The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem

“Maybe even God only exists from time to time,” the Chief Inspector added quietly. He had leaned forward, and with his face averted was listening attentively to what Gregory was spewing forth with such difficulty from deep inside himself.

“Maybe,” Gregory replied indifferently, “But the gaps in his existence are very wide, as you know.”

Inspector Gregory is called upon by Scotland Yard to investigate a strange series of crimes--corpses are disappearing from their caskets, only to be found a short ways away, the twist being that a few of them have been spotted in transit. In short, is this a case of prankish grave robbery, or are they something stranger and more destabilizing: a sort of resurrection?

The summary makes The Investigation sound like a horror story, or perhaps an existential detective novel in the vein of New York Trilogy or Death in Her Hands. And it is, in some ways, both of those things. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that, like in those two novels, the “crimes” such as they are, are never solved and the investigators undergo an identity crisis. Nor can it really be surprising that some parts are very creepy: a reel to reel recording of a witness dying as he spends his last breaths describing a writhing corpse; Gregory’s dream of his landlord as a puppet master who contacts the dead through his manipulation of a pair of mannequins; an interview with Sciss, a police statistician(?) that devolves into a strange psychosexual encounter complete with mysterious negative depicting snuff films.

Spoilers follow, to the extent that this can be spoiled.

The climax, no less unsettling for its predictability, sees Gregory, whose entire life has slowly been consumed by the case and its myriad unprovable causes--a psychopath, a virus, alien technology, God--given a plausible explanation by his chief, an explanation that posits a trucker who’s been slowly driven mad by driving through the foggy winter nights. He protests, he points out the facts that don’t fit the explanation, he protests about the arbitrary nature of it all; ultimately though, he accepts it, because to not do so would upset the constructions that allow Scotland Yard, religion, government, human relationships, et al, and the premise that lies behind it all: that there is some concrete meaning in the world, and that we can discover and  comprehend it. That actions can be explained, crimes solved, and corpses safely assumed to be dead.

And yet, the book as a whole is somewhat inert, consisting largely of long conversations between various detectives, officers, scientists, and doctors. Entire chapters pass with no real action, and many of the characters outside of Gregory, Sciss, and the Landlord blur together so that much of the book reads more like a philosophical dialogue than a novel. Outside of Gregory’s increasingly emotive responses (he’s always angry, confused, certain), his descent into obsession lacks the texture than makes New York Stories work so well, and the pathos Moshfegh gives the widow in Death in Her Hands. In spite of its compelling big ideas and exciting final quarter, I found this, my first Lem, to be underwhelming--but I’m still looking forward to reading more.

L'Amante Anglaise by Marguerite Duras

Do you know that murder doesn't happen all of a sudden? No. It creeps up slowly, like a tank. And then it stops. And there it is. A murder has just been committed in Vine. By Claire Lannes. There's no going back on it. Murder has descended on Viorne. It was hovering high in the air above, and it's there where Viorne is that it fell, in that house, in the kitchen of that house, and the one who did it--oh... the one who did it is Claire Lannes. She knew that the murder was there, and that only a thread kept it from falling on Viorne.

A policeman arrives at a bar in the French town of Viorne searching for information about a gruesome murder that has captivated the national press: a series of dismembered body parts, discovered on trains all around the country, which have been traced back to the rail junction at Viorne. As he discusses theories with the patrons there, a woman, Claire Lannes, comes up and confesses: she is the one who committed the murder. The victim is Marie-Therese, a deaf and mute woman who was Claire's cousin and housekeeper. L'Amante Anglaise tells this story as a series of interviews between an unnamed writer, who wants to write a book about Claire, and three figures: Robert, the bar owner; Pierre, Claire's husband; and Claire herself.

I think it's only when you read an author's second book that you really begin to understand who they are as a writer. L'Amante Anglaise shares with Duras' incredible book The Lover a sense that the real story is not being told, that it lies somewhere below the surface, inaccessible to both the reader and the characters themselves. Claire--whose section is by far the novel's most interesting--seems to have no idea why she killed her cousin. Murder, as she describes it, is a force that descends from outside, taking a place or a person as its vessel or host. And yet, she thinks that she might have answers for the writer, if only the writer would pose the right questions. But of course, she doesn't know the right questions any more than the writer does.

Truth, where it exists, is hidden; the novel's title, L'Amante Anglaise is written in French to retain the pun between la menthe anglaise, or English mint, Claire's favorite plant in her beloved garden, and l'amante en glaise, a "lover in sand" or "clay," which is her Freudian-slip pronunciation. Does Claire murder her cousin because of some inexpressible jealousy toward her dalliances with their friend Alfonso, or her sexual jealousy more broadly? What does it mean when the writer suggests that Claire has acted out not her own desire, but Pierre's, a desire to be free of both wife and housekeeper? Is Marie-Therese's still-missing head buried in the garden among the English mint?

I'm unsure what to think about L'Amante Anglaise. Its brief and oblique nature make it seem somehow incomplete--missing, like Marie-Therese, the identifying feature that will make it all make sense. Does L'Amante Anglaise conceal a buried secret, or does it only point toward the idea of secrets? Is there a truth at the heart of it, or only a gesture toward the possibility of truth? What's most interesting about it is, I think, the way it turns familiar stories of investigation and detective work on their head. The writer who seems so incisive with Robert and Pierre, working doggedly and shrewdly toward truth, seems suddenly stymied by Claire. So stymied, in fact, that the writer actually begins to lose interest in the conversation. It's a detective story that ends with a shrug.

Hostage by Guy Delisle

It was in the early morning hours of July 2 that I was kidnapped. I had been working for three months in the town of Nazran, in Ingushetia, a small Russian republic west of Chechnya. I was responsible for the  finances and administration of a medical N60 established in the North Caucasus. It was my first job in the humanitarian sector.

So begins the story of Christian Andre, a French humanitarian worker whisked away in the middle of the night by Chechen rebels, taken to an unknown location and chained to a radiator. Initially he assumes he’s been kidnapped because he’s the organization’s treasurer, the only person with a key to the safe in his house; as the days, weeks, and months go by, it becomes clear that they don’t know about the safe at all--he’s been held for ransom. As told to graphic journalist Guy Delisle, Hostage recounts his experience.

Graphic novels provide unique presentational opportunities. Anything goes and a cartoonist with some time can draw a story as large-scale as any blockbuster, be it a superhero apocalypse, a sprawling period piece, cosmic horror, whatever. But the elevator pitch for Hostage sounds like a poor fit. Most of it takes place in one room, with one character. There’s very little dialogue, since Christian can’t understand or communicate with his captors. Many of the panels recur over and over, as Christian studies his feet, tries to escape the handcuffs, sleeps in uncomfortable positions, counts the days, speculates on when and if he’ll be released. He’s moved to a few different locations, but none of them are much more visually complex. Aside from the ten or so pages where he entertains himself by replaying military history in his head, Hostage is a long, repetitious nightmare.

Thankfully, it all works perfectly. Comics excel at working with time, able to stretch a single second over pages and pages or elide years in the gutter between panels. They can also, crucially, communicate repetition with drawings instead of prose, which means that the reader who tires of being imprisoned with Christian can speed quickly through the book, but for me, I found the repetitive rhythms of the days drew me in, affecting a real sense of melancholy or hopelessness where a prose presentation might instead have brought boredom and irritation.

In the last 40 pages or so, the story picks up as Christian manages to escape(!) when his captors forget to lock his door when they leave. With the help of a family he reluctantly trusts, he eventually makes it back, safe and sound. And according to the afterword, he returned to continue his humanitarian work a year later. Hostage is an affecting work, a masterful use of the form, and I’m going to be seeking out more of Delisle’s work.

