The Dazzling Paget Sisters by Ariane Bankes

What elusive quality is it that propels people into the centre of things? My mother, Celia Paget, and her identical twin sister Mamaine seemed to possess that quality, to gravitate towards the very heart of the era in which they lived. Born in 1916 and brought up in relative simplicity in rural Suffolk, their lives became entangled with some of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, whether as friends or lovers, muses or wives.

The Paget sisters were identical twins who went from reluctant debutantes to society darlings, eventually becoming enmeshed in the social circles of England's greatest mid-century authors. Celia was a longtime lover of George Orwell, while her twin sister Mamaine was the lover and eventually wife of Orwell's friend and intellectual rival Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian emigre known for his novel Darkness at Noon. Mamaine carried on a brief, torrid affair with Albert Camus, and around the margins of their lives other literary greats hung: Beauvoir and Sartre, of course, as well as Andre Malraux and others. The Dazzling Paget Sisters, written by Celia's daughter Ariane Bankes, seeks to discover what it is that drew her mother and aunt "into the centre of things."

What that "elusive quality" was, I'm not quite sure. Apparently (as one can tell easily from the cover) both twins were quite beautiful, and they had a kind of twinly, otherworldly connection with each other. The question seems like a powerful one--why would these two ordinary girls from Suffolk end up so wrapped up with the century's literary greats?--but Bankes' biography mostly has the effect of demythologizing the very question she poses. The answer seems to be part privilege and part happenstance: the girls were "picked up" by a society maven named Dick Wyndham, who introduced them to these writers. As the story of their lives unfolded, I began to understand their lives not as a series of unlikely brushes with greatness, but something more ordinary: these writers, of course, all knew each other, and it stands to reason that their social circle included people who weren't writers.

What I enjoyed most about The Dazzling Paget Sisters was learning more about the emerging tensions between this circle as the Cold War began. Koestler in particular, who modeled Darkness at Noon on the Soviet gulag, spared no mercy for his fellow writers who let their Socialist sympathies lead them toward the USSR. This led to both Koestler and Mamaine becoming, half-willingly, useful operatives for the CIA, something I wish the book had explored in more detail. And I was interested, of course--who wouldn't be--in the doomed romantic dalliance between Mamaine and Camus, under Koestler's nose. But mostly, I felt that The Dazzling Paget Sisters might have been better served by an author other than Celia's daughter, who approaches the material in a hyper-faithful chronological way that never quite penetrates the surface. It made me wonder if someone with more of an outside perspective, with less loyalty to the letter of the story, might have found a way in to the real "centre of things."

The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald

She let her thoughts run free. She knew perfectly well that Savage, after years of enforced solitude, during which he had been afforded no prospect of a woman's love, was unlikely to be coming to her room just for a bundle of clothes. If he wanted to get into bed with her, what then, ought she to raise the house? She imagined calling out (though not until he was gone), and her door opening, and the bare shanks of the rescuers jostling in their nightshirts--the visiting preacher, Mr Luke, her father, the upstairs lodgers--and she prayed for grace. She thought of the forgiven--Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, the wife of Hosea who had been a prostitute, Mary Magdalene, Mrs Watson who had cohabited with a drunken man.

The title story of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Ways of Escape concerns a young Australian girl who discovers an escaped convict hiding in a rural church. Dressed in a hood, she can't see his face, and so she is able to project her young desires and fears onto him--not that he's young or handsome, exactly; she never rises quite to that level of imagination, but that he's arrived to carry her away on a tide of romance, in its older meaning. She waits for him to climb into her bedroom for a set of clothes as promised, but he never shows, and she discovers in the morning that he's run off with a much older servant woman.

This ending is a little too much of a punchline; it doesn't do justice to Fitzgerald's powers of plotting. But the story works because Fitzgerald captures young Alice's perspective so well: never over-wild, but callow and apprehensive, perhaps even purposely refusing to follow the line of her thoughts in order to let the mysterious event of her life happen. The convict has an analogue in the title character of "The Red-Haired Girl," a servant and painter's muse who ends up sacked for petty theft--how paltry the objects of our fascination turn out to be! But there's real magic, too, to be had, as with the title character of "Beehernz," a reclusive conductor living on a remote Scottish isle who is convinced to return and conduct a major orchestra because of the simple folk song idly sung by a woman who seems to the story in other ways entire irrelevant.

I really loved "Desideratus," a story about a poor boy who loses a precious medal--there's the great Penelopean image of the boy discovering the medal at the bottom of a puddle and ice and having to return after the thaw, only to find it gone--and then traces it to a wealthy estate, where a rich man pries the medal from the hands of his ill son. We never find out why the son was sick (did it have something to do with the ice and the thaw?) or whether the rich man is serious when he asks if the poor boy would trade the medal for a sum of money. We never find out anything else at all, because the lives of the rich and poor have only intersected here, once, obliquely, and then sundered to remain at arm's length.

But I must admit my favorite was "The Axe," a gruesome little ghost story framed as a memo from a middle manager to his boss, who has forced him to fire a long-time employee. That employee reemerges at the office with his neck severed, as if with the proverbial axe, and the middle manager rushes to his office, where, we learn, he's been writing the memo the whole time, not knowing whether the bloody apparition is still on the other side of the door. Fitzgerald was always so clever--and yet her work hardly ever seems too-clever or too neat; cleverness is always in service to a real human feeling. I'd long ago finished her novels, so it was a real treasure to discover this collection of stories, which I didn't even realize existed--none, perhaps, has quite the impact of her longer work, but it was great to luxuriate again in the work of such a peerless writer.

The Cat at the End of the World by Robert Perisic

Cats confused people. Not just those on the island who had never seen the animals, but also the Greeks who had taken them from the Egyptians--because that was not long ago, they were not used to them yet. They were the first ungovernable animals that made friends with the humans. When humans stood before cats, they did not see their own purpose.

In ancient Syracuse, a slave boy named Kalia becomes attached to a cat named Miu. Miu is a novelty among the Greeks, a strange creature brought from Egypt, where it's rumored they worship this strange, aloof creature. Miu is badly mistreated by the son of Kalia's owner, and the stark contrast between the freedom in the cat's bearing and Pigras' controlling nature awakens Kalia to the injustice of his own state as a slave. Hiding out in a barn, he ends up absconding on a ship with Miu--and a donkey named Mikro--on its way to the Adriatic coast, where Sicilian Greek settlers intend to set up a new polis. Kalia, Miu, and Mikro all become founding members of this new city, and it is through this new enterprise that Kalia comes to understand the nature of political and social life.

The third-person Kalia sections are interspersed with first-person observations by "Scatterwind," a creature who is made of the wind, if such a thing can be possible--even Scatterwind admits that to use the term "I" seems a bit out of place. Scatterwind, a relative perhaps of the bag of winds that sent Odysseus' men scrambling across the Mediterranean, is a keen observer of human (and animal) life. Because he is immortal, or at least long lived, he looks down at Kalia and the building of the polis with a kind of bird's-eye view that allows him to understand better how it expresses the nature of humans to collaborate and contest. Much of human behavior is inexplicable to Scatterwind, and his theories don't always pass muster: his accounting for love, for instance, emerges from the need for energy in the form of heat. And yet, his perspective puts the travails of one slave, one cat, and one donkey into a larger context of human flourishing and behavior.

The Scatterwind sections are, I think, the most novel and effective part of A Cat at the End of the World. I enjoyed the story of Kalia escaping with Miu, and the way that the plight of the domestic animals helps him understand his own place in the world and expand his sense of humanity and justice. The novel loses its energy a little, I think, as soon as the boat arrives on the Illyrian coast. There are excellent elements, great characters--the obsessive city planner whose exile from his polis is tantamount to a death sentence, the gruff-with-a-heart-of-gold former soldier missing an arm--but not having the wider perspective of a Scatterwind, I had trouble understanding the dynamic of the city's growth and the conflicts inherent to it. Kalia grows, becomes an adult, obtains a wife and has children, but these things are, even in a 400 page book, zoomed through so hastily I had a hard time integrating them to the story as a reader. But through it all there is Miu, the refugee, whose proud independence and nobility serve as a counterweight to shifting allegiances and philosophies.

With the addition of Croatia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 111!

