Field Notes by Barry Lopez

That winter I dreamed four times about wolverine. I decided I was going to go up there when spring came, regardless. I've never been able to learn what I want to know about animals from books or looking at television. I have to walk around near them, be in places where they are. This was the heart of the trouble that I had in school. Many of the stories that should have been about animals, about how they live, their different ways, were never told. I don't know what the stories were, but when I walked in the woods or out on the prairie or in the mountains, I could feel the boundaries of those stories. I knew they were there, the way you know fish are in a river. This knowledge was what I wanted, and the only way I had gotten it was to go out and look for it. To be near animals until they showed you something you didn't imagine or you hadn't seen or heard.

The characters in Barry Lopez's story collection are often academics or researchers: the Arctic voyager of "Pearyland," the fossil expert working at the American Museum of Natural History in "The Open Lot," the anthropologist in "The Entreaty of the Wiideema." They are collectors of knowledge, in a way, but their methods have a way of foundering against unknowns, mysteries which require different methods of seeing and knowing. That anthropologist seeks out the Wiideema, an unstudied (and totally invented) indigenous group in Australia because he's seeking that kind of knowledge, and finds more than he bargained for: when a Wiideema woman speaks to him for the first time, he quickly understands that it's not English she's speaking but a kind of universal language that emerges from sheer being. He can communicate with her, and them, as long as he doesn't try too hard to understand, anthropologist-like, to figure out just how it is they are communicating in the first place. In this way, the Wiideema represent something like the wolverines of "Lessons from the Wolverine," who also have their own language for speaking. The lesson they teach is that real knowledge emerges from existence, from being among the immediacy of the earth, its places, its animals; it cannot be found in systems, schemata, or books.

Over and over again Lopez contrasts this kind of knowledge with the bookish kind: the fossil expert "sees" the fossil within the rock better than any of her peers, but she never advances because she refuses to systematize or generalize. The narrator of "The Negro in the Kitchen" is a fitness-obsessed retiree who finds--as the title suggests--a strange black man in his kitchen one day, having set a place at the table for them both. The man, it turns out, is walking across the United States from the East Coast to the Pacific, searching for an intimacy with his own country. In a telling moment, the narrator gets up to examine a bird at the window and check it off his life list--a solitary vireo. His guest, who has learned birdsong by the hundreds, corrects him: it was a ruby-crowned kinglet. The man is disappointed--he's already spotted a kinglet--and when his guest leaves, he goes not to the window but to his bird book to read. Despite his air of smug (white) paternalism, he's failed to learn the lesson the "Negro in the Kitchen" has borne to him.

Field Notes is best when Lopez zeroes in on the details of place; he has a Willa Cather-like skill at describing the simple features of a landscape in way that allows us to see it with freshness, ranging from the Arctic to the American desert to rocky creeks of Colorado. He's better at places than people, which is why the story "Conversation"--in which a conservationist begs her brother, the Secretary of the Interior or something, to place the ferruginous hawk on the endangered species list--such a wooden mistake. The introductory piece, "Within Birds' Hearing," towers over the rest of the collection: a strange and hallucinatory account of a man who leaves his home in the Mojave without a map or supplies, or a clear reason, walking toward a distant creek. The man's journey is so reckless I thought for several pages Lopez was describing the migration of a bird. But maybe that's the point; we have grown incapable of following a birdlike instinct, if we ever were--in the end it is a group of mourning doves who save him by siphoning water into his mouth when he is close to death.

The Gringo Champion by Aura Xilonen

I shrug my shoulders again and feel like gunning away right there, awash in the many gallons of ink it must have taken the printers to splatter all those books with letters. But it's not like I'm scared of his anger. In the brawl outside, my pulse had been cataleptic, mummified. Serene. I could have passed a camel through the eye of a needle while I was pulping those scruffs. No, it's the chickadees, especially the beautiful ones, the flirtatious ones, that give me the shakes; I feel things leap in my belly just imagining I'm near one of them; I think I shouldn't even be breathing the same air they breathe; my marrow sizzles if I just brush their skin with my eyes, I can handle punch-ups, no problem. With those curves, though, I spin out and plunge into my deepest voids or whatever--but when the chickadee headed out of the bookstore I felt desolate, upside down, and all saggy-like.

Liborio works at a bookstore in a large, unnamed city somewhere on the northern side of the U.S.-Mexico border. His foul-mouthed boss lets him sleep in a small loft above the books, but when the store is broken into and vandalized, Liborio has to scram in case the cops come by and discover he's in the country illegally. Basically homeless, Liborio finds many people coming to his aid: a prurient woman reporter with cancer, the proprietor of a children's shelter, but most importantly, Aireen, the "chickadee" who lives across the street and with whom Liborio has fallen deeply in love. Being cast out brings challenges, but it ends up giving Liborio a new path in life, first with Aireen, and then as an amateur boxer: Liborio, we discover, has a punch that can take down even the biggest opponent.

