The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

I'm the best auctioneer in the world, but no one knows it because I'm a discreet sort of man. My name is Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez, though people call me Highway, I believe with affection. I can imitate Janis Joplin after two rums. I can interpret Chinese fortune cookies. I can stand an egg upright on a table, the way Christopher Columbus did in the famous anecdote. I know how to count to eight in Japanese: ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi. I can float on my back.

This is the story of my teeth, and my treatise on collectibles and the variable value of objects. As any other story, this one begins with the Beginning; and then comes the Middle, and then the End. The rest, as a friend of mine always says, is literature: hyperbolics, parabolics, circulars, allegorics, and elliptics.

Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez--Highway--is in his forties when he discovers his true calling: to be an auctioneer. He's always loved collecting things, from straws to ribbons, and auctioneering allows him to express his attachment to these objects. He describes his method in terms of conic sections, the hyperbolics, etc, etc, described above, which as any mathematician will tell you, are distinguished by their eccentricity, meaning some orbit very closely to their central point while others careen into distant topics. A simpler description of his method might be lying: his first great sales, which he recounts to us, are the sale of his own teeth, which he describes as belonging to famous people from history, from Plato to Virginia Woolf. He sells each tooth by telling a simple story about its owner, and he replaces the teeth he's had removed with a set belonging to Marilyn Monroe he purchased. At the end of the auction he's so overcome with his storytelling that he offers himself up to be bid upon, and is bought by his own estranged son, eager for revenge.

The story of The Story of My Teeth is a unique one: Luiselli was originally commissioned to write a piece of fiction for a catalog of the art collection belonging to Grupo Jemez, a juice company. The gallery and juice factory can both be found in Mexico City's heavily industrialized suburb of Ecatepec, and Luiselli conceived of a project that would bridge the divide between the two. After writing each section, she sent it to the factory to be shared with the workers--in an imitation of the "tobacco readers" that can still be found in Cuban cigar factories--who were recorded discussing it, and their conversations were then incorporated into the text.

This collaborative process resulted in a book that feels fresh and clever, engaged in constant revision and regeneration of itself. But it also grounds the book in the material world which it parodies and critiques. Absurdist narratives like The Story of My Teeth can often feel untethered from the real world, like exercises in self-referentiality that lack any kind of context that makes them readable. Yet for all its absurdity, Luiselli's novel feels like an honest window into the factory life of Ecatapec, where both Highway and his son Siddhartha are employed as guards. The unusual process manages not only to bridge the factory-gallery divide but inscribe, in a way, Luiselli's collaborators onto the page. It's a book that is, as Luiselli describes in the afterword, "not so much about but for the factory workers."

One of the things that The Story of My Teeth understands so well is the way in which both factory and gallery are connected sites of commercial production. The factory makes juice to buy and sell, and the artworks in the gallery, too, are bought and sold; what makes them different from juice? Highway offers an understanding of value, in its capitalist sense and otherwise, that is about storytelling. Having stolen the various artworks from the gallery, he sells them--or perhaps he only imagines he does--by enacting the same strategy as with the teeth, writing brief stories about the famous people who once owned the objects. The differences between these stories and those about the teeth illustrate the difference between "parabolics" and "allegorics," but what struck me most is the way that the line between production and self is blurred: we don't make our teeth in the same way we make an artwork, but what if the difference is reducible to the kind of story we tell about each? How is storytelling at the heart of our possession of ourselves?

Angelica's Grotto by Russell Hoban

He went to where Pesage Noir hung and stood before it. 'The strangeness of things,' he said to Redon -- 'I know it was always in your mind and it's always with me too; I used to think of it as a question that had no answer but now it seems to me that it's an answer for which no one can imagine the question. The world is full of strange answers and missing questions; each of us is an answer to some unknown question that we have to guess at and get wrong as often as not. Right now I'm the answer to the question, "Who will play Old Fool in a geriatric sex-farce?'"

Harold Klein is a 72-year old art critic, twice widowed, in poor health. Besides bouts of angina he's recently lost his "inner voice"--that unregulated part of ourselves that our conscious brain filters before speaking. He finds himself saying things without thinking, and getting himself punched in the face for it. He's shuffled from one psychiatrist to another, but he finds himself looking elsewhere to soothe his psyche: a porno website called Angelica's Grotto, where not only can you browse photographs of women engaged in sexual acts of all stripes, but chat with Angelica herself. Klein strikes up a relationship with Angelica--who turns out to be a sex researcher with the ridiculous name of Melissa Bottomley--insinuating himself into her life and her research.

I think a novel like Angelica's Grotto would be a hard sell for a lot of contemporary readers. There are few topics I think people are less apt to find interesting in 2021 than the sexual proclivities of old men. When Klein meets Melissa for the first time and she puts her tongue in his mouth, it's hard not to roll your eyes. Oh, you might find yourself saying, as I did, this is just another one of those books by an old writer who wants to bed young women. But what happens after that doesn't fit quite neatly into idea of the novel as wish-fulfillment, or if it does, it does so in an especially candid way: Melissa whips out a strap-on and sodomizes the less-than-willing Klein. In doing so, she compels Klein to undergo what thrilled him so much in the photographs that enthralled him.

