My Name is Sita by Bea Vianen

She gathers her suitcases and leaves. Azaat didn't come home. His car isn't at the door. She is glad that she will no longer have to witness the unhappy couple's scenes, glad that she will no longer have to watch the spectacle of naked children wandering around with flies on their buttocks and fat lice on their heads. No, that's not true. She will remember these things like the death meal of black vultures in the middle of the road. The scrawny chickens dragged from their pens in the dead of night by possums and left for dead on the roadside, the stench, the sadness, the isolation, the powerlessness. You can't change any of it, all you can do is watch everything choke itself in the grabbing arms of the jungle, how the vermin devour all that is beautiful in those romanticized forests with their terrifying sounds, their giant birds with bright wings spread dangerously across the sky, screeching and cursing the world below, the tuberculosis, the leprosy, the poverty, the corruption.

My Name is Sita, by Surinamese writer Bea Vianen, begins with the narrator--Sita, called S.--confronting an old woman named Adjodiadei about her past. It's hinted that Adjodiadei had an affair with Sita's grandfather, which later resulted in his abandoning their family and returning to his native India, followed by the suicide of Sita's grandmother, and later the death of her mother. Sita lives in the wreckage of these events, in the home of a father who is alternately absent and authoritarian. As she grows into womanhood, Sita is largely left on her own devices, relying on her friend Selinha for advice, but even Selinha abandons her, becoming pregnant by a Hindu, much to the chagrin of her Muslim family. Sita then finds herself the attentions of a young man named Islam, who foists himself upon her, impregnates her, and then becomes a resentful and inattentive husband.

My Name is Sita is a story of cycles, of the patterns of poverty and neglect which seem to repeat themselves with brutal specificity. Sita ends up in more or less exactly the same place as her friend Selinha, caught the snare of an interreligious relationship that is anathema to her family, though Sita lacks even the love that her friend Selinha shares. And at the end of the novel, she ends up repeating the same choices that bred such resentment in her toward her grandfather: she accepts being disowned by Islam, and lets him have their child, so that she might leave Suriname behind and travel to the Netherlands for an education. From a bird's-eye view, it's a story about the legacy of South Asian emigration to South America, whose promises were so meager that they led to a second exodus, either to Europe or back to the Indian subcontinent. We are happy for Sita at the end of the novel, but what will happen to child, ominously given the same name as Sita's neglected brother Ata, and left behind with the cruel, neglectful Islam and his family?

I don't know much about Suriname; it seems like an interesting place. It's an island of Dutch influence surrounded by French and Spanish colonial culture, and a very tiny country, basically a single city perched on the edge of a great jungle. My Name is Sita wasn't my favorite novel--it had a kind of elliptic nature that often threw me out of the story--but it struck me as a fascinating image of the difficulties in living in such a place. And I have to express my gratitude toward the publisher, Sandorf Passage, for resurrecting and republishing it, as they did with The Case of Cem, and apparently lots of other less-remembered novels from around the world.

With the addition of Suriname, my "Countries Read" list is up to 102!

Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

The creek was made narrow by little green trees that grew too close together. The creek was like 12,845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out.

Sometimes when I went fishing in there, I felt just like a telephone repairman, even though I did not look like one. I was only a kid covered with fishing tackle, but in some strange way by going in there and catching a few trout, I kept the telephones in service. I was an asset to society.

It was pleasant work, but at times it made me uneasy. It could grow dark in there instantly when there were some clouds in the sky and they worked their way onto the sun. Then you almost needed candles to fish by, and foxfire in your reflexes.

What is "Trout Fishing in America?" In Richard Brautigan's collection of short pieces, it's a lot of things: a book, a person, sometimes more than one person, a hotel. It's an activity, of course, but the kind of activity that talks back to you, or makes walnut catsup to eat on hamburgers, along with his girlfriend, Maria Callas. It's hard to explain exactly what Trout Fishing in America is, and it's hard to explain what Trout Fishing in America is, except that it's not like anything I've read before, which is always, always, always the single best thing that I could say about a book.

Brautigan's pieces borrow from the language of San Francisco beatniks and hippies, but this is a book of the Pacific Northwest, the interior especially, along the clear streams of Idaho. Brautigan's narrator--if indeed it is the same person speaking in each of the 1-3 page pieces that make up the novel--is always looking for a good place to fish, and only sometimes finding it. It's an American activity, mixed up with the ruggedness of the Mountain West and the self-sufficiency of winos and derelicts, people who by nature must fend for themselves. The narrator is often foiled in his search for the right place to fish:  an inviting creek with a waterfall turns out to be a set of stairs, or no one stops to pick up the hitchhiking fisherman. The narrator describes a stepfather who described "trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal":

Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.

I'd like to get it right.

Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.

Imagine Pittsburgh.

A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains, and tunnels.

The Andrew Carnegie of trout!

The chapters themselves are slippery things, like trout, mash-em-ups of images that refuse to come together for easy readings. "Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity" begins on the Calle de Eternidad in Gelatao, Mexico, and ends up a story about the narrator's youth working for an old woman. It never returns to Mexico, so what were we doing there? In "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard," the narrator investigates a junk store where you can buy a fishing stream cut up in into measured lengths, like pipes. The stories are defined by this kind of absurdism and playfulness, which I really enjoyed. Taken together, a picture emerges of America in the 20th century, rediscovering its own natural patrimony: camping, fishing, mountaineering, the national forests, etc., etc.  "As much as anything else," we're told, "the Coleman lantern is the symbol of the camping craze that is currently sweeping America, with its unholy white light burning in the forests of America." The narrator has a baby with his girlfriend, and they take it with them into the woods, bringing the mid-century hope of domestic life out into the American landscape.

I really enjoyed Trout Fishing in America, and I think I'll be thinking about it for a long time. I'm not a fisherman--I've never had the patience--but it spoke to a kind of pride and love deep within me for the American landscape and the way it has shaped the American character. 

The Employees by Olga Ravn

It's our experience that the objects from the valley of New Discovery want to stay with us here. It feels like they're ours, and at the same time like we belong to them. As if they in fact are us. The Six Thousand Ship can't function without our work. No, I don't want to say anything else to you now. Impending violence is by no means inconceivable. We're only just beginning to understand what we're capable of.