Getting to Know the General by Graham Greene

The novel On the Way Back nagged at me night and day on my return to France. Those characters which I had so mistakenly drawn from life wouldn't let me rest. I would constantly remember Chuchu's boast, "I'm never going to die"; is complex theology--"I believe in the Devil. I don't believe in God," and the way that he would prove the existence of the Devil by pushing at a swing door in the wrong direction. The General and Chuchu went on living, far away in Panama, and they refused to become characters in my novel. And Panama--so much of the little country had still been left unseen and it seemed highly unlikely that I would ever be able to return for a second visit.

In the 1970's, Graham Greene received a call inviting him to the small Central American nation of Panama. The request came from no other than General Omar Torrijos, Panama's recently installed leader. Torrijos, it seems, was sort of an odd duck: not explicitly Marxist but having come to power in a coup against Panama's right-wing regime, a passionate believer in social democracy but not in partisan or sectarian politics. His core issue is the return of the Panama Canal to Panamanian control. Arriving in Panama City, Greene finds himself immersed in a world of intriguing figures: Sandinistas and Somozans working against each other in nearby Nicaragua, right-wing journalists, scheming viziers. But at the heart of it all is Torrijos, who turns out, in Greene's telling, to be a simple and humble person who only wants to spend a little time with what he sees, through Greene's novels, as a kindred spirit.

I'm reaching a bittersweet age where I'm exhausting all my favorite novelists, so it was heartening to calculate recently that, at the rate of one book a year, I can be reading Graham Greene into my fifties, even if I have likely read all of his best works. I was drawn to Getting to Know the General because I'd never read one of Greene's non-fiction books, and I was interested to see what it was like for Greene becoming, in a way, a character from his own books. In fact, for the length of his time in Panama, which includes sporadic journeys over a period of five or six years, Greene is writing a book in his head based on the General and his right-hand man Chuchu. (Despite his expressions of admiration for Torrijos, it seems like most of Greene's time in Panama is spent with Chuchu.) The book, called On the Way Back, is doomed to never be written. Perhaps the real people crowded out the fiction, or perhaps Greene simply got too deeply integrated with his Panamanian friends to cultivate the necessary distance to write his novel.

The subtitle of the book, after all, is "The Story of an Involvement," and Greene did get involved: several times he describes, with offhand diffidence, lending his efforts to negotiating for the liberation of hostages taken by Central American guerilla groups. Greene is there in the room when the treaty between Torrijos and the Carter administration that provides for the return of Panamanian sovereignty to the Canal Zone; it's fascinating to see him look witheringly at some of the assembled slaughterers, like Pinochet and Henry Kissinger. Novel, too, to read about his friendship with "Gabo," Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who ends up as a kind of Latin-American counterpart in the light intrigues that Torrijos extracts from Greene.

So, as much as anything, Getting to Know the General is a fascinating document that captures a little-remembered slice of 20th century history. But it's a pleasure, too, in the way that Greene lends his cosmopolitan eye and ear to the natural and cultural landscapes of Panama: its islands, its mountains--like the one that will ultimately take the General's life in a suspicious plane crash--its towns, its rundown hotels and haunted houses, its terrible food and vile rum punches.  

The Evening Wolves by Joan Chase

From the beginning Dad said Gloria would bring a ray of sunlight into our darkness. He warned us to find the same star--win her heart or hitch up to the next wagon West. Sometimes it's dazzling, Gloria up in the morning, dressed to the nines for ham and eggs. Ready for a date if one should come knocking, lipstick prints on the coffee cups. Gloria has done us the great favor of leaving her wonderful home and responsible job for a thankless task. She did it of her own free will, including giving up smoking, although I think nothing is quite what she expected. Still, she can say, "I always wanted a family of my own," real tears and her smile breaking together. I can't think what it will come to and I wring my hands, avoiding her eyes. Sometimes she says I'm laughing at her, but I don't think so, although I don't always know what comes over my face when I'm not looking.

Francis Clemmons is red-haired, with the fiery personality to match, and so is Gloria--a perfect match. But Gloria doesn't quite know what she's getting into with Francis' children. The young boy--to young to remember his late mother--is no problem, really, but the two girls, Margy and Ruthann, are headstrong.  Francis handles them with the power of a mad king, making elaborate jokes, pouring cereal over their heads when they complain about being hungry, leaving them on the side of the road when they provoke his ire. (It's hard not to see, though I am constantly reminded of it, the tyrannical father of Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, though deep down we sense that Francis is a good and caring father, unlike Stead's.) The girls, for their part, give as good as they get. They grow up in this unusual household, become young adults with sexual yearnings, and Gloria is only partly capable of giving the guidance that they miss from their mother. A family that can be made can be unmade, too, and soon the two girls are off on their own, sundering the fragile ecosystem that the five had built.

I really loved Joan Chase's During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. It is, I believe, the only other novel that Chase wrote in her lifetime. It also tells the story of a big family, but it's fun trick is that it is narrated by all the family's young girls at once, in a "we" that can be split or combined as needed. Here, the narrative skips much more ordinarily through a series of first person narratives: Margy, Ruthann, Gloria, Tommy--though never Francis. This choice, in fact, is one of the reasons that the novel doesn't really seem to work. The novel is so fragmented, so hectic, that I felt as if I hardly knew what was going on, and I didn't get much out of the choice to depict the same moments from the perspectives of different characters. The two girls, I found, were not different enough, and they all share their father's elliptical, allusive speech, that made it hard to distinguish one from the other. Eventually I understood that Ruthann is more studious and more beautiful, more precociously sexual but also tormented by it--she marries a preacher to expiate her guilt over losing her virginity--while Margy is more lumpen, more aloof. But they both sounded a little too much like Francis, who perhaps sounds too much like Joan Chase.

Chase was an excellent prose writer, and I enjoyed the headlong flow of the sentences, which can be quite beautiful even as they borrow liberally from stock phrase and cliche ("win her heart or hitch up to the next wagon West") but the "big picture" was entirely lost on me. Big jumps in time, the introduction of new characters--it all gets lost in the thicket of language. It's hard to say exactly why this novel fails when The Queen of Persia works so well. Partly it's the point-of-view choice, but that's not it entirely. Perhaps it all comes down to the suspension of disbelief and the persuasion of character; I never really felt these characters were anything but curtain-thin. In The Queen of Persia everything comes together to give the illusion of a wholeness, a whole family--but the fractured, broken family of The Evening Wolves never has that kind of wholeness.

The Name of the World by Denis Johnson

What brought Flower Cannon to mind right then I don't know, but I have to say that the passing parade put my recent experiences with her into a kind of perspective. The experiences were mostly about seeing her, laying eyes on her--not about hearing her words, certainly not about touching her. And now I think this narrative might cohere, if I ask you to fix it with this vision: luminous images, summoned and dismissed in a flowing vagueness. The difference being that I didn't take Flower for a message, but a ghost, the ghost of my daughter--yes, and for a while  she came and went in the flow of events like my Elsie in the silent cataract of memory.

Michael Reed is an academic at one of those huge frosty schools in the American Midwest. His life is, as for all academics, fairly banal, except that he's haunted by the death of his wife and daughter in a car crash several years back. Wherever he goes, he seems to confront symbols of his own life in the wake of their death: the painting in the art gallery that makes concentric shapes, each one becoming more perverse; the students ice-skating around the unreachable monolith on the campus rink. Reed's life is like that, moving around the fundamental absence of his family, never able to break free and form a new trajectory. In his final year at the college, he becomes obsessed with a beautiful red-headed cellist who may offer him the key to a way of living again.

Written plainly, it sounds like an eye-roller: middle-aged academic finds new life in an affair with a beautiful young student. It's what BlueSky Y.A. mavens think all "classic" fiction is like. And there are some elements of that, in fact. Yet, Michael and the absurdly named Flower Cannon never sleep together, though he does see her naked twice: once, in an artsy "performance piece" where she shaves her mons pubis, and again in a racy strip contest at a local casino. (The satire on the academy and modern art that juxtaposition makes isn't exactly subtle.) But more interesting still is the slippage of Michael's attitude toward Flower, who reminds him at times of his wife, at other times his daughter, or someone he would have liked his daughter to grow up into. The Y.A. mavens might object at how available Flower is to the older, homely (self-described) Michael, and how easily Johnson associates her sexiness with mystery and healing. But I was really struck by the strange story that Flower tells about why she's so open to Michael hanging around, in which she tells him that he reminds her of a strange man who kidnapped her when she was young. It's so weird and difficult to integrate into the novel that it seemed like an acknowledgement that Flower Cannon is no archetype but a person with a strange and luminous life of her own.