Angelica's Grotto is filled with those Hoban-like details: lots of references, perhaps too many, to cultural and artistic artifacts, from Expressionist painter Odilon Redon to Orlando Furioso to the band Garbage. In Hoban's novels, these artifacts, especially paintings, tend to take on a kind of anthropomorphic quality, manifesting as strange physical presences. Klein intends to sell his priceless Redon to fund Melissa's research, hoping perhaps to exchange the representation of the id on the wall for mastery over the real thing. The id, that inner voice, Klein begins to associate with the Sumerian god Oannes, a half-man, half-fish who existed before forms were made but who carries with him the world's wisdom. Angelica's Grotto is an exploration of how the sex drive, too, is an expression of that inner voice, a part of ourselves which we can filter, but neither control nor understand. 

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

But there won't be any more journeys after this one, no more oceans explored. And maybe that's why I'm filled with calm. My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million. It's a relief to at last have a purpose. I wonder what it will feel like to stop. I wonder where we go, afterward, and if we are followed. I suspect we go nowhere, and become nothing, and the only thing that saddens me about this is the idea of never seeing Niall again. We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it's precious, and maybe it's enough, and maybe it's right that our bodies dissolve into the earth, giving our energy back to it, feeding the little creatures in the ground and giving nutrients to the soil, and maybe it's right that our consciousness rests. The thought is peaceful.

It is the near future and the earth is on the precipice of ecological collapse. Most animal species have gone or are going extinct: wolves, rhinoceroses, crows. Franny Stone is in Greenland, putting trackers on Arctic terns, one of the few species of bird remaining, and one of the most resilient. They travel from the Arctic to the Antarctic every year in search of food, the longest migration in the world. But the fish, too, are mostly gone, and so despite their resilience, the days of the Arctic terns are numbered, too. Franny, having no other way to track the terns, makes a deal with the captain of a fishing boat--someone who should be an enemy--telling him that if they follow the terns, the terns will bring them to fish. But Franny does not divulge that she's not associated with any university or research program; that she's following the terns for deeper and darker reasons.

I did not enjoy this book. The tone is poisonously, unceasingly serious, and the heroine seems cut from the cloth of television serials like Mare of Easttown--a woman whose self-destructive tendencies cause her to lash out, but who must learn to master her trauma. That's what this book is all about, TRAUMA in big capital letters. Interwoven with the story of the fishing boat, the Saghani, are bits of Franny's backstory, an endlessly unspooling narrative of trauma: an absent father, a disappeared mother, a habit of committing violence while sleepwalking, a tendency to run away for no reason, a stint in jail, a prickly disposition. All of this smaller traumas lead up to a bigger trauma that is only teased, although it's easy enough to fill in the blanks: Franny has, through an act of negligence, killed her researcher husband, and through this guilt she is driven to track the terns that were his own project.

I'd have to paraphrase it, but Charles Baxter described this kind of narrative in his book on fiction Burning Down the House, outlining a belief that the most important thing anyone can do in life, or in a story, is to find and name the source of one's trauma. It makes for dreary reading. On the other hand, there's an interesting thought at the heart of Migrations: that the traumas we receive on an individual level mirror the trauma we inflict on the earth. But Migrations is so wrapped up in the first kind of trauma that the second kind seems only partially fleshed out. Toward the end of the book, after a series of violent setbacks, only Franny and the captain of the Saghani are left out of the crew, and as they sail into the waters of Antarctica, the captain admits he is running, too, from a wife with a terminal illness who didn't want him to see her waste away. But why does anyone in the midst of ecological collapse need an excuse to act irrationally? Migrations struck me as a book about the end of the world that doesn't really think the end of the world is all that interesting.

Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster

She was silent. This cruel, vicious fellow knew of strange refinements. The horrible truth, that wicked people are capable of love, stood naked before her, and her moral being was abashed. It was her duty to rescue the baby, to save it from contagion, and she still meant to do her duty. But the comfortable sense of virtue left her. She was in the presence of something greater than right or wrong.

Lilia Herriton is sent on a trip to Italy by the family of her deceased husband, who hope that the exposure to culture might refine her sensibilities a little bit--and perhaps just get her out of their hair for a little while. But her rashness and poor judgment follow her to Italy, and word is cabled back to England that she has done the unthinkable: married an Italian, a passionate but indigent man who is the son of a dentist. Though the marriage is unhappy, it makes her more or less someone else's problem, until she commits another social faux pas--she dies--and her stepbrother Philip is compelled to travel to Italy to try to convince her widower to give up their infant son in exchange for money.

Where Angels Fear to Tread was Forster's first novel, and it's hard to recognize the author who would later write a book as mysterious and subtle as A Passage to India. The novel wears its influences much more on its sleeve, as first novels sometimes do, in this case the unmistakable whiff of Henry James pervades everything. The elements of culture clash between England and Italy are recognizable in A Room With a View, but Where Angels Fear to Tread lacks the sensitivity or moral urgency of that book. In fact, it sort of stinks. I found myself wondering the whole time if Forster wants us to really take seriously the motivations of Philip, his sister Harriet, and their accomplice Caroline Abbott, to steal away a baby for the simple reason that it couldn't possibly be appropriate to be brought up Italian.

