Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery

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.

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.

As a portrait of Cairo's underground, Proud Beggars 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.

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? 

With the addition of Egypt, my "Countries Read" list is up to 87!

Small Things Like These by Clare Keegan

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.

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.

Small Things Like These is, first and foremost, a novel about goodness. Furlong is a deeply good 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... 'Tis not one of ours." 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.

Small Things Like These 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"--a novel about the Magdalen Laundries--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.

Sister Golden Calf by Colleen Burner

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.

Gloria, the narrator of Colleen Burner's Sister Golden Calf, 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.

Sister Golden Calf 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.

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. Sister Golden Calf 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 present and tangible 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.

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

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.

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 onsen, 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.

I'm gonna be honest: I don't quite know what a geisha is. Judging from Snow Country, 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.

The power of Snow Country 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 real tragedy, perhaps, is that Kamoko can either make money from her clients or love them, not both.

Everything Happens As It Does by Albena Stambolova

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.

Albena Stambolova's Everything Happens As It Does 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.

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.

I enjoyed Everything Happens As It Does: 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.

With the addition of Bulgaria, my "Countries Read" list is up to 86!

The Incomparable Atuk by Mordecai Richler

'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.'

'Is she a nice Eskimo girl?'

Atuk scratched the back of his neck.

'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--'

'For Christ's sake, will you cut out that crazy talk. You sound like you were auditioning for Disney again or something.'

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.

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 The Incomparable Atuk 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.

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:

'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.'

'With reason, but. Conditions--'

'One persecution does not excuse another. Just because your people have suffered--'

'It's more than that. The land was promised to us by our gods.'

'Pardon me while I laugh.'

'We have a book. It's all written out there.'

'Look, everybody has a book. This is our country. You can't drive us out like--like Arabs. We're Canadians.'

'To us, you're all Arabs.'

Imagine putting that in a movie in the year 2024.

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.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

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.

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.

Minor Detail 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 and 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.

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 settler colonialism, 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:

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.

Strangely, what Minor Detail 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.

With the addition of Palestine (damn right I'm counting it), my "Countries Read" list is up to 85!

The Diesel by Thani Al-Suwaidi

I've been here since I was born and I don't have much longer to live. Isn't that so?

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.

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.

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.

The Diesel 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 The Diesel navigates the demands of tradition, modernism, and subversiveness, three ideas that make, I think, a trio rather than a spectrum.

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 The Diesel, 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 The Diesel 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.

This is the first book I've read from the United Arab Emirates, which means my "countries read" list is up to 84!

S. S. Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy

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.

For my own good.

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 S. S. Proleterka, 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:

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.

S. S. Proleterka 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.

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 he 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?

Two Books About the Aztecs: Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend and The Mexican Dream by J. M. G. LeClezio

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.

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, Fifth Sun, calls bullshit.

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. 

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."

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.

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 encomienda 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 mestizaje 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.

Thus began the True Story, 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.

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.

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 bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. 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 True History of Spanish evangelist Bernardino de Sagahun that Townsend identifies as the source of many of these self-serving stories.

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 The Mexican Dream 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.

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.