Olav Audunsson: Crossroads by Sigrid Undset

Now, in a state of calm reflection, Olav listened to the only voice that spoke to him in a language he understood. Here, in this foreign land, all other voices shouted at him as if there were a wall between them and him. Yet the voice of the church was the same one he had listened to as a child and a youth and a grown man. He himself had changed in terms of goals and thought and speech as he moved through the stages of life, but the church had changed neither voice nor meaning. It spoke to him in the holy mass just as it had spoken to him as a little boy, when he understood very few of the words yet still understood much by observing--the way a child understands his mother by watching her expressions and gestures before he understands the spoken words. And Olav knew that if he traveled to the farthermost regions where Christian men lived, their language and customs and appearance might seem strange and incomprehensible to him. But wherever he happened upon a church and went inside, he would be embraced by the same voice that had spoken to him when he was a child.

When we last left Olav Audunsson, his wife Ingunn had just died after a long illness. Ingunn's death resolves what might have seemed like the central tension of Undset's tetralogy, the love between the man and woman that thrived in spite of all the machinations of their families to drive them apart. I admit I was surprised, but I had to remind myself that, as one learns in Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset is no believer in the primacy of romantic love when there is a higher love, and a higher law. But Ingunn's death leaves Olav in a strange place, having taken in Ingunn's love-child Eirik and raised him as his own, while his own bastard, a son named Bjorn with a woman named Torhild, is at a neighboring estate. It's Eirik that will inherit the manor Hestviken, despite Olav's dislike of him (and he is quite annoying, apart from being the son of another man), while Bjorn exists for Olav only as a reminder of lost possibilities.

The first part of Crossroads is taken up by a trip to London, where Olav does some merchant business. Olav, lonely and adrift, nearly enters into an adulterous relationship with the wife of a blind man, but runs away at the last minute, repelled by her strangeness and foreignness. The blind man's wife speaks in a language Olav can't understand, but during his trip he rekindles his love for the church, which, as described in the passage above, speaks in a universal language that can be understood no matter where Olav is. Olav decides, with only some misgivings, that he will never remarry, and devote the remainder of his life to the memory of Ingunn and to the church.

The novel's subtitle suggests that it captures Olav at a "crossroads," and the novel feels like a crossroads, too, a necessary transition between points of stronger dramatic tension. The conflict that's established between Olav and Eirik only festers. Though the two find a way to become somewhat closer, Eirik's anxiety that somehow his inheritance will be stolen from him--deep down, perhaps, he understands something that he cannot articulate about why his father is so alienated from him--make him especially anxious and unreliable. Ultimately, Eirik flees from the conflict, entering into a knight's service, and the last time we see him, he has grown at last into a man. Olav is left with his manor and his daughters, but more or less alone.

The novel ends with something I'd never seen from Undset before: an honest-to-god battle. When Olav hears that Norway has been invaded by a Swedish duke, he and his fellow knights are called into battle to repel the party of the invaders. In the melee, Olav is badly wounded and left facially disfigured. (Perhaps sealing the deal on that promise to never remarry.) This, it felt to me, was the point to which Crossroads has been leading our hero: ravaged, abandoned, and yet with a renewed sense of his own obligations to God and country, which perhaps will steel him in whatever crisis of inheritance and fatherhood is coming in the series' final installment--coming, for this reader, next December.

Ice Palace by Edna Ferber

Later Baranof boasted that Chris Storm could pilot a float plane, drive a car, mush a team of nine huskies, paddle a skin boat, handle an outboard motor, cut up a seal with an ulu and mix the best sourdough pancakes in Baranof. Only this last accomplishment made her the envy of the town's more solid citizens. She had inherited her sourdough starter from Thor, who had originally come by it from a prospector on one of his Far North journeys. Melting, feather-light, delectable, the golden circlets were a more potent asset than all of Christine's more spectacular activities. She had shot a polar bear, helped pull in a beluga white whale, caught king salmon. She could knit and wear a sweater expertly. In her second and last Baranof college year Chris appeared at the final big dance in a slinky black strapless dress. The effect, with all that blondeur, was devastating.

Chris Storm is Alaska. She's the granddaughter of the two most notorious men in the city of Baranof, and probably the whole territory: Czar Kennedy, the business magnate responsible for the towering "Ice Palace," and Thor Storm, a Norwegian immigrant and newspaperman whose hardiness exemplifies the pioneer spirit. These men, with their opposing ideas of what Alaska should be, are long rivals, brought together by the romance of their children and the birth of Chris. As a result, Chris comes to represent both the pioneer spirit and the cutting edge of Alaska's future. She boasts that, as her mother was dying in childbirth, she was placed into the carcass of a caribou to keep warm--a real Alaskan birth.

Edna Ferber's Ice Palace was published in 1958, a year before the territory of Alaska earned its statehood. Territorial issues are at the heart of the novel: when it opens, a sinister business associate of Czar's is scheming to have his son Bay made governor of the territory, a position that might be a springboard to the role of Senator--from the state of Washington. Chris and Thor are believers that only statehood can fully guarantee independence and self-sufficiency for Alaska, which suffers from (as they see it) the importation of labor from "Outside." Ice Palace is familiar stuff for Ferber, who wrote similar books about the "larger-than-life" cultures of Texas, in Giant, and Oklahoma, in Cimarron. Ice Palace, in fact, might be read as a kind of update to Cimarron, about a pioneer territory hurtling toward full statehood, except it remains, for Alaska, still a future promise.

I'm OK with Ferber's own brand of pulp propaganda, but Ice Palace, unfortunately, stinks as a novel. It was Ferber's last book, and you can sort of see her narrative power leaving her behind. The novel spins and spins, setting up the competition between Thor and Czar, but never really figuring out what to do with either of them. Ferber insinuates over and over that Chris' "Alaskan-ness" promises her a role in the future of the territory--or state--but what that might be, the novel really has no idea. There's a suggestion that being Bay's wife is not enough for either Chris or Alaska, but the character remains all promise and no execution; it feels like Ferber spends the whole time setting up a novel that never really gets started.

The best part, I thought, was the visit to an "Eskimo" village on the Bering Sea, part of a months-long exploration of the territory that Thor wants to be a kind of education to Chris before she leaves to go to college "Outside." Chris is drawn to a handsome part-Inuit pilot named Ross, who offers a kind of alternative to Bay--a real Alaskan, rather than an imported power-grabber from Outside. Ferber's books all have a kind of "unwoke woke" quality to them, full of racial stereotypes but a larger message of American syncretism and cosmopolitanism, and the Inuit village is the only place where Ferber's image of Alaska feels really convincing. It's a site of tradition and continuity in a territory that's rapidly changing. Though Chris boasts of being born in a caribou, much of what Ferber spends her time doing is emphasizing how modern this Alaska is, how it has bowling alleys and cinemas and debutante balls and all the other stuff that makes it worthy of being American.

Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this "Other World" got confused not only with the "Next World" but with the Real World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the other side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world.

When he is a young boy, Van Veen falls hopelessly in love with his cousin, Ada. Except she's not actually his cousin, but the daughter of his own father, who had a tempestuous affair with his wife's sister, which makes Ada, of course, his sister. This is a fact discovered at some point by both parties in a long life of stormy coming together and breaking up, but if it ever matters, it doesn't matter for long. (One thing you could never say about old Vladimir is that he shies away from taboo, especially sexual taboos--the love affair between Ada and Van seems, perhaps in a small respect, a response to those who felt a little too squeamish about Lolita.) Ada, or Ardor tells the story of how Van and Ada are driven apart by jealousies, affairs, duels, and the romantic attentions of Ada's sister Lucette upon Van--a more palatable relationship, maybe, being just his cousin--but we also quickly understand that the novel is being written by Van at an old age, and the interpolations that appear "written in Ada's hand" signify a happy ending for the sexy siblings.

I've heard people describe Ada, or Ardor as a "love it or hate it" novel. That's too strong, maybe, but I certainly hated it more than I loved it. In Ada Nabokov indulges more heavily in his beloved wordplay than in any other novel of his I've read, and it often felt to me like one long punny joke, but one you have to know English, Russian, and French to understand. So I have to admit a lot of what was supposed to be funny was lost on me, and the stuff that was supposed to be funny that I did understand, I didn't think was very funny.