Ducks by Kate Beaton

I’ve waited too long to review Ducks, one of my favorite books of the year. I know this because I’ve already returned it to the library so I don’t have it on hand to consult. In my defense, Chris’s review is so good, I didn’t feel like I had much to add. But in the interest of reviewing everything this year, and not wanting to leave something that will likely make my year end list without a review, here goes.

Ducks is a graphic memoir, recounting the two years cartoonist and writer Kate Beaton spent working in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada. This is, I learned, a common rite of passage for young Canadians, and so, in spite of her family’s concerns, the book opens with Kate at the airport with her mother, about to leave her hometown of Cape Breton for the wild North.

The story is structured around the various camps at which Kate works plus one brief period at a museum in Victoria, and, within those sections, the story is broken up into a series of moments, interactions, and small scale events. The larger narrative emerges as the characters recur throughout various vignettes in different settings, as do the larger thematic concerns, most of which revolve around what it’s like to be one of the only women surrounded by hundreds of men who have largely been freed from the constraints of society.

And it must be said, the picture that emerges of the men here is not flattering. From her first moments in the sands, Kate finds herself being stared at, accosted, insulted, treated as inferior or, worse, as a prize, by seemingly every man she encounters. There are a few exceptions, characters whose names I can’t look up because I don’t have the book handy, and to Beaton’s credit, the portraits that emerge of the men are nuanced and complex--what are we to make of the men who are here working for their families, who gushingly share photos of wives and daughters and then make gross advances? Or of Kate’s boss who makes constant sexist remarks but also acts protectively? Or the hundreds of men with whom she never interacts, the silent majority, perhaps, who keep their heads down, make their money and go home? Beaton confronts this question head on, in a great conversation she has with her sister late in the narrative, but even there, no answers are forthcoming. Something about the isolation, the freedom from censure, the loneliness, the constant stress, causes breakdowns both internal and external, and, like the Safety Pyramid from the repetitive introductory seminars at each camp, these small disintegrations lead to larger disintegrations. Kate asks explicitly the question that the #NotAllMen contingent presumes the answer to: if our dad, our brother, our cousin were here, would they be any different?

The threat of sexual violence hangs heavy over the narrative; even before its explicitly mentioned we, the readers, can feel the looming threat, simply from the ratio of men to women. Later, it’s made more explicit, particularly when Kate visits a strip club with some of the men and learns about the practice of heating a quarter and tossing it at the dancer, with the intent that it hit and burn her genital area. Kate doesn’t know what to say to this; neither do I. But the darkest and boldest moment in the book comes when Kate, drunk at a party after being plied all night with drinks is taken to a back room and raped. And then, mere pages later, it happens again. The second time, Beaton illustrates her dissociation in a way that could exist only here, in the realm of graphic art, as she leaves her body, lets it happen, then tries to forget.

Beaton’s uncanny skill for capturing faces and expression with a few scratchy strokes pays big dividends as the cast grows. Her environments reflect the sameness and repetition of life on the sands, lulling the reading into the same cyclical rhythms without ever becoming visually boring. And the large illustrations, used sparingly, are both beautiful and imbued with meaning: the aurora borealis, the final group photo.

She leaves the sands only twice. Once to work at the aforementioned museum in Victoria, where we witness the birth of Beaton’s famous horse and, implicitly, Hark a Vagrant, her most famous work. And, at the end, when she returns from the sands and reunites with her family. In town, still with her family, she’s seen by a man she worked with on the sands, who says hello then tells her that, while she was stationed at his site, the men had a bet going about who would sleep with her first. She laughs it off, to the shock of her family, who ask why. And, like this book, she doesn’t offer them any answers.

Hiroshima by John Hersey

A year after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he could once do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty-room hospital it took him many years to acquire, and no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto's church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same.

John Hersey's Hiroshima tells the story of six ordinary Japanese citizens who lived through the bombing of Hiroshima. They are "among the luckiest," because those who were unlucky--nearly 100,000 of them--died in the blast, and many more died of radiation sickness shortly thereafter and were unable to be interviewed. But these "lucky" six had their lives transformed, physically, mentally, utterly, and Hersey's book traces their experiences from the moments of the blast to a year later; an added section provides updates totaling decades, and brings the book, if not the experience, to a close.

In his choice of subjects, Hersey provides an odd symmetry: two priests, two doctors, and two women. The subjects seem to be connected socially or professionally, and the choice of priests seems strange; it makes you wonder whether Hersey thought the Japanese Catholics would be more sympathetic to a Western audience, or whether they were the people who were easiest to talk to. One of the priests, Father Kleinsorge, is a German who loves the Japanese so much he ultimately takes Japanese citizenship and a Japanese name. The priests and the doctors, in the wake of the blast, find themselves in similar roles, compelled to the aid of the survivors in ways that exceed by many degrees their capacity for help. I was moved by the bitter irony of Dr. Sasaki, toiling away to bind the wounds of the patients in his hospital for days, not aware that the rest of the city, too, had been leveled. Dr. Fujii and the other priests make their way to Hiroshima's public garden with hundreds of thousands of others, and the sheer scope of the death and suffering they find there is even more shocking in Hersey's plain and unadorned language.

Hersey seems to make a point of keeping his voice simple, just the facts, bare of anger or despair. Images speak for themselves: "He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glovelike pieces." Another image: six nude, dead men, fallen in unison where they had been trying to push a boat into the water. Another: a group of air defense soldiers, huddled together in blind desperation because they had been looking up at the sky when the blast happened, melting their eyes. The details, Hersey knows, speak for themselves, and they tell a story of monstrous cruelty and human devastation that casts judgment better than judgment can. It was surprising, then, to read about how many of the Japanese survivors expressed indifference toward the ethics of the bomb, or who believed that their suffering was ennobled by their sacrifice for the Emperor. For a long time, the Japanese resisted commemoration or financial support for the hibakusha, the survivors, and resentment laid dormant until the American hydrogen bomb irradiated a Japanese fishing boat a decade later. For me, Hiroshima strengthened a conviction that those involved in the bombs' use should have been put in prison, or, since it's too late for that, hell.

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

She came back into the kitchen fast, to make sure that she caught the toasting cheese in time. And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen, when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock-still in front of her, crouching slightly, and staring straight at her face.

Dorothy is a housewife, the kind of housewife you read about in books. Her marriage to Fred has been a farce for years; they sleep in separate beds and are, as she tells her friend Estelle, too deeply unhappy to get a divorce. Fred clearly has a sidepiece, but who cares. Things look like they're going go on like that, forever, until a giant frog-faced monster shows up at her front door. His name is Larry, and he's escaped from a scientific facility, where he killed his captors to escape and is now on the lam. Dorothy hides him in her spare room (where Fred never even thinks to look) and soon Dorothy is in a full-flung sexual love affair with her amphibian lover.

It sounds so much like The Shape of Water I have to wonder whether the filmmakers were directly inspired by Ingalls' novel. But the flight to freedom that makes up the movie's climax isn't the kind of thing Mrs. Caliban is interested in (though it has its salacious and pulse-quickening moments). It's a domestic novel, a literally housebound novel: Dorothy lives her secret life with Larry while Fred is at work, though sometimes they go out driving at night, with Larry dressed up in a trenchcoat, hat, and gloves. Larry is a funny character, fluent in the English he learned at the lab--Larry is his own chosen name--but unfamiliar with the way that Dorothy's world works. His species approaches love and sex like most animals, without any special attachment to a single partner; there are no marriages, no childhood to speak of. As she teaches him the way of her world, she herself is, in a fashion, relearning it, reabsorbing youthful lessons about the possibility of real intimacy and family-making.

