Caught by Henry Green

In night clubs, it has been described, or wherever the young danced, couples passed the last goodbye hours abandoned to each other and, so Richard felt, when these girls were left behind alone as train after train went out loaded with men to fight, the pretty creatures must be hunting for more farewells. As they were driven to create memories to compare, and thus to compensate for the loss each had suffered, he saw them hungrily seeking another man, oh they were sorry for men and they pitied themselves, for yet another man with whom they could spend last hours, to whom they would murmur darling, darling, darling it will be you always; the phrase till death do us part being, for them, the short ride next morning to a railway station; the active death, for them, to be left alone on a platform; the I-have-given-all-before-we-die, their dying breath.

Richard Roe is a London aristocrat who, on the evening of World War II, does what he feels his duty: he joins the Auxiliary Fire Service, a hastily cobbled-together organization whose mission is to put out the fires started by German bombs. By a strange coincidence, his superior in the Auxiliaries is Albert Pye, whose sister has been placed in an insane asylum for having abducted a young boy from a department store--that is, Roe's child, Christopher.

The incident forms a strange, mostly unspoken relationship between the two men that colors their experience of the Auxiliaries. Neither man has initiated it, and both would be happy to divest themselves of it, but it's there, totally unlike any other relationship that might be recognizable--friend, authority, or enemy. For Richard, it's an unwelcome reminder of a life from which he has temporarily excused himself; Christopher and his wife Dy have been sent down to their country estate while he lives it up in the local and carries on an affair with a woman volunteer. For Pye, it's a threat to the authority that his been thrust upon him unwanted by the war.

Most of Caught, interestingly, takes place during the year before the Blitz, when the Auxiliary Fire Service existed only in preparation for the war to come. The firemen's day is taken up with drills and idleness. Some even stop them, who will later be considered heroes, in the street to accuse them of having joined to shirk their duty in the army. Green is less interested in war than he is the social politics of idle institutions; the firemen fight their boredom by engaging in petty gossip, of which Pye's sister's abduction of Roe's child will become of course an essential part. The ad hoc culture of the Auxiliaries is a backdrop for Green to explore the class politics of London: Roe responds to the discomfort of his aristocratic background among the Cockney firemen by standing everyone's drinks at the pub. Minor skirmishes of personality and class are circumscribed by bureaucracy; the worst possible sin is to be "adrift," that is, away without permission--a sin of which Pye, besotted with a pair of local girls, bears the greatest guilt. To be found out would be, like his sister was, the "caught" of the title.

Green is so slippery; Caught seems like many novels at once. It's a comedy of manners, rich in Cockney slang and speech, about how the war brings a collision between the upper and lower classes. Perhaps none of Green's other novels so perfectly illustrated the intense tension between his earthy ear for dialogue and his own spiked, serpentine prose. It's a war novel, too, as flash-forwards to the conflagrations of the Blitz show, written in a way that only Green could accomplish. And at times it's a novel of penetrating psychology and sexual repression that seems straight out of Green's American contemporary, William Faulkner. Pye, incensed by his sister's institutionalization (and the demand that he help pay for her upkeep), driven to instability by the pressure of his new position, forms a conviction that her impropriety is rooted in his own incest with her--something that he seems to have invented from a collection of muddled memories:

Without any warning, and with a shock that took all his breath, Pye saw the dry wood shaving creep, bent in the moonlight, the back ways to their cottage. He saw it again as though it was before his eyes, which he now tried to draw away from the doctor's. He had never before thought of his sister's creeping separate from his own with Mrs. Lane's little girl. In a surge of blood, it was made clear, false, that it might have been his own sister he was with that night. So it might have been her voice, thick with excitement and fright and disgust, that said "Will it hurt?" So in the blind moonlight, eyes warped by his need, he must have forced his own sister.

Caught's final chapter finds Roe back with his wife, having been incapacitated by a falling bomb. He tries in vain to tell her about the single night's experience in the Blitz, but he can't find the words and gets frustrated with her disinterest. (Green interrupts him from time to time to inform us that, despite his best attempts at description, the blaze was really "not like that at all.") Richard, we understand, has finally had the transformative experience that war and heroism have promised, and come back home only to find that not only can he not explain it, he barely seems to understand it himself. What makes him angriest, interestingly, is his wife's continued distrust of the (now-dead) Pye, brother to Christopher's abductor. What is it that makes him speak up in Pye's defense? Is it the bonds forged in war? Or the bonds formed in some other way, in the crucible of bureaucracy, of the institution, of the firehouse?

