A Turn in the South by V. S. Naipaul

Satan and God fighting for Paula's soul, Paula herself not responsible for the movements of her passion, helpless, capable only of choosing salvation and asking God to reveal his will: a medieval idea of chaos, and the solitude and helplessness of men, and the necessity of salvation. But this was not set in a medieval world of plague and disease and deprivation, the arbitrariness of the sovereign and the humility of the poor. We were in a town of the Research Triangle; and the theme of this culture was abundance and choice, the paramountcy of the individual (if only as consumer), with the beauty and luxury and sensual satisfactions as imminent possibilities for all.

In 1985, fifteen years before he won the Nobel Prize but nearly as many since the publication of A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul traveled through the American South. Though Naipaul is best remembered for his fiction now, he spent nearly as much time writing travelogues, first of the West Indies, then India, and then among Islamic states in Among the Believers. But the South presented a special challenge for Naipaul, who wrote that America "cannot be alien in the simple way an African country is alien. It is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection." And yet, casually inspect, Naipaul does: in metropolitan Atlanta, genteel Charleston, deep swamps and bottomland in Tallahassee and Jackson, and in the up-and-coming cities of the New South, Nashville and Raleigh.

A Turn in the South made me rethink a lot of things, not least among them Naipaul himself. For someone with a reputation as a crank and a bully, Naipaul comes off in A Turn in the South as remarkably open and empathetic. He lets people talk and talk, guiding conversation in only the subtlest of ways, and though perhaps it is only thanks to the writerly tactic of hiding his own questions in narrative voice while faithfully recording the responses of his interlocutors, the effect is of someone reserving judgments: a listener. Sometimes this is frustrating, as when Naipaul interviews an archconservative pastor in Elizabeth City, NC who calls himself a "Jesse-crat" after notorious senatorial douchebag Jesse Holmes, or any number of old white folks who perform paternalistic sadness at the degradation of Black life post-segregation. But it's a gift to get people to say what they probably know they ought not to say, and there's no doubt that in doing so Naipaul really does reveal something at the heart of Southern life. He gets more out of "ordinary people" than he does the black politicos of Atlanta, who are too cagey to stray from their talking points, or Eudora Welty, who is summoned for two paragraphs to talk about the long-gone fad for fur hats.

Naipaul really does empathize with white "rednecks"--a word that's more or less new to him--and with the Black Southerners he meets. Fascinatingly, that empathy seems to emerge from Naipaul's own Caribbean identity, which colors everything he sees in the South. Naipaul makes careful and articulate distinctions between the two regions of the New World, noting, among other things, the crucial lack of a white laborer class after the collapse of slavery and colonialism in Trinidad. "The possibilities" for a Black American, he writes, "were far greater than those of a West Indian. But there could be no easy movement forward for the mass; they had lived through too much; the irrationality of slavery and the years after slavery had made many irrational and self-destructive." And yet, when he writes that the culture of the South is defined by loss and by grief, one hears the echoes of his novels, in which colonial subjects struggle to forge an identity unchained by the weight of history: "The grief was special and was like religion; it would last beyond the decline of the nineteenth century empires, beyond the idea of empire itself." I think that, as a Caribbean, Naipaul is able to understand the South in a way that's difficult for an American Northerner, like Paul Theroux.

But it was the last section, titled "Smoke," which really hit home--literally--for me. The last stop on Naipaul's journey is in the "Research Triangle" of North Carolina, where I grew up, and I perhaps have never heard as insightful or as accurate a description of the place as Naipaul's:

...poor North Carolina pineland landscaped into the discreetest kind of industrial garden, many modern technological names represented by new buildings, long low lines of brick or concrete and glass, giving an impression of spaciousness and order and elegance, the land of rural poverty remade to suit its new function, the South seemingly abolished here, as it had been abolished at the space-research town of Huntsville in Alabama.

Durham poet Jim Applewhite, descendant of tobacco planters, takes Naipaul on a tour of the dying industry: the golden-leafed farms that scan still be found growing between the fresh new medical and research facilities, the meticulous handicraft of the curing barns and the packing process. "[I]t is close to the paradox of civilization itself," Applewhite tells Naipaul, "That this essentially poisonous substance formed the basis of a way of life that had so many attractive aspects--a formalized, seasonal cycle to it, which left the land combed into its even furrows after the stalks had been cut in the autumn." There can be no mourning the death of tobacco, if tobacco is dying, and yet the transition from the "folk art" and "nonutilitarian" practice of the small tobacco farm to the sleek anywhere technologies of biomedicine leave the land and its people bereft of something.

