The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

There was something wrong about these people. But perhaps, just as it is true of my love, they could not go on living except in the way that they do. If it is true that man, once born into the world, must somehow live out his life, perhaps the appearance that people make in order to go through with it, even if it is as ugly as their appearance, should not be despised. To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense undertaking before which one can only gasp in apprehension.

Japan, just after the end of the second World War. Kazuko is a young aristocrat in a world where the aristocracy has lost all meaning and prestige. Her father has recently collapsed and died, and her mother is increasingly ill. They are forced to move from Tokyo to the countryside, as if disappearing into the  wilderness. Her mother, though she retains in Kazuko's eyes the qualities of bearing and gentility that once marked the upper classes, seems to belong to yesterday's world, and her illness is a token of that world's vanishing. Meanwhile, her brother Naoji--their mother's favorite--reacts to the diminishment of the family's prestige by getting into alcohol and drugs. It's not that they are ashamed, really, only that each of them--Kazuko, mother, Naoji--feels increasingly ancillary in this Japan, which is already itself so transformed and diminished from what it had been.

Kazuko clings to her mother, desperate to keep the family intact as well as she can. At the same time, she has become obsessed with a dissolute artist and friend of her brother's named Uehara. Uehara is from another class entirely, and her relation to him is not so different from Naoji's; both attach themselves to the world that Uehara represents because they want to flee their own. More accurately, perhaps, Kazuko wishes to betray her class; by choosing Uehara, she turns her back on a life that only promises for her further vanishing and death. Her letters to Uehara go mostly unanswered until she hunts him down and spends a wholly unsatisfying, even repulsive, night with him. In her letters, she calls him "M. C."--my child, my comedian, even my Chekhov. Interestingly, Kazuko's cultural references all seem to be quite Western. She loves Chekhov and Shakespeare; she knows her Bible inside and out. Is it a sign of outwardness, of the noble class searching outside the world that has given it power and prestige for an intact culture? Or is it a sign of a cultural exchange that belongs to an older period, and was obliterated by the rise of Japanese nationalism and the war?

When--spoiler alert--Kazuko's mother dies of tuberculosis, everything falls apart. Naoji commits suicide, writing to Kazuko that his love for his mother was the only thing keeping him from doing it before. (His love for Kazuko, we understand, is not quite strong enough--or, rather, Naoji correctly intuits that Kazuko is strong enough, if only by bare inches, not to follow him into the grave.) Interestingly, this reflects something that Kazuko's mother had said after the death of her father and the retreat into the countryside: if not for Kazuko and Naoji, she simply would have stayed put, and died. It's easy to imagine the fragile family as a house of cards, where the removal of one sends the whole edifice tumbling. The title, The Setting Sun, is clearly in ironic contrast to Japan's identity as the "Land of the  Rising Sun," and it captures quite painfully an entire generation and class who feel at the very end of existence, for whom there is no tomorrow. Kazuko finds a small bit of hope in reading the writings of Rosa Luxemburg--again, looking to the West--whose fervor for revolution get mixed up with her attempt to ingratiate herself with Uehara. We get the sense that revolution and renewal are not to be found there--but neither, I think, does the book close the door on them completely. Whatever hope there is in the novel didn't keep Dazai from committing suicide a few years after the book's publication.

To Hell With Poets by Baqytgul Sarmekova

She put the pieces of dry dung into the sack, brought it to the house, opened the wood stove door, and emptied the sack into the firebox. My siblings and I had gathered the dung over the summer, often getting into fights with other kids. There was a story behind each piece of that dung. That thin whitish piece, dipped in diesel to make it ignite at once, had been produced by the cow with a broken horn that belonged to our neighbor Qambar. After finding old Qambar's cow eating the hay saved for our own cows, I chased it away, telling, "Botflies on you and blackleg too!" and every other curse I knew. When the wet flop she'd dropped as she walked away dried up in the sun, I picked it up and placed it against the wall of our cow pen. Yes, each piece of dung had a story like that.

In "The Black Colt," the story that opens Kazakh writer Baqytgul Sarmekova's collection To Hell With Poets, a man arranges a wedding for a longtime local bachelor, for which he is paid a fine black horse. He's never owned a horse before, but it becomes his pride and joy; no longer does he care for his many cows. But when the bachelor dies before the wedding, his brother comes to reclaim the horse. When the man demands the cost he paid in keeping the horse, he's paid by the brother--in horse feed. It's these little ironies, the kind that might happen all over the auls of the Kazakh steppe outside of where most literary eyes can see, that are the subject of To Hell With Poets.

An aul is a kind of fortified hillside village, as I understand it. Sarmekova's collection, which is more a collection of character sketches or vignettes than a collection of short stories, I think, goes back and forth from the aul to the city, whether Almaty or Astana, and the tension between the two is often at the book's center. The title story is about a naive young girl from the aul who dreams of being a poet (her poem is pretty good: "There's life in you, hard-shell egg. / Make the most of it. / In a moment, I'll smash you to pieces. / I'll have you over easy.") and who becomes caught in the whirlwind attentions of an older male poet from the city. Their tryst disillusions her from pursuing poetry; in a post-script, she has become a successful urban woman when she recognizes the former poet as her taxi-driver. The despair, the sense of inadequacy--which, it must be said, cannot entirely be blamed on the poet in the first story, whose attentions seemed genuine enough--are flipped around. The poet-taxi-driver looks at the now elegant woman, who is flipping him off, and thinks, "How could a fingernail be this long? Bright-red, as though dipped in blood, and pointed like a spear, the fingernail seemed to pierce his heart."

Overall, both book and stories have a slightness that prevents them from being truly memorable. But I appreciate the way they never try to do too much; "The Black Colt" is, even with its simple one-two-three plot, the most complex of them. Taken together, they offer a really fascinating glimpse into the tensions and contradictions of modern life in Kazakhstan. Which, by the way: with the addition of Kazakhstan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 104! I have to say, I really appreciate the work of Tilted Axis Press, which goes to such lengths to find translated literature from places not usually represented on American bookshelves.

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor

Polo never told fatboy anything during their drinking sessions; he never shared what he really thought of him or his ridiculous fantasies about Señora Marian, at least not in the beginning, during their first meetings down by the dock, when fatboy would get hammered and spend hours telling Polo whatever filthy shit went through his head, sparing no details and without a hint of embarrassment: about the porn he watched and how many times a day he masturbated, or the things he'd do to Señora Marian when he finally got his hands on her, by whatever means necessary, while Polo just nodded and chuckled along and shiftily downed three quarters of the bottle of rum that fatboy had paid for, humoring the fat prick but never opening his mouth unless it was to drink from his plastic cup or exhale his cigarette smoke up into the sky to chase away the mosquitoes that swarmed in vertiginous clouds above their heads, occasionally nodding to give fatboy the impression that he was listening to him, that he "got" him, and that he wasn't just there for the handouts, right?

Polo works as a groundskeeper for a luxury condominium in Progreso, a seaside town on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. He lives across the lagoon--supposedly haunted by the ghost of a sinister doña--with his mother and cousin Zorayda, who tortures him with sexual aggressions. The only friend he's ever had, his cousin Milton, has recently left, recruited against his will into the schemes of the cartel. In a long reported story, Milton tells Polo the gruesome ordeal of his own kidnapping, and of being forced to murder at the cartel's bidding, and yet Polo can only see the story as offering a kind of escape from the dreariness and poverty of his own life. At Paradais, he befriends Franco, the filthy-minded son of a wealthier family, though secretly Polo despises him and thinks of him as "fatboy." Franco/Fatboy is obsessed with Señora Marian, an elegant neighbor, and is constantly describing his own lurid fantasies of kidnapping and rape. Between the two of them--the desperate Polo and the sinister Franco--the fantasies inch closer and closer to becoming a real plan.