What I did like was the setup. Ada takes place in an alternate universe where Russian and French advances on North America were never fully repelled, and so much of the western continent is a Russian province called "Estoty" and the east a French province called "Canady," while "America" extends throughout what we call the Americas. In this world, electricity has been outlawed after a vague disaster, and what technology remains is powered instead, somehow, by water. But the most interesting part is that some people on this world have come to believe in an alternate Earth they called "Terra," making their Earth "Antiterra," and these beliefs sweep through the world like a powerful cult tradition, seen mostly as a delusion or fringe belief, but which enforces a sense that the world the characters live in is a kind of pale shadow or reflection of some deeper, truer existence. It's interesting to think about how we might lie at the bottom of the subconscious of the characters we read.

I liked many other things. I liked "The Texture of Time," a treatise of Van's about time which I understand some people find difficult or ancillary, but which for me were a welcome break from the barrage of silly punning and banter. I liked the character of Lucette, whose love for Van--who only loves Ada--drives her to the point of suicide. But overall, I found this one kind of a tedious experience.

Knots by Nuruddin Farah

She had never imagined she will see the day when she will appreciate the very thing she has always taken for granted--a clean washroom, the toilet system functioning, the bathroom floor immaculate, towels on the rails. She is comforted at the thought of being in an impeccable one for the first time since her arrival, and she is flushed with joy. It goes to show that only a corrupt society tolerates living in such filth, especially the men who put up with the muck they have made, as if dirt makes itself, reproduces itself. No woman with the means to do something about it will endure so much grunge. Her mother has always said that you are as clean as you make yourself.

Cambara is a Somali woman who, until recently, has been living in Toronto. Riven with grief at the death of her son, who drowned in a pool while her husband was having an affair, she has returned to Mogadiscio to reclaim her family property from the warlords who have appropriated it. She begins her journey at the house of Zaak, her former husband, whom she once married to help receive immigration papers. Zaak has been back in Mogadiscio for a long time, and his state--dirty, selfish, addicted to the stimulant qaat--is a representation, she feels, of the degradation of her country. Zaak is a lost cause, but there are other allies waiting to assist her, such as Kiin, the hotel operator, Bile, a handsome young defense contractor, and, for some reason, an Irish woodworker named Seamus. Cambara's plan is to inveigle her way back into the property when the warlords are out warlording, set up a defensive perimeter, and then put on a puppet show. As this process develops, she semi-adopts a couple of child soldiers to fill the hole in her life left by her son's death.

Farah's depiction of Mogadiscio is one of remarkable decline, but also one in which resilient and resourceful actors understand how to live within the ruined city. Kiin and the others are members of a network of women who provide each other mutual support in the absence of a functioning government. The warlords, interestingly, are largely kept off the page: we learn, for example, that Cambara's guards have killed a couple of the warlords' agents, but Farah's focus is on the helpers, not the villains, and a showdown I'd long expected with the warlord himself who had until lately been living in Cambara's family home never materializes. This is a novel about building and restoring, starting with the filthy shit-covered bathroom that serves as a representation of what the warlords have down to Somalia and Mogadiscio. They are, quite literally, filth.

I was shocked by how bad the prose in this book is. Several of the blurbs on the back describe Farah as a candidate for the Nobel Prize! But the prose struck me as written by someone without a genuine command of the English language, or a high school kid who's a little too attached to the thesaurus. Mixed metaphors, overly ornate but imprecise word choice abound. One character is described as having "long-term chicaneries hatching on the back burner." A typical sentence goes like this: "Nonplussed, she surrenders herself to the unbecoming mixed emotions knocking at the door of her brain." And once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it. In the passage above for example, isn't "grunge" a really strange choice? I found the whole thing actually quite baffling for a glossy major-publishing house release, and for an author with not a little bit of critical praise. Anyway, with the addition of Somalia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 114.

Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame

And listening to their father say about Francie, the children felt afraid, as if suddenly the walls of the house would collapse and the roof disappear and leave them, naked, with nothing to shut them away from the world, and the  world in one stride would walk in and take possession of them, holding them tight in his hand of rock and lava, as if they were insects, and they would have to struggle and kick and fight to escape and make their way. and each time they made their way and the world had dropped them for a while to a peaceful hiding place, it would again seize them with a burning one of its million hands, and the struggle would begin again and again and go on and on and never finish.

The Withers family of Waimaru, New Zealand: Father Bob and Mother Amy, and the children, Francie, Toby, Chicks, Daphne. Each of them grows up among the stultifying conformity of this small town in their own way, each a little strange. Toby is an epileptic, and his disease puts him outside the bounds of normal society; he grows up to work in the "tip," the garbage dump, where as a child he used to hunt for treasures. Chicks is a little strange in her vicious insistence on being normal; her section of Owls Do Cry is a long journal in which she confesses her desire to fit in with the respectable neighbor company, until she learns that one respectable neighbor has respectably murdered another one. As the oldest, Francie is the first to grow up into this world and face a life of working at the woollen mill, where the local lower-middle-class is condemned to its particular shape of narrow life. It's Francie who is the first to learn of the "time of living" in which people are slotted by life into their little niches:

But in all her knowing, she had not learned of the time of living, the unseen always, when people are like the marbles in the fun alley at the show; and a gaudy circumstance will squeeze payment from their cringing and poverty-stricken fate, to give him the privilege of rolling them into the bright or dark box, till they drop into one of the little painted holes, their niche, it is called, and there roll their lives around and around in a frustrating circle.

Here I will issue the customary SPOILER ALERT because I have to talk about the moment that I knew Janet Frame's novel was something special: after a quarter of the book devoted to Francie and her the particular struggles of her coming of age, she accidentally falls down the side of the garbage dump, where she's taken her siblings to forage, into a garbage fire, and dies. It's Francie's death that makes her strange, that puts her outside the margins of society and makes her like Toby, and it continues to haunt the other three siblings as they grow up. To Daphne, the youngest sibling, who spends most of the novel inside a mental institution, Francie never really dies. Daphne's mental state is not one that understands or permits death, at least not in the usual way. There's something incredibly bold about including both Toby and Daphne, and whether they differ in the unusualness of their perspective by kind or degree, I'm not really sure.

Daphne's story has a special resonance when you know a little about Janet Frame, the legendary Kiwi author. In and out of institutions herself for much of her life, Frame was scheduled to undergo a lobotomy when she received notification that a collection of her stories had been accepted for publication, the news of which made her doctors decide maybe it would be better not to remove a hunk of her brain. Daphne undergoes the procedure that Frame never did, and her final section of the book--in which her father comes to visit her, for the first time in years, right before the operation--is one of the book's most shocking and original moments.

Owls Do Cry blew me away. It reminded me a little of Patrick White, her counterpart across the Tasman Sea, who also wrote about altered states of understanding and the way epiphany emerges amid the repressive qualities of modern middle-class life. It reminded me, too, of N. Scott Momaday in the way that Frame folds in multiple modes and points-of-view that vary the voice and tone, like Chicks' diary. But it reminded me, too, of the great modern masters like Joyce--if what this is is "stream-of-consciousness," it's among the best of it. I found Owls Do Cry in turns shocking, tragic, bewildering, and profoundly funny. One of my favorite experiences every year is discovering a new author that makes me say, I want to read everything they've ever read, and Janet Frame is one of two for me this year, along with Rikki Ducornet. Really looking forward to that.

Three Books About Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico has been called the oldest colony in the world. While some people contest that statement, Puerto Rico's history is marked by five centuries of colonialism, stretching from 1493 to the present day. Colonialism has shaped the ways that Puerto Ricans conceptualize themselves, their politics, and their ideas of the nation. This book argues that we cannot understand Puerto Rico's current fiscal, political, and social crises without recognizing its colonial reality.