Tobacco, Naipaul notes, comes from the name of Tobago, Trinidad's junior island. Though tobacco planting was quickly abandoned there for the more lucrative sugarcane, Naipaul feels a kind of historical link between himself and the tobacco poet. And I felt it, too. Roughly ten months after Naipaul passed through the tobacco fields of the Research Triangle, I was born there. And it strange to read the great writer writing about the place that I would shortly be ushered into, and which I  have not quite always understood. I started A Turn in the South pleased to know a little more about Naipaul; I was unsettled at the end to find Naipaul looking back. But if that's the feeling I got from A Turn in the South, it's because, in Naipaul's own words, we share something way, way back--but not all that far back--in our histories.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

You saying God vain? I ast.

Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses god off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

What do it do when it pissed off? I ast.

Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.

Yeah? I say.

Yeah? she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.

Celie grows up learning to be used: raped and impregnated over and over by the man she believes to be her father, then married off to a man who really desires her sister, her sister who thinks better of the whole situation and runs off so as to not end up like Celie. Her new husband, called only Mr. ____, beats her regularly, and the unassuming Celie more or less assumes that this is the way of the world until Shug Avery appears in the house. Shug is a jazz singer, beautiful and fierce, who is the real object of Mr. ____'s affections. But when Shug falls ill, it's Celie that takes care of her, and soon the pair fall in love, and lust, with each other. It's Shug that teaches Celie to enjoy the pleasures her body demands, and to stick up for herself against the whims of men.

Famously, The Color Purple is written as a series of letters, some penned by Celie, and others by her sister Nettie, who has traveled with a pair of missionaries to Africa along with, for convoluted reasons, some of Celie's own children. The letters penned by Celie are written in a voice that is colloquial and spirited, full of rich vernacular that makes The Color Purple a pleasure to read. The Color Purple is perhaps the most prominent of a handful of books, like those by Toni Cade Bambara and J. California Cooper that came out in the 1980s that found in Black American dialect a rich voice worth exploring. Celie has such a powerful voice, but it takes the influence of Shug for her to realize it's worth using, and much of what I enjoyed most about the book was listening to Celie expand that voice with humor and withering judgment. The scene where she tells an incredulous Mr. ____ that she's leaving Georgia to travel with Shug to Memphis is one of the book's small masterpieces.

On the other hand, I felt that the narrative stops cold when it gets to Nettie's letters from Africa. In a way, Walker grasps at something sort of like the story of Homegoing, which explores the invisible links between Black American life and contemporary Africa. But I just couldn't make myself care about the made-up "tribe" that Nettie finds herself among, or their trials at the hands of roadbuilding, crop-destroying capitalists. And worse, Nettie--slightly more educated, more polished than her sister--has nothing like Celie's voice to make these sections more interesting. The whole Africa plotline seemed indicative of a messy convolutedness that can make the novel, at times, a chore.

Celie begins by addressing her "letters" to God; later, after she has learned of her sister's whereabouts, she addresses them to Nettie. This tracks with Shug's expression of a pantheism that takes in all of creation: if God won't reply, why not write to the God in Nettie? Shug's insistence that God wants us to stop and marvel at "the color purple in a field" verges on the sentimental and the faux-spiritual, but it works because we recognize the way that many women, like Celie, have been conditioned by a masculine world to believe that duty always comes before joy. Shug, who seems to be horny for everyone and everything, is a representation of this pantheist and pansexual principle. But Celie doesn't need to become like Shug: she only needs to learn, as Shug teaches her, to enjoy her own body, her own life, her own self.

Damascus Nights by Rafik Schami

It's a strange story to say the least: Salim the coachman lost his voice. If it hadn't happened right before my very eyes, I would never have believed it. Everything started in 1959, in August, in the old quarter of Damascus. Even if I wanted to make up such an incredible story, Damascus would still be the best place to set it. Nowhere but Damascus could such a tale take place.

Salim the coachman is revered in Damascus as one of the city's best storytellers. He encourages his fares to share their stories with him, and then takes them and polishes them for his his next passengers. But suddenly, when he loses his voice, a fairy appears to him and warns him that the gift which has been given to him by providence can be taken away--indeed, it has been taken away. But, she advises, if Salim receives seven unspecified gifts before 30 days have elapsed, the curse will be broken and Salim will have his voice again. After some trial-and-error, Salim's friends intuit that the gifts must also be stories, and so each of them prepares a story to tell Salim, hoping that their stories will give him his voice back.