Unlike the fish-man in The Shape of Water, Larry seems to me essentially human. He's something like Mork from Mork and Mindy: a creature with a human's disposition but without knowledge or experience. Such characters bring perspective. And of course they are hated: the radio spreads panic and fear about Larry, with predictably violent results. Leave Larry alone! He just wants to eat avocados and have sex with his human mistress! In the end, of course, Larry and Dorothy cannot be together; the inescapable logic of bourgeois life arrives to smash their relationship. A surprisingly scandalous ending leads to violence and death, and though--spoiler alert--Dorothy is able to help Larry escape into the sea, the last image of the book is its most haunting: Dorothy coming back to the shore every day, hoping he'll return, which he never does.

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.

A couple years ago, journalist Spencer Bokat-Lindell wrote a piece titled “Turducken is Performative” and received, to his surprise, a response from Judith Butler. First, they complimented his article, then very graciously cautioned him against associating “performative” with fake, clarifying that performance can emulate desired realities, and sometimes even bring them about. It’s funny, yes, that one of the most famous scholars in the world would fire off a note about a seemingly trivial misreading, but having read Gender Trouble, it makes sense: the entire work could be flippantly summarized by the famous Vonnegut quote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

Of course, it’s more complex than that. Much, much more complex. Gender Trouble is one of the most difficult texts I’ve ever completed, not due to Butler’s supposedly-impenetrable prose--I found it dense but generally quite lucid--but because it’s such a thorough investigation and dismantling of a number of theories of sex/gender, most notably Lacan and Freud but secondarily Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Wittig, Irigaray, and structuralist theories of sex/gender as a whole. I won’t attempt to summarize their specific arguments, not that I could, except to say that they consistently tug at one particular thread: is there a pre-symbolic/pre-linguistic/ontological foundation to sex/gender, or are they entire constructed through performance of both socially acceptable and culturally heterogeneous acts?

The structuralists and their immediate predecessors--especially Lacan and Freud--say yes. As I understand it, the origin of both sexuality and language can be found in, uh, incest, the original and strongest taboo. Sexuality is a discursive effect of the repression of the Oedipal desire; because they cannot have sex with the parent, their sexual desires are projected outward toward other members of the opposite sex who can temper but not slake the original desire. Language, on the other hand, grows from the pre-verbal cries of desire, transforming, as the child gains distance from the parent, into other symbols and signifiers, and so on.

Even a cursory reading of the above makes clear the foundational binary at play; there are heterosexual men and women who have heterosexual desires, there are heterosexual men and women who have homosexual desires (caused by the much rarer Reverse Oedipus, really). Ultimately all these desires must either be subsumed in (ersatz?) heterosexual acts or suppressed entirely, because the only alternative is literally madness.

Yeah.

While this may look regressive, the binary is equally strong even in some radical feminist approaches to gender. Wittig, the mother of political lesbianism, makes great headway at dismantling the necessity of heterosexuality but only imagines a wholesale rejection of opposite-sex acts as a response, finally serving only to further establish rejection of heterosexuality as the basis of a new binary, and starting the cycle again. Even Foucault, the thinker Butler seems most in sync with, envisions sex/gender primarily as the abolishment of all sexual identity, resulting in some sort of post-gender paradise, perhaps a nice idea but not one that seems coherent with the way people are.

Butler, on the other hand, thinks bigger. Her ideas are perhaps not as shocking as they once were--though who can say, as we live through Gay Panic 2.0--but it’s still bracing, in 2023, to read about the radical deconstruction and reconstruction of sexual and gender identity in such stark (such as it is) language. A section about how sex is as socially constructed as gender, supported by Foucault’s ideas of gender as a construct of social control, was especially thought-provoking, as it posits that splitting humanity into a binary based on sexual anatomy is just as arbitrary (and no less non-binary) than divisions based on hair color, skeletal structure, or whether one has an innie or an outie--that is, unless the primary purpose of your society is to reproduce the family structure as a means of consolidating power. Then it makes perfect sense to keep the women pregnant in the kitchen while the men go out hunting and gathering and waging war.

A sense of “there is no there there” pervades the last section of the work, in which performativity is presented in its full (at the time) academic form. As I understand it (and as Butler helpfully summarized in her Turducken letter), performance can be oppressive, mandated one’s place in the cultural hierarchy. But they can also be liberative, joyful, constructive, as in a drag show where the absurdities and disjunctions of sex and gender identity are banged together until they break (I understand why drag shows scare conservatives so much now). But even performance is circumscribed by cultural laws and expectations, as Butler discusses below:

The subject is not determined by the rules because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both concerns itself and endorses its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; agency then is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition. If the rules governing signification not only restrict but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, then it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible.

The above was like a light at the end of the tunnel after two hundred pages of theories that presented sex and gender as either immutable, posited a post-patriarchal society that still used the binary as a load-bearing wall, or critiques that identified problems but seemingly offered no way forward. The answer, Butler seems to say, is to do what we can, to make small changes in the acts of repetition that, after all, form us and the society we live in, until finally we can look around and see that things have changed in meaningful, liberating ways.

On a personal level, a few years ago, I thought my kids would be growing up in a world where aggressive queerphobia was verboten; seeing it make a comeback has been dispiriting in a way I can't describe. In a time when conservatives at home and abroad are targeting sexual minorities, where trans high schoolers are being stabbed to death, where men kill trans women after sex, Gender Trouble is necessary, a dense, difficult work that still sounds like the future. May the future get here soon.

Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono

The new Commandant needs a boy. Father Vandermayer told me to report to the Residence tomorrow. I am glad because I have not been able to bear life at the Mission since Father Gilbert died. Of course it is a good riddance for Father Vandermayer as well.

I shall be the Chief European's boy. The dog of the King is the King of dogs.

A Cameroonian is summoned to the bedside of a fellow countryman, dying in Equatorial Guinea. "What are we blackmen," the dying man says to the other, "who call ourselves French?" When he dies, the man reads his notebook journals, which tell the whole of his tragic story: the dead man, Toundi, fled his parents to become the servant to a white priest, believing in the superiority of French culture and religion. When the priest died suddenly, he became servant to the Commandant, who treated him with contempt and suspicion.

Toundi's story is a familiar colonial one: the way racism becomes internalized, and the disillusionment that follows on the heels of colonizer cruelty. Toundi is a good servant, conscientious and discreet, but it doesn't matter, because it is in the nature of the Commandant to be cruel. He doesn't want a good servant, actually: he wants a servant he can beat and upbraid, and if Toundi refuses to be that servant, he will beat him and upbraid him all the same. Toundi falls in love with the Commandant's wife when she arrives at the compound, but she turns out to be even worse. She carries on an affair with one of the Commandant's underlings, and treats Toundi poorly though a single word from him would betray their secret. Of course, when the Commandant does discover the affair, he punished Toundi for the imagined offense of being a go-between.

Houseboy is, like Toundi, a rather passive figure: Toundi is so obedient that the book has little narrative energy. The Commandant is cruel; his wife is cruel; Toundi cultivates a mindset that lives beyond and apart from their hatred toward him, or even their need of him. He becomes disillusioned, but circumstances will not allow him to act on disillusionment, though what one really desires is for him to "misplace" one of M. Moreau's letters to the Commandant's wife one day. Instead, he becomes even more the victim, accused by the French police of abetting a woman who has run away with her master's money. In another life, Toundi and the woman Sophie might have been lovers, but in this one she is repulsed by his obeisance, and his obeisance prevents him from becoming her accomplice--though that hardly matters to the police. They torture him until he makes an escape, limping off to Spanish Guinea where, as we know, he shortly dies.