I discovered while reading The Gringo Champion that Mexican-German writer Aura Xilonen was just 19 years old when she wrote it, and something about that makes sense; it has the air of a book written by an especially talented teenager. The story, such as it is, doesn't quite work; although the jacket compares it to The Adventures of Augie March, there's little of Augie's sense of being propelled forward into the wider world. Instead, Liborio kind of circles around the corner where Aireen lives, and where the bookstore was, spinning in circles, and the book sort of spins in circles, too. The latter of the book, set in the children's shelter, is a little treacly. (Liborio's greatest cheerleader is a young girl in a wheelchair; together they build the shelter a library.) And the way that Aireen appears in Liborio's life, cheerful and deeply interested, with only brief gestures toward conflict, reflects a teenager's hopeful attitude toward romance.

Despite all that, I couldn't put the book down, because I was captivated by the language. Liborio is an autodidact who learns everything he knows from the books in the bookstore; he's intelligent and articulate, and his eloquence overflows the vocabulary set out for him. Things are "poltergeistal," "polypathetic," "alphabeticated," "spangalanged." The success of it belongs, surely, as much to the translator, Andrea Rosenberg, as to Xilonen herself. And I was most struck by the way that Liborio describes the tribulation of crossing the Rio Grande into the United States; interspersed with the boxing and the chickadee-wooing is a harrowing story of braving the sun and the heat, and of narrowly escaping the bullets of the Border Patrol. Liborio is such a vivid, engaging presence; it can be easy to forget just how hard some people work to keep him from being here.

Why Comics? / Outside the Box by Hillary L. Chute

“One thing my mother did say about [Fun Home] was that I didn’t get the wallpaper pattern right. And she’s right... There was a point early on when she read one chapter and she said, Wow, this is really good. That was pretty astonishing. But since the book came out, she hasn’t said anything about the content of the book itself. But you know, how could she? This memoir is in many ways a huge violation of my family. I can’t expect them to give me strokes on my style, you know?” - Alison Bechdel, Outside the Box

Chris started the year by attending a seminar about comics and graphic novels, and as a result, I’ve read a number of them this year. I’ve been interested in the form since I was a kid, when I spent hours reading stacks of Archie digests and drawing my own comics starring a turtle-like humanoid named, uh, Josh. Then, when the first Spider-Man movie came out, I bought a bunch of black and white Marvel Essentials and got into superhero comics. Concurrently, I started visiting the bookstore near my college and reading--in the coffeeshop there--lots of indie books by many of the creators in these two books--Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan), Art Spiegelman (Maus), and even a little R. Crumb.

I’ve read a couple books about comics history, but always within the context of mainstream, usually superhero, books. While Chute does mention them occasionally, superheroes stay on the periphery--even a chapter called Why Superheroes? Why Comics? spends more time on the sci-fi aspects of the Hernandez Bros’ Love and Rockets than it does on Superman--as she discusses the form, history, and structure of comic books as a medium. Outside the Box, the contents of which are often excerpted in Why Comics? Is a collection of interviews with various creators and made a great companion piece, which is why I combined these two reviews. They cover a great deal of similar ground so reviewing them separately seemed superfluous.

Why Comics? Is structured around a series of Why questions--why disaster, why superheroes, why women, why sex, etc--using them to push off into discussions of how comics, especially indie comics, moved out of the newspapers, onto the newsstands, and eventually, deep into the heart of the 60s and 70s counterculture. A few creators figure very, very large; not a single interview in Outside the Box fails to mention R. Crumb’s Zap or Spiegelman’s Raw and Maus. And those two, along with editor and publisher Francoise Mouly and Justin Green, creator of Binky Brown Meets the Virgin Mary, a book I’d never heard of that has a strong claim to being the first graphic novel, truly are the cornerstones of the comix movement. As someone says in their interview, “Everyone had their R. Crumb phase”. And, as a result, most of the works discussed in these two volumes aren’t family friendly, putting it mildly. The topics are dark, the motives hard to suss out, the perspectives unflinching. From Justin Green’s compulsive masturbation and religious guilt, to Crumb’s strips about incestuous families, to Phoebe Gloeckner’s chronicles of childhood molestation, to Joe Sacco’s incredibly disturbing scenes of real life war, to Spiegelman’s Holocaust, well. I had to make sure I kept this book well away from the kids lest they open up to the double-page spread of Popeye and Wimpy, um, pleasuring Olive Oyl in a reprint of a Tijuana Bible and have to deal with that in therapy.

Chute writes dispassionately in Why Comics? and makes a strong case for the wildly free expression underground comics provided creators, and draws lines from Crumb to The Simpsons, and it’s not hard to see the influence on later comics and animation like Adventure Time and Spongebob that emerged from this anarchistic movement. And of course, it’s not all adult content either. While most of the cartoonists here target adults primarily, I was charmed by Lynda Barry’s painted strips, Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (and of course, Fun House). There’s a joy to even the bleakest of these works (well, maybe not Gloeckner), and in Outside the Box, the artists opine about the physicality of creating the artwork. As Bechdel says, “A novelist may never touch his words at all, but my fingers touch every part of the page.” There’s a lot of interesting stuff in both books about structure and what comics do well, some of which I stole pretty much wholesale for my review of Hostage. The control of time and space, the density that’s possible, the postmodern aspects of signifier and signified (which Chris Ware goes on about to such length that he gets embarrassed and stops). 