In the end, I think the book spurns the provincial moralism I suspected it of having: Miss Abbott, then Philip, become convinced that their mission is mistaken as they get to know the father, Gino, better, and only the prudish Harriet cannot be budged. Harriet's intransigence leads to an ending I found outlandishly and disproportionately violent. But even still, the moral question at the book's heart--is it better for a baby to be brought up with civilization or love--seems so foreign to me to be almost incomprehensible, and makes the book seem ridiculous. But of course, other novels--like Henry James'--make the moral demands of Victorians seem compelling, if not sympathetic, so I think it's fair to say that Where Angels Fear to Tread simply doesn't work, and is the product of a writer who had yet to find his own real voice.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself. This is true of the back yard and the small room I occupied at that time, my body, the cats, the red hen all my body all part of my own sluggish bloodstream. A separation from these well-known and loved, yes loved, things were "Death and Death indeed" according to the old rhyme of the Man of Double Deed. There was no remedy for the needle in my heart with its long thread of old blood. Then what about Lapland and the furry dog team? That would also be a fine violation of those cherished habits, yes indeed, but how different from an institution for decrepit women.

Marian Leatherby is 92 years old, living in Mexico City with her son and his family in the suburbs of Mexico City. One day, her friend Carmella gives her the gift of an ornate hearing trumpet made of horn, and once she puts it to her ear, the once-nearly-deaf Marian can hear at last what her family thinks of her: she's a nuisance and a burden, and the sooner they can put her in an old folks' home, the better. The home turns out to be a strange place called Santa Brigida, where a dozen eccentric old women--a blind painter, a fake spiritualist and murderer, a real spiritualist, a man pretending to be a woman--live in concrete huts shaped like mushrooms and boots and things. At Santa Brigida Marian, with her trusty hearing trumpet in tow, suffers with the other women under the scrutiny of the moralistic owners, but the new company of these women will open up new avenues in her life she had not yet imagined.

It's hard to talk about The Hearing Trumpet without spoiling it, because its most remarkable and essential quality is its transformation from one kind of book to a very different one. (Though I would suggest that this quality is so remarkable, you can't really approach it without an appreciation of that fact, so feel free to read on.) The Hearing Trumpet begins as a wry comedy about a little old lady discovering herself at last and becomes--perhaps you can guess--a novel about the end of the world, in which the earth begins to reverse its polarity after the release of the destructive horned god Sephira, who must be appeased with the return of the Holy Grail.

How does it this strange little book get from A to B? Well, at Santa Brigida, Marian is fascinated by the hanging portrait of a medieval nun who seems to be winking. She discovers that this portrait is of the Abbess Rosalinda, a Spanish occultist who spent her life hunting down the Grail itself, as well as a magical ointment associated with Mary Magdalene called musc de Madeleine. The Abbess, though sanctified by the church, really spent her life working against it, infiltrating the Knights Templar in order to pinch the grail and deliver it to the pagan Gods that Christianity has chased into exile. At Santa Brigida, Marian happily enlists in the cult of this Abbess, as many of the other residents have done, and it's their collective efforts that help bring about an apocalypse.

In one scene, a newly informed Marian descends the stairs of the great tower at Santa Brigida where the god Sephira has recently emerged, like an egg. At the bottom she finds herself, stirring an enormous pot of stew. Her doppelganger demands that she must decide which of them is the true Marian by way of climbing into the pot, or refusing to do so, and when Marian climbs into the soup, her consciousness is instantly transferred to the witchy doppelganger. This moment is The Hearing Trumpet in a nutshell: an old woman, comfortable but bereft of agency, refashions herself in opposition to the oppressive forces of Christianity, of family, of culture. The Hearing Trumpet is a book about the radical rejection of systems and creeds, and the embrace of something both ancient and feminine that lies within.

Putting a high gloss on it can seem silly, though, because the book itself is essentially silly, an exercise in joyous camp. Carrington saves one of her finest jokes for the very end, when an old friend of Marian's appears on a sledge--the reversing of the poles has turned Mexico into a snowscape, you see--with his new wife, the Queen of the Wolves, and her wolf army. Together with the old women and a platoon of bees, they defeat the Catholic Archbishop and restore the grail to Sephira--something which takes place in a single paragraph, like something written by a student who got bored at the end of their creative writing assignment. I like to think that the book steps up to the line of something very conventional--a Hollywood-style fantasy--and stops short, content to be the weird, winking, humorous thing it is.

Bury The Chains:  Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild

 

Hochschild is a former journalist (he co-founded Mother Jones magazine) turned historian who has made a career of producing wonderfully readable books about giant, complex topics – from the oppressive exploitation of the Belgian Congo to the Spanish Civil War.  He has a gift for building a large narrative out of small anecdotes in a way that enlightens aspects of history that have been overlooked.  This is his 2005 history of the emancipation movement in Great Britain.  While it is long and dense, it reads like a great novel, weaving together the stories of dozens of people almost lost to history who dedicated their lives to eliminating first the British Slave trade and then slavery in the British colonies of the West Indies.

