tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9340969670554818992024-03-17T23:02:38.176-04:00Fifty Books Project 2023<small>Everyday people with the goal of reading 50 books a year.</small>Fifty Books Projecthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08640286429668778869noreply@blogger.comBlogger2653125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-83764643324235542422024-03-16T10:44:00.003-04:002024-03-16T10:44:41.674-04:00The Murderer by Roy Heath<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjoZtvRt0ergKfG8d-uV2spv85UVqpzvng5NFz9QgIWPQ3YOrr-t7OAdNA7Jxn3dTenW1lpnGyzsUuErguIL7XtmiKIuVwEDv0oqw4errWT_l-ks_2AwZhgKrwuEtsOwHnhElM_ATArQMpPDNzLqR2e5KxlSkpVnRpzsYz4rn7Eh3aXl2GJC3zyWvowi-Q" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="445" data-original-width="266" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjoZtvRt0ergKfG8d-uV2spv85UVqpzvng5NFz9QgIWPQ3YOrr-t7OAdNA7Jxn3dTenW1lpnGyzsUuErguIL7XtmiKIuVwEDv0oqw4errWT_l-ks_2AwZhgKrwuEtsOwHnhElM_ATArQMpPDNzLqR2e5KxlSkpVnRpzsYz4rn7Eh3aXl2GJC3zyWvowi-Q=w119-h200" width="119" /></a></i></div><i>For the first time it occurred to Galton that he might be mentally ill. Not, indeed, because he had killed Gemma. He was convinced that any self-respecting man would have done so. Rather, his lack of success at achieving any goal he had set himself and his inability to face up to a situation that had taken him by surprise implanted in his mind the idea that he was progressively losing his grip. The following day, he told himself, he would be in a better position to assess the facts. One gain he had certainly made: he had achieved what he had always longed for, an area that belonged to him alone and from which others could be excluded at will.</i><p></p><p>Here is another book from Guyana, but how different it is from Beryl Gilroy's warm and lyrical <i><a href="https://fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2024/03/frangipani-house-by-beryl-gilroy.html">Frangipani House</a>. </i>Roy Heath's murderer is Galton Flood (great name): a man from a middle-class Guyanese family who grows up under the shadow of his better-adjusted brother, Selwyn. Galton is moody, mercurial, unable to build the human relationships his brother does; instead of pursuing his studies he takes menial jobs in the Guyanese "bush," then as a night watchman. Somehow, Gemma, the bookish and thoughtful daughter of a man from whom Galton rents a room, falls for him. He flees her, but the letters she writes him are some of the book's greatest moments, filled with provocations and ironic recriminations. She calls him her "torturer," and perhaps this is the only language that can reach Galton, who turns away from sentimentalism with disgust. Eventually, she induces him to marry, but his jealousy and resentment are too powerful, and one night, he strikes her dead with a plank of wood and disposes of her body in the harbor.</p><p><i>The Murderer </i>has Dostoyevsky's fingerprints all over it. Galton is, in a way, a Raskolnikov that is stupid. Like Raskolnikov, he rationalizes and justifies his deed so that he might ignore the deeper urges within that drive him to it. And like Raskolnikov, Galton's murder is an attempt to control the larger world, and thus detach oneself from it; though he yearns for Gemma, marriage for him is a torture, because it requires submission, entanglement with another. This need is inseparable from good old-fashioned male jealousy: it tortures Galton to think that his wife has had other lovers, and does not live for him alone (though he can't see that she's the only person who could ever come close to doing anything like this).</p><p><i>The Murderer </i>is bisected by Galton's deed: about half the book comes before, and half the book comes after. The second half of the book deals with the consequences of Galton's deed. Some are practical--he takes up with another girl, but her father refuses to allow her to see Galton because he is still technically married, having lied and said that Gemma emigrated to Venezuela. Others are psychological: Galton travels from place to place, from the tenement to a boarding house to his brother's house, never staying in any one location for long because, like Gemma, other people make demands on his time and his self. Eventually, Gemma's father, accompanied by an old friend of Gemma's, comes to understand what Galton has done, but the police don't care; there's no arrest or punishment forthcoming. Instead, Galton is forced to live the rest of his small life bearing the consequences of being himself.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-44490826278900580862024-03-11T17:44:00.001-04:002024-03-11T17:44:04.256-04:00The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEil0qJML4cSR8DejDglQ_ZAqNqkdY-k6z8m26_bjUIjNgUdSyKeLYD5Eoi2W46Sf7lnDt_H3WHDFg3hRHWwXZU-Gf8gnAoUaByzG5VWEsdgUKl3aD3hZB2khg5RCBFinPt-PfEytiiNdc8shk-mzK6OukecaQsWXp4qUo0b22U6AFIrV0_RT4KaAkqj3wM" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="297" data-original-width="180" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEil0qJML4cSR8DejDglQ_ZAqNqkdY-k6z8m26_bjUIjNgUdSyKeLYD5Eoi2W46Sf7lnDt_H3WHDFg3hRHWwXZU-Gf8gnAoUaByzG5VWEsdgUKl3aD3hZB2khg5RCBFinPt-PfEytiiNdc8shk-mzK6OukecaQsWXp4qUo0b22U6AFIrV0_RT4KaAkqj3wM=w121-h200" width="121" /></a></div><i>The dikes built by Ma in the plain, her "barriers against the Ocean," the whole thing was either a huge misfortune or a huge joke, depending upon the way you looked at it. It was a huge joke and a huge misfortune. It was terrible and it was screamingly funny. It depended on which side you took: the side of the Ocean which had knocked down everything, every stick and stone of the sea wall, at one blow, one single blow; the side of the crabs, which had made sieves of them; or, on the contrary, the side of the people who had taken six months to build that sea wall, in total forgetfulness of the certain damage that would be wrought by the crabs and the Ocean.</i><p></p><p>The title sea wall of <i>The Sea Wall </i>is, at the beginning of the novel, already no more. Constructed at great expense by the Frenchwoman known only as "Ma" on her concession land along the coast of Vietnam, it has crumbled away and the saltwater tide has ruined all hope of a successful crop. The misfortune defines Ma's life, and it comes to define the lives of her two children: Joseph, a brash young man whose passions are his jalopy and hunting dangerous panthers, and Suzanne, whose beauty and resentment both are incandescent. Neither Joseph nor Suzanne have ever been to France, where Ma was born; they are second-generation Colonials who must live in universe of ruin that Ma has created for herself, and they occupy a kind of degenerate middle ground between the "Natives" in the jungle and the pampered elite who live in the colony's principal city.</p><p>It's one of these, Monsieur Jo, who happens upon Suzanne at a canteen one day and falls madly in love with her. Monsieur Jo is a pathetic figure, both ugly and oblivious, who is utterly wrecked against Suzanne's beauty. He visits everyday, offering his attention as well as lavish gifts, enduring the condescension of all the members of the house, who accurately assess that he will endure all the resentment they bear against their lot simply to be near Suzanne. "He was not a person," Suzanne remarks about him inwardly, "he was only a misfortune." Monsieur Jo offers Suzanne a diamond ring if she'll go away with him and then, when she refuses, gives it to her anyway; Ma's farcical attempts to sell the ring in the colonial capital are the driving force of the book's middle section. Even when she <i>does </i>manage to sell it, the money goes to pay the debt on the construction of the sea walls. The money flows out like the tide, and leaves the family no better off; even their fortunes are misfortunes.</p><p><i>The Sea Wall </i>is just the kind of book I really love: mean-spirited, funny, and deeply sad. It is, in Duras' words, "terrible" and "screamingly funny." I didn't know that Duras <i>could </i>be funny. The other two books of hers I've read, <i><a href="https://fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-lover-by-marguerite-duras.html">The Lover</a> </i>and <i><a href="https://fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2023/02/lamante-anglaise-by-marguerite-duras.html">L'Amante Anglais</a>, </i>are also quite sad, but they are not funny. Ma is a great comic creation, emblematic of the bourgeois failures of a certain kind of colonial, for whom the promise of new land is a kind of cruel grift. Whether it reflects Duras' own upbringing in French Indochina I have no idea. One of the best sections of the book comes when Ma is allowed to speak for herself, in a long letter written to the cadastral agents who enforce the mortgage on her concession:</p><blockquote><p>And for the savings I put aside every day for fifteen years of my life, of my youth, what did you give me? A desert of salt and water. And you let me give you my money. That money I religiously carried to you one morning, seven years ago, in an envelope. It was all I had. I gave you all I had that morning, all, as if I brought you my own body as a sacrifice, as if from my sacrificed body would blossom an entire future of happiness for my children.</p></blockquote><p>When Ma writes off-handedly about killing the agents, we half-believe her. Or we believe, perhaps, that she has the will but not the power. But Joseph, the walls of his room laden with guns, might have both, might be exactly the kind of avenging spirit that Ma requires. And yet, we know that whatever happens, there is no hope for Ma, because hopelessness is written into her character. The diamond will sold, but the money will not satisfy; the sea walls will be built but they will only crumble again, and the sea will take what is theirs. In a way, Duras suggests, it may be better to be like the "Natives" whose children die at alarming rates, killed by Frenchmen's cars or lice or starvation, and who are quickly buried and replaced. But the colonial's fate is to never be at home, to have every hope dashed, and in that sense Ma is colonialism's perfect image.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-26643750761971556042024-03-10T13:36:00.002-04:002024-03-10T13:36:40.158-04:00You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgP6Sab9Ug0HN5ojRS4TJMBVQlnuxylYi3eUMwubn3J_TXIs1-GR4M3d2BeF48lIEn-j-GEH91iJY-LXCiBBAamOnOGbcddyeQcOw2jurLOchebCi0oKlWPw4VN5KnfMb2YOD4n1Oy3O0MY2DFbHmIUez1yu46kmHbweGgF7jcPPKsYpUfPzf3-Rq8R6JA" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="662" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgP6Sab9Ug0HN5ojRS4TJMBVQlnuxylYi3eUMwubn3J_TXIs1-GR4M3d2BeF48lIEn-j-GEH91iJY-LXCiBBAamOnOGbcddyeQcOw2jurLOchebCi0oKlWPw4VN5KnfMb2YOD4n1Oy3O0MY2DFbHmIUez1yu46kmHbweGgF7jcPPKsYpUfPzf3-Rq8R6JA=w133-h200" width="133" /></a></i></div><i>Where Tenoxtitlan had been there was now a Spanish city: palaces, churches, convents. There was a nun who was purest light, who also dreamed, and who, though she spoke Spanish, at mole and pipian and papalo and nogada. It was a huge coutnry: ravines, mountains, deserts, jungles. But it was a country of purest suffering too. The macehualtin uprisings, the slave ships, the priests fighting under the banner of Guadalupe, a republic fractured yet worthy in its way. The fucking gringos; a Zapotec tlatoani who won a war with France. Books, wars, universities, cities with many more people than anyone could ever have imagined; another tlatoani, a Mixtec--everybody was Oaxacan--and Eufemio Zapata walking through Moctezuma's palace dressed like a Spaniard; another republic that rose the best it could; and another hundred years and this book and you reading it and it was then that Hernando woke up.</i><p></p><p>It's the year 1519. Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes has been invited into the city of Tenoxtitlan by Moctezuma, but the emperor has made himself scarce. Instead, Cortes dines with the city's priests, with the princess who is both Moctezuma's sister and his wife, with his own generals, with his Maya translator, Malinalli. He schemes and plots, knowing his allies the Tlaxcala are stationed just outside the city. But with Moctezuma absent, the killing blow will have to wait.</p><p>Alvaro Enrigue's rendition of Moctezuma is, perhaps, the most interesting thing about his new novel <i>You Dreamed of Empires. </i>At first glance, it seems that his Moctezuma shares many of the flaws that have been assigned to him through history: his superstition, his indolence and indifference, his weakness. He seems to be overly dependent on psychedelic drugs; while Cortes is making his plots, Moctezuma is getting high on mushrooms and refusing to forego his daily nap. Enrigue's Moctezuma is obsessed with the conquistadors, these strange men from far across the ocean, but mostly he is obsessed with their <i>cahuayos, </i>their large deer--their <i>caballos, </i>their horses--which have eaten up one of the palace's interior gardens. Is this another kind of superstitious predilection, or is it evidence that Moctezuma, who recognizes the strategic promise of the <i>cahuayos, </i>is cannier than he is letting on? Does he, in fact, have a plan to foil the conquistadors who are only pretending to be good guests?</p><p>I had the good fortune to see Enrigue speak about this novel at the New York Public Library a month or so ago. He is all charm, with the dashing long-haired look of an older novelist, buttressed by a tremendous bank of knowledge and a gregarious laugh. It's easy to read <i>You Dreamed of Empires, </i>which is at times chummy and chatty, in his voice. The novel begins with a conquistador, Caldera, nearly nauseated by the smell of the human skin cloak he must wear while dining with the priests. This is a novel, we see, about cultural clashes, about two groups who must look past the unfamiliarity of their respective cultures to understand each other, to see one another's capacities for friendship, or malice. Enrigue emphasizes the clash with a pointedly anachronistic style, full of cliches and over-familiar phrases that stand out as strange purely through context. In one scene, which much interested his interviewer, Moctezuma overhears a snatch of spectral music that "he couldn't place, though in a possible future we would have recognized it. It was T. Rex's 'Monolith.'" I myself didn't find these qualities of the novel all that successful, but when I imagined Enrigue reading them aloud in his own voice, I felt more disposed to them.</p><p>I wanted to like <i>You Dreamed of Empires </i>a little better than I did. I <i>was </i>sort of interested in its lack of forward motion. Both the Mexica and the Caxilteca--a cutesy Nahautl-ism formed from the Spaniards' Kingdom of Castile--spend most of the novel sort of milling around and figuring out what to do; the strangeness of the context almost seems to paralyze them. In one scene, Cortes' generals get totally and utterly lost in Moctezuma's palace, which is labyrinthine in its orderliness and repetitiveness. I was a little lost as to what was happening with the literal "palace intrigue." But I did admire the boldness of the novel's final scenes, in which--spoiler alert--Moctezuma, finally face to face with Cortes, offers him a lick of a psychedelic cactus. The lick sends Cortes into a hallucinatory dream, in which he sees the future of Mexico after the Spanish conquest--but then he wakes up, and is killed. That's right, Enrigue pulls a Tarantino on us. But it works, especially because of the unsettling suggestion that we, too, are part of the dream. One day, <i>You Dream of Empires </i>suggests, we may all wake up from history.