A Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer

If she had no passport, no money, few marketable qualifications, in a country more concerned with shoring-up repressive regimes than providing so much as working space for those whose professional skills were to oppose them, she had the qualification of tragedy. There is no-one so safe, so secure, so frivolous or hard-headed as to be able to be unaware of that. Leonie knew Americans would be impressed, even intimidated by her presentation: a white widow and her fatherless black child, the black husband assassinated before the wife's eyes by a racist regime. The namesake's small black hand in her mother's white one: the shame of the slave yard, of the years of the Klan, the centuries-long march before Washington had been reached, the bullet that lodged in the dream of Luther King--this simple sight brought it all to them. For them, Hillela came straight from the kitchen where Whaila died on the floor. It was all of her they need to know. She began there. It was the signature of her life; what she had been, what she was, and would be.

Hillela Capran is, effectively, an orphan; her mother has left her to be raised by two sisters in alternation--proud, priggish Olga and progressive Pauline. Her father is away somewhere in Rhodesia. And yet, from this circumstance, Hillela grows up headstrong, confident, even sure of herself. She often takes what she wants, including the love of her cousin Sasha, with whom Pauline finds her in bed one day. This moment ushers in Hillela's long, not very bitter exile. From Pauline's house she makes her way to a beach camp outside of South Africa that's home to political refugees, to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, to other parts of southern Africa. She marries an activist with ties to Mandela's ANC and has a daughter with him, whom they name for Winnie Mandela (her less known first name--Nomzomo). When he's killed by an assassin--just on the other side of the refrigerator door from her--her exile grows, expands: Eastern Europe, London, America.

The title, A Sport of Nature, refers to a Latin term meaning a "spontaneous mutation," a kind of creature or form of life whose appearance cannot be explained by its genetic material. Again and again, the novel suggests that Hillela will become an internationally known figure, whose life is being reconstructed from primary sources, though it seems equally likely for being a terrorist as for being a diplomat. Only later in the novel do we discover that Hillela becomes the second wife of an African general, later the president of his unnamed state--though apparently it's supposed to be a fictionalized Kenya. How does Hillela become this person, who consorts with ANC freedom fighters and posh diplomats both? As the title suggests, nothing in her background suggests it. She certainly doesn't get it from Olga, and not from Pauline, either, whose progressive values are of the "work within the system" variety, even as she opens her home to dissidents en route to their escape from the apartheid regime. Hillela is not even like Sasha, her cousin, whose bitter hatred of apartheid lands him a lengthy jail sentence.

It's not clear that Hillela has values at all, not in the way we typically think of them. She's motivated by something deeper, and more sensual, in every sense of the word. We are told that her "skill is men," meaning her flirtations, her provocative sexuality, come in handy for her dissident associates--but the sexuality precedes the dissidence. Her association with the ANC emerges from her relationship with her first husband, Whaila, and not the other way around. Her love for Whaila, and her desire for a family wit him, serve in place of a conscious principle:

Our colour. She cannot see the dolour that relaxes his face, closes his eyes and leaves only his mouth drawn by lines on either side. Our colour. A category that doesn't exist: she would invent it. There are Hotnots and half-castes, two-coffee-one-milk, touch-of-the-tar-brush, pure white, black is beautiful--but a creature made of love, without a label; that's a freak.

Gordimer was a political novelist, but A Sport of Nature may be her most political novel. Those of us who are not South African may forget, or be ignorant of, her long association with Mandela and the African National Congress; famously, she helped write and revise Mandela's fiery speech that dared a judge to put him to death, before his life sentence. A Sport of Nature doubles as a kind of history of the anti-apartheid movement: there's the ANC, the SWAPO, the SACP, the MK, and every other acronym under the sun. Mandela is here, and several other figures whose names are less familiar to foreigners like me, like Oliver Tambo. It's a far cry from the abstract crisis of July's People--this is real history, recorded by a person who lived it. This is true for better and for worse, perhaps mostly worse, as the novel seems at times too granular. But as the novel's only fictional creation, Hillela hovers above it all, a character of power and individuality that, as far as I've read, is unmatched in Gordimer's fiction. Perhaps she was Gordimer's way of imagining a personality that might cut through the various contradictions and tensions of apartheid, a white woman freed from belief, led to the life of liberation by feeling only.

Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu

The essential ambiguity of my writing. Its irreducible insanity. I was in a world that cannot be described, and definitely not understood, through any other kind of writing, insofar as it can truly be comprehended. Revealing is one thing, and the painful process of reverse engineering, which is true understanding, quite another. You have before your eyes an artifact of another world, with other dawns and other gods, an enigmatic Antikythera mechanism that shines, floating in the air, in all the details of its metal brackets covered with symbols and small gears. It was difficult to retrieve it from the bottom of the sea, from all its oyster beds and undulating algae, to meticulously clean off the crust of petrified and and rust, to grease it with glittering oil, to set every gear in place so all the teeth fit together, and this is what my manuscript has done, up to this point: it has revealed, brought to light, unveiled what was hidden behind veils, it has decrypted what was locked in the crypt, it has deciphered the cipher of the box where it lay, without even a dash of the unknown object's shadow and melancholy dripping into our world.

Solenoid is narrated by an alternative version of Mircea Cartarescu, the writer whose 600-page phantasmagoria has made him famous (in book terms) around the world as well as in his native Romania. This version of Cartarescu, instead of achieving acclaim for his poetry early in life, had his work mocked and rejected, and ended up as a teacher of Romanian literature in a Bucharest middle school. He goes home each night to his "boat-shaped house," where a strange mechanical device--the title solenoid--generates a field that allows him to float above his bed at night. The solenoid provides the key, perhaps, to the strange and otherworldly occurrences that punctuate his life: the dream-like "visitors" that appear at his bedside, the invisible aliens who capture the school janitor, the enormous automaton that stomps a man to death, the secret chambers beneath the factory beside the school, the window into another world peopled by mites and other animalcules blown up to size of elephants.

If you know one thing about Solenoid, it's that it includes seven pages of nothing but the word "help!" repeated over and over. It's a cry that comes from deep within the narrator's being: help me! Get me out of this life, where I am imprisoned in a body, a body that will ultimately die. One of the funnier bits of Solenoid involves a group of protesters called the "Picketists" who demonstrate against death. Their protests are useless, of course, but who doesn't spend much of their life wondering about their own end, and why it has to be so, why it can't be otherwise? "Otherwise" is a key word for Solenoid, a word that resounds in its many doppelgangers and doubles, of which the second Cartarescu is one. (Another can be found in the way the narrator tells us he was raised as a girl by his parents, in effect, as his own dead or vanished twin sister.) Why must things be one way rather than another? Why must we be trapped in this existence, both metaphysically and physically?

I don't think I can explain to you what exactly the solenoids of the novel are, or what they're supposed to do, or how exactly they fit into the larger novel. I do get the sense that their power is in enabling that otherwise, in giving the narrator and others the ability to see life from another vantage point than their own limited one. Solenoid insists that, even though our own perspectives are by nature limited by our physical being, there is a world greater and more expansive that interacts with our own. The narrator's obsession with tesseracts is one example of this: four-dimensional shapes that change and transform as they pass through our own three-dimensional world, just as a three-dimensional cube passed through a plane creates a diamond that opens like a flower.

Another are the many, many images of microscopic animals, first arrayed in a kind of museum (accessible, House of Leaves-like, through a mysterious door in the narrator's own home), then glimpsed through a magical window. Cartarescu describes the mites as looking like the long-legged elephants from Dali; only later did I come to understand that what the narrator is given a glimpse of is not an alien planet, but our own world at a different scale, a world that is part of our own but has as little relation to our world as ours does to the world of the fourth-dimension--or the world of God. In one climactic scene--maybe the highlight of the long, bizarre novel--the narrator is transformed by a sympathetic librarian into a mite, where he is tasked with becoming the "Christ of the mites." How does a mite talk about? Through stomach waves and magnetic fields, it seems. The narrator's gospel "inspired in them an attitude they hadn't felt before, a longing toward what is impossible to imagine," and his description of the divine "they could not imagine except as an endlessly lazy and incredibly sad mite, wrapped in baroque-fetid scents, in whom putridness and sandalwood, formaldehyde and oleander, cinnamon and hydrogen sulfide, as well for us inconceivable smells of eyes, sky, spider, scream, hunger, claw, bronze, god, near, and, nor, probably weave together into a metaphysical robe of endless grandeur." This is, I think, wildly funny and poignant: all your religion, Cartarescu seems to say, is a cribbed and malformed understanding of that divine otherwise, and yet, by pointing the way outside of the self, it points to truth.