Most people, even most of the people here, don’t get rich or particularly famous by drawing comics, so why do it? That’s a “why” that doesn’t get its own chapter header, but it’s evident reading these interviews, and Chute’s criticism that it’s a labor of love. A love for the artform, a love of the process, a love of the art itself. Cumulatively, these two books are a love letter to the form and I’d recommend them to anyone who loves comics--as long as they’re over 18. 

A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan

What does a young man replace the world with, when the world is denied him? True, the world was never his, but if the promise of the world, free of charge, is suddenly plopped in his lap and then revoked? If the rights and freedoms of patricians are handed to him and then snatched away? If he is given a taste of a shining city of no limits, and then told to go back to the woods?

Horace had no alternative but to retreat into a world of guilt and confusion, not understanding the reasons for his exile.

When we first meet Horace Cross, a Black teenager living in the small town of Tims Creek in Eastern North Carolina, he's planning on transforming himself into an animal. He considers his options carefully, and concludes that he'd like to be a bird; perusing the bird guide at the local library he chooses a red-tailed hawk. At midnight, he sneaks out of his grandfather's house to perform the rite he's discovered in reading, one which requires, among other things, the blood of an infant, for which he has substituted a kitten. But he fails to be transformed, and dejected in the rain, he takes up his grandfather's gun and begins to wander nude around Tims Creek. Though the rite hasn't worked, it's unleashed something: a host of demons that propel Horace forward, making him face the agonies of his life. Chief among these: being gay in a community where his desires constitute a mortal sin.

Horace's story is interspersed with sections narrated by his cousin, the reverend Jimmy Cross, who was the last person to see Horace on the night of the demons. We know, from Jimmy's narration, that Horace committed suicide that night, unable to bear his guilt. Horace's death is just one of the failures haunting Jimmy; his words of conciliation--"You're normal; you'll change"--having been worse than useless. Other failures include the death of his beautiful, radical wife, Anne, and his inability to reconcile two of his elderly relatives. (The plot, such as it is, of Jimmy's sections mostly involves taking his elderly aunt to see another relative, Asa, on his deathbed, and the bitter spitefulness that emerges from the woman's confrontation with death.) Jimmy longs to be a good pastor, to shepherd and to guide, but where is the wisdom that might have saved Horace? Is it in Tims Creek, or does one have to look elsewhere?

This weekend we visited the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, which is a single room lined with framed photographs in a genteel house in genteel Southern Pines. I was pleased to see there the face of Randall Kenan, who died rather young a few years back, along with the faces of a few other authors I have loved but who are not well known, like novelist John Ehle and poet A. R. Ammons. What struck me about Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits was how it emerges from the tradition of the Southern Gothic. It's got one foot in the ordinary rhythms of Black life in Eastern N.C., and another in the wizards and comic book heroes that make up Horace's reading material. The demons that haunt him include a pair of eyeless women and a bison wearing a dress. As Horace wanders through Tims Creek, they chip away at his sanity, and ultimately he loses himself, succumbing utterly to the grotesque visions that his guilt and shame bring forth.

On one level, A Visitation of Spirits is a loving evocation of a culture: the celebration of a hog being killed for barbecue, the simple country church, the binding of strong family ties. But it also poses hard questions about the difficulty of being gay, or out of any kind of ordinary, in small towns like Tims Creek. Kenan makes explicit connections to the Civil Rights movement; suggesting that the strong moral clarity that defeated Jim Crow has faltered in the case of men like Horace. I don't think it's a stretch to read the hapless Pastor Cross as an image of the Black church, diminished in its post-Civil Rights era, unable to provide guidance for those who need it most. "It is good to remember," the last lines of the novel read, "for too many forget."

The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett

Surrounded by that ice and snow, Erasmus dreamed of home--less and less often, though, as the brig passed down Lancaster Sound. Around him were breeding gulls and terns, snow geese and murres, eiders and dovekies; the water thick with whales and seals and scattered plates of floe ice; a sky from which birds dropped like arrows, piercing the water's skin. Sometimes narwhals tusked through the skin from the other side, as if sniffing the solitary ship. They hadn't seen another ship since passing a few whalers at Pond's Bay, yet Erasmus was far from lonely. Dazzled, he looked at the cliffs, and knew Dr. Boerhaave shared his dazzlement.

I love the Arctic. I'll probably never go there. Few people do. But I like reading about it, probably because it is so improbable: remote, harsh, difficult to access and inimical to comfort, the Arctic retains something of the feeling of the old frontier. No wonder that, in the 19th century, once the world had been more or less mapped, those who had explorers' hearts and minds turned to the Arctic; and for once they were pretty roundly defeated. Some of the Arctic's mystique, actually, comes from the fact that there are people who make it their home, and live lives of remarkable resilience there, not just against harsh conditions, but against the predations of people who think they know better. So it's a joy to read about, whether in The Rifles by William T. Vollmann, who was defeated by the Arctic like his alter ego John Franklin, or in Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, a guy who knows more about the Arctic and its residents because he affords them a bit of basic respect.