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-42234993578072424052024-03-09T10:52:00.000-05:002024-03-09T10:52:06.756-05:00Cross Stitch by Jazmina Barrera<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh2x6QAm8qjBiZ20b2Q-F29KCmCC1MzMTjOgfDJDik-kNdmvskYnP63kaopERKM_8EXFZhEllKz8rLTbsY8pkNGMTLy4QzKQW4e_XqmsMkCk1lIGDPJhMTfhZHF7qvDv7AxtDTLHJ62HCK62M4WYVbMD2GpqGj7PGhJBg-vsnzgpgFLmBlN8YQCNvsa1lo" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="909" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh2x6QAm8qjBiZ20b2Q-F29KCmCC1MzMTjOgfDJDik-kNdmvskYnP63kaopERKM_8EXFZhEllKz8rLTbsY8pkNGMTLy4QzKQW4e_XqmsMkCk1lIGDPJhMTfhZHF7qvDv7AxtDTLHJ62HCK62M4WYVbMD2GpqGj7PGhJBg-vsnzgpgFLmBlN8YQCNvsa1lo=w121-h200" width="121" /></a></div><i>My grandmother always used a thimble. She was taught to embroider by her aunt in the small Yucatan town where she grew up but didn't discover thimbles until she moved to Merida. She thought they were marvelous and used to say that sewing machines, washing machines, and thimbles had changed her life. I never found thimbles comfortable to wear, but there was a period when I spent so much time embroidering that I got calluses on my fingertips, and if I pricked myself, the needle would never go deep enough to draw blood. Citlali would give a nervous giggle when I'd ask her to prick me to demonstrate the quality of my calluses. Remembering her laughter makes me want to laugh too, but I stop myself so as not to wake my daughter, who's sleeping in the next room while I embroider her name on the backpack she needs for her first day at nursery school. Laughter has to be one of the hardest things in the world to hold back, almost harder than tears.</i><p></p><p>Mila, the narrator of Jazmina Barrera's <i>Cross Stitch, </i>receives terrible news: Citlali, her old friend from high school, has drowned off the coast of Senegal. Mila arranges for the reception and disposal of Citlali's ashes with a ceremonial gathering of her friends, but the painful loss brings back a rush of memories, divided into what you might call--appropriately, given the novel's title and central motifs--two threads. First, the high school friendship between Citlali, Mila, and beautiful, much-desired Dalia. Second, a college trip to London and Paris, in which Mila and Dalia go looking for Citlali, whom they worry is in distress. When they find her in Paris, the three have the first adult adventure of their lives, but their worries are not misplaced, as Citlali shows repeated signs of an eating disorder. Though her later death in Senegal seems accidental, the trip seems to foreshadow their friend's ultimate disintegration--perhaps, unraveling.</p><p>I was really charmed by Jazmina Barrera's <i><a href="https://fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2022/02/on-lighthouses-by-jazmina-barrera.html">On Lighthouses</a>, </i>a mix of memoir, autofiction, and non-fiction essay. I found it both thoughtful and scrupulous, drawing on an impressive number of historical, geographic, and fictional sources on the subject of lighthouses. <i>Cross Stitch, </i>though more pointedly fictional, is a little like that, too: interspersed with--I guess I have to say <i>woven, </i>right?--the main narrative are many brief snippets about embroidery and sewing. Like <i>On Lighthouses, </i>the sources are innumerable and diverse. Barrera draws from Mayan cultural practices, modern feminist artists like Louise Bourgeois and Leticia Parente, medical textbooks, and fiction novels like <i>Jane Eyre </i>and my beloved <i><a href="https://fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-prime-of-miss-jean-brodie-by-muriel.html">Prime of Miss Jean Brodie</a>.</i></p><p>In one way, these pieces speak to the embroidery pursuits of the three girls, who bond over it, but in a symbolic way, they suggest an image of life as something woven together. The fabrics of life, perhaps, are threaded together from the lives of others. It's a cheesy way of putting it, but perhaps one point is that, though a thread may be cut, it reminds part of the larger fabric, where it intersects with other lives, other memories. Citlali remains woven in the fabric of the narrator's life. Nor is it lost that sewing and stitching are, in medical and garment contexts, a kind of healing that knits broken things together. It's a testament to Barrera's skill and the novel's thoughtfulness and gentleness that the book is <i>not </i>cheesy. The symbol, which might otherwise seem hackneyed or cliche--after all, the image of life as a thread goes back to the ancient Greeks--is renewed and invigorated by the essay portions of the novel. </p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-74579132900048351992024-03-07T18:17:00.001-05:002024-03-07T18:17:11.630-05:00House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj88xb-Ad2HP4uKiXrjF3atBNcYX6t9O80QBaMlvlNvGIspxqJwIxTUm-T2nTUpe8ZcYuSfvIo8YOhwP4Zm2AYFaGIs234puslv-OKWLyYxX8L5gApSUDoSxKZVrUhwWSR6VL1zJCa1IdKlqdikY3xPer6ReVQaGlt8iFilMJnGXYM15u8n_HV6vKmOs6E" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="475" data-original-width="310" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj88xb-Ad2HP4uKiXrjF3atBNcYX6t9O80QBaMlvlNvGIspxqJwIxTUm-T2nTUpe8ZcYuSfvIo8YOhwP4Zm2AYFaGIs234puslv-OKWLyYxX8L5gApSUDoSxKZVrUhwWSR6VL1zJCa1IdKlqdikY3xPer6ReVQaGlt8iFilMJnGXYM15u8n_HV6vKmOs6E=w131-h200" width="131" /></a></div><i>Later, when the sheep had filled into the arroyo and from the bank he could see them all, he dropped a little bread for the snake-killer dog, but the dog had quivered and laid back its ears. Slowly it backed away and crouched, not looking at him, not looking at anything, but listening. Then he heard it, the thing itself. He knew even then that it was only the wind, but it was a stranger sound than any he had ever known. And at the same time he saw the hole in the rock where the wind dipped, struck, and rose. It was lager than a rabbit hole and partly concealed by the chokecherry which grew beside it. The moan of the wind grew loud, and it filled him with dread. For the rest of his life it would be for him the particular sound of anguish.</i><p></p><p>I don't usually re-read books before teaching them, especially if I've taught them more than once. But N. Scott Momaday's <i>House Made of Dawn </i>is an exception. Perhaps it's just because the book is too dense, too rich, to get away with "faking it." But maybe it's because I love it, and it feels to me like one of those books whose wonders never cease to unfold. This time around, it feels especially poignant, given that Momaday himself died earlier this year at age 89. This time around, it has the feeling of a great legacy--wisdom, maybe, from the next world.</p><p>I don't have much to say about it here because I'm sort of doing a <a href="https://twitter.com/grnpointer/status/1764042173954052132">running thread about it on Twitter</a>. One thing that did stand out to me, that I hadn't really noticed before, is the passage above, where a young Abel is spooked by a hole in the rock through which the wind is moaning. This stood out to me for a few reasons. One, it reminded me of a similar moment in <i>Death Comes for the Archbishop </i>in which the bishop Latour is guided, in a snow storm, to a secret cave by an Indian guide, where he hears a great moaning coming from within its inaccessible recesses. It reminded me so much of it, actually, that I wondered if Momaday was pointedly referencing it: a moment of the Other, which in Cather is racialized and exotic. That it should strike Latour that way is no surprise, but Abel--always half an outsider because of his uncertain parentage--is, or ought to be, different.</p><p>It also brought to mind certain vague aspects of the Pueblo religion, which, like many Native American religions of the West, supposes a number of worlds laid one on the other. Many of these religions hold that humankind came up from another world through a hole like this one; some of them, like the Lakota, can even pinpoint the exact hole. The sipapu, the ceremonial hole in the sacred kiva of the Pueblo religion, represents this place of emergence. Perhaps what Tayo is hearing here--and what terrifies him so--is the sound of that other world: the unmediated touch of the real, which other characters (like Angela) long for, and seek to find in Indian country.</p><p>I loved re-reading <i>House Made of Dawn </i>this year. I don't know why, but it felt cleaner, simpler to me, more manageable and recognizable and familiar. Maybe having tackled some of its knottier aspects--its strange place-shifting, its many voices, its modernist structural tricks--what's left is the purity and simplicity of Momaday's language.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-89247850748863898722024-03-04T17:19:00.001-05:002024-03-04T17:19:09.077-05:00The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgZ7h7NHWuI3PggyfsRwf4iRfVSko23Qw1JfzN4GzIMvYkiLYDhEFZVnEwir7LErnrR8QZpWItCYZozkQRxsMXaQJjMrMvEgtriBOlTETT9lCtd7e5iAx8937qybR-oqctUwFot97GBIV6RLIQwCByDnFDSgFFFVJUJgrkpCDPy0jwDKO-UXSwDnU1pjdw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="392" data-original-width="259" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgZ7h7NHWuI3PggyfsRwf4iRfVSko23Qw1JfzN4GzIMvYkiLYDhEFZVnEwir7LErnrR8QZpWItCYZozkQRxsMXaQJjMrMvEgtriBOlTETT9lCtd7e5iAx8937qybR-oqctUwFot97GBIV6RLIQwCByDnFDSgFFFVJUJgrkpCDPy0jwDKO-UXSwDnU1pjdw=w133-h200" width="133" /></a></div><i>They were as dark as anything, and all marching in the straightest of files, with their hands raised at the same angle, while Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress and watched them. Mussolini had put an end to unemployment with his fascisti and there was no litter in the streets. It occurred to Sandy, there at the end of the Middle Meadow Walk, that the Brodie set was Miss Brodie's fascisti, not to the naked eye, marching along, but all knit together for her need and in another way, marching along. That was all right, but it seemed, too, that Miss Brodie's disapproval of the Girl Guides had jealousy in it, there was an inconsistency, a fault. Perhaps the Guides were too much a rival fascisti, and Miss Brodie could not bear it. Sandy thought she might see about joining the Brownies. Then the group-fright seized her again, and it was necessary to put the idea aside, because she loved Miss Brodie.</i><p></p><p>Two years ago I finished the last of Muriel Spark's books, and I grieved. Last year I wanted to start reading them again, and I thought it would be fun to read them in the order I first read them--but my copy of <i>The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie </i>was lent somewhere to someone, who hopefully read and enjoyed it, whoever they may be. So I reread <i>Robinson </i>instead, a strange and charming book. But this year, I really wanted to get back to Jean Brodie, and to find out whether it really is the best of Spark's books, or if I only remember it so fondly because it was the first (and of course, most famous). I'm pleased to report that it really is that book: riotous, shocking, mean-spirited, and deeply sad.</p><p>This time around, I found myself strangely more sympathetic toward Miss Brodie. The first time around I was a rookie teacher, and I still found myself sympathizing with the students rather than the faculty. Fifteen years on (!), I see in Miss Brodie some teachers I have known: people who use their classrooms to enact fantasies of control, perhaps because so much of life outside the classroom is uncontrollable. Miss Brodie is a fascist, an admirer of Mussolini, and fascism, too, is a fantasy of control and a childish one at that; a fantasy of perfect order by the suppression and exclusion of undesirable elements--those things that are not, as Brodie says, the "creme de la creme."</p><p>But the childishness of the fantasy is what makes Brodie a sad figure. I see now how she reduces class, and life, to a series of rote cliches and performative gestures. The fantasy has deadly consequences, of course--she urges one girl toward the war in Spain, and her death--but that makes it somehow more pathetic. And in Sandy Stranger, Brodie's betrayer, I see less an avenging angel than another kind of pettiness. Sandy seizes upon Brodie's fascist leanings to have her sacked, but it's not out of concern for the dead girl in Spain, or for poor stupid Mary Macgregor who is at the bottom of the Brodie totem pole. It's out of some other kind of pique, a resentment that Brodie takes on the role of God, as if Sandy herself is not a kind of planner and schemer.</p><p>A couple other things I noticed this time around: the "flash-forward" technique that I've always considered characteristic of Spark's technique is really much more prominent here. It's <i>so </i>mean-spirited: Spark can barely mention Mary Macgregor without reminding us that one day she's going to die in a fire, running "hither and thither" like an idiot. But it also takes on an air of predestination, as if Mary's ultimate death is inseparable from her essential identity, as essential as Sandy's taking the veil, or Miss Brodie's eventual betrayal and death. At the risk of repeating myself, Spark is always God, pushing her characters around, assigning them destinies. She's a cruel God, Calvin's God--she clearly thinks Mary Macgregor's death is funny, and it is. Perhaps by striking out against Miss Brodie, Sandy is striking out against Spark, too, but the joke's on her, because it's Spark who puts her in the nunnery.</p><p>Another thing: <i>Jean Brodie </i>is more of an Edinburgh novel than nearly anything Spark has written. I can't remember off the top of my head if any of her other novels are set in Edinburgh--many are London--and though I'm sure some of them are, I don't know the city is really central to any of them. But, among other things, <i>Jean Brodie </i>is a novel about the awakenings that come with coming-of-age, and one of the things that Sandy learns is the particular shape of middle-class Edinburgh life that surrounds her, and how it may differ from other kinds of life: "All she was conscious now was that some quality of life peculiar to Edinburgh and nowhere else had been going on unbeknown to her all the time, and however undesirable it might be she felt deprived of it; however undesirable, she desired to know what it was, and to cease to be protected from it by enlightened people." Part of that Edinburgh life is the bourgeois standards that keeps Jean Brodie from consummating her love for the art teacher Teddy Lloyd, and which drives her to recruit Rose, then Sandy, as her surrogate. Another part is Calvinism, and perhaps it's reacting against the pervasiveness of that religion that drives Sandy--like Spark herself--to Catholicism.</p><p>In this case, I think the critics got this one right. I have a few personal favorites among Spark's books, like <i>The Mandelbaum Gate </i>and <i>The Takeover, </i>and I think that <i>Loitering with Intent </i>and <i>A Far Cry From Kensington </i>may actually be more indicative of her style and themes, but everything about <i>The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie </i>sings. There's no one like Miss Brodie--that particular mix of self-regard and pathetic smallness--in any of her other books, or any book, frankly. And it's enlivened by the irony of the young students' untutored viewpoints, which is a tactic Spark seems not to have much patience for in other books. It's the creme de la creme--Miss Muriel Spark in her prime.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-9921446716307531962024-03-03T11:06:00.001-05:002024-03-03T11:06:11.923-05:00Young Once by Patrick Modiano<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj3K8tnQ3XQ7R-X6dMdE_jCe376vl_DKt2CZKcQbhAe5ZenHUySybJUhGWx_pIMqLAlYTr8uHgKiAv4tOcutvlgDZkD2bpOn0CDvd7NQImJfSrJuAQyjr06--BVD1SsrQjC1gkIi9HLmLG4p685KI17hw4q3EnCMiHGx93GB1nsh_FW78xgRa39kGAsmcU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1237" data-original-width="767" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj3K8tnQ3XQ7R-X6dMdE_jCe376vl_DKt2CZKcQbhAe5ZenHUySybJUhGWx_pIMqLAlYTr8uHgKiAv4tOcutvlgDZkD2bpOn0CDvd7NQImJfSrJuAQyjr06--BVD1SsrQjC1gkIi9HLmLG4p685KI17hw4q3EnCMiHGx93GB1nsh_FW78xgRa39kGAsmcU=w124-h200" width="124" /></a></div><i>She went into the Sinfonia. At that time of day, there were lots of customers. She slipped to the back of the store. She chose a record and gave it to the salesman so he could let her listen to it. She waited for one of the booths to be free and sat down, putting the little headphones over her ears. A silence like cotton wool. She forgot the hustle and bustle around her. She dreams that one day she will no longer walk around in this crowd, in this suffocating racket. One day, she will burst through this screen of noise and indifference and be nothing but a voice, a clear voice, set free, like the one she is listening to at the moment.