I took three books with me on my recent trip to Puerto Rico. The first was Jorell Melendez-Badillo's Puerto Rico: A National History, a general history of the island from the days of the Taino to the present. For "the world's oldest colony," such a history holds few surprises: the island was colonized by the Spanish beginning with Columbus, and its position made it a key stronghold in the Caribbean as well as a producer of, at various times, sugar cane and coffee. Despite a few skirmishes, the Spanish held the island without interruption until the Spanish-American War, when it was seized by the United States, who have never let it go. This history has put Puerto Rico in a strange place: though it's developed its own national identity, part of that identity is that it never really has had any kind of self-determination.

One thing Melendez-Badillo makes clear is that one of the primary fault lines, if not the primary fault line, in Puerto Rican society is the question of its status. Are you for continuing with the commonwealth status quo? Are you for statehood, or for independence? Melendez-Badillo makes it clear where he stands on the issue by focusing largely on the history of the Puerto Rican labor movement and independentista activism. Far be it from me to label something "too woke," but this is, in the end, a book that counts a twerking protest on the steps of the capitolio as a historical watershed of the same order as the American invasion. I thought it also did a good job of capturing the fact of "circular migration," by which the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States cycles back to the island, and how that affects ideals of a national identity. But for the most part, I found that the book was heavy on the this-then-that of history and struggled to articulate larger patterns or themes, including the five hundred year impact of colonialism that is the center of its thesis.

There was a Sears catalogue in every middle-class home in Ponce at that time. Like most families on the island, ours was divided politically. Carmita and Carlos were for statehood, whereas Abby was defiantly Independentista. But we all liked to browse through the Sears catalogue. Having it at hand was reassuring--proof that Puerto Rico was an inseparable part of the United States. We weren't like Haiti or the Dominican Republic, where people still hadn't heard of the telephone and kept food fresh in wooden crates with blocks of ice instead of in General Electric refrigerators. Thanks to the Sears catalogue we had the same access as the people of Kansas and Louisiana to the latest inventions and home appliances, and we could import them to the States without paying taxes. The cardboard boxes and crates came by ship from "el Norte" and took months to get to the island, but when you opened them up, you felt the invigorating cool air of the United States trapped inside like a breath of fresh air against your face.

But maybe I'm just a fiction guy. Much more informative and illustrative of Puerto Rican history was, I thought, Rosario Ferre's novel The House on the Lagoon. It's a familiar kind of book these days: a multigenerational history of a single family in a slightly "exotic" locale. But I thought it introduced a few interesting touches to this paradigm: The House on the Lagoon takes the shape of a book written by Isabel Monfort Mendizabal about the history of her family and that of her husband, Quintin Mendizabal. The Mendizabals, we're told, are an upper class Puerto Rican family whose paterfamilias, Buenaventura, is proud of his (spurious) Spanish nobility. Buenaventura lives through the passage of Puerto Rico's Spanish era to its American one, and is always ready to use it to his commercial advantage. The "House on the Lagoon" is a mid-century modernist construction that is emblematic of Buenaventura's wealth and power.

The question of statehood vs. independence looms. Quintin is an inveterate statehood supporter, while Isabel tends toward independence. Although Ferre shows how different attitudes exist even within families, there's a clear sense that statehood is the choice of the upper-class, whose relationship with the United States, like their relationship with Spain beforehand, is to their commercial advantage. But Ferre is skeptical, too, of the violence embraced by some independentistas: Quintin and Isabel's sons become mixed up in a terroristic nationalistic cell that threatens to bring down the Mendizabal family fortune. What makes the novel most interesting is that Ferre includes interstitial scenes in which Quintin, having discovered Isabel's novel, can't help writing his own version in the margins that flatters his own sense of how history has unfolded. Quintin is allowed to "talk back" to Isabel, but the novel is far from treating the two attitudes as balanced; in fact, we come to understand that the novel itself is Isabel's way of finding a voice that the domineering Quintin has never let her have. Beyond this there's little in the way of metafictional tricks or even stirring prose, but I thought The House on the Lagoon captured something fundamental about the history Melendez-Badillo writes about it in a gripping and specific way.

I also consider that these messages, which seem to arrive on sunbeams or on the wind, could surely only happen here, that they're a form that life takes on in San Juan. Like this, like writing at this table with a tangle of feelings lashing out against the ocean that separates us from everything and everybody, even our friends, such as Diego. For some reason we've chosen to talk without looking at ourselves, without knowing for sure who we are, without any real contact. The routine of the city: solitude drives down the highways, making pit stops at twenty-four hour gas stations.

Eduardo Lalo's Simone takes the trio of novels up to modern-day San Juan, and it's certainly the most literary and accomplished of the three. Lalo's narrator is a Puerto Rican writer who struggles with feelings of anomie and disconnection: the first quarter or so of the novel, which are little more than single-paragraph vignettes of a drifting life in San Juan, is a real high point. The writer begins to receive messages from a mysterious stranger, each one consisting of a quotation from some other text. The quotations reinvigorate him, giving him something to search for. Eventually he discovers that they are written by a Li, a worker at a Chinese restaurant. They begin a strange and not-quite-satisfying affair--Li insists she is a lesbian--that forces the writer to confront his understanding of himself.

Simone--named for Simone Weil, one of the personas Li adopts in her messages--draws a parallel between the life of a Puerto Rican and an immigrant like Li. Li may feel isolated and atomized by being an extreme minority in Puerto Rico, but to be Puerto Rican is itself a kind if isolating, atomizing position, a nowherehood. Lalo makes his interests clear in a long passage where the writer and his colleague get into a passionate argument with a smug writer from Spain. I thought this was all very interesting, and captured a psychological side of the same historical processes that interest both Melendez-Badillo and Ferre. But neither does Lalo sacrifice the specificity of the protagonist and his relationship with Li, which I found to be affectingly and tenderly drawn, even as it unfolds toward what we expect is its doom. As the novel brings the narrator and Li together, and then tears them apart again, it becomes slightly more conventional, but still effective and touching.

Lili is Crying by Helene Bessette

He is dragging his wife along the hot road in the shadowless evening.
He is shouting:
--You'll have to choose, it's me or her.
--She's my mother, sobs Lili, I choose my mother.
--Naturally, Lili, she is your mother, and its a great shame, but if you want to see her again, you'll have to do it without me there. A separation, Lili. This evening, I broke up with my mother-in-law.
He cracks a match. He lights a cigarette, leaning forward, cupping his hands around his mouth.
He's a man.
And this evening he's fighting.
This troubled evening.
This tormented evening.
This tearful evening.
This cigarettes evening.
Lily is crying.
He hates to see Lili cry.
And so he gets angry.

Lili is Crying takes place in Provence during the early 20th century. Lili is a young woman living with her domineering and possessive mother, Charlotte, who runs a small boarding house. Charlotte is suspicious and resentful of any suitor of Lili's, regarding them as thieves who want to take her daughter away from her. To Charlotte, a mother should enough for Lili--a patently ridiculous thing to believe about the life of a young woman, but a belief with long-reaching consequences. Eventually, Lili marries a man who has no idea the trap he's walking into, how Charlotte will rage against him simply because she took her daughter away, and much of the novel is a back-and-forth between Charlotte and Lili's husband in which one demands that Lili choose them over the other. No wonder Lili is crying. "There are so many ways to love a daughter," Bessette writes, "And how well she could have loved her daughter, that mother Charlotte. There are thirty-six right ways. (But she chose the thirty-seventh.)"

This impossible dynamic is solved, in a way, when the man is taken away by the Nazis and sent to Dachau. In his absence, Lili and her mother become entangled again, and though the man eventually comes back, he struggles to realize that he has lost Lili's affections entirely in his absence. He's rich, in a way, having filled his pockets with the jewels and other affects that the dead of Dachau will no longer need, but Charlotte threatens to turn him into the authorities for this--all of which is a particularly bitter image of the life that those who managed to come back from the Nazi camps might have found. There's no place for Lili's husband; his absence was like a vacuum that has been filled. This culminates in a dalliance between Lili--who is now in her 40's--and a simple-minded shepherd who is thirteen years younger. Life at Charlotte's side has made Lili stunted, and an ordinary life seems to have passed her by; she has aged without ever really having the normal married life she dreamed of.