Shame by Taslima Nasrin

As Suranjan came up the road, a group of boys standing nearby shouted, "There goes a Hindu, catch him and kill him." The boys belonged to this locality. Many faces had become familiar to him during his seven-year stay here. There was a boy called Alam, who would turn up every now and then and ask for a donation. they had a club here. Suranjan used to sing at their cultural functions. He thought of teaching some of the boys the songs of D. L. Roy and Hemanga Biswas. Off and on, they would father at his house asking for some favor or another. Sudhamay had given them medical assistance free of charge for their being residents of the locality. And it was the same chaps who were now mockingly threatening to kill him. Suranjan walked rapidly in the opposite direction, not driven by fear, but by shame. He felt shame not for himself but for his supposed attackers. Shame gained a new dimension not for the tortured people, but for those rogues inflicting the torture.

In 1992, a group of Hindu nationalists destroyed the Babri Mosque in India, igniting violence throughout India and the Indian subcontinent. In neighboring Bangladesh, the Muslim majority took their revenge for the destruction of the mosque from the Hindu minority, destroying temples, killing and torturing, and raping women. Taslima Nasrin's Shame tells the story of this reprisal from the perspective of Suranjan, a young socialist who has fought for years against the tide of what he calls "communalism," the factionalism of separate Hindu and Muslim communities at the expense of a larger Bengal or Bangladeshi identity. Suranjan reacts to the violence with apathy and despair, and only later, as the violence increases and his own sister Maya is kidnapped by Muslim gangs--does he feel himself getting swept up in the bitterness of the very "communalism" he has abhorred.

As I understand it, Shame caused a great deal of controversy within Bangladesh, and resulted in a Rushdie-style fatwa against Nasrin that drove her first to India, and then to the United States, where she lives in exile. Forgive me for saying so, but it's amazing to think that such profound consequences could emerge from a book that is so astonishingly bad. Shame is a baffling book, a novel whose small capacity for imagination is overwhelmed by a obsessiveness with recording the violence of 1992 in the most extensive detail. Everywhere Suranjan goes, he meets people who have an encyclopedic knowledge of what's happening throughout Bangladesh, from the names of the temples that have been attacked and destroyed...

...to the specific percentages of fluctuating Hindu and Muslim populations in the country:

I can't emphasize enough that most of the book is like this; statistics and names take up more than half of the novel's page count. It gives the effect, you might say, of Suranjan wandering in blindness while everyone else knows exactly what the stakes of the violence are. But mostly it just seems comically inept, an obsession with recounting every injustice that even a historian would know to avoid, much less a novelist.

When the novel returns to the story of Suranjan, there are flashes of interest: the stroke suffered by Suranjan's father who can't leave the house for medical attention for fear of being attacked; the disappearance of Maya; and most of all Suranjan's descent into anger and bitterness over the course of a week's violence. In one shocking scene, he engages a Muslim prostitute, whom he essentially rapes, biting and beating her during the sexual act. There's a powerful statement here about how difficult it is to escape cycles of violence and factionalism--but it's totally undercut by this insane mode of hyper-scrutiny. I never abandon books, but I nearly abandoned this one. The only reason I didn't is because I've never read an author from Bangladesh before, so my "Countries Read" list is up to 92!

The Living and the Dead by Patrick White

Conversation with the Spaniard returned to him, the evening in the street after the party at Adelaide's, and his own retreat from what had been too pertinent. As if the Spaniard were presenting the choice of the two ways, of the living or the dead. You wanted instinctively to close the eyes, like Adelaide or Gerald, like Muriel, or the ranks of red suburban houses, smothered in a plush complacency. Because the alternative, to recognize the pulse beyond the membrane, the sick heartbeat, or the gangrenous growth, it was too much, even at the risk of sacrificing awareness, and the other moments, the drunken, disorderly passions of existence, that created but at the same time confused.

The Standishes are a familiar upper middle-class London family: matriarch Catherine has been left to raise her two children alone by the death of her husband in the "Great War," and to rediscover her own sensuality and desire later in life. Her daughter Eden is headstrong and proud, flirting with men and politics. Son Elyot is more reserved, more aloof, unable to form a connection to the various women who demand his attention, to the people which populate his life, or to the social and political questions that engage his sister.