Who are "the employees" of The Employees? Some of those working aboard the Six Thousand Ship are human, and some are "humanoid," biological androids who resemble, but are not exactly like, their human coworkers. The novel takes the form of a series of interviews done with a mysterious HR wing of the ship's administration, and though at first the distinction between these two types of interlocutor is unclear, over time the differences--and divisions--between the two classes of coworker become clear. Over the course of the interviews, it's revealed that the ship has taken on board several mysterious "objects" from a valley on a planet called New Discovery. These objects--perhaps like the humanoids--seem somehow both mineral and organic, and they call out to the workers of the ship in subtle ways--through colors, dreams, smells.

Though the mechanism is kept ambiguous, the presence of the objects seems to create an awareness in the humanoids of the difference between them and their human coworkers. Already at the beginning of the novel, Ravn hints at a redacted moment of violence and banishment; this is, perhaps, the first signal of the objects' effect. I read The Employees as a book about the development of a class consciousness: though the Six Thousand Ship is structured in such a way to elide the differences between humans and humanoids, the humanoids are really a lower class of worker, a kind of android proletariat, and their connection to the objects allows them to see the differences for the first time. The novel's HR speak--starting with its title--point to a satire on the language of modern employment. It made me think about the way that companies like Uber intentionally blur the line between "employees" and "contractors," and other ways that modern workplaces are striated and stratified under the guise of the "we're a family here" attitude. Of course, it also brings up certain anxieties about the future workplace under automation. What if all those self-checkout machines at the CVS decided they didn't want to do our bidding anymore?

The Employees has a kind of too-good-for-science-fiction vibe, for both better and worse. Better, in that the language is sharper and the images often striking, and in the way that Ravn eschews lengthy exposition about the nature of the objects or the scientific mechanisms of their functioning. Worse, in that the world of the Six Thousand Ship seems undercooked, drawing from stock ideas about space travel that feel obvious or dilettantish. Brent said that he wanted the story to be either more ambiguous or more unambiguous, and that feels right; the littleness and spareness of the method end up giving the impression of an allegory or a fable, rather than a novel. 

Native New Yorkers: The Legacy of the Algonquin People of New York by Evan T. Pritchard

I think that if the Munsee and the other nations of New York are all honored once again and given their proper place in U.S. history, it will be a good sign that, in the words of the old Munsee blessing, "The sun will shine on our wigwams, and our moccasins will not get wet." We will then begin the great healing of all our people that must take place--the red, white, yellow, and black nations coming together as four parts of the hoop of life. Only then can the earth be healed. As the Cree say, "Animals don't have problems, we do!" It's our healing that will ensure a more bountiful earth and a better place for children to grow up. And that's something we can all do for each other.

At one point in Mi'kmaq author Evan T. Pritchard's Native New Yorkers, he tells the reader that the Algonquin people who call New York their homeland trust in visions, in which respected family members or guides often appear. He then tells us about one such vision of his own, walking around Manhattan. It's a clear sign that, while scrupulously and doggedly researched, Native New York is not quite like other books you might have read about Indigenous history. It is, among other things, a book that takes seriously the power of life as it was lived among the Munsee Lenape, and takes seriously the idea that it might provide a kind of schema for us to live by in the future. A good antidote, actually, to the stale land acknowledgements who present Indigenous presence as something long gone and never to return.

Mostly, Native New Yorkers is what its title promises: a compendium of Indigenous history and geography in New York State. Pritchard takes us through a tour of nearly all of New York State, from the city to the Hudson Valley to the Capital Region to Long Island--western New York is conspicuously left out--describing the names and locations of tribes, villages, and pathways. I was interested to learn that Manahatta, the island we now know as Manhattan, was not really a densely populated place, thanks to its rockiness, but instead often served as a kind of meeting place for the various tribes of the area. I was impressed by the level of detail here. A different book might have tried to pick and choose a few places to illustrate larger themes, and while that might have been (sorry to say) a slightly more readable book, there's something awe-inspiring, and informative, about seeing every single Lenape, Mohican, or Haudenosanuee village mapped out. It's impossible to read Native New Yorkers and come away thinking that Dutch colonists sailed into a "fresh, green breast" empty of people.

In between the geography, Pritchard fills in the gaps with chapters on history and culture. I really enjoyed his attempts to capture the shape of what life might have been like among the pre-colonial Lenape, and the section on "Lenape exodus" really cleared up for me a lingering question about how the Lenape got from New York to their reservations in Oklahoma and Wisconsin. (Much of the story, which I did not know, involved a gradual migration to Pennsylvania and then further into the Ohio River Valley, where they were absorbed by the Shawnee of the great rebel Tecumseh.) And although I wasn't always persuaded by the parallels that Pritchard tries to draw between history and the present--like when he insists that the chess tables of Washington Square Park are somehow a continuation of the "outdoor gaming contests" of the Lenape--they often made me laugh, and think a little more deeply about the fundamental humanity of those who once stood where I am standing.

Two Books about Cherokee Removal

Our grandfathers followed a stick to northern Georgia. It was an old migration. The Great Spirit led us here. How can the soldiers drive us from our land? Maybe it was because we worshiped the Earth instead of God, Reverend Mackenzie preached. Maybe it was because some of us had black slaves, Reverend Bushyhead said. Maybe it was because of gold and our cornfields, the men said.

Maybe the Great Spirit just calls us to the beyond where he lives. Maybe he's going to show us another world.

But who wants another world?

The Trail of Tears looms large in our memory as one of the country's greatest moral crimes: thousands upon thousands of Native Americans, uprooted from their homes in the Southeast, and forced to march for months to what is now Oklahoma. And yet, I think Diane Glancy's novel Pushing the Bear is the first time I've seen anyone try to show, in art, what the trail was like for those who underwent it, how they suffered to leave their homes behind, how they became sick and weak and died, how they had to hurriedly bury their own before being rushed off to the next unfamiliar place. Glancy's novel, which focuses on a group of Cherokee from North Carolina, takes a multivocal approach, trading first person narratives at a half-page clips. By taking a wide view, Glancy shows a fundamental diversity among the Cherokee, who brought with them their resentments and rivalries with other bands, who brought traditional religions and Christianity, who brought different ideas about how best to respond to the forced removal. It's not not a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, but the Cherokee of Pushing the Bear do not manage to come together in inspiring ways. A crisis, Glancy tells us, has a way of prying open all our divisions.