Helene Bessette was a member of Oulipo, the French school of "potential literature" founded by Raymond Queneau that prized wordplay and "constrained" writing. Lili is Crying is not so playful or experimental as some of what the Oulipians produced, but you can see the influence in her language. The novel unfolds almost like a poem of strung dialogue, sometimes demarcated by dashes when a speaker changes. The line between what characters think and what they say is not always clear. Its simple, staccato phrasing provides a grounding of the strangeness and tragedy of the story, which i found very affecting.

Baltasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago

Every man follows his own path in search of grace, whatever that grace may be, a simple landscape with the sky overhead, a certain hour of the day or night, two trees, three if they are painted by Rembrandt, a sigh, without our knowing whether this closes or finally opens the path or where the path my lead us, whether to some other landscape, hour, tree, or sigh, behold this priest who is about to cast out one God and replace him with another, without knowing whether this new allegiance will do him any good in the end, behold this musician who would find it impossible to compose any other kind of music and who will no longer be alive a hundred years from now to hear that first symphony, which is mistakenly referred to as the Ninth, behold this one-handed soldier who has ironically become a manufacturer of wings, though he has never risen to being more than a common foot soldier, man rarely knows what to expect from life, this man least of all, behold this woman with those extraordinary eyes, who was born to perceive wills...

Medieval Portugal. Baltasar is a former soldier who has lost his hand in Portugal's wars, replacing it with a spike or a hook, whichever is most useful. Blimunda is the daughter of a woman exiled by the Inquisition, and she has her own secret that it would be best that the Inquisitors not discover: she can see into people. When she looks into a person--which she must be fasting to do, therefore she eats a crust of bread every morning before opening her eyes so she will not pry into Baltasar--she sees mostly guts, but also a black cloud that is the human will. These two unlikely people find each other and fall in love.

This romance is set against the construction of a great cathedral in Baltasar's hometown of Mafra, to celebrate the birth of the princess of Portugal. It's a process that takes years and a lot of labor; one of the best scenes--if something as long as the Saramagian single-sentence gauntlets can be called a "scene"--is when Baltasar is put in charge of moving a giant stone miles and miles from the quarry to the cathedral, a task that crushes a man to death and maims others. Much of the historical background is drawn from life, including the figure of Dominic Scarlatti, the famous musician who spent time at Portugal's court, and Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, a Brazil-born priest who invented a primitive flying machine called the Passarola. Baltasar and Blimunda become Father Lourenço's accomplices, and they alone know how the machine really works: with the upward thrust of the wills that Blimunda has collected from the dying.

The Passarola flies only a couple of times, partly because it seems to be impossible to steer, or land. But long after it's crashed in the woods outside of Mafra and the Father Lourenço disappeared, Baltasar and Blimunda continue to tend to it, repairing it and restoring it. For what? Perhaps its power is mostly symbolic: it represents a kind of dream kept in reserve, the power of the will to help one rise above the station of the common person, who is so pushed around by the powerful, as Baltasar is with his heavy stone, or Blimunda, with her mother in exile. For these themes, I found Baltasar and Blimunda very moving, and I enjoyed the richness of its evocation of medieval Portugal, though Saramago is not an easy read, and the circuitous, comma-packed sentences keeps one at a remove from the immediacy of the story. Still, it's hard to emerge from Baltasar and Blimunda without feeling as if you've been invested in something both impossibly clever and impossibly rich, and the ending, I felt, was remarkably affecting and sad.

The Nenoquich by Henry Bean

Now we are together nearly every day except weekends, which she says are torture, and gradually she arrives earlier and leaves later until it seems she goes home only to eat, sleep and sign in. How could Joshua not know? One morning she appeared at ten-thirty with a picnic lunch in a wicker basket, and I thought, my God, this woman is going to eat me, she will eat my entire life, doesn't she have anything else to do with herself? She was disappointed when I said I had to work until noon. Had to? She didn't think I had to, and couldn't today be an exception? It could not. Angry and hurt, this was Joshua all over again, said she'd wait downstairs. I stared at the page for fifteen minutes, weighing the discipline of work against the discipline of flexibility, found the latter more difficult, and, in this instance, truer to an ethic that, if I could not practice in my life, I would not be able to depict in my work--so that ultimately both principles led one way, and I turned off the lamp.

Writer Harold Raab begins an obsession with Charlotte Cobin, a married woman, in an unusual way, not by meeting her or even seeing her, but by hearing her briefly discussed on the telephone. His roommate says to someone else: "Well, she's mad about him isn't she? At least in the physical sense..." This remark intrigues him so intensely that he maneuvers himself into a parting where Charlotte will be, and slowly peels away her affection from her husband, a doctor. It's almost Machiavellian, and yet Harold's need comes from, we sense, a deep sense of disaffection and alienation from the world. The title, the Nenoquich, refers to an Aztec belief about children born during a handful of intercalendrical days, without purpose or use in life. Harold feels as if he is one of these useless people, different from others somehow, unable to relate to Charlotte in a normal way, but still obsessed with her. It's no surprise that, as soon as he manages to pry her away from her husband, she becomes a burden, as repulsive as once she was attractive.

The Nenoquich is the debut novel of Henry Bean, better known as a screenwriter of movies like Internal Affairs and Basic Instinct 2. His filmography, it must be said, is not really an indicator of the quality of The Nenoquich, which is nuanced and unsettling, and often remarkable in its prose. You get the sense that Bean is not entirely in control; my patience flagged a little bit with the middle of the novel, which is talky and murky. I got the sense that we're supposed to sympathize a little more than Harold than we do, Harold who is, it must be said, a real piece of shit, no matter the depths of his social dysfunction. And the attempts to place his relationship with Charlotte in a larger context of the life of young people in Berkeley, California's post-hippie era made the novel at times too diffuse. But when the novel focuses on the relationship between Harold and Charlotte, it's captivating: sinister, magnetic, and deeply troubling.

It was the novel's last section that really sold me. The novel is framed as a kind of diary-cum-writing-project, and as Harold's relationship with Charlotte finally crumbles, he comes to the symbolic end of a first notebook. The "second notebook" becomes necessary when Harold finds that Charlotte has been in the hospital for an infection that began as a venereal disease. He's had it, too, and it's not clear which of them gave it to the other--a consequence, perhaps, of the permissive approach to sexuality practiced by Henry's generation--but whereas for him it is a regimen of pills and creams, for Charlotte, it becomes a death sentence. Harold is forced to reconnect with Charlotte in her hospital bed, where it becomes increasingly clear that the infection cannot, and that Charlotte is living out the last days of her life. What could have been mawkish or didactic is handled with surprising insight; Bean captures in a really fascinating and tragic way how sickness and death transform us and lead us to new and unexpected states of being. And similarly, I thought this "second notebook" allowed the novel to find its own altered state, to rise above a murky tawdriness and really capture something true.

Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin

When Sara turned back to us, the bird wasn't there anymore. Her mouth, nose, chin, and both hands were smeared with blood. She smiled sheepishly. Her gigantic mouth arched and opened, and her red teeth made me jump to my feet. I ran to the bathroom, locked the door, and vomited into the toilet.

In "The Digger," a story from Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin's collection Mouthful of Birds, a man rents a vacation house that comes with a digger, a man whose job seems entirely devoted to digging and maintaining a hole in the yard. In a moment when his digger has taken a break, the man accidentally caves in part of the hole, but his attempts to fix it seem to be more inappropriate than the fact that he caved it in--"It's your hole," the digger says menacingly, "you can't dig." That's the whole story. The next story, "Irman," describes a couple who stop at a late night diner to find that the proprietor, a large woman, has died and lays on the kitchen floor, while her--husband? coworker?--Irman struggles to keep the diner going, not able even to reach the ingredients on the high shelves. The couple berate Irman, force him to cook for them, and steal from the diner. These two stories, I think, have something to say about the indignity of labor, the way that people are exploited for the most trivial of needs, or perhaps no needs--simply to enforce a hierarchy of those who pay and those who work.

The digging comes back again in a story called "Underground," in which a traveler hears a story about a town whose children had become obsessed with a large pit. When the children disappear, the townspeople find that he hole has been filled in--become a mound--and they tear up the town's floors in search of their children, who have disappeared into the earth. Perhaps here the digging is a metaphor for death--the mound like a grave, like disturbed earth--or perhaps it is a symbol of the strange and terrifying world in which we are forced to send our children. 