Once in my life I believed that the best novels are more metaphysical than political; they explore certain truths about human life that are beyond history and culture. I don't really believe that anymore; at least, I don't believe that the political is a sphere separate from the metaphysical, and I feel that claims to expressions about "the human condition" often ignore the ways that humans actually interact with one another. But Solenoid inspires the old feeling in me, that there is a truth at the bottom of human life, and it deals with the mystery of existence and the inescapable tragedy of death. Help! You said it, brother.

The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

In Thalia sex was just not talked about. Even Genevieve would go to  considerable lengths to keep from calling a spade a spade. Everything acknowledged the existence of sex: babies were born now and then, and things to prevent them were sold at the drugstores and one or two of the filling stations. The men told dirty jokes and talked all the time about how they wished they had more pussy, but it didn't really seem to bother many of them so long as the football team was doing well. The kids were told as little about sex as possible and spent most of their time trying to find out more. The boys speculated a lot among themselves and got the nature of the basic act straight when they were fairly young, but some of the girls were still in the dark about it when they graduated from high school. Many girls simply refused to believe that the things the boys peed out of could have any part in the creation of babies. They knew good and well that God wouldn't have wanted any arrangement of His to be that nasty.

Sonny and Duane are seniors in the (very) small town of Thalia, Texas. Duane is going with Jacy, the most beautiful girl in the school, and plans to marry her, while Sonny secretly pines for her. When Sonny breaks up with his own girlfriend, he finds himself adrift, until the school's coach asks him to drive his wife to a medical appointment. Sonny and Ruth, the coach's wife, find themselves ineluctably drawn together: for Sonny, it's a chance at the kind of real physical intimacy that scarcely belongs to the naive world of high school girls. For Ruth, whose boorish husband prefers the bodies of his male students to hers--a sexuality so secret that he seems not to even recognize it in himself--Sonny offers a chance to be touched, and loved, for the first time. They try to keep it a secret, not very well. Sonny and Ruth's relationship forms the core of The Last Picture Show, and flawed as it is, it may be the only relationship, in either physical or romantic terms, that gives anybody in the sad, lonely town any kind of pleasure at all.

McMurtry's vision of small town America is horribly bleak. Thalia is stultifying and repressive, ruled by a set of social norms that murder pride and pleasure of any kind. The Last Picture Show is, at its heart, a book about the consequences of sexual repression, which manages not to eliminate sex but to transmute it into dangerous, joyless forms. One of the favorite pastimes of the boy of Thalia High School is--unbelievably--to "play around" with local farmers' calves. That's how little romance McMurtry has for small towns--they're full of people who fuck cows. Repression's other consequences are, if not as graphic, even more dispiriting: the boys pay a whore to have sex with a mentally handicapped teen against his will; the deeply closeted coach lashes out of his own misery by having an English teacher fired for being the "queer" he himself really is; Sonny and Duane receive their own sexual initiation among underage, pregnant prostitutes in Mexico. And none of the adults, Sonny's parents or Jacy's, who have spent their whole miserable lives in Thalia have relationships that are anything but curdled.

Among such repression, Jacy, the prettiest girl in school, quickly learns to weaponize her attractiveness, using sex to climb the social ladder, from Duane to a series of wealthy "city boys." (Hilariously, the "city" for these characters is the metropolis of Wichita Falls.) Knowing that Sonny has always held a torch for her, she sets out to wreck his affair with Ruth just because she can. She even goes so far as to suggest eloping, in order to stick it to her parents, who she knows will come to fetch her and have the marriage annulled. She's a moral monster, and yet she is only what small towns like Thalia are designed to produce. She, too, is a victim, young and naive enough to think that her sexuality is a weapon that only she can wield and not one that can be wielded against her, too; she knows enough to see the way that she might manipulate Duane and Sonny but walks into the very same traps when set by men who are richer, older, or more sophisticated.