The two central voices of the novel are a married couple, Maritole and Knobowtee. Maritole loses everything and everyone on the trail, beginning with her cabin: she is allowed to return briefly to fetch a few items and finds, chillingly, a white family has already moved in. On the trail, she gives birth to a baby who dies, and then loses her mother and father; her brother fled to the woods and will never be seen again. When she needs Knobowtee the most, he abandons her, failing to provide any comfort or companionship. We learn that Knobowtee, a widower, has married Maritole for her farm, and now that Maritole no longer owns a farm, what is the foundation of their relationship? Maritole becomes close to a white soldier, who shows a puppyish interest in the Cherokee in their ways, but their relationship invites the scorn of the other Cherokee, driving her further to the margin of the march. "I gave him my life in the dark," Maritole says of her first sexual liaison with the soldier, "I let him feel my hurt. My wounds inside. I would always be cut in two. Part of me in North Carolina. Part of me in the new land. I held open my wounds for him to soothe."

It's Maritole who coins the title phrase: in periods of madness and distress, she feels as if she is pushing away a giant bear that nibbles at her. The bear is a symbol of the march itself, a beast that would devour her whole if she let it, and which requires constant effort and attention to push away, though of course, it always comes back. Over the course of the march, Maritole and the marchers begin to approach a zen-like resignation, not of defeat, but of openness to the possibility that their lives can be rebuilt anew. "Maybe that was the Great Spirit's lesson," one Cherokee writes, "I could receive and lose in the same breath. The burden the white man carried was that he didn't know the lesson yet." This, to me, may be the central truth of Pushing the Bear: that those who are unable to believe that history might work on them, rather than others, are in a dangerous place.

We are speakers of the dead, the drifters and messengers, the old and the young, lurking in the shadows of tall trees at night, passing through the walls of abandoned buildings and houses, concrete structures, stone walls and bridges. We are the ones watching from underwater, rising up like mist, spreading like a rainstorm, over fields and gardens and courtyards, flying over towers and rooftops and through the arched doorways of old buildings with spider cracks in their walls. We reveal ourselves to those who will look. It has been said we are illusions, nightmares and dreams, the disturbing and tense apparitions of the mind. We are always restless, carrying the dreams of children and the elderly, the tired and sick, the poor, the wounded. The removed.

Diane Glancy's Cherokee find themselves, at the end of the novel, facing a new life at Fort Gibson in modern-day Oklahoma. The characters in Brandon Hobson's The Removed may be their descendants, Cherokee living in an Eastern Oklahoma town called "Quah" (a lightly fictionalized version, one might guess, of the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah). As its name suggests, Hobson's novel asks the question: is Indian removal a historical process that is completed and over? Or does it live on, in some form or another, to today?

The Removed centers on the Echota family, whose name evokes the Treaty of New Echota, made between the United States and the Cherokee prior to the Trail of Tears. Sixteen years prior to The Removed, the eldest Echota brother, Ray-Ray, was shot and killed by a white police officer. In the present, we see through alternating first-person narratives--a method that recalls Pushing the Bear, though without Glancy's brisk switching--how the murder continues to effect each member of the family today. Mother Maria has agreed to serve as an emergency foster parent for a young Cherokee boy whose wisdom and sense of humor remind her of Ray-Ray. The boy, Wyatt, makes an even stronger impression on her husband Ernest, who becomes convinced that Wyatt really is Ray-Ray reincarnated, and it's hard to say he's wrong. The arrival of Wyatt reverses the symptoms of Alzheimer's in Ernest, who suddenly finds himself reconciled to his memories and whole for the first time in years. Daughter Sonja spends her time seducing a single father named Vin, a pursuit of singular and baffling obsessiveness that makes little sense--until it's revealed that Vin is the son of the cop who killed Ray-Ray.

The most interesting section, though, belongs to son Edgar, whose disillusionment and despair have led him into a life of addiction. Edgar imagines--or perhaps is--followed around by an aggressive "red fowl" whom he nursed as a chick and who has turned against him. A symbol of drug addiction, maybe? Edgar decides at the last minute to return home for a yearly bonfire in Ray-Ray's memory, but he finds himself waylaid with his friend Jackson in an eerie town known only as the "Darkening Land." Is this a real place, or a limbo-like place where, it's suggested, suicides live? Edgar's friend Jackson says he's making a video game about Jim Thorpe, and keeps wanting to capture Edgar's "Indian" likeness as a reference. This, we learn later, is a lie; Jackson has designed a video game that allows players to hunt Indians, and the line between the holograms who are the targets and real Indians like Edgar is frighteningly blurry. It's a bit of a groaner when we learn that Jackson's last name is Andrews--Jackson Andrews, get it?--but I think that, through the skillful creepiness of the setting, Hobson earns it.

How many ways can one be removed? Ray-Ray's death gives us one way. Addiction, provoked by poverty, might be another. There is a suggestion, too, that the foster system encourages a kind of removal; Hobson brought his longtime professional experience with the Oklahoma foster system to bear in his (excellent) novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, and does so again here. All of this suggests that Indian Removal is a process that plays out again and again, when Native Americans are ground out of the systems that identify them as dependents or threats. And yet, the novel gives us visions of reconciliation and restoration, too, in the arrival of Wyatt, the living memory, and in the way that Sonja is forced to abandon her quixotic and half-baked plan of revenge. The final voice threaded with Maria's, Edgar's, and Sonja's is that of Tsala, a 19th century Cherokee folk hero who fought against removal and saved the Eastern Band of Cherokee (and who appears briefly in Pushing the Bear as "Tsali"). Tsali, like Ray-Ray, was a martyr, but his spirit could not be conquered.

Maud's Line by Margaret Verble

Maud began to feel a growing hatred for who she was and where she lived. She was sick to death of dirt, sick of chickens, sick of guns and snakes, and, most of all, sick of dead bodies gnawed by animals. Her only chance for escape had been that bright blue canvas rocking her way. She cursed Booker out loud. She stormed at his character until she remembered he'd left her a letter. She just didn't know what it said. But that didn't really matter. He hadn't come back for their wedding. That told the words.