Paradais is the story of how a terrible crime comes about. Polo and Franco are quite different, both in temperament and status, and yet they both become invested in realizing Franco's bloody, predatory fantasies. Franco could never be a point-of-view character; he's poisoned by his relative affluence to the point of desensitization. We get the sense that life is not much different to him than a video game, or a video on the pornography websites he spends most of his time on. It's harder to understand, on the other hand, why Polo participates. He hates Franco, and despises his fantasies, and yet they come to represent for him a lashing out against the forces that have conspired to place in in poverty and immobility: his cruel mother, his lascivious cousin, his abandonment by Milton, his tyrannical boss, and especially the moneyed residents of Paradais, whose freedom over their own lives Polo recognizes as something he can never have. Polo is a teenager, and we can see easily that his desperation and resentment are stronger than the reasoning centers of his brain. Yet, beyond the misfortune of his station, Melchor does very little to make him an appealing or sympathetic character. There's no heart of gold here, just nastiness and despair.

Paradais is a dispiriting read. It's bleak, it's seedy, it's sordid. It makes you feel like taking a shower. You pray that something will happen to derail the horrible denouement, but it never does--that would be too literary, too easy. It's effective in its portrayal of the anger and resentment produced in those who think they have no escape from their own poverty, or the simple tedium of a life without the benefits of wealth. And yet I felt at the end of it that it hadn't quite justified, or found something revelatory, in its own sheer ugliness. I finished reading it in the emergency room, and boy, that felt bad. But you can't say it doesn't do exactly what it wants to do, as unremittingly awful as that might be.

A Heart So White by Javier Marias

("Listening is the most dangerous thing of all," I thought, "listening means knowing, finding out, knowing everything there is to know, ears don't have lids that can close against the words uttered, they can't hide from what they sense they're about to hear, it's always too late. Now we know and it may well stain our hearts so white, or are our hearts merely pale or fearful or cowardly?")

Juan is a contemporaneous translator, working to facilitate communication between politicians and government officials. But he knows, too, that communication, the revelation of the inner thought, is no simple matter, and that the difficulty of translation is predicated on the difficulty of ever successfully saying what is true: "Sometimes," Marias writes, "I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered." On his wedding day to another translator, Luisa, Juan's father Ranz--a rakish art dealer with connections to known forgers--give him a piece of advice: never tell your wife your secrets. Of course, no one says this if they don't have secrets themselves, and Juan goes on to uncover, somewhat reluctantly and with Luisa's help, the secrets of his father. These secrets have to do with his three marriages, and the suicide of his second wife--shockingly depicted in the novel's foreword--who was the sister to his third, Juan's mother. 

This secret, and its unveiling, form the spine of the novel. You can see the influence of detective fiction on Marias; there's scenes of following and watching from afar, though unlike detective fiction, it's never clear what these stakeouts accomplish. In a detective novel, the revelation of the killer results in their arrest and conviction, but here, the only victory is the truth being known, and as Marias writes, that's a more equivocal victory than it may seem. But what interested me most about the novel were the various scenes and mysteries that crowd around this "central" mystery, ones that are never really resolved. On their honeymoon, Juan and Luisa overhear a man in an adjoining Havana hotel room agree with his lover to kill his wife. In New York, Juan helps a fellow translator and friend arrange a tryst with a mysterious video-date who makes increasingly lurid demands. Juan even has an inkling that this man and the one in Havana may be the same--which would be a shocking coincidence, but not one that's unheard of in the cheap paperbacks the novel is riffing on--but this inkling goes nowhere. The date happens, and Juan's friend clams up; she's gotten what she wants, and nothing is left to be revealed. Nor do we ever find out if the man from Havana ever really killed his wife, or intended to.

It's these scenes that give the novel its satisfyingly unsettled nature. Oddly, the central mystery is revealed quite clearly in due time, but we leave the novel with a sense that we have learned very little, that the "whole story" is not out there to be found. I also really liked all the material about the father's life as a dealer in art forgeries, which you think is going to be part of the grand mystery, but which isn't. I loved the story about Ranz, walking through the Prado, seeing a security guard about to take a lighter to a Renaissance painting. He's grown sick seeing the scene every day, how it never changes, how the characters in the margins never seem to reveal themselves. It's an image, maybe, of that hope that things will be revealed, and that revelation will put things right; it's also just a great scene on its own, and something that I myself was thinking about--oddly enough--as I toured the Prado on my trip to Spain. How crazy it must drive those guards to sit there every day and stare at the same art, even the most celebrated art in the world! Oh, or maybe, it's an image that shows us that even normal people, driven to extremes by the most ordinary mechanisms of time and life, will from time to time give into their most violent impulses.

Ornament of the World by Rosa Maria Menocal

The old Arabic word for palace, al-qasr, was what the Castilians called their splendid new royal homes. The elaborate plasterwork that decorated nearly every inch of the Alcazar's interior walls was barely dry, and the Muslim emissary from Granada found himself in rooms that in every way echoed the freshly finished palaces of this Islamic city he had just left. Peter, a son of Alfonso XI and the heir to his great-great-grandfather Alfonso X (the Learned), who had died in this city, was justifiably proud of this example of his wealth, taste, and vision. All three were on display in this Sevillian tribute to the very latest architectural style of Spain. Ibn Khaldun could hardly have avoided the realization that Peter's new palaces, with their multilobed latticework arches and their pure-white arabesque ornamentation on every spare surface, were an unstinting homage to the style of the Nasrids, whose envoy he was. There, on the open and sunny plain, sitting next to the giant old Almohad mosque in Seville--the mosque had been reconsecrated more than a hundred years before and was the cathedral of the Christian capital--was an unabashed evocation of the fortlike palaces at the top of the rocky mountain retreat of Granada, the last and lonely Islamic state on the Iberian peninsula.

I had the great fortune last week to visit two of Spain's most striking and important landmarks: the Alcazar of Spain, a royal palace that is still the sometime home of the King and his family, and the Alhambra, an enormous palace complex built by the Muslim Nasrids of Granada. The Alcazar is a Christian edifice, done in what's known as the "Mudejar" style, meaning Christian architecture with Muslim edifices. It really does look a lot like the Alhambra, and visiting the two, someone who didn't know exactly what to look for might get the impression that they were built by the same people for the same purposes. The two structures are, to author Maria Rosa Menocal, powerful symbols of one of history's true golden eras: medieval Spain, when Muslims, Christians, and Jews existed side by side in a culture of tolerance and cultural exchange. A Christian ruler might, even after the reconquest of much of the Iberian peninsula, in which Muslim rule in Spain was shrunken down to just the city-state of Granada, recognize Islamic art and culture as part of his own powerful patrimony, and built a palace worthy of such creative and intellectual forebears.