Andrea Barrett's The Voyage of the Narwhal is a fiction book about an Arctic voyage gone, as all of them go, wrong. Its protagonist is Erasmus Wells, a middle-aged naturalist who signs on under Zeke Voorhees, a younger man and Erasmus' old friend. Zeke turns out to be a bad captain: he cares more about his own ambitions than the safety of his crew, and this ambition, mixed with a mercurial temper and plain poor judgment, leads to the Narwhal becoming stuck in pack ice. Like, they suspect--and we now know--the doomed Franklin expedition, of which the Narwhal is searching for evidence. Zeke's heedlessness kills, perhaps indirectly, several members of the voyage, and when the crew refuses to go on an ill-advised sledge excursion, Zeke goes by himself. When he fails to return, Erasmus takes the only opportunity to get out of the pack ice--lest they be frozen in for another year--leaving Zeke for dead.

That's all all right. I wouldn't say that Barrett has the knack for describing these alien landscapes like Vollmann and Lopez. Far more interesting, I thought, was what happens when Erasmus returns to Philadelphia. As it turns out, Elisha Kent Kane's Arctic voyage returned just before the crew of the Narwhal, having mapped first every bit of coastline the Narwhal thought they'd discovered. Erasmus returns basically empty-handed, and while Kane tours the country with tales of his exploits, Erasmus is either forgotten or loathed for having abandoned Zeke.

All this gets worse when, as any reader surely expects, Zeke shows up again, this time with an Greenlandic woman and her son in tow. According to Zeke's rendition, the pair have accompanied him voluntarily, but Erasmus suspects that there has been some coercion involved; that Zeke knew his only chance at notoriety was to bring back real life "Esquimaux." I wonder if Barrett was thinking of the Inuit woman and her son that caused such a stir in London. Like that real-life pair, Zeke's Greenlanders--Annie and Tom--grow quickly sick in the unfamiliar climate, and Zeke treats them shabbily, as curios to be shuffled onto the stage and then crammed in a drawer when not in use. Annie dies. Erasmus, working doggedly on a natural history of the Arctic--a book that lies in contrast to the dazzling half-truths of Kane and Zeke--decides that he must right Zeke's wrongs, and steals away on one final voyage to the Arctic, to return Tom to his family.

So there's a whiff of white saviorism to Erasmus' noble deed. But there's also a powerful critique of the way that natural philosophy has been practiced, of the cruel tools used to expand human knowledge. Zeke's methods are inhuman, murdering and despoiling the very places and people he claims as the field of his exploration. On the other hand, Erasmus represents another kind of scientist: humble, cautious, empathetic, and more interested in pursuing what is true and good than becoming celebrated. The book never tells us whether his natural history of the Arctic finds success; if it does, it probably still pales in comparison to the fame that the real-life Kent and the fictional Zeke claim. But the Arctic doesn't suffer fools, and perhaps like Franklin, they too will meet the ill consequences of their own recklessness.

The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zeran

Paloma’s problem wasn’t the language, but the weightlessness of that word. That’s why I didn’t respond...and faced with my silence, it was Consuelo who finally spoke. And I switched off again, trying to avoid falling under the weight of those sentences, convinced, as I had been as a little girl, that we don’t live for a set number of years, but rather we’re assigned a set number of words that we can hear over the course of our lives. Each of my mother’s words was like a hundred, a thousand, regular ones, and killed me quicker. Perhaps that’s why I’d learned another language: to buy me more time.

When Women Kill, Alia Trabucco Zeran’s genre-defying semi-nonfiction work from last year, was one of my top 10 books, and as soon as I finished it, I went online to order this, her first (and only, as of 2023) novel. It is quite different, as one might expect given the distance between a memoirist approach to historical events and an actual novel, but it does share a lot of similar concerns: the impact of the past on those in the present, the treatment of the marginalized in Chile, and most prominently, the way the powerful in a society erase, rewrite, or hide anything and anyone that doesn’t serve their goals.

It opens, after a short prologue, at a party on October 8, 1988, the night Pinochet’s reign in Chile ended. The narrator, Iquela, is a child and doesn’t fully understand the impact of what’s happening. Her interest is less in the adults gathered around the radio, listening in shock as Pinochet is deposed, as it is in her friendship, and youthfully romantic rendezvous with her friend Paloma just outside, on the patio. The two share a kiss just as the gathering breaks into chaos: Paloma’s father punches Iquela’s and everyone disperses quickly, chaotically, and nothing is explained to the girls or Felipe, an adoptee who spends the book having visions in which he counts down casualties of the post-Pinochet violence that sweeps over Chile, desperate to reach zero, an accounting of all the dead that leaves no remainder. They’re brought together again, years later, when Paloma returns to Chile from Germany, where she’s been living with her mother, who has died and whose body has been sent, perhaps against her will, back to Chile to be buried. When Paloma arrives and meets with Iquala’s mother to claim the body, they find that it has not arrived; that it has, in fact, been lost in transit, and the three kids, now older teenagers, requisition an old hearse and set out on a road trip to get it back.

