The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

Something changed in Jansci before the end.

After he was diagnosed with cancer, his head began to explode with ideas of a kind he had never entertained before, and in such copious quantities that I came to fear that, if the disease did not kill him, mental overexertion surely would. This sudden, formidable fecundity was, of course, nothing new in him, it was as if he had recovered, seemingly overnight, the same zeal that he lost after Godel thwarted his attempts at entangling the entire world in a web of logic. Much more curious still was the fact that he also developed (though perhaps it would be more precise to say that he was beset by, as it was a violent and abrupt transformation) feelings that he had no prior experience with: spells of almost overwhelming empathy and a deep concern about the general destiny of humanity. These anxieties, which he could neither contain nor deny, would at first send him into flights of blind panic, though later, when he became more accustomed to the invasion of his psyche by all that he had previously chosen to ignore, he learned to channel these thoughts into himself, where they became the source of a fantastic thirst, an unquenchable curiosity regarding all matters of the spirit.

Perhaps it's because Hungarian mathematician and physicist John von Neumann dabbled in so much that he is rarely remembered today: he was an instrumental part of the Manhattan Project, and later basically invented game theory, before turning his attention to the self-reproducing "automata" that are the basis of today's artificial intelligence programs. He would fit in nicely among the mad geniuses of Benjamin Labatut's previous novel, When We Cease to Understand the World: a brilliant man who outpaces all his rivals, caught up in the whirl of wartime, and then suffers a breakdown of the psyche and spirit. Labatut's von Neumann is a dangerous man, whose intelligence allows him to be cruel to his wives and collaborators, and who expresses little interest in the deadly consequences of his work. In his last days, riddled with cancer, he is struck by a sudden attack of empathy, but at the same time his brilliance has been dulled: his daughter describes leaving his sick room in tears, as he struggles with adding together single-digit numbers. Von Neumann dies relatively young, but his legacy is profound. How much of his cruelty is contained within the ideas and systems he bequeathed the world? How much empathy? How much madness?

The Maniac is bookended by two sections only tangentially related to von Neumann's life. The first is about physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who killed his disabled son in 1933 before turning the gun on himself. Ehrenfest knew what the ascendant Nazis would do to his son if they were able; he so no future either for his son's disability or his own genius. Among other things, this section roots von Neumann's story in the grand political struggle of World War II, which evolves into the Cold War conflict of mutually assured destruction--a concept born not just from von Neumann's work with the Manhattan Project but his invention of game theory--and the destabilizing affects of modern AI. But it also introduces a question about the mental processes that animate men like Ehrenfest and von Neumann--is madness the handmaiden of genius? Or are they a single creature with two faces? The later bookend is a short history of AlphaGo, the AI program that defeated the world Go grandmaster.

In between, Labatut chooses to tell von Neumann's story through the first-person voices of his friends, family, and colleagues. Some of these are wildly entertaining--the whole book, I think, would have been better if it had been narrated by Labatut's version of Richard Feynman--but this strategy ultimately struck me as a mistake. The voices feel false as often as they are convincing, and are inherently less interesting and engaging than Labatut's own erudite voice that begins and closes the novel.

It's the last section, actually, about AlphaGo, that struck me as the best part of the novel. Labatut explains that Go is not like chess; whereas a chess board begins with a large but limited number of possible future configurations, a Go board is a blank space on which the pieces unfold. The number of possible Go boards dwarfs the number of chess boards by many degrees of magnitude; many believed even after Deep Blue's victory over Garry Kasparov that such a program for Go was nearly impossible. But the AlphaGo program takes down the braggadocious Go champion, Lee Sedol, down four games to one, a moment Labatut literally describes as epoch-making. It's funny, actually, to read this section at the moment, where intelligent people (as far as I can tell) are rather down on the power of AI. The language learning models that can't draw hands, or count to ten, are a far cry from the artificial intelligences that Labatut finds frightening, and which men like von Neumann and Turing thought had the power to outstrip their human creators. But perhaps those LLMs are not the same thing as programs like AlphaGo, which have no root or interest in language or art, only the cold purity of mathematics.

But it's not the four AlphaGo wins that make this section fascinating--it's AlphaGo's single loss. Beaten and discouraged, Sedol manages to find a move that baffles AlphaGo so badly it essentially begins making random, desperate moves with no strategy whatsoever. Spectators, having seen the program bait Sedol into mistakes before, assume that the machine is thinking a thousand steps ahead, but the programmers know the truth, because they have seen this before, the program descend into a kind of madness. In this, the program comes to resembles its godfather von Neumann in the most frightening way: it, too, has exploded genius to madness. In this way Labatut suggests that artificial intelligence may resemble our own in ways more frightening than we conceive; they, too, may be prone to psychic unraveling. 

The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis

Because, of course, anything can happen in a dream. A fierce old woman can be turned into a soft and trusting creature; she can be made to act in ways which betray her true nature. In the dream the dead can come back to life, and make you do things you'd never have done when they were still alive. They can make you let them touch you, make you open your body to them. They  can make you doubt your own true nature, leave you lying there on your bed sick with spent desire for something you never thought you wanted in the first place. How many times did Helle show up in my dreams, her skin like a sheet of water, thin and clear, an insufficient disguise for the glassy stalk of her will? Watery hands, watery mouth, turning suddenly, unexpectedly, to soft, pliant flesh.

