You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue

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.

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.

Alvaro Enrigue's rendition of Moctezuma is, perhaps, the most interesting thing about his new novel You Dreamed of Empires. 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 cahuayos, their large deer--their caballos, 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 cahuayos, 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?

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 You Dreamed of Empires, 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.

I wanted to like You Dreamed of Empires a little better than I did. I was 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, You Dream of Empires suggests, we may all wake up from history.

Cross Stitch by Jazmina Barrera

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.

Mila, the narrator of Jazmina Barrera's Cross Stitch, 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.

I was really charmed by Jazmina Barrera's On Lighthouses, 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. Cross Stitch, though more pointedly fictional, is a little like that, too: interspersed with--I guess I have to say woven, right?--the main narrative are many brief snippets about embroidery and sewing. Like On Lighthouses, 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 Jane Eyre and my beloved Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

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 not 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. 

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

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 don't usually re-read books before teaching them, especially if I've taught them more than once. But N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn 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.

I don't have much to say about it here because I'm sort of doing a running thread about it on Twitter. 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 Death Comes for the Archbishop 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.

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.

I loved re-reading House Made of Dawn 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.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

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.

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 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was lent somewhere to someone, who hopefully read and enjoyed it, whoever they may be. So I reread Robinson 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.

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."

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.

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 so 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.

Another thing: Jean Brodie 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, Jean Brodie 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.

In this case, I think the critics got this one right. I have a few personal favorites among Spark's books, like The Mandelbaum Gate and The Takeover, and I think that Loitering with Intent and A Far Cry From Kensington may actually be more indicative of her style and themes, but everything about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 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.

Young Once by Patrick Modiano

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.

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.

I can't take credit for this observation, because I read something like it somewhere (can't remember), but Young Again 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."

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.

Frangipani House by Beryl Gilroy

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.

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.

One thing I liked about Frangipani House 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.

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 Frangipani House 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.

With the addition of Guyana, my "Countries Read" list is up to 88!

The Immoralist by Andre Gide

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.

The Immoralist... 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.

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 The Immoralist 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.)

I found the parts of The Immoralist 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 The Immoralist, in the end, is unable to asnwer.

White by Marie Darrieussecq

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.

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.

I've never read a book like White. (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. White 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.

One of the strangest things about White: 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.

White 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.

My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley

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'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 My Dog Tulip, 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 his safety--it's clear that Tulip's devotion is stronger and more pure than any human creature's ever could be.

Interestingly, My Dog Tulip 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 My Dog Tulip that people used to not pick up after their dogs at all, and heated arguments would take place about whether dogs should be able to relieve themselves on the sidewalk 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 excretions dogs had.)

What I got out of My Dog Tulip 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.

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.

In the Eye of the Wild by Natassja Martin

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.

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 In the Eye of the Wild, 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 .

To her friends among the Indigenous Evens, Martin has become a medka, 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.

I've never read a book quite like In the Eye of the Wild. 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./