This felt like a strange sort of novel for Johnson. His work, it seems to me, often focuses on precarity: the precarious lives of the poor and addicted, or the precarity of spies whose are always gambling with their life or safety. His characters always seem to live well outside the margins of ordinary society--a description that might even take in the post-apocalyptic strivers of Fiskadoro or the rustic hermit of Train Dreams. Compared to the protagonists of those other novels, Michael Reed is frustratingly ordinary, and it's possible to read The Name of the World as a novel by a guy who got so comfortable in the world of academia that he found himself detached from the worlds he once thought important to put down on the page. (OK, I guess being an academic is also quite precarious these days, but that isn't quite what I mean, either.) But Johnson writes about grief in ways that feel devastating and true, and quite different than the ordinary bromides one gets, and so in that way The Name of the World is a reminder of the ways that deep interior experiences, too, can put us outside the common life. And of course, with Johnson there are always the sentences, the incredible sentences.

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

He perched on the chaise, in the muted light of the small lamp next to it, his lovely, dark farmhouse floating near him, the night just beyond the room's closed shutters... Perhaps the nervous American schoolteacher was sitting on her balcony like a sentinel at the prow of a ship keeping them from harm... How many wonders there used to be for him! The miraculous human landscapes! Long, brilliant nights... Was he never to be one of those again? Whatever role he'd been assigned in the girl's drama--her drama of triumph, her drama of degradation--it was certain to be a despicable or ridiculous one. There was no chance--at least almost no chance--that she would receive from him what he so longed to provide: even a tiny portion of pleasure or solace. And when she remembered him, no doubt she would remember him with contempt.

The first and title story of Deborah Eisenberg's collection Twilight of the Superheroes is a snapshot of post-9/11 New York. Nathaniel and his group of friends have been renting an incredible top-floor apartment, procured through the help of his uncle Lucien, from an absent Japanese businessman, but the experience has been deeply tainted by the bird's-eye view the apartment has given them of the collapse of the towers. "Twilight of the Superheroes" is an attempt to capture a kind of ennui that comes in the wake of destruction, and the feeling of things deteriorating around you: the Japanese businessman is returning and Nathaniel and his friends must scrounge again, like everyone else, for their refuge; though the apartment is poisonous, it's worse somehow to let it go because one has to let the dream go as well. Even the hero of Nathaniel's indie comic strip, Passivityman, seems to have curdled; his passivity is turned against himself, toward submission to the forces of capitalist warp against which his passivity was once a rebellion.

I didn't quite get what Eisenberg was doing in this story. I had to read the others in the collection to see that these stories often lack a center--it's a story about Nathaniel, but also Lucien, but also a half-dozen people besides. They shift to new perspectives, without attempting artificially to bring those perspectives to an intersection or resolution. I thought this worked much better in "Like It Or Not," a story about a meek American schoolteacher who allows herself to be taken out for a single day by a rich art collector in the Italian countryside. It's a story about the teacher's, Kate's, feelings of inadequacy against the backdrop of the luxurious and ancient Mediterranean, but it pauses for a long beat to capture her host's, Harry's, liaison with a spoiled barely-legal teen in the next hotel room. I was struck by how sympathetic the portrait of Harry was (quoted above), how lacking in judgment, and thus more powerful than prudishness or condemnation might have been. The story returns to Kate's perspective and continues chugging along; what Harry has done is largely irrelevant to her, but the story has captured a multiplicity that makes it richer. For this reason, I suppose, the stories are longish, languid things: in a book of 230 pages, there are only six.

The final story, "The Flaw in the Design," was one of my favorites, and I thought it returned to some of the themes of "Twilight of the Superheroes" in a more successful way. Here, two parents struggle with the mania of their young adult son, whose verbal floridity and unpredictable attitudes are in part a reaction to the father's work with some nameless--but certainly evil--multinational concern. To me, this captured much better a post-9/11 feeling about the world being constricted by forces of power and greed, and the hopelessness one feels against them at a personal level. And the final scene--in which the mother seeks out an anonymous tryst on the D.C. metro--complicates and estranges it even further. I liked all the others to varying extents, including the boldness of "Window," about a woman who falls in love with a single father who also happens to be a violent gun-runner. Here, as in the other stories, the pleasure is in seeing the story unfold, not chronologically necessary but in layers, though here I thought Eisenberg was less successful in hiding that authorly hand.

Jackson's Dilemma by Iris Murdoch

Edward was (as Benet recalled and even retailed later) made of steel. He had ceased to tremble. He was no longer pale, but somewhat flushed. He sat silently, very still, frowning and looking down at the paper. Then he handed it back to Benet, and speaking in his ordinary voice, he said, 'So be it.' then he said, 'We must put off the wedding guests. Is it too late to ring them?'

Benet, now more collected, said, 'That is her writing, isn't it? It could be a hoax--'

'It is her writing -- rather hasty -- but yes, hers."

On the eve of Edward Lannion's marriage to Marian Berran, a message is discovered at Hatting Hall, Edward's estate. It's in Marian's handwriting, and it says she cannot marry him, and has gone away. This sends the hanger-son at Hatting Hall, and its neighbor, Penndean, into a flurry of handwringing and activity, chief among these Benet, the master of Penndean who orchestrated, more or less, the marriage between the two. It's Benet's servant, the mysterious Jackson, who ends up getting to the bottom of things. through cunning and sheer luck he's the one who tracks down Marian, who is in a state of hysteria after being coerced into writing the note by her Australian lover. Jackson, sensing perhaps that she is really more in love with the Australian than Edward, delivers her to him, leading to a chain of events that resorts the fragile ecosystem of the two houses.

It took me a while to figure out what exactly this novel was doing. Ultimately, though Marian's letter feels like the beginning of chaos--like the mysterious rock thrown through Edward's window at the beginning of the novel--it ends with all the characters understanding themselves better and pairing off in happy relationships. Edward ends up--spoiler alert--with the widowed Anna, whom he has always truly loved. Marian ends up with the Australian. Tuan, one of Benet's hangers-on, distinguished by being Jewish and neurotic, ends up with Marian's sister Rosalind, who had until now been nursing a wayward crush on Edward herself. And Benet ends up with Jackson, who he inherited from the dead patriarch "Uncle Tim," and whose mysterious nature he has always been unduly suspicious of--Jackson's deeds, in this case, wipe away the suspicion and bring the master and servant together in a new relationship as friends. Looking at it this way, the novel is something of a fairy tale or a Shakespearean comedy, and it suggests that the characters are induced to throw off the yoke of "Uncle Tim," whose dead hand guides the misbegotten relationship between Edward and Marian.

I didn't think much of this worked, really. I thought the novel made the fatal flaw of depicting Jackson as both mysterious--he shows up at Tim's/Benet's door with no history or family, and only the one name--while also giving us sections of his internal third person deliberation. It might have worked if Jackson really had been a figure of mystery, but the mysteriousness here feels like something more declared than explored. I was left wondering what it is about the guy that everyone feels is so extraordinary. I was put off, too, by Jackson's delivering of Marian to the Australian, who has basically gotten Marian drunk and forced her to write that letter. I was shocked by Jackson making such a mistake as to deliver Marian up to a sort of predator, and shocked moreover when I came to understand that Murdoch didn't think it was much of a mistake. I often find Murdoch's novels frustrating, teasing up big reveals or dramatic moments that don't quite come, piddling around with philosophical ideas that have little or nothing to do with the story, and this one might have been the most frustrating of all.

Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann

Whether it is a happy life or a sad one the Skinz live is of course unknowable to anyone watching them stride by, turning their bulging skulls greedily upon their bulging necks, trying to pitiless, exclusive; not listening much to one another; but we can consider the question. The lone ones lean up against the restaurant windows, hunching their heads in like turtles at the same time they swivel their gaze in what might be anxiety or might be automatic street wisdom. They spend too much time waiting, but on the whole they are arguably happy, having their fights to look forward to. What more, after all, could anyone yearn for in his guts than the chance to hurt somebody else, jawkicking a soul to screaming subhumanness in order to reiterate that I live?