When Helle Ten Brix, a Danish emigre to upstate New York, dies of a long illness, she leaves a great burden to her friend Francie Thorn in her will: The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, an unfinished opera based on a Hans Christian Andersen folk tale. Helle's operas have always been rooted in the experiences of her own life: the early death of her mother, her cruel and cow-like stepmother, the unrequited loves foisted upon other women, who spurned her to become ordinary housewives, or worse, Nazi collaborators. It's these moments that make up the ur-text of operas like Det Omflakkende Mol, "The Erratically Flying Moth," whose moths are the same ones that flew out of Helle's stepmother's pantry, or The Harrowing of Lahloo, whose diva, pinned in place in the role of the figurehead of a great ship, perhaps mirrors the immobility of a woman's life in mid-century Europe. To finish The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Francie must go all the way back and recount the story of Helle's life, looking for the truths that might have emerged upon the blank staff of music.

The folktale at the heart of the opera goes something like this: a young woman, not wanting to spoil her new shows, lays a loaf of bread intended as a gift for her parents on the surface of a bog. Stepping on it, she's punished for her selfishness by being dragged to the bottom of the bog by the Bog Queen, who turns her into a statue. The loaf, perhaps, represents all those things that are not appropriately appreciated--perhaps a symbol of the love that Helle wastes on her girlhood crushes?--but really, it's the bog itself that matters most. It's a symbol for that hidden life, the depths hidden within a person, the dark place where love and pain reside alongside the capacity for creation. It's funny, this book reminded me so much of Robertson Davies' The Lyre of Orpheus, another book in which people come together to write an opera at the behest of a particular estate. Davies is all Jungian archetypes; his opera emerges almost deterministically by the sortition of mythological patterns. But it's Davis, I think, who understands the depth and turmoil of the real psyche, and the operas in The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf are infinitely more interesting. I was especially struck by the description of Fuglespil, the Nightingale, who enlarges himself over the course of the play by gruesomely stealing the eyes and parts of the other birds.

Yet, something made me feel as if I was skipping along the surface of the bog for much of the novel, rather than plumbing the depths. Kathryn Davis is, I think, one of the great living sentence writers, and The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf is certainly the best of her novels I've read since having my life changed by her debut novel Labrador several years ago. The language is, as you might guess, appropriately operatic, all sturm and drang, rich and stormy. But its richness prevented me, in some small way, from really understanding Helle in the way I think the book wanted me to. The book's ending--spoiler alert--struck me as so discordant that I felt that I must have totally missed something: Helle, having invited the whole town to a costume party, shoots Francie's married lover Sam three times in the heart. Well, I suppose I did notice that Helle had expressed a romantic interest in the much younger Francie, though I had never really imagined with the intensity of her schoolyard love for Inger. Perhaps that is part of Francie's, and the novel's surprise; perhaps we are gulled into not paying enough attention. Or maybe it was just me. Or maybe Helle's final act before she takes ill and dies is to do something truly operatic: a show-stopper.

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

I have dwelt on this sequence of stories, one after another, exploring the ways in which the faithfulness of God is manifest in the world of fallen humankind. This kind of interpretation might seem ingenious and little more if there were not essential truths lying behind it. The first of these is that these divine likenesses among whom we live are of the highest interest and value to God. We have been given the coin of wealth to barter among ourselves for the things we need or want. We assign worth to persons, consciously or not, and then to prestige and property and ease, all the things that compete so successfully with the claims of justice and righteousness, kindness, and respect, which would follow from a true belief that anyone we encounter is an image of God. and the second is that we do not know how to judge or where to blame because events are working themselves out at another scale and toward other purposes more than we can begin to grasp.

I had the good fortune to be able to see Marilynne Robinson speak about her now book, Reading Genesis, at the New York Public Library last week. Robinson is, to me, a living avatar of wisdom. She looks wise, with her leonine gray hair and bearing; she sounds wise, with her quiet and well-measured statements. Reading Genesis, which might be described as a work of theology, seems to me a part of that old and forgotten tradition called wisdom literature, of which Robinson herself perhaps is the last and greatest living practitioner.

Robinson begins by observing that it is trendy to pick Genesis apart. A common viewpoint holds that it is the work of many authors, and that each author's particular political or cultural agenda can be traced in the text. In this way, the text is deconstructed and falls apart; it is a text at odds with itself. So the first thing that Robinson does that is quietly radical--in our times at least--is to read Genesis as a single text, with themes and ideas that animate it from beginning to end. For me, too, this was rather radical, because even growing up in the evangelical church, I don't think I was ever asked to read Genesis, or any book, from beginning to end. I know all the stories here, but seeing them laid out as a single narrative made me understand that I'd been missing something fundamental by dealing with them piecemeal.

What does animate Genesis? For Robinson, it is that fundamental truth which lies at the heart of scripture: that human beings are at the heart of creation. Robinson makes much of comparisons with Babylonian and other Near Eastern literature, like Gilgamesh, many of which have been taken as the "sources" from which Genesis stories, like the flood and the tower of Babel, have been borrowed. But Robinson points out that in these stories, the gods have a tense, inimical relationship with human beings, whose sacrifices they must have in order to eat. The God of Genesis, of course, does not eat; he does not need human beings, yet he created them and the world for their purpose and enjoyment. Genesis is a creation story, and one that places mankind at the center of everything. It's a story that unfolds in the lives of very ordinary people, shepherds like Abraham, Isaac, Joseph; it's through these humble people that God will create a chosen lineage, and through this lineage with which he communes with the entire world. (She asserts also that the family trees of Genesis clearly show that Gentiles are more closely related to the chosen people than one might think; in Genesis, we are all neighbors.)