Damascus Nights is a shaggy, discursive book. It's organized, as you might expect, into seven significant sections, with one story from each friend, but things aren't so simple. Stories are interrupted by other stories, or stories contain other stories nested within them, or people beyond Salim's friends tell stories. The stories are often about storytelling: the restaurant owner tells of the storyteller he has hired to keep his patrons entertained; another tells a story about a king who could speak but not listen; some characters even, like Salim, end up having their voice stolen. Over and over again the stories repeat variations on the same inward theme: how storytelling enlivens us and connects us with others. One of Salim's friends, the former minister, tells a story that is long and tedious, and when the mute Salim thinks of how he might amend it to tell it in his own way, he begins to understand that "a story needs at least two people in order to live."

Damascus Nights is part of a long literary tradition that includes The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron, but its clearest antecedent is One Thousand and One Nights, the Arabic-language classic about Scheherazade, who tells innumerable stories each night to her husband so that she might survive another night. Like Scheherazade, who saves the best part of each story for the following night, Schalk understands that the best stories don't fit neat and closed designs; they burst out of their parameters and keep one guessing. Schalk's Damascus is an ancient city, deeply rooted in literary traditions like the Nights, but a diverse one, too, that brings together people of all classes, religions, and backgrounds, united by the stories that create in them a shared audience. It's especially bittersweet to read knowing what a tragic place Damascus has become, racked by strife and civil war. I know little about the city, but I'm guessing it's not--though I hope it might become again--a place where friends can gather in the plazas with strong coffee in the night and listen to each other's tales.

With the addition of Syria, my "countries read" list is up to 81!

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Esi learned to split her life into Before the Castle and Now. Before the Castle, she was the daughter of Big Man and his third wife, Maame. Now she was dust. Before the Castle, she was the prettiest girl in the village. Now she was thin air.

Homegoing begins with the story of two half-sisters who have never met: Effia is a Fante woman who becomes the wife of the white colonial administrator on Ghana's Cape Coast; her marriage elevates her to a status and lifestyle that most of her countrymen could never dream about. Esi is the daughter of the "Big Man," the local tribal leader, but in a nighttime raid she is caught and enslaved. She's kept in the lower floors of the same castle in which Effia now lives. As she struggles to breathe, packed with her fellow enslaved like stacks of cordwood, Effia trods the boards above her head, not knowing that her half-sister struggles down below.

Homegoing follows the lineages of these two women over the next two and a half centuries: Esi's descendants are raised in slavery in the American South, sometimes escaping into freedom and sometimes being pulled back into bondage; when slavery ends, they find themselves at the mercy of the forces that have shaped Black life in the 19th and 20th centuries: sharecropping, Jim Crow, jazz. Effia's descendants experience the tumult of Ghana's colonial history: alliance and enmity with the British, colonial subjugation, Christian proselytizing, independence, diaspora. They are sometimes powerful and sometimes lowly. In the novel's end, the two threads are tied together again: Effia's descendant Marjorie migrates to America with her family and falls for her millionth-cousin-a-billion-times-removed, Esi's descendant Marcus.

The power of Homegoing is in its scope. In a world where the practice of slavery has obscured the lineage of most Black Americans, it's fascinating to see the way the generations may, for one family, unfold. The impression that you get is that a few centuries really seem like nothing at all; for both Esi and Effia's lines, it takes only seven generations to get from then to now. Just a handful of names, not difficult at all to memorize. The novel smartly avoids making any grand over-statements about the sisters' two paths; we are not, for example, asked to believe that Marjorie has ended up in a better place than Marcus because she has not suffered from the historical effects of slavery. If anything, Homegoing seeks to remind us that the conquest of white supremacy has many consequences, and touches everyone and everything, though in different ways. And Gyasi insists over and over again that Ghanaian complicity with European slavery must be made part of the story, too.

But as a book, it really didn't work for me. Seven generations and two lineages means fourteen vignettes in 300 pages, and though many of the stories have compelling elements--I liked the one about the Baltimore freedman whose freeborn wife is abducted under the Fugitive Slave Law, and the one about the Ghanaian teacher who falls in love with his housekeeper--Gyasi is too intent on packing these characters' whole lives into each vignette. As a result, Homegoing speeds through too much summary, and none of the characters really live. That packed-sardine quality might explain, too, why she so often has the characters pointedly explain the themes to us:

How many more times could he pick himself up off the dirty floor of a jail cell? How many hours could he spend marching? How many bruises could he collect from the police? How many more letters to the mayor, governor, president could he send? How many more days would it take to get something to change? And when it changed, would it change? Would America be any different, or would it be mostly the same?