Houseboy is wry, mocking, but at its heart is an essential bitterness: if Toundi had been a little wiser, had played his masters a little more artfully, he might have been better off. But European colonialism requires a subject to be disciplined, and it always begins, we learn, with the close at hand. The Commandant and his wife share every vice, from adultery to malice to greed, but by projecting these evils onto their houseboy, they are able at last to put aside their differences.

Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan

A lot of my friends have gotten killed. A lot of them have steel rods down their spines. One guy lot his leg. He was a jockey who lost his leg, but he'd still gallop horses and pony them to the gate. Sometimes his fake leg would fall off when he was riding and someone had to run out and pick it up for him.

There's a lot of pain and pill abuse. You learn some of them are drunks. They show up to hot walk and they're drunk. When they say they're hungry, you don't give them money. You take them to get a bite instead.

Kathryn Scanlan's Kick the Latch is the story of a horse trainer named Sonia. Sonia grows up with a love for horses and wants to be a jockey, but she's too tall; as a child, she stacks books on her head to keep her from growing. She becomes a successful trainer, working mostly at low-rent tracks, which are worlds away from the mint juleps and fancy hats of the Kentucky Derby. It's a hard life: back-breaking and highly physical. The "backside" of the tracks are little universes of their own, places where people spend all their time because of the grueling nature of the job, and they have their own small and large human dramas. It's a tough place for women, and Sonia is belittled and doubted, and once, raped. But she's good at what she does.

Kick the Latch is based, the afterword notes, on a series of interviews with the real "Sonia," but the result is a fictional version of the real person's life. If there are seams between reality and fiction, they don't show: Scanlan captures the earthy and reflective voice of Sonia; each vignette sounds like what it is, a story told over the phone. As a result, Kick the Latch has a powerful verisimilitude. You're convinced by the specificity of the detail, the truth of the language: the Bowie Clay and leg paint, the doping, the untrustworthy jockeys who shock their horses with electrical devices to give them an edge, the horrible accidents that leave some jockeys and trainers wrecked or paralyzed. It's a convincing portrait of a person in an unglamorous profession; sometimes there's nothing more captivating than a portrait of a person who is utterly devoted to some niche and invisible task.

Sonia's life is long and varied. Her successes are bringing horses that no one believed in into the winner's circles. The challenges are tough--the physical labor, the instability of track life--and she ends up getting seriously injured and going into a coma. When she emerges, she has to give up the life she's loved. For a while she takes a position as a groomer with more expensive, Derby-bound stables, but the rigidity and absurdity of the high-stakes world is distasteful. She leaves horses entirely and takes a job as a prison warden, which is, as you might expect, no easier for women. The parallels between the two jobs--the hard hours, the detailed care required toward captive creatures, the way those creatures are devalued and abused, the sexism--are there, but never overdone; Sonia's life never becomes a metaphor or an allegory. She is only what she is: dedicated, strong, even in a small way, heroic.

Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and Depraved of Chornobyl by Markiyan Kamysh

The Dead City. Dead, oh yes,. Twice dead. For the second time, with the emergence of thousands of photos and the shitty lines of official tours. Bored hipsters shot Prypyat dead with their expensive cameras; rich girls from the capital soiled the rotten couches with their tattooed backs and mapped every nook of the terra incognita on Instagram. The sense of mystery has been lost; it has escaped, vanished in the web. The aura of mysticism was scattered like ash in all directions, flying through the Internet byways to distant foreign lands. After that, abandoned apartments can’t be scary.

I’m not sure what I expected from this book, exactly. Based on the title, I’d anticipated a traditional travelogue, where a guy goes someplace unfamiliar, meets some people, talks to them, writes a little about the history of such and such a place, tells about some of their experiences, finds a good place to wrap it up, and sends in the manuscript. 

In fact, Kamysh’s book is almost the exact opposite. Kamysh is intimately familiar with Chornobyl, ”the Zone”. His father was a liquidator, one of the men who dealt with the fallout from the Chornobyl explosion, and Kamysh himself has spent large swathes of his adult life making trips in and out of the Zone, which is illegal, camping in abandoned houses, having romantic rendezvous in rotting villages, drinking irradiated water, spending time with the weirdos and degenerates who populate the Zone. There’s very little third person dialogue; Kamysh generally narrates his encounters himself, from the police to the tourists who don’t know what they’re getting into, to the taxi driver who made the 3 hour drive to the edge of the Zone until the shuttle came. There’s not much history here either, not much talk about a pre-explosion Zone.

What we’re left with is a very personal work, punkish and blase about how fucked up it is to visit the Zone over and over, a recounting of Kamysh’s various misadventures that at first seems to come from a defensive posture but which eventually reveals itself to be more complex, and more concrete. Kamysh’s identity is tied up with the Zone in ways he can’t fully explain himself. At times, he talks about it like an addiction, about the cycle of visiting, exploring, getting lost in the snow or a flood or cornered by wolves, surviving, heading home and thinking “never again” and then finding himself sitting in his apartment a week later, trying to schedule another trip. Like an addict, Kamysh seeks out the next high, taking less supplies, heading further in, staying longer. He’s also pretty sure it’s going to kill him, writing about a future where he and the other Zone addicts sit together in a cancer ward, swapping stories.

Ultimately though, the sadness that pervades the book isn’t about the addiction--which, in spite of what I wrote above, actually seems like a precious and good thing in Kamysh’s telling--but about a loss of the past, a loss both physical, as the Zone is slowly decimated by nature and by the government, and metaphysical, as the Zone is transformed from a terrifying mystery to a commodified tourist trap. I couldn’t help but think of DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America, as the Zone turns into a decontextualized postcard. And what happens to the people who need the Zone, who identify a part of themselves with it? Perhaps like the utopian city it once represented, they’re doomed to be lost, destroyed by forces beyond their control. But perhaps not entirely. Kamysh writes,  as he lights a candle in an abandoned church:

Our memories of our loved ones who are no longer with us fly away with its smoke--up to the church dome, to the bees and higher, through the cracks in the dome. The smoke will fly up into the sky; tears will drop on the hardwood floor. The candle will burn out, and I’ll forget everything. Farewell.

This church is dear to me, and I believe that out of all the things in the Zone, it’s the only one with a future, with its patch of hope, sentimentality, and infinitely dazzling sunrays rushing in every morning when I open the heavy gate and light fills a semi-dark vestibule.

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning, our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and ear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride.

David is an American in Paris: not rich, perhaps, but of the kind of class where it's typical to take the Grand Tour before returning to the States to begin a real life. He has a girlfriend, Hella, who's off in Spain thinking things over, leaving David to his friends, which consist mostly of older gay libertines. David himself once had an affair with a boy, but it left him so confused and ashamed he cut his then-friend from his life, and though he insists to men like Jacques and Guillaume that he is straight, a young bartender named Giovanni catches his eye, and their instant attraction puts the lie to all of David's claims. David begins a passionate affair with tempestuous Giovanni, even moving into his room, a dirty closet on the edge of Paris. The room becomes the novel's controlling symbol, a space of intense intimacy, beset by chaos, cut off from the world.