</i><p></p><p>Louis and Odile are married, living a charmed life in the Swiss Alps with their children. They're comfortable, if a little bored, and their boredom gives them plenty of time to look back on the beginning of their relationship, when things were quite different: Odile, trying to make it as a new wave singer, suffering under the abuses of predatory men--record label owners, night club owners, cops--who would control her; Louis, penniless in Paris, taking up a mysterious job working for a petty criminal. Together, they are two young people navigating a world in which they are essentially powerless against the forces of wealth and stature. When Louis first meets Odile, she is at her lowest point, with her head laid against the table of a Paris cafe--but together, the poverty and powerlessness become something that forges their love.</p><p>I can't take credit for this observation, because I read something like it somewhere (can't remember), but <i>Young Again </i>deflates popular myths about the golden age of 1960's French culture. The older people that Louis and Odile get involved with--Louis's friend Brossier, Odile's mentor Bellune, the criminal operative Bejardy, all these "B" names as if we're supposed to forget who is who, exactly--have their own heyday in the Paris of thirty years prior; they're always talking about those days, or sharing photographs. A golden age, it seems, is always out of reach, somewhere back in the past. But it's interesting how Modiano frames the story with the older Louis and Odile, who are more successful and comfortable by any metric, and yet it's easy to see how they look back on these difficult years as a kind of prime: "Later, when the two of them talked about the past--btu they only did so on very rare occasions, mostly after the birth of their children--they were surprised to realize that the most decisive time in their lives had lasted barely seven months."</p><p>I found Modiano's style very strange to acclimate to. I'm not sure if "minimalist" is the right word, or "Hemingwavian" or something else, but it seems stripped down to some kind of essence that shears it completely of sentimentality. The language is plainspoken in the extreme, and limited to the bare facts of what happens. I happen to like this kind of writing, but I struggled with the smoothness of it; I wondered whether that smoothness belied a great depth, or whether it was only the surface. Louis and Odile are never quite real as characters, but perhaps they have the kind of unfinished quality that young people often have before they come into themselves.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-64140113050101143862024-03-02T11:27:00.002-05:002024-03-02T11:27:25.118-05:00Frangipani House by Beryl Gilroy<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYc3GdgItgPhQhJaKvF77Y0DoTAP-_XqVXmWD97VnYGrsz9jVW1vetV-f8pHLlMPa3Tk6jkJFgYc5y5YIh15b6-usSFdOnK3_dh1EIzV8-yJ-Q6fMkQpHVheH-CnAlqKgcD5eoA6R_r3dQolj-Xc8kbWxoRtdqLra3ATsqnTc_TzXYHZwVr5-WINk0OHY" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="653" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYc3GdgItgPhQhJaKvF77Y0DoTAP-_XqVXmWD97VnYGrsz9jVW1vetV-f8pHLlMPa3Tk6jkJFgYc5y5YIh15b6-usSFdOnK3_dh1EIzV8-yJ-Q6fMkQpHVheH-CnAlqKgcD5eoA6R_r3dQolj-Xc8kbWxoRtdqLra3ATsqnTc_TzXYHZwVr5-WINk0OHY" width="157" /></a></div><i>Even as she lay suspended, between being lost and the coming of her destiny, Mama saw Death and Life, both children of the same father, both legitimate. Death, dominant and conclusive. Life, uncertain and accidental, friable as dry earth, malleable as clay, and finally fragile as gossamer in the hands of death.</i><p></p><p>Mama King is getting on in years. Most her family has moved away from Guyana to the United States, and she is, in a sense, alone. Her daughters arrange for her to move into Frangipani House, a nursing home where she will be taken care of. But Mama King feels the loss of her independence keenly, and Frangipani House is ruled with an iron fist by the cruelties of the proud Matron, who resents Mama King's attempts to free herself. There are friends and allies among the other residents, but they don't stick around for long--Frangipani House reeks of death and decay. Perhaps that, really, is the reason that Mama King escapes to live among Indian beggars, who welcome her into their lifestyle with eagerness.</p><p>One thing I liked about <i>Frangipani House </i>is the way it explores what it means to be old and close to death, and to face a state of mental deterioration. Though it embodies a fundamental truth, I think we don't have enough novels that focus on this state of life, partially because people who enter into it are rarely up to writing novels, and partly because I think we are afraid to look to closely at life's last stages. For Mama King, it means living with a foot in two worlds: one in the present of Frangipani House and another in the past, where her husband, a no-good roustabout named Danny, gives her two children and then suddenly disappears in the jungle. (As a matter of fact, Mama King's close friends know a shocking truth about Danny's story that, it seems, can only unfold now, when Mama King is busy trying to wrap up the threads of her life.) But Frangipani House, perhaps, is no place for an old woman, because it treats Mama King like a child, when really she is something quite different.</p><p>Mama King's escape brings her daughters and their children back to Guyana to track her down. Longed-for independence turns out to be dangerous for Mama King--with the beggars, she finds herself in a violent exchange with a policeman that sends her to the hospital--but by bringing her family back home, it gives her a chance to endure the last stage of her life with the next generations that she fears had abandoned her. She is lucky, perhaps; not all the residents of Frangipani House get this. And though it's touching, it's not sentimental or too easy; in fact, I found this book extremely rich and complex for its briefness. Mama King is interesting, but so is the insecure, heavy-handed Matron, and so are Mama King's children and grandchildren who have taken part in the 20th century's mass movement away from the Caribbean. They are searching for a better life, but <i>Frangipani House </i>is, at least in part, about what they must leave behind in order to do so. (One character remarks that Frangipani House is a "Caucasian" institution, and what is needed is to go back to African methods.) And I was really fascinated by the book's rich and colorful Guyanese dialect, which combines fascinatingly with Gilroy's erudition.</p><p>With the addition of Guyana, my "Countries Read" list is up to 88!<br /></p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-73641999467107916612024-02-28T17:40:00.003-05:002024-02-28T17:40:42.061-05:00The Immoralist by Andre Gide<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71XDiQfG5bL._SL1200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="508" height="200" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71XDiQfG5bL._SL1200_.jpg" width="127" /></a></i></div><i>What words had I been reading that night?... Oh yes; Christ's words to Peter: "Now thou girdest thyself and goest where thou wouldst..." Where was I going now? Where did I want to go?... I didn't tell you that from Naples that last time, I had gone to Paestum one day, alone... Oh, I could have sobbed before those stones! The ancient beauty appeared: simple, perfect, smiling--abandoned. Art is leaving me, I feel it. To make room for... what? No longer, as before, a smiling harmony... I no longer know, now, the dark god I serve. O new God! Grant that I may yet know new races, unforeseen kinds of beauty.</i><p></p><p><i>The Immoralist... </i>it sounds to my ear like a CBS procedural. But in fact, it's an early 20th century novel by Andre Gide about Michel, a man who struggles between his attachment to his beautiful and caring wife Marceline and his desire to shake off bourgeois moral conventions in order to live a life free of restraints. It might be best remembered today--this is certainly my greatest association with it--as a focus of Edward Said, who wrote about the way that Michel's journey in North Africa exemplifies the colonizer's narrative control over the colonized. In Tunisia and Algeria, Michel finds a landscape and culture free of European pretension, but, interestingly to me, it's not this trip exactly that causes him to seek this new life, but a long bout of tuberculosis that leaves him stranded there.</p><p>Sickness as a transformation that is physical, mental, spiritual. How does it work? Perhaps it is that, alone, Michel is cut off from the niceties of civilization and must descend alone into himself--sickness always feels a little like that, like you are inside yourself. But of course, Michel is not alone in his sickness, he has Marceline with him always; it's her tender care for him that makes him fall in love with her--previously, he had married her only to satisfy her father. But more than this, there are young boys in Africa, and Michel is drawn to their beauty and their grace. Are we meant to understand that, between the lines of the book, Michel is abusing them? Gide himself was a self-described "pederast," although <i>The Immoralist </i>felt much more ambivalent about such behavior than a proud pederast might project. Marceline even procures some of these boys for him; it makes one wonder how much she knew about her husband even then, and whether she, too, knows to take advantage when European civilization's back is turned. (OK, probably not.)</p><p>I found the parts of <i>The Immoralist </i>in North Africa engrossing, richly written. Once Michel returns to Europe, I found the novel a rather dreary affair: the settling into the grand estate, the conversations with Menalque, another "immoralist" who encourages Michel down the path of profligacy, the crush on his estate manager's son and his dalliance into poaching. (The poaching, among other things, reveals something of the pointlessness of Michel's freedom from the bourgeois--in the end, he's stealing from his own estate!) The novel picks up once again when Marceline herself takes ill and Michel ferries her back to Africa, dreaming, perhaps, that the environment there will cure her, too; and yet, once they arrive, he increasingly abandons her to pursue his own hedonistic pleasures. "The capacity to be free is nothing," he writes; "the capacity to be free, that is the task." But can one be free without being cruel? Is Michel a sick man, or an inspired one? These are the questions I think <i>The Immoralist, </i>in the end, is unable to asnwer.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-55026338244746516552024-02-25T14:05:00.002-05:002024-02-25T14:05:37.426-05:00White by Marie Darrieussecq<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEirYX2zBm7SW1GjoFjvoHjDu5Gqs5OSCUTjhmiJrWD8ZXp86Ybpsyw0WExX2YrHYqbLwW0X_dvFmyoDb67rfcIWyFk_YzpSE1pYwqAYd58zEfM3yWSSWRBiurq8KLq6-Cqc2ySunhJR2dhxOgIduv-LSaCPoUKOp4pxPS7RXsSJKrcjxwZJ2DC-Z1sZt4E" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="629" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEirYX2zBm7SW1GjoFjvoHjDu5Gqs5OSCUTjhmiJrWD8ZXp86Ybpsyw0WExX2YrHYqbLwW0X_dvFmyoDb67rfcIWyFk_YzpSE1pYwqAYd58zEfM3yWSSWRBiurq8KLq6-Cqc2ySunhJR2dhxOgIduv-LSaCPoUKOp4pxPS7RXsSJKrcjxwZJ2DC-Z1sZt4E=w126-h200" width="126" /></a></i></div><i>Fleeting moments of density in our mass cause laughter to ring out haphazardly. It does not take much to hold us here, in this zone, it does not take much at all. Vacillating, yet perpetual. Solid as ice. In the perpetual whiteness where nothing ever happens, the White Project forgotten. In the whiteness that suits us. Several mythologies situate us here: sometimes we are the dead, or those who are still moving. Above all, we avoid being counted. Of course, we can drift up to the surface of the planet, like an atmospheric phenomenon, El Nino or La Nina, but if the Earth holds us, then Antarctica is our... what? Our anchorage? Leave that to the sailors. Our territory? Leave that to the animals, the seals, whales and penguins. Our field? For the gardeners. Our empire, our realm? For others still. Our country? What a joke. Marshland is for the will-o'-the-wisp, lava for trolls, forest for elves; but the South Pole is our identity, like the sea for the melancholic, the chaise-longue for the consumptive, or an empty room for the amnesiac. We would set down this equation: that Antarctica is to Geography what our bodies are to History. And we would add that for this season (as they put it) we shall certainly be drawn to floating around the White Project. Perhaps even more than usual.</i><p></p><p>Two people arrive at a research base at the South Pole. One is Peter Thomson, an Icelandic heating engineer, whose job is to keep the generator running and the heat on. The other is Edmee Blanco, a French woman living in Houston, who is the radio operator--the base's link to the outside world. Slowly, at a pace that matches the changelessness of the white continent's days, they are drawn together. Perhaps because they sense that the other has, like them, come to Antarctica to escape some unbearable aspect of their lives. For Peter, it is his racial ambiguity that has made him an outcast all his life among the pale Icelanders. For Edmee, it's a terrible murder to which she is only tenuously connected, though perhaps being tenuously connected to a murder is even more difficult than being directly implicated. These stories unfold in Darrieussecq's narrative with a strange dilatoriness; at first they seem so random--the kind of thing a scriptwriter might throw in to give a character roundness--but by the end of the novel, they feel convincing. And yet, on the white continent, these stories feel strangely irrelevant--as no doubt Edmee and Peter are hoping.</p><p>I've never read a book like <i>White. </i>(Isn't it amazing how, after fifteen years and thousands of books, you can still find yourself saying a thing like that?) Darrieussecq's descriptions of Antarctica are the book's greatest pleasure, not just in a physical sense but a metaphysical one. For her, as for Edmee and Peter, Antarctica is a place that is both peripheral and central, a spot that is blank both on the map and in life, a "white patch pierced by a metal rod at the bottom of the luminous globe." Nothing grows here, and yet is the "place where the winds are born." Its emptiness and impenetrability are its chief qualities, but as one researcher explains, if you extract a miles-long core from the ice--as the White Project attempts to do--you can read the record of all of human history, ancient eruptions as well as ash from the World Trade Center. <i>White </i>unfolds very slowly, and barely seems to have a plot at all--the long arrival, then the quiet dalliance between Peter and Edmee, and then at last a generator failure that brings the project to ruin--but on a metaphysical level, the continent is constantly unfolding its mystery.