Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books, islands. Islands, books. Lake of the Woods in Ontario and Minnesota has 14,000 islands. Some of them are painted islands, teh rocks bearing signs ranging from a few hundred to more than a thousand years old. So these islands, which I'm longing to read, are books in themselves. Then there is a special island on Rainy Lake that is home to thousands of rare books ranging from crumbling copies of Erasmus in the French and Heloise's letters to Abelard dated MDCCXXIII, to first editions of Mark Twain (signed) to a magnificent collection of ethnographic works on the Ojibwe that might explain the book-islands of Lake of the Woods.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country begins with author Louise Erdrich piling into a blue minivan with her newborn daughter, Kiizhik. This is an unconventional trip, and at 46 years of age, she's an unconventional mother. The destination is the lake country of northern Minnesota and southern Ontario, Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake, vast freshwater lakes that are dotted with islands, a place that is still home to the Ojibwe. Erdrich herself is a "plains" Ojibwe, from the eastern stretches of North Dakota, and so the place still retains some of its strangeness, but there's home here, too, not least because she is meeting the mysterious father of her infant, a medicine man named Tobasonakwut. (One reads between the lines to see that the pair are not quite a conventional couple; elsewhere I've read that he was a married man.) In these islands she sees something akin to the books that are her lifelong passion: numerous, inviting, mysterious, and even, in some cases as she explains above, legible.

What a precious object this book is for me. I picked it up at Erdrich's own Minneapolis bookstore, Birchbark Books, after a week of exploring the Ojibwe lands around Lake Superior. We never quite got up to where Erdrich describes in this book, but we did end up a stone's throw from Rainy Lake, at Lake Kabetogama, also now a part of Voyageurs National Park. But I recognized something, just a little, of the awe that suffuses that place, where the islands really do fan out and multiply in an impossible way. The book is just a book, it isn't even signed, but it lies at the crossroads of my own experiences and that of an author who has meant a lot to me. Maybe there's even a small touch of the numinous in the way of Erdrich's visit to the cabin of explorer and naturalist Ernest Oberholtzer, where she sleeps among his vast library, making herself known to his immense store of books.

Beyond that, I was really touched by this book. I've only read Erdrich's fiction, which can be fanciful and goofy, but reading her in this mode, a mix of memoir, naturalism, and travelogue, was really fascinating. She's always had a way of persuasively writing about the way that myth and magic appear in everyday life, and she manages to make the ancient stone glyphs of the Lake of the Woods seem as mysterious and meaningful as anything from Tracks or Bingo Palace. And I was struck by the gentle, strange relationship between herself and Tobasonakwut, as well as the late-coming child, who seems to have a natural attraction for the lake's animals: sturgeon, otters, moose. Even the principle metaphor of the book, which ought to be silly--a book is like an island--seems natural and persuasive in Erdrich's hands. I really enjoyed seeing this other side of a great writer.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy

Looking back, I see that it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words of the Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture. This side of Catholicism, much of it cheapened and debased by mass production, was for me, nevertheless, the equivalent of Gothic cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts and mystery plays. I threw myself into it with ardor, this sensuous life, and when I was not dreaming that I was going to grow up to marry the pretender to the throne of France and win back his crown with him, I was dreaming of being a Carmelite nun, cloistered and penitential; I was also much attracted by an order of fallen women called the Magdalens.

When Mary McCarthy was a little girl, she took a train from Seattle to Minneapolis, where her parents meant to relocate near to her aunt and uncle. On that train, the entire family caught the Spanish flu, and by the time that McCarthy herself emerged from her convalescence, both of her parents were dead, having died within a day of each other. Thus began an unusual childhood, first under the care of her cruel resentful aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, then under her stern but caring Protestant uncle in Seattle. During that time, McCarthy latched onto the Catholicism of one side of her family, perhaps as a way of providing a consistency and continuity in a life of upheaval, or perhaps just because the grand drama of the Catholic religion can be appealing to a young girl. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a series of essays that chronicles these years of Mary's life.

One interesting thing that McCarthy does here is append an italicized afterword to each essay, presumably having been published somewhere else and at some other time, detailing how, where, and why, she'd taken poetic license. There's a great story of a rule-obsessed teacher at the Catholic boarding school who bonds with McCarthy over a love of Cicero's ancient fight with Cataline, but who nevertheless reports McCarthy--at the risk of expulsion--for sneaking out of the dormitory during the last week of school. I liked this one because it's an interesting profile of a recognizable kind of person, who clings to the rules for their own sake, despite the laxity that characterizes the actual figures of authority. But in the afterword, McCarthy describes how the timeline has been compressed to make the teacher's betrayal seem even more quixotic than it really was, how it probably wasn't just the day after they'd concluded their play, to great applause and aplomb from the student body.

As a book of essays, there isn't a strong throughline like a more traditional memoir, but this didn't bother me; McCarthy is such a strong, sensitive, and funny writer. In fact, I enjoyed this book a great deal more than her novel The Birds of America, having the funny-but-true verisimilitude of a real life, though perhaps not as much as the (in some ways, drawn equally from life) novel The Group. As the title suggests, the essays are drawn together perhaps by the strength of McCarthy's not-quite-cradle Catholicism. McCarthy captures well how a childhood religion can mix aesthetic and cultural concerns with deeper, more spiritual ones, how these can often be indistinguishable. As a teenager, McCarthy "loses her religion" as a kind of social ploy to receive sympathy and attention from her boarding school classmates, as well as the school's nuns and priests, but then a funny thing happens: she's not able to find it again. As ever happens, the pretenses we take end up becoming real.

True North by Jim Harrison

My name is David Burkett. I'm actually the fourth in a line of David Burketts beginning in the 1860s when my great-grandfather emigrated from Cornwall, England, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan which forms the southern border of Lake Superior, that vast inland sea of freshwater. this naming process is of no particular interest except to illustrate how fathers wish to further dominate the lives of their sons from the elemental beginnings. I have done everything possible to renounce my father but then within the chaos of the events of my life it is impossible to understand the story without telling it.

David Burkett hates his father for two distinct, but interrelated reasons. First, his father is the heir of a line of timber barons who have made their wealth from pillaging forests, exploiting workers, and being generally nasty. In this, author Jim Harrison draws from the true history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which often pitted industrial capitalists against the miners, loggers, and Native Americans whose labor their vast wealth required. I was interested to see the historical details crop up along the route of our trip recent trip through the Upper Peninsula. At one point, David's forebears are squarely blamed for a stampede in which hired goons yelled "Fire" in a crowded theater, crushing dozens of children, and which I read about during our visit to the Calumet National Historic Park on the Keweenaw Peninsula. The other reason is that his father is a pederast and a rapist, pursuing underage girls with the doggedness of the truly depraved, including raping the young daughter of his Mexican groundskeeper, Jesse, a crime that stands out in David's mind as the pinnacle and exemplar of all his crimes.

In part, David's response to this is to run from money, living simply in cabins and trucks throughout the U.P. He also responds by trying to write a thorough history of the U.P. in which his family's crimes will play a starring part. This effort is a Casaubon-like attempt that's destined to fail because there's too much history to uncover, and it's hamstrung by the fact that, as it turns out, David is a shitty writer. And yet, nothing he does seems to help David emerge, psychologically speaking, out from under the shadow of his father. As he grows from a teen into a man and begins to accumulate the ordinary sexual obsessions, he finds himself tortured by the possibility that his lusts will make him closer to his father than he would like. And yet, a series of women are on hand to give themselves sexually to David: the youthful Laurie, his abbreviated wife Polly, the poet Vernice, and others. Each of them encourages David, in their own way, to find a way to let go of his obsession with his father.

In this way, True North is very much a masculine novel in a kind of old-school way. Women never seem to say "no" to David, sexually speaking, or if they do, it's only contextual, no woman is ever just-not-interested, and they all represent stages of self-expression or self-growth, the woman as the extension of the man. But Harrison is a talented writer, and he brings them enough to life that you're willing to forgive this hoary old dynamic. I found the book ultimately very engaging and readable, and I was impressed with the way that Harrison keeps David's father largely off the page in order to keep the focus on the psychological damage that David himself carries around. It was a great pleasure to read on the Upper Peninsula (I actually read the whole thing on two long ferry rides to and from Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior), and it gave me a much richer sense of the heritage of the place: the Ojibwe, the Finns, the Cornish, the mines, the timber, et cetera, et cetera. Although it's telegraphed at the beginning of the novel, the extreme and out-of-place violence of the ending shocked me; I'm still not sure how to integrate it mentally with the rest of the novel.