When Giovanni's Room begins, the affair has already ended, and David is waiting in the south of France to hear about Giovanni's execution by guillotine. Until the novel's end, we don't know what it is Giovanni has done to deserve this fate, but we understand it has something to do with David's ultimate rejection and abandonment of him. Of course, Giovanni's room is not the world, and David has a life, and a girlfriend, then fiancee, outside of it. But it's only in Giovanni's room that David can truly be real, that "real world" outside is really a falsehood, whether David is able to admit it to himself or not. Giovanni's Room is a novel about repression, and the power the social world has even over our most inner lives. Yes, David betrays Giovanni--but what world is possible where David does not? Jacques, David's older gay friend, and even sinister bar-owner Guillaume, give a glimpse of David's future, one in which he's not able to accept his sexuality until it's soured and curdled inside of him.

It took me a long time to get to Giovanni's Room. I read Go Tell It On the Mountain, which I didn't like: too abstract, too melodramatic, too internal. I thought, well, he must be one of those guys that's an amazing essayist who doesn't write fiction very well. So I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Giovanni's Room. Baldwin's long, stacked sentences bring out a lyric beauty in David's devastation, and the characters, Giovanni especially, are lively and vivid. There's a slightly antiquated quality to it that reminds me of an author I can't quite identify. At times I thought it was Fitzgerald, and at other times Forster--not even because of the gay-love-across-class-lines plot that resembles that of Forster's own doomed Maurice.

To have published a book like Giovanni's Room in 1956 seems like an act of suicide, or madness. Perhaps we've come some way since then. But it's hard not to wonder, in 2023, how many Davids are out there, how many Giovannis, gay or perhaps trans women and men, whose lives are contained in their little rooms because there's no place for them.

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Stand against that tree, he said, a rowan not much taller than me, the trunk against which I leant my forehead no wider than my face, and as his arm rose and swung and rose again, as the belt sang through the sunny air, I thought hard about the tree between my hands, about the cells in its leaves photosynthesizing the afternoon sun, about the berries ripening hour by hour, the impalpable pulse of sap under my palms, the reach of roots below my feet and deep into the earth. It went on longer than usual, as if the open air invigorated him, as if he liked the setting. I thought about the leather of his belt, the animal from whose skin it was made, about the sensations that skin had known before the fear and pain of the end. Itching, scratching, wind and rain and sun. About the flaying, the tanning. Pick up those rabbits, he said when he had finished, and don't let me ever catch you stripping again, lying around naked liked that, waiting for one of those lads, I'd say, and don't you imagine I won't do this as often as it takes, as long as you're living under my roof you'll behave yourself or else, do you understand.

Silvie, her father, and her mother are participating in an archeological experiment: they are living as ancient Britons did in rural Northumberland. They wear uncomfortable tunics, sleep in a communal hot, and eat only what they can hunt or forage. There are others taking part, grad students in archeology and their professor. Silvie's father is a bus driver, but he knows as much or more about the ancient Britons than any of them; he has inveigled his way into the experiment, somehow, and relishes it more than any. For him, it is a return to a simpler way of living that has been lost, supplanted by modern trash, modern mores. He rules his wife and daughter strictly and violently; Iron Age women who did not do as the should--foraging, washing, or simply heeding their male leaders--would not live long. While none of the other participants are watching, he beats Silvie cruelly, as he does at home.

Silvie, as many victims of abuse do, rationalizes her father's behavior. She, too, is knowledgeable about plants, can make fires and find her way in a forest; her father has after all taught her such self-sufficiency. But she soon comes to identify with bog people, the mummified corpses of Iron Age Britons sacrificed for unclear purposes to the bog's propitiatory powers They are often young women, who are unearthed with their eyes still blindfolded and their hands still tied, even after two thousand years. Their image moves from the symbolic to the literal: toward the end of the novella, Silvie's father and the professor persuade her to let them tie her up and perform a sacrifice. It's just pretend, they say, an exercise, to explore what the ancient Britons might have been experiencing, but as Silvie has seen, such games can quickly become serious.

Here's one truth I see at the heart of Ghost Wall: those RETVRN-type trads you see all over the internet conceal an atavistic need for violence and control. Those who fetishize the past often do so not out of a desire for simplicity, but a yearning for what they consider lost structures of hierarchical control. Silvie's father is violent and cruel, and longs for a social context that will excuse, even justify, his violence. Against the forces of atavism is Mollie, a student on whom Silvie nurses a painful crush. (Silvie's dad's assumption that, when he discovers her bathing naked in a creek, she is waiting for one of the male students betrays a blinkered sense of possibility that reveals the rigidity of his mind.) Mollie sneaks out at night to see boys in town, eat ice cream, or just take a shower. It's Mollie that presses Silvie to recognize that her father is mistreating her, Mollie who is the image of the modern world, which, for all its faults, has at least embraced the idea that physical abuse is morally outrageous.

Ghost Wall asks: when we say things used to be better, what do we really mean? What are we refusing when we refuse to live in the modern world? Few of us, perhaps, go back as far as the Celts and the Picts, but attitudes like Silvie's dad's are not uncommon. Ghost Wall is even sympathetic to such thinking--without it, it's impossible to imagine Silvie's empathy with the luckless victims of the bog--but it shows the dangerous rottenness of those who only dream of turning back the clock.

Cronopios and Famas by Julio Cortazar

Death stands there in the background, but don't be afraid. Hold the watch down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that burgeon the air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell of bread.

What did you expect, what more do you want? Quickly strap it to your wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the watch's veins, cankering the cold blood and its tiny rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant.

Julio Cortazar's pieces collected under the title "The Instruction Manual" are one of my favorite creative writing prompts. Like "How to Wind a Watch" above, they employ the structures of an instruction manual with mordant humor and the language of profound things. Sometimes they are extended jokes, like "How to Climb a Staircase"; sometimes, like "How to Kill Ants in Rome," they are absurdist vignettes. Students pick up quickly on how Cortazar uses the structure to ground his more fantastical images in the everyday, and they're able to make passing imitations without much study--which I think is a testament to how well the gimmick works. But until now, I'd never read the collection, Cronopios and Famas, of which "The Instruction Manual" is a part.

Cronopios has four parts; "The Instruction Manual" is first. It's followed by "Unusual Occupations," a series of scenes about a strange family who build a gallows in their yard, take over the post office and tar and feather the mail, keep a tiger. The third, "Unstable Stuff," is a hodge-podge of unrelated shorts, which showcase Cortazar at his most experimental. Some work, and others are--rarely--a little too one-note.

The final section is the title section, "Cronopios and Famas," about the title--people? Figures? Animals? Cortazar never stops to define the neologisms; we learn little about what they refer to except that cronopios tend to be wet, and green. By their interactions we begin to learn their characters: the famas are outgoing and rigid, the cronopios hapless but sensitive. They are joined by a third group, the cruel esperanzas, doing things like getting mad at famas for dancing in one way rather than another. What emerges from these pieces is a sense of a caste system, in which people or things are slotted into narrow social roles by their disposition; there are echoes, perhaps, of the racial classifications you see in fantasy novels--proud elves, grumpy dwarves, wise wizards.

One might build a considerable interpretive apparatus on the backs of these short tales of cronopios and famas--something about social conditioning, or human psychology, or something like that. But to do that would risk missing how fun these stories are, how playfully game-like an uninhibited. It might turn you into a fama--or worse, an esperanza.

Ice by Anna Kavan

I thought of the ice moving across the world, casting its shadow of creeping death. Ice cliffs boomed in my dreams, indescribable explosions thundered and boomed, icebergs crashed, hurled huge boulders into the sky like rockets. Dazzling ice stars bombarded the world with rays, which splintered and penetrated the earth, filling earth's core with their deadly coldness, reinforcing the cold of the advancing ice. And always, on the surface, the indestructible ice-mass was moving forward, implacably destroying all life. I felt a fearful sense of pressure and urgency, there was no time to lose, I was wasting time; it was a race between me and the ice.