The other big theme that animates Genesis for Robinson is mercy. She takes exception to the image of the raging, vengeful Old Testament God, and the belief common even among Christians that the God of the New Testament is somehow a different character. Look, for example, at the story of Cain: God spares Cain's life for the killing of his brother, and the famous "mark" that is placed upon his forehead is not actually one of shame, but a kind of protection; it demonstrates that wherever Cain goes he is to be protected from those who wish to slay him for his misdeeds. Cain is the ancestor of the human race, and by saving him from what he deserves--punishment for his murder of Abel--a greater purpose is worked. Robinson notes that this kind of story is told over and over again; characters in Genesis are made to suffer far less than we might think they deserve: Noah, Isaac, the brothers of Joseph.

I often wonder who Robinson writes for. Her firm Calvinism puts her out of step with most of the secular world, and her understanding of scripture certainly doesn't seem to fit in with that of Christian America; I can't imagine Reading Genesis on an endcap at Lifeway, if Lifeway still exists. And yet, the room at NYPL was packed with people who came to enjoy her wisdom. She speaks to some much deeper need in us, I think, to understand the way in which we ourselves are part of a universe that has only become stranger and less familiar in the age of the Big Bang. 

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson

Writing. It's easy work. The equipment isn't expensive, and you can pursue this occupation everywhere. You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape. You don't have to be high-functioning or even, for the most part, functioning at all. If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the drunk, I'd certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time, and production wouldn't suffer. I've gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It's not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie--although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don't get back where you came from for years and years.

There's a moment in Denis Johnson's collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden that stopped me cold. At the end of "Triumph Over the Grave," an elegiac story in which the narrator reminisces on the decline and death of two friends, he writes: "It doesn't matter. The world keeps turning. It's plain to you that at the time I write this, I'm not dead. But maybe by the time you read it." I nearly set the book down and cried. Famously, Johnson completed Largesse right before his death at age 67; I think it may have even come out just after he died. Johnson must not have imagined when he wrote those words that the maybe would become a certainty so soon, or perhaps he did: the word "maybe" contains so many possibilities. But it's hard not to read these words, too, and feel the loss of other possibilities, of many years of incredible literature, and the life of, by all accounts, a humane teacher and good man.

"Triumph Over the Grave" is my favorite of the five long-ish stories in Largesse of the Sea Maiden. It has a nested structure that makes its true core elusive. Two deaths, two griefs, framed one within the other. One, a talented writer and teacher wasting away on a Texas ranch; the visits from his sister and brother-in-law, long dead, turn out to be emanations of the brain cancer he doesn't know he has. The other a friend whose wife, long since remarried, has succumbed to dementia, and whose now-husband drives her to see him on his deathbed. (Both of these stories, in fact, are framed with the shocking news of another, third death, which it seems, is too fresh a grief to be part of the story--only, perhaps, its instigation.) The diers in "Triumph Over the Grave" take a long time dying. When does it begin, one wonders? The writer, does his death begin when the first cell mis-multiplies, unknown and unseen within the body? Or is it when he retreats to the ranch, isolated from the world? Or is it when he sees these visions of his dead family that show he has one foot in the grave? Does the other man's ex keep him alive, having regressed in her mind to a point of life before the point of decay? Or is her forgetting, too, a kind of death, an obliteration of so many years? Whatever else, "Triumph" offers that final line, which is no less true and necessary because it is so often said: "The world keeps turning." The maybe happens to us all.

"Triumph" is followed by "Doppelganger, Poltergeist," which you might call the collection's "showstopper." In it, a brilliant poet becomes obsessed with a theory that Jesse, the twin brother of Elvis Presley who supposedly died at birth, in fact was sold to a midwife, who later schemed with Colonel Parker to murder Elvis and replace him with Jesse. The story is not so much about the theory but the poet's obsession with it; he's even arrested for digging up baby Jesse's grave. The story is narrated from the perspective of the poet's former teacher, a half-talented academic who becomes the poet's confessor. The theory, we come to find out, was actually--stay with me here--the poet's brother's who died, a brother who himself had a twin who died in childbirth like Presley. There's your doubles, your doppelgangers, your poltergeists. The narrator has his double in the professorial figure who haunts the poet's poems, a figure given the name of the dead twin.

It's all very complicated, as a good doppelganger story should be. A good doppelganger story never has just one doppelganger; it's always sensitive to the way that a double can divide again, like mitosis. It's sensitive to the way that things are never repeated only once. On top of everything else, it's a 9/11 story, and contains perhaps the best description of the towers falling I've ever seen in literature. The obvious connection--twins, twin towers--is lost on our narrator until the poet makes it. More richly, the little griefs are reduplicated as big griefs; worlds are shaken on every scale. Elvis arrives to a kindly farm couple to let them know he has seen their aunt Gladys in Paradise. This, to the poet, proves that Elvis had already died when he was supposed to be alive, but perhaps we can be haunted by our futures as well as our pasts.

Jesus's Son gave Johnson a reputation as a writer of the down-and-out. Two stories here make good on that legacy. The first is "Starlight on Idaho," an epistolary story that takes the form of a collection of letters from a man enduring rehab in a former motel in California. (The Starlight Motel--you know, on Idaho Street.) The voice here, rattled and ranting, desperate but determined, is one of the book's many victories. The other, "Strangler Bob," actually brings back one of the characters from Jesus' Son, Dundun, this time as a prisoner in a jail of violent and mercurial figures. This story--perhaps because it has a little too much going on--struck me as the weakest of the five. 