Laughing Whitefish by Robert Traver

It was one of those glorious Northern evenings I was learning to love, the tall reddish sky shot and aflame with great soaring rays and reflections from the dying sun. The Creation must have been something like this, I thought. As my rented horse plodded along the dusty ore-stained road I reflected about this elusive thing called success and material attainment. Who was ever to say with confidence that the Marjis of this world were failures? By and by I found myself thinking about the complex new legal situation in which I suddenly found myself--my first big case--thinking about it and all of its ramifications, thinking, too, about my new client, the withdrawn and aloof but strangely exciting young Indian woman, Laughing Whitefish.

Robert Traver was the pen name of John Voelker, a distinguished judge from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who parlayed his work into a career of popular early legal fiction, including the novel Anatomy of a Murder, later turned into a film by Otto Preminger. Laughing Whitefish, like Anatomy of a Murder, is based on a real legal case that occurred in the Upper Peninsula, though in this case, in the late 19th century: an Ojibwe woman named Charlotte Kobogum sued a mining company for the shares owed to her father, Marji Kobogum, promised to him for showing the mining company the location of a vein of ore. Charlotte's claim hinged on whether or not she could be proved to be her father's legal heir: she was born of his second polygamous wife and raised, after that wife's death, by a third.

To this story, Traver adds a green young defense attorney, William Poe, who has the case fall in his lap after another attorney comes to him wishing to wash his hands of the case. Poe is eager to help the young woman, whose Ojibwe name (in the novel--I don't think in real life, but I could be wrong) is Laughing Whitefish, also the name of a river near Marquette. Poe's eagerness becomes mixed up with an increasing affection for Laughing Whitefish, who returns his affections by the novel's end--a progressive-enough marriage for the civilized outpost of Marquette in the late 19th century, and maybe even in the mid-century when Traver wrote the novel.

Laughing Whitefish is breezy, readable, and largely artless. It suffers from being, in a way, ahead of its time: at the time it was written, we were not yet awash in legal dramas, and the courtroom scenes feel stagey and quaint. Similarly, the legal genius of Poe's ultimate strategy suffers from being entirely obvious with the aid of modern hindsight. Seeing that the opposing counsel tries again and again to settle, he senses that there is something that he's missed about the case that makes it winnable. That turns out to be the supremacy of U.S. treaty law: the American treaty with the Ojibwe, which promises recognition of all traditional Ojibwe relationships, ratifies Laughing Whitefish's claim to be her father's rightful heir. That Poe has to "discover" this bedrock fact of Indian law suggests, perhaps, that this jurisprudence was not quite obvious to everyone in the late 19th or even the early 20th century; after all, the United States has always had a way of forgetting stipulations in its supposedly "supreme" treaties when convenient. Still, Laughing Whitefish is interesting in the way it captures a moment in the changing legal landscape of the frontier, and it's hard not to see the symbolism in the generational shift from the drunk, dissolute Marji to his civilized, shrewd daughter, Laughing Whitefish--Charlotte.

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

I yearned for them, my room, my workshop on the roof, Kareem. What I missed most was the smell of our house. Once, but once, when I was still a boy, I cried and screamed, throwing things as I had done before to stop Baba going on one of his endless business trips. Judge Yaseen acted nobly. He simply shut the door to the room that he had given me in his house, then later sent the maidservant in which a cold glass of sugarcane juice. I buried my face into the sharp lavender smell of the pillow, mourning the familiar: digging my face into her neck, kissing his hand.

One day, young Suleiman sees his father in the middle of Tripoli's Martyrs' Square, wearing black sunglasses. Only, his father is supposed to be on a business trip. At home, his mother does what she always does when Baba is away: she drinks her "medicine" and tells Suleiman stories take from One Thousand and One Nights. The similarity between herself and Scheherazade is not lost on Suleiman's mother, trapped in an arranged marriage, stuck in a room while the man who governs her life goes about his business. But just as Suleiman must confront what that business is, so do the officials of Qaddafi's Libyan government, who begin to sniff around, having recently abducted Baba's neighbor and, as it turns out, collaborator.

What makes In the Country of Men work is not that it tells the story of Libyan resistance through the eyes of a young child; stories that ironize the upheavals of human history in just that way are too common. What I liked about it was that, in several meaningful ways, author Hisham Matar makes young Suleiman a collaborator with the regime that hunts his father. His mother burns their father's books so they won't be discovered; Suleiman, angered on his father's behalf, saves one, which happens to have an incriminating message written in it. A man named Sharief watches the house from a parked car, and Suleiman believes him when he says that he's only looking out for Baba's interests, to the point where he even divulges some of the necessary information the man is looking for. This dynamic is exacerbated by the ways that Suleiman, acting out his fear and anxiety, becomes isolated from his community, mocking his friend and son of the abducted man, as if that mockery could protect his own father. Later, he throws a rock that hits the neighborhood's most physically vulnerable child. That's Suleiman: lashing out from deep anxieties, and harming the wrong people. Part of me expected that In the Country of Men would turn out to be the story of the son of a freedom fighter who grows up to be a torturer for the regime.

It's not that kind of book, thankfully. But neither is it the mawkish or sentimental kind of book that would follow Suleiman's gradual awakening to the truth about the country in which he lives, which would lead to him growing more admiring of and closer to both father and mother. Suleiman plays his small part in the ultimate failure of his father's political work, and the sundering of his family. In the end, the regime is too strong and the family is too small, change is still too far in the future, and Qaddafi's Libya is still Qaddafi's Libya.

With the addition of Libya, my "Countries Read" list is up to 109!

Death in Her Hands by Otessa Moshfegh

There was so much more work to be done. There were people to locate, to question, and how I would do this was unclear. I was not a detective. I had no magnifying glass, no handcuffs. I was a civilian. I was a little old lady, according to most people. I'd have to sneak, I'd have to sniff. I'd have to be a fly on the wall, and overhear what I could, glean, detect things through vibrations. I'd have to use my psychic abilities. Didn't Walter always say I was a witch?

Vesta Gul, an old woman who has just fled to a remote cabin after the death of her husband, is walking through the woods one day when she discovers a scrap of paper. The words written there: "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no dead body--only the scrap of paper. Is it the beginning of a novel or a story? Or a confession? Vesta begins to obsess over the paper, which she takes as a call to become a detective, to solve the murder of the mysterious Magda, but her method of investigation is peculiar. This is a woman, after all, who needs help from the librarian to figure out how to Ask Jeeves. Instead, she begins to imagine everything about the case, starting with Magda, whom she imagines as a beautiful young emigrant, to a series of wholly invented suspects: her boyfriend, her lover, her abusive landlady, and a mysterious ghoul, who also might be a police officer, whose name is Ghod.

Moshfegh's books are always best when she pulls the reader deep into the psyche of some isolated, alienated person who doesn't quite understand the world around them. Like the protagonists of Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Vesta doesn't quite have an outer world available to confirm or disqualify her imaginings, which is what allows them to linger and proliferate. We understand quickly that, in Vesta's case, what she's really doing is processing her relationship with her now-dead husband, whom she never was able to see clearly during his life. In imagining Magda as a beautiful, rebellious victim, she is in a way coming to understand the way that Walter circumscribed her life and her potential. Moshfegh is too talented and too canny to make it a one-to-one comparison--Magda is not Vesta--and yet, thinking on Magda allows Vesta to bounce back and forth between the world of understanding and the world of imagination. What she ends up "solving" is not the killing of Magda, but the killing of her own spirit. Perhaps more obviously symbolic is the dog Charlie, who Vesta considers her one kindly companion, and who ends up turning on her violently.

That said, Death in Her Hands is a little too disinterested in the actual mystery at hand. Any reader who expects that something will ultimately be revealed about Magda or the writer of the page in the woods is in for a real disappointment. Ah, you can almost hear Moshfegh intoning behind the pages, but it isn't Magda who's the true subject of investigation... But the richest and most effective unreliable narrators, it seems to me, become rich through the ironic distance they create with what we assume is the "real" world, and I found Moshfegh's refusal to resolve the mystery of Magda pretty deflating. Instead, Moshfegh offers up a few symbolic sops--gasp! this shopkeeper has the same name as one of the imaginary suspects in Vesta's head!--that felt less than meaningful. Ultimately, I felt this to be one of those books that can never truly satisfy because the real drama, the real tension, is all back somewhere in the past, rather than the present.