There’s a bit of As I Lay Dying in the structure, not just in the journey to inter a body properly but also in the way the narrators swap in and out, the main three but also occasionally another who is unnamed who may be Paloma’s mother speaking from beyond the grave, and chapters that are only a sentence or two long. Each of the primary narrators has a distinctive voice and concerns. Felipe’s sections are stream-of-consciousness, recounting nightmarish visions of bodies that need counted before they can find peace, often punctuated with moments of shocking physical or sexual violence. An outsider both by genealogy and temperament--his grandmother, tasked with caring for him after his father, a revolutionary, was killed, gave him to Iquala’s family after he brutally dismembered a parrot during one of his visions. He nurses an unrequited crush towards Iquela but is driven by his obsession with accounting for all the Chilean dead. Iquala narrates more traditionally and her concerns are largely relational--her difficult relationship with her overbearing mother, her surrogate sibling-ship with Felipe, her sapphic longings towards Paloma--deformed into complex shapes by trauma. And finally, Paloma spends most of the novel in a state of shock, convinced that finding her mother will resolve the conflict she feels about her expat status.

When they finally arrive at the airport where Paloma’s mother’s body was lost, they find a hanger stacked high with caskets, hundreds and hundreds of Chileans who’ve been forgotten, erased, mislabeled, ignored, left to rot until they’re disposed of by someone who can’t handle the smell anymore. I know I missed a lot of the subtext here, given my minimal knowledge of Chilean history, but in some ways the takeaway here is universal. In the end, the remainders are the children, the children’s children, who are left behind in the wake of nationalist violence and fracture, left with no past and no clear future.

White Sands by Geoff Dyer

Even now, after this spectacular renaissance, the Spiral Jetty is not always visible. If there is exceptionally heavy snowfall, then the thaw does for the lake what the globally heated polar ice pack threatens to do to the oceans. Once the snowmelt ends up in the lake, it can take months of drought and scorch to boil off the excess and leave the Jetty high and dry again. Was it worth traveling all this way to see something we might not be able to see? Well, pilgrims continued to turn up even during the long years when there was definitely nothing to see, so it seemed feeble not to give it a chance. (There is probably a sect of art-world extremists who maintain that the best time to have visited the Spiral Jetty was during the years of its invisible submergence, when the experience became a pure manifestation of faith.)

The first thing Geoff Dyer does when he arrives in Tahiti is lose his biography of Gauguin. This cataclysm comes to stand in for the whole excursion, which is defined for Dyer by its absences, the holes in the experience, as huge and gaping as the absence of Gauguin's massive Where Do We Come From?, which turns out not to be on display when Dyer arrives at the Louvre. Gauguin's Tahiti has become a Disneyland, expensive and crass, and though a fellow traveler encourages him, "Look out there... Look at that amazing sea," the view is lost on him. Traveling further to a remote island where Gauguin spent his days, Dyer writes, "[T]he question 'Where are we going?' was turning into its vexed opposite, 'Where are we not going?'--to which the answer was: all the places I really wanted to go. Other people thought Hiva Oa was paradise, but if this was the case it was a paradise from which I was becoming impatient to be expelled."

Is this working for you? Or do you feel, like I feel, supreme annoyance at the display of a guy traveling to somewhere I'll never be able to go, on a trip underwritten entirely by Tahiti's tourism board, telling me that it's not all it's cracked up to be? Dyer's disappointment is not any ordinary disappointment, it's a contemplative disappointment, that's supposed to tell us something about the gap between our mental scheme of a place and the actual experience of being there. Thank god for guys like this, who can go somewhere and tell us, and in such articulate language, that it's all so dull. Dyer's primary interest in Tahiti is the women, who are "total babes in a babelicious paradise of unashamed babedom," until "almost overnight, they get incredibly fat." (There are about two pages describing how fat Polynesian people get.) In the next essay, Dyer writes about how his lukewarm interest in Beijing's Forbidden City was supplanted by his interest in his female tour guide, and how he spent the rest of his trip hoping to bring her back to his hotel room.

Of course, it's not really Dyer in these essays. A note preceding the collection warns us that they are fictionalized, that the "I" is not really an "I." We are safe, then, to feel a little creeped out by the narrator's prurient interest in the women of Tahiti and China, or his lamentation for Polynesian obesity, because that's just a character. Presumably it's also a character who spends a trip to Svalbard in the middle of winter, hoping to see the Northern Lights, quibbling with his wife Jessica. The pair have a miserable time, but that's not really Dyer's wife. His wife isn't even Jessica; her real name is Rebecca. But it's hard to ignore the feeling that there's some sleight-of-hand going on, that Dyer really does think the Tahiti is a "babelicious paradise," and wants to say it without being perceived as truly having said it. Is there a Dyer underneath all this, somewhere, that had a pleasant morning in Tahiti, or enjoyed an afternoon in Svalbard? Or are the real Dyer and the fake Dyer in unison that travel often proves to be a joyless disappointment?