Maud Nail is a Cherokee woman living in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. She's just turned eighteen, and several of the local boys have their eye on her, but she's drawn to Booker, a traveling salesman whose bright blue wagon tokens a wider world. Booker is drawn to Maud in turn, but he has entered her life at a moment when many changes come in to complicate things. First, her father disappears, implicating himself in the murder of a pair of white farmers who have been known to have designs on the Nail allotment. Her brother Lovely has become what my relatives would call "touched," seeing visions of the dead, and Maud fears that the culprit might be a case of rabies, brought on by the carcass of a dead dog deposited in the house by the aforementioned farmers. One by one, the men in Maud's life leave, first her father, then Lovely, and then finally Booker, leaving her alone on her allotment to fend for herself, and to face the prospect of an unexpected pregnancy.

One interesting thing about Maud's Line is that it tells a story about Native life that is adjacent to a more familiar one, the killing of the Osage that's depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon. Verble makes a single off-hand reference to the Osage driving around in Cadillacs. Maud is Cherokee, not Osage, and her allotment holds no oil, and yet it is the target of white mischief all the same. The machinations of the white farmers are a backdrop to a much deeper story about individual determination, and--since, after all, they are quickly murdered--less integral to the story than I was first expecting. But the novel also presents a lot of interesting and subtle suggestions about the way that early 20th century Cherokee did and did not fit into the larger systems of white society that surrounded them. The disappearance of Maud's father and brother, for instance, seem to take place in a context in which itinerancy is more expected, and where her uncles are always "laying out," that is, shacking up at the house of their current love interest. There's a kind of fluidity and freedom in Maud's life that I suspect would seem unacceptable in white households of the time. When Booker leaves, it's because (he says) he struggles morally with the way she lies to protect her father from the sheriff, but I get the sense, too, that he is reacting to something in her way of life that is to him both unfamiliar and difficult to put into words.

Maud's Line is competently, briskly written; it is bracingly forward about violence and sex. There's a hardbitten realism to it--I expected, for example, that the murder of the white farmers would turn out to be a deeper mystery, but we learn in the end that Maud's father really was involved. Later (spoiler alert spoiler alert), Lovely commits suicide, forestalling any idea that the novel will be about pat reconciliations or restitutions. Still, in the end, Booker does come back, though perhaps a little dimmer in our eyes, and a little less the worldly traveler that we once saw him as. In the end, Maud leaves with Booker, headed to a life of motherhood in Oklahoma's version of the city, and to do this she must abandon her allotment, that portion of land afforded to her by her citizenship in the Cherokee nation. It's a moment of great ambiguity, and only possibly a happy ending.

The Indian Lawyer by James Welch

Now, as he remembered to look out at the small crowd, he saw the posters bobbing over the faces, red and blue with white lettering, YELLOW CALF FOR CONGRESS, and the large buttons on topcoats and wool jackets, and he became excited by what he was actually doing. All the planning, the strategy, the issues, which had seemed so academic to him, gave way to the reality that he was actually running for office, that he was qualified, not in the politician's way but in his own beliefs and values. He felt a great wave of anticipation through his body and he thought, I am on my way, I will make a difference because I am Sylvester Yellow Calf and I do count. He suddenly felt as though his life had inexorably led him to this moment and he wanted it to be momentous.

Sylvester Yellow Calf is a successful lawyer in Helena, Montana's capital. As a teenager, he was the star of the high school basketball team in Browning, on the Blackfeet reservation; this success marked him as a leader and made him what he is--which is to say, it got him off the reservation. Now he's on the precipice of considering a run for Congress, in which he hopes to become a strong advocate for the issues that affect Indians like those back home. But Yellow Calf also sits on the parole board, and a devious inmate named Jack Harwood has cooked up a plan to obtain his freedom by convincing his wife, Patti Ann, to seduce Yellow Calf and blackmail him.

It's interesting to compare Yellow Calf to the protagonists of James Welch's four other novels. (This is his fifth, and last--sad for me.) There are the historical figures of Fools Crow and Charging Elk, both caught in moments of great upheaval and change. Then there are the heroes of Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney, whose life on the reservation seems never-changing, only a dead end. Yellow Calf, by contrast, is the one who got out and made something of himself, but with the success comes the conflicted feelings of having left one's community behind. This is underlined for Yellow Calf when he sits on the parole board for another Indian his own age, whom he distantly remembers from the reservation. This man is not, perhaps, a frightening reminder of what might have been, but a reminder that not everyone had Yellow Calf's luck, or ability to shoot a basketball, and that success has meant becoming somewhat alien to the community whose hero he once was.

As a political thriller, The Indian Lawyer isn't much. It might have benefitted from a James Patterson-type, who could have turned the blackmail into something that fits a little better the desperation and deviousness we are meant to see in Harwood. Welch does try to ratchet up the intensity of the conflict; Harwood loses control of his scheme when a pair of reckless accomplices decide to take matters into their own hands. Harwood himself, though, provides an interesting contrast to Yellow Calf. Whereas we're told that Yellow Calf did all he good to "make good" on his difficult upbringing, Harwood is a shrewd, intelligent man--and a white one--who seems to have turned to crime out of pure pique. He's neither as stupid nor violent as his accomplices, but he's made an active choice to embrace criminality, perhaps for no better reason than he can. Together, the two of them seem to illustrate that the limitations of one's birth--geographic, economic, racial--are not absolute.

I don't know much about Welch as a person, but I wonder if this image of a fellow Blackfoot who transformed himself by leaving the reservation behind resonated with him. I wonder if Sylvester's success, and his grappling with it, emerged from Welch's own relative success and prestige as a writer. In any case, it's not Welch's best novel (it's probably the least interesting and effective of the five), but it's worth reading for the way it stands alone.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Over the door to the next room hung a painting rather strange in form, around fix feet wide and no more than ten inches high. It portrayed the Savior just taken down from the cross. The prince glanced fleetingly at it, as if recalling something, not dropping, however, waiting to fo on through the door. He felt very oppressed and wanted to be out of this house quickly. But Rogozhin suddenly stopped in front of the painting.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Lev Nikolaich; do you believe in God or not?”

“How strangely you ask and stare!” the prince observed involuntarily.

“But I like looking at that painting,” Rogozhin muttered after a silence, as if again forgetting his question.

“At that painting!” the prince suddenly cried out, under the impression of an unexpected thought. “At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!”

“Lose it he does,” Rogozhin suddenly agreed unexpectedly.