Dust and Other Stories by Yi T'aejun

Living submerged by the current of the age is like a spirit living beneath the water. They say that even the mulberry fields turn into blue ocean, but it's simply that all things follow the movement of the general current, and it's not possible to fill the ocean back up by moving pebbles.

In Yi T'aejun's story "Unconditioned," the narrator witnesses a peasant woman filling up a small creek, pebble by pebble. Later, he learns that the spot was once a lake where the woman's son once drowned, closed off now by a dam. Little by little, the woman fills the remaining water with stones to make it vanish, hoping to free her son's spirit from where it lingers in the lake. In the very next story, "Before and After the Liberation," the author's stand-in, Hyon, quotes the paragraph of the story he's just written. Hyon is a moderately successful writer who struggles with the climate of censorship and intellectual repression that marks the Japanese occupation of Korea: his fellow writers take Japanese names, sprinkle their speech with Japanese words, and write in Japanese. Hyon yearns for freedom, and it eventually comes, but the political uncertainty and division of "after the liberation" brings its own contradictions and difficulties. Where can the writer go to write? Where can one go to be free?

The stories in Dust are all about these contradictions, and the competing social orders that constrict full life and self-expression. Yi (according to the back of the book and the scant information I can find on the internet) is known in Korea as "The One Who Went North," having moved from U.S.-occupied South Korea to Soviet-occupied North Korea, where, far from liberation, he was viewed with suspicion and sent into exile, where his fate is unknown. The title story of the collection is a superb piece of anti-U.S. and anti-South Korean propaganda about a Pyongyang book collector who travels to see his daughter in Seoul. It's a highly anticipated trip, and he brings with him a small nest egg to buy books--something that should be easier in the more literary south--but ends up almost immediately hustled into a prison cell by soldiers under the command of Syngman Rhee. Strings are pulled for his release, but he finds himself at a party with a boorish American general whose main characteristics, hilariously, are his love for steaks and whisky, as well as his enormous gut. It must be said: He got us. Americans rule this not-yet-officially-South Korea, buying up everything with their powerful dollar--including Hyon's beloved books--while inflation keeps basic necessities out of the hand of Koreans.

So, propaganda. It certainly explains a great deal about Yi's choice to flee the South for Pyongyang. And yet, like all great propaganda, there's a deeper truth that may go unnoticed by those whose agenda is propaganda only: where, exactly, is Hyon supposed to go in a divided Korea, where people have become increasingly pressed between two sides? The tragic final ending hardly seems to absolve the Soviet-sponsored North Koreans; any hope of return, or appreciating the North more, is closed off to the ravished writer.

Yi's stories are subtle things. There's a few murders and grisly deaths, but for the most part, there's little drama or melodrama. Resentments and verbal violence bubble up in ways that show us they were always there, beneath the surface of a Korea under the thumb of a foreign power, and then under the thumb of itself. I appreciated the smallness and subtlety of the stories, though I didn't always feel as if I understood the larger history that comes to bear on the characters. One of my favorites was "Tiger Grandma," a story about a stubborn old woman who is the final holdout in a program to increase literacy in her small Korean village. Many of the stories in this collection deal with small people: peasants, local clerks, fishermen, etc., all caught up in the upheavals of Korean history. In their small way, they struggle against the deadening forces of imperial occupation and political repression, but it's not possible to fill the ocean back up by moving pebbles.

With the addition of North Korea, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 108!

Divorcer by Garielle Lutz

Divorce, I kept forgetting, is not the opposite of marriage; it's the opposite of wedding. What comes after divorce isn't more and more of the divorce. What came after, in my case, was simply volumed time, time in solid form, big blocks of it to be pushed aside if I ever felt up to it, though more often than not I arranged the blocks about me until I had built something that should have been some sort of stronghold but in fact was just another apartment within the apartment in which I was already staying away from mirrors, shaving by approximation, bathing in overbubbled water that kept my body out of sight.

The title story of Garielle Lutz's collection Divorcer begins with a woman leaving her partner and moving in with the narrator. They live a short and fitful marriage--we learn later it was only five weeks--before divorcing him. While signing the papers, the divorce lawyer beckons the narrator below the table, and then reveals his penis. ("No need for you to touch it... But can you at least admit how much you've gladdened it? it's not been glad like this all day. It's a gladiolus. So, Mister Man, what would be a very nice last straw?") A reminder, perhaps, that the old dreary rigamarole of marriage-to-divorce is only one of the many ways that people couple. Yet so many of us do it. We are compelled to marry, compelled to divorce. All of the stories in Divorcer feature narrators going through the process of coupling and then parting. Though in several important ways they are all different--they are men and women, gay and straight--the alienating effects of divorce and separation strike them all.

The second story, "The Driving Dress," begins with a man trying to lose weight to fit into his ex-wife's dresses. (A symbol of isolation and alienation, the need to become self-sufficient, that echoes, I would note, the cafe owner in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.) Amateur gumshoes might read this, and the small detail in "Divorcer" about how the narrator uses the creams and deodorants his wife has left behind, as foreshadowing of Lutz's own transition in 2021. (I'm sorry to say I saved a few dimes by buying a used copy of Divorcer with a deadname on the cover.) But I think it also points to a richness and fluidity of gender that the novel captures well, the ways that our needs and desires of having and being spill out over the containers of gender and sex. The abstraction of Lutz's language--maybe "abstraction" is not right, but a fleeing from the staid writerliness of the object and the moment--makes it so that the lesbian narrator of "To Whom Might I Have Concerned?" seems like they might be the same as the narrator of "Divorcer," with only that one minor aspect of their identity changed.

What makes these stories so incredible, really, is the language. Lutz is one of those few writers--Joy Williams is another--who demands that you take every sentence slow, read every word, because every word is a shock and a surprise. The prose is full of misprisions, words used incorrectly but somehow perfectly, and neologisms: sloppage, quillwise, rumpus-assed. Turn the page and find a brilliant, strange sentence: "The sister's kids smelled like pets." Sentences that take an unforeseeable turn: "All she did, I think, was take one gracious, simple, short-lived piss while I stood by." Sentences that go on and on, in wonderful swervings: "To cut things short: she was mortally thirty and was drown now to the uncomely, the miscurved, the dodged-looking and otherwise unpreferred, so my body must have naturally been a find--breasts barely risen, putty-colored legs scrimping on sinew, knees that looked a little loose, teeth provocative and unimproved." After all this time, it's amazing to find that there are writers out there who can write in ways that you've never thought possible, or even imagined.

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with the land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators, you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete with each other and co-operate with each other. The competitions are as much a part of the inner workings as the co-operations. You can regulate them--cautiously--but not abolish them.

Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac is one of those books that stands at the heart of the modern conservation movement. You might stretch it back further to Walden, but there is a kind of awakening in conservation--indeed, a kind of invention of the idea of conservation itself--that is invented in the mid-twentieth century, and A Sand County Almanac is one of its pillars, perhaps alongside only Silent Spring. It's interesting to read now, because much of what is there seems so familiar to us now, but I found there was a great deal in it that still felt fresh and invigorating. 

A Sand County Almanac is essentially named after the first of several parts. The first, titular section, is a series of essays that follow the months of the year at Leopold's humble farm in "Sand County," which is really the area around Madison, Wisconsin. The fields flood, the birds retreat and return, ice and snow form, wildflowers grow and die. The pleasure of this section is like the pleasure of exploring a landscape with someone who knows it very well, down to the smallest organism, and who knows moreover how that organism fits into the whole. One of the most impressive things about it is Leopold's ability to narrate backward from the state of a landscape: what assemblages of plants and animals indicate clear-cutting, or flooding, or different kinds of farming and harvesting. One of the most fascinating moments, in fact, is when he describes sawing down an old lightning-blasted tree, going through each ring and describing what was happening in the landscape of Wisconsin at that time, back hundreds of years. It's a nice reminder that history is more than just human history, that the landscape, too, has its own history, and it's a history that is legible to those who know how to read it.

The next section, "The Quality of Landscape," is arranged geographically, rather than annually, and takes the reader through a series of well-observed vignettes from Wisconsin to Iowa and Illinois, all the way down to New Mexico and Arizona, where Leopold was a forester who helped establish the Gila Wilderness, and even into Chihuahua and Sonora. But the most interesting stuff in the whole book, I thought, were the more polemic essays that come after, where Leopold lays down his theories of conservation, including the idea of a "land ethic." Leopold, a believer in progress, argues that human history is an exercise in developing superior ethics, that move from nationalism into democratic equality, and that the next necessary ethic that man must develop is a "land ethic" in which he recognizes himself as part of a larger ecosystem. Probably Leopold would be outraged by much of what we've done to the earth (how hard it is to read these old conservationists who had no idea what were doing to the climate), but I wonder if he'd see this as an idea that's been easily and widely accepted. Of course, we have our reactionaries, and they're definitely in charge right now, but it's crazy to read A Sand County Almanac and understand just how little purchase this kind of thinking really had.