Elyot's dilemma is the central question of the novel: what does it mean to be alive, and what does it mean to be dead? White's setting is England between two world wars, a time of putative peace, and yet that peace is dogged by intimations of foreign war--the Spanish Civil War. White suggests perhaps that the English peace of the interwar years was a false promise, predicated on ignoring the conflicts of the larger world, ones that later exploded into the wave of fascism that swallowed Europe. The novel's simple conscience is found in Joe, a working-class laborer with whom Eden has a brief affair. Joe, shocked by the news from Spain, decides to join the war effort, even at the risk of his own life:

There was a time, said Joe, when I could read the papers and keep things in their place. That's where they belonged, in the papers. It was other people's business. It was foreign names. Then it got to being part of yourself. You couldn't keep out your feelings no more. It got mixed up with what you did. I can't think clear. I got to go, you see? There's no use, Julia says, there'll be time enough, and troubles of your own, without fighting other people's wars. As if you can keep it parcelled out. Because it's right here, Elyot, sure as ever there's right and wrong.

It's this attitude that Elyot admires but cannot adopt, even in versions less extreme than Joe's. Is Joe one of the living of the title, because by embracing his common humanity with the oppressed in Spain, he becomes truly alive, while aloof, uncommitted Elyot lives a death-in-life? Or is Joe one of the dead--because by leaving for Spain he essentially signs his life away? The power of The Living and the Dead, such as it is, is in the way White explores the connection between the political and the metaphysical, the way the soul roots itself in its relations with others, one-on-one and en masse. Except for Riders in the Chariot, which is very much a post-World War II novel, it might be White at his most consciously political (although this is, in typical fashion, somewhat hidden behind the fractious prose and streams of consciousness.)

The Living and the Dead, as far as I can tell, is the only one of White's novels to take place entirely in England. As such, it brings into relief some of White's English forebears, like Henry Green and D. H. Lawrence, not to mention Henry James. It makes it easier to see how White transformed those traditions and pointed them toward the colonial landscape, the English writers made alien and strange. It was White's second novel, and far more psychological and less plotted than Happy Valley, the novel about a backwoods Australian sheep station town that preceded it. Yet I think it holds less interest and insight than Happy Valley, and is probably his weakness overall. Still, it does interesting things--none of his other novels slides so easily, like a lubricated eye, from one consciousness to another--and some of its characters, like the hapless and moon-eyed Connie Tiarks and the crass American big band musician Wally Collins, are among White's best. I don't have any of White's novels left, now--just a few short story collections--and though I suppose it makes sense that a minor work would end up last, it mostly made me hungry for White's masterpieces, which all wisely leave England behind.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

He then remembered: others did not see his and Lily's as a mutual love and why would they. There were too many jealous bumps, sudden disappearances, pointed rebukes--no one saw theirs as the passion it was. It looked like weariness and defeat and sometimes it was, but it was weariness and defeat as attachment. It was passion-at-peace, adoration gone awry and away, then returned, love in the armistice, which one never had without a little war. Finn and Lily's love was a shared secret--though shared secret was one of those phrases that also meant its opposite. Like cleave. Or overlook. Nor one seemed to have seen what he had seen, or known what he had known: that he and Lily were water birds who'd mated for life--and yet often conducted their lives separately in another part of the meadow or the pond.

Finn leaves the side of his dying brother to face urgent news about his estranged partner, Lily: she's killed herself, and in gruesome fashion--letting the water from the shower in the psych ward fill her lungs. He wanders to the "green burial" site where she has been deposited, only to find her sitting in the dirt, alive. It's the ultimate fantasy, the dream that follows everyone who's lost a loved one, the dream of more time. Finn and Lily climb into his car for one final road trip, from New York to Knoxville, Tennessee, where, we are told, a more desirable sustainable cemetery awaits. Joyed at Lily's return, Finn ignores that the road trip must needs head toward a second death, a second loss. For a moment, they are the couple they once were, joking and sniping at one another, indulging in the hokey wordplay that characterizes Moore's writing, though this time Lily's longing to die haunts him in a more concrete way.