It's a familiar enough sentiment, but it feels trite to me, as much of the book does. You can see Gyasi straining to get in all the major elements of Black U.S. history--here's where the Great Migration goes, and here's the Fugitive Slave Law, and we can't forget prison. There might be a way to do that without seeming forced, but Homegoing doesn't manage it. That might explain, actually, why the Ghana scenes are more convincing: thought they hit the same pointed historical notes, it's a history that's not familiar to me, so it all feels a little bit fresher.

With the addition of Ghana, my "countries read" list is up to 80!

The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare

Every so often as he sat at his desk, he would feel his head grow heavy, and wonder at the pages already written as if it had been someone else who'd penned them. There before him lay the melancholy aggregate of the sleep of one of the vastest empires in the world: more than forty nationalities, representatives of almost all religions and of every race. If the report had included the whole globe, it wouldn't have made much difference. To all intents and purposes it covered the sleep of the entire planet--terrible and infinite shadows, a bottomless abyss from which Mark-Alem was trying to dredge up a few fragments of truth. Hypnos himself, the Greek god of sleep, couldn't have known more than he did about dreams.

Mark-Alem is a member of the prestigious Albanian Quprili family, whose lineage boasts a number of viziers to the Ottoman Empire. But Mark-Alem himself is a bit wayward, young and without prospects, until he is given a job at the Palace of Dreams, an immense bureaucracy where the dreams of the citizens of the Empire are read and analyzed for their portents. The Palace of Dreams, or Tabar Sarrail, as it's known, is perhaps the most powerful institution in the Empire. Kadare depicts it as a series of long, dark, and difficult to navigate corridors; a place like Kafka's Castle. Mark-Alem is uncertain about his work there, and yet he keeps rising through the ranks, from the Selection room to the all-important Interpretation Room, where he pores over the mysterious dreams of his countrymen with little but his own confusion and intuition to guide him.

One thing the Palace of Dreams suggests is that national and historical memory run deep, at a level of the subconscious. We learn that the dreams that topple Sultans are usually received by small men, grocers or farmers; though they mean little to the Empire in practical purposes, their dreams are an expression of the larger political will that moves imperceptibly among a people. "States," we're told, "that had been dead for a long time and reduced to skeletons might slowly arise and reappear in the world." We suspect that among Mark-Alem's powerful uncles are those who seek to reaffirm their Albanian nationality in light of the Empire's homogenizing control; an Albania subsumed within the Empire is one of these dead states that operates something on the level of a dream, hidden in the synapses of even those who think that such things don't concern them much. It's no coincidence that, after some time working in the Tabar Sarrail, Mark begins to wonder if he shouldn't drop the Islamizing Alem from his name in favor of something truer to his Quprili Albanian roots.

One thing that's interesting about The Palace of Dreams is that, even though Mark-Alem moves upward through the ranks of power at the Tabar, he never seems to know what's really going on. The Sultan moves against his uncles and his uncles retaliate against the Sultan, and all, he discovers, on the basis of a dream he had read during his time in Selection, and then again in Interpretation, and dismissed as meaningless. Is Mark-Alem being used? By whom? Can one really become a master of dreams, or are we always the ones who are mastered by them? In the final scenes, Mark-Alem finds himself poring over thousands and thousands of dreams from every corner of the Empire, and yet no wiser about the workings of the world.

With the addition of Albania, my "countries read" list is up to 79!

Jump and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer

Then the trial was over and he got six years. He was sent to the Island. We all knew about the Island. Our leaders had been there so long. But I have never seen the sea except to colour it in blue at school, and I couldn't imagine a piece of earth surrounded by it. I could only think of a cake of dung, dropped by the cattle, floating in a pool of rain-water they'd crossed, the water showing the sky like a looking-glass, blue. I was ashamed only to think that. He had told me how the glass walls showed the pavement trees and the other buildings in the street and the colours of the cars and the clouds as the crane lifted him on a platform higher and higher through the sky to work at the top of a building.