</p><p>One of the strangest things about <i>White: </i>it's narrated by ghosts. They are not the ghosts of former explorers, though they describe themselves as playing among Robert Falcon Scott's dead horses; they're not the ghosts of people at all. What they are is never clear, though as Darrieussecq explains, they are to history what Antarctica is to Geography. I suppose that means fundamentally inscrutable or unexplainable. They gather around Peter and Edmee, watching and describing, agglutinizing like memories or a thoughts which have no real physical ability to affect anything, but which are still somehow quite powerful. If Peter and Edmee believe that, by running to the farthest point of the globe, they are running from the ghosts of their own lives, they might be surprised to find that there are ghosts even there that cannot be avoided. It's a strange and bold authorial move, but it fits, somehow, the white continent's strangeness and its allure.</p><p><i>White </i>is, among other things, a novel about failure. Set in a near-future, the White Project researchers are overshadowed by the first manmade mission to Mars. (The connection between these two kinds of pioneers is explicit, though the Mars mission is more well-known because it contains seeds of progress and hope--a way out of the earth. The White Project, by contrast, is an unpleasant reminder that even the Earth has its secret and unknown places.) Like the White Project, the Mars mission is doomed to failure: the Antarctic researchers, like everyone else, see the lander tip over on its door, trapping the astronauts in their own tomb. We'll remember this image when the Antarctic researchers are huddled in their own emergency pod, waiting to be rescued. But for Edmee and Peter, whose affair is over nearly as soon as it's begun, it's a warning that escape is not possible, not in the stars, and not in the white continent, where the winds are born.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-18375895368334979022024-02-24T11:09:00.001-05:002024-02-24T11:09:06.879-05:00My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgAxYMT6DFUlolVsrBxvzBuAMnD0AC10rslPWdOHKdJEbpcERcXc0lUzhzMNZqglgHAY7xqS1HSVgo8kb-8L1DkT_2Oghiw2Phpn6OiLWPhw6uITd5yLkMwOb1w-IGkqmX1rMbbA-jzTfeSB7ojAYpqEhRee8KBYTBeAnLTjvMBuEOK4h2G35Z2_v5axfY" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1045" data-original-width="650" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgAxYMT6DFUlolVsrBxvzBuAMnD0AC10rslPWdOHKdJEbpcERcXc0lUzhzMNZqglgHAY7xqS1HSVgo8kb-8L1DkT_2Oghiw2Phpn6OiLWPhw6uITd5yLkMwOb1w-IGkqmX1rMbbA-jzTfeSB7ojAYpqEhRee8KBYTBeAnLTjvMBuEOK4h2G35Z2_v5axfY=w124-h200" width="124" /></a></i></div><i>But Nature will not be cheated, fooled, bribed, fobbed off, shuffled out of the way. I still have to return in the evening, and, dodge it as I may, I know what I shall find, a burning creature burning with desire. "Heat" is the apt word; one can feel against one's hand without touching her the feverous radiations from her womb. A fire has been kindled in it, and no substitute pleasure can distract, no palliative soothe, no exertion tire, no cooling stream slake, for long the all-consuming need of her body. She is enslaved. She is possessed. Indeed, especially towards the peak--it is the strangest, the most pitiful thing--her very character is altered. This independent, unapproachable, dignified and single-hearted creature, my devoted bitch, becomes the meekest of beggars.</i><p></p><p>I've never had a dog. Not growing up and not now. Though I'd like one--or perhaps it might be better to say I am curious about having one--our lease disallows it. I've had cats, but the relationship between a cat and its owner is nothing like the bond one feels toward their dogs. J. R. Ackerley's <i>My Dog Tulip, </i>a memoir centered on his German Shepherd ("Alsatian") Tulip, is a testament to the devotion that dogs show their owners, and in turn, owners show their dogs. Ackerley, an English journalist and longtime editor, comes off in the memoir as a slightly lonely, befuddled bachelor, who takes on Tulip to fill the absence of companionship in his life. He finds that owning Tulip is not so simple, but from the very first visit to the vet--who tells Ackerley that Tulip's troublesome behavior in the examining room is not because of her own distress, but because she worries for <i>his </i>safety--it's clear that Tulip's devotion is stronger and more pure than any human creature's ever could be.</p><p>Interestingly, <i>My Dog Tulip </i>focuses largely on the dog's physical needs and bodily existence. First, the visits to the vet, then the problem of what to do with Tulip's poops, then the long and convoluted battle of breeding her and dealing with her yearly estrus. (I learned from <i>My Dog Tulip </i>that people used to not pick up after their dogs <i>at all, </i>and heated arguments would take place about whether dogs should be able to relieve themselves <i>on the sidewalk </i>or be forced into the dangerous street. I don't know when we started picking up the poop, but whoever invented those little biodegradable bags deserves more credit than they've ever gotten.) The breeding process, which takes up much of the book's second half, is a comedy of errors that involves introducing Tulip to a peanut gallery of German Shepherds with names like Gunner, Mountjoy, and Dusty, and Ackerley spares us none of the specific details of the physical act. (Before reading this, I never knew just how many specific kinds of <i>excretions </i>dogs had.)</p><p>What I got out of <i>My Dog Tulip </i>is this: there are a lot of abstract ideas that conglomerate around dogs, like loyalty and companionship, strength and beauty. And yet, to own a dog is to own a physical creature, and to attend to its physical needs, the ones that its own nature demands. The most heart-rending part of owning Tulip is knowing that nothing can be done about her yearly distress, when her body calls out for something Ackerley cannot provide. I don't know if people just didn't fix dogs back then, or we don't know how, or it was seen as sort of gauche, or what. Maybe Ackerley is right that all our modern veterinary medicine cannot "bribe" or "fob off" the nature of an animal that retains some of its wildness, whether we like to think so or not.</p><p>Other than that, the book was just fine. Long and descriptive passages about expressing Tulip's anal glands didn't make me want to get a dog any more, and the descriptions of Tulip's unruly behavior certainly didn't make me want to get a German Shepherd. So I'll stay dog-curious a little longer.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-16690094767808070682024-02-19T13:07:00.004-05:002024-02-19T13:07:22.199-05:00In the Eye of the Wild by Natassja Martin<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/MEDIAX_849526-T1/images/I/91DDdC7zi4L._SL1500_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="518" height="200" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/MEDIAX_849526-T1/images/I/91DDdC7zi4L._SL1500_.jpg" width="130" /></a></i></div><i>On that day, August 25, 2015, the event is not: a bear attacks a French anthropologist somewhere in the mountains of Kamchatka. The event is: a bear and a woman meet and the frontiers between two worlds implode. Not just the physical boundaries between the human and the animal in whom the confrontation open fault lines in their bodies and their minds. This is also when mythical time meets reality; past time joins the present moment; dream meets flesh. The scene unfolds in our time, but it could equally have happened a thousand years ago. It is just me and the bear in this contemporary world that's indifferent to our personal trajectories--but this is also the archetypal confrontation, the unsteady man with his erect sex standing face-to-face with the wounded bison in the Lascaux well. And as in the Lascaux well scene, the incredible event depicted is dominated by uncertainty about its outcome, although it is inevitable. But unlike the well scene, what happens to us next is no mystery, for neither of us dies, for we both return from the impossibility that has happened.</i><p></p><p>In 2015, French anthropologist Natassja Martin was attacked by a bear in the wilds of the Kamchatka peninsula. The bear attacked Martin's face and leg, taking a piece of her jawbone away in his own jaws. Martin's recovery, as recounted in her memoir <i>In the Eye of the Wild, </i>was long, requiring several surgeries, first at a remote Russian army hospital and then back in Paris. But only a fraction of the attack's effects were physical: deeper and more lasting is the transformation within. Ultimately, Martin must return to Kamchatka to--what? Heal? Recover? None of these words quite fit what it is that drives her back to the wild. She returns to Kamchatka to find and face not just the bear, but herself, though these may be the same thing .</p><p>To her friends among the Indigenous Evens, Martin has become a <i>medka, </i>someone who is half-person, half-bear. Some avoid her and even her things, because of a belief that, once a person has survived the attack, the bear with which they are entwined will never cease pursuing them, and thus bring danger and ruin to the whole community. And indeed, the experience, in Martin's account, has an air of inevitability to it. Even before the attack, Martin dreamed of bears, and describes the meeting with the bear on the mountain as going out to meet her dream. After the attack, Martin describes the experience as one that has transformed both her and the bear. As the bear walked away with her jaw, so a piece of the bear has been symbolically lodged inside her. The attack is that rare event, a moment when the boundaries between animal and human have broken down. In a way, the attack epitomizes what Martin is looking for among the Evens, who she describes as living closer to land, to danger, and to risk, a refuge from the false protection and promise of the urban world.</p><p>I've never read a book quite like <i>In the Eye of the Wild. </i>If it were only a memoir of the experience of a bear attack, it would be worth reading for that alone--though Martin spends little if any time recounting the attack itself. But Martin's mixture of academic anthropological language and the mystical style of her "animist" philosophy are what really sets the book apart as a book. In these Martin finds a language appropriate to what has happened to her, fitting the strangeness and the inscrutability of the wild bear. It is hard, actually, not to walk away thinking that Martin is correct: that the bear is her dream, and that it would have always found her, because no one else could have told the story of the dream the way she has./</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-91280928179378410232024-02-16T16:48:00.006-05:002024-02-16T16:48:40.919-05:00Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/MEDIAX_849526-T1/images/I/41RTv7jO0LL._SY445_SX342_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="445" data-original-width="279" height="200" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/MEDIAX_849526-T1/images/I/41RTv7jO0LL._SY445_SX342_.jpg" width="125" /></a></i></div><i>Resigned, Nour El Dine fell silent. Once again weariness took hold of him. This empty room gave him a feeling of peace and seemed to isolate him from the rest of the universe. He imagined himself sleeping on the pile of newspapers, happy and lazy, freed from his anguish. What was the use of continuing to search for an impossible happiness? It was true that nothing could happen between these walls, in this skillfully arranged emptiness. No doubt Gohar was right. To live like a beggar was to follow the path of wisdom. A life in the primitive state, without constraints. Nour El Dine dreamed of how sweet a beggar's life would be, free and proud, with nothing to lose. He could finally indulge in his vice without fear or shame. He would even be proud of this vice that had been his worst torment for years.</i><p></p><p>Gohar, a beggar and former professor of philosophy, murders a beautiful young prostitute. The murder happens so quickly and compulsively it seems to be almost without motive: Gohar, yearning for his daily fix of hashish, covets the girl's expensive-looking bracelets; afterward they prove to be made only of paste. This act draws a policeman named Nour El Dine into the world of Cairo's impoverished underground; his investigation draws in several of Gohar's circle, including the hideous and love-starved poet Yeghen and the childish revolutionary El Kordi. And yet, it seems that Gohar himself wears the investigation, and his guilty act, more lightly than these: how can one upend a life that is already pared down basically to nothingness? Gohar's only dream is to travel to Syria, where his beloved hashish is legal, but even this dream seems more powerful to Gohar's acolytes than himself.</p><p>As a portrait of Cairo's underground, <i>Proud Beggars </i>is strangely conflicted and complicated. We know little about the life that Gohar has intently abandoned; he seems entirely satisfied with his life of asceticism. When, in the novel's opening scenes, his apartment is flooded by the ritual cleansing of a death next door, there's nothing to worry about, no things to ruin; even his bed is a stack of newspapers that can easily be replaced. Yet it seems impossible to say that Gohar has shaken off all attachments. It's his need for hashish, after all--and the intermediary desire for the golden bracelets--that drive him to commit a terrible crime. The denizens of Cairo's slums exhibit a strange mix of pride and despair. Take Gohar's new neighbor, for example, a man with no arms and legs who must be fed and washed by his wife--yet, whose prowess at lovemaking make him much in demand with the local women.</p><p>Nour El Dine, the policeman, is tormented by what he calls his "vice," his attraction to men. He is smitten with a young man named Samir who clearly despises him, and only hangs around, it seems, for the pleasure of torturing the desperate cop. Nour El Dine is the representative of a repressive political system, perhaps, but he is its victim as well as its agent--as I suppose is fairly common. Bourgeois Cairene life has trapped him in a cycle of desire, disappointment and guilt, and though he quickly zeroes in on Gohar as the killer, he, too, falls under the spell of Gohar's asceticism. If he were to live as Gohar does, would he be free to pursue his desires? Or is it the bourgeois life that keeps men like Nour El Dine from giving in wholly to their desires, as Gohar does? </p><p>With the addition of Egypt, my "Countries Read" list is up to 87!</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-55498092530639910682024-02-15T17:04:00.004-05:002024-02-15T17:04:30.163-05:00Small Things Like These by Clare Keegan<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEij6cHk-PvFlJOoFlDuVFXm4WdtYB2bVox8vlTgua08LOvWEjMe9GwoMJltNNxPHlGQIhyL2OuT2jwUlPeU6rv_TvIPRipsSXpSWmJr7GcrfvUU2rr4uV7qsleBKKUblMjrD-2w5BVxy3yOfomUWNGncck2Nr8F3ZcqPJOzrRi-8dd1D47_uwUnaW7BQ-c" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="640" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEij6cHk-PvFlJOoFlDuVFXm4WdtYB2bVox8vlTgua08LOvWEjMe9GwoMJltNNxPHlGQIhyL2OuT2jwUlPeU6rv_TvIPRipsSXpSWmJr7GcrfvUU2rr4uV7qsleBKKUblMjrD-2w5BVxy3yOfomUWNGncck2Nr8F3ZcqPJOzrRi-8dd1D47_uwUnaW7BQ-c=w128-h200" width="128" /></a></i></div><i>As they walked on, Furlong met people he had known and dealt with for the greater part of his life, most of whom gladly stopped to speak until, looking down, they saw the bare, black feet and realised the girl with him was not one of their own. Some then gave them a wide berth or talked awkwardly or politely wished him a Happy Christmas and went on. One elderly woman out walking a terrier on a long strap confronted him, asking who the girl was, and was she not one of those wans from the laundry? At another point, a little boy looked at Sarah's feet and laughed and called her dirty before his father gave his hand a rough tug and told him to whisht. Miss Kenny, wearing old clothes he'd never before seen her in and with drink on her breath, stopped and asked what he was doing with a child out in the snow with no shoes on, assuming Sarah was one of his own, and marched off. Not one person they met addressed Sarah or asked where he was taking her. Feeling little or no obligation to say very much or to explain, Furlong smoothed things over as best he could and carried on along with the excitement in his heart matched by the fear of what he could not yet see but knew he would encounter.