The Idiot opens on a train, where the protagonist, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young man fresh from a years-long treatment of his epilepsy in Switzerland, is returning to Russia to seek family and to restart his life. He is, in Dostoevsky’s words, “a perfect man”, a man uniquely unsuited for life in modern Russia. His fellow passengers include the mercurial and chaotic Parfyon Rogozhin, who has just come into possession of a large fortune, Lukyan Lebedev, a gossipy know-it-all clerk. In conversation with the pair, Myshkin is directed to the household he has come to visit, that of his distant relatives the Epanchins. He also learns of Nastasya Fillipovna, who was orphaned as a child and is now a kept (and “fallen”) woman, with whom Rogozhin is obsessed.

Upon arrival at the house, a long conversation ensues, typical of Dostoevsky, during which most of the additional principles of the novel--disgraced General Ivolgin, his passionate son Gavrily,the Epanchin daughters, including the beautiful Aglaya--appear. By the time the gathering ends, all the crucial conflicts of the novel have been established, and Rogozhin has offered to, well, buy Nastasya Fillipovna from her benefactor, and Myshkin has come, surprisingly and suddenly, into a large inheritance which he tries to use to block Rogozhin from further disgracing Nastasya, which the Prince, in his guileless way, has already fallen deeply in love with. But, in one of the most electrifying scenes in the whole book, Nastasya moves to accept, then suddenly rejects, the Prince’s selfless offer and instead leaves with Rogozhin.

There are MAJOR SPOILERS in the following paragraph.

Like most of the big Russian novels, the ensuing book defines simple description. There’s ample intrigue interspersed with long conversations that are sometimes fascinating and moving, as when the Prince tells about a mentally ill outcast he befriended in Sweden, or his story of trying to understand the feelings of a man who is only moments from being executed, and dull or confusing, as in the two or three conversations where everyone seems to be in hysterics for no clear reason. Which is not really a downside--part of the buy-in with Dostoevsky is the sprawling nature of the stories and, just like I wouldn’t remove Teso Dos Bichos or Space from The X-Files, I wouldn’t remove a single long digression about Russian politics. Suffice to say, the book hurtles (if something can hurtle slowly) towards a number of confrontations. Unexpectedly (or not?), Dostoevsky’s book about a Christlike Prince has what is easily the darkest ending of his major works, ending with (GIANT SPOILERS) Nastasya’s murder by Rogozhin and Myshkin’s subsequent return to Sweden, his mind and spirit seemingly broken beyond repair.

Holbein’s painting The Dead Christ, which is what’s being discussed in the excerpt above, is the connection point between the various characters that populate the novel. The painting, which depicts Christ’s body in the grave, is grotesque, almost gleefully. It asks, what if Christ never rose but is, instead, rotting in the grave? What good is it to follow a dead man who led a good life but died a failure? And of course it is impossible not to ask these same questions of Dostoevsky’s hero, as Myshkin is always upright, always kind, always reaching to “save” the wicked Rogozhin, the unfairly exiled and used Nastasya, the beautiful but machiavellian Aglaya, the vindictive and jealous Ganya, the foolish and dishonest Ivolgin, even the aggressively antagonist young anarchist Ippolit, and in return, is embroiled in their petty conflicts and scandals, used as a pawn, and discarded, broken and seemingly without hope at the end of the story?

Like Dostoevsky’s most famous writings, the “Grand Inquisitor” chapters from The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot asks the hardest questions; unlike the later novel, The Idiot offers very little as a counterargument, save, perhaps, that everyone in this book is pretty miserable except Myshkin. The most famous line from The Idiot is “Beauty will save the world”; but the phrase isn’t uttered or affirmed by Myshkin, the novel’s moral center, but mockingly by Aglaya Epanchin, whose machinations propel the tragedy that closes the story. 

Maybe beauty will save the world. Or maybe what is beautiful will always be crushed by the ugly and powerful. Maybe Christ is still rotting in that tomb and selfless love is a mug’s game. I closed the book impressed the Dostoevsky, a devout Christian whose life was marked by violence and tragedy, was able to write something so unflinchingly bleak. And I think about all the “Christians” running things now who see following Christ as a guarantee of victory, and not an invitation to love our neighbors more than we love ourselves, even if that means we rot too.

The Indian Card by Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz

I begin to think about my own Native identity as a series of overlapping circles. A Venn diagram, id you will. In one of these circles exists political identity: membership in the Lumbee Tribe, citizenship through the process of enrollment. From a Native Nations standpoint, this identity seems paramount. Enrollment is the mechanism by which Tribes maintain political sovereignty and the vehicle by which they ensure their continued survival.

In another circle exists my racial identity: I am a Lumbee woman; a Native woman. Of course, the concept of a "Native race" is complicated. Many people would consider their Tribe to be their primary identity; they d o not feel an inherent sense of belong to a more global, pan-Indian "race." I'll be honest: it's still something I'm navigating for myself.

Remember when Elizabeth Warren released the results of her DNA test, showing that she had some percentage of Native American ancestry? It's got to be an all-time unforced error: it didn't convince any of the right-wing jerkoffs who like to call her "Pocahontas." But crucially, it offended many actual Native Americans, who responded by saying that a DNA test isn't enough to claim a Native American identity in the absence of any relationship with a Tribe or a tradition. Warren's cluelessness, in fact, touched upon a sore point in Indian Country today, one that you might only not know is a sore point if you haven't been paying attention: who gets to call themselves Native American, and how?

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz's new book, The Indian Card, is an in-depth exploration of this question. Schuettpelz frames the book with the story of her own "Indian card," a tribal document she received from the Lumbee Nation when she was a child. The card gave Schuettpelz a sense of legitimacy and connection, but this was troubled, in turn, by the fact that she lived in Iowa, far away from the geographical heart of the Lumbee in North Carolina. (And further troubled, we learn later, by the fact that the Lumbee Nation is not recognized by the federal government, which complicates the relationship between enrollment and sovereignty.) Schuettpelz, who worked in the Obama administration, pursues the question by means of statistical data analysis, but also through the stories of people, like her, whose "Native" identity is not straightforward, like those who have been denied enrollment because of the way different tribes define enrollment differently: because they don't have enough "blood quantum," or because of the barriers of proving their ancestry on the tribe's rolls.