In "Safe Houses," one of the better stories in South African writer Nadine Gordimer's collection Jump, the protagonist is a member of a revolutionary cell who has recently returned to his hometown under an alias. He lives a transient life, sleeping on couches and never staying too long in one place, knowing that if he does he'll be discovered. He begins an affair with a woman he's met on a bus, a wealthy woman whose life in a gated suburb is immured from the dangers of revolutionary activity, as well as the very problems that revolution seeks to fix. She's married; she has her secrets, too. These are the protagonists of Gordimer's fiction, those who have chosen lives of secrecy and alienation in the name of justice. Oddly, their actual convictions never seem of great importance; the decision always lies somewhere in the past, so concrete and unchangeable that the beliefs that made it necessary have become almost beside the point. In the title story, a former military parachutist idles in a spare condo he's been placed by the operatives who have needed his services. It actually wasn't clear to me which side he had worked for--the white regime or its revolutionary opponents--but it almost doesn't seem to matter.

These characters have their Black analogs, too: In "Amnesty," a young woman eagerly awaits her husband's return from Robben Island, the famous South African political prison where Mandela and his associates were imprisoned for decades. When he returns, she barely recognizes him; their young son looks at him and says, "That's not him." For Black Africans, there often is no other choice than to enter into these kind of non-lives: in the affecting "The Ultimate Safari," a group of displace Mozambicans make their way to asylum through the dangerous, lion-filled Kruger Park in South Africa. They starve and shiver, just yards away from the lighted camps of white trekkers. One of Gordimer's great gifts is an ability to write with immense empathy, an empathy perhaps counterintuitively drawn from a political cynicism which wards off condescension and sentimentality.

Such cynicism is on full display in "Some Are Born to Sweet Delight," which is one of the bleakest short stories I think I have ever read. It's about a young white servant girl who falls in love with her family's Middle Eastern lodger. She fights passionately for him to be accepted by her family, and the owners of the estate who employ them, with a fair amount of success. She becomes pregnant by him, but--spoiler alert--when he sends her off on an airplane to meet his family for the first time, the bomb he's placed among her luggage explodes: "Vera was chosen. Vera had taken them a, taken the baby inside her; down, along with her happiness." "Some Are Born to Sweet Delight" is a darker version of Gordimer's novel The Pickup, one which suggests that the immense forces of political depredation really can't be dented by the minor things of life, like love and motherhood.

The "shocking twist" of the story really does shock; it's one of those great final moments that makes the whole story look different, in hindsight. Elsewhere, the trick fails to come off, as with "The Moment Before the Gun Went Off," wherein we learn, in the story's final line, that the Black worker the Boer farmer has accidentally shot and killed was in fact his own son. Overall, I don't think short fiction plays to Gordimer's strengths. Her work is rather chilly and aloof; it's only over the course of many pages of a novel, I think, where one begins to see something like human life behind the veil of words. The best stories here, like "Sweet Delight" and "Safe Houses," share the best qualities of her fiction, but others are uncharacteristically slight, too attached to the idea of a single effect, and lack the knotty richness of her novels.

Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila

The Tram retained its botched-night splendor. It stayed the same, yesterday, today, and the day after. Beers were served fifteen minutes late. The waitresses and the busgirls, supported by the mother superior, mocked the world about them. The baby-chicks, all welcoming smiles, accosted the clients with no distinction. The mixed facilities remained overcrowded. The men entered and exited as happy as ever.

They shared the same aspirations: money and sex. They loved money and baby-chicks. They were all drawn to the mines and the Tram. Days, they roamed the mines, whenever they could excavate with the dissident General's authorization, and nights, they celebrated their good fortune at the Tram. They hit on the baby-chicks and the ageless-women, identified with the jazz, and drank beer till they threw up.

The City-State has seceded from the nameless African nation it was once a part of; it's become the site of tensions between rebel factions and the "dissident General." Its economy revolves around "the stone," the minerals that are clawed out from the ground by black laborers at the behest of foreign "tourists." And amid labor and war, entertainment: the ramshackle nightclub known as Tram 83 pulses with life every night. People of every social background gather there to drink and hear music; they gather, too, to engage the services of prostitute "single-mammas" and underage "baby-chicks."

The main characters of Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83 are a pair of regulars at this club: Requiem, a criminal and agitator in control of the city's underground, and his old friend Lucien, an anxious writer who has recently returned from the "Back-Country." Requiem is haughty, powerful, and reckless; reasoning that the average lifespan in the City-State is below forty, he's determined to live his remaining years without trepidation. Lucien is an intellectual struggling to write a play in which dozens of great figures from history--Patrice Lumumba, Christopher Columbus, Napoleon--tussle and bicker. Requiem hates Lucien for stealing his wife while he, Requiem, was away in the service of a warlord. Requiem and Lucien are two archetypal African men of the 21st century, a doer and a thinker, one grasping with a semiautomatic and the other with a pen. In truth, as Mujila writes, they are two halves of the same consciousness:

Was Requiem not ultimately Lucien's double? Distanced, thousands of miles from each other, by dramas, fissures, and follies, how did they manage to live under the same roof? Some wagging tongues were abrupt in their appraisal. They are children of the same father, whether they like it or not.