</i><p></p><p>Times are tough in Ireland, but Bill Furlong is doing all right: he's got a thriving business delivering wood and coal; he's got a family, a wife and four daughters. It hasn't been easy for him, growing up as a poor orphan in the house of a woman who took pity on him, but despite his hardships, Furlong has achieved a hard-won security and stability. While making his rounds, he begins to notice the girls who staff the local church laundry look frightened and worn; they say things that seem shocking to him, a passing outsider. What Furlong has discovered is one of Ireland's now-infamous "Magdalen Laundries," which were essentially forced labor institutions that tortured young women considered to be "fallen." When he discovers one of them in the church's coal shed, exiled there in the dead of winter, he is faced with a choice between stability and his own powerful moral sense.</p><p><i>Small Things Like These </i>is, first and foremost, a novel about goodness. Furlong is a deeply <i>good </i>person, shaped by his experiences of orphanhood and penury. Goodness, in this novel, mean seeing the the things that other people turn a blind eye to. Furlong's own wife chastises him for caring too much about the plight of others, when they have their own family to support and defend. "But what if it was one of ours?" he asks, to which she acerbically replies, "This is the very thing I'm saying... <i>'Tis not one of ours." </i>Perhaps goodness, too, means expanding the arbitrary lines that demarcate whom you are responsible to, as Furlong remembers quite clearly being the kind of person who fell outside of any radius of obligation. The proprietor of the local tavern advises Furlong not to get involved; it's better to get along, and what can one do anyway? But Furlong sees, and will not deceive himself, and to see is to act.</p><p><i>Small Things Like These </i>goes down smooth. Keegan's clear, plainspoken prose is like water, though it's touched with a bit of folksy Irish brogue for flair. It matches well the simple working-class life that Furlong leads. And the novel's moral vision is a compelling one. Yet to me, there's a kind of smell on it, the smell of an "issue novel"--<i>a novel about the Magdalen Laundries--</i>that the language is unable to wash away. A smell of falseness, maybe. Probably that's not fair, but it's what I felt. And I felt, too, something that's rare in my experience with SHORT BOOK FEBRUARY: I wish there had been more of it. The moral arc of the novel--Furlong ponders whether to act, then acts--is too clean. The novel's high point comes when Furlong, having rescued the girl Sarah from the coal shed, walks her through a Christmastide gauntlet of local faces who do not yet quite understand what it is he's done. We understand that the life he's chosen is the harder one, that it will be difficult to explain why Sarah is in his home--to the church, to the police, to his wife--but that he will fight for her, because he's not a man who sees any other choice. I found myself wanting to read that novel, and I wondered if the book didn't let him off a little too easy.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-84049486016247303912024-02-12T20:13:00.002-05:002024-02-12T20:13:31.290-05:00Sister Golden Calf by Colleen Burner<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgg2TQS-GBmLEIpa8wdwVOdCUL5COFn9EHyVU29Hzkgwpo01LPD5Alhu_SiG6rHv0-Jmf8aQ616ZDGzGyiHHqyTw4oLC5CZKmtu3sDWU-ltfsrsEcEWlKdhgG1nXPeesa3o3vHUxbowPZ-dZRNueoWz6MsG4odDlZl5c7WZfjBT4jnMaBCknCc1Rhq5T3w" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="667" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgg2TQS-GBmLEIpa8wdwVOdCUL5COFn9EHyVU29Hzkgwpo01LPD5Alhu_SiG6rHv0-Jmf8aQ616ZDGzGyiHHqyTw4oLC5CZKmtu3sDWU-ltfsrsEcEWlKdhgG1nXPeesa3o3vHUxbowPZ-dZRNueoWz6MsG4odDlZl5c7WZfjBT4jnMaBCknCc1Rhq5T3w=w133-h200" width="133" /></a></i></div><i>INVENTORY: one beautiful baby mutant calf preserved by the miracle of taxidermy, sans placards, sans glass case, sans roadside museum. A light mass covered in tawny hairs and full of a crumbling, dusty substance, possibly the product of animal becoming vegetable matter. The sweetest bulging brown eyes, which, objectively speaking, are crooked as hell and crusted with glue all the way around, yet they are naive and pleading without being pained. An outlaw, an outcast, qualified to live among the dead. This is my golden calf and I have no qualms. She practically glows. She smells like victory, like heaps of gold coins, salty sweat, and the quickest draw. Champion of bounties. Her presence feels almost too real to bear.</i><p></p><p>Gloria, the narrator of Colleen Burner's <i>Sister Golden Calf, </i>sets off with her sister to explore the back highways of New Mexico. Their car is filled with innumerable glass jars, one of which contains the ashes of their recently deceased mother Bonnie, who wishes to be dispersed to the landscape. The rest contain invisible, intangible things that the sisters have collected, as their mother taught them: emotions, moments, experiences, with labels like TARANTULA ACTION, DEAD LIGHT, BEGINNER'S LUCK, SOUL OF A JACKRABBIT. They trade these jars for a little gas money, to keep Bonnie's ashes on the wind, and their journey going. Gloria becomes obsessed with the taxidermied remains of a six-legged, two-headed calf, seen in a small town museum. She splits from her sister, who takes the car, while Gloria sets out to hitch--or walk--her way back to her beloved calf.</p><p><i>Sister Golden Calf </i>is filled with holes. The jars are the prototype: receptacles which seem empty, but which contain something more than mere air, something ineffable. Another is the miraculous hole that Gloria's sister Kit sets off to find, the one in the church that heals people with its dirt, and which re-fills mysteriously each night. (I recognized this as a version of the sanctuary at Chimayo, which I visited over the summer--as far as I know the hole doesn't magically refill, but the description of crutches left behind by the lame, stacked up in their hundreds by the cured, rang true.) Another are the empty cavities of the horse Day-Mare, whose blindness killed the daughter of a woman who offers Gloria food and shelter. Day-Mare has lost her eyes, but Gloria holds a jar up to her face and bottles, as she believes, the final memory of the horse's sight.</p><p>All this sounds a little twee, maybe. It sounds like someone who's read a lot of Joy Williams--that six-legged calf sounds right out of the Joy playbook. But it works: the richness of the labels on the jars, and the dreamy logic that leads Gloria on through the desert, struck me as frequently lovely, and more importantly, entirely sincere. <i>Sister Golden Calf </i>is one of my SHORT KING FEBRUARY books, and it would probably wear out its welcome at any more than its 100-ish pages; it has the brevity and persuasiveness of a rich dream. In the calf, Burner offers a symbol of captive strangeness; who knows why Gloria is drawn to it, exactly, except that it seems to need to be freed. It seems as strangely <i>present </i>and <i>tangible </i>symbol, when the rest of the book is built so profoundly out of absences and invisibilities. Or perhaps the calf itself is a kind of jar, a vessel in which the real--a memory, a desire--is trapped. When, at the end, the reunited sisters burn the calf, releasing it and transforming the remains to ash, the analogy to their mother's ashes is difficult to ignore. Later, they open all their bottles, no longer clinging to their mysteries. Then they go home.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-86914732112798977762024-02-11T13:01:00.002-05:002024-02-11T13:01:06.886-05:00Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjotxWH0qutKi-isNsb4bzLTV5OKLhOe-kU_tlxjmYvBlWR6d9KYYc5T3hKotfAhl7hbzwJxW9MsQ-oo05kTfei1ymAtKSDCptmwDPmkKjPjLAnp_aih0aUJrkJ_LnDNGSCvHp5WhJtndnpb_6P607_XMn_o4OA8o6-mejWDEGZX2DxZSJukUSOeUdYMkM" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="350" data-original-width="229" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjotxWH0qutKi-isNsb4bzLTV5OKLhOe-kU_tlxjmYvBlWR6d9KYYc5T3hKotfAhl7hbzwJxW9MsQ-oo05kTfei1ymAtKSDCptmwDPmkKjPjLAnp_aih0aUJrkJ_LnDNGSCvHp5WhJtndnpb_6P607_XMn_o4OA8o6-mejWDEGZX2DxZSJukUSOeUdYMkM=w131-h200" width="131" /></a></i></div><i>He had stayed so long that one might wonder whether he had forgotten his wife and children. He stayed not because he could not leave Komako nor because he did not want to. He had simply fallen into the habit of waiting for those frequent visits. And the more continuous the assault became, the more he began to wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living as completely. He stood gazing at his own coldness, so to speak. He could not understand how she had so lost herself. All of Komako came to him but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew that he could not go on pampering himself forever.</i><p></p><p>Shimamura is a wealthy Japanese "dilettante"--the book's word, and an interesting one--who lives in Tokyo with his wife and children. He frequently takes trips to a certain <i>onsen, </i>a hot springs bathhouse, in Japan's western mountains, where snow is frequent, early, and late. There, over a number of trips, he becomes entangled with a geisha named Komako. On each visit, he finds Komako a little further advanced in her career as a geisha--when he meets her, she's not a geisha at all, only a nineteen-year-old apprentice--and a little more in love with him, having waited for him with a little more intensity. And yet his feelings toward her are largely cold; he's unable to wholly return her affections.</p><p>I'm gonna be honest: I don't quite know what a geisha is. Judging from <i>Snow Country, </i>the job is an interesting mixture of sensual submissiveness and erudition. Is prostitution a part of it? I'm actually not sure, but the relationship between Komako and Shimimura is certainly a sexual one. More than this, her job seems to be to provide a good party companion: she's hired out to groups of men who want someone who can look beautiful, sing a pretty song, and even share in knowledgeable conversation. Komako is good at her job and always in demand. She can converse expertly with Shimamura about dance and literature--he, on the other hand, discards his interest in Nobu to take up an interest in Western ballet, which he's never seen, and which represents, perhaps, the way he treasures his own disaffectation and detachment. Heavy drinking, too, is a part of her role as party guest: as Shimamura's visits continue, she increasingly begins to show up at his room at strange hours, dead drunk, ready to bare freely both her love for him and her resentment.</p><p>The power of <i>Snow Country </i>lies in the complexity of the relationship between these two, the power of the dialogue, and the intensity of the subtext, what goes unsaid. The dialogue, as good dialogue often does, hovers just on the other side of sense; what the characters say is clearly not the sum of what is in their heart. Like Shimamura, we come to pity Komako, because we know the intensity of her love for Shimamura is all for nothing. "Wasted love" is one of the book's frequent phrases, and both Shimamura and Komako describe their relationship this way. It captures the essential tragedy--Shimamura will always return home to his family; there is no future for them--but I think it also hints at a truth about the geisha system of pre-war Japan, which has commodified the relationship between men and women. The <i>real </i>tragedy, perhaps, is that Kamoko can either make money from her clients or love them, not both.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-62387681674602078912024-02-10T11:18:00.002-05:002024-02-10T11:18:29.339-05:00Everything Happens As It Does by Albena Stambolova<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEil3V_wUZEygsIKG4gJOdwarq8xe0yt5so9Q0wF5I6Pez3eRFmMNlFCIBfQh47JfyMtfugcinIv-XN9mMpLbHFj64f7W0NXV6SwWszdTSUcAlDiogMAsB3Ujg63Ve_k6OiQ5PJNekzXOU1qH9YaaEhIrfAhWMT9LgeuPvwHruFQV830W8K1DtaHGdsCRaM" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="647" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEil3V_wUZEygsIKG4gJOdwarq8xe0yt5so9Q0wF5I6Pez3eRFmMNlFCIBfQh47JfyMtfugcinIv-XN9mMpLbHFj64f7W0NXV6SwWszdTSUcAlDiogMAsB3Ujg63Ve_k6OiQ5PJNekzXOU1qH9YaaEhIrfAhWMT9LgeuPvwHruFQV830W8K1DtaHGdsCRaM=w129-h200" width="129" /></a></div><i>Usually things happen very quickly, just like that. What people fail to understand is that things have already happened. Their senses are only sharp enough to put them on the alert. Those more sensitive can perceive that something or other is beginning. Then they believe themselves clear-sighted and quick because they have been able to see a beginning, or whatever word they choose for it, and they start to think. Laughter rang through the forest, scattering through the snow.</i><p></p><p>Albena Stambolova's <i>Everything Happens As It Does </i>begins with Boris. As a child, he's sensitive and quiet, a loner, more comfortable with the bees in this hives than other people. Seeing another boy, who has died suddenly, lying in his coffin, he is "pierced by jealousy, wishing he, too, could become invisible to others." So it is strange, then, when he grows up to marry Maria, a beautiful and mysterious woman with fickle affections. From Boris and Maria, the novel expands outward, like ripples in water, to encompass a number of other characters: Maria's lonely ex Philip; their twin children, resentful Valentin and simple-minded Margarita; even their divorce lawyer, Mr. V, and his wife and daughter.</p><p>Why should these people be thrown together instead of others? Why should any group of people anywhere? Stambolova hints that there is more than chance in the connections between her characters: there is a kind of inevitability, a universe turning like a clock. Early in the book, a young Boris ventures into a woodland chapel where he has a vision of a woman with "fog-colored eyes." Only later, when Maria leaves her family and absconds into the forest to die, do we realize that she is that woman, on her way to a rendezvous with her young husband that has, in a sense, already happened.</p><p>I enjoyed <i>Everything Happens As It Does: </i>each of the individual characters is crisply interesting, each of them a kind of loner who is unable to enter psychologically into the world of others, though they are bound together by these universal forces. In one scene, Valentin is incensed that his sister Margarita--a kind of holy fool--has come into possession of a laptop. He assumes she must have stolen it, because how else would she get it? He follows her one day, to find out what it is she's up to, but discovers that she spends the day on buses, winning games of solitaire. The novel begins with Boris, but he's quickly shuffled away--it's Maria, in the end, who binds them together, though her love for any of them, Philip, Boris, the twins, seems in short supply. When she disappears (or dies?) it brings all the characters together into a single house, in a scene of touching grief and camaraderie. Even in her absence, it seems, Maria is the expression of that impersonal and implacable force in the world that binds people together.</p><p>With the addition of Bulgaria, my "Countries Read" list is up to 86!