For Leopold, exercising this "land ethic" begins with cultivating the kind of visual acuity and sensitivity that's so impressive in the first part of the book. "Like all real treasures of the mind," he writes, "perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring the South Seas. Perception, in short, cannot be purchased with either learned degrees or dollars; it grows at home as well as abroad, and he who has a little may use it to as good advantage as he who has much." Good words worth remembeiring.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez

I got up and ran to the kitchen to get the gloves I used for washing dishes. The angel baby followed me. And that was only the first sign of her demanding personality. I didn't hesitate. I put the gloves on and grabbed her little neck and squeezed. It's not exactly practical to try and strangle a dead person, but a girl can't be desperate and reasonable at the same time. I didn't even make her cough; I just got some bits of decomposing flesh stuck to my gloved fingers, and her trachea was left in full view.

I really enjoyed "Angelita Unearthed," the first story in Mariana Enriquez's collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. In the story, a young woman digs up some small bones in her yard. Her father is skeptical, but her grandmother insists they are the bones of her sister who died as a baby, and whom she dug up and carted to this new house many years ago when they moved. When the baby's spirit appears, it appears as a baby of rotting flesh with many demands: it pesters the protagonist until she returns to the house where she was born and buried. I liked how physical the ghost is, not diaphanous or bodiless like so many other ghosts: in the scene above, the protagonist literally tears chunks of flesh out of her, though her essence seems unharmed. Taking the ghost baby back does not seem to quell its restless spirit; it follows the protagonist still, until the protagonist realizes that she, too, can torment her tormenter: "I made her run after me on her bare little feet that, rotten as they were, left her little white bones in view."

Unfortunately, I didn't really like the other stories. Most of them struck me as the kind of one-note ghost story that's never quite developed past the initial idea. There's promise in some of those ideas, like a story in which a beloved goth musician who commits suicide is exhumed and devoured by his most devoted teen fans, or "Where Are You, Dear Heart?," about a woman whose fetish is listening to arrhythmic heartbeats, and the man with the cardiac conditions who lets her torture his heart with pills and drugs. There's some interesting social commentary lurking here, as in the (too) long story "Those Who Came Back," in which abused and disappeared children begin returning all over Argentina. (That they come back different is a given for anyone who's ever seen a zombie story or read Pet Sematary.) I was interested in another story, "Rambla Triste," which dealt with overtourism in Barcelona, and features a hellish neighborhood that literally traps locals while letting tourists pass through.

The stories, with their focus on the macabre, and especially on teen girls--and, OK, a little because of the Latin American setting and context--reminded me of Monica Ojeda's Jawbone, but for the most part, they struck me as too predictable, too safe, and not scary enough. Their tight, sort of predictable structures resemble the kind of ghost stories you might tell at a bonfire, but they don't have the kind of freewheeling horror that anything can happen, as Ojeda's novel does. 

Lanark by Alasdair Gray

Now he saw that Hell was the one truth and pain the one fact which nullified all others. Sufficient health was like thin ice on an infinite sea of pain. Love, work, art, science and law were dangerous games played on the ice; all homes and cities were built on it. The ice was frail. A tiny shrinkage of the bronchial tubes could put him under it and a single split atom could sink a city. All religions existed to justify Hell and all clergymen were ministers of it. How could they walk about with such bland social faces pretending to belong to the surface of life? Their skulls should be furnaces with the fire of Hell burning in them and their faces dried and thin like scorched leaves.

Where to start with Lanark? The beginning, maybe, but which beginning? An epic novel by Alasdair Gray--author of the novel that became the Lanthimos movie Poor Things--Lanark is split into four books, ordered 3, 1, 2, 4. The "outer" books are the story of Lanark, a man who wakes up to find himself in the strange, grotesque city of Unthank, where the sun never shines, controlled by a shadowy "Institute" where he soon finds himself a patient, growing scales and feasting on human flesh. The two "inner" books are a realist coming-of-age story about one Duncan Thaw, a clear stand-in for Gray himself, growing up in the lower-middle class of Glasgow and struggling to pursue a life of art and love. It's implied that Thaw and Lanark are the same person, but the exact mechanism of the transition is never really explained. Perhaps Unthank is the Glasgow of the afterlife, but if so, that means nothing good for Duncan Thaw.

Thaw is a sensitive kid, prone to bouts of depressive hysteria. His parents become accustomed to "curing" him by throwing him into a bathtub full of ice to shock him to his senses. Except for a brief exile to the Highlands during World War II, his life must be fashioned in the context of Glasgow, a gray industrialized city where beauty and passion seem in short supply. Thaw seems to feel more deeply than his peers; he excels in English but struggles to make himself care about mathematics, and so he stumbles toward an uncertain future. More than anything, he's frustrated by the attentions (and lack thereof) of girls, who are easily incorporated into his worlds of personal fantasy and dreaming but more difficult in real life. In Book 3, Thaw lucks into an art school scholarship, but this, too, is too repressive and prescriptive for his yearning for self-expression. He flunks out because, instead of doing his final project, he takes a commission painting a mural in a humble parish church. The mural balloons into a project of years, as Thaw tries to paint the entire story of creation. It attracts the attention of critics, but no money, and the parishioners, unable to use the church space, hate it. There is no space, Gray suggests, for the true artist in the social scene, which makes other demands: the demands of industry, capitalism, clergy, etc. Thaw's failure sends him into a manic episode where he possible, but maybe not, kills a young woman who spurns him.

I recently read Alistair Moffat's History of Scotland, and I noticed that Thaw's story draws in sneaky ways from Scottish history: he makes a rich friend at art school with the name of Kenneth McAlpin, the name of the legendary first king of Scotland;  another associate, more pointedly, is named Macbeth. A decorator that helps him in the parish church is named Rennie, like Charles Mackintosh Rennie, the modernist architect who designed the Glasgow School of Art. Someone more knowledgeable about Scotland than I might be able to pick apart the references and assemble them into a kind of interpretation, but for me, it made it clear enough that Gray thinks of Lanark as reflecting Scottish history at large.

The Lanark books are--weirder. The first takes place mostly at a hospital run by a mysterious institute. (Lanark arrives at the hospital by leaping into a mouth-shaped hole in the ground and being swallowed.) The hospital treats people who, like Lanark, have "dragonscale," a condition where they grow scales and slowly become lizard-people, then combust. Lanark is cured, but he discovers that those who don't make it become food for the other patients. This is a big theme in the novel--"man," Gray writes, "is the pie who bakes and eats himself." By making an annoyance of himself, Lanark is allowed to leave with his lover, Rima. The fourth book finds him back in Unthank, a place he despises and wants to leave, but with which he becomes increasingly entangled. Unthank, we discover, is due to be sacrificed for its "human energy"; the local administrators cow Lanark into acting as a delegate to the assembly in Provan (a version of Edinburgh) and speaking out for them. Time in this strange world moves more quickly than in ours, and Lanark finds himself over the course of what feels, in a narrative sense, like weeks or months, growing to old age. Rima has a son, Alexander, in a matter of days, then leaves Lanark; the next time Lanark sees him, he's a teenager, then a grown man.

Unthank is Glasgow; that's clear enough. But the strange, speculative recasting of the Duncan Thaw sections as "Lanark" has the effect of universalizing the story, even as it remains rooted in its specific Scottish cultural context. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the forces that threaten Unthank, and the people that Lanark has come to love in his short time in this strange world, are the same forces that threaten the world that That lives in: the rapacious demands of corporate interests, the disinterest of elected figures, a greedy idolization of economic progress, the disposability of common people. In the book's epilogue (which comes before the end, rather than after it) Lanark meets a man who claims to be the author of the book we're reading. The author and the reader control Lanark's life as surely as the social forces he battles--though there are hints, too, that Lanark has ways of escaping his creator's control. During the conversation, the author-figure (who is not named Gray, but is Gray) diagnoses the problem as being too little love. It seems a startling simplification for this enormous, inventive, complicated, perhaps over-complicated novel, but who can say it's not true?