This is the first of Moore's novels that I've read that I thought just didn't work. Moore's jokiness works well enough, but not always, in the repartee between Finn and Lily, but in the lengthy opening scene with Finn and his brother Max, it seems (for the first time) pointless and cheesy. The road trip is too talky, with no sense of motion or change, no interest in landscape or event--leaving us only with the words that don't quite work. More confusing still, I felt, were the interwoven passages from a 19th century innkeeper who admits to killing a chauvinistic resident-slash-suitor, and which turn out to be leaves in a diary that Finn reads in a Tennessee inn while Lily sleeps. The antiquated voice is not quite right, and the story too thin to stand of interest on its own. Yet the connection with Finn and Lily--between, perhaps, the urge to kill and the urge to die--seems also half-baked.

I sort of expected this to pull together in the end; in each of Moore's books there have been moments of doubt for me that were ultimately put to rest. She has a knack for prodding a reader with the ridiculous, and then justifying it, but here, the final act never seems to come. It's a shame, because the core moment of the novel--the pure, unlooked-for grace of finding the dead living, followed by the bittersweet realization that death can only be postponed, never stopped--is powerful.

A Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer

If she had no passport, no money, few marketable qualifications, in a country more concerned with shoring-up repressive regimes than providing so much as working space for those whose professional skills were to oppose them, she had the qualification of tragedy. There is no-one so safe, so secure, so frivolous or hard-headed as to be able to be unaware of that. Leonie knew Americans would be impressed, even intimidated by her presentation: a white widow and her fatherless black child, the black husband assassinated before the wife's eyes by a racist regime. The namesake's small black hand in her mother's white one: the shame of the slave yard, of the years of the Klan, the centuries-long march before Washington had been reached, the bullet that lodged in the dream of Luther King--this simple sight brought it all to them. For them, Hillela came straight from the kitchen where Whaila died on the floor. It was all of her they need to know. She began there. It was the signature of her life; what she had been, what she was, and would be.

Hillela Capran is, effectively, an orphan; her mother has left her to be raised by two sisters in alternation--proud, priggish Olga and progressive Pauline. Her father is away somewhere in Rhodesia. And yet, from this circumstance, Hillela grows up headstrong, confident, even sure of herself. She often takes what she wants, including the love of her cousin Sasha, with whom Pauline finds her in bed one day. This moment ushers in Hillela's long, not very bitter exile. From Pauline's house she makes her way to a beach camp outside of South Africa that's home to political refugees, to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, to other parts of southern Africa. She marries an activist with ties to Mandela's ANC and has a daughter with him, whom they name for Winnie Mandela (her less known first name--Nomzomo). When he's killed by an assassin--just on the other side of the refrigerator door from her--her exile grows, expands: Eastern Europe, London, America.

The title, A Sport of Nature, refers to a Latin term meaning a "spontaneous mutation," a kind of creature or form of life whose appearance cannot be explained by its genetic material. Again and again, the novel suggests that Hillela will become an internationally known figure, whose life is being reconstructed from primary sources, though it seems equally likely for being a terrorist as for being a diplomat. Only later in the novel do we discover that Hillela becomes the second wife of an African general, later the president of his unnamed state--though apparently it's supposed to be a fictionalized Kenya. How does Hillela become this person, who consorts with ANC freedom fighters and posh diplomats both? As the title suggests, nothing in her background suggests it. She certainly doesn't get it from Olga, and not from Pauline, either, whose progressive values are of the "work within the system" variety, even as she opens her home to dissidents en route to their escape from the apartheid regime. Hillela is not even like Sasha, her cousin, whose bitter hatred of apartheid lands him a lengthy jail sentence.

It's not clear that Hillela has values at all, not in the way we typically think of them. She's motivated by something deeper, and more sensual, in every sense of the word. We are told that her "skill is men," meaning her flirtations, her provocative sexuality, come in handy for her dissident associates--but the sexuality precedes the dissidence. Her association with the ANC emerges from her relationship with her first husband, Whaila, and not the other way around. Her love for Whaila, and her desire for a family wit him, serve in place of a conscious principle:

Our colour. She cannot see the dolour that relaxes his face, closes his eyes and leaves only his mouth drawn by lines on either side. Our colour. A category that doesn't exist: she would invent it. There are Hotnots and half-castes, two-coffee-one-milk, touch-of-the-tar-brush, pure white, black is beautiful--but a creature made of love, without a label; that's a freak.

