mechanical one can.

It's Heisenberg who discovers the truth: Schrodinger's wave equation describes the electron's numerous possible states, which it occupies simultaneously, only "choosing" one of these possibilities when it is measured by human observation. (Physicists: you can let me know what's wrong with my description in the comment section below.) What's more, there is a limit to what you can simultaneously observe about it; if you collapse the wave function, determine its position, you can not know its velocity; if you determine its velocity, you cannot know its position. What Heisenberg demonstrated is that there is a fundamental limit to how much we can understand about the world--not just an experimental or mechanical limit, but a fundamental one, baked into the very fabric of the universe. Like Schwarzschild, he too is tortured by the implications of this, a science that has led not to understanding but the knowledge of what cannot be understood.

Heisenberg makes these discoveries when, in one of the book's most remarkable passages, he's forced to drink a glass of absinthe by knifepoint by a bar patron who insists that scientists like him have led the world to be impossible to understand. He wants the scientist, too, to be disoriented; ironically, it is this flight of drunkenness and hallucination--complete with a vision of the horrors of nuclear war--that leads Heisenberg to shake the possibility of a knowable world from its pedestal. The limit that Schwarzschild finds in the deepest reaches of impossible space, Heisenberg discovers at the smallest and most fundamental levels of reality as we live it.

When We Cease to Understand the World shows, better than anything I've ever read, the true size and scope of the revolution the study of physics brought to the world in the early 20th century. It draws a parallel between these momentous revelations and the wars that twice brought Europe into ruin, another place at which our understanding founders. Its methods--mixing fact and fiction without marking the boundaries between--seem of a piece with its subject, as if suggesting that where knowledge and measurement falter, only intuition and imagination can bridge the gap. It's a book that brings not just genius, but the paradox at the heart of reality, down to a human scale.

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

I entertained an incredible scenario where Ninomiya and his friends had somehow forgotten all about me.

When summer was over, I would how up at school to find their memories of me erased. My arrival would provoke no feeling or emotion, nothing. Something would have happened to them over the break. they would be entirely different people, no longer interested in me at all. I knew that it was cruel to be so optimistic, but, in my solitude, I couldn't resist the urge and spent entire days basking in idiotic fantasies, sometimes verging on prayer. The longer I stayed in the house the more that everything at school felt like a fragment of some story I had stumbled upon when I was young. As if none of that had anything to do with who I had become.

The narrator of Mieko Kawakami's Heaven is mercilessly bullied at school. The bullying is not just name-calling, not just mental, but physical: his tormentors force him to eat chalk, then clean up his own vomit. They beat him again and again but somehow never leave marks. In one horrible scene, they place a torn volleyball over his head and treat him like a human soccerball. The narrator--whom they call "Eyes" because of his lazy eye--submits to this, because he knows that things will only be worse for him if he protests, or fights back. One day, when he finds a note pasted under his desk by someone wanting to be his friend, he thinks it's another cruel joke. But as it turns out, it's Kojima, a girl who is also bullied, who seeks him out, seeing a kindred spirit.

His budding friendship with Kojima transforms the narrator's life. Though they never speak at school, their letters, and their secret meetings, become a bright spot in the misery of his tortured life. Kojima explains that the things that make her the target of bullies--she rarely washes, is dirty and smells bad--are meant to be "signs" of the life of poverty she once led with her father, before her mother remarried a rich man. For Kojima, there is a secret and profound meaning in the way that she and the narrator are bullied. Their weakness means something, and their refusal to fight back has a kind of moral force that gives them superiority over their tormentors. In contrast, one of the narrator's bullies, a laconic boy named Momose, tells him that there is no meaning in any of it: people do what they have the will and the power to do, and no more. At the novel's climax, when the two friends are discovered and the bullying reaches a pitch of newfound intensity and danger, the narrator begins to suspect that these two attitudes are somehow two sides of the same coin. That is, perhaps they are both ways of justifying the unjustifiable, and extending it.