Tram 83 is a comic endeavor, peopled with broad characters and farcical scenarios. Its language is frenetic, disordered, and lively. Tram 83 is a jazz club, and the life lived there by diggers and child-soldiers and warlords and tourists and baby-chicks is a jazz life, as Mujila says pointedly. The prose, too, is jazz, with its staccato rhythms and airs of improvisation. "Jazz," Mujila writes, "is a sign of nobility, it's the music of the rich and the newly rich, those who build this beautiful broken world." The narrative is even broken by the refrain of the baby-chicks, fishing for clients--"Do you have the time?"--like a repeated motif, or perhaps a simple chime.

And while the story itself struck me as circular, even repetitive, I couldn't help but be drawn in by the rhythms of the writing. I liked, too, the powerful duality of Requiem and Lucien, two halves of the same personality, at war with itself, much like the City-State in which they live.

With the addition of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (that's the big one), my "countries read" list is up to 78!

Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro

Trouble began, perhaps, as soon as they said that they loved each other. Why did they do that--defining, inflating, obscuring whatever it was they did feel? It seemed to be demanded, that was all--just the way changes, variations, elaborations in the lovemaking itself might be demanded. It was a way of going further. So they said it, and that night Georgia couldn't sleep. She did not regret what had been said or think that it was a lie, though she knew it was absurd. She thought of the way Miles sought to have her look into his eyes during lovemaking--something Ben expressly did not do--and she thought of how his eyes, at first bright and challenging, became cloudy and calm and sombre. That way she trusted him--it was the only way. She thought of being launched out on a gray, deep, baleful, magnificent sea. Love.

In "Oranges and Apples," a story in Alice Munro's collection Friend of My Youth, a man named Murray comes home to see his wife suntanning by the pool, and Victor, his friend who has been staying in the pool house after a rough split with his wife, watching her through binoculars. Something in her body language makes Murray certain Barbara is aware of Victor, even arranging herself for him to sea. Murray spins this moment into a rage-inducing fantasy of betrayal, even going so far as to arrange for Victor and Barbara to be alone together, as if to confirm his own nightmare by forcing it to become true. In "Goodness and Mercy," young Averill listens to the captain of a passenger ship tell a story of an elderly woman who once died on board, and whom he buried at sea. Averill becomes convinced he is talking about her; after all, she is on board with her elderly and terminal mother, both of whom suspect she may expire before journey's end. Somehow, without even uttering a word, Averill comes to believe she is collaborating with the captain in a fantasy in which, her mother having been discarded, she is free to be seduced by him.

Friend of My Youth is probably the most subdued of all the collections of Munro's I've ever read. Some disasters remain--a drowning, a boy blinded by a rake, and any number of tawdry affairs--but they are somehow less real than the things that do not happen; the lives that people live in their own head, simply because the ones they really do lead are too narrow, or because everyone really wishes they could lead more than a single life at a time. This is the impulse that leads to the cuckold fantasy of "Oranges and Apples," and the dead-mom-sex-with-the-boat-captain fantasy of "Goodness and Mercy." "Differently" is another version of "Oranges and Apples" in which Georgia abandons her closest friend because of a notion--not even a belief or a conviction, it doesn't even quite get that far; it doesn't need to--that she has bedded Georgia's lover. In "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," a woman travels at last to the small town in Scotland where her now-dead husband spent the happy years of his deployment, only to discover that no one remembers him and he probably invented the relationships he had with every one of them.

Perhaps it's this impulse that leads Munro's characters, especially women, to pursue affairs with men they know are unattractive, and don't really like.  Perhaps this impulse leads to the many lies that are told. In one of my favorites in the collection, "Pictures of the Ice," an elderly minister goes around showing his parishioners a photo of the woman in Hawaii he plans on marrying, and describing the life he'll live out there in retirement. Meanwhile, his true intentions are to take a position exactly like the one he has now, in an even more frigid and remote part of Ontario. Or maybe he's the inverse of all the others: the man who loves his single life so much he wants to live a version of it forever, and must pretend to have dreams for the sake of others.