Let me be fair: it's not all like that. I was really grateful for Dyer's essay about traveling to Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field, an installation in the New Mexico desert made of hundreds of lightning rods. The Lightning Field seems primed to be a disappointment. Access is strictly controlled; you have to enter a lottery, and when you're given a date, you are picked up and driven to a remote cabin by the installation for a day and night. But lightning only strikes sixty or so days out of the year; most people who are lucky enough to visit The Lightning Field see no lightning. And Dyer doesn't. But he's captivated by the way the light unfolds on the installation itself--it's a work of time as much as art. "Part of the experience of coming here is the attempt to understand and articulate," Dyer writes, "one's responses to the experiences." So he has a sense of wonder after all.

Dyer is at his best writing about large-scale artworks like The Lightning Field. Another essay focuses on Spiral Jetty (which I too have seen), the seminal earthwork by Robert Smithson that has been at times invisible beneath the Great Salt Lake. (Though it was written only in 2016, it seems strange to write about Spiral Jetty without talking about the lake as a victim of climate change; someone who visits the jetty now will not have to entertain the possibility of not seeing it because the lake has shrunk well past the jetty and shows little sign of recovery.) Another essay about the Watts Towers of L.A., built single-handedly by an Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia, captures the sense of baffling human achievement that such works inspire. Dyer is at his best when he finds a way to care about these place--the Watts Towers are deeply connected to the world of jazz, and intersect in fascinating ways with another essay about exploring the L.A. of German emigres Theodore Adorno and Thomas Mann. If only Adorno or Ornette Colman had spent a few years in Tahiti or Svalbard.

The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis

What was inside Buddy was like stars connected by strings of light, a chain of stars, strings linking star to star to star, and not just in there but the strings were everywhere, in her arms, for example, and a whole lot of them strung to the star at the back of Buddy's nose. The closer she got, the more densely knitted it all was and also clumped with debris, dark clots of stinking matter, buzzing like bees and restless, fidgeting around, bumping themselves into place and taking up all the room. A smell like what came from the sanitary-napkin disposal boxes in the school bathroom and also, weirdly, banana skins.

Three young girls, living in a New England town on the Canadian border, come across a dead body. It's their neighbor, Carl Banner. Two of them head off to alert the authorities, but one stays behind, Mees Kipp, to use a power she's kept secret for many years: she brings Mr. Banner back to life.

There's no reason that it should be Mees that has this power. She's an ordinary child, and kind of a shit, prone to resentment and antisocial behavior. But it's Mees that brings Carl Banner back to life, and later, her friend's dog Buddy, who's been shot by a neighbor for attacking her chickens, and then, much later, a drug-addled criminal who wants to rob the church collection plate. Why is it Mees, of all people, who is visited by Jesus in the woods? Who can see into the stuff of life, "like stars connected by strings of light?" It's no coincidence that the novel's climax--that church robbery--takes place on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples in the form of tongues of flame. The disciples were nobody special; they hadn't earned the gift of God's powers. Such gifts are given of God's free will, and He's accountable to no one for whom he gives them to.

I feel like I've been chasing the high of Davis' first novel Labrador for many years. This is the fourth of her books I've read, after The Walking Tour and Versailles, and I'm beginning to see how Davis is interested in the way the strangeness of the religious and the metaphysical erupts into the ordinary. In that way, The Thin Place is the most like Labrador; Mees' gift, the mercurial visits from Jesus, the recycling of Biblical language, all have their analog in the angel Rogni who attends on the protagonist in Labrador. And when Davis is in her metaphysical-religious mode, man, this book really hums: "Life has nowhere to move," she writes, "being everywhere, doesn't move though it's always in motion, is the leaf is the trash is the girl's pierced navel the worm the cat's paw the lengthening shadows." Or, talking about birdsong and sounding like Joy Williams (who will always be linked to Davis in my mind perhaps mostly for having read them at similar times): "Theirs is a kind of music that lightens the human heart, and there is no telling what we'll do to one another when it finally stops." Or this:

The world was strange from day one. Let there be light, God said, and there was light. There is probably nothing more beautiful and implausible than the world, nothing that makes less sense, the gray bud of the willow, silky and soft, the silk-white throat of the cobra, the wish of nature or humans to subsume all living matter in fire and flood. I will hurt you, hurt you, hurt you, says the world, and then a meadow arches its back and golden pollen sprays forth.

But the brilliance of Labrador was not just in this mode, but in the powerful singularity of the ordinary scene: the intense jealousy and admiration the narrator has toward her beloved sister. The Thin Place, by contrast, spreads everything around, trying to capture a couple dozen main characters. I couldn't make myself interested in Carl Banner, or the middle-aged womanizer Piet, or the bourgeois Crocketts, or hapless Billie Carpenter, or the Episcopal Priest, or the book binder who ends up in a coma. Davis even gives us point of view chapters from dogs, cats, and beavers! The point is, these too, are life, and are part of the interconnectedness of things; Mees' gift is only a slight interruption in great geologic churning of life that includes deer and fisher-cats and butterflies and lichen. It's often powerful and powerfully written, but sometimes reading The Thin Place I felt as if I'd rather be hearing about the lichen.