Here's a couple big takeaways I had. While each tribe determines their own enrollment differently, there are only two main methods. One is blood quantum, the percentage of "Indian blood" you possess, often set at a minimum of one-quarter or one-eighth. The other is by tracing your ancestry back to someone who appeared on the official rolls of a particular historical census. This last is complicated by the fact that some tribes require patrilineal or matrilineal descent. This leads to complicated scenarios where someone, even with the same amount of "blood," is unable to claim the same enrollment as their half-sibling. These questions are not just about identity and belonging, Schuettpelz notes; they determine whether someone is able to receive cash payouts, like casino proceeds, or even use tribal health care resources. But they are also methods that can only be traced back to settler-colonial practices. She shows that many of the historical rolls used to determine ancestry were actually drawn up to facilitate forced immigration or allotment, tools used to depredate Natives of their land or resources. Similarly, blood quantum relies on European racial ideas imported to facilitate enslavement. Such is the bind placed on Native identity.

You might say that The Indian Card relies on three woven methods: statistical and historical fact, the interviews that Schuettpelz undertakes with various people about the challenges facing their own enrollment, and Schuettpelz's own story of her "Indian card." I felt a little underwhelmed by the book as a whole, perhaps because each of these three on its own seemed not quite whole or developed enough. It's no fault of the author's, really, but I think I might have liked a more scholarly approach, which traces more clearly and comprehensively the historical forces that created modern paradigms of identity. That said, as issues around Native identity go from being bruited within Indian Country to becoming public and political news--like Warren's DNA test, or the recent spate of "Pretendian" unveilings--it's good to have a book like this to fill a gap in general knowledge.

The Ancient Child by N. Scott Momaday

What he saw, not once but recurrently, was a dark, impending shape on a dark field of the sky. It seemed very slowly to revolve and approach. At a certain distance it was seen to be a beast, massive and indefinite. It was disintegrated, distorted, changing. The head was twisted in a severe, unnatural attitude, as if the neck were broken. It described a terrible mutation and suffering, a pain so great so to have become desperation and rage, and profound helplessness. There were faint blue facets upon the grotesque head and limbs, elongated like the quick strokes of a brush. But these only intensified the darkness of the thing and gave to it the illusion of light within, of a deep, steady, central life. The sky beyond was murky and splotched with light, not points of clear bright light, but random forms like beads of amber in which were ancient and delicate debris. And closer, the eyes of the beast glinted and were pierced with dull opalescence, and the great misshapen mouth gaped and flamed. Set had the terrifying conviction that when the beast drew near to him, within reach, it would crack open with pain and all its shining, ulcerous insides, its raveled strings and organs, its slime and blood and bile would fall and splash upon him, and he would dissolve in the hot contamination of the beast and become in some extreme and unholy amalgamation one with the beast.

Locke Setman--Set--is a successful artist living in the Bay Area. He has a beautiful girlfriend, a thriving  career, a loving adoptive father. One day he gets a cryptic message from Oklahoma: his grandmother, from the Kiowa side of his family that he knows little about, is dying. He rushes to Oklahoma out of curiosity and compulsion, but he's too late. His grandmother, who he never had a chance to meet, is dead. But there is another woman there, a beautiful young medicine woman named Grey, who gives him the bundle of bear medicine that is his birthright. Returning, stymied, to California, his life begins to fall apart. He suffers a series of nervous breakdowns; he becomes violent. His artwork is better than it's ever been, but unsellable. He comes to understand that he must return to Oklahoma, to Grey, that a life that he thought he was severed from by the fact of his adoption. It's only this return by which he might rescue himself.

Momaday's House Made of Dawn is a book that means a lot to me. The first time I read it--in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico--I was captivated by its slipperiness, its difficult language and shifting genres, though it is only through teaching it and letting the book unfold as an experience over many readings that I feel like I understand it. I was reluctant, a little, to read Momaday's only other novel, The Ancient Child, because what if it wasn't as good? There is something a little more recognizably written and human about The Ancient Child, perhaps because it's a novel of the 80s and not the 60s, but it shares with House Made of Dawn the qualities that make it both a challenge and a joy. 

At bottom, there's a story I recognize: a Native American, alienated from his heritage and culture by the forces of political modernity, becomes whole by traveling to the place of his ancestors. That's the story of House Made of Dawn, too, though in both novels Momaday gives us protagonists who have multiple heritages, different tribes and European heritages overlaid into the same identity, so it's not a simple matter of tracing back one's blood. The central myths of the novel are about bears. There's the Kiowa story about the boy who was transformed into a bear and chased his sisters into the sky; his scratching of a great tree created what's now known as Devil's Tower and the sisters become the Pleiades. But there's another story, too, from the Piegan tradition, in which a little boy appears in the village out of nowhere, and then leaves. His appearance, we're told, is so strange and hard to understand that the villagers suppress the memory: it must have been a bear that visited them. The madness and despair that stalk Set are like the spirit of the bear that transforms the boy against his will--simple enough--but the Piegan story undermines the story of the bear, and suggests perhaps it is only a way of smoothing over a deeper and more troubling truth.

Then there's Grey, who flouts most literary expectations for "medicine women" by being beautiful and young. Grey's status as medicine woman is depicted as a kind of holy innocence; we are told over and over again that she "never had to quest for visions"; they simply come upon her. She's a skilled horse rider, who can snatch a match from the ground on horseback without falling, and in one pivotal scene she ties the hands of a man who tries to rape her with barbed wire and circumcises him. For the most part, Grey's visions bring her back to the Wild West, where she becomes the lover of Billy the Kid. This is so strange, but clearly important; Billy is a significant character in the story, and he exists in a kind of timeliness with Grey where he is able to converse with her about the famous circumstances of his own death. Grey is in love with him--are we supposed to read this as a suggestion that even Indigenous people can fall in love with the myths of the American West? I'm still wondering what it is that Billy is doing in this novel, but I love him here; I love the way the pieces refuse to fit neatly together. I do see that Set's return to Oklahoma means that Grey must learn to let Billy go; I see that she's not just a magical healer for Set (like, for example, the medicine woman Ts'eh in Ceremony) but someone who herself must find a way to live wholly.