William T. Vollmann's Rainbow Stories are organized in the order of the visible spectrum, from "White Knights" to "Violet Hair," passing through every color in between. The symbolism there is immediately apparent: I am going to tell you about the full spectrum of human experience, of all the different kinds of people in the world, and though they may seem to one another quiet alien, they are all parts of the same phenomenon. And then, right from the beginning, he challenges you with this easy observation by giving you a story about Nazi Skinheads living in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. In fact, this story (chapter? essay? section?) is classic Vollmann, a dispatch from a margin of the world that most people would prefer to pretend doesn't exist, or if it does, to think of it somehow as below noticing or writing about. Vollmann's depiction of the Skinz is both sympathetic and unsparing; they are racist and violent but also, in some way, childlike. The next story, "Ladies and Red Lights," builds on the depiction of Tenderloin prostitutes that appears in Vollmann's Whores for Gloria, but it was "White Knights" that struck me most as that book's successor and heir.

The other section I really liked was "Yellow Rose," about the Vollmann character's brief and doomed relationship with a young Korean woman named Jenny. Jenny's family will never accept a white boyfriend, something the narrator knows but cannot accept, and his insistence on presenting Jenny with an engagement ring is one of the book's saddest and most powerful moments. But the whole thing is really driven by the power of Jenny's voice, twinged with not-quite-Englishisms and a bubbliness that conceals a deeper desperation. ("Mom would stab me with knives... Mom would fry me alive if she know. I'm become steel faced, as my mother said these days.") I was delighted when these two stories, "White Knights" and "Yellow Rose," came together in the story "Blue Wallet," wherein the Vollmann character invites both Jenny and her friends and his skinhead friends to the same party, with predictably tense results. (The title refers to a wallet that Jenny loses, assuming it was stolen by said skinheads.)

There are other stories here that explore the margins of Bay Area society, notably "The Blue Yonder," a fantastical imagining of the motivations that drive a real-life killer of the homeless who was never identified or caught, and "Indigo Engineers," about a group of scrap metal engineers who attract huge crowds for a kind of proto-Battle Bots exhibition of machines that stab and slice each other. But other stories seemed to me, if not failed experiments exactly, big swings that never quite come together. I didn't really connect with "The Green Dress," about a man who falls in love with his neighbor's green dress--not his neighbor--stealing it and treating it as a lover. And I thought that a pair of mytho-historical stories, one about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace called "Scintillant Orange" and one about the Thugs of ancient India called "The Yellow Sugar," never quite rose to the convincing level that Vollmann perfected in his novels about the colonization of North America. Like The Atlas, this is really an odds-and-sods collection with organizational pretenses. Well, they're all odd, and a couple are sods, but when he's at his best, there's really nothing like him, is there?

Chaka by Thomas Mofolo

Chaka, right from his childhood, did not have many wishes; his desire was for one thing only: kingship and fame. Now he is very famous and he is a great king. Is it possible that he will be satisfied? Never! Now his greed has been aroused, and he is in search of something which even he himself does not know. Now Chaka was able to decide on matters of war without anything standing in his way, he alone having the power to do as he wished. He looked upon all the nations to the north, up to the places which even he did not know, and he longed to see his kingdom stretch till it reached those very places which he did not know. He looked upon those nations settled among the sea and stretching to the south, and the saw the villages and hamlets; great kings and small, the country adorned with villages built on the foundation of peace, and he smiled to himself.

Masotho (I just learned this is the demonym for someone from Lesotho) author Thomas Mofolo's Chaka is an account of the life of the legendary 19th century Zulu king Chaka, perhaps better known in the Western world as Shaka Zulu. Chaka's life begins ignominiously, as the illegitimate son of a king; though at first it seems that, as the only male son, he will be the king's heir, a sudden spate of issue from the king's other wives sees both Chaka and his mother sent into exile. Chaka is bullied by the other children of the bush until he commits an unthinkable pair of deeds, killing a rampaging lion and hyena, two of the vicious creatures that stalk the villages without mercy. I was struck by the way that Mafolo describes the cowardice on behalf of the villagers, who refuse to run to the aid of anyone taken by these beasts. Chaka's acts are an expression not only of his bravery and cunning but a harbinger of things to come: Chaka will transform his kingdom from cowardice to a highly militarized society that uses violence to establish an empire in Southern Africa.

Chaka's adult life has the shape of ancient myth. Through his bravery and skill, and with the help of a shadowy "sorcerer" named Isanusi and a couple of other mystical personages, he defeats his siblings and becomes king, introducing to his kingdom the new name "MaZulu," or "People of the Sky." But even at the pinnacle of a power that no other king has known, he's greedy for more, and Isanusi advises him that if he wishes to reach the true extent of his greatness, he must sacrifice his beloved, a woman named Nowila, whom Chaka ultimately kills at his own hands. It's a familiar story: a man gains all the power in the world and loses his soul. Chaka exhibits what I understand (from Wikipedia, of course) to be an attitude of ambivalence toward the legendary king, who led the Zulu to become a great empire, but did so by ruling through violence and fear. Chaka's killing of Nowila is reproduced on a broader scale when he has thousands of his own people killed for cowardice or simply perceived cowardice; as the story goes on, Chaka's rationalizations for his killing become weaker and weaker, until it seems that he seeks violence for its own reason.

One of the more fascinating moments of the story comes at the end, when Chaka is finally defeated and killed by his rivals. In his last moments, on the precipice of entering the world of the dead, he prophesies that while his rivals have defeated him, they will soon have to confront a much more dangerous enemy: the coming white man. In this, it's possible to see the story of Chaka not simply as the story a legendary king, but the formation of a culture and a kingdom who will be further defined by their conflict with the imperial powers of Europe.

With the addition of Lesotho, my "Countries Read" list is up to 110!

Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq

I saw my poor body, saw how damaged it was. There was nothing--almost nothing--left of my former radiance. The skin of my back was red, hairy, with strange grayish spots running down my spine. My thighs, once so firm and well proportioned, sagged beneath a mass of cellulite. My rear end was smooth and fat as a huge pimple. I had cellulite on my belly, too, but a strange kind, both droopy and stringy. And there, in the mirror, was what I dreaded seeing--not what I'd seen in the marabout's mirror, but something equally horrible. The teat over my right breast had turned into a real dug, and there were three other blotches on the front of my body: one above my left breast and two others, perfectly parallel, just below my real nipples. I count and recounted, there was no mistake: that made six all right, including three fully formed breasts.

The narrator of Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation snags a coveted job at a perfume shop that also turns out to be a high-end brothel. She's popular with her clients, perhaps even too popular, and too enthusiastic at her job for a clientele that prizes demureness and bashfulness. But her body, which we are told is quite curvy and expressive, drives them wild, even after she begins to grow larger and larger, her hair becoming more bristle-like, her fingernails more like claws, her hips more bent over to the ground: she's becoming, in a short, a pig. For the narrator, this seems to be a waxing and waning phenomenon (one might even call it hormonal): some days she's more human, and some days she's more pig-like. But when she's pig-like, she's truly pig-like, yearning to root around in the earth and eat bugs and wild chestnuts.

What's the symbolism here? Desire, perhaps, always conceived of as the animal that lived inside of us. And beauty standards, of course. As the narrator's body grows more grotesque, there are those who are repulsed and those who are more attracted, and where the line is is never clear. But of course our bodies are shifting, changing things, and for women, both approval and remuneration are predicated on the body never changing at all. How well this is shown by Honore, the narrator's boyfriend, who goes from romancing her at the local waterpark to dumping all her stuff out on the street. When the narrator does find a relationship where she's loved for her ever-shifting ways, it's with another shapeshifter: a rich perfumier who also happens to be a werewolf.

As you may be picking up, Pig Tales is a silly, over-the-top book, and best when it leans into the fundamental absurdity of the piggy life the narrator must leads. The second half of the book suffers, I think, from a strange political subplot that involves the rise and fall of a fascist politician who, at one point, puts the narrator in pig form in a dress and uses her for an inscrutable campaign ad. The protagonist's life intersects with his in strange, violent ways, but for the most part we are left to interpret his rise and fall, and his replacement by a theocratic regime, obliquely. In a funny way, it gives one the sense that whatever symbolic meaning you want to attach to the protagonist's transformation, it's a meaning that transcends the political sphere, only briefly and haltingly being subordinated to it. Whatever the political landscape, perhaps, the demands and expectations put on women rarely change.