 

Hochschild begins by exploring the ubiquity, size and economic value of the slave trade – observing that in 1800 “well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another.”  Focusing on the Atlantic slave trade, Hochschild gives a clear picture of its size and complexity – with hundreds of British ships plying the west coast of Africa, buying and transporting across the middle passage some 40,000 people every year.  The trade in humans is driven by what he refers to as “the Middle East of the late eighteenth century” – Europe’s insatiable desire for West Indian sugar, with Great Britain importing over 6 million gallons a year, so that British trade with Jamaica alone was worth more than that with the 13 North American colonies.

 

In part because of this size and value, there was little discussion of the morality of the slave trade until the spring of 1787 when Thomas Clarkson – a young minister in the Church of England (which itself owned several West Indian sugar plantations and hundreds of slaves) – organized a meeting of 12 like-minded men who formed the first abolitionist society in Great Britain.  Most of these men were Quakers who had been theoretically opposed to slavery for some time, and one of them was Olaudah Equiano – a formerly enslaved man who would go on to write the first great slave narrative.  At the time there was no organized opposition to slavery or the slave trade and British politics did not include ways for popular social movements to be translated into legislation.

 

Much of Hochschild’s story centers of the building of the movement for the abolition of the slave trade. In Great Britain, abolitionists wanted to end the trade, emancipationists wanted to end slavery itself.  Hochschild makes clear that there were very few emancipationists, even at that first meeting.  Slavery itself seemed to be a given, it was the cruelty of the slave trade that awakened consciences.  While their aims were limited, the movement spent much of its time developing means rather than debating ends.  Hochschild recounts how virtually every tactic prominent in social justice campaigns today got its start with this movement to ban the slave trade:  they gathered information, produced pamphlets, held rallies, designed and distributed buttons and posters, organized boycotts and distributed petitions that they sent on to Parliament (hundreds of times, with thousands of signatures).  What Clarkson, Equiano, Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce (the MP who made abolition his primary cause through a long and illustrious career) uncovered was a well of previously hidden opposition to the trade.  The emerging industrial centers of Manchester and Birmingham became great sources of support as the factory workers developed an understanding of oppression.  Even cities heavily dependent on the trade – Liverpool and London – developed pockets of support for abolition.

 

The history of their success is long and complicated – it involves the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, The Maroon uprising in Jamaica, the development of women’s social justice groups and the long fight to reform and democratize Parliament as well as concerted organizing and political pressure over twenty years for the trade to be ended and another thirty for emancipation.

 

Along the way we get portraits of the principal activists as well as George III, his son the Duke of Clarence (later George IV), Tousaint L’Ouverture, early feminist activist Elizabeth Heyrick and learn of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings connection to the slave trade and William Blake’s work to end it.  There are fascinating side anecdotes about printing and the Louisiana Purchase along with abundant stories establishing the brutality of slavery and of the wars fought to put down slave uprisings.  I expect that most American readers of this will come away with a significantly more complex view of the slave trade, as well as a certain discomfort with the fact that the United States never developed an emancipation movement nearly as powerful or successful as Great Britain’s. 

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only. Now at thirteen Joel was nearer a knowledge of death than in any year to come: a flower was blooming inside him, and soon, when all tight leaves unfurled, when the noon of youth burned whitest, he would turn and look, as others had, for the opening of another door. In the woods they walked the tireless singings of larks had sounded a century, and more, and floods of frogs had galloped in moonlight bands; stars had fallen here, and Indian arrows, too; prancing blacks had played guitars, sung ballads of bandit-buried gold, sung songs grieving and ghostly, ballads of long ago: before birth.

Joel Knox is thirteen. He has been living in New Orleans with a caretaker most of his life, until a letter finally comes from a far-flung estate in the Louisiana backwoods: yes, Joel's biological father, Edward Sansom, would like for Joel to come and stay with him. Arriving at the estate, Joel finds a small cadre of strange and reclusive people: his father's anxious wife Amy; effeminate "cousin" Randolph; Zoo, a black servant who provides the closest thing Joel will get to parenting in this strange place; her ancient father Jesus Fever; the redheaded tomboy Idabel and her twin sister. A strange white-haired lady appears at a window like a ghost and is never seen again. Life with this group turns out to be quiet and strange, like "living in a glass bell," and where is his father anyway?

I picked up Other Voices, Other Rooms because I was inspired, in a perverse way, by Jenn Shapland's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: Capote and McCullers, she contends, were bitter enemies--McCullers, it seems, accused Capote of cribbing from her. (It's hard not to see her point: look how young Joel longs for nothing more to see snow, like Frankie in The Member of the Wedding, published just two years before. And I have no idea if this is borne out by timing, but the descriptions of cousin Randolph striding through the empty manse in his silk kimono certainly seems to recall McCullers herself, who cultivate this look to accommodate her long-term illness.) With McCullers in mind, though, I became impatient with the familiarity of Capote's southern Gothic: the overgrown mansion, the woman with the scar around her neck, the identical twins.