</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-41299194756556100312024-02-08T18:14:00.003-05:002024-02-08T18:14:18.495-05:00The Incomparable Atuk by Mordecai Richler<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi_VIZ02y4XM6YJCnFxnyAHimtxZqIAN4_lIgbOGym2OszadYuxvKO7EG1F05EDa3CT2Uo2SVejicdbNRxh6HRJjYLyCxtjq4hF7Ymf9F9AlMWb1rk6ZrGyQRy0MHjrsQ8s-ybwHkp2OOJxvZe8So7WLww2J4k_75W1ZMRofI-7wETSjIuZLoA7IkODbAo" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="608" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi_VIZ02y4XM6YJCnFxnyAHimtxZqIAN4_lIgbOGym2OszadYuxvKO7EG1F05EDa3CT2Uo2SVejicdbNRxh6HRJjYLyCxtjq4hF7Ymf9F9AlMWb1rk6ZrGyQRy0MHjrsQ8s-ybwHkp2OOJxvZe8So7WLww2J4k_75W1ZMRofI-7wETSjIuZLoA7IkODbAo=w122-h200" width="122" /></a></div><i>'Old One.' Atuk loathed addressing him like that, but ever since his father had figured in that prize-winning National Film Board short he had insisted on it. 'Old One,' Atuk continued, 'I have found the girl I want to marry.'</i><p></p><p><i>'Is she a nice Eskimo girl?'</i></p><p><i>Atuk scratched the back of his neck.</i></p><p><i>'Speak no more. Atuk, my son, I remember when your eyes were deep and true as the blue spring sea. I recall when your soul was pure and white as the noon iceberg. This is no more. Today--'</i></p><p><i>'For Christ's sake, will you cut out that crazy talk. You sound like you were auditioning for Disney again or something.'</i></p><p>Atuk, an Inuit from Baffin Bay, hits it big with a collection of poetry. He's brought down to Toronto for an award, and he decides to stay. A lot of people are invested in Atuk's success: the big businessmen who bankroll his publications, the professors who pontificate on his cultural significance, the journalists who write about his dalliance with Bette Dolan, a pin-up and Canadian icon who recently swam the length of Lake Ontario. To these people, Atuk plays the naive Native, speaking in simple language and writing about polar bears and icebergs, but deep down, he's a shrewd operator who knows how to manipulate those who think they're manipulating him.</p><p>Richler's Canadian satire is most famous today for its ill-fated movie adaptations, which supposedly killed several leading men who were attached to it: John Belushi, John Candy, Chris Farley. I don't think that movie's ever going to be made--it's hard to imagine the broad racial comedy of <i>The Incomparable Atuk </i>translating in our day and age. And there's plenty in the depiction of the Inuit--the book, of course, uses the outdated-to-offensive "Eskimo"--that seems cringeworthy today. But ultimately, it works, because the satire is pointed back at Canadian society. Atuk's "Nativeness" is all a sham, a kind of performance meant to satisfy white Canadian expectations. Atuk's exploitation of these expectations is intense and complete: he keeps his family, including several brothers and a father known only as "Old One," locked up in a Toronto apartment building mass-producing cheap Inuit sculptures. At first, Atuk's family seems like they might be as pure and uncorrupted as he pretends to be--he convinces them that the television is a charmed box, where Humphrey Bogart appears by way of incantation--but soon they wise up to his schemes and start agitating for their own share of the cash.</p><p>Richler has his sights set on Canadian identity. People believe in Atuk because he's a symbol of Canada, like the Maple Leafs. Much of this identity, Richler observes, is founded on being different from the United States, that foul country to the south that wants to punish Atuk for eating a wayward Army pilot (come on now), even while it has adopted American attitudes toward money and self-interest wholesale. Richler saves a special sharpness for Canadian Jews, who adopt Protestant affectations and attitudes to get ahead. One conversation between Atuk and his benefactor Rory Peel (ne Panofsky) even takes aim at Zionism, underlining the comparison toward the end with a thick black line:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>'How amusing. You come back after thousands of years and would like me and my family to move out. Your people sound very aggressive to me.'</p><p>'With reason, but. Conditions--'</p><p>'One persecution does not excuse another. Just because your people have suffered--'</p><p>'It's more than that. The land was promised to us by our gods.'</p><p>'Pardon me while I laugh.'</p><p>'We have a book. It's all written out there.'</p><p>'Look, everybody has a book. This is our country. You can't drive us out like--like Arabs. We're Canadians.'</p><p>'To us, you're all Arabs.'</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Imagine putting <i>that </i>in a movie in the year 2024.</p><p>Richler's best books, I think, manage to combine his particular brand of satire with a deep pathos. Atuk is an amoral schemer; there's nothing in him that resembles the striver resentment of Duddy Kravitz or the aging guilt of Barney Panofsky. He's a cartoon, and perhaps there's no room in this little book to make him real. The satire wheels from black to bright colors, often funny but always superficial, marked by silly gags, like the dalliance between an FBI agent and an undercover journalist who fall in love with each other while crossdressing--like a rejected plotline from Shakespeare. But the sheer brazenness of Atuk--and the novel--are well worth their brief span.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-14553046862725556812024-02-07T17:34:00.003-05:002024-02-07T17:34:45.111-05:00Minor Detail by Adania Shibli<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhK-xKmzRZwTrAxHf_UN8210RDUVJxNac6UUaQ451nzREEZqw4EroLTceolBWCGmipdgK3NMfn55jM86tX-S9NzbQwpvXIo2vnWHK0spakBtcLGZnENCYrhK3fZvL9RMrSsDt_dsLjko6mCo9vTX431owJUrrXqJrjDHzj8XYxDfKzphswKsTz4bIZJMfY" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="805" data-original-width="500" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhK-xKmzRZwTrAxHf_UN8210RDUVJxNac6UUaQ451nzREEZqw4EroLTceolBWCGmipdgK3NMfn55jM86tX-S9NzbQwpvXIo2vnWHK0spakBtcLGZnENCYrhK3fZvL9RMrSsDt_dsLjko6mCo9vTX431owJUrrXqJrjDHzj8XYxDfKzphswKsTz4bIZJMfY=w124-h200" width="124" /></a></i></div><i>The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences. This grants a person a sense of serenity, despite everything else. There are some people who navigate borders masterfully, who never trespass, but those people are few and I'm not one of them. As soon as I see a border, I either race toward it and leap over, or cross it stealthily, with a step. Neither of these two behaviors is conscious, or rooted in a premeditated desire to resist borders; it's more like sheer stupidity. To be quite honest, once I cross a border, I fall into a deep pit of anxiety. It's a matter, simply put, of clumsiness. Once I realized that I inevitably fail whenever I try to navigate borders, I decided to stay within the confines of my house as much as possible.</i><p></p><p>In the Negev Desert, in 1949, the officer of a platoon is bitten by some kind of animal in the night. The bite festers and becomes infested; he cleans it and keeps it a secret, though his body is racked by fevers and pains. The platoon comes across a group of Bedouins; they shoot them all, except for a girl, whom they take back to their camp. She's raped, first by the soldiers, then the bitten captain, and then she's taken out to the desert, shot, and buried. In the present, a Palestinian journalist becomes obsessed with her story. The journalist makes her way to the remote spot in the Negev where the murder occurred, hoping to find some kind of information that remains there. But to do so, she must travel illegally, go where she isn't supposed to go, with credentials borrowed from those who are allowed to travel freely--and so knowledge comes at the risk of great violence--yet she goes anyway.</p><p><i>Minor Detail </i>is most notorious these days for having a prize retracted by the Frankfurt Book Fair in the wake of the October 7th attacks in Israel. To read it is to become only more indignant at the injustice of the act, because it is, in part, about the dogged lengths to which Palestinians must go for the kind of free expression that is granted to others without question. The journalist, who perhaps is and is not Shibli herself, cannot explain why she is so drawn to the story of the Bedouin girl: why this one story of injustice and not others? The lengths she goes to in order to find the truth--she must borrow an ID <i>and </i>a credit card, meaning that she puts others at risk as well--suggests a principled determination, but that's not quite right. Like the borders she crosses without premeditation, her obsession with the story seems to be below the level of logic; it drives her on past the point of sense.</p><p>But I was drawn, too, to the image of the platoon leader, suffering in stoic silence while also perpetrating terrible crimes of passion. He tries to impose order on his men, forbidding their mistreatment at riflepoint, before raping her himself. The festering animal bite is a mark of rottenness, something that eats at him from inside, even as he tries to hide it; his rape of the girl, perhaps, comes from that secret and shameful place, too. When he goes through his tent, hunting down every possible spider, scorpion, and reptile hiding in every corner, the imagery speaks loudly: he is eradicating the vermin, making the space clean. Later, he captures that desire in a speech to his men. There's been a lot of chatter recently about whether Zionism is a form of <i>settler colonialism, </i>but if this speech--and I have no doubt it is accurate to some of the ideas of early settlers--doesn't fit that term, nothing does:</p><blockquote><p>We cannot stand to see vast areas of land, capable of absorbing thousands of our people in exile, remain neglected; we cannot stand to see our people unable to return to our homeland. This place, which now seems barren, with nothing aside from infiltrators, a few Bedouins, and camels, is where our forefathers passed thousands of years ago. And if the Arabs act according to their sterile nationalist sentiments and reject the idea of us settling here, if they continue to resist us, preferring that the area remain barren, then we will act as an army. No one has more right to this area than us, after they neglected it and left it abandoned for so long, after they let it be seized by the Bedouins and their animals. It is our duty to prevent them from being here and expel them for good. After all, Bedouins only uproot, they do not plant things, and their livestock devour every bit of vegetation that lies before them, reducing, day by day, the very few green areas that do exist. We, however, will do everything in our power to give these vast stretches the chance to bloom and become habitable, instead of leaving them as they are now, desolate and empty of people.</p></blockquote><p>Strangely, what <i>Minor Detail </i>reminded me of most, at least in an aesthetic sense, is the stories of Gerald Murnane. It's in the plainness of the language, which is rooted in repetition. The scenes of the platoon leader fastidiously unwrapping, cleaning, and re-wrapping his bitten thigh over and over are as engaging and tension-filled as anything I've read recently. The scenes in the Negev of 1949 are so tense that we are not surprised when violence erupts--we have been waiting for it with held breath. In the modern day, we hope that things will be different, that violence is a thing of the past, but we fear--perhaps even know--that we're mistaken. There's little hope in the way the book ends, perhaps only a sense of grim inevitability, of recognition. The two years since its publication have only proved, despite what a bunch of dumb Germans might think, how true it is.</p><p>With the addition of Palestine (damn right I'm counting it), my "Countries Read" list is up to 85!</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-8753188727975711472024-02-05T21:01:00.002-05:002024-02-05T21:01:22.118-05:00The Diesel by Thani Al-Suwaidi<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEirq3WGcp5hOhwQy37BJDRuV3cTtGEEARJ6UsuGHygt5aE52cy9KI8mQYe6xFaUNrBuwjE_mKyW5D3fj5nMsvLFz55eR4jEUUWBnHgKYV7bvBMvOMsW-rQdVQxclLPcFy0sXENQMZ7b6z1TygOVyIWkyGr_8wWErgyuW1jTZBIWBQmPS8r2mlhkLhwrAP8" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="562" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEirq3WGcp5hOhwQy37BJDRuV3cTtGEEARJ6UsuGHygt5aE52cy9KI8mQYe6xFaUNrBuwjE_mKyW5D3fj5nMsvLFz55eR4jEUUWBnHgKYV7bvBMvOMsW-rQdVQxclLPcFy0sXENQMZ7b6z1TygOVyIWkyGr_8wWErgyuW1jTZBIWBQmPS8r2mlhkLhwrAP8=w113-h200" width="113" /></a></div><i>I've been here since I was born and I don't have much longer to live. Isn't that so?</i><p></p><p><i>When my father died, I watched death drift across his flushed face. All of you deal with the dead better in the mosque, after the person's spirit has been surrendered to heaven.</i></p><p><i>Yes, neighbor, that's the truth. My father's tears left me parched. My last image of him is the smile he granted me as if wishing to absolve me from some future sin.</i></p><p>The Diesel is a man, a woman, a singer, a dancer, a traveler. Born in an Arab country on the precipice of modernization--perhaps a place like the Emirates of author Thani al-Suwaidi--he grows up through transformations of many kinds. As he tells his story to the novel's silent audience, the muezzin of a mosque, he describes being raped by a "wayfarer" as a child, then watching his father fall from a boat and die. He dons women's clothes and becomes a singer in a women's ensemble, a role that allows for a fuller expression of his inner self (though the use of the pronoun "he" remains consistent.) The introduction describes the Diesel as "trans," and perhaps that's true, especially in a broader since of moving across identities and roles. It's this final role, as a singer and dancer, that the Diesel becomes famous, and it's in this artistic expression--both radical and, as I understand it, somewhat rooted in tradition--that gives him a way to be in the world.</p><p><i>The Diesel </i>is part of my SHORT BOOK FEBRUARY project, and its slimness, along with its stream-of-consciousness and its bewildering imagery, gives it the air of a long prose poem. Indeed, Emirati author Thani al-Suwaidi is a poet, and this is a poet's novel. I didn't always find the images as arresting as I would have liked, and I often felt as if there were some cultural context I was missing, but I was interested in the ways that <i>The Diesel </i>navigates the demands of tradition, modernism, and subversiveness, three ideas that make, I think, a trio rather than a spectrum.</p><p>I found myself wondering about the name: is it a reference to the petroleum industry that launched the economy of once humble places like the U.A.E.? The Diesel reminisces on the first house in her village to be electrified; by the end of her tale, great electric cities have bloomed in the desert. It seemed to me that <i>The Diesel, </i>more than anything, is a meditation on a new Persian Gulf, one that has undergone tremendous transformations over the past fifty years. The Diesel, like the Gulf, goes through a number of transformations, and in doing so finds a way to his or her true self; does <i>The Diesel </i>suggest that the economic and political transformation of the Gulf is an opportunity to redefine one's self in relation to gender and sexuality, too? There is always something hopeful, I suppose, about a changing world, which even in the face of uncertainty holds a certain amount of promise, too.</p><p>This is the first book I've read from the United Arab Emirates, which means my "countries read" list is up to 84!</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-80164272814865650582024-02-04T10:15:00.006-05:002024-02-04T10:15:52.006-05:00S. S. Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi7FYVkXFoaFCohpd_NFGj4YqUyZuzByIDg6HbfPr9TkqzGi6-4f12MH7dvOiD7hpHzbA0qBtq7Vmk4Xenx6hzUQqWO4chbd3rynyNgWjnc1qckylTldY4tmx35IZWu5BveeaMX57gMjHGkyB2aXKTZ_-N5JxvAWIOoDGjd6wh4wOsdci3htdBZCdXDFwg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="425" data-original-width="285" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi7FYVkXFoaFCohpd_NFGj4YqUyZuzByIDg6HbfPr9TkqzGi6-4f12MH7dvOiD7hpHzbA0qBtq7Vmk4Xenx6hzUQqWO4chbd3rynyNgWjnc1qckylTldY4tmx35IZWu5BveeaMX57gMjHGkyB2aXKTZ_-N5JxvAWIOoDGjd6wh4wOsdci3htdBZCdXDFwg=w134-h200" width="134" /></a></i></div><i>All the rooms know. Likewise the portraits. Ancestors who do not favor a better lot for their successors. For the children. Perhaps Johannes's twin in his wheelchair went from garden to garden trampling over the fate of Johannes's daughter. Objects and predecessors, names no longer uttered, a genealogy of images was against me. I stand listening to the news, the decision of my departure. Orsola's voice comes from a chair behind the desk. "It is for your own good." "And Johannes?" "Your father will do as we decide." It is for my own good. A venomous expression. But it sounds good. I know that that expression has never boded any good. Since then it has worsened my condition as a minor. You ought to watch your back when listening to diktats of this kind. When you are a hostage to the good. A prisoner to the good. The good of the people. Expressions typical of dictatorships. I leave the house with a suitcase and my schoolbag. I have been consigned to others.</i><p></p><p><i>For my own good.</i></p><p>Happy SHORT BOOK FEBRUARY, everyone. I've got all the books in my house that are under 200 pages stacked up, ready to be read in a 29-day frenzy. First up is <i>S. S. Proleterka, </i>a crisp 120-pager from Swisss author Fleur Jaeggy, a book as compact and sharp as "incorruptible crystal," a phrase the narrator uses to describe her heart. Having just received the ashes of her dead father, Johannes, she reminisces about a Mediterranean voyage they once took to Greece among the namesake ship. On this trip, the daughter fails to grow any closer to her aloof, unknowable father. She does get to know, however, at the age of fifteen, several of the ship's mates, who induct her into the world of sexual maturity--at her demand:</p><blockquote><p>Johannes's daughter follows him to the cabin. He tells her to strip. He tells her to do what she does with Nikola. And no nonsense. The daughter thinks that this is part of experience. She strips and does what she does with Nikola. The mate's rough fingers fondle her. Scales. Like Nikola, he is violent. She feels as if drawn by lots. Drawn by lots by the crew. she feels pleasure in the disgust. I don't like it, I don't like it, she thinks. Yet she does it all the same. She no longer has much time. The Proleterka is the locus of experience. By the time the voyage is over, she must know everything. At the end of the voyage, Johannes's daughter will be able to say: never again, not ever. No experience ever again. "I want to go," she says now. The other throws her clothes at her. "Be my guest." He laughs, pointing at the door.</p></blockquote><p><i>S. S. Proleterka </i>is a book that makes you want to quote it rather than write about it, partially because of Jaeggy's staccato, almost violent, prose, and partially because it is so self-contained and self-possessed that it leaves you unsure of what to say about it. The key word in this passage seems to me to be "knowing": the narrator desires knowledge through experience, and sexual experience specifically, knowledge as in "carnal knowledge." Yet on the deck, she emphasizes over and over again how little she knows of her father, with whom she does not live, and who expresses no feelings whatsoever toward her, though it seems he has asked for her to accompany him on this jaunt. At the end of his life, she puts a nail in his pocket before cremation, hoping that something of hers will be mingled with him at last, but it comes back from the crematory whole alongside his ashes.</p><p>Jaeggy's narrator flips back and forth between the first person and third, between "I" and "Johannes's daughter"; her alienation from him is linked to an alienation from herself. (Anyone who's ever tried to play around with point of view in writing might recognize what a skillful thing this is.) She slips between the present tense and the past tense, too, mingling the present with memory in a way that collapses the distinction. She describes herself as haunted by a spectral twin, as Johannes had his own twin, a version of himself confined to a wheelchair. And then, at the end of the novel, a surprise, a swerve: the narrator is contacted by an aging man who insists that <i>he </i>is her biological father. The spectral twin, then, is that man's son, who died as a little boy. It's almost as if, for Jaeggy, learning the truth about oneself means nothing at all, has no impact. The strange man and his wife enter the narrator's life with belated chumminess, and we're not sure what to make of them. The truth, if it is the truth, has the air of falsehood. Who could be the real father of this narrator, so detached and severe, so haunted by the limitations of her own knowledge, than the man in the urn, Johannes?</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-73058297423521683072024-02-03T11:45:00.002-05:002024-02-03T11:45:17.803-05:00Two Books About the Aztecs: Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend and The Mexican Dream by J. M. G. LeClezio<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhcDPm3qW-pcrnvwTsRmMEGFvgBWZ54yc5IX-reO67W9h3KrF-XVX5UOrMEEIDwZo8Kt4Oxw6flFnpLc26t2TGz4gi6zgfggzv8QCvM1QfOzP6SDv3mH7QUjGXVXyuRpfVS7OmutW-AGVczyB4RoqQlcaF1hbNplnaUh_tKCvNJOrVzVQ3iexOJXswRkC4" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="993" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhcDPm3qW-pcrnvwTsRmMEGFvgBWZ54yc5IX-reO67W9h3KrF-XVX5UOrMEEIDwZo8Kt4Oxw6flFnpLc26t2TGz4gi6zgfggzv8QCvM1QfOzP6SDv3mH7QUjGXVXyuRpfVS7OmutW-AGVczyB4RoqQlcaF1hbNplnaUh_tKCvNJOrVzVQ3iexOJXswRkC4=w133-h200" width="133" /></a></i></div><i>Many years later, it would become an accepted fact that the indigenous people of Mexico believed Hernando Cortes to be a god, arriving in their land in the year 1519 to satisfy an ancient prophecy. It was understood that Moctezuma, at heart a coward, trembled in his sandals and quickly despaired of victory. He immediately asked to turn his kingdom over to the divine newcomers, and naturally, the Spaniards happily acquiesced. Eventually, this story was repeated so many times, in so many reputable sources, that the whole world came to believe it. Moctezuma was not known for his cheerful disposition. Even he, however, had he known what people would someday say, would certainly have laughed, albeit with some bitterness, for the story was, in fact, preposterous.</i><p></p><p>The word "advanced," like the word "primitive," is a word that's slung around too often without being questioned. Yet, by any metric, the Aztec civilizations that the Spanish conquerors encountered were the most "advanced" of North American peoples. They planned and lived in great urban cities; they had complex systems of trade and technology; they had spectator sports and libraries. In many ways, they are more recognizable to us as "modern" than, say, the nomadic tribes of the U.S. plains. And yet, they found themselves quickly subdued by a small group of Spaniards. Why? Answers to this question have often relied on the Aztecs' religion. I remember learning in school that the Aztecs believed that the Spaniard and the horse were a single, frightening creature, and that they saw in Cortes the return of the god Quetzacoatl. Camilla Townsend's award-winning history of the Aztecs, <i>Fifth Sun, </i>calls bullshit.<br /></p><p>The problem with these accounts, as Townsend describes it, is that they rely too heavily on Spanish language accounts of the conquest. This, despite the fact that several accounts written in the indigenous Nahautl language survive, and present a very different story. Townsend's history--she implies, and I'm ready to believe--is the first account of the Aztecs to prioritize indigenous sources. And what those sources, like several "annals"--basically Aztec accounts of what happened each year--and the history of the Indigenous historian Don Domingo Chimalpahin, tell is a different story. In this story, the Aztecs quickly understood the military superiority of the Spanish, predicated on "the Spaniards' use of metal, and their extraordinary communication apparatus." "What is striking," Townsend writes about the Aztec reaction to the Spaniards' military advantages, was not that they interpreted them as divine, but "how quickly they realized that these issues were at the heart of the matter." The choices made by Moctezuma and his allies, as well as those who allied with the Spaniards like the Maya woman historically known as Malinche, begin to make sense as pragmatic and political acts. </p><p>Townsend's history is split basically into thirds: Aztec life before the conquest, the conquest, and the aftermath. I really enjoyed reading the first part, about the Aztec world pre-Cortes, which is something about which I knew very little. I was especially eager to hear what Townsend had to say about human sacrifice, which, if you've ever had the misfortune of interacting with a Twitter racist, you might know is used to justify the brutal colonial practices of not just the Spanish but all European colonizers of the new world. Townsend notes that the scale of human sacrifice is, first and foremost, much smaller than formerly assumed--she estimates it at perhaps two thousand sacrifices over a hundred year period. For the Aztecs, sacrifice was connected to stories in which a god allowed themselves to be destroyed so that a new world might be born; they themselves believed the universe had exploded four times and they were living in the "fifth sun."</p><p>But Townsend makes it clear that, during the rise of the Mexica Empire centered on Tenochtitlan, sacrifice took on a practical and military aspect as well, punishing cities that refused to pay homage and allegiance. Fascinatingly, the Mexica engaged in "Flower Wars" with their most entrenched enemies like the city of Tlaxcala: a type of ritualized, less lethal warfare, which maintained the status quo between rivals who would otherwise attack one another. The Spaniards, who attacked and then allied with the Tlaxcala against their Mexica rivals, actually managed to explode a stable political detente into the violence that had long been avoided.</p><p>The "after," too, is fascinating for its glimpse into the processes which transformed a nation of conqueror and conquered into the Mexico of today: the beginning of the <i>encomienda </i>system, which supplanted and extended the Aztec system of imperial tribute, the brutality of forced labor, the subsummation of Aztec identity into a Spanish identity that evolved into the <i>mestizaje </i>ideology of Mexican "mixedness," etc. I was surprised to hear that much of the instability of early colonial Mexico fell not just on the Indigenous but on Black slaves imported from Africa. It's in the midst of this world that writers like Don Chimalpahin wrote their own accounts of the conquest in their own language, and knowing the circumstances they were writing under makes their resolve in recording their story for future generations all the more impressive.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgmj0O4yi2yGkuytewece1WGjym--TNQ_1LZ2qJYjhqZ-TzmJ4UF3ALT4CPaJfqvIZMkTaRJHG5x_gQqPfKXBJJBxDeLi5kjG_s_icZUhu3zdtndhCgHkXVd35iMgBZTzoMz7MkK0uwQ0j-yvIrlXhPS4kUnJjVwbOtcCovRESo0CLNKCMDSix7x7ptfVU" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1262" data-original-width="860" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgmj0O4yi2yGkuytewece1WGjym--TNQ_1LZ2qJYjhqZ-TzmJ4UF3ALT4CPaJfqvIZMkTaRJHG5x_gQqPfKXBJJBxDeLi5kjG_s_icZUhu3zdtndhCgHkXVd35iMgBZTzoMz7MkK0uwQ0j-yvIrlXhPS4kUnJjVwbOtcCovRESo0CLNKCMDSix7x7ptfVU=w137-h200" width="137" /></a></div><i>Thus began the </i>True Story<i>, with that meeting of two dreams. There was the Spanish dream of gold, a devouring, pitiless dream, which sometimes reached the heights of cruelty; it was an absolute dream, as if there were something at stake entirely different from the acquisition of wealth and power; a regeneration in violence and blood to live the myth of Eldorado, when everything would be eternally new.</i><p></p><p><i>On the other side was the ancient dream of the Mexicans, a long-awaited dream, when from the east, from the other side of the ocean, those bearded men guided by the Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl would come to rule over them once again. Thus, when the two dreams and the two peoples met, the one demanded gold and riches, where as the other wanted only a helmet to show the high priests and the king of Mexico, since, as the Indians said, it resembled those once worn by their ancestors, before they disappeared.</i></p><p>After reading Towsend's history, it's hard to turn to Nobel winner J. M. G. LeClezio's account of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico and not think <i>bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. </i>All the myths Townsend identifies are here: the single creature made of horse and rider, the reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl in the form of Cortes. The Aztecs' fall to the Spanish can be explained, for LeClezio, by the intensity of their apocalyptic religious beliefs, by the power of prophecy and visions that foretold the coming of the conquerors. It's no surprise that LeClezio, writing in the mid-60s, draws entirely on the <i>True History </i>of Spanish evangelist Bernardino de Sagahun that Townsend identifies as the source of many of these self-serving stories.</p><p>To his credit, LeClezio seems to really know a great deal about Indigenous Mexican religion, not just that of the Mexica and other Aztecs, but the Maya and the Purepecha, who were and are centered in the western region of Michoacan. I have no way of knowing how accurate he is--I have a general sense that Indigenous Mexican religion is often misread, that some figures are falsely conflated and figures who really are avatars of one another are often missed--but LeClezio's account of the three main religious systems in rich and detailed. For LeClezio, these are "barbarian" religions, a term used more with admiration than disgust: he believes that the immanence of their religion made them closer to both nature and the divine, which is supposedly in contrast to European Christianity, which is less an animating force for the Spaniards than a quasi-religious "dream" of riches and gold. LeClezio's interlude about Antonin Artaud, who went to Mexico in search of a pre-European way of being only to come back a mental and physical wreck, make the stakes of <i>The Mexican Dream </i>clear: LeClezio is less interested in understanding Aztec religion than he is in using it as a kind of mirror held up to European degradation.</p><p>In this one respect, I do agree with LeClezio: the conquest of Indigenous America interrupted a process of historical development that might have served us better than the European colonial project did. LeClezio asks: "How might those civilizations, those religions have evolved? What philosophy might have developed in the New World if the destruction of the Conquest had not taken place?" In one way, this is a silly question; Indigenous civilizations did not disappear; they're still with us, and they have evolved. Mexico is home to two million Nahuatl speakers. But in another way, I think LeClezio is plainly right. He writes about an Indigenous belief in that "equilibrium was the very expression of divine creation," that we have a divine mandate to live in reciprocal relationships with places and resources. I often wonder what our world would be like today if it were this ideology that had taken root around the world, rather than one predicated on resource extraction and economic development at all costs. When LeClezio writes that Western man has "put himself in a position of disequilibrium, because he has let himself be carried away by his own violence," it's hard to disagree.