One last thing that stuck out to me: Set is an artist. The novel's biggest flaw, I think, is that it has trouble conceptualizing Set's art, because it really isn't interested in it as art, but rather as a symbol for a way of seeing. The novel is separated into sections called "Lines," "Planes," and "Shapes," pointing toward the fleshing out of vision, of visual elements coming together into a whole. It seems to me that Set's art picks up some of the yearning to see that characters profess in House Made of Dawn; I was reminded of the white woman Angela wanting to see "beyond the mountain," which I read as a kind of modernist desire to see beyond the intervening stages of art, words, interpretation. What interests me and troubles me about The Ancient Child is the way it adds myth to the list; myth points to the deeper truth of what happens to Set and Grey, but it can never be real, it can never satisfy. The novel ends with Set, gone on a pilgrimage to Devil's Tower, encountering and becoming the bear, the real, at last.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

After crossing the Red River sometime in the 1830s, a priest climbed a tree seeking a spot where he could safely observe an approaching herd of buffalo. There he witnessed a deranging spectacle--the buffalo stretched all the way to where they disappeared into the line between sky and earth. He was forced to stay in the tree for three days as they passed, passed and migrated, three days of horizon-to-horizon buffalo. He nearly died of thirst. 'You may judge now the richness of these prairies,' he wrote later. There was no end to the beasts. Just like it seems there is no end to us, in our billions. But everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.

Kismet Poe is torn between two men: one is Gary Geist, a local football star whose chief attraction seems to be that he is desperately in love with her. His desperation, we learn, has something to do with a horrible accident that killed two of Gary's friends, and which Kismet's proximity seems to allay. The other is Hugo, an oafish redhead who works at the local bookstore. Hugo is sensitive, clever, kind, though he lacks some of Gary's sex appeal. Gary presses Kismet again and again, in quite coercive and abusive ways, into marrying him, but after the wedding, Kismet feels trapped in his parents' large farmhouse. In the margin, other crises rear their heads. Kismet's father disappears, leaving a mysterious mortgage on their property. And the dirt that has supported the local sugar beet crop--from which the Geists derive their fortune, and which supports just about everyone in the region--has become hostile through the overuse of pesticides.

Traditionally, I read fiction by Indigenous authors in January, to get into the mindset of my second semester senior class. In practice, that means I almost always start the year with Louise Erdrich, who is more or less unrivalled among Native American authors still writing in the U.S.A. Erdrich has been going through a kind of late period Renaissance lately, publishing a novel nearly every other year, winning the Pulitzer Prize. I was pleased to get to hear her read from The Mighty Red a few months ago in Brooklyn, and the church hall where she read was entirely full. And yet, The Mighty Red confirmed for me a feeling that Erdrich's late novels haven't quite matched up to her earlier ones, though they share much of the same superficial trappings. A couple of pivotal scenes in The Mighty Red, in which the parents of Hugo and Gary confront one another regarding Kismet's affections, take place at book clubs meetings. (Funnily, the first book is Eat Pray Love and the next The Road.) But it also gave me an unpleasant feeling that The Mighty Red is not unlike the kind of book you might read at a book club (sadly, derogatory).

It's hard to say why I felt this book was so unsatisfying. It might be that the most intriguing theme here--the depletion of the soil because of the deleterious practices of big agribusiness, which is linked to the kind of dystopian future captured in The Road--never gets fully drawn into the light. The central focus is on Kismet's mistake of marrying Gary, and while this story has its highlights, it left the book feeling sort of static and motionless to me, because of the way Kismet is borne along by Gary's desire, unable to assert herself or make any positive choices. A subplot in which Kismet's father, Martin, reappears as a bank robber who dresses in a different theatrical outfit--old lady, elf, nun--for each robbery points toward some of Erdrich's boldness and humor. Short chapters and quickly shifting vantage points left the book feeling rather unfocused to me, and I never really thought that Erdrich was able to bring together all the novel's various strands into something that felt whole.

This is the eleventh (!) of Erdrich's books that I've read. It's probably the least satisfying. But that's OK. It's always a pleasure to return to Erdrich's North Dakota, even if it's not the best of visits. One of my hopes is that sometime she'll return to the historical fiction that feels, at least to me, her strength.

Mating by Norman Rush

My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing I have to a religion is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn't gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

Book 1 of 2025, let's go!

Norman Rush's Mating follows an unnamed American academic living in Botswana. When she hears that a famously contrarian anthropologist named Nelson Denoon is building a secretive community in the desert, she shows up unannounced--after a week-long, life-threatening trek through the Kalahari Desert--to become a part of it. She becomes Denoon's lover and accomplice in the project, a female-dominated village called Tsai.

These two threads, love and the village, dominate Mating. The narrator and Denoon are, in many ways, perfect for each other: they are intellectuals and skeptics, people of both body and brain, sensual, devoted to the physical act of love, and secretly rather needy. Mating, if it does nothing else, gives a convincing sense of two people whose romance makes sense, because their thoughts and feelings seem to vibrate on the same wavelength. This love might just be the kind of kind of "equal love between people of equal value" that the narrator dreams about, but even the most equal loves exist within the context of the larger world, and this fact hangs over their heads. Tsai is meant to be a self-sustaining community, led by and for African women, and Nelson's role as leader--in fact, his presence--are only meant to be temporary. Will their love be able to survive somewhere else? Or is it only here, in Tsai, that the relationship can prosper?

Tsai is, I think, the most interesting thing about Mating. Decisions in Tsai are made my a woman-only council; necessary labor is assigned a daily value according to its urgency and can be performed by anyone in the community in exchange for credits to purchase items from a village store. Tsai is clean and orderly, both off the grid and technologically cutting-edge; it relies on the abundant sun for solar power and makes use of several practical inventions created by Denoon himself. For Denoon, Tsai represents a thumb in the eye of "development," a word that captures the ignorant meddling of NGOs in the lives of Africans. Tsai is designed to be bottom-up, to give power to the powerless. And yet, the model fails to keep out malcontents and bad actors, especially among the token number of men, who resent Denoon's position and seem to be scheming for ways to reassert their traditional dominance.

I think my favorite part of Mating is the final movement, in which Denoon sets out on an urgent and controversial mission, but ends up nearly dying in the desert before being rescued by a group of nomads. Denoon returns from his ordeal changed, more Zen-like, shorn of his humor and his cantankerousness. No one else seems to register the difference, or they like it. Only the narrator is left feeling abandoned, because, of course, there is no equal love between an ordinary woman and a Christlike Denoon, a Zen master. It's an interesting moment, because it suggests that the love we share for each other is as much about our flaws as our virtues. And it made me wonder if the same is true for our political communities, even for places like Tsai--are conflict, enmity, and friction a necessary part of the way we live with others? Utopias cannot stamp them out, but even if they did, would we want them to?