In the Company of Men by Veronique Tadjo

At night, I have nightmares. I dream I'm still among the sick. The tent's a furnace. In the middle of the day, the sun's beating down on the canvas. I gasp for breath, my head buzzes, I don't have any protective suit on--I'm naked, in fact, and the virus has infected me. My gums are bleeding, my soul leaving my body. I can feel it slipping away through my navel... I wake up with a start.

Ivorian author Veronique Tadjo's In the Company of Men details the 2015-2016 Ebola epidemic of West Africa through numerous eyes. The novel is structured as a series of monologues by implicated figures, some you might expect, others that might surprise. It begins with a doctor, struggling to make it through a day in the highly contagious atmosphere of a tent hospital, a nurse, a young girl who survives the disease, making her immune and a perfect volunteer, a man separated for the last time from his fiancee. But Tadjo also gives a monologue to none other than the disease itself, who of course pleads innocence--it's man who's to blame, really, selfish and greedy and having isolated himself from the natural world that produces both the disease and healing. The voice of Ebola is balanced out by that of the bat who enabled transmission from the animal world to the human one, and who speaks on humanity's behalf. These arguments are adjudicated by the Baobab, the great tree who anchors the novel, watching the progress of human life.

As Tadjo illuminates, a disease like Ebola needs more than just virulence to spread. There's human cruelty and paranoia, as with those who exile their own families, refusing to look out for them even after the disease is cured, or the countries that harden their borders and even turn to armed conflict. But it's a story of human resilience as well, of people who come together at great risk to themselves in order to keep others alive. In its final judgment, the Baobab tells us that it agrees with the bat, not the disease: "in its desire to absolve itself," Ebola "considers only Man's faults." This approach, which transforms the disease, the bat, and the tree into characters from a kind of medieval passion play or Greek philosophical treatise, works--but the novel suffers, I thought, when it turns the same methods to human beings. There's too much pressure to make the doctor all doctors, the nurse all nurses, the suffering patient all patients. They end up seeming more like avatars than real people.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. Se him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has people the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?

Child of God begins with Lester Ballard, a no-account rustic of Sevier County, Tennessee, being dispossessed of his land and house. He starts a fight with the auctioneer--the first violent moment in a book full of them--but it's no use. From that point on, Lester is set free into exile, wandering the woods and mountains of the Great Smokies with just his rifle. He's condemned and little-liked, but for a while, he doesn't seem much worse than any of the "characters" who get told about in backwoods stories, or the dumpkeeper who names his daughters after words he finds in a medical textbook: Urethra, Cerebella, and Hernia Sue. But when Lester discovers a pair of lovers in a car on top of the mountain, having mysteriously died mid-coitus, he discovers that there is a certain kind of woman who cannot deny his sexual advances (unlike Hernia Sue) and he goes on a killing spree, taking the corpses of the women he kills back to a remote cave where he defiles them.

Child of God is a gross book. It seems pointedly designed to poke at our last taboos, like necrophilia. Lester, as he draws further away from society and further into himself, becomes only more foul: he makes no distinction between adult women and young girls; he starts wearing their dresses and fashions wigs for himself out of their scalps, etc., etc. Like many of McCarthy's other books, the focus here is on human violence and depravity: where they come from, how they're possible, etc., etc. In other novels, McCarthy seems to me to recognize a kind of mystic evil that comes from outside of human nature--think of Ed Todd, lamenting at the end of No Country for Old Men, what the world is slouching toward, or of course the symbolically or perhaps literally immortal figure of the Judge--but here McCarthy pointedly notes that Ballard is a "child of God, just like you or I." Ballard's depravity is set in the context of other violence, other audacities, including the story of the proto-Klan "Whitecappers" that the Sevier County sheriff proudly reminisces on having run off. This, McCarthy says, is human nature--or at least one version of it.

For such a nasty book, it can be very funny. I'm still laughing at "Hernia Sue." And one of the best moments comes toward the end, when Ballard, having been caught by the sheriff and forced to lead him and his posse to the location of the bodies, wriggles away down a hole in the cave and leaves the posse unsure about how to get back to the surface. Ballard himself gets lost and nearly dies, makes his way out, turns himself in at the hospital, gets locked up in the asylum, dies, and has his remains inspected by medical students "like those haruspices of hold perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their configurations." But if the students find anything monstrous or unusual inside the brain of this necrophiliac serial killer, they don't say.

The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

The privately owned mushroom is an offshoot from a communally living underground body, a body forged through the possibilities of latent commons, human and not human. That it is possible to cordon off the mushroom as an asset without taking its underground commons into account is both the ordinary way with privatization and a quite extraordinary outrage, when you stop to think about it. The contrast between private mushrooms and fungi-forming forest traffic might be an emblem for commoditization more generally: the continual, never-finished cutting off of entanglement.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World is a deep dive into the informal economy that produces the matsutake mushroom. Prized by consumers, especially those in Japan and Eastern Asia, the matsutake grows in forests from Oregon to Yunnan to Finland. Where it is picked, it is picked by loose "assemblages" of people operating on the margins of official society. In America, that often means Southeast Asian immigrants, Hmong and Lao, among others, as well as white survivalist types who embrace the notion that mushroom hunting offers a kind of freedom from the demands of normative society. Tsing's thesis, as far as I can tell, seems to be that this is a kind of economy that is not capitalist, that emerges from a kind of commons, but that these non-capitalist modes of economic activity are quickly and summarily subsumed by the capitalist economy. I don't know about that--but maybe I mean that literally, because the economic angle here isn't exactly my forte.

In general, I expected the book to be more about mushrooms, and less about economic and social theory. But I did enjoy how Tsing manages to bring together many modes: straight reporting about the matsutake pickers, of course, and economic theory, but also ecology and social history. In the growth of the mushroom, which relies on mutualistic assemblages so vast it's hard to isolate the fungus into specific, isolated species, she finds a powerful metaphor for the commons. As a result it's hard to say what kind of book this is, though I think a general reader might find its more theory-laden sections difficult.

One thing that struck me: The matsutake, as Tsing describes it, actually thrives best in the most ecologically ruined forests. In America, that means in forests of opportune lodgepole pines that emerge in the wake of clearcut ponderosas. This points to something that Tsing describes as "salvage," that I'm not sure I quite understood, but which has something to do with the way that the ruins of capitalist activity are reinscribed into informal economies. In that sense, there's an interesting kind of circularity to the economy that Tsing describes: it thrives in the wake of capitalist ruin and excess, transformed into an informal economy that is then reinscribed into the formal economy by buyers and wholesalers.

Scotland: A History from Earliest Times by Alistair Moffat

Reflecting on the immense journey that is our history, many competing interim conclusions crowd the landscape. But at least one theme is clear. Scotland was never an inevitable destination. As we approached several crossroads, our destiny might easily have turned in different directions. Scotland could have become Pictland, Alba, Norseland or Northern England. This recurring sequence of uncertainties, real enough at the time, is a useful corrective to the temptation to read history backwards.

On my recent trip to Scotland I saw many famous names: Stirling Bridge. Bannockburn. Culloden. William Wallace. Robert the Bruce. Rob Roy. Mary, Queen of Scots. John Knox. Loch Ness. Loch Lomond. Glen Coe. Iona. But at the same time they were arranged for me in a kind of mental geography, I needed a book like Alistair Moffat's Scotland: A History from Earliest Times to help me arrange them into chronology and narrative--a big fat history of this beautiful country. 

Moffat's history does indeed begin from earliest times, with the geological forces that created this landscape, with its volcanic islands and deep glacial lochs, and the prehistoric peoples whose mysterious "standing stones" still dot that landscape today. As Moffat moves forward through history, identifiable kingdoms begin to emerge: the Picts, the westerly Gaelic kingdom of Dal Riata, Northumbria, etc. Moffat shows how what we think of as Scotland and the Scottish people really emerge from a series of converging migrations and conquests: the indigenous Picts, the conquering Gaels, Romans, Norse, and Normans. (I found Moffat's reliance on DNA markers to trace this heritage a little tedious and suspicious, but I don't really know anything about it.) Scottish identity emerges only later on, with the battle of the Wars of Scottish Independence when William Wallace and Robert the Bruce fought to shake off English power and influence.