Heaven is not for the faint of heart. At its core are some of the oldest questions: why do people suffer? Why do people inflict suffering? The violence of the novel is vivid and unflinching; it is at times a difficult read. It made me think of Toni Morrison's assertion in the introduction to The Bluest Eye that there is no way to write the book from the point of view of the tortured Pecola, as well as Dorothee Soelle's chilling assertion that there are kinds of suffering that are beyond human expression and explanation. That the narrator can give his story suggests, in some small way, that there is an escaped hatch, and forebodingly, it is difficult to imagine the novel written from the perspective of the increasingly haggard and paranoid Kojima. We may be touched by the tender friendship between the two, but even this is not inviolable, and there is no guarantee that a release for one might be a release for both. This might be the most troubling aspect of a troubling novel.

Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark

The other servants fall silent as Lister enters the room.

'Their life,' says Lister, 'a general mist of error. Their deaeth, a hideous storm of terror.--I quote from The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, an English dramatist of old.'

'When you say a thing is not impossible, that isn't quite to say it's possible,' says Eleanor, who, though younger than Lister, is his aunt. She is taking off her outdoor clothes. 'Only technically is the not impossible, possible.'

'We are not discussing possibilities today,' Lister says. 'Today we speak of facts. This is not the time for inconsequential talk.'

"And Alexander wept, for there were no more Sparks to conquer." That's right: after 22 books, I have officially read every novel Muriel Spark ever wrote. I have loved reading them, these tight little performances of control. They are all quite different, but no author could be more unmistakable; each and every one is a meditation in some way on predestination and power. They are frequently cruel and often funny, usually blackly or bloodily so. They are somehow simultaneously undercooked and overstuffed, drawn down to what seems like their most essential details, and yet why each detail is essential often remains elusive, like an extra piece of a completed puzzle. They are full of surprises, and I'm sorry that I'll never be surprised by another one.

What kind of Spark was this to end on? Not to Disturb is certainly not the worst of her books (that's The Finishing School), but it is probably the slightest. It takes place over the course of a single night, in the "backstairs" of a grand English manor, among a group of servants awaiting for their masters, the Baron and Baroness. The head servant, Lister, seems to know exactly what will go down: the Baron and the Baroness will arrive separately, and so will their secretary, Victor Passerat, and they will convene inside the library, where the Baron will give orders that they are not to be disturbed. The Baron will shoot the Baroness and the secretary, who, it is suggested, is her lover. The photographer and writer the servants have hired for the occasion will write it all down in a manner that is salacious, yet flattering to the servants themselves. They will option the story as books and films, in which they will play themselves, or perhaps each other.

All this is more or less what happens. The reader waits on a conflict, some unpredictable wrench, that never comes. There are complications, yes, as when the Reverend arrives to check on the Baron's mad brother, who is kept hidden away in the attic. Quick-thinking Lister has the dotty Reverend marry the brother with pregnant Heloise (who is hilariously unashamed of her inability to determine which of a dozen men is the father), ensuring that she will inherit the Baron's vast fortune. But this is ingenuity, or perhaps luck, and not conflict; everything happens as Lister says it will, and the characters are shuffled happily off the stage at the end of this very short book, having encountered nothing to stop them on the way to riches and fame.

I think what I liked best about Not to Disturb is the canny inversion of wealth and power the servants represent. In this book, it is Lister and the others who hold the Godlike power of predestination. It's almost beside the point to ask how Lister knows the evening will go exactly as he says it does. He's Spark's co-writer; and the pieces fall into place like he says they will because she's the one that places them. Like I said, all of Spark's books are about predestination in way or another, figured in the power of the author herself, but instead of writing about a character who fights against it, like the suicide of The Driver's Seat, Not to Disturb is about someone who happily collaborates in the arrangement. This works because of Lister's social station; the idea of a servant dictating the life of his master is one that provides the pleasure of busted social hierarchies. It's nice to see the lowly get their way.