But I was eventually won over by the dreamlike quality of Other Voices, Other Rooms. Joel is frustrated by the strangeness and loneliness of his new home, but as the days wear on, its strangeness seems to seep into his mind, and his outlook becomes more and more feverish, prone to visions and hysterias. When he is at last allowed to see his father, he is only unsettled more: Edward Sansom is a paraplegic whose eyes are perpetually open, and who tosses tennis balls into the sitting room to demand attention. At last Randolph tells him the full story: many years ago, his girlfriend began an affair with a handsome boxer. Randolph, enraged not by her unfaithfulness but the unwelcome realization that he too was in love with the boxer, tried to shoot them--but hit Sansom, the boxer's manager instead. Now they live here in this house, caring for each other--each an abandoned half, cast off to make a unity.

The estate is an outpost at the end of the earth where the injured and guilty flee. It's only here that Randolph can really live, in his kimono and painted toenails--that white-haired lady at the window, of course, is him, too. It's where Zoo can live and be safe from the possessive lover who gave her the scar, though she lives with the daily fear of his return. This strange place is a haven, but a fragile haven, and it hardly seems a place for a boy as young, and as sensitive, as Joel. Thirteen year old boys have such active imaginations already, and Joel is no exception, but life at Skully Landing threatens to push that imagination into overdrive. An abortive attempt at running away with Idabel is no good; he brings the madness of the place with him, and when he's felt up on a Ferris wheel by a little person--I am not joking--he nearly breaks from reality completely. Only when he's dragged back to his newfound home can he really begin to find himself again.

The strong implication here is that Joel, like Randolph, must learn to accept his own homosexuality, and that Randolph, who nurses him through his pneumonia, is his true exemplar and father figure. (His love for Idabel, we presume, is a response to her masculine nature as opposed to her more feminine sister Florabel.) And yet the book suggests that there are few places in the world where people who have become truly themselves can live without degradation and shame, places that must seem strange to a world to whom they've turned their back.

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

I am hardly qualified to write a biography of Carson McCullers. Who am I to her? I slid my arms up the sleeves of her long lime-green wool coat, I folded her nightgowns, I labeled her socks. I made biscuits in the kitchen of her childhood home and I walked in the park where she used to play by herself. I have read enough biographies to know, in no uncertain terms, that they are built of artifice and lies. I am not a fiction writer, and this is not a biography.

While working as an archivist at the University of Texas' Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland discovered a set of letters from a Swiss socialite named Annemarie Schwarzenbach to the American author Carson McCullers, letters of fondness that don't shy away from words like "love." The discovery led Shapland to embark on the project that would become My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, a project in which Shapland plumbs the depths of McCullers' archives trying to reconstruct her relationships with women like Schwarzenbach and, in her later years, her therapist Mary Mercer, whose letters to and from Carson show too a profound intimacy. Shapland traces McCullers' life, quite literally: first as a researcher-in-residence at the museum that was her childhood home in Columbus, Georgia, and later as a resident at the Yaddo writers' colony in upstate New York McCullers joined a dozen times in her life.

For Shapland, the mission is personal: in recovering McCullers' lesbian relationships, she is able to recognize and affirm her own repressed and uncertain sexuality:

So it isn't about "Is Carson a lesbian?" or "Carson is a lesbian" or "What is a lesbian?" What I want to know is, how have lesbians gotten by and had relationships and found love and community? What does that look like? One answer: If we--writers, historians, biographers--can just start acknowledging the lesbian parts of ourselves and others, maybe we can start to know what it is. What it is to love women. But please, no more demands for certain kinds of proof, no more "doesn't count unless--" bullshit. Don't tell me there's just not enough evidence. Let's call a lesbian a lesbian. Loved another woman. Period. You loved your mother? Lesbian.

There is a danger, Shapland concedes, in applying labels to people who did not or could not apply them to themselves. She pores over an account McCullers provides to Mercer of the time McCullers' abusive husband demanded to know if she was a lesbian. In the moment McCullers demurred, but Shapland sees in the silence and uncertainty around McCullers' the very dynamics of erasure that continue today. She recalls being sat down by the director of the McCullers home and being told that, in no uncertain terms, McCullers was not a lesbian and had no romantic relationships with women--though one can plainly see in the letters and notes Shapland collects that McCullers' intimacy with Schwarzenbach and Mercer, and many others, the pitch and resonance of love. Shapland rejects the constant demands of proof that are made regarding the sexuality of historical figures, as if in the absence of proof of queerness one remains conscripted by heterosexuality.

To my mind, the director's insistence is not only shocking, but silly. When you read McCullers' books, queerness is there on the page: the repressed lust of the army captain in Reflections in a Golden Eye, the love of Singer for Antonopoulos in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Biff's androgyny in the same, the wild love of Jester for Sherman in Clock Without Hands. What's the point of looking at all of that and saying, Oh no, McCullers might have written all of that--but she herself could never be queer? The question's outside of my expertise and capacity, but the defensiveness of such a position, regarding a writer whose work is so clearly queer, baffles me. Yet this thought reveals what I found missing in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: a deeper investigation of her books themselves. They feel sometimes like an afterthought, far less important than the letters and the notes from therapy--which perhaps they are, but they might have provided a richer context than they do.