I thought this book was so different from White, a book about Antarctica that totally surprised me. That book is much quieter and more subtle, but if I squint (perhaps becoming quite piglike myself when I do so) I can see a kind of writerly boldness that the two books in common, a strangeness that pushes the narrative into unexpected places.

Dreamer by Charles Johnson

At the SCLC part of my job description was recording the Revolution, preserving its secrets for posterity--particularly what took place in the interstices. Naturally, this is where the stories of all doubles occur. In a spiral notebook, one I kept from my college days, I made entries on Chaym Smith's progress, having no idea at the time that just possibly I was composing a gospel. I--even I--was startled to discover ho much he'd already absorbed about King since 1954, as a man might meticulously study his rival, or an object of love, or--in his case--someone he loved and envied simultaneously. He was determined to possess the mystery of the minister's power and popularity, make it his own.

Dreamer begins with the narrator, Matthew Bishop, knocking on the hotel room door of his boss, Martin Luther King, Jr. "You'll want to see this for yourself," Bishop says, and brings King to see a visitor named Chaym Smith, who turns out to be King's exact double. Smith is a bit prickly and unpredictable, but he appears to want to make himself useful to the King project, which has just begun to confront radical opposition in the city of Chicago, as well as among his own allies who resent the broadening of King's message into an anti-poverty and anti-Vietnam platform. But how can the campaign make use of such a man? One answer, of course, is to use him as a decoy--an attempt has already been made on the minister's life--but this is a possibility with which King is deeply uncomfortable. He assigns Bishop to take Smith away to a safe house in rural Indiana and babysit him, perhaps mold him into something useful.

Chaym Smith is the novel's most interesting creation. He resembles King in many important ways, including a deep engagement with world religion, including Eastern religion, in this case emerging from his time as a soldier in Korea. But he describes himself as a non-believer, and his attitude toward most of King's work is one of cynical disbelief. He certainly doesn't share the minister's commitment to non-violence, perhaps being responsible for the death of his wife and her children; we also see him set fire to an apartment block where he's been summarily evicted. Is he King's doppelganger, or his opposite? Perhaps he is a secret third thing: the shadow self that follows King around, the self-doubt and cynical voice that eats away at his self and his mission, wondering if true change really is possible.

For all that, it felt to me that Johnson wasn't really sure what to do with this interesting character, no more than King himself seems to be. The one time he's actually used as a decoy to save King from violence--Smith is shot by a minister-hating Black man who climbs into Bishop's car--seems to happen by happenstance. Mostly, Smith is kept out of the way in Indiana, troubling Bishop's conscience and tending a church garden. When he's whisked away by government agents toward the novel's end, it's not clear what they want from him, or how it might bear on the assassination that, as you might expect, is the novel's culmination. Perhaps we are meant to think that King's shadow lives on after him somewhere, in the wind. But it read to me as if Johnson dispatched Smith because he wasn't sure how to make him matter.

In fact, what I liked best about the novel were the interstitial, italicized sections that follow King himself in the close third person. Here, Johnson relies on his scrupulous research--which often seemed to crowd out narrative and meaning in the sections narrated by Bishop--to form an image of King who is determined and principled, but haunted by exhaustion as well as his own doubts and demons. I came away with even more respect, I think, for King, reflecting on this version of a man who does great things despite his own deep troubles and misgivings: a real human being. Among other things, these sections emphasize how deep King's commitment was to a vision of true equality which is confounded by the fundamental differences we see in the faces on the street. Deep down, this vision says, we're all the same--and what better proof of this than confronting your own double?

Canoes by Maylis de Kerangal

When did I start placing myself in the fable? At first I kept my distance--and maybe a certain mocking grin had even settled into the corners of my lips, the smirk of someone who's not fooled and wants everyone to know it, someone who puts on airs--up until the day when I was at Folks (the renowned main-street store that was also mimicking something, for example the grocery and hardware store of a pioneer town, and smelled like floor wax, onions, and ground coffee) and a woman with her hair braided into a crown hands me a brochure, points to Kid and then up into the air: you should go up there with the little boy! On the ceiling, all I saw was a row of pinkish neon lights. Then I peered closer at the brochure while the woman looked on, probably impatient to see my reaction: Buffalo Bill is buried at the top of the mountain that overlooks the city, the summit of the panoramas, Lookout Mountain, he's right there. I didn't know Buffalo Bill was a real person and not just a fictional character, a figure of the Far West portrayed some fifty times over in the movies, nor did I know that in 1882, he'd created Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, a history of the "conquest" of the West under the Big Top, which toured in North America and Europe and was seen by more than seventy million spectators--the re-enactment depicted the version of the victors, focusing on the great mythical epic, the moustaches, gold nuggets and guns, using fictional pioneers in Stetsons, but real "natives," who played out their own attempted genocide while the federal army was massacring them in real life.

The protagonist of "Mustang," the novella that anchors French author Maylis de Kerangal's Canoes, is a French woman whose husband has relocated to Golden, Colorado, to work as an engineering professor. Her only task is to look after their young son and adjust the new American landscape, which is a demanding task indeed. She becomes obsessed with the minerals in the window at the rock shop (my God, what's more American than a rock shop?) and captivated by the mythologies of the Wild West, the cowboys and the Indians, at the same time she casts toward them a skeptical, European eye. Her husband buys a car, a green vintage Mustang, a good, garish American car, and learning to drive gives her a sense of limited freedom in this isolating place. In one very funny scene, she opens the driving instructor's glovebox to find a gun, which she then has to hide under her buttocks, and which then slips into her bag, taking it away with her because she's too embarrassed to admit to prying. That's America: the gun gets in your bag whether you like it or not.

This story got close to the magic of de Kerangal's novel Painting Time, with its liquid but precise sentences, its dogged but determined prose, that marches so unflappably through the inner workings of a mind. And I loved how, like de Tocqueville, "Mustang" gives a sense of America from an outsider's perspective, one characterized by fascination and revulsion, and the shock of being absorbed into a place that you're not sure you want to be absorbed into. America will assimilate you, whether you like it or not. The central image of the Mustang is a little on the nose, perhaps, as is the astounding crash-up that ends the story, but I was, as they say, very much along for the ride.

The other stories in Canoes are a very different sort. They're much shorter, naturally, but pointedly vignette-like, without much in the way of plot or dynamism. Sometimes they are only snapshots, some which work, and others which fall a little flat. I liked, for instance, the contrast between the recent high school graduate undertaking primal scream therapy with her friend group and her brother's halting stutter in "After," and the strange shiftiness of "Ontario," about a visit to Toronto on Decoration Day, although--or perhaps because--I'm not really sure what it's about. I was less interested in a story where a man agonizes over whether to delete his wife's voice from an answering machine, one of a few that felt very one-note. De Kerangal is deeply interested in voices and sounds: a narrator meets an old friend to discover that her voice has changed; a woman is tasked with reading Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" into a microphone and finds herself estranged from her own voice. Rooms are filled with other noises, and de Kerangal is especially sensitive to the ebb and flow of ambient noise, which either conceals or makes space for voices. 

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books, islands. Islands, books. Lake of the Woods in Ontario and Minnesota has 14,000 islands. Some of them are painted islands, teh rocks bearing signs ranging from a few hundred to more than a thousand years old. So these islands, which I'm longing to read, are books in themselves. Then there is a special island on Rainy Lake that is home to thousands of rare books ranging from crumbling copies of Erasmus in the French and Heloise's letters to Abelard dated MDCCXXIII, to first editions of Mark Twain (signed) to a magnificent collection of ethnographic works on the Ojibwe that might explain the book-islands of Lake of the Woods.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country begins with author Louise Erdrich piling into a blue minivan with her newborn daughter, Kiizhik. This is an unconventional trip, and at 46 years of age, she's an unconventional mother. The destination is the lake country of northern Minnesota and southern Ontario, Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake, vast freshwater lakes that are dotted with islands, a place that is still home to the Ojibwe. Erdrich herself is a "plains" Ojibwe, from the eastern stretches of North Dakota, and so the place still retains some of its strangeness, but there's home here, too, not least because she is meeting the mysterious father of her infant, a medicine man named Tobasonakwut. (One reads between the lines to see that the pair are not quite a conventional couple; elsewhere I've read that he was a married man.) In these islands she sees something akin to the books that are her lifelong passion: numerous, inviting, mysterious, and even, in some cases as she explains above, legible.