Gordimer was a political novelist, but A Sport of Nature may be her most political novel. Those of us who are not South African may forget, or be ignorant of, her long association with Mandela and the African National Congress; famously, she helped write and revise Mandela's fiery speech that dared a judge to put him to death, before his life sentence. A Sport of Nature doubles as a kind of history of the anti-apartheid movement: there's the ANC, the SWAPO, the SACP, the MK, and every other acronym under the sun. Mandela is here, and several other figures whose names are less familiar to foreigners like me, like Oliver Tambo. It's a far cry from the abstract crisis of July's People--this is real history, recorded by a person who lived it. This is true for better and for worse, perhaps mostly worse, as the novel seems at times too granular. But as the novel's only fictional creation, Hillela hovers above it all, a character of power and individuality that, as far as I've read, is unmatched in Gordimer's fiction. Perhaps she was Gordimer's way of imagining a personality that might cut through the various contradictions and tensions of apartheid, a white woman freed from belief, led to the life of liberation by feeling only.

Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu

The essential ambiguity of my writing. Its irreducible insanity. I was in a world that cannot be described, and definitely not understood, through any other kind of writing, insofar as it can truly be comprehended. Revealing is one thing, and the painful process of reverse engineering, which is true understanding, quite another. You have before your eyes an artifact of another world, with other dawns and other gods, an enigmatic Antikythera mechanism that shines, floating in the air, in all the details of its metal brackets covered with symbols and small gears. It was difficult to retrieve it from the bottom of the sea, from all its oyster beds and undulating algae, to meticulously clean off the crust of petrified and and rust, to grease it with glittering oil, to set every gear in place so all the teeth fit together, and this is what my manuscript has done, up to this point: it has revealed, brought to light, unveiled what was hidden behind veils, it has decrypted what was locked in the crypt, it has deciphered the cipher of the box where it lay, without even a dash of the unknown object's shadow and melancholy dripping into our world.

Solenoid is narrated by an alternative version of Mircea Cartarescu, the writer whose 600-page phantasmagoria has made him famous (in book terms) around the world as well as in his native Romania. This version of Cartarescu, instead of achieving acclaim for his poetry early in life, had his work mocked and rejected, and ended up as a teacher of Romanian literature in a Bucharest middle school. He goes home each night to his "boat-shaped house," where a strange mechanical device--the title solenoid--generates a field that allows him to float above his bed at night. The solenoid provides the key, perhaps, to the strange and otherworldly occurrences that punctuate his life: the dream-like "visitors" that appear at his bedside, the invisible aliens who capture the school janitor, the enormous automaton that stomps a man to death, the secret chambers beneath the factory beside the school, the window into another world peopled by mites and other animalcules blown up to size of elephants.

If you know one thing about Solenoid, it's that it includes seven pages of nothing but the word "help!" repeated over and over. It's a cry that comes from deep within the narrator's being: help me! Get me out of this life, where I am imprisoned in a body, a body that will ultimately die. One of the funnier bits of Solenoid involves a group of protesters called the "Picketists" who demonstrate against death. Their protests are useless, of course, but who doesn't spend much of their life wondering about their own end, and why it has to be so, why it can't be otherwise? "Otherwise" is a key word for Solenoid, a word that resounds in its many doppelgangers and doubles, of which the second Cartarescu is one. (Another can be found in the way the narrator tells us he was raised as a girl by his parents, in effect, as his own dead or vanished twin sister.) Why must things be one way rather than another? Why must we be trapped in this existence, both metaphysically and physically?

I don't think I can explain to you what exactly the solenoids of the novel are, or what they're supposed to do, or how exactly they fit into the larger novel. I do get the sense that their power is in enabling that otherwise, in giving the narrator and others the ability to see life from another vantage point than their own limited one. Solenoid insists that, even though our own perspectives are by nature limited by our physical being, there is a world greater and more expansive that interacts with our own. The narrator's obsession with tesseracts is one example of this: four-dimensional shapes that change and transform as they pass through our own three-dimensional world, just as a three-dimensional cube passed through a plane creates a diamond that opens like a flower.