Menocal frames her book as a series of biographical sketches of figures who typified the 750-year-ish era that constituted the golden age of al-Andalus. Among them are Samuel the Nagid, an influential Jewish poet and leader who served as a general in Muslim Granada; prolific Islamic writers like Ibn Hazm and Averroes; the Christian warrior known as El Cid; even apostates who rejected the world of philosophical tolerance like Jewish thinker Judah Halevi. This format made it a little hard to grasp some of the overarching historical narratives at play, but I think I more or less got the gist: survivors of the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in Baghdad arrived in al-Andalus around 750 CE, where they created a Muslim state centered on Cordoba that incorporated Christians and Jews but also cemented Arabic as the primary language of both knowledge and art. These Umayyads were eventually conquered by a pair of strict invading Islamic states, the Almohads and Almoravids, who were supplanted by a system of individual city-states known as taifas. The taifas lasted until the reconquest, ending with the loss of Granada and the edict of Isabella and Ferdinand--a pair of history's great villains, no doubt--expelling the Jews from Spain, cementing the entire peninsula as a Christian polity.

I had a vague idea, of course, that Muslim thinkers protected and progressed the traditions of Greek philosophy during the time that much of these sources were lost to Christian Europe. What I didn't know is just how much of that happened in Spain. It was Averroes, the Latinized name of Ibn Rushd, for example, whose commentaries on Aristotle kept the Greek philosopher's legacy alive, later to be integrated into the Christian philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Nor did I realize that Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales has its roots in the writings of Petrus Alfonsi, a Spanish convert from Judaism to Christianity, whose "Priestly Tales" held little interest for his own countrymen but which Englishmen had never seen. Nor had I ever really thought about the fact that, as must be true, even the Jewish and Christian thinkers of the time period wrote in Arabic, a language that had come to supplant Latin as a lingua franca. Even the great Jewish writer Maimonides, for example, wrote his commentaries on the Mishna in Arabic. One of the great, perhaps even tragic, turning points for Menocal, is when King Alfonso the Wise chooses to elevate the vernacular romance language of Castile to official status.

It's clear that Menocal sees the story, or perhaps stories, of medieval al-Andalus as not just history, but a model for the way society could be. A postscript notes that she finished the book shortly after 9/11, when the book's pleas for tolerance--especially in relation to the contributions of Muslim and Arabic thinkers--became especially ignored, and especially needed. As Menocal shows, much of the great philosophy, poetry, art, and architecture--the Alcazar of Seville and Alhambra of Grenada among them--were only able to exist because a culture of tolerance and free exchange allowed them to exist. 25 years later, it's hard to see that a society like this remains a probability for us, though the book shows quite effectively that such worlds are possible.

The Hive by Camilo Jose Cela

The morning arrives, step by step, crawling like a worm over the hearts of the men and women in the city; it beats, almost tenderly, against eyes that have just opened, eyes that will never see new horizons, new landscapes, new environments.

The morning, the same morning over and over again, plays its little games, of course, changes the face of the city: that tomb, that greasy pole, that hive...

Lord, have mercy!

Camilo Jose Cela's novel The Hive begins with Doña Rosa, the proprietress of a cafe in Madrid after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Doña Rosa is a tyrant, abusing her workers and her patrons alike, but her brutishness seems to have no effect on the success of her cafe, which is constantly filled with the lonely, the miserable, and the poor, using what change they've been able to scrounge to buy a coffee (but not, to Doña Rosa's dismay and anger, any of the available pastries). From there, the story moves outward, into the lives of the patrons, and branching off of them in patterns that resemble a network of nerves as much as it does the insect hive of the title. The Hive has, it is said, over three hundred characters, some of whom have the same or similar names, and some of whom have no names at all; it's impossible to tell, at first glance, who will be really important to the novel, and who is shuffled onto the stage to provide a single and singular image--like the young suicide who throws himself out the window because the room smells too strongly of onions--and who will end up as a recurring character.

I'd be lying if I said I followed the novel all too well. It's the first book I read on my new Kindle, which I got for traveling, and which I feel like puts up a kind of mental-physical barrier--I could not easily, for instance, riffle through the page to find a character's first appearance. But it did allow me the ease of reading the novel in Madrid, who you might say--imagine!--is the real protagonist of The Hive, a city of the poor and beleaguered having just emerged from Civil War, and not into liberation, but an oppression that will last decades. (No surprise that Doña Rosa, unlike many of her Bohemian clients, is an ardent Francoist.) More appropriately, it might be said that the protagonist is one Martin Marco, a penniless leftist poet who is unable to pay his tab at the cafe, who lives on the equivalent of a friend's couch, and who spends his days wandering the city doing nothing but feeling deeply.

Perhaps in the wake of Franco's victory there were many who felt like Marco, whose passion and sensitivity had no outlet for action, while the brutality and the tyranny of someone like Doña Rosa turned out to be the order of the day. (It's a stretch, but there's something in the the parallel between the proprietress' Francoism and her cruelty that reminds of the way certain people are reveling in the permission now granted them by political circumstance to treat others cruelly.) But Marco is only one character, and the position of the novel seems to be that life goes on no matter what the circumstances, that different days, different political orders, have little effect on the sum totality of human activity, which adds up to something rather tedious and sordid. There's Elvira, the sad, aging prostitute; there's the young girl who goes into prostitution to earn money for her boyfriend's tuberculosis medicine; there's blackmail and cross-blackmail; there's the murder of a local woman with a terrycloth towel that turns out to be--though who has any way of knowing this?--instrumental to the conclusion of the novel's plot, such as it is. I've not mentioned several hundred characters, and those that I have I probably haven't got quite right; but I'm not sure that The Hive is a novel to be diagrammed. It's something you're supposed to hold up to your ear, and listen to the buzz.

Temporary by Hilary Leichter

The feeling of ending was the feeling of a new season. My complexion changed, and birthmarks that had gone into permanent hibernation once again rose to the surface. I was suddenly famished. The house unfolded around me like a paper swan laid flat and the spring air came rushing across my shoulders, and I knew the job was complete. I know this isn't how houses work, but this is how it felt, and it's the only way the memory exists for me now. I packed my leather planner, soon to overflow with meetings, interviews, endless interviews. I collected the envelope of payment from the mailbox at the end of the driveway, closed the front door one final time, and went off to claim my palimpsest career.

The narrator of Hilary Leichter's Temporary is just that, a temp. She fills in for all sorts of jobs: Chairman of the Board, pirate, bank robber, murderer, pamphlet-deliverer, human barnacle. In this strange world, as perhaps in ours, to be a temp is to live in a strange kind of limbo where your existence is never your own. Our narrator's mother was a temp, also, and took her daughter to her first job, opening and closing the doors of a strange house on a particular schedule--an eerie job that turns out to be filling in for a ghost. The narrator yearns to be made a "permanent," that is, to find a permanent job, and thus a permanent identity, a permanent self, something that perhaps happens to temps, but only rarely. Even her love life has a kind of indeterminate status; while she's out filling in for pirates and murderers, all of her various boyfriends (the tallest boyfriend, the culinary boyfriend, the favorite boyfriend) are convening in her house and growing closer. To choose from them, we perceive, would be the kind of thing that a permanent can do.