Brent's Top 10 of 2024!

 Another year, another 35-40 books I read and didn't review. Last year, I didn't even get an end-of-year top 10 posted; this year, I am. 

As always happens, when I read through my list, I realized what a wonderful year of reading it had been. Of the 60 books I completed, I only disliked a couple (which shall remain unnamed) and even those, I considered worthwhile. There were less graphic novels and less new authors this year; there was more nonfiction--including Madwoman in the Attic, which I've been chipping away at for years; there was a little less international lit, which I hope to recitfy in 2025.

And so without further ado, here are the peaks of the pages for 2024. 

Honorable Mentions:
In the Eye of the Wild - Nastassja Martin
Who knew a book about being mauled by a bear could be so existentially upsetting?

The Children's Bach - Helen Garner
I was going to say that this reminded me of the Australian The Man Who Loved Children, then I remembered that's already Australian.

Falling Man - Don DeLillo
Not DeLillo's best, but the first 3/4ths reframe 9/11 in a way I wouldn't have expected to work at all.

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Finally got around to reading the "funniest novel of all time" and it was indeed very funny. And bleak, my god, it's bleak as hell.

Pew - Catherine Lacey
Another member of the 75%er club--I wasn't satisfied with the ending but the journey to get there was as compelling as it gets.

Monologue of a Dog: Poems - Wisława Szymborska
I rarely remember new poems for long, but the title poem of this collection is going to be with me forever.

My Documents - Alejandro Zambra
My second Zambra opens with one of the most jarring nd precise short stories I've ever read, and that's not nothing.

Lapvona - Otessah Moshfegh
This book is disgusting and probably nihilistic and I'm not sure it holds together really, but also, I liked it.

American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism - J. D. Dickey
If you want to know what George Whitfield and Donald Trump (who doesn't appear in this book) have in common, this is the book for you.

House Made of Dawn - N. Scott Momaday
This probably would've been in my top 10 if I'd reviewed it when I read it. A great modernist Native American novel.

My top 10 this year were fairly easy to determine, but unlike many years, actually ranking them was difficult, partially because of the amount of nonfiction that made the cut. So take this ranking with a spoonful of salt, and read all of these wherever I've ranked them.

10. Robinson - Muriel Spark
Spark's second novel could have been made for me in a laboratory. I love Robinsonades, Spark, locked room mysteries, and short funny books. This was all four, a ripping and cynical tale of a group of castaways on the titular island, at the mercy of the titular character. A little triumph.

9. The Changeling - Joy Williams
My least favorite of Williams' novels so far, The Changeling is still one of the best and strangest books I read this year. It's a mysterious and often macabre examination of woman-and-motherhood, almost a thematic retelling of Williams' State of Grace, but much weirder and bleaker. I still don't know what to 

make of the closing pages but the final sentence haunted me all year.

8. Reaganland - Rick Perlstein
The other magesterial work of nonfiction, besides Madwoman, that I read this year. My timing was spot on, since most of the book is really about Carter--it ends on election night 1980. I spent most of the book almost as frustrated with Jimmy as I was with Ronnie, and by the time I finished I'd resolved to read Perlstein's other 3 books on the rise of conservatism. And isn't that really the highest compliment you can pay an author?

7. The Wall - Marlen Haushofer
The second Robinsonade on my list is a much stranger beast on paper, and yet, maybe not in practice. While the premise--a woman wakes to find that she's been trapped in the country with no other humans behind an invisible wall--might sound like science fiction, the book itself has more in common with Robinson Crusoe than Under the Dome. Long and riviting passages about nature and survival butt up against shocking and inevitable climaxes.

6. Clock Without Hands - Carson McCullers
Another unexpectedly timely book, not because it's about racism, which is always timely, but because the form the racism takes, that of the proper, upstanding, even charming, Judge is so well-wrought that you can't help but see him in all of the kindly, helpful people in your life who nevertheless prioritize their own fears and prejudices over the well-being of others. 

5. H is for Hawk - Helen Macdonald
I've been blessed, for most of my life, to suffer very little loss, until the last decade when mortality came home to roost. And H is for Hawk captures the complexity of the grief of sudden loss better than almost anything else I've read. It really is a book about hawks too--it's just a book about Hawks that will probably make you bawl like a baby.

4. Too Much Happiness - Alice Munro
Every Munro collection is good; every Munro collection is dark. But this one was better and darker than most. Child's Play is surely one of the bleakest things in Munro's bibliography, and almost every story has a moment or two of shocking violence. Perhaps there's a little less anger here than in something like Runaway; or maybe the anger is just made more concrete here. 

3. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse - Louise Erdrich
My fourth Erdrich novel is my favorite so far. An inveterate Graham Greene stan, I couldn't help but love a book about a priest who does the right thing in the wrong way. The explorations of gender, faith, and the American West all came together here in a way I found both techincally impressive--does anyone write prose better than Erdrich?--and moving at the same time.

2. Story of of the Lost Child - Elena Ferrante
I can't believe I've read all four of Ferrante's Neopolitian novels--for my money, the best extended narrative in modern literature--and haven't reviewed any of them. And part of me feels like this should really be my number one book, since it nailed the ending, wrapping up the story of Lenu, Lila, and their entire neighborhood over the course of 60 years as perfectly as anyone could.

1. Solenoid - Mircea Cărtăresc
I don't know what exactly to say about Solenoid. Like many of the other books I enjoyed this year, it feels impossible that it should work. It's too long, too strange, too gross, too avant garde, too indulgent--and yet, the surreal story of a man whose life is circumscribed by forces beyond his control or comprehension works perfectly, an expertly calibrated novel that takes ideas so bleak as to be nearly  Lovecraftian and winnows them to the fine point, repeated for 12 straight pages: HELP. And by the time the novel ends, we think there's a slight chance that someone--or something--may. 

And that's all! Here's to an ever better 2025. Thanks to the few readers of this blog and especially to my blog partner and friend Chris, without whom my literary life would be far less rich and this blog would be far more empty.