It would flatten Anna Kavan's sci-fi-dreamscape Ice, and rob it of its power, to summarize it, so don't read this paragraph: against the backdrop of worldwide war and a rapidly freezing world, an unnamed man searches for an unnamed girl. He describes her as fragile and pale; he worries that she will be unable to fend for herself in the ruined world, and indeed she is described as having a learned helplessness. She's at the mercy of a sinister figure called the warden, who looms large in the planet's war, and who is possessive as the narrator is of her. He races to find her, and does, and then lets her go again, only for the cycle to begin again.

Like I said, that summary entirely fails to suggest the experience of reading Ice. It has been called a science fiction book, but it seems more to me to make gestures toward science fiction: the rapidly advancing ice sheet that crushes everything in it path emerges not from the logic of science but the logic of dreams. Like in dreams, knowledge is transmitted without medium; the narrator doesn't need to pass by the ice sheet to see it, or even learn about it, he only needs to tell us about it--and war and social upheaval get the same treatment.

The point-of-view changes without notice or fanfare; from the narrator's to the warden's to an omniscient third person's. Kavan deftly uses these POV shifts to suggest an overlap between the narrator and the warden, who are sometimes enemies and sometimes very possibly the same person. Even basic storytelling logic is interrupted: in several scenes, the girl dies, and in the next the narrator is hunting for her again. Are these merely dreams or visions? It's a trick question, the whole book is a dream, the whole book is a vision. Ice is a book that should not work, and it's greatest achievement is that it does. It's one of those books that makes you think, I didn't know you could do that. It flies in the face of every convention, and attempts to slot it into genre are sure to fail. 

It seems to me that Ice speaks to us today with a kind of prophetic vision of climate change. Here the temperature is going down, not up, but the novel captures the kind of hallucinatory existence that must accompany the end of the world. Like Joy Williams' Harrow, it's a book that understands old forms will never be able to tell the story of the world's end. And there's something familiar in the ambiguous nature of the narrator, who sometimes positions himself as the girl's savior and sometimes as her torturer, himself as implacable and unstoppable as that sheet of ice. He is implicated with it: "I could not remain isolated from the rest of the world," he writes, "I had to take an active part in whatever was going on." His dogged pursuit of the girl, too, speaks of the relentless patterns of abuse disguised as masculine care.

Some have said, apparently, that the novel is an allegory for Kavan's heroin addiction. Maybe so. I can see it in the book's hallucinatory cycles, and the fear of being pursued by something you can't fend off, or pursuing something you can't tear yourself away from. But addiction is such a private disaster, one that draws one inward, toward collapse. But such inward, psychological readings seem too small for Ice, which says quite plainly: the crushing ice is coming for everyone.

Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg

I don’t know how to explain why I feel more alone now. Maybe it was because we shared memories. Memories only he and I knew, even though we never spoke of them when we met. I realize now it didn’t matter that we didn’t talk about them. They were a presence in the hours we spent together at Cafe Canova, those oppressive, never ending hours. They weren’t happy memories because your father and I were never happy together. Even if we had been briefly and occasionally happy, everything got sullied, ripped up, and destroyed. But people don’t love each other only for happy memories. At a certain point in life, you realize that you just love the memories.

Like Waiting for Godot, Happiness as Such revolves around an absence, really a pair of absences--the physical absence of exiled son Michele and the metaphysical absence of the elusive happiness of the title. The main characters, like Michele’s mother Adriana in the excerpt above, try to articulate something about both absences, what they mean, what they look like, what it would mean if they were present. But the “as such” in the title is a guiding principle here--no one gets much closer than a facsimile of either, though sometimes it’s enough for them.

Michele, pursued by the authorities for his involvement in revolutionary activities, has left Italy, and in his wake his family--especially mother Adriana and sister Angelica--and his friends--maybe-baby-mama Mara and bestie-and-possibly-gay-lover Osvaldo--are working to clean up the mess he’s left behind. Much of the book is either epistolary, comprised of letters between those left in Italy and Michele, or dialogue. There’s no direct speech from Michele, but most of the other characters spend time conversing, often about where, exactly, Mara and her baby are going to stay, whether or not Osvaldo is gay and if he was Michele’s lover, and what, exactly, is going to be done with the property belonging to Adriana’s recently deceased husband, especially the unfinished tower that represents the ways the various relationships in the book have been left permanently unresolved by the father’s death and Michele’s absence.

Michele himself doesn’t come off so well, his political involvements facile and his actions directed only at what will bring him the most short-term happiness--that word again. He won’t come to his father’s funeral, won’t send more than cursory responses to his mother’s letters, won’t help Mara with the baby, won’t tell the family what to do with the tower which was actually bequeathed to him. Instead his letters are filled with excuses, evasions, grand statements of future plans that come to nothing, requests for pretentious books. He’s an infuriating character, made worse by the love that the closeted Osvaldo has for him, love that’s exploited so Michele’s every whim can be met.

In the end (SPOILER), Michele is killed during a protest in Bruges, cutting short all the stories being told here. The tower is sold, unfinished, to developers, and the people who’ve revolved around Michele find themselves unmoored, uncertain what to do next. But they talk, and talk, and talk. “You can get used to anything when there’s nothing else left.” Angelica says, and it’s easy to imagine these people moving on, recentering their lives on something besides the void that was Michelle.

Voices Made Night by Mia Couto

Suddenly, the ox exploded. It burst without so much as a moo. In the surrounding grass a rain of chunks and slices fell, as if the fruit and leaves of the ox. Its flesh turned into red butterflies. Its bones were scattered coins. Its horns were caught in some branches, swinging to and fro, imitating life in the invisibility of the wind.

One of my favorite stories from Mozambican writer Mia Couto's collection Voices Made Night is "The Girl with a Twisted Future": a poor man hears of a contortionist whose snake-like transformations attract gawkers from miles around, all willing to pay for the privilege of witnessing these oddities. The poor man instructs his daughter to begin practicing to be a contortionist, too; at night he straps her to a curved barrel so that her bones and spine will soften. It doesn't work, of course; the daughter becomes crippled and sick. When he brings her to see the contortionist's manager at last, he's told that contortionism is no longer the thing--what people want to see are steel teeth that can bite through anything. The poor man's schemes begin again, but his daughter's body is too ruined to match them.

The protagonist of Couto's stories are all like this poor man: dreamers made desperate for poverty, looking to make ends meet in absurd and uncanny ways. In "The Whales of Quissico," a man forsakes his life to go to the sea where he's been told beached whales will deposit whatever you wish for from their mouths. In "The Day Mabata-bata Exploded," an indentured cowherd runs from his boss because his herd's bull is exploded by the bird of lightning. In the first story, "The Fire," a man begins to dig his wife's grave before her death, because he's afraid he won't be able to afford a spade later, but the digging brings on an episode of fever that kills him instead. (The moments where he insists that his wife get in her grave before he dies, so that he can get his money's worth, speak to the viciousness poverty inculcates.)

Couto's stories have the air of fables or fairytales. Magical realism is often revealed as falsehoods: the storied whales are actually enemy submarines; the bird of lightning is a landmine. In "The Tale of the Two Who Returned From the Dead," two men who make their way back to their village after being carried away in a flood are informed that they cannot be accepted back into their village, because they have been declared legally dead and therefore must be ghosts. In "The Talking Raven's Last Warning," a raven tells people's fortunes, but only in a language its owner can hear. For Couto, magical realism is the language of poor men's dreams; impossible dreams that take impossible forms. Yet dreams have their power, too, as Couto shows in "The Ex-Future Priest and His Would-be Widow," about a woman who uses witchcraft to force her cold husband to please her sexually--though he can only do so while they are both dreaming.