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-17485212013834988042024-01-28T12:06:00.003-05:002024-01-28T12:06:28.630-05:00The Beadworkers by Beth Piatote<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhZ7Eg3ahB46wecMijvT0w0N-kq68RyMaQpsmKgEdbEHAIaGXNxiJmE0SAdjHsb8vgt-GYbZcRyemeQM1EF1p3hfIxylceTNCn-Z7t3CXT0mWlJ5saitJA9ltkjG1g4prQuL8GchGMwGFuP9rhj3wpeCKGItPS3Ps6VxAdh5mkxollUea9uORQvqTZ2zac" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="425" data-original-width="283" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhZ7Eg3ahB46wecMijvT0w0N-kq68RyMaQpsmKgEdbEHAIaGXNxiJmE0SAdjHsb8vgt-GYbZcRyemeQM1EF1p3hfIxylceTNCn-Z7t3CXT0mWlJ5saitJA9ltkjG1g4prQuL8GchGMwGFuP9rhj3wpeCKGItPS3Ps6VxAdh5mkxollUea9uORQvqTZ2zac=w133-h200" width="133" /></a></i></div><i>A few years ago one of these unextinct Sinixt men killed an elk in his homelands. Then he called the game officials in Canada and turned himself in. They took the bait. When the province pressed charges against him for taking big game without a license, he pleaded not guilty. He cited his aboriginal rights to hunt in his own territory. And now that case is in court, and Canada will have to look at that man, standing in the middle of the room, and all his people around him, and Canada will have to admit that the Sinixt are not extinct. The Sinixt man is very brave. And so is the elk who gave himself. That man and that elk knew each other from long ago; they met in dreams and sweat, blood and forest. The man needed the elk; the people need the elk. Without the elk, there would be no case, no path home, no court for the man to present himself to the state and say: we are alive.</i><p></p><p>In August, I visited Big Hole National Battlefield in Montana, where American forces ambushed a group of Nez Perce who were in the midst of a "fighting retreat," trying to make their way to the Canadian border to escape confinement on reservations. Big Hole is hallowed ground, still a cemetery, where the bodies of Nez Perce leaders were buried. It's a place you want to walk through quietly. I bought Beth Piatote's book <i>The Beadworkers </i>in the gift shop there. I hadn't remembered it at the time, but I'd read some of Piatote's work in <i>Poetry; </i>I had been struck by the power in her appropriation of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." Her collection <i>The Beadworkers </i>is a lovely kind of extended coda to a quiet walk through Big Hole: a loud assertion that the Nez Perce are still here, and their living stories are worth as much attention as their silences, their absences.</p><p>The pieces in <i>The Beadworkers </i>are a diverse bunch: some are relatively straightforward, like "Fish Wars," which might be my favorite. In "Fish Wars," a young girl worries that the tense conversations she overhears between her parents mean that, like her friend's parents, they're headed for divorce. When her father is arrested, her white schoolmates taunt her--just another drunk Indian--but the truth is that he's been arrested for illegal fishing, an act of civil disobedience in the "Fish Wars" of the 1970s and 80s in which tribes around Puget Sound pressured the government to recognize their treaty rights. "Falling Crows" tells the story of a young Indian who comes back from Afghanistan missing an arm and leg, and his extended family's attempts to help him adjust to his new existence.</p><p>But others are more experimental, like the trio of pieces labeled "Feast I," "Feast II," and "Feast III" that open the book. "Feast I" is a poem that, littered with Salish words, at first estranges and alienates a casual reader. But "Feast II" provides a kind of dictionary or key, elaborating on each term. We read the section quoted above and now we know what it means when Piatote writes, "where <i>wewukiye </i>bugle / in fog-mantled mornings. "Feast III," a story about a pair of women living on the Nez Perce reservation of the early 20th century, seems rather slight and uneventful on its own, but when paired with the other two parts we see the way that the poem, the unfamiliar Salish words of "Feast I," the piecemeal anecdotes of "Feast II," combine in the actual living of a life. </p><p>The most unusual piece in <i>The Beadworkers </i>is "Antikoni," a dramatic retelling of the Antigone myth. In Piatote's version, the brother Polynaikas is a set of remains held in a tribal museum, and the king Kreon is the tribal chief who punishes Antikoni/Antigone for stealing the remains and ceremonially burying them. Interestingly, the piece depicts Kreon as rather understandably trying to navigate the demands of the tribe and the demands of the federal government; NAGPRA--the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act--is depicted as a kind of bureaucratic force that keeps tribal members like Antikoni tied up in red tape and reinforces the very practices it's supposed to solve. Tribal politics are a repeated theme of <i>The Beadworkers; </i>in "<i>wIndin!</i>" a woman works to create a tongue-in-cheek board game that satirizes the greed and self-interest of tribal government. Kreon is something of an accommodationist, who thinks he's doing the best he can for his people under the law, but Antikoni makes it clear that in doing so he has alienated himself from them: "I do pity you, Uncle, for you have long ago admitted yourself / To this prison, a darkness of another name."</p><p>Thematically, this is one of the most interesting things about <i>The Beadworkers: </i>its political approach is as much about tribal government as it is the federal government. Given the extent to which Indigenous writers know they are writing for a largely non-Indigenous audience, tribal government tends to be more or less ignored. Piatote does a great job of making a critique that's understandable, even universal. And she does so with a great deal of creativity and innovation.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-67467876520925719222024-01-26T10:44:00.002-05:002024-01-26T10:44:48.468-05:00Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah<i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjVQ6YTRfT3cf_ChRdx4GFoyZiX7-aFBzKfsXgq_XTCSFiGkCDN3jECdWVj42RPesVcfWOKrLRLnfuLbPFMLAAAbt8yGWnp2TQsHFwEOLdo9DQ15RE2AE6JJos4eDlbqbYr6z-C7i6qHFCgEMMDp2jblkJmsW06atFBlb3N0MAZ7n-3bzgCpadItQasyZ8" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="662" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjVQ6YTRfT3cf_ChRdx4GFoyZiX7-aFBzKfsXgq_XTCSFiGkCDN3jECdWVj42RPesVcfWOKrLRLnfuLbPFMLAAAbt8yGWnp2TQsHFwEOLdo9DQ15RE2AE6JJos4eDlbqbYr6z-C7i6qHFCgEMMDp2jblkJmsW06atFBlb3N0MAZ7n-3bzgCpadItQasyZ8=w133-h200" width="133" /></a></div>"Kiowas always wear red on the left," I told them. I wanted to teach them about their culture. I knew Turtle and Lila were always busy with work. I didn't know how much time the spent at the gourd dances.</i><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"What color do Cherokees wear?" Ever asked.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"Cherokees don't have a color."</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"Mom is not going to like that," Quinton aded.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"No, I mean in the gourd dances there are two colors. Red for Kiowa and blue for Comanche."</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"My dad's a Comanche," Quinton said. He was almost to the end of his popsicle.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"Your dad is Kiowa and Comanche," I told Quinton.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"Do Mexicans have a color?" Ever asked.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"No, Mexicans don't have a color."</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"How come I saw three colors on a big blanket at my house?" Ever asked. "Red, white, and green."</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"That was a flag, Ever."</i><br /><br /></div><div>Ever Geimausaddle is like a lot of people growing up in Oklahoma, the crossroads of Indian culture in the United States: a mix of cultures. His mother Turtle is Kiowa and Cherokee and his father Everardo is Mexican. Though Everardo is an abusive brute, made bitter by a beating he receives at the hands of Mexican border agents, Ever himself has a large, rich extended family to support him during what turns out to be a coming of age made difficult by poverty, addiction, and violence. <i>Calling for a Blanket Dance </i>is a polyphonic novel, a collection of stories that capture a snapshot of Ever's life from childhood to adulthood, each one narrated by a different person in his life--mother, auntie, cousin, girlfriend, son.</div><div><br /></div><div>The central story, to me, was the one narrated by Ever's most distant relative, Opbee--the niece of his grandfather Vincent. In this story, the title "blanket dance" is performed at a powwow for Ever and his family, in which they are surrounded by dancers, symbolizing the support of the larger community--who also toss cash onto their blanket. Later, Opbee realizes that a quilt she's purchased from Ever after the powwow is one knit by his grandmother Lena for her great-grandchild. Opbee travels around the area searching for the blankets, sold out of necessity, to re-purchase them and collect them so they can be returned to Ever and his children. There's a neat symbolism to the quilt, itself a woven object, and the act of "knitting up" committed by Opbee, who literally ties together the loose strands of Ever's life and gathers them back together. One of the strengths of <i>Calling for a Blanket Dance </i>is its insistence that all the strands of one's life and heritage are important. The passage above, from when Ever is a child, is pretty funny, but it also captures some of the difficulty of navigating the many facets of one's identity--Mexican, Kiowa, Cherokee, Comanche, each with its own gifts, and its demands.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Calling for a Blanket Dance </i>is interested, too, in the ways young men grow up. Men like Ever's father Everardo and his grandfather Vincent never grow out of their destructive patterns, or, as in the case of Vincent, who gives up alcohol to late to save his health and his life, grow out of them too late. Ever, too, must fend off the allure of gang violence and drug addiction; his first wife, Lonnie, is ravaged by meth. Ever seeks a refuge in the army, but even this proves to be a false start; discharged, he returns home. Ultimately, it's fatherhood that saves him, first by adopting a troubled teen named Leander (whose casual and sarcastic voice is one of the novel's best artistic strokes) and then having children of his own.</div><div><br /></div><div>Funnily, <i>Calling for a Blanket Dance </i>covers some of the same ground as Brandon Hobson's novel of the Oklahoma foster system, <i>Where the Dead Sit Talking. </i>But the comparison reveals the limitations of <i>Calling for a Blanket Dance. </i>When, in Hobson's novel, Sequoyah imagines grinding his thumb into the face of his sleeping roommate, we believe him; we are convinced that he may lash out in violence he cannot control. When Leander feels like lashing out, we are certain that social worker Ever's solution--"When you get angry, I want you to draw"--will help Leander channel his impulses into positive behavior. There's never any other narrative possibility; though marginal characters like Vincent and Lonnie may suffer, we are sure that Ever and his immediate family will be knit back into health and safety. When, in the final story, narrated at last by Ever, he camps out overnight waiting for a crack at a foreclosed house being distributed by the Cherokee Nation, is there any doubt that he'll receive one--or that, in a gesture toward the possibility of loss, that he'll be the last person in line to get one? Still, the many voices of <i>Calling for a Blanket Dance </i>are a difficult feat, and are what make it worth reading.</div>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-83583004305933368372024-01-21T12:59:00.007-05:002024-01-21T13:01:54.047-05:00Blood Run by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke<p></p><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjzpZhXHriis11i8b_zsdzJHFTk0QHRQVbhA4Y3uojucLKut8b9eT3mPgqSewsWfICldgrjsOGFASvjd5vN79vKUQbUEpDUF64oH78qwjjOzhAr_p9j_ysCS3Pp8wFs5L5-wWqhzc0tk66Ep0XPSIFYyxobJ0kC6Cefuk9MDFETXv1ZASrF4_3C-U_mt9U" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><i><img data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="880" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjzpZhXHriis11i8b_zsdzJHFTk0QHRQVbhA4Y3uojucLKut8b9eT3mPgqSewsWfICldgrjsOGFASvjd5vN79vKUQbUEpDUF64oH78qwjjOzhAr_p9j_ysCS3Pp8wFs5L5-wWqhzc0tk66Ep0XPSIFYyxobJ0kC6Cefuk9MDFETXv1ZASrF4_3C-U_mt9U=w129-h200" width="129" /></i></a></div><i>Civic, ceremonial, elegant effigy--Snake--<br />our purposes funerary, fundamental, immaculate.<br /><br />Until sons of Orpheus, fools of fortune,<br />looters, anthros, squatters--their tractors, rakes--<br />altered, removed on superiority-driven raids.<br /><br />When the animals leave this place,<br />now without protective honorary sculpture.<br />When River returns with her greatest force.<br /><br />When flora, fauna will themselves back,<br />here where we all began ago, long for.<br />When our people return, to the place<br />offerings kept free, balanced, hallowed,<br /><br />when The Reclaiming comes to pass,<br />all will know our great wombed hollows,<br />the stores of Story safely put by.<br />All will come to truth.</i><p></p><p>I first read about Allison Adelle Hedge Coke's poetry cycle <i>Blood Run </i>in Chadwick Allen's book <i><a href="https://fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2022/06/earthworks-rising-by-chadwick-allen-and.html">Earthworks Rising</a> </i>about the literary uses and abuses of Native American mounds. Allen approached Hedge Coke's poems, at least in part, as a numerological exercise, counting the many voices and their place in the narrative: the Mounds, the River, the Deer, the Skeletons, the Ghosts, the Beaver, etc., etc. It all seemed a little silly to me, but I was interested in what Allen had to say about the importance of the voices themselves, which represent the different aspects of the Blood Run Mounds in Iowa's far northwest corner, how the act of letting the mounds themselves speak--as opposed to being spoken for by white historians and anthropologists--constitutes a radical act.</p><p>I wish I hadn't left Allen's book at work, because I'd like to go back and read through what it is he said about Hedge Coke's poems, and not rely on my former review, or on memory. For myself, what struck me most about the poems is the unfolding of their chronological structure: first, the Mounds speak from memory, from prehistory, and then they witness--along with the animals and the skeletons and the ghosts--the cataclysmic arrival of settlers, who tear the Mounds to pieces and interrupt the wholeness of the ecology of which the Mounds are a part. I liked the Serpent, a snake-shaped mound like the famous one in Ohio that has since been obliterated, who predicts his own return: "Though my body / suffered sacrifice / to railway fill, / my vision bears/ all even still. / Be not fooled. / Be not fooled. / I will appear again. / Sinuous, I am." And true to form, the poem then moves toward a narrative of future return, in which the river and the mounds are made whole again.</p><p>As poetry, it felt a little clunky to me. I love the sinuousness of the snake, the turning of its simple lines, but other poems struck me as being rather plodding. Perhaps that's all right, perhaps they're meant to be solid and earthlike. I did laugh when I got to the cycle's only rhyming poem, narrated by "The Jesuits"--Europeans who brought their ways of poetry with them as surely as their religion and their ways. But in the end I did enjoy the sense of the land speaking, and the interconnectedness of things, and the cycle's proud insistence that things which many have insisted are lost might return again, to their rightful place.</p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12500451355263180972noreply@blogger.com0