Fantasies, lies, telling stories. Many of the stories are really about telling stories. The narrator of the title story hears second-hand, from her mother, a story about a woman who gives up her fiancé when he impregnates her own sister. In the mother's version, the woman is saintly, self-sacrificial; but the narrator wants to write the version wherein the woman is proud and controlling, all too happy to have her sister and former lover under her roof to arrange their lives according to a logic of guilt and shame: "a Presbyterian witch." Of course, we never are to know who the "real" Flora was; such questions are barely worth mentioning. What the story is really about is the writing of the story--though it is also about her mother, and about mothers. In "Meneseteung," an unnamed narrator tells the story of an underappreciated Ontario writer who lived a life of spinsterhood; though the details are drawn from the writer's journals, we are keenly aware that the gaps are filled with supposition and invention. There's no other way. Even stories that don't seem to be about stories are: Georgia of "Differently" is told by a creative writing instructor, in a nice Munrovian touch, that her stories contain "Too many things": "The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out."

Sometimes Munro's stories are set in Vancouver or Victoria or Toronto, but they're most often set in small-town Ontario, and those that are always feel as if they are set in the very same place. Maybe they are. In Lives of Girls and Women, the town is called Jubilee; in Friend of My Youth, it's Walley. One of the secondary themes of all the stories is that way that Walley has changed, the way that towns change, and the way the 1950's housewife world has passed into something different--and not necessarily better. People return to Walley and see its changes, as they make note of the changes in their old friends, and in themselves. I think you have to squint a little, dig a little deeper, to find the richness and drama in Friend of My Youth, like you do with a town like Walley. When I think back on Munro's stories, I don't know that any of the ones from this collection will be on the forefront of my mind. Small towns are like that, too: sometimes they blend together, and sometimes you forget them altogether. But they are still out there, full of life and living.

Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou

bless my quills, how time flies, my voice is raw, night has fallen over Sekepembe already, I weep and weep, I don't know why, for once my solitude is a burden to me, I feel so guilty, I did nothing to save my master, was there anything I could have done to stop those two kids who tormented him so in the few weeks before his death, I don't know, I really don't, at first I just wanted to save my skin even though I was sure that if Kibandi died I must die also, and under conditions like that, it's true what they say, better a live coward than a dead hero, well I'm not exactly overcome with grief at Kibandi's absence, nor embarrassed to have been lucky enough to survive till now, to have you as my confidant, but I'm ashamed of all the things I've been telling you since this morning, I wouldn't want you to judge me without taking into account the fact that I was just an underling, a shadow in Kibandi's life...

Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou's Memoirs of a Porcupine is what the title promises: a story narrated by a porcupine. In this case, the porcupine is a "harmful double," a creature bound by dark magic to a young man named Kibandi by his father. When the novel begins, Kibandi has died, and the porcupine narrator is certain that he must perish also, as is the way with harmful doubles, but the death never comes. As he frets, he tells his story to a sheltering baobab tree: though he was once a willing participant in the magic, leaving his porcupine community behind in order to be Kibandi's double, he has since come to regret the cruelty of his master, who uses him and his poisonous quills to commit many murderers without being caught. Perhaps it's this independent spirit, developed over a lifetime of subservience to evil, that saves the porcupine's life when Kibandi dies.

One thing I find interesting about Memoirs of a Porcupine is the image of the double. Kibandi has not just one double, but two: double doubles. Besides the porcupine, he has a literal double that has no nose or mouth. Kibandi's cruelty is what "feeds" his faceless self. If this horrible thing is Kibandi's true double, what is the porcupine? Something bound to Kibandi's self but not quite coequal to it, something that kills but is not nourished or fed. He is called on to commit acts of increasing violence--murdering a young girl who rejects Kibandi's advances, and then the infant child of a rival--but it is the faceless double who is fd. The porcupine, too, ends up being extremely creeped out by the faceless Kibandi, a kind of true double self he can never supplant or become.

Memoirs of the Porcupine is pretty fun, a modernist jaunt that draws heavily (I presume) from traditional Congolese stories and legends. I enjoyed the voice of the porcupine, and the breathless and unlettered style of the sections, which move hastily without periods, only commas. Maybe that's the way a porcupine would talk, if it could. It reminded me a little of Mia Couto's terrific stories in Voice Made Night, which do something similar with stories from Mozambique. 

This is the first book I've read from the Republic of the Congo (that's the small one), which brings my "countries read" list up to 77!

The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

Donna looked out at the window at the street below. You couldn't open the windows. A tree outside was struggling to burst into bloom but had been compromised heavily by the parking area. Big chunks of its bark had been torn away by poorly parked cars. When she was a child, visiting Florida, she'd seen a palm tree burst into flames. It was beautiful! Then rats as long as her downy child's arm had rushed down the trunk. Later, she learned that it was not unusual for a palm tree to do this on occasion, given the proper circumstances. This tree didn't want to do anything like that, though. It couldn't. It just struggled along quietly.