These stories are small but powerful, and though they are quite fable-like, they avoid easy morals and clean lines; they eschew happy endings, and clear endings at all. It's easy to see why Couto's name comes up every year when Nobel Prize season rolls around. Among other things, these stories point toward the complex realities of a multiracial Mozambique, reeling from the history of Portuguese colonialism and the dictatorship of Salazar. I enjoyed them a lot.

With the addition of Mozambique, my "countries read" list is up to 75!

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

War disarms? War takes away hope and meaning, makes everything grey, and sucks life out of the city and the street, leaving nothing?

What do you mean? War is a great help for us. It provides us distraction from ourselves. It absolves us from seeing ourselves close up. It's been some time now that we've been peeking into ourselves through war only.

In one story from Ukrainian writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets' Lucky Breaks, "The Transformations," a woman named Olga makes things transform: a pot of kasha becomes a flower; a tablespoon becomes an Easter egg. Sometimes Olga transforms objects intentionally and sometimes by accident, sometimes her powers fail her. These transformations have something to do with Kyiv in the summer months, when it "empties out"; Kyiv, too, is liable to be transformed. Are Olga's transformations merely a kind of change, or a disappearance--what happened to the kasha and the tablespoon anyway? Are they gone, or merely different? Could Olga's transformations represent the power of war to transfigure and erase--the war that rages in the distant provinces of Donbas and Donetsk? Or might we read Olga's powers as a hopeful gesture, of an incipient ability to make the world into what one wishes?

As Brent noted in his review, Lucky Breaks is all about disappearances, about refugees. Women disappear from their jobs and then reappear later as if nothing is happened; they are taken away because they are found standing in the middle of street screaming. The grand motions of war and dispossession, for Beloruts, find expression in small things: the discarded umbrella that a woman chastises as if it were a person, the mitts of the witch who catches babies in them, and who works other kinds of evil magic on her small town. Nearly all of the characters are women, and they live small women's lives. They are cosmetologists and florists, and the pointed ordinariness of their lives is not erased by the emergence of small and fantastic things, curses and omens, bits of magical realism that reflect, perhaps, the strangeness of life during wartime.

To be honest, I didn't connect much with Lucky Breaks. I liked a few of the stories, like "The Transformations," and another about a perpetually sick woman who is unable to handle the stress of being suddenly and consistently well. Others were enigmatic, too shapeless or slight, to hold my attention, but if I'm telling the truth, I probably ought to have read them at a time when I was feeling less sleepy. The photographs that appear throughout its pages connected for me not at all. More knowledge of the specifics of the war in Ukraine might have helped, too, but there is still quite a power in seeing the familiar names of the nightly news--Kharkiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia--emerge as real places from which real people emerge, or disappear.

This is the first book I've ever read from Ukraine--which brings my "countries read" list up to 74.

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

How old was your brother?

Twenty-one.

Didnt he have girlfriends?

He tried. It never came to anything. I wasnt jealous. I wanted him to see other girls. I wanted him to see the truth of his situation.

That he was in love with you.

Yes. Bone of his bone. Too bad. We were like the last on earth. We could choose to join the beliefs and practices of the millions of dead beneath our feet or we could begin again. Did he really have to think about it? Why should I have no one? Why should he? I told him that I'd no way even to know if there was justice in my heart if I had no one to love and love me. You cannot credit yourself with a truth that has no resonance. Where is the reflection of your worth? And who will speak for you when you are dead?

Alicia Western is an outlier: a brilliant mathematician, a musician of genius--though not top ten in the world, sadly--and beautiful to boot. But her life is wrecked: bereft at the apparent loss of her brother, lying in a coma in France, she returns to Stella Maris, a mental institution in Wisconsin where she's committed herself twice before. It seems unlikely that it will be able to give her what she's looking for, even if she knew what that was. Stella Maris takes the form of a long dialogue between Alicia and a doctor at the institution.

Some of the things she tells him we know already, if we've read The Passenger, the "first" of the two companion novels McCarthy released last year: Alicia has a mathematical mind that rivals only that of super-genius Alexander Grothendieck, her idol; greater than even her brother, who is also a kind of genius. We know that she is in love with her brother, and feels no compunction about the incest taboo. We know that she is harried by visions of a Vaudevillian dwarf she calls the Thalidomide Kid and his band of performers. If we have read The Passenger, we know some things also that Alicia and Dr. Cohen do not yet know: that Alicia will commit suicide, that Bobby will wake up from his coma. But Stella Maris signals to the reader how badly Alicia's voice--clever, cruel, desperate--was missing from that other novel. We hear more about the mathematics that Bobby, turned deep sea salvager, only touches on, and we learn the depth of Alicia's despair.

All that math stuff, is there something to it, or is it only the rendition of a dilettante and wordcel? It certainly doesn't have the ring of mathematical perception that, say, Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World does, but as a dilettante of a much higher order I suppose it's not for me to say. (Does it keep McCarthy up at night to think his are the second and third best books of the past few years to feature Grothendieck?) For McCarthy, who recently wrote about the theory that language developed as a kind of parasite--a claim repeated by Alicia in Stella Maris--math is a way of searching for the elusive heart of reality, purer than words, and yet Alicia seems unconvinced that numbers are any more "real" than words.

After Godel, all mathematicians must face the reality that even mathematics cannot describe the world with accuracy and wholeness; what Stella Maris suggests, in typical McCarthy fashion, is that this is perhaps a lesser horror than what we would find if we were able to see and describe the world. Alicia tells Dr. Cohen of her childhood vision of "the Archatron," a malicious figure who lives in a realer world behind gates of falsehoods. (To call this gnostic, like much of McCarthy's worldview, is a cliche that remains frustratingly accurate.) She insists over and over that the Kid has his own kind of reality and does not emerge from within her; does he come from somewhere like the Archatron's realm?

It strikes me that Stella Maris is, on some level, about the relationship between genius and non-genius. McCarthy's spent the last couple decades hanging out among professional atom-smashers in New Mexico, and presumably he knows a thing or two about geniuses and what they are like. Alicia's knowledge is like a curse, partially because she perceives more than others, and partially because she understands the limits of her own perception better than anyone else can. She returns to Stella Maris looking for someone, perhaps, to talk to, and though Dr. Cohen is insightful and articulate--McCarthy does well to give him a life of his own, and make him something more than a Socratic prompter, though not much more--they both he will never wholly understand what he has to tell him. It's the reason she lusts for her brother; he's the only person in the world that shares her intellectual atmosphere. When they are together, she reasons, they have moved into a place beyond taboo, beyond society. The fact that he is a little less genius than she may account for his reluctance to follow her into that place. Though Stella Maris has not been all that well received, it seems to me that making Alicia's genius believable is no small authorial feat.

On its own, Stella Maris is--well, not bad, but unsatisfying. It's slight, underdone; constricted by the need to remain in dialogue. Sometimes, when Alicia stops talking like Alicia and starts talking like Cormac, the seams show. But at the same time, it's almost impossible to imagine it being incorporated into The Passenger without making it unbalanced or redundant. In the end, the double novel seems to have been the right choice. The Passenger speaks to Stella Maris and Stella Maris speaks back to The Passenger. I said I think that we'd be grappling with The Passenger for a long time, and while I can't say that I think Stella Maris is a great novel, I don't think it'll be jettisoned, because together the two books seem more to me than the sum of their wholes.