Temporary is a kind of book that you recognize well enough once you see its basic design: take one of the metaphors or cliches that underline our lives and elevate them to literalness. It's the same basic logic, though a very different book, as Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, and it succeeds for the same reason that Whitehead doesn't, because it throws itself into the schtick with gusto, and runs gleefully away from any question of realism or internal consistency. Leichter's workscape is a caricature universe, but the image of labor is a very real one. It captures our gig economy world, where so much labor is temporary, and where the promise of a good, steady, and permanent job--the kind my grandfather had from the time he graduated on the G.I. Bill to his retirement--has become entirely elusive. It's funny, I don't think temps exist anymore, or if they do, the cultural niche they occupy in the cubicle world (Ryan on The Office, for example) has become much muted. But we're all temps now. (Except, not me--I'm union.) More than this, Leichter builds upon the literalized metaphor to illuminate how destabilizing the constant ebb and flow of life's changes can be, and how difficult it can be to establish anything that feels like steadiness and reliability, in work or love, or anything else.

Temporary is 180 pages long; still, sometimes, it felt to me like she was stretching the idea a little too thin. But I wouldn't want to let that detract from the whirlwind imagination it took to make it work to the extent it does, and how what might have been a one-note idea is constantly refreshed and renewed. I loved the moment, for example, when a fellow temp on the pirate ship takes captive a woman who turns out to be the one for whom she's filling in. The violent reaction from the temp shows just how cutthroat you might turn out to be when face-to-face with your own life's competition. I liked the man filling in for the parrot, and I liked how the narrator is accompanied by the ghost of the Chairman of the Board, whose ashes she's been tasked with keeping talisman-like around her neck. Some of the jokes land flat, but most of them just land. And in the end, it made me feel how powerfully precarious life in this modern world can be, and how there is a small voice in the back of all our minds reminding us how easily we might be replaced.

Christendom by Peter Heather

Christendom, then, is a response to what seems to me the pressing intellectual challenge of reassessing Christianity's rise to pre-eminence in the light of its modern eclipse, by re-examining the historical processes that first generated the defining coincidence between Europe and the cultural dominance of the Christian religion. It aims to give full weight to contingency, to Christianity's almost limitless capacity for self-reinvention, and to the potential of past populations to have made alternative choices. My aim here is not to produce another total history of Christianity, but to explore afresh exactly how Europe became Christendom: that part of the planet dominated by Christian rulers and overwhelmingly Christian populations.

Peter Heather takes two points in European history as the beginning and end of Christendom, his massive history of the growth of the Christian religion throughout Europe: first, the 4th century conversion of Constantine, which brought official Christianity to the Roman Empire for the first time, and then the 14th century conversion of the Lithuanians, the last major polity in Europe to be Christianized. It took about a thousand years, then, for Christianity to conquer the continent, which seems like a long time, but maybe isn't so much when you consider what historical undertakings must have taken place for a single continent to become so religiously homogenous. What happened in between is the subject of Heather's book.

One of the main theses of Christendom is that Christianity's rise was not foreordained. Before Christianity began to wane as a social force in Europe, Heather explains, it was easy to look at the religion's success and determine that it was simply built different. Now, in a post-Christian era, it's easier to appreciate how things might have been otherwise, and Heather shows us meticulously how this was true: Constantine's conversion, for example, eventually drew in much of the landowning Roman elite, but left the pagan public untouched, requiring an early medieval campaign of temple-busting to spread throughout the Eastern empire. The orthodox Nicene Christianity that we take for granted today was closer, Heather argues, to being defeated by its rivals than we really appreciate; the Gothic successor states of the Roman Empire were split between different forms of Christianity that might easily have led to vastly historical paths. And of course, Heather reminds us, Christianity's traditional strongholds in the Near East and North Africa were swallowed wholesale by Islam in a process of elite capture that remarkably resembled the rise of Christianity among the same groups; if Islam could capture the places where Christianity was born, why not the rest of Europe? Heather calls this contingency, and an awareness of the way things might have been different alerts us to the fact that history is made up of positive actors, not merely those swept up in inevitable tides of change.

Christianity thrived, Heather argues, because of its adaptability. The Christianity adopted by Constantine and the Roman elite was not much like the rusticism of the Desert Fathers and the Jesus Movement of early Palestine. Roman intellectual and literary traditions helped provide an infrastructure for a Christian empire, which all but fell apart after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, giving way to a collection of largely autonomous communities held loosely together by missionary and monastic traditions. In the middle of the middle ages--say, 600 to 1100--most Europeans would not have gone to church regularly, and only a few would have been exposed to regular preaching. Religious authority lay not in the pope but in divinely appointed kings--especially the Carolingians, whose strong hand and interest in religious control did much to resurrect Christianity as an institutional practice--who used it as a tool to build alliances and cement their own legitimacy. The end of Heather's story begins with the "Twelfth Century Renaissance" and the gradual assertion of the papacy as a singular Christian authority, which mutually reinforced a set of social institutions that renewed a particular orthodoxy. It's interesting to reflect on how young the idea of papal supremacy is, and certain associated theological positions, like notions of sin, penitence, and purgatory, which only come into their own alongside the rise of the Holy See. When the Lithuanians completed the puzzle of European Christianity, Heather argues, they did so in the context of an institutional Christianity that was much stronger than it had been since the days of Constantine, and which looked much different even from the Christianity of a century or two before.

I really enjoyed reading this. Even as a relatively curious and knowledgeable person (I hope), the long middle ages really seem like a single mashed up period to me. It's hard to conceptualize a period in which, say, Charlemagne and St. Francis are as far apart as me and George Washington, and even this is is only a fraction of the long history of Christianity's growth to the ends of the continent. It confirmed for me something I long suspected: that today's "trads" are largely bullshit artists who have no idea, or perhaps simply no interest, in whether or not the traditions they seem to value actually represent unbroken strands of Christian practice at all. Christianity's adaptability, we see, is its great strength, but it also means that there is and was an immense diversity as to what the religion meant in both concept and practice.  

Chess Story by Stefan Zwieg

From my own experience I was well aware of the mysterious attraction of the "royal game," which, alone among the games devised by man, regally eschews the tyranny of chance and awards its palms of victory to the intellect, or rather to a certain type of intellectual gift. But is it not already an insult toc all chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all people and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit?

Chess Story tells about a single chess match between masters of the game, held on a transatlantic passenger ship. On one side is Mirko Czentovic, a Slavic savant and world champion whose abilities at the board are belied by his inability to understand the game without said board in front of him. On the other side is Dr. B, whose skills, by contrast, are wholly imaginary: as he tells the narrator, he was held for months, perhaps years, in a hotel room by the Nazis with only a chess instruction book to entertain himself. When he came to the end of it, he began to play chess against himself in his mind. The game he is to play against Czentovic will be the first game of real chess he's ever played in decades, and the first real opponent.

Chess Story is a novel about the Nazis, for one, the way they tried not only to eliminate the lives and livelihoods of their victims, but also their intellectual and imaginary capacity. Dr. B's mental chess game is a way of defeating his captors, and chess turns out to be the perfect tool, discrete but endlessly variable, so that the possibilities never end. But playing against himself turns out to have had deleterious effects on Dr. B's mind. He tells the narrator that he essentially had to create two selves, a black self and a white self, and isolate them from each other so strongly in his mind that each was forced to guess at the strategy of the other, as one would a real chess opponent. Mirko, who turns out to be not such an idiot about everything but the chess board, cannily sees that his opponent is playing every game but the one on the table, and adjusts his strategy accordingly. So, it's about the Nazis, but it's also about the mind, and whether the mind is really all-powerful, or whether it tends toward dissolution in the absence of the practical and the real.

