The Carpathians by Janet Frame

She thought, surprised at such a natural event, 'Why, it's raining.' Yet the falling rain was not 'real' rain. Specks, some small as carrot seed (George Coker had shown her his packets of garden seed), others as large, mapped purple and grey, as beanseed, some like hundreds-and-thousands, others like dew-drops set with polished diamonds, rubies, emeralds; or plain dew-drops that flowed in changing shapes among the layers of seeds and seed-pearls and jewels white and brown and red pellets of clay and then earth-coloured flecks of mould; smears of dung, animal and human, and every 'raindrop' and mixture of jewels and waste, in shapes of the 'old' punctuation and language--apostrophes, notes of music, letters of the alphabets of all languages. The rain was at once alive in its falling and flowing; and dead, for it was voiceless, completely without sound. The only sound was the continuing rage from the people of Kowhai Street.

Mattina Brecon is the rich American wife of a once-successful novelist. Her hobby is long vacations in which she stays in one place, trying to know it as best she can, and her latest trip takes her to the small town of Puamahara in New Zealand. What draws her to the town is the legend of the Memory Flower, an ancient... uh, flower... that holds all... memories? It's pretty unclear, but whatever it is, it's been seized upon by the tourist board, and whoever Mattina talks to on Kowhai Street where she has taken up residence regards it as little more than a tourist gimmick. The Memory Flower is one of two mysterious phenomena that exert their influence on The Carpathians; the other is the "Gravity Star," which is some kind of scientific phenomenon that has the power to erase distance, separation, particularity, to turn the mountains of New Zealand into the Carpathians of eastern Europe. Neither the Memory Flower nor the Gravity Star is ever explained in any real way, but the influence they exert is powerful, especially on Kowhai Street, which seems to be the focal point for metaphysical powers with the ability to transform life entirely.

The Carpathians is a strange book in how not strange it can be. Much of it seems to be the fairly simple story of a woman who travels to a part of the world that is strange to her and tries, and mostly fails, to get to know people. They're far more interested in a murder that has recently occurred on the street than whatever the "Memory Flower" is, and they want to hear stories about American places they know by name, like San Francisco and Miami. Not only is Mattina unable to connect with these people, they seem to barely be able to connect with each other. But eventually the Gravity Star comes to bear: in the middle of the night, Mattina is woken by the sound of all the residents of Kowhai Street walking into their yard and screaming. A rain pours down letters, numbers, punctuation marks, that gather, real enough, on the edge of the windowsill. The next day, all of the residents are gone, and Mattina is unable to get anyone else in Puamahara to take their disappearance seriously. The best she can do is buy up the vacant properties, which she will leave for her husband and son to visit later, and pay witness to.

What is this book all about? The Gravity Star, whatever it might be on a literal level, seems to have the potential to truly transform human life on the planet. Who needs language when there is a power that can literally bring what is distant close? Language, words, have mostly failed us; they have not provided the residents of Kowhai Street with a sufficient means to enter into each others' lives. The happiest among them might be a non-verbal autistic daughter, placed in a local home, who will never be able to express what she is feeling, whether happiness or something else, to her parents. But if the scene of the alphabet rain is a sign that the Gravity Star is obliterating language in exchange for something else, why is it that all the people disappear? Have they been brought closer, or brought together, or have they simply been annihilated? It's a strange, strange scene in a deceptively strange book, made stranger by small details, like the fact that it seems to be simultaneously "written" by a local amateur named Dinny Wheatstone and Mattina's son John Henry. I didn't find it as immediately gratifying as Frame's Owls Do Cry, which I read last year and loved, but that scene--the screaming, the jewel-and-shit-encrusted letters falling from the sky--is certain to stick with me.

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

Widespread Planet, same person as that piece of work Cause Man Steel, while thinking clear-headed higher rather than thinking low, was confident about how he would survive the climate emergency. He avoided the crowd--which meant humanity--and chose to be as some kind of crepuscular man, moving around the isolated bush by himself in the twilight hours in pursuit of his business venture, to put into action far more grandiose plans about how to make real money.

The aboriginal town of Praiseworthy in Australia's Northern Territory has been covered with an impenetrable haze. It's making everyone irritable, but it puts an idea into the head of one Cause Man Steel, who anticipates the worsening of climate change and the need for radical change: he'll collect a herd of feral donkeys that can be used for transport when fuel is no longer available. Cause, also known as Widespread and Planet--because he's. you know, everywhere--is especially in search of a special platinum-colored donkey he thinks will be the key to the whole scheme, for not particularly clear reasons. But the noisy, stinky donkeys only make Cause unpopular in town, and worsen the fractures in his own family: his wife Dance dreams of moving to China; his son Aboriginal Sovereignty commits suicide by drowning himself after being torn away from the younger girl who was his betrothed; his younger son Tommyhawk goes full-on "fascist" and tries to make his dreams of being adopted by the country's white minister of Aboriginal Affairs come true.