I really enjoyed Lonesome Dove, but I think The Last Picture Show is the more powerful novel. Lonesome Dove is a true epic, a long book (and part of an even longer series) written over a large map, and though it begins in Texas it encompasses nearly all of the American frontier. The Last Picture Show is a modern vision of the frontier that has shrunk down, where the last few generations cling to a lonely and barren place. Even as Duane gets out of Thalia--by way of the U.S. Army--Sonny never seems able to imagine a life outside of Thalia. The scene where, having graduated, he attends a football game only to discover how outside that world he is, is one of the saddest in a book where all of the scenes are sad. Even the excursions to the outside world--Wichita Falls, Fort Worth, Matamoros, even a senior trip to San Francisco--seem to exist only to confirm how provincial and inescapable Thalia really is. It takes real skill, I think, to craft a book so singularly punishing and bleak that doesn't feel like an exercise in cynicism. But I think The Last Picture Show speaks powerfully against a small-town romanticism that may be even more powerful today than it was when it was written. Sometimes, small towns are just small: in size, in vision, and in virtue.

A Book, Untitled by Shushan Avagyan

This book doesn't contain any novel ideas.

It simple (re)visits the main events of the past, and tries to understand the present, which is incomprehensible.

Yet the brilliant writers (who never did meet each other) were writing about their realities with such clarity and foresight that even after a hundred years their ideas have remained so relevant.

...And when each time my mind wanders back to Yerevan.

Armenian writer Shushan Avagyan's A Book, Untitled imagines a meeting between two forgotten masters of Armenian literature: Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan. Though they came from different centuries, different backgrounds, even different parts of Armenia--the Soviet East and the Turkish West, roughly and respectively, as I understand it--but they are similar insofar as their poetic achievements have been overlooked, either entirely (as is the case with one--I forget which--Yesayan?), or in the sense that their revolutionary work has been ignored in order to portray them as a "domestic," feminine poet. By imagining a meeting between them, Avagyan brings together threads of Armenian literary history that have never been allowed to connect.

Or perhaps the real subject of A Book, Untitled is the creation of the book itself: Avagyan weaves together the story of Khurginian and Yesayan's meeting with bits of research and poetry, as well as conversations between herself and her research partner Lara, as they investigate the poets' archives. Avagyan describes the book she's writing as having "four authors" of which she is only the "typist/writer/translator"; stupid me didn't pick up till the very end that she means herself, Lara, and the two poets, who are cast as equal contributors. Or perhaps Lara is not included, and the fourth is the reader themself, whom Avagyan invites into the process of composition. The novel's many threads--Khurginian and Yesayan, Avagyan and Lara, poetry, research, snippets of the poets' interrogation at the hands of the state, even scraps from postcards written to an anonymous lover--are scattered so freely, often alternating from one line to the next, that the whole thing seems like a kind of puzzle that must be pieced together. Avagyan even invites the reader to give the book, ostensibly untitled, a title of their own satisfaction.

I really hate when people say stuff like, "This book was too hard," or even worse, "It felt like homework." Yet I couldn't help feeling, as I read A Book, Untitled, that I was failing some test the book was putting out for me, or if not a test, then failing to take up some puzzle or game in the spirit it's intended. I wonder if knowing more about Armenian history might have helped here--it wasn't clear to me, even, who the interrogators seeking to censor Khurginian/Yesayan (which was it, again?) were supposed to be--Turks or Soviets? I came to appreciate the motifs of distance and collision, the way in which the distance between the author of the postcards and their recipient mirrors the way in which the poets at the heart of the novel are kept apart, spiritually, socially, culturally, etc. But the metafictional aspects of it felt more alienating and grueling than illuminating, to me. Surely the failure is mostly mine; hopefully there are readers out there more game for the puzzle than I was.