What a precious object this book is for me. I picked it up at Erdrich's own Minneapolis bookstore, Birchbark Books, after a week of exploring the Ojibwe lands around Lake Superior. We never quite got up to where Erdrich describes in this book, but we did end up a stone's throw from Rainy Lake, at Lake Kabetogama, also now a part of Voyageurs National Park. But I recognized something, just a little, of the awe that suffuses that place, where the islands really do fan out and multiply in an impossible way. The book is just a book, it isn't even signed, but it lies at the crossroads of my own experiences and that of an author who has meant a lot to me. Maybe there's even a small touch of the numinous in the way of Erdrich's visit to the cabin of explorer and naturalist Ernest Oberholtzer, where she sleeps among his vast library, making herself known to his immense store of books.

Beyond that, I was really touched by this book. I've only read Erdrich's fiction, which can be fanciful and goofy, but reading her in this mode, a mix of memoir, naturalism, and travelogue, was really fascinating. She's always had a way of persuasively writing about the way that myth and magic appear in everyday life, and she manages to make the ancient stone glyphs of the Lake of the Woods seem as mysterious and meaningful as anything from Tracks or Bingo Palace. And I was struck by the gentle, strange relationship between herself and Tobasonakwut, as well as the late-coming child, who seems to have a natural attraction for the lake's animals: sturgeon, otters, moose. Even the principle metaphor of the book, which ought to be silly--a book is like an island--seems natural and persuasive in Erdrich's hands. I really enjoyed seeing this other side of a great writer.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy

Looking back, I see that it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words of the Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture. This side of Catholicism, much of it cheapened and debased by mass production, was for me, nevertheless, the equivalent of Gothic cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts and mystery plays. I threw myself into it with ardor, this sensuous life, and when I was not dreaming that I was going to grow up to marry the pretender to the throne of France and win back his crown with him, I was dreaming of being a Carmelite nun, cloistered and penitential; I was also much attracted by an order of fallen women called the Magdalens.

When Mary McCarthy was a little girl, she took a train from Seattle to Minneapolis, where her parents meant to relocate near to her aunt and uncle. On that train, the entire family caught the Spanish flu, and by the time that McCarthy herself emerged from her convalescence, both of her parents were dead, having died within a day of each other. Thus began an unusual childhood, first under the care of her cruel resentful aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, then under her stern but caring Protestant uncle in Seattle. During that time, McCarthy latched onto the Catholicism of one side of her family, perhaps as a way of providing a consistency and continuity in a life of upheaval, or perhaps just because the grand drama of the Catholic religion can be appealing to a young girl. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a series of essays that chronicles these years of Mary's life.

One interesting thing that McCarthy does here is append an italicized afterword to each essay, presumably having been published somewhere else and at some other time, detailing how, where, and why, she'd taken poetic license. There's a great story of a rule-obsessed teacher at the Catholic boarding school who bonds with McCarthy over a love of Cicero's ancient fight with Cataline, but who nevertheless reports McCarthy--at the risk of expulsion--for sneaking out of the dormitory during the last week of school. I liked this one because it's an interesting profile of a recognizable kind of person, who clings to the rules for their own sake, despite the laxity that characterizes the actual figures of authority. But in the afterword, McCarthy describes how the timeline has been compressed to make the teacher's betrayal seem even more quixotic than it really was, how it probably wasn't just the day after they'd concluded their play, to great applause and aplomb from the student body.

As a book of essays, there isn't a strong throughline like a more traditional memoir, but this didn't bother me; McCarthy is such a strong, sensitive, and funny writer. In fact, I enjoyed this book a great deal more than her novel The Birds of America, having the funny-but-true verisimilitude of a real life, though perhaps not as much as the (in some ways, drawn equally from life) novel The Group. As the title suggests, the essays are drawn together perhaps by the strength of McCarthy's not-quite-cradle Catholicism. McCarthy captures well how a childhood religion can mix aesthetic and cultural concerns with deeper, more spiritual ones, how these can often be indistinguishable. As a teenager, McCarthy "loses her religion" as a kind of social ploy to receive sympathy and attention from her boarding school classmates, as well as the school's nuns and priests, but then a funny thing happens: she's not able to find it again. As ever happens, the pretenses we take end up becoming real.

True North by Jim Harrison

My name is David Burkett. I'm actually the fourth in a line of David Burketts beginning in the 1860s when my great-grandfather emigrated from Cornwall, England, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan which forms the southern border of Lake Superior, that vast inland sea of freshwater. this naming process is of no particular interest except to illustrate how fathers wish to further dominate the lives of their sons from the elemental beginnings. I have done everything possible to renounce my father but then within the chaos of the events of my life it is impossible to understand the story without telling it.

David Burkett hates his father for two distinct, but interrelated reasons. First, his father is the heir of a line of timber barons who have made their wealth from pillaging forests, exploiting workers, and being generally nasty. In this, author Jim Harrison draws from the true history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which often pitted industrial capitalists against the miners, loggers, and Native Americans whose labor their vast wealth required. I was interested to see the historical details crop up along the route of our trip recent trip through the Upper Peninsula. At one point, David's forebears are squarely blamed for a stampede in which hired goons yelled "Fire" in a crowded theater, crushing dozens of children, and which I read about during our visit to the Calumet National Historic Park on the Keweenaw Peninsula. The other reason is that his father is a pederast and a rapist, pursuing underage girls with the doggedness of the truly depraved, including raping the young daughter of his Mexican groundskeeper, Jesse, a crime that stands out in David's mind as the pinnacle and exemplar of all his crimes.

In part, David's response to this is to run from money, living simply in cabins and trucks throughout the U.P. He also responds by trying to write a thorough history of the U.P. in which his family's crimes will play a starring part. This effort is a Casaubon-like attempt that's destined to fail because there's too much history to uncover, and it's hamstrung by the fact that, as it turns out, David is a shitty writer. And yet, nothing he does seems to help David emerge, psychologically speaking, out from under the shadow of his father. As he grows from a teen into a man and begins to accumulate the ordinary sexual obsessions, he finds himself tortured by the possibility that his lusts will make him closer to his father than he would like. And yet, a series of women are on hand to give themselves sexually to David: the youthful Laurie, his abbreviated wife Polly, the poet Vernice, and others. Each of them encourages David, in their own way, to find a way to let go of his obsession with his father.

In this way, True North is very much a masculine novel in a kind of old-school way. Women never seem to say "no" to David, sexually speaking, or if they do, it's only contextual, no woman is ever just-not-interested, and they all represent stages of self-expression or self-growth, the woman as the extension of the man. But Harrison is a talented writer, and he brings them enough to life that you're willing to forgive this hoary old dynamic. I found the book ultimately very engaging and readable, and I was impressed with the way that Harrison keeps David's father largely off the page in order to keep the focus on the psychological damage that David himself carries around. It was a great pleasure to read on the Upper Peninsula (I actually read the whole thing on two long ferry rides to and from Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior), and it gave me a much richer sense of the heritage of the place: the Ojibwe, the Finns, the Cornish, the mines, the timber, et cetera, et cetera. Although it's telegraphed at the beginning of the novel, the extreme and out-of-place violence of the ending shocked me; I'm still not sure how to integrate it mentally with the rest of the novel.

Laughing Whitefish by Robert Traver

It was one of those glorious Northern evenings I was learning to love, the tall reddish sky shot and aflame with great soaring rays and reflections from the dying sun. The Creation must have been something like this, I thought. As my rented horse plodded along the dusty ore-stained road I reflected about this elusive thing called success and material attainment. Who was ever to say with confidence that the Marjis of this world were failures? By and by I found myself thinking about the complex new legal situation in which I suddenly found myself--my first big case--thinking about it and all of its ramifications, thinking, too, about my new client, the withdrawn and aloof but strangely exciting young Indian woman, Laughing Whitefish.

Robert Traver was the pen name of John Voelker, a distinguished judge from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who parlayed his work into a career of popular early legal fiction, including the novel Anatomy of a Murder, later turned into a film by Otto Preminger. Laughing Whitefish, like Anatomy of a Murder, is based on a real legal case that occurred in the Upper Peninsula, though in this case, in the late 19th century: an Ojibwe woman named Charlotte Kobogum sued a mining company for the shares owed to her father, Marji Kobogum, promised to him for showing the mining company the location of a vein of ore. Charlotte's claim hinged on whether or not she could be proved to be her father's legal heir: she was born of his second polygamous wife and raised, after that wife's death, by a third.