But for the most part, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is a book not about the down-and-out, but the up-and-in, or at least the moderately successful. The middle-aged academic of "Doppelganger," who admits abashedly that he dreams of tenure at his small Midwestern college, the lightly famous writer of "Triumph"; these are people with comfortable lives. One wonders if they are versions of Johnson himself, having become himself a widely regarded writer and teacher, and having (to my understanding) left youthful vagaries behind. "Doppelganger" isn't really about the tortured genius of the poet; it's about the narrator's comfortable mediocrity, which itself is a kind of torture. The first and title story, too, is about an ad man living a life of relative comfort and ease. It's a funny story, arranged as a series of short flash pieces, without what I'd call a clear through line. But even the most comfortable and ordinary man is prone to fantastic dreams, some of which come true:

Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folk tales that I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, and pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.

The Murderer by Roy Heath

For the first time it occurred to Galton that he might be mentally ill. Not, indeed, because he had killed Gemma. He was convinced that any self-respecting man would have done so. Rather, his lack of success at achieving any goal he had set himself and his inability to face up to a situation that had taken him by surprise implanted in his mind the idea that he was progressively losing his grip. The following day, he told himself, he would be in a better position to assess the facts. One gain he had certainly made: he had achieved what he had always longed for, an area that belonged to him alone and from which others could be excluded at will.

Here is another book from Guyana, but how different it is from Beryl Gilroy's warm and lyrical Frangipani House. Roy Heath's murderer is Galton Flood (great name): a man from a middle-class Guyanese family who grows up under the shadow of his better-adjusted brother, Selwyn. Galton is moody, mercurial, unable to build the human relationships his brother does; instead of pursuing his studies he takes menial jobs in the Guyanese "bush," then as a night watchman. Somehow, Gemma, the bookish and thoughtful daughter of a man from whom Galton rents a room, falls for him. He flees her, but the letters she writes him are some of the book's greatest moments, filled with provocations and ironic recriminations. She calls him her "torturer," and perhaps this is the only language that can reach Galton, who turns away from sentimentalism with disgust. Eventually, she induces him to marry, but his jealousy and resentment are too powerful, and one night, he strikes her dead with a plank of wood and disposes of her body in the harbor.

The Murderer has Dostoyevsky's fingerprints all over it. Galton is, in a way, a Raskolnikov that is stupid. Like Raskolnikov, he rationalizes and justifies his deed so that he might ignore the deeper urges within that drive him to it. And like Raskolnikov, Galton's murder is an attempt to control the larger world, and thus detach oneself from it; though he yearns for Gemma, marriage for him is a torture, because it requires submission, entanglement with another. This need is inseparable from good old-fashioned male jealousy: it tortures Galton to think that his wife has had other lovers, and does not live for him alone (though he can't see that she's the only person who could ever come close to doing anything like this).

The Murderer is bisected by Galton's deed: about half the book comes before, and half the book comes after. The second half of the book deals with the consequences of Galton's deed. Some are practical--he takes up with another girl, but her father refuses to allow her to see Galton because he is still technically married, having lied and said that Gemma emigrated to Venezuela. Others are psychological: Galton travels from place to place, from the tenement to a boarding house to his brother's house, never staying in any one location for long because, like Gemma, other people make demands on his time and his self. Eventually, Gemma's father, accompanied by an old friend of Gemma's, comes to understand what Galton has done, but the police don't care; there's no arrest or punishment forthcoming. Instead, Galton is forced to live the rest of his small life bearing the consequences of being himself.

The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras

The dikes built by Ma in the plain, her "barriers against the Ocean," the whole thing was either a huge misfortune or a huge joke, depending upon the way you looked at it. It was a huge joke and a huge misfortune. It was terrible and it was screamingly funny. It depended on which side you took: the side of the Ocean which had knocked down everything, every stick and stone of the sea wall, at one blow, one single blow; the side of the crabs, which had made sieves of them; or, on the contrary, the side of the people who had taken six months to build that sea wall, in total forgetfulness of the certain damage that would be wrought by the crabs and the Ocean.

The title sea wall of The Sea Wall is, at the beginning of the novel, already no more. Constructed at great expense by the Frenchwoman known only as "Ma" on her concession land along the coast of Vietnam, it has crumbled away and the saltwater tide has ruined all hope of a successful crop. The misfortune defines Ma's life, and it comes to define the lives of her two children: Joseph, a brash young man whose passions are his jalopy and hunting dangerous panthers, and Suzanne, whose beauty and resentment both are incandescent. Neither Joseph nor Suzanne have ever been to France, where Ma was born; they are second-generation Colonials who must live in universe of ruin that Ma has created for herself, and they occupy a kind of degenerate middle ground between the "Natives" in the jungle and the pampered elite who live in the colony's principal city.

It's one of these, Monsieur Jo, who happens upon Suzanne at a canteen one day and falls madly in love with her. Monsieur Jo is a pathetic figure, both ugly and oblivious, who is utterly wrecked against Suzanne's beauty. He visits everyday, offering his attention as well as lavish gifts, enduring the condescension of all the members of the house, who accurately assess that he will endure all the resentment they bear against their lot simply to be near Suzanne. "He was not a person," Suzanne remarks about him inwardly, "he was only a misfortune." Monsieur Jo offers Suzanne a diamond ring if she'll go away with him and then, when she refuses, gives it to her anyway; Ma's farcical attempts to sell the ring in the colonial capital are the driving force of the book's middle section. Even when she does manage to sell it, the money goes to pay the debt on the construction of the sea walls. The money flows out like the tide, and leaves the family no better off; even their fortunes are misfortunes.