Scotland's relationship with its powerful neighbor to the south is a big theme in this history. To me, it seems as if the story goes something like this: after fending off English encroachment (and at times, direct control) for several hundred years, Scotland ends up sort of like the mouse that catches the cat when James VI becomes James I of England, bringing the two nations closer together than ever. But far from exerting a Scottish power over England, James' accession only further entrenches the entanglement that lasts all the way through the Acts of Union that create Great Britain in 1707 through the Jacobite uprisings, where forces loyal to the deposed line of James II tried to take the throne back from William of Orange, to the present day, when Scotland extracted the right to the reestablishment of its own parliament at the turn of the 21st century.

I knew some of that already, but there was much of it that was new to me, especially the line of hapless Stewarts that lead up, somehow, to the powerful reign of James VI and I, a narrative that's filled the expected gory and macabre details of medieval jockeying for power. I also enjoyed understanding better the internal conflict between Lowland and Highland Scots, which sometimes, but not always and never perfectly, maps to other conflicts: Protestant vs. Catholic, Scots vs. Gaelic, elite power vs. the hinterlands. Moffat makes a late point that really stuck with me, claiming that many of the symbols we associate with Scotland, like the kilt and the bagpipes, are cultural elements appropriated by a Lowland Scottish culture from a Highland culture where they're basically not found anymore--the irony of this being, of course, that through the Highland Clearances and the 19th century, these symbols were thought to be indicative of a primitive, savage backwardness.

To me, Moffat's book gets often too caught up in the details, the this-then-that, and misses the opportunity for a larger thematic understanding that might have helped a novice to Scottish history like me. I actually found the brief explanation of the Stewart line delivered by our tour bus driver on the Isle of Skye to be more digestible and understandable, though it must also be said that he illuminated the more detailed history of Moffat's I was already reading. I thought this was especially true of the military history, which gets bogged down in troop movements and strategies that I often felt myself straining to understand the larger importance of Stirling Bridge, or Bannockburn, or the massacre at Glen Coe. I actually found the most interesting and entertaining part of the book the little capsules Moffat includes about people, moments, and details that don't fit neatly into the overarching history. Scotland: A History from the Earliest Times is a big tome--I had to finish it on the 7-hour plane ride--but it ended up really enriching and elevating my exploration of this beautiful country.

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood

As soon as she touched down in Scotland, she believed in fairies. No, as soon as the rock and velvet of Inverness rushed up to her where she was falling, a long way through the hagstone hole of a cloud, and she plunged down into the center of the cloud and stayed there. You used to set a child out for them, she thought, and was caught in the arms, and awoke on the green hillside.

Patricia Lockwood's new novel Will There Ever Be Another You is punctuated by illness and disaster. First, there is the death of the niece which is the culmination of her last novel, No One Is Talking About This. The death of "the Child" hangs over a family trip to the island of Skye in Scotland, and occasions many thoughts about changelings, those targets of fairy transformation who represent both irreparable loss and the possibility of radical and miraculous transformation. Then, there's COVID. Lockwood's narrator (can we just say Lockwood?) battles with a case of Long COVID that leaves her feeling like stranger to her own body, unable to recognize her own limbs, her brain falling apart, etc. Then, later on, her husband falls sick with some kind of spleen disease and undergoes the long process of hospitalization, surgery, and recovery. Everyone in this book, I guess, is falling apart, but falling apart means going to pieces, pieces that are put together again, and who better to put them together than a poet like Lockwood, whose whole schtick is about connecting the seemingly unconnected?

"The line of poetic logic," Lockwood explains to a group of students, "is as easy to disrupt as the narrative, is the narrative, where none appears to exist." No better explanation than that of the novel's entire theory of being. Certainly a book like this one will frustrate lovers of narrative as an expression of imaginary time and sequence. Lockwood is a poet, and this is a poet's novel, and I mean that in a totally different way than I meant it when I said it about Anna Moschovakis' novel, which seemed to be about wringing alienation of banality and cliche. Lockwood, by contrast, is all about harmonies and resonances, the way an image or a phrase can come back again and suddenly appear new in a new context.

But the elliptical nature of it can be rather frustrating, and I think you'd be excused if you felt from time to time that the poetic narrative, the line of poetic logic, can be too cute and self-interested. In No One Is Talking About This, the Internet provided the backbone of such logic; everything pointed back to it, and mirrored it: its collective, fractured nature, the algorithm and the feed, and the way social media sets repetition and recontextualization into hyperdrive. The omniculture stabs of Will There Ever Be Another You (Mrs. Doubtfire, Garry Shandling, Anne Hathaway, whom Lockwood meets for lunch and calls "Shakespeare's Wife," a long treatise on Tolstoy) try half-heartedly to recreate that in the aggregate.

But as often as not, Will There Ever Be Another You finds deep meaning in the collision of image and experience. The long principal section of Lockwood's Long COVID is a tour-de-force whose associative and rippling nature mirrors the experience of losing oneself piece-by-piece. And later, when Lockwood becomes the caretaker, rather than the patient (her husband glibly puts her "in charge" of "the Wound"), the images and phrases turn back in on themselves and find new meanings, new expressions. Around these tentpoles there are sections that seemed to wink, not quite successfully at their own self-indulgence, both materially and artistically: hey, did you know "Shakespeare's Wife" is going to portray me on the stage? That sounds a little more critical than I mean it to be, I think, because even though this novel lacked the urgent, propulsive shape of the last, it's always a pleasure to spend time with someone who knows their way around words like Lockwood does, and with such humor and insight.

They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire

What are we to make of such a saint or his levitations? And we are referring here to the saint, not the man. The saint can be encountered in many documents, but the man himself is much harder to find. Saint Joseph not only levitates more frequently than an other saint in Christian history but also rises higher off the ground. He not only hovers but actually flies--not just indoors, where it is relatively easier to employ wires or other props and fool people, but also outdoors, where such trickery is relatively more difficult or impossible. And he flies forward and backward too. Unlike Saint Teresa of Avila, whose levitations ceased after she complained to God about them, Joseph's gravity-defying ecstasies continued to occur up until the last few days of his life. Moreover, his levitations often point beyond themselves: while they are always carefully described as a side effect of sudden ecstasies brought on by God, rather than as events willed by Joseph himself, they often serve practical purposes and thus are much more than mere wonders.

They Flew, Carlos Eire's survey of flying miracles in medieval and Renaissance history, comes with a readymade pitch. If you've read a review of the book, you probably know it: Eire takes the flights seriously. That is to say, the book remains open to the possibility that what is said about those holy figures who were known to fly is true, and refrains from seeking alternative explanations, or a "true story." In some cases, as Eire explains, this is mere parsimony. As with the case of Saint Joseph of Cupertino, a 17th century friar, there are simply too many eyewitnesses not to remain open to the possibility. And perhaps to assume that the flights really happened is to deal with the people of the past on their own terms. Even Protestants and the skeptics of the Inquisition, Eire explains, believed that these miracles happened: the only difference is that they assumed it was the devil, not God, who gave people these powers. The impossibility of human flight as a rationalist stance simply was not in the cards. And yet, it might be said that this pitch is just that, a marketing ploy, and that the much-advertised credulity of the book only distinguishes it from alternative accounts in superficial ways. Still, it's a lot of fun.

They Flew offers up three case studies of flying saints: Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Joseph, and Maria de Agreda, known as Maria de Jesus or simply "Sor Maria." Saint Teresa, in Eire's telling, was a reluctant levitator, prone to ecstasies of divine communion that lifted her off the ground, embarrassing her so totally that she eventually asked God to cut it out. Saint Joseph, Eire describes, flew much more often and more happily, but his levitations seemed to have been tied up with his simplicity and incompetence as a monk: they are the miracles of someone transported not by ambition or calculation, but pure joy in the Holy Spirit. It must be said that these are the only two "pure" levitators on which the book focuses; the third, Sor Maria, levitated in the process of "bilocation," in which she was transported during her ecstasies to the New World, where she ministered to the Indigenous people of Spain's New Mexican territories. Although I didn't feel that bilocation was quite within the thematic framework of "flying," I enjoyed Sor Maria's story the most. Later, the book deals with a certain number of "cheats" and frauds who confessed their flights were made with the help of demons, and then with more pointedly "wicked" levitators like witches.