The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag

I could feel myself growing more and more upset because before long it would be my turn to leave behind the flock, Arsylang, our home, Father and Mother, the Black Mountains--everything that had been part of me. With that thought came misgivings that led to further thoughts and left me afraid: Would Grandma find me if I were no longer at home? What would come of our flock, which meanwhile had become my flock? What of the yurt we would have to get somehow and in which I planned to live with Grandma? Would I one day become a teacher or even a darga and live off a salary rather than livestock? In that case, would I live in a shack made from larch logs and smeared with clay, just like the elegant people in the sum center? Which meant, didn't it, that I would never have a yurt of my own, would never put it up and take it down and move with it through the four seasons and across the four rivers, from the mountains into the steppe, over to the other mountains, to the lake, and back? And did this mean that I would have to leave behind, and would never be able to return to, all that I had had and held so far, and all that had been mine?

Mongolia: it's one of those gray countries that reads NO DATA. So how rare to have a novel like this: a first-hand account, translated into English, of a nomadic childhood among Mongolia's Altai mountains. Galsan Tschinag is a Tuvan shaman--that is, not ethnically Mongolian but of a Turkic group most famous in the West, perhaps, for their otherworldly throat-singing. The Blue Sky is his story of growing up a boy among nomads, tending to their flocks of sheep in times of summer fat and disastrous winter, and of his loyal dog, Arsylang.

Little Galsan, known in the book as Dshukuruwaa, is the youngest of three children. He lives with his mother and father, as well as two siblings who are soon carted off to the village, or sum, and made to go to school by Soviet functionaries. There's also his grandmother, who's not really his grandmother at all, but the less prosperous sister of a nearby woman who finds her household--or yurthold--slowly being absorbed by her selfish sister, until she sets out one day to find someone to shave her head as a symbol of her forgotten status. Coming to the boy's family, she soon finds herself a home, and a special attachment to the young boy, to whom she entrusts the remainder of her sheep herd. Emboldened by the gift, he begins to dream of becoming a baj like his father once was: a rich man whose wealth is in his immense herd. This is why he fears the school to which his siblings disappear, and in the meantime there are more obstacles, like the excruciating experience of falling into the boiling kettle of yak's milk.

What lurks behind The Blue Sky is an image of a changing Mongolia: Galsan's father is no longer a baj because he cannily divested himself of his wealth when Soviet ideology, and Soviet ideologues, emerged in Mongolia looking for what they considered kulaks, wealthy landowners whose money comes from the exploitation of farm labor. Such a label, of course, makes no sense among nomadic people, but that's revolutionary fervor for you. Little Galsan doesn't understand that the dream he has for himself is one that has already become extinct; what he longs for is not his own future but a past that has already been closed off. And yet the family's traditional life persists, though at a level of as-of-yet-unknown precarity: without his former herd, Galsan's father is suddenly at the mercy of a single harsh winter, like the one that brings their small family to a crisis at the novel's end.

The winter is the family's crisis, but Galsan has his own. The novel opens with a nightmare: the trusty Aryslang, dying on the ground, vomiting poison. The vision comes true after the harsh winter when Galsan's father leaves out poison to meet Soviet hunting quotas, and the death of the sheepherding dog--about as sad as the death of any pet in any book I've read ever--rends young Galsan's life so completely that he finds himself raging at his parents and cursing the very universe, throwing insults at the "blue sky" that represents some divine force of providence, and which has failed him. I thought it was a strange way of ending the book until I read in the afterword that Tschinag wrote two sequels; one about the experience of Soviet schooling, where he eventually did go, and a third about his ultimate reconciliation with the sky and the Tuvan way of life. I'd like to read those; I really enjoyed the detailed depiction of the young herder's life The Blue Sky presents, and the humor and pathos that come alongside them.

Thanks to the addition of Mongolia, my "countries read" list is now up to 76!

Free Day by Ines Cagnati

Me, I've never been able to love anything, because nobody wanted me. I know that my mother didn't have time to look after me, what with the field work, the livestock, my father, Maria and the other babies that never stopped coming, and after that, Aunt Gina's romance novels. I don't miss the caresses I never had. They horrify me. Even right now, if someone brought a damp mouth to me for a kiss I would slap them hard, I'd be so horrified. Except for my mother. She's my mother. And Fanny. She has smooth, freckled cheeks, like warm bread. She's so pretty. If I'd been loved, I'd be pretty, too. It would have been enough for me to be a puppy or any kind of domestic animal. My father and mother take good care of animals. As for me, when I was little, I would have liked to be a little calf. I would have been loved, like everybody.

Galla, the protagonist of Ines Cagnati's Free Day, takes an extra holiday off from boarding school to travel home on her loyal bicycle. But when she arrives, her father takes one look at her and tells her to go away. So begins the titular "free day": one in which Galla wanders around the outskirts of her home, waiting for her mother to come out, cuddling with her dog, Daisy, and exploring the familiar--but loathed--marshes around her house.