That said, I love this press, Tilted Axis, which is dedicated to English translations of all kinds of world literature. This is the first book I've read by an Armenian writer, which brings my "Countries Read" list up to 91!

Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa

It's high noon in Bruneville. Not a cloud in the sky. The sun beats down, piercing the veil of shimmering dust. Eyes droop from the heat. In the Market Square, in front of Cafe Ronsard, Sheriff Shears spits five words at Don Nepomuceno:

"Shut up, you dirty greaser."

He says the words in English.

Last week I spent a few days in Brownsville, a city on the Rio Grande where Texas borders Mexico. Brownsville is one of the most heavily Latino cities in the United States, and it still has a distinctly Mexican feel to it. Across the border lies the city of Matamoros, Brownsville's Mexican "twin." Though we never saw it, we did overlook the border many times, looking for birds. It's hard to stand there and not feel underwhelmed; is this narrow, sluggish, brown river really such a meaningful boundary that it preoccupies our national imagination? A kindly local suggested we try birding at a former golf course on the river "where the illegals cross," though he hastened to add that nothing bad would happen there. Nearby, on an anonymous and scrubby patch of grassland, is where the opening shots of the Mexican-American war rang out. You feel the history, perhaps, but the feeling of the border, the boundary, is elusive.

Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa's book Texas: The Great Theft begins on the American side of the river, in Bruneville, a fictionalized version of Brownsville, in the 1850s. A white sheriff is picking on a Mexican drunk in the town square. When Don Nepomuceno, a wealthy Tejano rancher, objects, the sheriff insults him, calling him a "greaser," a word which will reverberate for miles and miles on both sides of the Rio Grande, and which will ultimately lead to a war between Nepomuceno's forces and the white settlers who resent the claims that the Mexicans, Tejanos, and Indians have on the land. The first quarter or so of the novel follows the news of the sheriff's insult as it passes from mouth to mouth, a process by which it takes in all of the novel's frankly enormous cast of characters: ranchers, vaqueros, gamblers, the bargeman, the innkeeper, the doctor, the mayors of Bruneville and its twin Matasanchez, journalists, spies, bandits, enslaved men, freedmen, Seminoles, Comanches, Germans, children, the keeper of the messenger pigeons, fishermen, and more. Texas has maybe the largest cast of characters per page of any book I've ever read; Boullosa pointedly gives us as wide a view as possible. The sheriff's insult, then, ripples like a stone dropped in the river.

Texas is a highly fictionalized version of a true story; Nepomuceno is a version of the Tejano rancher Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, who lead bands of raiders against the white ranchers in south Texas. I recognized many of the ranchers' names, like Kenedy and Kleberg, who gave their names to south Texas counties, and King, whose namesake ranch is still the largest in the United States, and who inspired the cattle barons of Edna Ferber's novel Giant. Like the Rio Grande, the border between fiction and history is permeable, and who belongs to which is not always discernable. The sheer number of characters gives the novel a kind of breakneck pace, and steers it away from modes that emphasize the interiority or psychology of historical figures. Instead, it gives the history a kind of fable-like quality, a colorful flatness that emphasizes breadth over depth.

It's a story not just about Nepomuceno but all of south Texas, and it's a story about racial violence that comes down squarely on the side of the Mexicans and Tejanos. For them, the border is a boundary placed down to delineate and permit violence and deprivation. The sheriff's insult sets off the war, but the larger context is the white ranchers who have eaten away by subterfuge the lands belonging to Nepumoceno's mother Dona Estefania, and who exert control over Mexicans (and Black people and Indians) by a regime of dispossession and disrespect. Boullosa captures the way that Brownsville/Bruneville, having been founded to mark and watch over the border, represents a kind of diminished and degraded mirror image of its sister city across the border. And I thought it was interesting how Nepomuceno, having been roped into the United States by the machinations of the Anglo ranchers, cannily insists on his claim to American citizenship--though the two cities are emblems of opposition, they exist in a kind of symbiosis that cannot be fully pulled apart or cleanly separated.