Another are the many, many images of microscopic animals, first arrayed in a kind of museum (accessible, House of Leaves-like, through a mysterious door in the narrator's own home), then glimpsed through a magical window. Cartarescu describes the mites as looking like the long-legged elephants from Dali; only later did I come to understand that what the narrator is given a glimpse of is not an alien planet, but our own world at a different scale, a world that is part of our own but has as little relation to our world as ours does to the world of the fourth-dimension--or the world of God. In one climactic scene--maybe the highlight of the long, bizarre novel--the narrator is transformed by a sympathetic librarian into a mite, where he is tasked with becoming the "Christ of the mites." How does a mite talk about? Through stomach waves and magnetic fields, it seems. The narrator's gospel "inspired in them an attitude they hadn't felt before, a longing toward what is impossible to imagine," and his description of the divine "they could not imagine except as an endlessly lazy and incredibly sad mite, wrapped in baroque-fetid scents, in whom putridness and sandalwood, formaldehyde and oleander, cinnamon and hydrogen sulfide, as well for us inconceivable smells of eyes, sky, spider, scream, hunger, claw, bronze, god, near, and, nor, probably weave together into a metaphysical robe of endless grandeur." This is, I think, wildly funny and poignant: all your religion, Cartarescu seems to say, is a cribbed and malformed understanding of that divine otherwise, and yet, by pointing the way outside of the self, it points to truth.

Once in my life I believed that the best novels are more metaphysical than political; they explore certain truths about human life that are beyond history and culture. I don't really believe that anymore; at least, I don't believe that the political is a sphere separate from the metaphysical, and I feel that claims to expressions about "the human condition" often ignore the ways that humans actually interact with one another. But Solenoid inspires the old feeling in me, that there is a truth at the bottom of human life, and it deals with the mystery of existence and the inescapable tragedy of death. Help! You said it, brother.

The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

In Thalia sex was just not talked about. Even Genevieve would go to  considerable lengths to keep from calling a spade a spade. Everything acknowledged the existence of sex: babies were born now and then, and things to prevent them were sold at the drugstores and one or two of the filling stations. The men told dirty jokes and talked all the time about how they wished they had more pussy, but it didn't really seem to bother many of them so long as the football team was doing well. The kids were told as little about sex as possible and spent most of their time trying to find out more. The boys speculated a lot among themselves and got the nature of the basic act straight when they were fairly young, but some of the girls were still in the dark about it when they graduated from high school. Many girls simply refused to believe that the things the boys peed out of could have any part in the creation of babies. They knew good and well that God wouldn't have wanted any arrangement of His to be that nasty.

Sonny and Duane are seniors in the (very) small town of Thalia, Texas. Duane is going with Jacy, the most beautiful girl in the school, and plans to marry her, while Sonny secretly pines for her. When Sonny breaks up with his own girlfriend, he finds himself adrift, until the school's coach asks him to drive his wife to a medical appointment. Sonny and Ruth, the coach's wife, find themselves ineluctably drawn together: for Sonny, it's a chance at the kind of real physical intimacy that scarcely belongs to the naive world of high school girls. For Ruth, whose boorish husband prefers the bodies of his male students to hers--a sexuality so secret that he seems not to even recognize it in himself--Sonny offers a chance to be touched, and loved, for the first time. They try to keep it a secret, not very well. Sonny and Ruth's relationship forms the core of The Last Picture Show, and flawed as it is, it may be the only relationship, in either physical or romantic terms, that gives anybody in the sad, lonely town any kind of pleasure at all.

McMurtry's vision of small town America is horribly bleak. Thalia is stultifying and repressive, ruled by a set of social norms that murder pride and pleasure of any kind. The Last Picture Show is, at its heart, a book about the consequences of sexual repression, which manages not to eliminate sex but to transmute it into dangerous, joyless forms. One of the favorite pastimes of the boy of Thalia High School is--unbelievably--to "play around" with local farmers' calves. That's how little romance McMurtry has for small towns--they're full of people who fuck cows. Repression's other consequences are, if not as graphic, even more dispiriting: the boys pay a whore to have sex with a mentally handicapped teen against his will; the deeply closeted coach lashes out of his own misery by having an English teacher fired for being the "queer" he himself really is; Sonny and Duane receive their own sexual initiation among underage, pregnant prostitutes in Mexico. And none of the adults, Sonny's parents or Jacy's, who have spent their whole miserable lives in Thalia have relationships that are anything but curdled.