The Sea Wall is just the kind of book I really love: mean-spirited, funny, and deeply sad. It is, in Duras' words, "terrible" and "screamingly funny." I didn't know that Duras could be funny. The other two books of hers I've read, The Lover and L'Amante Anglais, are also quite sad, but they are not funny. Ma is a great comic creation, emblematic of the bourgeois failures of a certain kind of colonial, for whom the promise of new land is a kind of cruel grift. Whether it reflects Duras' own upbringing in French Indochina I have no idea. One of the best sections of the book comes when Ma is allowed to speak for herself, in a long letter written to the cadastral agents who enforce the mortgage on her concession:

And for the savings I put aside every day for fifteen years of my life, of my youth, what did you give me? A desert of salt and water. And you let me give you my money. That money I religiously carried to you one morning, seven years ago, in an envelope. It was all I had. I gave you all I had that morning, all, as if I brought you my own body as a sacrifice, as if from my sacrificed body would blossom an entire future of happiness for my children.

When Ma writes off-handedly about killing the agents, we half-believe her. Or we believe, perhaps, that she has the will but not the power. But Joseph, the walls of his room laden with guns, might have both, might be exactly the kind of avenging spirit that Ma requires. And yet, we know that whatever happens, there is no hope for Ma, because hopelessness is written into her character. The diamond will sold, but the money will not satisfy; the sea walls will be built but they will only crumble again, and the sea will take what is theirs. In a way, Duras suggests, it may be better to be like the "Natives" whose children die at alarming rates, killed by Frenchmen's cars or lice or starvation, and who are quickly buried and replaced. But the colonial's fate is to never be at home, to have every hope dashed, and in that sense Ma is colonialism's perfect image.

You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue

Where Tenoxtitlan had been there was now a Spanish city: palaces, churches, convents. There was a nun who was purest light, who also dreamed, and who, though she spoke Spanish, at mole and pipian and papalo and nogada. It was a huge coutnry: ravines, mountains, deserts, jungles. But it was a country of purest suffering too. The macehualtin uprisings, the slave ships, the priests fighting under the banner of Guadalupe, a republic fractured yet worthy in its way. The fucking gringos; a Zapotec tlatoani who won a war with France. Books, wars, universities, cities with many more people than anyone could ever have imagined; another tlatoani, a Mixtec--everybody was Oaxacan--and Eufemio Zapata walking through Moctezuma's palace dressed like a Spaniard; another republic that rose the best it could; and another hundred years and this book and you reading it and it was then that Hernando woke up.

It's the year 1519. Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes has been invited into the city of Tenoxtitlan by Moctezuma, but the emperor has made himself scarce. Instead, Cortes dines with the city's priests, with the princess who is both Moctezuma's sister and his wife, with his own generals, with his Maya translator, Malinalli. He schemes and plots, knowing his allies the Tlaxcala are stationed just outside the city. But with Moctezuma absent, the killing blow will have to wait.

Alvaro Enrigue's rendition of Moctezuma is, perhaps, the most interesting thing about his new novel You Dreamed of Empires. At first glance, it seems that his Moctezuma shares many of the flaws that have been assigned to him through history: his superstition, his indolence and indifference, his weakness. He seems to be overly dependent on psychedelic drugs; while Cortes is making his plots, Moctezuma is getting high on mushrooms and refusing to forego his daily nap. Enrigue's Moctezuma is obsessed with the conquistadors, these strange men from far across the ocean, but mostly he is obsessed with their cahuayos, their large deer--their caballos, their horses--which have eaten up one of the palace's interior gardens. Is this another kind of superstitious predilection, or is it evidence that Moctezuma, who recognizes the strategic promise of the cahuayos, is cannier than he is letting on? Does he, in fact, have a plan to foil the conquistadors who are only pretending to be good guests?

I had the good fortune to see Enrigue speak about this novel at the New York Public Library a month or so ago. He is all charm, with the dashing long-haired look of an older novelist, buttressed by a tremendous bank of knowledge and a gregarious laugh. It's easy to read You Dreamed of Empires, which is at times chummy and chatty, in his voice. The novel begins with a conquistador, Caldera, nearly nauseated by the smell of the human skin cloak he must wear while dining with the priests. This is a novel, we see, about cultural clashes, about two groups who must look past the unfamiliarity of their respective cultures to understand each other, to see one another's capacities for friendship, or malice. Enrigue emphasizes the clash with a pointedly anachronistic style, full of cliches and over-familiar phrases that stand out as strange purely through context. In one scene, which much interested his interviewer, Moctezuma overhears a snatch of spectral music that "he couldn't place, though in a possible future we would have recognized it. It was T. Rex's 'Monolith.'" I myself didn't find these qualities of the novel all that successful, but when I imagined Enrigue reading them aloud in his own voice, I felt more disposed to them.