Above all, Praiseworthy is a satire on the paternalistic attitude of the Australian government towards Aboriginal people. The book presents a series of complaints, none of which I knew before: the government identified an epidemic of pedophilia among the country's outstation communities, banned pornography, keeps Aboriginal assets on a kind of controlled credit card with major restrictions. Aboriginal Sovereignty, a young man betrothed to a teenager (we never see her) is a victim of this paternalism, whereas his brother Tommyhawk absorbs the government propaganda wholeheartedly, considering everyone in Praiseworthy, including and especially his own father, a pedophile. And the "death of Aboriginal Sovereignty" has its own obvious secondary meaning, though Ab. Sov.'s death is more enigmatic and less final than such a phrase would seem. Cause, though short-sighted and selfish, represents a kind of trickster figure who stands against this paternalism, desperate to eke out a bit of autonomy and agency in a world that wishes to convince him it's better to play along.

This is the second book of Wright's I've read after Carpentaria, and I think I liked this one more, though it's possible that I was just better prepared for it. Wright's prose is still somewhat baffling to me, wordy and junky, full of cliches and weird circumlocutions. Nouns become adjectives and vice versa, and some of them even become verbs. I wondered more than once when reading both books if there's something about the strange, dense language that reflects Aboriginal dialect, but that would only be speculation on my part. I don't think I can get to the level of the writing being good, but it certainly works on its own terms, and the experience of diving into this 600-page tome is pretty brainmelting. I enjoyed it, but I'm glad to put it behind me, because it's one of those books that does something to your own words, you know? And moreso than in Carpentaria, I thought Praiseworthy reached more than once a feverish state where the clunky prose was transformed into something strikingly modernist, especially in the scenes where Aboriginal Sovereignty is described as mingling among the traditional spirits of the sea. Praiseworthy is one of those books I don't think I'd ever recommend, but if you get it, you get it.

The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenkov

"We're gonna make it to Italy. Everything'll change," said Serafim. "There'll be no more Moldovan mud in our lives, no more terrible poverty hanging over our heads like a scab on a bald tramp's noggin. No more of this interminable, hellish work, which makes you want to howl louder than a dog on the doorstep o fa penny-pinching priest."

The dream of everyone in Moldova, Europe's poorest country, seems to be to move to Italy, where work, one hears, is plentiful. Of course, dreaming is one thing, and doing is another. In a town called Larga, the citizens hatch a number of wild schemes, led by one Serafim: they pretend to be a curling team, en route to a tournament in Italy, but the driver who takes their money simply drives them around Moldova before dropping them off in Chisinau, pretending it's Rome. They build an airplane, then a submarine, out of the remnants of an old tractor, but in each case are turned back by the Italian armed forces. Even the president of Moldova gets in on the action, faking a plane crash on an Italian mountainside so that he can sneak into the country and take up the more desirable life of a migrant worker. But through all this, Italy remains a dream, a kind of symbolic Eden always just beyond the schemers' reach.

Eden, paradise, heaven--these words are not hyperbole. So strong is the image of Italy in the mind of the Moldovans that Larga's priest gins up a crusade to bring the faithful to the Italian promised land. When it doesn't work, he tries again with a children's crusade, just like the real crusades. The belief in Italy is so strong that it generates equally strong naysayers: one of the village's old men insists that Italy is, in fact, a myth, and doesn't really exist. For this heresy he is tortured and killed. In this way, author Vladimir Lorchenkov takes the dream of immigration to its most absurd extremes, turning The Good Life Elsewhere into a shaggy dog-satire that reminded me of some of the work of Bohumil Hrabal. The book is extremely dark--one of the first thing that happens is that the wife of one of the protagonist hangs herself from a tree as apology for the failed curling team scheme--but profoundly funny, and illuminating of a part of Europe that is typically forgotten, if not ignored completely.

With the addition of Moldova, my "Countries Read" list is up to 119!

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Perhaps one of the dead women I'd seen in the bunkers was my mother, and my father was lying mummified near the bars of one of the prisons; all the links between them and me have been severed. There's no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven't heard its music, I haven't seen its painting, I haven't read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silene. There is nothing we can do about it.

Thirty-nine women are gathered in an underground bunker. They are watched over by three male guards, and their days are torture: the lights are kept on all the time; they are given meager food and made to cook it themselves; they are whipped if they touch each other. They can remember their lives before they were imprisoned, but they can't remember how they got there, and the taciturn guards give no clues. They are sure they will live and die like this, in hell. One, a fortieth, is not a woman, but a girl, one who seems to have gotten mixed up among the others. She alone is too young to remember the world outside, and because the guards do such a good job isolating them, she grows up sullen and aloof, unable to connect with the other women who are so much like her. She is stunted, not going through a full puberty--her body, we're told, intuiting that its energies are better sent elsewhere--but she is shrewd. She is only beginning to warm up to her elders when a siren interrupts a mid-day meal, and the guards scatter, leaving the door open, and the women make their way to the surface.