I liked all three of these stories to various degrees: "Irman" is the best of them, with its strange unfolding of menace and neglect. The others work, though they are a little one-note; others in Schweblin's collection I thought failed to really present more than a premise. That includes the title story, about a young girl who eats birds, and stories like "The Merman," about a narrator who falls in love with a Merman. I thought these stories struggled to move past the significance of the premise, and when they tried to become slightly more complex, like the story "Onigiris," that takes in multiple points-of-views of customers and masseuses at a strange spa--more labor--became almost inscrutable. I'm thinking of Mariana Enriquez's The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, another collection of surreal/horror stories from Latin America. I think horror, if that's what these stories, is a genre particularly at risk of not doing enough with its premises, especially in the short story, and I found Mouthful of Birds fairly disappointing compared to Schweblin's novels, which have the space to develop and mutate in more effective ways.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

Aunt Julia went out every day to have lunch or tea with one or another of her many suitors, but she saved her evenings for me. We spent them at the movies, as a matter of fact, sitting in one of the very last rows at the back, where (especially if it was a terrible film) we could kiss without bothering the other spectators and without running the risk of somebody recognizing us. Our relationship had soon stabilized at some amorphous stage; it was situated at some indefinable point between the opposed categories of being sweethearts and being lovers. This was a subject that cropped up  constantly in our conversations. We shared certain of the classic traits of lovers--secretiveness, the shared fear of being discovered, the feeling that we were taking great risks--but we were lovers spiritually, not materially, because we didn't make love (and, as Javier was later shocked to learn, we didn't even "feel each other up").

Mario, the narrator of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, falls in love with his Aunt Julia, and I am obligated before going any further to point out that Julia is his aunt by marriage, recently divorced, so we're not talking about incest. The pair are driven together by the little-r romantic force of mutual admiration, though Mario is eighteen years old and Julia an old maid at the hideous age of thirty-two. (Vargas Llosa really did marry his aunt-by-marriage when he was nineteen and she was twenty-nine.) Their relationship is kept, of course, a secret, because they know that it will cause a furor among their family if anyone finds out. At the same time, the radio station where Mario works hires an accomplished writer of serial programs who brings the station a newfound popularity. Like Julia, who is a devotee of the programs, he is Bolivian (the relationship between the various countries of South America is one of the topics at hand here, as the scriptwriter gets in trouble over and over for sneaking in various insults to Argentines into his work).

Pedro Camacho, the scriptwriter, is the novel's high point: a tiny man who writes without ceasing nearly every minute of the day. He's monomaniacal, difficult to work with, and yet Mario admires him somewhat because he has what Mario wants: accomplishment as a writer. One day, stopping at Pedro's apartment, Mario is shown a box of costumes and wigs that Pedro uses in secret to meterse en papel, get himself into paper--a fun Spanish term I just learned that means to "get into character." But what is most interesting about the novel is that chapters about the "real story" are interleaved with stories that are clearly taken from Pedro's radio serials, gruesome stories of incest, rape, and murder that have captured the attention of Lima. These serials are half the book, and so the novel is in some ways also a collection of short stories. Many of these are fascinatingly disturbing: the serial about the doctor who discovers the incestuous relationship between two siblings on the sister's wedding day, or the one about the Jehovah's Witness accused of rape who threatens to cut off his genitals to absolve himself of a rape. In true radio serial fashion, these stories tend to end on a "tune in next time" cliffhanger.

But the pace of the work is too much even for Pedro, who begins to lose it, mixing up the various characters in his serials. Suddenly, a character who was killed in another serial comes back again in a new one, transformed into a doctor or a priest, or a character who has been named Lituma has suddenly borrowed the name of Quinteros. The effect is that the stories begin to bleed together into one. They become increasingly violent, not just on the scale of pulp, but on the scale of disaster: huge fires, collapsing football stadiums, that murder off characters by the dozen just for them to be put through the ringer in next week's episode. It's funny, the story of Mario and Julia unfolds very staidly and straightforwardly next to the serials. Is their romance like the romances of fiction? Or is it perhaps not complicated enough? Whatever else is true, there's a suggestion that Mario's devotion to Julia above all else is a sign that he'll never be able to reproduce the passion of Pedro, who cares about nothing else beside his art, and that's both a good and bad thing.

With the addition of Peru, my "Countries Read" list is up to 113! Additionally, with the addition of Vargas Llosa, I've now read 57 of 128 Nobel Prize in Literature laureates.

Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner

Maybe we should have seen it coming. It takes a while to put things together. You can't always do it while it's happening to you. A week before the fire started, the rebels closed down the main highway east of Las Tunas. That meant they had control of Oriente, so much of which was owned by Americans. Us, and the American government, which ran the Nicaro nickel mine. Batista was persona non grata with the Cubans, and we were caught in the middle. Fidel and Raul, these were local boys, and I think Daddy was hoping he could reason with them.

Rachel Kushner's debut novel Telex from Cuba captures the lives of Americans living in Cuba as the civil war broke out in the 1950s. They come from all walks of life: they're rich, like K. C. Stites, whose father runs one of the plantations of the United Fruit Company, or middle-class, like Everly Lederer, whose father comes down to serve as a manager there. Even the lower classes are able to get in on the exploitation of Cuba's resources, like Allain Hatch, who finds a haven in Cuba away from the laws of the United States, where he's wanted for a killing. To these characters Kushner adds a real-life French arms runner named La Maziere, and a beautiful prostitute--conspicuously named "Rachel K"--who is reputed to be Batista's favorite, but who is really in league with Maziere and the rebels. All of these characters have their role to play in the revolution, whether rebel or victim, and all have their lives upended by the sea change that transforms Cuba.

Telex from Cuba is scrupulously researched, finely detailed, and boring. I thought it bore the hallmarks of a debut novelist's pitfalls: there's too much research, for one, not sifted through enough to give a singular impression. There are too many characters and too many points-of-view: K. C. gives a first person account, rife with patrician resentment at the loss of his birthright, but Everly, La Maziere, and many others get their turn in the third person limited seat, including about a dozen white-collar Americans and their wives whose roles in the novel I found difficult to get straight. Any one of these might have made a good novel--I thought this particularly about the irony in K. C.'s first person narration--but on the whole, they turn into a real mash. Things that ought to be huge, like the Stites' family's son Del joining the rebels, recede into the background in favor of images and symbols of dubious importance, like an abandoned Pullman railway car.

I rather enjoyed The Mars Room, which pulls some of the same point of view tricks, but without feeling overstuffed or encouraging impatience. Maybe the fact that it's mostly set in prison--a naturally confining space--helped. But this one didn't work for me.

Henry VIII by William Shakespeare

WOLSEY

This is the state of man. Today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth.

So let's start by saying that Henry VIII is not very good. It really has two claims to fame among Shakespeare's play: one, it has more stage directions than any other. These are mostly descriptions of kingly processions and pomp, and not the fun kind about being chased by bears. Two, it was long controversially argued, and now widely accepted, that Henry VIII is a collaboration between Shakespeare and his contemporary John Fletcher. This composite composition helps to explain why the play is often seen as a kind of incoherent mash of parts, even by contemporary-ish observers like Samuel Pepys.

I actually found Henry VIII to be fairly coherent and unified as a play. It read to me as being about the way that the elite are locked into a cycle of rise and fall, from Henry's scheming cardinal Wolsey to Queen Katherine (of Aragon), at one moment on top of the world, and the next exiled or sentenced to death. The king himself is depicted as being rather weak and fickle, led by Wolsey as much as he is his lust for the woman called here "Anne Bullen." Wolsey engineers the downfall of the Duke of Buckingham, and later sits in judgment of Katherine, who has been suspicious of his influence, but later on, Wolsey himself--caught writing to the Pope in opposition to the king's marriage to Anne--is the meteor who falls.