I wanted to like You Dreamed of Empires a little better than I did. I was sort of interested in its lack of forward motion. Both the Mexica and the Caxilteca--a cutesy Nahautl-ism formed from the Spaniards' Kingdom of Castile--spend most of the novel sort of milling around and figuring out what to do; the strangeness of the context almost seems to paralyze them. In one scene, Cortes' generals get totally and utterly lost in Moctezuma's palace, which is labyrinthine in its orderliness and repetitiveness. I was a little lost as to what was happening with the literal "palace intrigue." But I did admire the boldness of the novel's final scenes, in which--spoiler alert--Moctezuma, finally face to face with Cortes, offers him a lick of a psychedelic cactus. The lick sends Cortes into a hallucinatory dream, in which he sees the future of Mexico after the Spanish conquest--but then he wakes up, and is killed. That's right, Enrigue pulls a Tarantino on us. But it works, especially because of the unsettling suggestion that we, too, are part of the dream. One day, You Dream of Empires suggests, we may all wake up from history.

Cross Stitch by Jazmina Barrera

My grandmother always used a thimble. She was taught to embroider by her aunt in the small Yucatan town where she grew up but didn't discover thimbles until she moved to Merida. She thought they were marvelous and used to say that sewing machines, washing machines, and thimbles had changed her life. I never found thimbles comfortable to wear, but there was a period when I spent so much time embroidering that I got calluses on my fingertips, and if I pricked myself, the needle would never go deep enough to draw blood. Citlali would give a nervous giggle when I'd ask her to prick me to demonstrate the quality of my calluses. Remembering her laughter makes me want to laugh too, but I stop myself so as not to wake my daughter, who's sleeping in the next room while I embroider her name on the backpack she needs for her first day at nursery school. Laughter has to be one of the hardest things in the world to hold back, almost harder than tears.

Mila, the narrator of Jazmina Barrera's Cross Stitch, receives terrible news: Citlali, her old friend from high school, has drowned off the coast of Senegal. Mila arranges for the reception and disposal of Citlali's ashes with a ceremonial gathering of her friends, but the painful loss brings back a rush of memories, divided into what you might call--appropriately, given the novel's title and central motifs--two threads. First, the high school friendship between Citlali, Mila, and beautiful, much-desired Dalia. Second, a college trip to London and Paris, in which Mila and Dalia go looking for Citlali, whom they worry is in distress. When they find her in Paris, the three have the first adult adventure of their lives, but their worries are not misplaced, as Citlali shows repeated signs of an eating disorder. Though her later death in Senegal seems accidental, the trip seems to foreshadow their friend's ultimate disintegration--perhaps, unraveling.

I was really charmed by Jazmina Barrera's On Lighthouses, a mix of memoir, autofiction, and non-fiction essay. I found it both thoughtful and scrupulous, drawing on an impressive number of historical, geographic, and fictional sources on the subject of lighthouses. Cross Stitch, though more pointedly fictional, is a little like that, too: interspersed with--I guess I have to say woven, right?--the main narrative are many brief snippets about embroidery and sewing. Like On Lighthouses, the sources are innumerable and diverse. Barrera draws from Mayan cultural practices, modern feminist artists like Louise Bourgeois and Leticia Parente, medical textbooks, and fiction novels like Jane Eyre and my beloved Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

In one way, these pieces speak to the embroidery pursuits of the three girls, who bond over it, but in a symbolic way, they suggest an image of life as something woven together. The fabrics of life, perhaps, are threaded together from the lives of others. It's a cheesy way of putting it, but perhaps one point is that, though a thread may be cut, it reminds part of the larger fabric, where it intersects with other lives, other memories. Citlali remains woven in the fabric of the narrator's life. Nor is it lost that sewing and stitching are, in medical and garment contexts, a kind of healing that knits broken things together. It's a testament to Barrera's skill and the novel's thoughtfulness and gentleness that the book is not cheesy. The symbol, which might otherwise seem hackneyed or cliche--after all, the image of life as a thread goes back to the ancient Greeks--is renewed and invigorated by the essay portions of the novel. 

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

Later, when the sheep had filled into the arroyo and from the bank he could see them all, he dropped a little bread for the snake-killer dog, but the dog had quivered and laid back its ears. Slowly it backed away and crouched, not looking at him, not looking at anything, but listening. Then he heard it, the thing itself. He knew even then that it was only the wind, but it was a stranger sound than any he had ever known. And at the same time he saw the hole in the rock where the wind dipped, struck, and rose. It was lager than a rabbit hole and partly concealed by the chokecherry which grew beside it. The moan of the wind grew loud, and it filled him with dread. For the rest of his life it would be for him the particular sound of anguish.

I don't usually re-read books before teaching them, especially if I've taught them more than once. But N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn is an exception. Perhaps it's just because the book is too dense, too rich, to get away with "faking it." But maybe it's because I love it, and it feels to me like one of those books whose wonders never cease to unfold. This time around, it feels especially poignant, given that Momaday himself died earlier this year at age 89. This time around, it has the feeling of a great legacy--wisdom, maybe, from the next world.

I don't have much to say about it here because I'm sort of doing a running thread about it on Twitter. One thing that did stand out to me, that I hadn't really noticed before, is the passage above, where a young Abel is spooked by a hole in the rock through which the wind is moaning. This stood out to me for a few reasons. One, it reminded me of a similar moment in Death Comes for the Archbishop in which the bishop Latour is guided, in a snow storm, to a secret cave by an Indian guide, where he hears a great moaning coming from within its inaccessible recesses. It reminded me so much of it, actually, that I wondered if Momaday was pointedly referencing it: a moment of the Other, which in Cather is racialized and exotic. That it should strike Latour that way is no surprise, but Abel--always half an outsider because of his uncertain parentage--is, or ought to be, different.