Still, Shapland does a great job illuminating McCullers' life. Having never read another biography, I had never heard of how tumultuous McCullers' two marriages to Reeves McCullers, a tormented and closeted gay man himself, who once tried to kill her. This marriage, for both obvious and insidious reasons, has apparently captured most of the imagination of McCullers' other biographers. But it's Shapland who shows, in painstaking and thoughtful detail, the love that exists between the lines, for which those other biographers failed to account. At times I did feel like Shapland's identification with McCullers became overpowering--it struck me as sort of cringeworthy, for example, to insist that McCullers would have been excited about the election of Hillary Clinton. But the story that Shapland tells of her own sexuality, which she comes to embrace wholeheartedly by tracing McCullers', proves in the end to be very powerful.

The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist

I am twenty-six inches tall, shapely and well proportioned, my head perhaps a trifle too large. My hair is not black like the others', but reddish, very stiff and thick, drawn back from the temples and the broad but not especially lofty brow. My face is beardless, but otherwise just like that of other men. My eyebrows meet. My bodily strength is considerable, particularly if I am annoyed. When the wrestling match was arranged between Jehoshaphat and myself I forced him onto his back after twenty minutes and strangled him. Since then I have been the only dwarf at this court.

The dwarf Piccoline resides at the court of an Italian prince in the 14th century. His position there is nebulous: he is not a buffoon, he informs us, as some dwarfs are, and though he serves the Prince he does not seem to be a kind of servant. He is rather like an emanation of the Prince himself, a ghost or shadow: "Even the ignorant mob understands that the master's dwarf is really the master himself," he writes. What distinguishes Piccoline, in his eyes, is that, while others hide their monstrous nature with pomp, play, and pretend, he resembles himself. He says: "Only I am."

Piccoline's view of humanity is a jaundiced one. His position as dwarf--literally overlooked, you might say--enables him to see what others cannot or do not: the way the Princess carries on her affair with the knight Don Riccardo, for instance, or their daughter Angelica's secret love for the heir of the Prince's foreign enemy. He sees the way courtiers give themselves over to lust and gluttony, both of which nauseate him, and which he considers a kind of vanity.

And yet his cynicism keeps him from seeing everything that he might, or understanding everything. He does not understand, for instance, why the sage Bernardo dissects a corpse to learn about the composition of the human body, something he considers both disgusting and irrelevant. His bafflement and disgust at the divulgence of what's inside the human body mirrors his bafflement and disgust at human feeling: "I cannot understand the love that human beings feel for each other," he says. "It merely revolts me." Piccoline is the shadow self of the Prince, and the shadow self of all people, maybe: the small voice that speaks to us from within and tells us that life is worth so little.

I was really captivated by the steely, sour persona of Piccoline. The story he narrates is one of national advancement and decline, though what happens seems less important sometimes than the power of his point of view on these things: the Prince wages war on a foreign power, sieging their city, and then uses the pretext of a peace treaty to ambush the opposing lord. Later, the Prince finds himself sieged by his enemy's vengeful heirs, only to be ambushed by a much more powerful foe in the Black Plague. The Prince's astronomers look for a narrative in the stars, but Piccoline knows that fate is a force beyond understanding: "I sit at the dwarfs' window and gaze out into the night, exploring it as they do. I need no tubes or telescopes, for my gaze itself is deep enough. I too read in the book of night."

Early in the book, Piccoline is tasked by the Prince to lead a mass for dwarfs, a performance which he turns into a grotesque satire, and for which he is punished. "I eat my own splenetic flesh," he says, "I drink my own poisoned blood"--a religion of solipsism, you might say. But Lagervkist, who wrote of the way Christ uses even the most wretched and vile refusers in Barabbas does so also here: toward the end of the novel--spoiler alert--Piccoline whips the Princess in a fit of disgust over her philandering. Racked with guilt, it is something she has craved, but still it sends her into a coma, then killing her. After her death she begins to be revered as a saint, and Piccoline is sent to the dungeon, made to suffer for years--thus becoming the kind of Christ figure, enobling the Princess' soul through his own suffering, in which he does not believe. The Dwarf is a story of radical ecumenicism, a novel that believes even hatred can be turned to the power of divine transfiguration.

The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer

It is not only the man on the sofa who is the victim. Harald and Claudia have, each, within them, now, a malignant resentment against their son that would seem as impossible to exist in them as an ability to kill could exist in hm. The resentment is shameful. What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates. But the way to deal with the resentment will come, must come, individually to both. The resentment is shameful: because what is it that they did to him? Is that were the answer--Why? Why?--is to be found?