Galla's free day is an opportunity to reflect on her place in the world: the favorite of her always-pregnant mother, she is the oldest of her many sisters. Their land is poor, and they live in deep poverty, yet Galla has managed to convince her mother to send her to the high school in the city. She is despised by the other students, who look down on her for wearing the wrong color smock--she can't afford any other--and by her teachers, who consider her rude and a troublemaker. (Only Fanny, of the warm bread cheeks, is a beacon among them.) And though Galla seems to despise the inanity of school, and her mother deeply needs her at home to help look after the smallest children, including tiny blind Antonella, Galla insists on doing to school because she senses, it seems, that school is the way to get out of the foggy and noxious marshes, and the cycle of poverty in which her family is trapped.

Galla is ambitious, then, but she is also cynical and full of self-loathing. She spends much of her free day thinking about how she'd prefer to die: lost at sea, so that she might sink to the bottom and never be found. Violent fantasies are informed by a life punctuated with violence: at successive steps along the marsh, Galla is reminded of her how her father hangs their dogs, or the car crash she caused which caused a little girl to lose half her face, or the death of her beloved younger sister Cendrine, who was hooked by a cow and launched into a field (!). Does such violence ever touch the other girls at the high school? Or is it only the property of the poor? In her foreword, translator Liesl Schillinger describes how Free Day is inspired by Cagnati's experiences as the child of Italian immigrants brought into France for poor labor. It's a book about the experience--troubling, even dangerous--of being an outsider.

Galla's voice is what really makes Free Day so engaging from the very beginning. Simple, like a young girl's voice, but full of weary wisdom, and a strange mix of self-hatred and bold defiance. It works so well, is so endearing and so chilling, that it propels the book foreword even though, properly speaking, hardly anything happens: just a girl wandering around the marshes, thinking about her life.

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

It had taken four years. They had endured violent storms, accidents, one disappointment after another, public indifference or ridicule, and clouds of demon mosquitoes. To get to and from their remote sand dune testing ground they had made five round-trips from Dayton (counting Orville's return home to see about stronger propeller shafts), a total of seven thousand miles by train, all to fly little more than half a mile. No matter. They had done it.

Last year, on our way home from our annual trip to the Outer Banks, we stopped at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, where you can see a replica of the Flyer that made the first ever powered flight on December 3rd, 1902--and walk along the paths of its first flights. I really enjoyed the museum there, which made the achievement seem somehow even more impressive: did you know, for instance, that after arriving at Kitty Hawk, Orville and Wilbur discovered that all the data they were using, which had been collected by German aeronautist Otto Lilienthal, was basically garbage, and they had to start from scratch all on their own, using wind tunnels of their own design? So when we went back down this year, I took along historian David McCullough's The Wright Brothers, a biography of the two men and their achievement.

What I enjoyed most about The Wright Brothers is probably the historical sense it gives of Kitty Hawk in the early 1900's. The Outer Banks were barely inhabited at the time, save for "life-saving stations" that were stationed every six miles to save stranded or sinking boats. People lived with their families in the meagerest conditions, growing what they could in small garden plots of mostly sand. Wilbur and Orville stayed with a time with Kitty Hawk's postmaster, and the local life-saving crew provided critical support for the brothers during their stay on the remote beach, and were among the first people outside of the brothers themselves to witness human flight. Kitty Hawk today is all yogurt shops and escape rooms, but you really get a sense of that remoteness passing over some of the bridges further to the south; though many flight enthusiasts of the time were thought of as obsessives or cranks, you have to marvel at the commitment the brothers had toward the goal of flight. On his very first trip over, McCullough describes rough waters that nearly drowned poor Wilbur, who even had to reverse course and camp out for the night in a sheltered part of the sound.

Part of me wanted my experience reading The Wright Brothers to be more like my experience in the museum: to explain (or remind) the various technical achievements that made the Wrights the first to achieve human flight, while so many were making the same attempt. What was so genius about the wing-warping system the Wrights used? How did they perfect the propeller? But McCullough is a historian, not an engineer, and the book is written with an eye toward the human rather than the scientific.

What I really didn't know was what happened after the successful trials at Kitty Hawk. First, no one seems to have believed they'd done it. The first eyewitness account was written in a magazine called Gleanings in Bee Culture. The Wrights attempted over and over again to contact the U.S. government to sell them the Flyer, but the U.S gave them the cold shoulder every time, even after the Wrights had returned to Dayton and begun making regular flights at Huffman Prairie. But not every country was so dismissive--it was actually the French government that first expressed interest in the Wright's invention. France, as I did not know, seems to have been the real epicenter of research into human flight. It wasn't until Wilbur demonstrated the Flyer at Le Mans in 1908--five years after Kitty Hawk--that the momentousness of the achievement had really become clear. And it was the beginning of a period in which the brothers became European celebrities, which seems to have been bemusing and a bit troubling to them both, being rather American in the simplicity of their tastes and habits.

Though I liked the first part of the book best--the wind-swept dunes, the tireless tinkerers, all that stuff of legend was what I wanted to hear about again--but it was this second part, which told the part of the story I'd never heard, that was probably the most valuable.