It also brought to mind certain vague aspects of the Pueblo religion, which, like many Native American religions of the West, supposes a number of worlds laid one on the other. Many of these religions hold that humankind came up from another world through a hole like this one; some of them, like the Lakota, can even pinpoint the exact hole. The sipapu, the ceremonial hole in the sacred kiva of the Pueblo religion, represents this place of emergence. Perhaps what Tayo is hearing here--and what terrifies him so--is the sound of that other world: the unmediated touch of the real, which other characters (like Angela) long for, and seek to find in Indian country.

I loved re-reading House Made of Dawn this year. I don't know why, but it felt cleaner, simpler to me, more manageable and recognizable and familiar. Maybe having tackled some of its knottier aspects--its strange place-shifting, its many voices, its modernist structural tricks--what's left is the purity and simplicity of Momaday's language.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

They were as dark as anything, and all marching in the straightest of files, with their hands raised at the same angle, while Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress and watched them. Mussolini had put an end to unemployment with his fascisti and there was no litter in the streets. It occurred to Sandy, there at the end of the Middle Meadow Walk, that the Brodie set was Miss Brodie's fascisti, not to the naked eye, marching along, but all knit together for her need and in another way, marching along. That was all right, but it seemed, too, that Miss Brodie's disapproval of the Girl Guides had jealousy in it, there was an inconsistency, a fault. Perhaps the Guides were too much a rival fascisti, and Miss Brodie could not bear it. Sandy thought she might see about joining the Brownies. Then the group-fright seized her again, and it was necessary to put the idea aside, because she loved Miss Brodie.

Two years ago I finished the last of Muriel Spark's books, and I grieved. Last year I wanted to start reading them again, and I thought it would be fun to read them in the order I first read them--but my copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was lent somewhere to someone, who hopefully read and enjoyed it, whoever they may be. So I reread Robinson instead, a strange and charming book. But this year, I really wanted to get back to Jean Brodie, and to find out whether it really is the best of Spark's books, or if I only remember it so fondly because it was the first (and of course, most famous). I'm pleased to report that it really is that book: riotous, shocking, mean-spirited, and deeply sad.

This time around, I found myself strangely more sympathetic toward Miss Brodie. The first time around I was a rookie teacher, and I still found myself sympathizing with the students rather than the faculty. Fifteen years on (!), I see in Miss Brodie some teachers I have known: people who use their classrooms to enact fantasies of control, perhaps because so much of life outside the classroom is uncontrollable. Miss Brodie is a fascist, an admirer of Mussolini, and fascism, too, is a fantasy of control and a childish one at that; a fantasy of perfect order by the suppression and exclusion of undesirable elements--those things that are not, as Brodie says, the "creme de la creme."

But the childishness of the fantasy is what makes Brodie a sad figure. I see now how she reduces class, and life, to a series of rote cliches and performative gestures. The fantasy has deadly consequences, of course--she urges one girl toward the war in Spain, and her death--but that makes it somehow more pathetic. And in Sandy Stranger, Brodie's betrayer, I see less an avenging angel than another kind of pettiness. Sandy seizes upon Brodie's fascist leanings to have her sacked, but it's not out of concern for the dead girl in Spain, or for poor stupid Mary Macgregor who is at the bottom of the Brodie totem pole. It's out of some other kind of pique, a resentment that Brodie takes on the role of God, as if Sandy herself is not a kind of planner and schemer.

A couple other things I noticed this time around: the "flash-forward" technique that I've always considered characteristic of Spark's technique is really much more prominent here. It's so mean-spirited: Spark can barely mention Mary Macgregor without reminding us that one day she's going to die in a fire, running "hither and thither" like an idiot. But it also takes on an air of predestination, as if Mary's ultimate death is inseparable from her essential identity, as essential as Sandy's taking the veil, or Miss Brodie's eventual betrayal and death. At the risk of repeating myself, Spark is always God, pushing her characters around, assigning them destinies. She's a cruel God, Calvin's God--she clearly thinks Mary Macgregor's death is funny, and it is. Perhaps by striking out against Miss Brodie, Sandy is striking out against Spark, too, but the joke's on her, because it's Spark who puts her in the nunnery.

Another thing: Jean Brodie is more of an Edinburgh novel than nearly anything Spark has written. I can't remember off the top of my head if any of her other novels are set in Edinburgh--many are London--and though I'm sure some of them are, I don't know the city is really central to any of them. But, among other things, Jean Brodie is a novel about the awakenings that come with coming-of-age, and one of the things that Sandy learns is the particular shape of middle-class Edinburgh life that surrounds her, and how it may differ from other kinds of life: "All she was conscious now was that some quality of life peculiar to Edinburgh and nowhere else had been going on unbeknown to her all the time, and however undesirable it might be she felt deprived of it; however undesirable, she desired to know what it was, and to cease to be protected from it by enlightened people." Part of that Edinburgh life is the bourgeois standards that keeps Jean Brodie from consummating her love for the art teacher Teddy Lloyd, and which drives her to recruit Rose, then Sandy, as her surrogate. Another part is Calvinism, and perhaps it's reacting against the pervasiveness of that religion that drives Sandy--like Spark herself--to Catholicism.