This one felt a little like cheating. At 80 pages, it really is a Chess Story and not a Chess Novel. It has a short story's singularity of impact, and it felt to me even more streamlined and singular than a novella might. And yet, here it is between two covers. I enjoyed the small and colorfully drawn cast of characters; I think the novel works because while Dr. B is at the novel's heart, Mirko is just as interesting, and so are some of the other characters, like the braggart Scottish industrialist who can't let himself lose even to the undisputed world champion. If you're wondering, this is not the guy who wrote Shrek. That's William Stieg. But even still, I enjoyed Chess Story.

The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet

Another example: Let's suppose the memory is like a jade cabinet, but a cabinet belonging to an infinitely irresolute collector. Each time we look inside, the jade appears to be the same, yet the mind is forever replacing one chimera for another that resembles it. Let's suppose the memory is a cabinet of chameleons and the mind as unstable as the moon.

Excuse my digression, but as I write all this down, it occurs to me that there are as many ways to tell a story as there are ways to remember it.

Memory writes the story of her sister, Etheria, born beautiful, but mute. As children, Memory and Etheria are devotees of Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, and they are two of those chosen children that Dodgson entertains with his fancies of imagination and clever games. Their parents, Angus and Margaret, are the kind of cheerful polymaths that only the Victorian era could produce. But the era, produces, too, a man like Radulph Tubbs, a fantastically wealthy industrialist who is charmed by Etheria's beauty. He charms her with a cabinet full of jade animals--which he himself finds rather appalling--and seduces her into marrying him, but the marriage is an unhappy and violent one. He rapes her with a jade phallus; he pries up the garden with its stone mosaics, the only place in the house where she feels at home. He replaces it with a smooth pyramid of glass, designed by an architect named Prosper Baconfield, who regards the pyramid as a geometrically perfect shape representative of an unforgiving divine principle.

It seems to me that Tubbs represents that part of the Victorian psyche that beckons toward the coming 20th century. He is suspicious of Dodgson/Carroll because he doesn't understand him; he loves no sight better than his own smokestacks, poisoning the air. No wonder he calls his estate "New Age." Memory tells us her theory is that he hates anything that exists according to the feminine principle, anything "folded, concealed, creased." He is unchecked industrialism and the death of sentiment. But strangely, it's his book: once Etheria disappears, she is gone, except for a single tantalizing vision toward the novel's end. It's Tubbs who's left trying to reckon with his own diseased behavior, a reckoning that takes him most of his life. The second half of the book is largely taken up with a trip to Egypt, where Tubbs and Baconfield are invested in a scheme to buy ibis mummies in bulk to grind them into gelatin power. (Unchecked industrialism eats up everything, even the dead.)

He's accompanied by a Hungerkunstler, a "Hunger Artist" who had recently captivated Etheria and Memory's father Angus, who believed that she, in disconnection from the material world, has accessed the fundamental universal language that haunts his dreams. But the Hungerkunstler is the most hungry of them all, a kind of id that presents to Tubbs the consequences of his own rapaciousness. She's also one of the novel's masterstrokes, a character who manages to be both silly and sinister. It's the introduction of the Hungerkunstler who strikes me as the novel really kicking into high gear, and establishing a sense that it could go anything or anywhere. Anyway, in Egypt Baconfield goes mad inside a pyramid, meeting the design of the divine face to face. Tubbs, too, faces down his dream in Egypt, coming to understand that only if he can find Etheria again will he ever find happiness of peace.

The Jade Cabinet is presented as a novel about language. Angus Sphery dreams of finding the immanent ur-language. It's present, perhaps, in Etheria, whose silence resembles in the language of the jade crystals she adores. Both Memory and (perhaps) Etheria grow up to become magicians, those people who claim to be able to turn "magic words" into real rabbits. Memory uses the same metaphor to describe, well, memory: "from out fragments of fur, I give you a living rabbit." Memory is the novel's other great theme; we are told from the beginning that much of the story is reconstructed from the memoirs of a contrite and much diminished Tubbs. But, in my mind, both of those rather well-trod themes sell short how inventive the novel is, how relentless and freewheeling; the pieces feel familiar but the construction is wholly original. Like I said, I actually read The Jade Cabinet as being deeply interested in intellectual history, pinpointing the Victorian era as the moment that the quest for deep knowledge was at last overwhelmed by the inexorable logic of production and consumption.

It's also really funny. I don't know if this lands the same without being in the context of the novel, but I can't remember reading anything recently that made me laugh as hard as this line, spoken by a doctor with whom Tubbs strikes up a friendship on his way back from English:

One morning, Spritzner, misconstruing Tubbs's ill humour, explained with a wag ill-fitted to Tubbs's impatience that his consuming interest in the vagaries and variabilities of the female anatomy had little to do with lechery and owed much to the physician's interest in physiognomy. Their friendship ended dramatically when just as a radiant redhead entered the dining room, Spritzner, his mouth full of toast, sputtered in Tubbs's ear:

'See dat vun? She haf a porple pussy!'

She haf a porple pussy.

Last Days by Brian Evenson

How do you know the moment when you cease to be human? Is it the moment when you decide to carry a head before you by its hair, extended before you like a lantern, as if you are Diogenes in search of one just man? Or is it the moment when reality, previously a smooth surface one slides one's way along, begins to come in waves, for a moment altogether too much and then utterly absent? Or is it the moment when you begin opening doors, showing each man behind each door the head of his spiritual leader before killing him with the cleaver tucked into your belt? Or is it the moment when all the dead begin to talk to you in a dull, rumbling murmur? Or is it the moment when these same voices suddenly fade away and stop talking together, leaving you utterly alone?

Kline, an ex-cop, goes through a shocking ordeal: an intruder cuts his hand off with a cleaver, and he is forced to cauterize his own stump with a hot plate--before shooting the intruder in the eye. Somehow, this is the beginning of his troubles. When it makes the news, the story of Kline's self-cauterization catches the eye of a cult of "mutilates" who believe that the more body parts you lop off, the closer you are to God. They kidnap Kline, ostensibly to help solve the murder of their leader (although how you can tell a guy with no legs, arms, eyes, genitals, or tongue is alive is a central question). Kline resists as far as he can, but the mutilates see him as one of their own--which mean they want to "honor" him by mutilating him further--while the cult's second-in-command seems to have a secret intention of his own.

It must be said, the premise of this book is bonkers. Evenson has a skill for taking a single image--the lopping off of a limb, with its suggestions of violation and loss, of the diminishment of the self--and extending to the point of logical and imagistic extreme. It borrows from the body horror-genre, of course, but Last Days seems actually to have more in common stylistically with noir: Kline is hard-boiled, terse, and the novel is framed, though suspiciously, by the need to get to the bottom of a crime. That these two genres don't end up together more often seems like a real oversight that Evenson intends here to fill.

Evenson ratchets up the intensity when Kline, realizing that he's being set up, makes his escape. The mutilates vow to follow and kill him, and they try their best, but he's saved at the last second by another group of amputees, all calling themselves Paul and missing their right hand--like Kline. As it turns out, the Pauls are the original group, and the mutilates are a splinter group that decided to take the Pauls' logic to a more extreme conclusion. Kline finds himself caught between these two groups, and the Pauls perhaps are worse, because they see in Kline a kind of Christ figure, reasoning that he seems to be immune to being killed. It also means they plan to crucify him (because that's what you do to a Christ figure, I guess). Kline ends up going on a killing spree that makes him confront the nature of his own humanity.