To this story, Traver adds a green young defense attorney, William Poe, who has the case fall in his lap after another attorney comes to him wishing to wash his hands of the case. Poe is eager to help the young woman, whose Ojibwe name (in the novel--I don't think in real life, but I could be wrong) is Laughing Whitefish, also the name of a river near Marquette. Poe's eagerness becomes mixed up with an increasing affection for Laughing Whitefish, who returns his affections by the novel's end--a progressive-enough marriage for the civilized outpost of Marquette in the late 19th century, and maybe even in the mid-century when Traver wrote the novel.

Laughing Whitefish is breezy, readable, and largely artless. It suffers from being, in a way, ahead of its time: at the time it was written, we were not yet awash in legal dramas, and the courtroom scenes feel stagey and quaint. Similarly, the legal genius of Poe's ultimate strategy suffers from being entirely obvious with the aid of modern hindsight. Seeing that the opposing counsel tries again and again to settle, he senses that there is something that he's missed about the case that makes it winnable. That turns out to be the supremacy of U.S. treaty law: the American treaty with the Ojibwe, which promises recognition of all traditional Ojibwe relationships, ratifies Laughing Whitefish's claim to be her father's rightful heir. That Poe has to "discover" this bedrock fact of Indian law suggests, perhaps, that this jurisprudence was not quite obvious to everyone in the late 19th or even the early 20th century; after all, the United States has always had a way of forgetting stipulations in its supposedly "supreme" treaties when convenient. Still, Laughing Whitefish is interesting in the way it captures a moment in the changing legal landscape of the frontier, and it's hard not to see the symbolism in the generational shift from the drunk, dissolute Marji to his civilized, shrewd daughter, Laughing Whitefish--Charlotte.

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

I yearned for them, my room, my workshop on the roof, Kareem. What I missed most was the smell of our house. Once, but once, when I was still a boy, I cried and screamed, throwing things as I had done before to stop Baba going on one of his endless business trips. Judge Yaseen acted nobly. He simply shut the door to the room that he had given me in his house, then later sent the maidservant in which a cold glass of sugarcane juice. I buried my face into the sharp lavender smell of the pillow, mourning the familiar: digging my face into her neck, kissing his hand.

One day, young Suleiman sees his father in the middle of Tripoli's Martyrs' Square, wearing black sunglasses. Only, his father is supposed to be on a business trip. At home, his mother does what she always does when Baba is away: she drinks her "medicine" and tells Suleiman stories take from One Thousand and One Nights. The similarity between herself and Scheherazade is not lost on Suleiman's mother, trapped in an arranged marriage, stuck in a room while the man who governs her life goes about his business. But just as Suleiman must confront what that business is, so do the officials of Qaddafi's Libyan government, who begin to sniff around, having recently abducted Baba's neighbor and, as it turns out, collaborator.

What makes In the Country of Men work is not that it tells the story of Libyan resistance through the eyes of a young child; stories that ironize the upheavals of human history in just that way are too common. What I liked about it was that, in several meaningful ways, author Hisham Matar makes young Suleiman a collaborator with the regime that hunts his father. His mother burns their father's books so they won't be discovered; Suleiman, angered on his father's behalf, saves one, which happens to have an incriminating message written in it. A man named Sharief watches the house from a parked car, and Suleiman believes him when he says that he's only looking out for Baba's interests, to the point where he even divulges some of the necessary information the man is looking for. This dynamic is exacerbated by the ways that Suleiman, acting out his fear and anxiety, becomes isolated from his community, mocking his friend and son of the abducted man, as if that mockery could protect his own father. Later, he throws a rock that hits the neighborhood's most physically vulnerable child. That's Suleiman: lashing out from deep anxieties, and harming the wrong people. Part of me expected that In the Country of Men would turn out to be the story of the son of a freedom fighter who grows up to be a torturer for the regime.

It's not that kind of book, thankfully. But neither is it the mawkish or sentimental kind of book that would follow Suleiman's gradual awakening to the truth about the country in which he lives, which would lead to him growing more admiring of and closer to both father and mother. Suleiman plays his small part in the ultimate failure of his father's political work, and the sundering of his family. In the end, the regime is too strong and the family is too small, change is still too far in the future, and Qaddafi's Libya is still Qaddafi's Libya.

With the addition of Libya, my "Countries Read" list is up to 109!

Death in Her Hands by Otessa Moshfegh

There was so much more work to be done. There were people to locate, to question, and how I would do this was unclear. I was not a detective. I had no magnifying glass, no handcuffs. I was a civilian. I was a little old lady, according to most people. I'd have to sneak, I'd have to sniff. I'd have to be a fly on the wall, and overhear what I could, glean, detect things through vibrations. I'd have to use my psychic abilities. Didn't Walter always say I was a witch?

Vesta Gul, an old woman who has just fled to a remote cabin after the death of her husband, is walking through the woods one day when she discovers a scrap of paper. The words written there: "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no dead body--only the scrap of paper. Is it the beginning of a novel or a story? Or a confession? Vesta begins to obsess over the paper, which she takes as a call to become a detective, to solve the murder of the mysterious Magda, but her method of investigation is peculiar. This is a woman, after all, who needs help from the librarian to figure out how to Ask Jeeves. Instead, she begins to imagine everything about the case, starting with Magda, whom she imagines as a beautiful young emigrant, to a series of wholly invented suspects: her boyfriend, her lover, her abusive landlady, and a mysterious ghoul, who also might be a police officer, whose name is Ghod.

Moshfegh's books are always best when she pulls the reader deep into the psyche of some isolated, alienated person who doesn't quite understand the world around them. Like the protagonists of Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Vesta doesn't quite have an outer world available to confirm or disqualify her imaginings, which is what allows them to linger and proliferate. We understand quickly that, in Vesta's case, what she's really doing is processing her relationship with her now-dead husband, whom she never was able to see clearly during his life. In imagining Magda as a beautiful, rebellious victim, she is in a way coming to understand the way that Walter circumscribed her life and her potential. Moshfegh is too talented and too canny to make it a one-to-one comparison--Magda is not Vesta--and yet, thinking on Magda allows Vesta to bounce back and forth between the world of understanding and the world of imagination. What she ends up "solving" is not the killing of Magda, but the killing of her own spirit. Perhaps more obviously symbolic is the dog Charlie, who Vesta considers her one kindly companion, and who ends up turning on her violently.

That said, Death in Her Hands is a little too disinterested in the actual mystery at hand. Any reader who expects that something will ultimately be revealed about Magda or the writer of the page in the woods is in for a real disappointment. Ah, you can almost hear Moshfegh intoning behind the pages, but it isn't Magda who's the true subject of investigation... But the richest and most effective unreliable narrators, it seems to me, become rich through the ironic distance they create with what we assume is the "real" world, and I found Moshfegh's refusal to resolve the mystery of Magda pretty deflating. Instead, Moshfegh offers up a few symbolic sops--gasp! this shopkeeper has the same name as one of the imaginary suspects in Vesta's head!--that felt less than meaningful. Ultimately, I felt this to be one of those books that can never truly satisfy because the real drama, the real tension, is all back somewhere in the past, rather than the present.

Dust and Other Stories by Yi T'aejun

Living submerged by the current of the age is like a spirit living beneath the water. They say that even the mulberry fields turn into blue ocean, but it's simply that all things follow the movement of the general current, and it's not possible to fill the ocean back up by moving pebbles.

In Yi T'aejun's story "Unconditioned," the narrator witnesses a peasant woman filling up a small creek, pebble by pebble. Later, he learns that the spot was once a lake where the woman's son once drowned, closed off now by a dam. Little by little, the woman fills the remaining water with stones to make it vanish, hoping to free her son's spirit from where it lingers in the lake. In the very next story, "Before and After the Liberation," the author's stand-in, Hyon, quotes the paragraph of the story he's just written. Hyon is a moderately successful writer who struggles with the climate of censorship and intellectual repression that marks the Japanese occupation of Korea: his fellow writers take Japanese names, sprinkle their speech with Japanese words, and write in Japanese. Hyon yearns for freedom, and it eventually comes, but the political uncertainty and division of "after the liberation" brings its own contradictions and difficulties. Where can the writer go to write? Where can one go to be free?