Among such repression, Jacy, the prettiest girl in school, quickly learns to weaponize her attractiveness, using sex to climb the social ladder, from Duane to a series of wealthy "city boys." (Hilariously, the "city" for these characters is the metropolis of Wichita Falls.) Knowing that Sonny has always held a torch for her, she sets out to wreck his affair with Ruth just because she can. She even goes so far as to suggest eloping, in order to stick it to her parents, who she knows will come to fetch her and have the marriage annulled. She's a moral monster, and yet she is only what small towns like Thalia are designed to produce. She, too, is a victim, young and naive enough to think that her sexuality is a weapon that only she can wield and not one that can be wielded against her, too; she knows enough to see the way that she might manipulate Duane and Sonny but walks into the very same traps when set by men who are richer, older, or more sophisticated.

I really enjoyed Lonesome Dove, but I think The Last Picture Show is the more powerful novel. Lonesome Dove is a true epic, a long book (and part of an even longer series) written over a large map, and though it begins in Texas it encompasses nearly all of the American frontier. The Last Picture Show is a modern vision of the frontier that has shrunk down, where the last few generations cling to a lonely and barren place. Even as Duane gets out of Thalia--by way of the U.S. Army--Sonny never seems able to imagine a life outside of Thalia. The scene where, having graduated, he attends a football game only to discover how outside that world he is, is one of the saddest in a book where all of the scenes are sad. Even the excursions to the outside world--Wichita Falls, Fort Worth, Matamoros, even a senior trip to San Francisco--seem to exist only to confirm how provincial and inescapable Thalia really is. It takes real skill, I think, to craft a book so singularly punishing and bleak that doesn't feel like an exercise in cynicism. But I think The Last Picture Show speaks powerfully against a small-town romanticism that may be even more powerful today than it was when it was written. Sometimes, small towns are just small: in size, in vision, and in virtue.

A Book, Untitled by Shushan Avagyan

This book doesn't contain any novel ideas.

It simple (re)visits the main events of the past, and tries to understand the present, which is incomprehensible.

Yet the brilliant writers (who never did meet each other) were writing about their realities with such clarity and foresight that even after a hundred years their ideas have remained so relevant.

...And when each time my mind wanders back to Yerevan.

Armenian writer Shushan Avagyan's A Book, Untitled imagines a meeting between two forgotten masters of Armenian literature: Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan. Though they came from different centuries, different backgrounds, even different parts of Armenia--the Soviet East and the Turkish West, roughly and respectively, as I understand it--but they are similar insofar as their poetic achievements have been overlooked, either entirely (as is the case with one--I forget which--Yesayan?), or in the sense that their revolutionary work has been ignored in order to portray them as a "domestic," feminine poet. By imagining a meeting between them, Avagyan brings together threads of Armenian literary history that have never been allowed to connect.

Or perhaps the real subject of A Book, Untitled is the creation of the book itself: Avagyan weaves together the story of Khurginian and Yesayan's meeting with bits of research and poetry, as well as conversations between herself and her research partner Lara, as they investigate the poets' archives. Avagyan describes the book she's writing as having "four authors" of which she is only the "typist/writer/translator"; stupid me didn't pick up till the very end that she means herself, Lara, and the two poets, who are cast as equal contributors. Or perhaps Lara is not included, and the fourth is the reader themself, whom Avagyan invites into the process of composition. The novel's many threads--Khurginian and Yesayan, Avagyan and Lara, poetry, research, snippets of the poets' interrogation at the hands of the state, even scraps from postcards written to an anonymous lover--are scattered so freely, often alternating from one line to the next, that the whole thing seems like a kind of puzzle that must be pieced together. Avagyan even invites the reader to give the book, ostensibly untitled, a title of their own satisfaction.

I really hate when people say stuff like, "This book was too hard," or even worse, "It felt like homework." Yet I couldn't help feeling, as I read A Book, Untitled, that I was failing some test the book was putting out for me, or if not a test, then failing to take up some puzzle or game in the spirit it's intended. I wonder if knowing more about Armenian history might have helped here--it wasn't clear to me, even, who the interrogators seeking to censor Khurginian/Yesayan (which was it, again?) were supposed to be--Turks or Soviets? I came to appreciate the motifs of distance and collision, the way in which the distance between the author of the postcards and their recipient mirrors the way in which the poets at the heart of the novel are kept apart, spiritually, socially, culturally, etc. But the metafictional aspects of it felt more alienating and grueling than illuminating, to me. Surely the failure is mostly mine; hopefully there are readers out there more game for the puzzle than I was.