"Something terrible happened," begins Nadine Gordimer's novel The House Gun. That something, as Harald and Claudia Lindgard are about to learn, is an act of terrible violence: their son Duncan has shot his roommate to death using the gun kept in the house to ward off intruders. The facts, such as they are, will follow: Duncan walked in on Carl, with whom he had a brief sexual relationship, in the middle of having sex with his current girlfriend, Natalie. The shooting took place the following day; the gardener found the gun tossed into the garden. There's never any real doubt that Duncan has committed the act, but whether he is guilty--what even it means to be guilty; whether the impulse to kill comes from the parents, or without, from social contagion; whether Natalie's cruelty and Carl's thoughtlessness are part of that guilt--is a question that must be worked out over months at trial. The only sure thing is that Duncan's life, and the life of Harald and Claudia, has been forever transformed: "The old Gregorian," Gordimer writes, "cannot register this day."

Duncan's lawyer is Hamilton Motsamai, a proud, talented lawyer--a black lawyer. The House Gun was, as far as I know, Gordimer's first novel after the end of apartheid in South Africa, and one of the many questions that hang over the novel is whether the nation is capable of change, capable of reconciliation. Motsamai's position as Duncan's lawyer represents a great reversal; had the shooting taken place only a few years earlier, it would have been unthinkable. Harald and Claudia's mild liberalism is tested: Motsamai seems capable, sure, but will a black man be as persuasive to a judge? Their awareness of this reversal is so shameful that only such a crisis can really bring it to the surface; the conviction, deep down, that it ought to be one of them in the seat of the accused and one of us in the position of the defense attorney.

The gun itself is in image of a great rot at the heart of South African society. Novels like July's People show that Gordimer was, I think, a pessimist about apartheid; they suggest that racial liberation will only be bought at the price of enormous violence. The race war imagined in July's People never came to pass, but The House Gun refutes the idea that the country's transformation was a non-violent one. The "house gun" is the logical endpoint of a society in which violence is endemic. That violence, fostered by racial inequity, manifests in the form of the gun, and though it was purchased for self-defense, such violence cannot be contained; it ends with whites shooting whites. This possibility is a theme teased by Motsamai in his defense, and developed by the judge, though whether it helps us understand what Duncan has done is never totally clear. When violence is everywhere, who can say where any particular act began?

The mystery at the heart of the act is also at the heart of The House Gun. Duncan, Harald, and Claudia, all watch as Motsamai puts forth a theory of Duncan's mental state that will exonerate him. Harald sees that what Motsamai does is a performance, really, a narrative whose artificiality is substituted for that which is unexplainable. Gordimer shows how deep our motivations are, how primal, how little we understand them, and how they intersect with the dangerous forces that lie outside of us. The long climax, in which the judge patiently elaborates on the evidence in preparation for the ruling he is about to give, kept me enthralled as much as it does the people in the courtroom--a kind of heightened attention that Gordimer tells us resembles Simone Weil's definition of prayer--but while we crave for the judge's sentence to make human behavior explainable, we remain suspicious that it is really beyond our understanding and our judgment.

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

 

It took me almost as long to read the Rabbit sequence as it took Updike to write it.  Beginning with Rabbit, Run in 1960, the books come about once a decade and narrate the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom at the dawn of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.  I read Rabbit Run in about 1990, read Rabbit Redux shortly after, waited a good ten or twelve years before Rabbit is Rich and only finished the series (today) because I owned a copy of Rabbit at Rest and thought I might as well.

 

A short reaction to each novel:

Rabbit, Run is the best of the four and is pretty brilliant.  The opening sequence, with Harry travelling home from work to a young family that feels like a boring trap then stopping to play basketball with some high school age boys on the street, remembering his own youth and the power and freedom he felt on the court, was worth the price of the entire sequence.  It is a kind of perfect male portrait of how the promise of youth is not kept by later life, how the American Dream never quite lives up to its billing.  There are other sections of the novel that compete with this opening in my memory – the long drive with the DJ’s catalogue of love songs as he leaves his wife, the golf game for his soul with the minister, the drowning of his daughter – but in each case the descriptions go on a little too long and while we see an artist enjoying his medium, we also see him showing off his own talent in ways that distract from the emotional power of the scene.

 

Rabbit Redux is the worst of the four.  It feels generally unnecessary and I remember feeling that Updike wrote it because the 60s did not go as he and Harry had imagined ten years earlier.  Harry’s inability to see real humanity in other people – especially women, but now also Blacks and radicals, starts to feel like it is Updike’s problem.  Certainly, his portrait of the activist/drug dealer Skeeter and the hippy Jill give the impression that Updike’s understanding of those parts of America came from Time Magazine.

 

Rabbit is Rich was a good comeback.  Admittedly, my feelings for it may be colored by the fact that I was close to adult in the years it chronicles, and so remembered the news items Harry obsesses over as part of my own life.  Updike’s continued examination of the economic decline of Harry’s home town, Harry’s new career at Toyota, and his later dealing with gold krugerrands captured something about America’s splitting into two countries – the constant refrain that we are getting soft and losing to the Japanese is complicated by Harry’s own prosperity.  His more settled and believable extra-marital affairs temper his increasingly scummy character, and while he is unlikeable, he is relatable and sympathetic.