The first of the "new" stories in Joy Williams' "New and Collected Stories" omnibus, The Visiting Privilege, is called "Brass." Unlike most of Williams' stories, it's in the first person, as if she's reminding us that she do it this way, too. The narrator of "Brass" is an irascible middle-aged man describing his relationship with his son, an odd kid that never seems able to fit in with the world. The narrator vacillates between pitying the son and defending him, and our response is twofold. First, we wonder if there might not be something more seriously wrong with the young man than the narrator is able to grasp, and second, we begin to think, well, you're no prize yourself, man. Only at the end does the narrator let the hammer fall, about the helicopter and the men who come looking for the son. "No, we were never afraid of him," he said. "Afraid of Jared?" That is, Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman who shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed 19 others in Tucson in 2011.

"Brass" is, in a way, a kind of "Where is the Voice Coming From?" for the 21st century, a story that tries to grapple with the nature of destruction and its practitioners. For Welty, the murderer of Medgar Evers is a small and petty man, confused in his thinking, lashing out of his smallness. By contrast, Williams has few answers for what animates someone like "Jared"; their proximity of death, their love for it, puts them outside the bounds of human knowing. It's a them she returns to again and again: There's May and her grandson Bomber in "The Blue Men," adrift but united by their father's execution. There's the support group in "Cats and Dogs" for mothers of convicted murderers. But dying puts one outside of the bounds of understanding, too, not merely killing: that's why so many of Williams' stories take place in hospitals and nursing homes. The title story, the very first of the bunch--and probably the weakest--begins in a hospital, where an elderly pastor finds himself saddled with both a dying wife and a newborn baby, and perhaps this provides the key for everything else that is to come.

Consider what might be my favorite story in the omnibus, "Congress," from the 2004 collection Honored Guest. Miriam is married to Jack, a forensic anthropologist, beloved by both his students and the family members of murder victims, who receive closure thanks to Jack's thorough identification of human remains. Jack takes up hunting with one of his students, and makes a little lamp out of the feet of a deer he kills. Later, Jack is wounded in a hunting accident and loses the ability to speak. The student, Carl, insinuates his way into Jack's life, becoming the only one who knows how to communicate with Jack, who is living a kind of death-in-life. (In a way Carl is a medium figure, like the young boy of "The Country" who has the ability to channel his dead mother and grandparents. And that boy in a way is an analog of the father in The Quick and the Dead who is haunted by the ghost of his controlling wife.) As Jack drifts away from her, Miriam becomes inextricably attached to the little deer-foot lamp. The four of them--Miriam, Jack, Carl, and lamp--go on vacation, but Miriam is abandoned by the two men, and stumbles into a museum of taxidermy whose devotees consider it a holy place. The taxidermist, discovering Miriam, bestows the museum on her.

What kind of story is this? What is it up to? How can it be so ridiculous, and yet work so perfectly? See how living things move out of our orbit by means of disaster and death, and yet must still be tended to: silent Jack, the deer-become-lamp, the many animals of the museum. Miriam loses her husband to a man who can pass through the barrier that injury has placed between them, but in return she is granted the role of high priestess, the woman who tends for dead things and keeps them alive. Or, if not keeps them alive, exhibits their death and makes it visible, approachable, understandable--holy. As another character says, in another story, "There's no fucking energy around anymore... You notice that? It's because death's energy, death's vital energy, is being ignored. It's not being utilized. The more and more death, the more it's wasted. People just let it evaporate. But not us."

On the dust jacket to The Visiting Privilege, Joy is wearing her trademark black sunglasses. She's got a wide-open smile, she's beaming; she looks every bit her name. The avatar of joy. She looks, in fact, like she's off on vacation, to Florida Keys or the Everglades or the Maine coast or Nantucket or White Sands National Park. These are the places her stories so often take place, vacation spots. Sometimes they feature people on vacation, and sometimes they feature "townies," the people who live lives, unconscionably, in the places you're not really supposed to live. Maybe it's too easy to say that Williams shows us that death haunts us even on vacation, as it's too easy to note the disjunction between her expression in the jacket photograph and the darkness at the heart of the stories. Maybe there is something about these vacation places that brings us closer to death, that frees us from the solace of the everyday routine--the comforting fiction that tomorrow will be like today. That it won't be something else, and maybe worse