In this case, I think the critics got this one right. I have a few personal favorites among Spark's books, like The Mandelbaum Gate and The Takeover, and I think that Loitering with Intent and A Far Cry From Kensington may actually be more indicative of her style and themes, but everything about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie sings. There's no one like Miss Brodie--that particular mix of self-regard and pathetic smallness--in any of her other books, or any book, frankly. And it's enlivened by the irony of the young students' untutored viewpoints, which is a tactic Spark seems not to have much patience for in other books. It's the creme de la creme--Miss Muriel Spark in her prime.

Young Once by Patrick Modiano

She went into the Sinfonia. At that time of day, there were lots of customers. She slipped to the back of the store. She chose a record and gave it to the salesman so he could let her listen to it. She waited for one of the booths to be free and sat down, putting the little headphones over her ears. A silence like cotton wool. She forgot the hustle and bustle around her. She dreams that one day she will no longer walk around in this crowd, in this suffocating racket. One day, she will burst through this screen of noise and indifference and be nothing but a voice, a clear voice, set free, like the one she is listening to at the moment.

Louis and Odile are married, living a charmed life in the Swiss Alps with their children. They're comfortable, if a little bored, and their boredom gives them plenty of time to look back on the beginning of their relationship, when things were quite different: Odile, trying to make it as a new wave singer, suffering under the abuses of predatory men--record label owners, night club owners, cops--who would control her; Louis, penniless in Paris, taking up a mysterious job working for a petty criminal. Together, they are two young people navigating a world in which they are essentially powerless against the forces of wealth and stature. When Louis first meets Odile, she is at her lowest point, with her head laid against the table of a Paris cafe--but together, the poverty and powerlessness become something that forges their love.

I can't take credit for this observation, because I read something like it somewhere (can't remember), but Young Again deflates popular myths about the golden age of 1960's French culture. The older people that Louis and Odile get involved with--Louis's friend Brossier, Odile's mentor Bellune, the criminal operative Bejardy, all these "B" names as if we're supposed to forget who is who, exactly--have their own heyday in the Paris of thirty years prior; they're always talking about those days, or sharing photographs. A golden age, it seems, is always out of reach, somewhere back in the past. But it's interesting how Modiano frames the story with the older Louis and Odile, who are more successful and comfortable by any metric, and yet it's easy to see how they look back on these difficult years as a kind of prime: "Later, when the two of them talked about the past--btu they only did so on very rare occasions, mostly after the birth of their children--they were surprised to realize that the most decisive time in their lives had lasted barely seven months."

I found Modiano's style very strange to acclimate to. I'm not sure if "minimalist" is the right word, or "Hemingwavian" or something else, but it seems stripped down to some kind of essence that shears it completely of sentimentality. The language is plainspoken in the extreme, and limited to the bare facts of what happens. I happen to like this kind of writing, but I struggled with the smoothness of it; I wondered whether that smoothness belied a great depth, or whether it was only the surface. Louis and Odile are never quite real as characters, but perhaps they have the kind of unfinished quality that young people often have before they come into themselves.

Frangipani House by Beryl Gilroy

Even as she lay suspended, between being lost and the coming of her destiny, Mama saw Death and Life, both children of the same father, both legitimate. Death, dominant and conclusive. Life, uncertain and accidental, friable as dry earth, malleable as clay, and finally fragile as gossamer in the hands of death.

Mama King is getting on in years. Most her family has moved away from Guyana to the United States, and she is, in a sense, alone. Her daughters arrange for her to move into Frangipani House, a nursing home where she will be taken care of. But Mama King feels the loss of her independence keenly, and Frangipani House is ruled with an iron fist by the cruelties of the proud Matron, who resents Mama King's attempts to free herself. There are friends and allies among the other residents, but they don't stick around for long--Frangipani House reeks of death and decay. Perhaps that, really, is the reason that Mama King escapes to live among Indian beggars, who welcome her into their lifestyle with eagerness.

One thing I liked about Frangipani House is the way it explores what it means to be old and close to death, and to face a state of mental deterioration. Though it embodies a fundamental truth, I think we don't have enough novels that focus on this state of life, partially because people who enter into it are rarely up to writing novels, and partly because I think we are afraid to look to closely at life's last stages. For Mama King, it means living with a foot in two worlds: one in the present of Frangipani House and another in the past, where her husband, a no-good roustabout named Danny, gives her two children and then suddenly disappears in the jungle. (As a matter of fact, Mama King's close friends know a shocking truth about Danny's story that, it seems, can only unfold now, when Mama King is busy trying to wrap up the threads of her life.) But Frangipani House, perhaps, is no place for an old woman, because it treats Mama King like a child, when really she is something quite different.

Mama King's escape brings her daughters and their children back to Guyana to track her down. Longed-for independence turns out to be dangerous for Mama King--with the beggars, she finds herself in a violent exchange with a policeman that sends her to the hospital--but by bringing her family back home, it gives her a chance to endure the last stage of her life with the next generations that she fears had abandoned her. She is lucky, perhaps; not all the residents of Frangipani House get this. And though it's touching, it's not sentimental or too easy; in fact, I found this book extremely rich and complex for its briefness. Mama King is interesting, but so is the insecure, heavy-handed Matron, and so are Mama King's children and grandchildren who have taken part in the 20th century's mass movement away from the Caribbean. They are searching for a better life, but Frangipani House is, at least in part, about what they must leave behind in order to do so. (One character remarks that Frangipani House is a "Caucasian" institution, and what is needed is to go back to African methods.) And I was really fascinated by the book's rich and colorful Guyanese dialect, which combines fascinatingly with Gilroy's erudition.

With the addition of Guyana, my "Countries Read" list is up to 88!