As a result, the best parts of Henry VIII seemed to me to be those moments where a character speaks elegiacally about their own downfall and doom. I liked Katherine's incensed rejoinders to Wolsey:

Sir,
I am about to weep; but, thinking that
We are queen, or long have dreamed so, certain
The daughter of a king, my drops of tears
I'll turn to sparks of fire.

And even Wolsey's sudden realization that his life of glory is over:

I have touched the highest point of all my greatness,
And from that full meridian of my glory
I haste now to my setting. I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
And no man see more.

Anne speaks wisely to her maid when she says, ignorant of the heights to which she is about to be raised, that "'tis better to be lowly born / And range with humble livers in content / Than to be perked up in a glistering grief / And wear a golden sorrow." I expect that those lines resonated quite loudly with Shakespeare's audience, who were not all that far removed from Anne's execution. And yet, the play must hedge a little on the wisdom of Henry and Anne's union, because it produced the legendary Elizabeth (who had died and been succeeded by James I by the time of Henry VIII's performance), who gets held up and prophesied over in a bit that felt like pure propaganda. One can only imagine what James' court thought, though, of these depictions of great people doomed to fall.

Sun City by Tove Jansson

There are more hairdressers in St. Petersburg than anywhere else in the country, and they are specialists at creating airy little puffs of thin white hair. Hundreds of old ladies stroll beneath the palm trees with white curls covering their heads. There are fewer gentleman, however. In the guesthouses, they all have their own rooms, or they share with another person--some of them for only a short time in the even, healthful climate, but most of them for as long as they have left. No one is sick, that is, not in the normal sense of sick in bed. Such matters are attended to incredibly swiftly by ambulances that never sound their sirens. There are lots of squirrels in the trees, not to mention the birds, and all these animals are tame to the point of impudence. A lot of stores carry hearing aids and other therapeutic devices. Signs in clear, bright colors announce immediate blood pressure checks on every block and offer all sorts of information about things such as pensions, cremation, and legal problems. In addition, the shops have put a lot of thought into offering a wide selection of knitting patterns, yarns, games, craft materials, and the like, and their customers can be sure of a friendly and helpful reception.

The name of the retirement home at the center of Tove Jansson's novel Sun City is utterly perfect: Friendship's Rest. The old people who fill it, this retirement home in St. Petersburg, Florida--still, somehow, nearly fifty years later, the epicenter of America's old people--are sometimes friends, and sometimes at rest, but sometimes they hate each other. Eager-to-please Evelyn Peabody finds a great deal of catharsis in finally letting herself hate the bitter Catherine Frey. Thompson--one of the retirement home's few men--hates everyone more or less, but especially the gardener, on whom he loves to play cruel tricks. He also hates his wife, who shows up one day at Friendship's Rest wondering where he's been for the last twenty years. Rebecca Rubinstein, who cruises through the home like a Borscht Belt Battleship, looks down at them all with a sense of wry bemusement. Even the happy-go-lucky residents, like Hannah Higgins, who seems content to spend her final days with a pair of knitting needles in hand, follow a strict hierarchy of arrangement of veranda rocking chairs that adumbrates all the social relations at Friendship's Rest. The novel has a lot to say about what it's like to be in the last years of your life, and one such message is that you most certainly do not outgrow pettiness and resentment.

I loved Sun City. It felt like a novel that someone wrote specifically for me. And though I have loved Tove Jansson's books before, especially the lovely Summer Book, I never would have expected this particular book from her. It reminded me most of Penelope Fitzgerald: comic and insightful, with a large and slightly absurd cast of characters. Most of them, of course, are old people, but the novel has exactly two young people: "Bounty Joe," a motorcycle-driving Jesus Freak hippie who works as an ersatz swashbuckler at the HMS Bounty, a "movie ship" in St. Petersburg harbor, and his girlfriend, Linda, Friendship Rest's Mexican housekeeper. Joe is waiting for a letter to come from another group of Jesus Freaks that will summon him in the case of, I guess, Jesus Christ's return, and as the letter keeps not coming, he grows increasingly frustrated and bitter. Linda is sweet, and sort of simple-wise, and her philosophy of finding beauty in each moment contrasts with Joe's frustrated millenarianism. It struck me that, in the sense that he is waiting for an imminent world to the end, Joe is both an interesting variation on and contradiction of the old people at Friendship's Rest: they are all waiting for an end that's just around the corner, but Joe seems to think that he will be spared the full progression of life that is the inheritance of every fortunate person.

"Death is young," Peabody remarks cryptically. She is watching a young boys' chorus: "In an irrational moment she got the idea that they were harbingers of death, that they were like death itself, relentless, incomprehensible, and beautiful." Beautiful!? This sort of shocking insight, the surprising word, is the kind of thing that reminds me of Fitzgerald and one of the reasons that I found the book so satisfying. No doubt Thomas Teal's translation from Swedish has a lot to do with the book's impact as well. It's not a perfect novel where all the different threads are brought cleanly and elegantly together; in fact, the ending is kind of a mess: the residents of Friendship's Rest end up at one of Central Florida's freshwater springs at the same time that Bounty Joe and Linda are also there on a long-awaited excursion. It's a curated experience, but the Florida jungle lurks at the margins, full of shadows and monkeys. The residents get loose and lost, and the whole thing is sort of a mess, and when it was over I thought, well, what was the point of all that? But I liked the book a little bit better for that, too, for the way it denies a straightforwardly legible resolution. Because what does the end of one's life ever resolve?

Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo

In this city, after the outbreak of the war, we are more bored than ever, and, as a substitute for psychoanalysis, I have returned to my beloved papers. For a year I hadn't written a word; in this, as in everything else, obeying the doctor, who commanded that during my therapy I was to reflect only when I was with him, because unsupervised reflection would reinforce the breaks that inhibited my sincerity, my relaxation. But now I find myself unbalanced and sicker than ever, and, through writing, I believe I will purge myself of the sickness more easily than through my therapy. At least I am sure that this is the true system for restoring importance to a past no longer painful, and the dispelling the dreary present more quickly.

Zeno Cosini, an aging businessman in postwar Italy, finds himself in the analyst's chair. He has a deep distrust of the analyst, and is determined to work through his "conscience" on his own, by writing the tome in our hands known as Zeno's Conscience. The story begins with the death of his father and moves through Zeno's association with the well-to-do Malfenti family, whose patriarch takes Zeno in as a kind of surrogate son. Malfenti has only daughters, and it's from these daughters that Zeno feels he must take his choice of a wife: he is deeply in love with the beautiful but cold Ada, and when she spurns him, he turns to the studious Alberta, then a third, Anna, but they spurn him, too, and he turns with despair to Augusta, the plainest of the four, who has nurtured a crush on Zeno for a long time. She understands that he does not love her, but she accepts, believing she will make a good wife--and she does. This picture of a "good marriage" makes Zeno's Conscience rather unique, even as Zeno undertakes a rather pathetic affair with an amateur opera singer.

I really enjoyed Zeno's Conscience, though I fear that I read it too slowly to have much interesting to say about it. It's interesting to see a book about Freudian analysis from 1923, when it was still in its relative infancy; the novel moves very naturalistically and has little of the qualities we might associate with fragmented modernism in a Freudian mode. I think what I liked best about it is how it captures Zeno as a character who acts from impulse and id even when he knows that his actions are wrong or unlikely to lead to happiness; Svevo captures the lengths we will go through to capture the attentions of a member of the opposite sex we know will never really want us in return, even in the face of evidence that we can see and understand clearly. I've heard Zeno called an "unreliable narrator," but I don't know that that phrase really captures what's going on; the later Zeno who is writing understands himself quite well, even as the Zeno of the time doesn't. We share that quality with the writing Zeno, looking back at foolish actions with the knowledge of better judgment.