That said, I love this press, Tilted Axis, which is dedicated to English translations of all kinds of world literature. This is the first book I've read by an Armenian writer, which brings my "Countries Read" list up to 91!

Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa

It's high noon in Bruneville. Not a cloud in the sky. The sun beats down, piercing the veil of shimmering dust. Eyes droop from the heat. In the Market Square, in front of Cafe Ronsard, Sheriff Shears spits five words at Don Nepomuceno:

"Shut up, you dirty greaser."

He says the words in English.

Last week I spent a few days in Brownsville, a city on the Rio Grande where Texas borders Mexico. Brownsville is one of the most heavily Latino cities in the United States, and it still has a distinctly Mexican feel to it. Across the border lies the city of Matamoros, Brownsville's Mexican "twin." Though we never saw it, we did overlook the border many times, looking for birds. It's hard to stand there and not feel underwhelmed; is this narrow, sluggish, brown river really such a meaningful boundary that it preoccupies our national imagination? A kindly local suggested we try birding at a former golf course on the river "where the illegals cross," though he hastened to add that nothing bad would happen there. Nearby, on an anonymous and scrubby patch of grassland, is where the opening shots of the Mexican-American war rang out. You feel the history, perhaps, but the feeling of the border, the boundary, is elusive.

Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa's book Texas: The Great Theft begins on the American side of the river, in Bruneville, a fictionalized version of Brownsville, in the 1850s. A white sheriff is picking on a Mexican drunk in the town square. When Don Nepomuceno, a wealthy Tejano rancher, objects, the sheriff insults him, calling him a "greaser," a word which will reverberate for miles and miles on both sides of the Rio Grande, and which will ultimately lead to a war between Nepomuceno's forces and the white settlers who resent the claims that the Mexicans, Tejanos, and Indians have on the land. The first quarter or so of the novel follows the news of the sheriff's insult as it passes from mouth to mouth, a process by which it takes in all of the novel's frankly enormous cast of characters: ranchers, vaqueros, gamblers, the bargeman, the innkeeper, the doctor, the mayors of Bruneville and its twin Matasanchez, journalists, spies, bandits, enslaved men, freedmen, Seminoles, Comanches, Germans, children, the keeper of the messenger pigeons, fishermen, and more. Texas has maybe the largest cast of characters per page of any book I've ever read; Boullosa pointedly gives us as wide a view as possible. The sheriff's insult, then, ripples like a stone dropped in the river.

Texas is a highly fictionalized version of a true story; Nepomuceno is a version of the Tejano rancher Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, who lead bands of raiders against the white ranchers in south Texas. I recognized many of the ranchers' names, like Kenedy and Kleberg, who gave their names to south Texas counties, and King, whose namesake ranch is still the largest in the United States, and who inspired the cattle barons of Edna Ferber's novel Giant. Like the Rio Grande, the border between fiction and history is permeable, and who belongs to which is not always discernable. The sheer number of characters gives the novel a kind of breakneck pace, and steers it away from modes that emphasize the interiority or psychology of historical figures. Instead, it gives the history a kind of fable-like quality, a colorful flatness that emphasizes breadth over depth.

It's a story not just about Nepomuceno but all of south Texas, and it's a story about racial violence that comes down squarely on the side of the Mexicans and Tejanos. For them, the border is a boundary placed down to delineate and permit violence and deprivation. The sheriff's insult sets off the war, but the larger context is the white ranchers who have eaten away by subterfuge the lands belonging to Nepumoceno's mother Dona Estefania, and who exert control over Mexicans (and Black people and Indians) by a regime of dispossession and disrespect. Boullosa captures the way that Brownsville/Bruneville, having been founded to mark and watch over the border, represents a kind of diminished and degraded mirror image of its sister city across the border. And I thought it was interesting how Nepomuceno, having been roped into the United States by the machinations of the Anglo ranchers, cannily insists on his claim to American citizenship--though the two cities are emblems of opposition, they exist in a kind of symbiosis that cannot be fully pulled apart or cleanly separated.