 

I found Rabbit at Rest to combine the best and worst of the previous novels.  I grew bored with some of Updike’s undeniable talent.  He has a tremendous visual imagination and calls up the world around his characters in a constant stream of realistic and highly specific detail.  However, this often meant reading lists of fast food places along the highways of Florida, or Harry’s remembrance of what used to exist in the streets of his Pennsylvania hometown.   There are brilliant moments here – in his last visit with his mistress Thelma, now dying of lupus, in his own heart attack while sailing with his granddaughter, in the amazing sequence when he dresses as Uncle Sam for the Memorial Day parade and finds people still remember him as “Rabbit” the star basketball player, and in the brilliant way he ends the entire sequence, with a final, fatal heart attack during another pickup basketball game that gives him a last moment of liberation into his own skills.  The problem is that there is not one such final game, but two, so that the death comes some thirty pages after the reader has recognized the completed circle and the connection to that opening 1500 pages earlier.  Even the second game is not the end, as we get another few pages of doctors opining on his condition and his family discussing whether to forgive his final trespasses.

 

In the end, I found the creation of Harry’s adult life– the way he is so firmly embedded in history, the way he rises above individuality towards something like an American Everyman – a truly remarkable achievement.  At the same time, I got sick of Harry.  He is complex and conflicted in the beginning, but hardens into something simply unlikeable at the end.  He has few good qualities – he is a terrible husband, a terrible father, makes no social contribution and never really attempts to achieve more than his bases desires dictate.  At times I relate to him in a frightening way – Updike does get me to think of my own limitations and I find myself fearing that I am in some ways like Rabbit.  But then he will do something so simply reprehensible that I am let off the hook.  For the same reason, he does not become an American Everyman, and so we are all let off the hook.

Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga

But I couldn't find that last word. I would look out of the window, I would watch the waves of the sea rising and breaking and I would ask the waves for an answer, but it was no use. Then I asked the stars in the sky and it was the same. I asked other people and that was even worse. I mean they were no help at all, they always ended up leaving me alone again in front of the blank page. And then I would think to myself: Why don't you tell the story of the journey you made to Obaba? Maybe in recounting the events of the weekend you'll find the wretched word.

"For a man already in the autumn of his life," writes Esteban Werfell, the title character of the first story in Bernardo Atxaga's Obabakoak, "a few short hours may not seem a matter of much significance, but it is all I have to tell, indeed it is the only thing worth telling." The story he tells goes like this: one day, compelled by his friends, he visits church for the first time, much to the chagrin of his father, an atheist who longs for the cultured atmosphere of his home city of Hamburg. At church Esteban faints and has a vision of a beautiful young girl, who also lives in Hamburg, and tells him her name and address there. For years, Esteban and the girl maintain a correspondence, and Esteban grows estranged from his rustic Basque friends, choosing instead to spend his time studying the subjects which will make worthy of his foreign love. Years later, after the correspondence has long since ceased, he visits the house in Hamburg, where he discovers an old friend of his father: as it turns out, it was his father who wrote the letters all along.

Obabakoak, whose name means something like "The stories of the people from Obaba," is, according to its prologue, one of less than a hundred books published in the Basque language. "Esteban Werfell" records the pride and anxiety of such a project, the specter of a more cultivated Europe, behind which the Basque country badly lags. And yet, Esteban, as far as we can tell, writes his story from his home in Obaba, where he remains, looking out the window at the swans.

Obabakoak collects several stories, most of which--but not all--center on this fictional Basque town. In "An exposition of Canon Lizardi's letter," a white boar that rampages through Obaba is suspected of being the spirit of a poor and hated child, who has returned to wreak his revenge on those who hurt him. In "Post tenebras spero lucem," one of my favorites, a young Spanish teacher stationed in Obaba's most remote corner--what must feel like the ends of the earth--becomes scandalously close to the young orphan who lights the furnace for the schoolroom each morning. These stories offer a vision of the Basque country as a kind of Brigadoon, a place that is so hard to reach most people don't know it's there, and where myths and superstitions remain, thriving in isolation from the wider world. A long story called "Nine Words in Honour of the Village of Villamediana" substitutes for Obaba the title village, but the place is recognizable with whatever name: in this story, a traveler looking for isolation strikes up an unlikely friendship with a poet-dwarf claiming to be the last descendant of the region's former Count.

The full second half of Obabakoak is taken by a wonderfully rambling collection called "In Search of the Last Word." The unnamed narrator of this story, having discovered an old photograph of his grade school class, suspects that the class troublemaker is responsible for making another student go deaf and mad by sticking a lizard in his ear. He and a friend set out to uncover the truth on their way to a storytelling party thrown in Obaba by the narrator's uncle; the resolution of the lizard question is waylaid again and again by stories and storytellers who appear to break up the narrative. In one sense, "In Search of the Last Word" seems like a clever framework in which to fit several fun but unrelated stories, but in another, the stories--and their dilatory nature--warn us that the resolution the narrator seeks will be elusive, that our expectations for how a story should unfold, or end, will be thwarted.