Zeno strikes up a business relationship with Guido, the Argentinean whom Ada marries. His former love for Ada colors the relationship between Zeno, Guido, and the Malfentis, with many resulting misunderstandings, but Guido and Zeno actually become rather close friends. When Guido becomes a little too addicted to speculating on the stock market, the Malfentis turn to Zeno to help save him, and Zeno is cast suddenly in the position of being the responsible and soberly judging one. Guido is well-meaning and naive, and his speculation is the beginning of a horrible and tragic downfall. One thing that I got from his chapter is a sense that Guido is the one, more than Zeno, who might have benefitted from analysis, that Zeno may not always understand himself with clarity and precision, but that Guido is the true master of repression and foolish self-denial. The ending of Guido's story is, as the rest of the novel is, both deeply sad and somehow riotously funny, as when (spoiler alert) Zeno ends up missing Guido's funeral because he follows the wrong procession to the wrong cemetery.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

'I wouldn't be you for a kingdom, then!' Catherine declared emphatically -- and she seemed to speak sincerely. 'Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is -- an unreclaimed creature, without refinement -- without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I'd have soon put that little canary into the park on a winter's day as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It's deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior. He's not a rough diamond -- a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.'

It's been fourteen long years since I last touched Wuthering Heights. I decided to reread it in advance of the new adaptation, whose trailer makes it look like a an upstairs-downstairs forbidden sex romp. Maybe it'll be good (I doubt it), but one thing it isn't is sexy. In fact, the stormy love between Heathcliff and Catherine seems to me, even moreso on this reading, to be entirely sexless. Cathy and Heathcliff both describe themselves, again and again, as the same soul occupying two different bodies, which is to say that embodiment is, in Wuthering Heights, a kind of challenge or trap. It's no wonder, perhaps, that people are always getting sick or injured and dying before their time, starting with Hindley's wife/Hareton's mother and continuing all the way to, spoiler alert, Heathcliff himself. The closest that Heathcliff gets to Catherine physically seems to me to be the moment that he digs up her grave to embrace her and accidentally, as he says, releases her ghost.

This disembodiment, perhaps, explains why Catherine is so willing to overlook, as no one else seems to be, Heathcliff's racial coloring and ambiguous heritage. You often hear people say that Heathcliff is supposed to be Black (making Jacob Elordi all wrong for the part), but it's clear to me that Heathcliff's background is meant to be much murkier than that; part of his tragedy is that he is racially ambiguous and thus there is no social place for him at Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, or anywhere else. He's described as Romani or a "Lascar," but this ambivalence is underlined by the way in which the elder Earnshaw shows up with him in tow from a trip to London as if he's simply materialized; no explanation is given. Nature vs. nurture is an unsettled question in Wuthering Heights: is Heathcliff's savageness meant to be racially constituted? Or does the novel suggest that he is a nasty piece of work because he's othered by the vindictive Hindley? Heathcliff's viciousness is, I feel strongly, too overwhelming to be the product of socialization; I trust Catherine when she says there is no oyster inside the pearl. Then again, perhaps that viciousness is natural, and thus preferable to the viciousness of someone like Hindley, dolled up and justified by his greater social standing. And on top of that, Heathcliff's little experiment turning Hindley's son Hareton into a kind of carbon copy of himself--brutish and resentful--seems so successful, at least until the coda, that perhaps the book really does believe that one is primarily the product of their social environment.

I don't think this book was as pleasurable for me the second time around, mostly just because I knew what was coming--it is a book that thrives on melodrama and shock, of the best kind--but I remain in awe of it. It's really a book that pulls no punches; people say the most out of pocket shit to each other on every page. It's almost like watching a really pulpy reality TV show. What I did come away with on this re-read was an appreciation for the second half, which I expect to be more or less cut out of the movie. Heathcliff's desire for vengeance is so strong, like his love, that it survives even Hindley, his tormentor: what is the point, I wondered this time, of pursuing Hindley's heir and house after Hindley himself has been drinking himself to a miserable death for more than a decade? I found myself interested now in the story of Cathy, Hareton, and Linton, who are all trying desperately to escape the shape that the despot Heathcliff would pound them into. It seemed to me this time around that this is where the "real" story lies, despite the popular image of the novel as consisting mainly of Heathcliff and Catherine's romance. By the end, young Cathy and Hareton seem like true survivors of a kind of natural storm that killed just about everyone else, and it's their romance that seems like a normal human one.

The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick

Because all the Yance-men had this streak. They were selfish; they had made the world into their deer park at the expense of the millions of tankers below; it was wrong and they knew it and they felt guilt--not quite enough guilt to cause them to knock of Brose and let the tankers up, but enough guilt to make their late evenings a thrashing agony of loneliness, emptiness, and their nights impossible.

When Nicolas St. James decides to go to the surface in search for an artificial pancreas for a friend, he knows it might be a suicide mission. If the robot "leadies" fighting the decades-long war between the United States and the Soviet Union don't kill him, the radiation might, or one any number of sinister diseases with names like the Bag Plague and the Shrink Stink. But what he finds is not a war-ravaged Earth, but an expanse of enormous, cultivated "demesnes," each belonging to a member of the world's ruling elite. These elite keep the surface population low--and thus hold on to their demesnes--by concocting a fictional war waged by a fictional president, a robot named Talbot Yancey. Yancey's speeches are written by a cabal of "Yance-men" who are among the surface world's most powerful.

The Penultimate Truth is a kind of riff on the ideas of "Those Who Walked Away from Omelas": prosperity, at its heart, depends on the repression of the subaltern, who are often ruled not merely by violence but by subterfuge and propaganda. But burying the subaltern below ground cannot prevent the rifts of hierarchy from straining the society of the elite. The Yance-men are administered by Stanton Brose, an eighty-year old whose physical grotesqueness comes from his firm control over the continent's store of artificial organs. The main plot of The Penultimate Truth, in fact, concerns intrigue between Brose and a pair of Yance-men named Joseph Adams and David Lantano who may or may not be hatching a plan to kill Brose. Meanwhile, the grip they have on those below proves very vulnerable. Besides St. James, there are thousands of others who have emerged above ground, being stashed away in giant apartment-style prisons, and happy enough to live in a limbo between the underground tanks and true freedom--for now.

There's much that's familiar in The Penultimate Truth: the power of propaganda, for instance, and the sense that what appears to be the real world is only the topmost of a layer of subterfuges that may have no real bottom. But something else that interested me about the novel, which I don't think I've seen before in Dick, is the way that it acts as a metaphor for the frontier and the settlement of the West. The Yance-men want to convince themselves that their claims (and they literally do claim them, like Oklahoma sooners, by being first into a particular "hot spot") are terra nullius, but they know that thousands toil beneath their beds, and they're tortured by this. St. James emerges into Lantano's demesne near what was once Cheyenne, Wyoming; a significant plot point involves the planting of spurious artifacts in Utah's "Dixie" region; the national government is operated outside of Estes Park in Colorado. Even Adams' demesne in foggy California suggests that this is a novel of the West.

Sort-of-significant spoiler here: one character, whose darker skin is thought to be the effects of radiation poisoning, turns out to be an Indian. Only St. James perceives it, not having known (as the surface-dwellers know) that the Indians were all wiped out in the war. And not only this, but the character is a veteran of the earliest Indian Wars on the American continent, having prolonged his life to six hundred years through the use of a complex time-travel device. (Here Dick makes a really simple mistake, identifying the man as a Cherokee, despite describing him as being part of a "war party" in Utah--he ought to be, like, Cheyenne--or is this, too, a half-truth?) Of course, a mistaken belief that Native Americans were wiped out, or were soon to be, sustained the belief in an open West there for the taking. Dick invests the Native man with incredible secret power, and by doing so, symbolically reverses familiar narratives about disappearance and conquest.

This one was really good, not perhaps in the top tier of Dick's work, but among his best pure genre fiction. Reading Dick, really reading him, I think, can only produce awe: he produced a couple of these books every year, and though they recycle many of the same concepts again and again, like "precogs," they are so endlessly inventive, and even the prose is of surprisingly literary quality. I don't think anyone in 20th century America really elevated genre work to literature the way he did, and the fact that no one ever talks about him that way is proof of how seamlessly he melded the two.