As brief as it is, Not to Disturb has its share of the extraneous elements that make Spark's novels so enduringly fascinating and slippery. What are we to make of the fact that Lister has a flirtatious and semi-incestuous relationship with his younger aunt, Eleanor? Or the fact that the walls of the great house are lined with hundreds of only the smallest paintings? Looking back now, I've come to see these details as reminders that power doesn't need justification; if God can construct a world that is so paradoxical and strange, Muriel Spark can fill the wall with miniatures; to say that our lives are predestined is not to say they make sense, or have a purpose, or anything like that. The strangest detail in Not to Disturb, actually, is a literal act of God: a lightning bolt that kills the secretary Passerat's two friends, who've been skulking around the house all night, locked inside the gate but barred from the house. Lister describes them as minor characters, irrelevant to the plot he's either created or described, and Spark's lightning bolt proves him right. And that's the scary thing: who can say whether they are a minor character in real life?

White Noise by Don DeLillo

The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings. We weren't sure how to react. It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low, packed with chlorides, benzines, phenols, hydrocarbons, or whatever the precise toxic content. But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event, like the vivid scene in the switching yard or the people trudging across the snowy overpass with children, food, belongings, a tragic army of the dispossessed. Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious. It is surely possible to be awed by the thing that threatens your life, to see it as a cosmic force, so much larger than yourself, more powerful, created by elemental and willful rhythms.

As Jack Gladney and his family move slowly through traffic, having been ordered to evacuate their homes after the accidental release of a black cloud of toxic chemicals, he looks into a furniture store and sees families inside shopping. He marvels for a moment at how different their understanding is than his own. Who's to say whose reaction is the right one? Which of them has the correct information and the correct analysis? Now, it's been at least fifteen years since I last read White Noise, which I know because there's no review for it on this blog. But it seemed almost serendipitous to me to pick this novel up again at this particular point in time: who hasn't had the experience, during the COVID pandemic, of looking into a crowded bar or restaurant and thinking, What the fuck are those people doing? Oh, right: there are lots of people who are in the bar looking out. They have different information, a different analysis.

I'd like to write about this more at length sometime, but I was struck by how much "The Airborne Toxic Event," the middle section of White Noise, resonates with the world during COVID. The crisis is different, but the reactions are the same: the fear, the need for decisive authority, the safety of information. White Noise is, perhaps more than anything, a book about information. See how Jack's friend Murray, a visiting professor at the same college, sits for hours with Jack's children watching television, saying that it's full of data. But data that suggests what? Jack is awash in information, but to what end? Every few pages, he overhears a fragment of a sentence from the television or radio shorn from context, useless. In the end, even the body becomes a site of information generation, as Jack becomes increasingly paranoid about the "seed of death" the Toxic Event has apparently planted in his body. He searches himself for symptoms, wondering if, when he feels them, they are invented or real. He asks, "Is a symptom a sign, or the thing itself?" Anyone who has opened the pickle jar to test their sense of smell or wondered about their scratchy throat these past few years must recognize that feeling. There is so much information, from within and without, but nothing can be discerned.

The final section of the novel, "Dylarama," is about the one thing that is certain: death. Discovering that his wife Babette has been taking part in an underground clinical trial for a pill that promises to rid one of the fear of death, he becomes desperate to track down the shady pillmaker who supplied it. I found this section as terrifying as I did fifteen-plus years ago, maybe more so, given that I'm fifteen years closer to my own death. You can't do anything about dying, and what White Noise suggests is that you can't do anything about the fear of death, either. The Information Age provides no answers, and neither does modern consumer culture, although it does provide a very funny scene where Jack approaches a kind of ecstasy by going on a shopping binge.

White Noise is funny. It's way funnier than it has any right to be, being so bleak. I loved the conversations Jack has with his family, each awash in its own kind of misinformation, whether about "Sunny Muslims," which are confused with Korean "Moonies," or the "sun's corolla." Perhaps more than any other writer--including Pynchon, who tries harder--DeLillo understands the absurdity endemic to life in America's late era, its foolish jargon, its inherent falseness and insincerity. Time hasn't dulled the acerbic nature of the novel at all; though it was published too early to reflect the true "Information Age," it seems almost prophetic in it vision of an America awash in bits and bytes of useless knowledge, contextless words and images. What's most remarkable about White Noise, though, is not how perfectly it captures a particularly timely spirit, but how something timeless--that fear of death--is revealed beneath all the--well, "white noise." White Noise might be the most hypermodern novel, but it's also one that paradoxically understands that some things never change, that there is something fundamental, even primeval, in human nature that cannot be changed.