This is where the book lost me a little. The scene of a man drenched in the blood of others, asking himself how far he goes before he becomes human no longer, perhaps even to the point of embracing the ubermensch fantasies about himself--it's a little edgelord, isn't it? A little Deviant Art? There's a great parallel between Kline's growing sense of himself and the literal loss of his limbs, the physical shrinking, but in the end I'm not sure it was enough to overcome a feeling of melodrama that kept the book from totally working for me. Brent recommended some of Evenson's short fiction, and I think if I try again, I'd like to try something like that, because Last Days struck me as a book that sort of stumbled under its own need to keep the horror growing until the last bloody scenes.

The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

Patience, pallor, and deep anxiety: there goes suffering, Harvey reflected. And I found him interesting. Is it only by recognizing how flat would be the world without the sufferings of others that we know how desperately becalmed our own lives would be without suffering? Do I suffer on Effie's account? Yes, and perhaps I can live by that experience. We all need something to suffer about. But Job , my work on Job, all interrupted and neglected, probed into and interfered with: that is experience, to; real experience, not vicarious, as is often assumed. To study, to think, is to live and suffer painfully.

Harvey Gotham is studying Job. It represents, he says, the "only problem": why is it that God lets us suffer? The question to him is, perhaps at first, mostly academic; he's rich enough to be inured from most suffering. That is, until his estranged wife Effie is suspected of terrorist activity, and Harvey finds himself under intense suspicion by the police, who think he may be funding her terrorist cell. In truth, Harvey hasn't seen Effie in years; he left her in the middle of an excursion to the Italian countryside when she stole a chocolate bar from a gas station, claiming that she acted out of solidarity with the working class. But Harvey is still enmeshed with Effie's world, and even lives for a time with her sister Ruth, who has left her husband Edgar, an actor who makes up the final point in the foursquare drama.

I have fond memories of this one, and often list it among my favorite Spark novels. Re-reading it now, I'm struck by how unusual it is among Spark's works because of how unified it is. I often find that Spark's novels have one or two extraneous details that throw the whole thing into whack, forcing you to wonder how it is they fit in. Here, maybe it's the student-cum-housekeeper Nathan, who may or may not be mixed up in Effie's activities, but for the most part, The Only Problem is remarkable in how it tells a single story: Harvey, trying desperately to work on his book about Job, being pestered and interrupted by the police. It's remarkable, too, because of the sense that it is telling a story where all the events are happening somewhere else, off screen. Spark has no interest in the bloody details of Effie's terrorist cell, or the policeman they kill (you can practically see her sneering at the cop who interviews Harvey, begging him to take his colleague's death seriously), or their justification for their actions. It's a thriller with no thrills, a shoot-em-up with no shooting.

Is that the way with suffering, especially in the developed West? Are we not always thinking about suffering as something that is happening somewhere else, far away? Harvey insists that his work being interrupted is a kind of suffering, and maybe he's right. He's certainly suffering more than he otherwise would be, but is suffering that must be measured at a certain minimum level, or does it have its various shades? When we are but slightly put upon or annoyed, are we, too, partaking in some sense the story in the story of Job? After all, does an omnipotent God not have the ability to keep us from waiting in lines or having minor toothaches? What is funny, though, is the way that Harvey is always talking about Job. In a letter written to his lawyer, Harvey interrupts his refusal to offer Effie any alimony with speculation about the date of Job's composition; he just can't help himself. In one really funny scene, he forces a gaggle of reporters who want to know about his relationship with Effie to listen to an hour of rambling about Job and the nature of suffering. Harvey thinks endlessly about suffering, but it isn't at all clear he ever experiences it, or truly understands it.

Having read all of Spark's books now, I would probably rate The Only Problem a little lower than I had first thought. But it may be one of her books with the most singular vision, and one of the most thematically interesting.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

At first, I thought mainly about me, and how--what--I'd been: chippy, jealous, and malign. Also about my attempt to undermine their relationship. At least I'd failed in this, since Veronica's mother had assured me the last months of Adrian's life had been happy.  Not that this let me off the hook. My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been. If only this had been the document Veronica had set light to.

England, the 60's: Tony Webster is a young and clever, but not quite as clever as his friend Adrian, who everyone seems to admire. They go their separate ways after high school, and at university Tony has his first real girlfriend, a girl named Veronica whom he describes as manipulative, but mostly seems rather humorless or charmless. Meeting Veronica's family, he feels condescended to by her father and brother, though her mother is more welcoming. There's a single awkward sexual encounter, and the relationship goes bottom up. Later, she begins to date Adrian, a fact about which he is informed through a rather self-serious letter. Not long after he sends a childish reply, he gets a piece of shocking news: Adrian has killed himself.

After setting this story up, The Sense of an Ending jumps forward forty years: Tony is now divorced, but more or less happy, having an adult daughter and a good friend in his ex-wife. He is shocked, then, to find this history, which he has more or less put behind him, rear up again when he's bequeathed a strange gift: Veronica's mother has left him five hundred pounds and Adrian's diary. Why would she think of Tony, whom she met once over a long weekend, and why would she have Adrian's diary? The answers are not forthcoming; the diary is in Veronica's possession, and the adult Tony finds it very difficult to track her down. Only after a persistent email campaign does Tony manage to get her to meet him, but she remains sour, standoffish. She makes cryptic remarks about him not understanding the situation, and as he struggles to do so he comes face-to-face with the person he had been as a young man.

The Sense of an Ending reminded me most of Remains of the Day: a staid, British book about the way we efface our own memories, or fashion them to our own purposes, and how difficult it is to pull the wool from our own eyes and see our pasts, and thus ourselves, as we really are. Veronica refuses to send the diary except in pieces, and she sends, too, a copy of the letter that Tony sent when he was informed of her relationship with Adrian. It really turns out to be a nasty letter, and though Tony must reevaluate his own hurt at Veronica's hands in light of his own stupidity of cruelty, it really seems like a young man's sin. Tony even begins to fantasize about reconnecting with Veronica and rekindling a relationship, but perhaps this only goes to show that our ability to tell ourselves comforting falsehoods is not limited to the past.

You feel reading The Sense of an Ending that a great revelation is coming, and you feel, too, that the book can only end up being as successful as that revelation. Is it successful? I'm rather torn. SPOILER ALERT--Veronica takes Tony to witness the scene of an adult man with a learning disability being led around by a caretaker. Tony guesses that this is Veronica's child with Adrian, and that his cruel comments in his letter about the pair's future offspring have continued to cut deep. But, as it turns out, the man is the child of Adrian and Veronica's mother, and that warm reception he received all those years ago was something that Adrian received as well. He even, we're asked to believe, helped it to happen by encouraging Adrian to talk to Veronica's mother in the letter (to find out how messed up she is, in this case, but it seems that Adrian discovered much more).

Is this satisfying? Well, one can see how it might have stuck in Victoria's craw after all these years, and how Tony's letter must have gotten mixed up with the pain of her mother's pregnancy and her boyfriend's suicide. But the revelation is a little too large; there's no small but meaningful difference of perspective here that illuminates the human condition, just one big melodramatic secret. It seems ironically to overpower Tony's youthful dickishness; it's so much beyond anything he might have said or done that it seems a little silly to even suggest he had a part in it. The book makes much of the idea of blame; as boys they talk in their history class about how the complex web of causation leads us either to blame no one or everyone, and the truth must be somewhere in between--but I think if I were Tony, I probably wouldn't feel too bad about this one.