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit

Cinema can be imagined as a hybrid of railroad and photography, an outgrowth of those two definitive nineteenth century inventions, the technologies Stanford and Muybridge represented, in which case fatherhood is too simple a metaphor for it. After all, zootropes, photography, and magic lanterns are also key aspects of it, and Muybridge only initiated and did not complete the invention of cinema. The railroad had in so many ways changed the real landscape and the human experience of it, had changed the perception of time and space and the nature of vision and embodiment. The sight out the railroad window had prepared viewers for the kind of vision that cinema would make ordinary; it had adjusted people to a pure visual experience stripped of smell, sound, threat, tactility, and adjusted them to a new speed of encounter, the world rushing by the windows; had taken them farther into that world than they would have ever gone before; broadening many horizons at the same time it made the world itself a theater of sorts, a spectacle.

The movies, it can be argued, were born with a photographer named Eadweard Muybridge took a snapshot of a horse. Under the patronage of California railroad magnate Leland Stanford, Muybridge was trying to discern what happened when a horse galloped. Equestrians and scientists couldn't even agree at the time whether a horse always had one hoof on the ground or not. Muybridge's innovations allowed for a photograph to be taken with an exposure time short enough to capture the horse mid-stride. (It turns out that a horse does not have a hoof on the ground at all times.) As a revolution in sight, this was huge; as Solnit points out in her book River of Shadows, the nation's most accomplished painters of horses had to go back and rethink all the work of their careers. But more was to come, because when Muybridge put such snapshots together later in a sequence, the "motion picture" was born.

I found Solnit's biography of Muybridge to be incredibly fascinating. She captures some of what has made Muybridge himself a subject of fascination: he was an English weirdo who changed his name a half-dozen times and ended up killing his wife's lover in cold blood. But the strength of the book is in the way Solnit connects Muybridge's innovations to the changing technological landscape of the Western United States and the world as a whole. The motion picture, she shows, is deeply connected to the way that the railroad--that technology pioneered by Leland Stanford--transformed the lives of Americans. It's true, there's something about looking out a railroad window that is replicated in the experience of the frames being pulled hastily over the projector. But more convincingly, Solnit connects both technologies to the nineteenth century attempt to "annihilate space and time," to break down the barriers that separated people by time and distance.

Muybridge's achievements weren't only in motion photography; he was also known for pioneering large-scale landscape and cityscape photography, taking, for example, some of the earliest panorama shots of the city of San Francisco. Solnit takes these in, too, connecting Muybridge's time photographing the Modoc War in northern California to the rapidly shifting face of the West. (I chuckled a little at the academic attitude toward the word technology, which takes in both horses and the "Ghost Dance" of the nineteenth century West, and which certainly made making these connections easier.) Solnit does a good job, too, of making the case that Muybridge shows the centrality of California in the emergence of the modern world. It's the reason the railroads were built, after all, and Muybridge was at the center of the innovations by which California changed the world: Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

I don't know much about Solnit; I associate her with the book Men Explain Things to Me and a cultural flashpoint over stuff like "mansplaining." This book is, I'm pretty sure, much earlier, and perhaps a relic of a time when Solnit was less of a well-known name, but I thought it was really insightful and erudite, and I can easily imagine why such an intelligent and thoughtful writer would bristle at being spoken down to by male chauvinists. Really enjoyed this one.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Larry and Sally Morgan return after many years to the Vermont cabin where they once spent their happiest moments. Their old friend, Charity Lang, is dying, with her husband Sid at her side. Charity's impending death promises an end to a lifelong friendship between the foursome, fused at first in the crucible of the University of Wisconsin, where Larry and Sid were professors of literature. After losing their jobs in a flurry of firings during World War II, rich Sid's Vermont property was offered as a safe haven to the poorer Morgans. An idea of a life was constructed there, in which the Langs might act as patron to their friends, but the idyll proved to be short-lived, as Sally's sudden polio whisked them away. Now, as Charity is dying, it is an occasion for narrator Larry to look back on a beautiful friendship that never quite made as large a part in anyone's life as they would have liked.

I found the first half or so of Crossing to Safety terrifically boring. We are asked to believe that these two couples are amazed and awe-inspired by what they find in each other, but outside of a clear kind of sympathy, it was never independently clear to me that any of them was quite worth the hearts in the eyes or the dropped jaws or what have you. And the setting of the academy of the 1940's, when someone like Larry could receive a check equivalent to a quarter of his yearly salary for writing a single short story and mailing it off to the Atlantic, made the book feel sort of self-consciously "literary" in a way that people tend to make fun of. (Stoner, anyone?)

But I thought it became more interesting when the cracks started to show in the friends' relationship: we're told that Sid nurses a crush on Sally, for one. More than this, I was interested in the relationship between Sid and Charity: he sees himself as a poet but she pressures him into a narrow view of success, academic success, something at which he is manifestly less talented and less passionate about. Larry's brief success as a writer activates Sid's jealousy, and more than that, his resentment toward Charity. There's a great and telling scene where the friends go hiking and Charity is so slavishly devoted to the counsel in her guidebook that she nearly kills them with undercooked chicken. (When it says "three minutes on one side," everyone points out to the stubborn charity, it means hamburger, not poultry.) Charity even tries to die "by the book," sending Sid away at the last minute and "slipping away" (I guess this means suicide?) so that she might die cleanly, without burdening anyone. Of course, this isn't what Sid wants--he wants to be by his wife's side--but even at the end of their lives, the differences between the two seem intractable.

I don't think I'd recommend this one. It has some nice elements to it, but I found the whole thing a little tweedy and twee, and it often felt that the book was too insistent, and consequently not persuasive enough, about the power of the foursome's friendship.

Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison

"I need plywood," said my son, Paulie, in his sleep. Or I heard wrong. I know it was "need" something.

That was my first day there, at his flat on St. Anne, before the NYPD began hiding him.

He looked like this: in white cotton socks and frayed blue jeans, a cowhide belt and a petal-green sweater. his hands in their horrible bandages must've been on his lap and I couldn't see them because he was bent over, with his plate pushed aside and his face on the dining room table, and he was all-the-way asleep, with a tiny chip of emerald glinting there in the lobe of his ear.

Money Breton lives in Alabama with her friend Hollis ("Hollis not my ex-anything and not my boyfriend. He's my friend. Maybe not the best friend I have in the world. He is, however, the only."). Her daughter Mev has a kindly heart and a need for methadone. She has a boyfriend in New Orleans named Dix who is as dumb as a concrete levee. She works as a "script doctor," polishing up a script about Bigfoot and flying out to Los Angeles every few weeks to get yelled at by the producer, Belinda. Her son Paulie is in the witness protection program, readying to testify against some unnamed assailant (she calls him the "Evil Snake Parts Criminal," among other things) who is responsible for raping and torturing Paulie. And her cat has gone missing.

Why Did I Ever is made up of 500+ mini-chapters, some stretching to a couple of pages, but many more only a sentence or two long. They're clever little snapshots of frustration, of interpersonal tension, of annoyance and grief, of professional hardship and, when Money lets herself think about him, a deep, deep anguish about the state of her son. Most of them aren't all that important to the plot, the plot that isn't all that important to the novel. They are funny and weird:

I would say to one particular ex: "Twit was too short a word and Pigboy was unkind. I should never have said such ugly things about you. Bumpkin, however, and Thieving, Lying Wino can stay right where they are."

I liked the ones about Dix especially:

Dix says, "You don't gotta worry. I'm not one of those guys gets his rocks off beatin' on a woman."

"God love you," I say.

"You do gotta worry, though, that at times I can be verbally abusive."

"No, you really can't," I say. "To do that you'd have to know the language better, Dix. You'd ahve to know, first of all, what is a verb."

"Everything that you own," he says, "is the BEST STUFF MONEY CAN BUY!"

One can easily recognize Why Did I Ever as the work of the same woman who wrote Oh!, a book I also found to be riotously funny. Except Oh! has a kind of forward energy, a propulsiveness that makes it impossible to put aside, but Why Did I Ever takes a deliberately antithetical strategy, delivering the novel in halting chunks that only seem to come together in the aggregate. But this works, because it's easy to see that Money's life itself is similarly in tatters. The story with Paulie, which is only rarely directly addressed but seems to run under every other misfortune and sadness, as if Money cannot let herself look at or think about her son directly, is extremely touching and sad. I was skeptical for most of the novel that Robison would pull it off, but I thought the ending especially really brought things to an effective (if very sad) conclusion.