These sections don't quite have the focus that makes the three case studies so engaging; I spent some time wondering when it was, exactly, that Eire was going to get to the parts about flying. But these sections do offer the opportunity to put the flying in a larger context about belief and our changing relationship to it, which might be said to be the "true" thesis of the book. The epilogue, for instance, argues for approaching history with certain post-rationalist or post-materialist methods that are, as Eire suggests, outside the mainstream. One thing that interested me among these discussions is how, far from being credulous, those who lived in the world of Teresa, Joseph, and Maria, could be skeptical in the extreme. All three were, in different fashion, mobbed by attention, both by their admirers and their detractors. The Inquisition, for instance, examined claims of miracles with great skeptical intensity. They would do things like lock nuns who claimed to be able to survive with no food but the eucharist (a common miraculous claim) in their cells until they revealed their fraud by nearly starving to death. In the case of Joseph of Cupertino, the saint's flights were such a political headache that the authorities shuffled him around from monastery to monastery, eventually shutting him up in a cell by himself and letting no one enter. Ironically, this skepticism emerges from an attitude, as Eire shows, of taking these possibilities seriously.

Eire points out that some of these flights are basically happening at the same time as the Enlightenment, and encourages the reader not necessarily to think of them as in tension, but part of similar fronts in a changing relationship to belief. Did they fly? Who knows. Why not. Maybe it doesn't matter. But as the book shows, their flights, "real" or whatever, had a political, cultural, and theological reality that reveals the fault lines of doctrine and power.

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

And my grandma. Her whole house smells like mothballs, not just in the closets but in every drawer too. And her pots look a million years old with dents all over. Grandma msut know every recipe with mustard cabbage in it. She can quote from the Bible for everything you do in a day. Walks everywhere she goes downtown Kaunakakai, sucks fish eyes and eats the parsley from our plates at Midnight Inn.

And nobody looks or talks like a haole. Or eats like a haole. Nobody says nothing the way Mr. Harvey tells us to practice talking in class.

My favorite town when I went to Hawaii last summer was Hilo, on the rainy side of the "Big Island": far from the tourist mecca of Kailua-Kona, Hilo felt to me like a real place, where real people lived. That meant grit and it meant visible poverty, including visible homelessness--each storefront on Hilo's small main street seemed to have someone sleeping in it. Lovey Nariyoshi, the young protagonist of Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, is a poor girl of Japanese descent living in the Hilo of the 1970s. Lovey wants more than anything to be like the rich girls who torment her at school, with their nice clothes and hair, and even more than that she wants to be a "haole," a white Hawaiian:

Sometimes I secretly wish to be haole. That my name could be Betty Smith or Annie Anderson or Debbie Cole, wife of Dennis Cole who lives at 2222 Maple Street with a white station wagon with wood panel on the side, a dog named Spot, a cat named Kitty, and I wear white gloves. Dennis wears a hat to work. There's a coatrack as soon as you open the front door and we all wear our shoes inside the house.

But Lovey is not a haole, she's Japanese and poor, and her visible poverty makes her deeply unpopular at school. Her only friend is Jerry, who is only slightly less popular than she is, and who is as interested in acquiring and amassing a collection of Barbie dolls as Lovey is--if you catch my drift. Jerry's brother, Larry, is one of the pair's chief tormenters--he steals and shaves the heads of all those Barbies, for one, but is capable of real physical violence as well--while his girlfriend Crystal is one of the few people who treat both Jerry and Lovey as human. One thing that sets Yamanaka's writing apart, both here and in Blu's Hanging, which I loved, is her attention to the material culture of time and place: Donny Osmond, Sonny Chiba, Charlie's Angels, a Hawaiian children's program called Checkers & Pogo. Yamanaka's cultural references come quickly, but they never feel irrelevant or overwhelming; instead, they seem to make up the cultural fabric that Lovey is always standing just on the outside of, dreaming of living the fantasies of popular music and television.

Wild Meat is a book about, among other things, how you speak: Lovey's teachers exhort her to adopt a kind of standard English that she's unable to master, illustrating that the difference between her and the world she wishes to occupy is one of being able to talk right. Lovey's parents aren't able to master it either, and the novel is buoyed by their colorful and evocative Hawaiian pidgin, a slightly modified version of which is also the language by which Lovey narrates the book. Of course, the strong and powerful voice that carries the book forward is ironically the very thing that Lovey tries and fails to eliminate in herself. Another recurrent motif is the importance of animals, both wild and domestic. In one story, we see Lovey's father drag her all around the island looking for feathers to use in the production of tourist leis. (The sellers who try to offer up native 'io, or Hawaiian hawk, feathers, are sinister people not to be trusted.) In the title story, Lovey describes being unable to eat a burger made from the family cow "Bully." There's a kind of overlap in these motifs, I think: the Hilo residents who speak perfect haole probably never stop to think where their meat comes from, or how a lei is made.

I didn't think that Wild Meat was as effective as Blu's Hanging. For one, Wild Meat is much more a novel of "linked stories," some of which are very brief and vignette-like. It lacks some of the physicality and viciousness that made Blu's Hanging such a shock, and until the very end it seemed much lighter in spirit and tone. I found myself longing for something like Blu's father's story about being isolated in a Moloka'i leper colony, and thinking it wouldn't come, until, in the novel's final chapters it did: First (spoiler alert) with the suicide of Crystal, unable to deal with the possibility of a second abortion. Then, with the possible blinding of Lovey's father in a convoluted story about trying to save some goats from a lava flow. Lovey, having listened to her father's stories about the highlight of his life--a boy's camp on Kaua'i--manages to hope a cross-island flight and bring her father back a bag full of earth. Blinded, he recognizes the earth by smell, and it smells, as he told her it would, like home. It's a wild swing by Yamanaka (she's like twelve??) but it works, and all the more because the novel refuses to tell us whether Lovey's father's blindness will be a lifelong condition.

So, by the end, I found myself persuaded and touched by Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. Not to pick on it too much, but I found myself thinking of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, a novel where all "local flavor" to me felt cheap and forced. By contrast, Yamanaka's books pulse with Hawaiian life (as far as this haole can tell, at least), because she knows that such a local existence is also made up of the tawdry, cheap, and chintzy, and the stuff of mass culture.

Tales from Watership Down by Richard Adams

There was a time (said Dandelion), long ago, when rabbits had no sense of smell. They lived as they do now, but to have no sense of smell was a terrible disadvantage. Half the pleasure of a summer morning was lost to them, and they couldn't pick out their food in the grass until they actually bit into it. Worst of all, they couldn't smell their enemies coming, and this meant that many rabbits fell victim to stoats and foxes.

Watership Down was the third book I read for the Fifty Books Project, way back when Brent and I started this blog in 2007. It was a different world, and many of the books I've read since then have become blurry in my mind, this is a book I remember with real fondness. I loved the way that Adams turns the life of the rabbit into something both whimsical and adventurous, fraught with real dangers. It's not entirely true that the coziness and pastoralism of Watership Down is a facade, meant to lull you into a much darker and violent story, but it is true that it is several different types of book at once, and does them all well.

So I knew that no matter how good Adams' odds-and-ends sequel, Tales from Watership Down, would be, it would be nice to return to that world again. And it was. Tales from Watership Down begins with a series of stories (told in frame by the newly established rabbits in their hard-won warren) about the rabbit trickster figure El-ahraihrah, whose legends are a model and inspiration to the rabbits of the original novel. My favorite of these was the story in which El-ahraihrah goes on a quest to bring rabbitkind the sense of smell. This involves traveling far to meet the King of Yesterday, a shaggy bison or auroch who presides over a forest filled with all the animals that have gone extinct because of human activity. The King of Yesterday sends him to the King of Tomorrow, a deer who seems to inhabit a future world in which wildness has returned to the British Isles again, and the world. An appropriate framework, perhaps, for a story about the rabbits receiving those gifts that offer them protection against their enemies. (The vulnerability of rabbits is a big theme in their legend, it seems, "El-ahraihrah" means "The Prince With a Thousand Enemies.")

But the most satisfying parts of Tales from Watership Down are those stories that continue the tale of the rabbits of the original warren. Having secured their safety, the Chief Rabbit Hazel must adapt to being the leader of the rabbit exodus to a peacetime executive, and many of these stories are about the crises that threaten the stability of the warren: new, cocky generations of rabbits who do not remember the war with the rival warren Efrafra, the arrival of strangers, like a doe obsessed with the threat of "White Blindness" (myxomatosis) or a hutch-raised rabbit who would be killed because he "smells of man." These crises threaten Hazel's leadership, but of course, he always seems to navigate the right path, with the help of his lieutenant, Fiver, and enforcer, Bigwig. And in these stories, we see the warren in the next stages of its evolution: overcrowded, it must send out an envoy to establish a new satellite. For a rabbit, as for a college student with a Blogspot account, time moves on.

Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

The boy is River's. I know it. I smelled him as soon as he entered the fields, as soon as the little red dented car swerved into the parking lot. The grass trilling and moaning all around, when I followed the scent to him, the dark, curly-haired boy in the backseat. Even if he didn't carry the scent of leaves disintegrating to mud at the bottom of a river, the aroma of the bowl of the bayou, heavy with water and sediment and the skeletons of small dead creatures, crab, fish, snakes, and shrimp, I would still know he is River's by the look of him. The sharp nose. The eyes dark as swamp bottom. The way his bones run straight and true as River's: indomitable as cypress. He is River's child.

Young Jojo has grown up hearing his grandfather's stories of Parchman, a notorious Mississippi prison. Jojo's fascination with them stems in part from his admiration for his grandfather's resilience and in part because his father, a white man named Michael, is at Parchman. On the day that Michael is to get out of prison, Jojo's neglectful mother Leonie piles him and his sister Kayla into a car to head north, into the Delta. They come back not only with Michael but the spirit of Richie, a young boy Jojo recognizes from his grandfather's stories about Parchman. Richie recognizes Jojo, and attaches himself to him, out of a vague sense that there is some business to settle with Jojo's grandfather, who failed in his attempts to keep Richie from being killed at Parchman. Their return puts Richie's ghost on a collision course with that of Given, Leonie's brother killed in a "hunting accident" by Michael's cousin, as well as Leonie's mother, who is busy ritually preparing for her own death.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is, ostensibly, about the reverberations of cruelty and racism into the present day. The story is not really Parchman (although it probably should have been), but the way that the violence of Parchman resounds in the lives of people who did not live through it, like Leonie and Jojo. The presence of the ghosts, who, we are made to understand, stick around because they experienced terrible, violent deaths--something Leonie's mother is determined not to let happen to herself--and become basic, literalized representations of the ways that racist violence still "haunts" the people of Mississippi. The malevolent ghost of Richie is eventually banished in two ways: first, Jojo's grandfather has to complete the story he has only partially told Jojo, and confront the shame of his failure to keep Richie alive. This is the novel as therapy, a representation of the idea that trauma can be healed by revealing and narrating. (In this, of course, Sing, Unburied, Sing is not alone; this idea is core to so many books these days.) Then, when Richie tries to snatch the ghost of the grandmother, it's Given who has to scare him off. So our ghosts haunt us, but maybe they protect us, too.

I hated the experience of reading this book. I found it turgid, mawkish, sentimental, humorless, overwritten, convoluted, and at times incomprehensible. At least half of it is a long, drawn-out "road trip" novel that moves like swamp water. The focus of this first half seems to be mostly on what a terrible mother Leonie is; when Kayla gets badly sick, it's Jojo who has to look after her--but this sickness is never really explained or resolved, and as such seems to justify Leonie's contention that she just has motion sickness. The conclusion, by contrast, comes quickly and confusingly, drawing the threads of dead Richie, dead Given, dying grandmother, etc., together in a way that feels badly forced. Despite a few aborted attempts to capture a regional voice, the prose is unrelentingly cloying. (The ghost of a teen that died 50 years ago describes Jojo as "indomitable as a cypress?") But most significantly, I felt that this book had very little meaningful to say about racism and violence. It's bad, and it haunts us. OK. Fine.

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

Until I came to Brandham hall the world of my imagination had been peopled by fictitious beings wo behaved as I wanted them to behave; at Brandham Hall it was inhabited by real people who had the freedom of both worlds; in the flesh they could give my imagination what it needed, and in my solitary musings I endowed them with certain magical qualities but did not otherwise idealize them. I did not need to. Marian was many things to me besides Maid Marian of the greenwood. She was a fairy princess who had taken a fancy to a little boy, clothed him, petted him, turned him from a laughing-stock in to an accepted member of her society, form an ugly duckling into a swan.

At Brandham Hall, thirteen-year-old Leo Colston is out of his element. Recruited for the summer by a friend from school, he finds himself at sea among the upper classes. The temperatures climb, but he has only his one suit, and it's only when his friend's sister, Marian, has the grace to take him shopping for summer clothing that he finally finds himself at ease. His new cool green suit is symbolic of his difference from the others at Brandham Hall, but also Marian's charity toward him, and he quickly falls for her in the half-romantic, half-admiring way that young men fall for adult women. When Marian asks him to take a message to Ted Burgess, a local farmer, he jumps to be of service, but only later does he discover that these messages are ones of love, and he's become embroiled in an illicit love affair between the two.

One thing that interested me about The Go-Between is how deftly it manages the envy that emerges from the class divide. By all rights, Leo should be sympathetic toward the farmer, Ted, who is closer to his own class, and who treats Leo, all-in-all, with a kind of fatherly affection. But Leo finds himself gravitating more strongly toward Lord Trimingham, a nobleman, disfigured from his World War I service, who is, or plans to be, Marian's true fiance. Lord Trimingham is polite but cold, and it's not difficult to see why Marian prefers the humble Ted--so does the reader--but for Leo, Trimingham's nobility seems to emerge from the same distinctions as Marian's grace and charity. Leo is, although he doesn't realize it, and only in his heart, a kind of class traitor. The richness of The Go-Between emerges out of the ambiguous conflict within Leo's heart; he becomes increasingly suspicious of what he's been tasked to do, but not really for the right reasons, although he comes close to a flash of truth when he begins to think that both Marian and Ted have been neglectful in using him for their own ulterior purposes.

There's a comfort-food feeling to The Go-Between: stuffy, British, breezy, bucolic. It shares DNA with the classic boarding school novel, like Brideshead Revisited or A Dance to the Music of Time. I found it a little simple compared to these, a little less complex than it might have been. It felt as if it held perhaps a little too tightly to the three-part love triangle, so clean in its design--lady, lord, farmer. But I was really charmed by it, and I was pleasantly surprised by the ending, which presents at first a seemingly over-simple resolution, which it then complicates by sending the reader hurtling far forward in time to the "present" day. I didn't quite expect that, although I suppose I ought to have expected it form the novel's famous first line: "The past is a different country, they do things differently there." 

Silk by Aarathi Prasad

I have heard it said that scientific study can take away a sense of wonder because science reduces a miraculous organism into mere mechanical parts. I have never found that to be true. Perhaps I find miracles in mechanisms. But however I looked at them--these insects, their metamorphosis, their silken threads--all were still miracula, true "objects of wonder." Over centuries, the transformation of insects through metamorphosis had proved so inexplicable a mystery, and the silks that came of it so extraordinary, that women and men have studied it with the kind of fervor that cost some their eyesight, others their health, and a few their lives. And yet it is an obsession that persists.

Silk is kind of weird when you think about it. That stuff comes from a bug's butt. But there's no arguing with results: few fabrics are as lustrous, or soft, and, as Aarathi Prasad describes in her book about the natural history of silk, strong: for a long time it was even used to stop bullets. Human beings have long known the value of silk, as attested by the fact that the silk moth, Bombyx mori, is one of the earliest known domesticated animals we have, going back thousands upon thousands of years. The humble silk moth lost its ability to fly in the process of domestication, and now exists, like cows and chickens, almost entirely at our service. But there are other silks than moth silk, and the most interesting parts of Prasad's book are actually about the attempts to farm silk from other organisms, most of which met insurmountable challenges: the fine hairs of certain mollusks, and the ultra-strong silk of spiders. (As it turns out, it's harder to farm spider silk at scale because, unlike moths, spiders like to eat each other.)

Prasad's book is organized by personality, rather than chronology. Each chapter highlights, more or less, an important personage in the production or understanding of silk. There's Maria Sibylla Merian, whose artistic renderings of silk moth cocoons helped us understand the transformation process of silk moths for the first time. There's René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, whose experiments with farming spider silk were so popular they were translated into Chinese for the emperor. And then, toward the end of the book, there are the modern researchers who are using the technology of silk to build stronger fabrics and materials for the modern age, including those using gene-splicing technology to produce spider silk in goats. What this organizing strategy lacks in chronological sense--I had a hard time separating out the where and when, because the chapters jump around in time as well as place--it makes up in human interest. For Prasad, the story of silk is the story of human beings, and specifically those obsessive scientists and naturalists who advanced our knowledge of the production and nature of silk--as opposed to, perhaps, a broader sense of the larger social dynamics of the silk trade.

What I enjoyed most about Silk is the way that it sits at the nexus of several different types of book: it's a history book as well as a natural history book, and it balances history and science well. Prasad is a skilled writer, and the book felt breezy and readable--for the layman. And it left me wanting to get my hands on a pair of spider-silk socks.