Destroy, She Said by Marguerite Duras

"Total destruction will come first through Alissa," Stein says. "Don't you agree?"

"Yes. And do you agree she isn't altogether safe?"

"Yes," Stein says. "Alissa isn't altogether safe."

A man, whose name we will learn is Max Thor, spends all his time at a luxurious resort staring at a woman, whose name we will learn is Elisabeth Alione. Another man, Stein, makes Thor's acquaintance. When Thor's much younger wife, Alissa, arrives, the three of them--Thor, Stein, and Alissa--begin to attach themselves to Elisabeth. What do they want with her? Is it sexual? Stein becomes obsessed, in turn, with Alissa, and is frequently found fondling her, while Thor happily looks on. The three of them try to beckon Alione into the mysterious forest at the edge of the resort, of which she is quite afraid. Do they mean to rape her there? Or is the forest only meaningful for its symbolism, its wildness, and the way it sits on the other side of civilization's clear boundary? When Alissa says, simply, "Destroy," we know she means Elisabeth. But whether she means this quite literally, or, perhaps, whether she means she is out to destroy Elisabeth's petit bourgeois sense of herself, is not quite clear.

Destroy, She Said is a very cryptic book. It was too cryptic for me. It's hard to believe that this is the same writer who could produce such a funny, satirical novel as The Sea Wall, which must have represented a much different early career path. Destroy, She Said also seems less like a novel and more like a treatment for the film version that Duras herself directed; appended to the novel is a long interview with French director Jacques Rivette about both novel and film. Perhaps in the film, the crypticness of it works alongside a more cinematic kind of mood; where the sound of the unseen tennis balls caroming off of the courts works more effectively than the peripatetic attentions of the main characters upon the tennis players. 

So, I don't know about this one. With that said, you often here--and I have often said--that writers today are too monopolized by film, and that much of what is dead in modern prose comes from writers trying to write "scenes" of film upon the page. What Duras, who was also a very acclaimed filmmaker, does here, and perhaps elsewhere in her body of work, is to provide a model for a synthesis between film and literature that is much more successful. Perhaps--I'm spitballing here, not having seen the movie--the surface qualities of a film make it rather suited to evoking the mysteriousness of other people and their intentions; the novel certainly seems to put up a kind of image or scene as a barrier to prevent real psychological investigation.

We never really know what it is that the trio are up to with Elisabeth, but what comes through quite clearly is their strangeness, their unspoken abandonment of bourgeois morals. There's a really interesting scene where Elisabeth's husband shows up and meets them, and only halfway through the meal stops and realizes he's the only one eating. The rest are alien, as if in no need of nourishment, and we see that their attempts to sway Elisabeth to their side, whatever that might mean, have been successful. What also comes through clearly is the sense of some kind of revolution or violation; Alissa especially picks and borrows from revolutionary language. Does destruction promise release and renewal? Or is it only destruction?

The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

I retired as deep as I could into the depths of my own being like an animal that hides itself in a cave in the wintertime. I heard other people's voices with my ears; my own I heard in my throat. The solitude that surrounded me was like the deep, dense night of eternity, that night of dense, clinging, contagious darkness which awaits the moment when it will descend upon silent cities full of dreams of lust and rancour. From the viewpoint of this throat with which I had identified myself I was nothing more than an insane abstract mathematical demonstration. The pressure which, in the act of procreation, holds together two people who are striving to escape from their solitude is the result of this same streak of madness which exists in every person, mingled with regret at the thought that he is slowly sliding towards the abyss of death...

Only death does not lie.

A man looks from a hole in his cellar into a courtyard and sees a woman that beguiles him. He knows she is too beautiful for him, but indeed, one day she knocks on the door of his house and gives herself to him. Only afterward does he feel how cold she is, and realizes that the whole time she's been dead. He cuts her body into pieces and takes surreptitiously to be buried in a suitcase. The experience sends him into such a fugue of obsession and melancholy that he begins to write his life story, narrating it to the shadow of his own figure on the wall, a shadow shaped menacingly like an owl: as a young man, he was married to a woman who despised him, and the agony of her coldness toward him became mixed with a long sickness, both physical and spiritual, that separated him from other people, perhaps even--in his eyes--making him better than those with health. Of course, if we take the man's story as at least resembling the truth, we have already noticed that there is no wife in the picture when the dead woman arrives at his doorway, and so we may piece together where the story he is telling may end.

Iranian writer Sedagh Hedayat's The Blind Owl lives somewhere in between Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe. But better than either of these it captures something of the horror and dread that live inside the human psyche; it's most reminiscent of "The Tell-Tale Heart," but in that story there is a kind of outer truth by which to measure the madness of the man who hearts the heartbeat beneath the floorboards. In The Blind Owl, there's no real outer truth, and the imagistic circularity of the novel is proof that we are not in a place where the logic of realism really holds. The novel makes frequent use of repetition, bringing back the same phrase or sentence without context as if it's being said for the first time. In the first section, the unnamed narrator is taken to the cemetery by a carriage driver who seems unable to draw any inferences about what's being carted to the cemetery in a suitcase; after the narrator wanders for a while, the same man picks him up again--and tells him all about the real weirdo he just dropped off the cemetery. I loved, too, the way the younger narrator becomes obsessed with his wife's infidelity, focusing on the ragged old peddler he thinks she's letting into her room each night, only to look in the mirror after he--spoiler alert--murders her, and find the peddler's face.

Is the dead woman who gives herself to him the same as the wife he murders? Are we to understand that his wife, or a version of his wife, gives up to him in death what she always refused him in life? The narrator writes that he himself, in his illness, becomes enlarged by his proximity to death; perhaps, the novel suggests, death is not just something that haunts us, but has the ability to perfect us or make us ideal. Or maybe it's only the ravings of a madman, and the story of the dead woman is a way of rationalizing the narrator's guilt of having killed his wife, by revising the truth into a story where she is grateful both to be dead and to give herself to him. Who knows. I did find that The Blind Owl hits a note of surrealism and macabre that I actually don't find all that convincing in Poe. These short books for short book February go by so quickly, and I've been sick, so The Blind Owl felt a little like a fever dream to me--but I think there's something really rich here worth returning to, and that coming back to this book again in the future might yield something totally new and different.

With the addition of Iran, my "Countries Read" list is up to 103!

My Name is Sita by Bea Vianen

She gathers her suitcases and leaves. Azaat didn't come home. His car isn't at the door. She is glad that she will no longer have to witness the unhappy couple's scenes, glad that she will no longer have to watch the spectacle of naked children wandering around with flies on their buttocks and fat lice on their heads. No, that's not true. She will remember these things like the death meal of black vultures in the middle of the road. The scrawny chickens dragged from their pens in the dead of night by possums and left for dead on the roadside, the stench, the sadness, the isolation, the powerlessness. You can't change any of it, all you can do is watch everything choke itself in the grabbing arms of the jungle, how the vermin devour all that is beautiful in those romanticized forests with their terrifying sounds, their giant birds with bright wings spread dangerously across the sky, screeching and cursing the world below, the tuberculosis, the leprosy, the poverty, the corruption.