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

Here, where I live now, nobody understands any of it. There’s no one I can explain to what it’s like for the lights to go out every day in a small village. How we sat around as if inside a bunker, warning ourselves by a bonfire when we managed to light one. How we were next to one another knowing that, in time, all of us would go our separate ways. We huddled against each other by the fire, but later we forgot who we sat next to, what kind of children they were, what kind of people.

To be a refugee is to live in fear of disappearance. Writer after writer--Kundera, Hrabal, Sam--speak at length about the disappearances around them, whether people, buildings, ideals, even history itself. To be displaced is to be reshaped against your will, and the ultimate act of resistance, futile as it may be, is to resist this involuntary transformation, to build new shrines, find new ways to communicate, preserve the real history by scratching it into stone, if necessary.

Not all of the people in Belorusets’ book--is it a novel, a short story collection, an experimental work?--are refugees, but all of them have found themselves displaced, either in their home country of Ukraine or out of it, by the seemingly endless aggression of the empire-mad leaders of their neighbor, Russia. Of course, everyone is talking about Ukraine now, with the current invasion ongoing, but there aren’t many dates here, a sobering reminder that what’s happening now has happened before, and will likely happen again.

The residents “interviewed” here, in these short, fictional pieces, don’t talk much about the big picture, about the endless loop of siege and unsettling peace. They’re focused on preserving what they can, or at least surviving whatever’s next. An umbrella, a trip to the cosmetologist, a meal around a campfire, a romantic liaison (one that might include the unnamed interviewer). Some of the tales here are fanciful, like the woman who can change herself into a variety of inanimate objects, or the much-feared neighborhood witch, but most are grounded, first person narratives of normal people, mostly women, caught in the endless churn of displacement.

In addition to the interviews and the somewhat obscure framing story, there are also photographs here, images that chronicle a city in decay. There are two or three sequences, and it’s often difficult to know which series each photo belongs to, by design. Sometimes even what’s depicted isn’t entirely clear--is this one a man napping in a field or a dead body?--and in that sense, the photos serve both to disorient the reader and ambiguate the interviews themselves. While the introduction, written in character by the narrator, claims there is no connection between the stories and the images, the brain makes connections anyway, places this smiling man in this sad story, this dilapidated building in this park. The stories and images both refuse closure. They stand as a concrete witness to experiences, to times, that may well disappear, be rewritten, presented with the full realization of their inability to say just what they mean.

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock

Once the first shocks of invasion were past, the Native men (and occasionally women) who crossed the Atlantic for political purposes were ordinarily not isolated pioneers striking out into the unknown. They were sophisticated diplomats, aware of the nuances of what we would all international law (the foundations of which were being laid in this period, often in response to the challenges of indigenous diplomacy), and able to draw on the experience and support of previous travellers, legal advocates and colonial officials.

I'm looking forward to when, in a couple weeks, my friends and I return to Ocracoke Island in North Carolina, where we've been going every February for over a decade. The island is already rich with history--it was the favorite haunt of Blackbeard--but when I go this time, I'll be thinking of a story Caroline Dodds Pennock tells in her history On Savage Shores: Manteo and Wanchese, two Croatan men who had traveled to England in the late 16th century to meet Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I, were on their way home when, off the shore of Ocracoke, then called Wococon, their ship ran aground and begun to sink. "We can only imagine the feelings of Manteo and Wanchese," Pennock writes, "after nearly a year away, fearing that they would die only metres from the soil of their homeland."

Today, Manteo and Wanchese are the names of the two towns on Roanoke island: Manteo "nicer" and Wanchese, perhaps, more "rustic." There's something in that that matches the separate paths of their lives; Manteo stayed loyal to the English and their interests in the New World, whereas Wanchese turned against the English and fomented resistance among the Croatan. What must have Wanchese seen in England that turned him against his former friends? Was it, like a Powhatan man who accompanied Matoaka (Pocahontas) on her journey, that he was shocked by the abundance of corn and wheat among the English who putatively had arrived in North America looking for resources? Or, as many other Indigenous sources report on their sojourns, was he aghast at the rampant inequality among Europeans? Or was he simply feeling jealous of the greater prestige given to Manteo who--as I did not know, despite having learned all about Manteo and Wanchese as a kid in North Carolina--helped to create the first Algonquin alphabet while in England?

As Pennock shows, we often think about the arrival of Europeans in the New World as a one-way endeavor: they arrived, took root, did some rather dirty deeds, and stayed. Our historical narratives, too, tend to face from west to east, looking through the eyes of the Europeans at a strange world full of resources and plunder. Rarely do we think about how Indigenous people looked back at Europe, or what they saw when they traveled there. As they did, apparently, in numbers that might seem to us surprising. Pennock splits these narratives up into six categories: "Slavery," which tells the stories of those who were forcibly removed from North America and whose labor was exploited in Europe; "Go-Betweens," for those who, like Manteo and Wanchese, acted as interpreters and envoys for European colonizers; "Kith and Kin," for those Indigenous people who married into European families and their children, who inherited lineages from two hemispheres; "The Stuff of Life," about the many resources, including tomatoes, potatoes, and tobacco, that crossed the Atlantic during the Columbian exchange and those who supplied them; "Diplomacy"--rather self-explanatory--; and "Spectacle and Curiosity," which tells stories like the tale of the Inuk man who wowed crowds by fishing in the Thames with a spear.

Just to consider the chapter titles is to understand how diverse the experiences of Indigenous people in Europe were. Some arrived in chains, but others arrived in full regalia, and were treated--after some prodding--as the kings they were. On Savage Shores recently attracted some negative attention from the kind of people who are devoted to coloring-book notions of European colonialism. Too bad they didn't really read it, because if they had, they might have noted that several stories in Pennock's book resist easy lefty narratives about colonial violence. Many Indigenous people were quite happy to ally themselves to European power for assistance in conquering their local enemies; others were simply politically def. For example, the city of Tlaxcala was pretty Machiavellian in the way it used Cortes and the Spanish to bring down its rival, Tenochtitlan; the Inca ensured some measure of survival by doing what European powers did, marrying into Spanish families. Which is not to say Pennock is anything but clear about the horrors of colonialism; one of the book's great challenges is to tease out stories and voices that were intentionally elided from the historical record. While factually scrupulous, Pennock engages in a necessary amount of supposition--What must Manteo and Wanchese have seen? Of course, what the book's malcontents really object to is the inclusion of Indigenous voices at all.

Here's one specific thing I didn't appreciate until reading On Savage Shores: not only did the Spanish really get to the Americas before the English and French, their approach to the Indigenous people they found there was totally different. They weren't any less brutal, really, but Indigenous people were assimilated into Spanish society more readily than that of their northern rivals. Sometimes that meant forced enslavement--I was shocked to read about how many Indigenous slaves there were in Spain, and how often they sued for their freedom by arguing that their enslavement was illegal, not to mention how often they succeeded--and sometimes it meant intermarriage. That alone goes a long way in explaining the contemporary differences between American and Canadian relationship to Indigenous people and Mexican or Latin American ones. I had often wondered why Mexican culture values the idea of mestizaje--a shared Indigenous heritage--in a way that's totally foreign to us up here.

The best thing I can say about On Savage Shores is this: it's one of those history books that seems so obviously needed, you wonder why nobody's written it before. Its simple reframing--what did Europe look like through Indigenous eyes?--turns so much of what we think we know about history on its head.