The stories in Dust are all about these contradictions, and the competing social orders that constrict full life and self-expression. Yi (according to the back of the book and the scant information I can find on the internet) is known in Korea as "The One Who Went North," having moved from U.S.-occupied South Korea to Soviet-occupied North Korea, where, far from liberation, he was viewed with suspicion and sent into exile, where his fate is unknown. The title story of the collection is a superb piece of anti-U.S. and anti-South Korean propaganda about a Pyongyang book collector who travels to see his daughter in Seoul. It's a highly anticipated trip, and he brings with him a small nest egg to buy books--something that should be easier in the more literary south--but ends up almost immediately hustled into a prison cell by soldiers under the command of Syngman Rhee. Strings are pulled for his release, but he finds himself at a party with a boorish American general whose main characteristics, hilariously, are his love for steaks and whisky, as well as his enormous gut. It must be said: He got us. Americans rule this not-yet-officially-South Korea, buying up everything with their powerful dollar--including Hyon's beloved books--while inflation keeps basic necessities out of the hand of Koreans.

So, propaganda. It certainly explains a great deal about Yi's choice to flee the South for Pyongyang. And yet, like all great propaganda, there's a deeper truth that may go unnoticed by those whose agenda is propaganda only: where, exactly, is Hyon supposed to go in a divided Korea, where people have become increasingly pressed between two sides? The tragic final ending hardly seems to absolve the Soviet-sponsored North Koreans; any hope of return, or appreciating the North more, is closed off to the ravished writer.

Yi's stories are subtle things. There's a few murders and grisly deaths, but for the most part, there's little drama or melodrama. Resentments and verbal violence bubble up in ways that show us they were always there, beneath the surface of a Korea under the thumb of a foreign power, and then under the thumb of itself. I appreciated the smallness and subtlety of the stories, though I didn't always feel as if I understood the larger history that comes to bear on the characters. One of my favorites was "Tiger Grandma," a story about a stubborn old woman who is the final holdout in a program to increase literacy in her small Korean village. Many of the stories in this collection deal with small people: peasants, local clerks, fishermen, etc., all caught up in the upheavals of Korean history. In their small way, they struggle against the deadening forces of imperial occupation and political repression, but it's not possible to fill the ocean back up by moving pebbles.

With the addition of North Korea, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 108!

Divorcer by Garielle Lutz

Divorce, I kept forgetting, is not the opposite of marriage; it's the opposite of wedding. What comes after divorce isn't more and more of the divorce. What came after, in my case, was simply volumed time, time in solid form, big blocks of it to be pushed aside if I ever felt up to it, though more often than not I arranged the blocks about me until I had built something that should have been some sort of stronghold but in fact was just another apartment within the apartment in which I was already staying away from mirrors, shaving by approximation, bathing in overbubbled water that kept my body out of sight.

The title story of Garielle Lutz's collection Divorcer begins with a woman leaving her partner and moving in with the narrator. They live a short and fitful marriage--we learn later it was only five weeks--before divorcing him. While signing the papers, the divorce lawyer beckons the narrator below the table, and then reveals his penis. ("No need for you to touch it... But can you at least admit how much you've gladdened it? it's not been glad like this all day. It's a gladiolus. So, Mister Man, what would be a very nice last straw?") A reminder, perhaps, that the old dreary rigamarole of marriage-to-divorce is only one of the many ways that people couple. Yet so many of us do it. We are compelled to marry, compelled to divorce. All of the stories in Divorcer feature narrators going through the process of coupling and then parting. Though in several important ways they are all different--they are men and women, gay and straight--the alienating effects of divorce and separation strike them all.

The second story, "The Driving Dress," begins with a man trying to lose weight to fit into his ex-wife's dresses. (A symbol of isolation and alienation, the need to become self-sufficient, that echoes, I would note, the cafe owner in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.) Amateur gumshoes might read this, and the small detail in "Divorcer" about how the narrator uses the creams and deodorants his wife has left behind, as foreshadowing of Lutz's own transition in 2021. (I'm sorry to say I saved a few dimes by buying a used copy of Divorcer with a deadname on the cover.) But I think it also points to a richness and fluidity of gender that the novel captures well, the ways that our needs and desires of having and being spill out over the containers of gender and sex. The abstraction of Lutz's language--maybe "abstraction" is not right, but a fleeing from the staid writerliness of the object and the moment--makes it so that the lesbian narrator of "To Whom Might I Have Concerned?" seems like they might be the same as the narrator of "Divorcer," with only that one minor aspect of their identity changed.

What makes these stories so incredible, really, is the language. Lutz is one of those few writers--Joy Williams is another--who demands that you take every sentence slow, read every word, because every word is a shock and a surprise. The prose is full of misprisions, words used incorrectly but somehow perfectly, and neologisms: sloppage, quillwise, rumpus-assed. Turn the page and find a brilliant, strange sentence: "The sister's kids smelled like pets." Sentences that take an unforeseeable turn: "All she did, I think, was take one gracious, simple, short-lived piss while I stood by." Sentences that go on and on, in wonderful swervings: "To cut things short: she was mortally thirty and was drown now to the uncomely, the miscurved, the dodged-looking and otherwise unpreferred, so my body must have naturally been a find--breasts barely risen, putty-colored legs scrimping on sinew, knees that looked a little loose, teeth provocative and unimproved." After all this time, it's amazing to find that there are writers out there who can write in ways that you've never thought possible, or even imagined.

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with the land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators, you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete with each other and co-operate with each other. The competitions are as much a part of the inner workings as the co-operations. You can regulate them--cautiously--but not abolish them.

Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac is one of those books that stands at the heart of the modern conservation movement. You might stretch it back further to Walden, but there is a kind of awakening in conservation--indeed, a kind of invention of the idea of conservation itself--that is invented in the mid-twentieth century, and A Sand County Almanac is one of its pillars, perhaps alongside only Silent Spring. It's interesting to read now, because much of what is there seems so familiar to us now, but I found there was a great deal in it that still felt fresh and invigorating. 

A Sand County Almanac is essentially named after the first of several parts. The first, titular section, is a series of essays that follow the months of the year at Leopold's humble farm in "Sand County," which is really the area around Madison, Wisconsin. The fields flood, the birds retreat and return, ice and snow form, wildflowers grow and die. The pleasure of this section is like the pleasure of exploring a landscape with someone who knows it very well, down to the smallest organism, and who knows moreover how that organism fits into the whole. One of the most impressive things about it is Leopold's ability to narrate backward from the state of a landscape: what assemblages of plants and animals indicate clear-cutting, or flooding, or different kinds of farming and harvesting. One of the most fascinating moments, in fact, is when he describes sawing down an old lightning-blasted tree, going through each ring and describing what was happening in the landscape of Wisconsin at that time, back hundreds of years. It's a nice reminder that history is more than just human history, that the landscape, too, has its own history, and it's a history that is legible to those who know how to read it.

The next section, "The Quality of Landscape," is arranged geographically, rather than annually, and takes the reader through a series of well-observed vignettes from Wisconsin to Iowa and Illinois, all the way down to New Mexico and Arizona, where Leopold was a forester who helped establish the Gila Wilderness, and even into Chihuahua and Sonora. But the most interesting stuff in the whole book, I thought, were the more polemic essays that come after, where Leopold lays down his theories of conservation, including the idea of a "land ethic." Leopold, a believer in progress, argues that human history is an exercise in developing superior ethics, that move from nationalism into democratic equality, and that the next necessary ethic that man must develop is a "land ethic" in which he recognizes himself as part of a larger ecosystem. Probably Leopold would be outraged by much of what we've done to the earth (how hard it is to read these old conservationists who had no idea what were doing to the climate), but I wonder if he'd see this as an idea that's been easily and widely accepted. Of course, we have our reactionaries, and they're definitely in charge right now, but it's crazy to read A Sand County Almanac and understand just how little purchase this kind of thinking really had.

For Leopold, exercising this "land ethic" begins with cultivating the kind of visual acuity and sensitivity that's so impressive in the first part of the book. "Like all real treasures of the mind," he writes, "perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring the South Seas. Perception, in short, cannot be purchased with either learned degrees or dollars; it grows at home as well as abroad, and he who has a little may use it to as good advantage as he who has much." Good words worth remembeiring.