My Name is Sita, by Surinamese writer Bea Vianen, begins with the narrator--Sita, called S.--confronting an old woman named Adjodiadei about her past. It's hinted that Adjodiadei had an affair with Sita's grandfather, which later resulted in his abandoning their family and returning to his native India, followed by the suicide of Sita's grandmother, and later the death of her mother. Sita lives in the wreckage of these events, in the home of a father who is alternately absent and authoritarian. As she grows into womanhood, Sita is largely left on her own devices, relying on her friend Selinha for advice, but even Selinha abandons her, becoming pregnant by a Hindu, much to the chagrin of her Muslim family. Sita then finds herself the attentions of a young man named Islam, who foists himself upon her, impregnates her, and then becomes a resentful and inattentive husband.

My Name is Sita is a story of cycles, of the patterns of poverty and neglect which seem to repeat themselves with brutal specificity. Sita ends up in more or less exactly the same place as her friend Selinha, caught the snare of an interreligious relationship that is anathema to her family, though Sita lacks even the love that her friend Selinha shares. And at the end of the novel, she ends up repeating the same choices that bred such resentment in her toward her grandfather: she accepts being disowned by Islam, and lets him have their child, so that she might leave Suriname behind and travel to the Netherlands for an education. From a bird's-eye view, it's a story about the legacy of South Asian emigration to South America, whose promises were so meager that they led to a second exodus, either to Europe or back to the Indian subcontinent. We are happy for Sita at the end of the novel, but what will happen to child, ominously given the same name as Sita's neglected brother Ata, and left behind with the cruel, neglectful Islam and his family?

I don't know much about Suriname; it seems like an interesting place. It's an island of Dutch influence surrounded by French and Spanish colonial culture, and a very tiny country, basically a single city perched on the edge of a great jungle. My Name is Sita wasn't my favorite novel--it had a kind of elliptic nature that often threw me out of the story--but it struck me as a fascinating image of the difficulties in living in such a place. And I have to express my gratitude toward the publisher, Sandorf Passage, for resurrecting and republishing it, as they did with The Case of Cem, and apparently lots of other less-remembered novels from around the world.

With the addition of Suriname, my "Countries Read" list is up to 102!

Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

The creek was made narrow by little green trees that grew too close together. The creek was like 12,845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out.

Sometimes when I went fishing in there, I felt just like a telephone repairman, even though I did not look like one. I was only a kid covered with fishing tackle, but in some strange way by going in there and catching a few trout, I kept the telephones in service. I was an asset to society.

It was pleasant work, but at times it made me uneasy. It could grow dark in there instantly when there were some clouds in the sky and they worked their way onto the sun. Then you almost needed candles to fish by, and foxfire in your reflexes.

What is "Trout Fishing in America?" In Richard Brautigan's collection of short pieces, it's a lot of things: a book, a person, sometimes more than one person, a hotel. It's an activity, of course, but the kind of activity that talks back to you, or makes walnut catsup to eat on hamburgers, along with his girlfriend, Maria Callas. It's hard to explain exactly what Trout Fishing in America is, and it's hard to explain what Trout Fishing in America is, except that it's not like anything I've read before, which is always, always, always the single best thing that I could say about a book.

Brautigan's pieces borrow from the language of San Francisco beatniks and hippies, but this is a book of the Pacific Northwest, the interior especially, along the clear streams of Idaho. Brautigan's narrator--if indeed it is the same person speaking in each of the 1-3 page pieces that make up the novel--is always looking for a good place to fish, and only sometimes finding it. It's an American activity, mixed up with the ruggedness of the Mountain West and the self-sufficiency of winos and derelicts, people who by nature must fend for themselves. The narrator is often foiled in his search for the right place to fish:  an inviting creek with a waterfall turns out to be a set of stairs, or no one stops to pick up the hitchhiking fisherman. The narrator describes a stepfather who described "trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal":

Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.

I'd like to get it right.

Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.

Imagine Pittsburgh.

A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains, and tunnels.

The Andrew Carnegie of trout!

The chapters themselves are slippery things, like trout, mash-em-ups of images that refuse to come together for easy readings. "Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity" begins on the Calle de Eternidad in Gelatao, Mexico, and ends up a story about the narrator's youth working for an old woman. It never returns to Mexico, so what were we doing there? In "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard," the narrator investigates a junk store where you can buy a fishing stream cut up in into measured lengths, like pipes. The stories are defined by this kind of absurdism and playfulness, which I really enjoyed. Taken together, a picture emerges of America in the 20th century, rediscovering its own natural patrimony: camping, fishing, mountaineering, the national forests, etc., etc.  "As much as anything else," we're told, "the Coleman lantern is the symbol of the camping craze that is currently sweeping America, with its unholy white light burning in the forests of America." The narrator has a baby with his girlfriend, and they take it with them into the woods, bringing the mid-century hope of domestic life out into the American landscape.

I really enjoyed Trout Fishing in America, and I think I'll be thinking about it for a long time. I'm not a fisherman--I've never had the patience--but it spoke to a kind of pride and love deep within me for the American landscape and the way it has shaped the American character. 

The Employees by Olga Ravn

It's our experience that the objects from the valley of New Discovery want to stay with us here. It feels like they're ours, and at the same time like we belong to them. As if they in fact are us. The Six Thousand Ship can't function without our work. No, I don't want to say anything else to you now. Impending violence is by no means inconceivable. We're only just beginning to understand what we're capable of.

Who are "the employees" of The Employees? Some of those working aboard the Six Thousand Ship are human, and some are "humanoid," biological androids who resemble, but are not exactly like, their human coworkers. The novel takes the form of a series of interviews done with a mysterious HR wing of the ship's administration, and though at first the distinction between these two types of interlocutor is unclear, over time the differences--and divisions--between the two classes of coworker become clear. Over the course of the interviews, it's revealed that the ship has taken on board several mysterious "objects" from a valley on a planet called New Discovery. These objects--perhaps like the humanoids--seem somehow both mineral and organic, and they call out to the workers of the ship in subtle ways--through colors, dreams, smells.

Though the mechanism is kept ambiguous, the presence of the objects seems to create an awareness in the humanoids of the difference between them and their human coworkers. Already at the beginning of the novel, Ravn hints at a redacted moment of violence and banishment; this is, perhaps, the first signal of the objects' effect. I read The Employees as a book about the development of a class consciousness: though the Six Thousand Ship is structured in such a way to elide the differences between humans and humanoids, the humanoids are really a lower class of worker, a kind of android proletariat, and their connection to the objects allows them to see the differences for the first time. The novel's HR speak--starting with its title--point to a satire on the language of modern employment. It made me think about the way that companies like Uber intentionally blur the line between "employees" and "contractors," and other ways that modern workplaces are striated and stratified under the guise of the "we're a family here" attitude. Of course, it also brings up certain anxieties about the future workplace under automation. What if all those self-checkout machines at the CVS decided they didn't want to do our bidding anymore?

The Employees has a kind of too-good-for-science-fiction vibe, for both better and worse. Better, in that the language is sharper and the images often striking, and in the way that Ravn eschews lengthy exposition about the nature of the objects or the scientific mechanisms of their functioning. Worse, in that the world of the Six Thousand Ship seems undercooked, drawing from stock ideas about space travel that feel obvious or dilettantish. Brent said that he wanted the story to be either more ambiguous or more unambiguous, and that feels right; the littleness and spareness of the method end up giving the impression of an allegory or a fable, rather than a novel.