I imagine that for many people who read I Who Have Never Known Men, a kind of cult book that has recently received a renewed following, the first and most obvious touchstone is The Handmaid's Tale. What regime is this, where men imprison women without wanting anything from them, not labor or sex--and why not just kill them? But a better comparison is (I know, I'm always talking about this one) Marlen Haushofer's The Wall, a book about a woman who finds herself in impossible, isolating circumstances with no information about what's happening to her or why. Like in The Wall, there is no explanation forthcoming; all the narrator can do is try her best to survive. When they emerge from the bunker, none of the women are even sure this featureless landscape is Earth; one theory has been that they have been transported somewhere. They come across other bunkers where it seems the residents were not so lucky to have an open door when their captors fled; all have died. Some even appear to be groups of men, which kind of throws a wrench into the whole gendered oppression thing.

The rest of the novel takes place over years, as the narrator's compatriots become old, and then die, as they have always known would happen. In the bunker, the women pity the narrator because they know that ultimately she will be left alone; above ground, it happens just the same. No explanations, no revelations means no surprises. It's interesting, though, to watch the small society that grows up among the women, how they feed and arrange themselves, how they manage the difficult relationship with their past selves, and how the narrator grows up among them, receiving an understanding of another world only secondhand. She, of all people, is made for this strange new world, though she feels keenly the lack of understanding and memory that others have. The book is so strange that it's hard to say what is revealed in this strange experiment--a glimpse, perhaps, of how one manages to get by in the face of the narrowness of any given life. But few lessons emerge for the narrator, as for us--whatever happened here, the only possible response is to live through it.

The Price of Their Toys by John P. Loonam

The red dress is still spread out on her side of the bed, and I reach down, run a hand along its empty length once again. I take off my pajamas, pick up the dress and, raising my arms above my head, slide it down, twist my shoulders through and tug the silky sheath past my belly. As the hem flutters against my thighs, I feel the dress fill up with flesh again and turn toward the mirror, looking for Anna's native grace to come alive in my own awkward pose, but see only my hairy chest and shoulders pushing out around those spaghetti straps, my belly stretching the fabric out of shape. From the window, a loud, raucous car horn gives an extended beep, followed by a voice, shouting the one word, "Pervert," loud and clear. I fall to my hands and knees, hiding behind the bed.

I'm really pleased to be able to write this review of The Price of Their Toys, a collection of stories by my friend and workshop partner John Loonam. Several of these stories I have seen in earlier drafts, and I enjoyed being reminded of several I had forgotten about. I had forgotten how much I enjoy John's story "Make the Man," in particular, about a man who is pushed, before he's ready, to get rid of his late wife's dresses, and begins to wear them instead. His private grieving is complicated by the increasing dementia of a neighbor across the street who has been showing up in his yard without clothes of any kind, and when these two collide of an emergency--man in dress meeting man without pants--the story reaches a kind of comic fervor that belies the deftness with which it deals with the difficulties of aging and loss. I think it's one of the best stories in the collection.

John's stories often take place in the Long Island suburbs, in bedroom communities where the Catholic Church continues to circumscribe the emotional and cultural range of what is possible. The stories really evoke an era of suburban life in the 60's and 70's that is, if not gone, surely drastically changed, and the stories show, to my mind, why such an existence might have been as fragile as it is narrow. I really liked one story I hadn't read, titled "Trump" (no relation) about a young gay Catholic school student who befriends the school's new and only Black student. The relationship becomes complicated by the attentions of a Father who is deeply unpopular among the student body, and the protagonist, Frankie, ends up choosing a difficult and violent betrayal to keep his precarious place in the school's ecosystem.

Another that I liked and hadn't read moves the action to Manhattan, where a young and disillusioned legal assistant becomes obsessed with Richard Nixon, who after the end of his presidency has moved his law office into a nearby building. The protagonist, for reasons that are unclear even to him, keeps demanding to be given access to the former president--who, in the end, shows up in the public plaza to give him a bit of dubious advice. This story, I thought, has only a tenuous relationship to the politics that are the invisible backdrop of so much of the book, but the parallels it draws between the failed president and the directionless protagonist, are really powerful.

It was a real honor and pleasure to see some of these stories being crafted, but the best part of The Price of Their Toys was, for me, getting to read the ones that were totally new to me. If you're interested, you can by John's book here.

Sister Carrie by Lauren Fairbanks

Would you be willing to give us a profound remark on the concept "LOVE" and what tie-ins that may have to Carrie?

My opinion? It may be a strange concept to you. It doesn't spurn those who abuse it most. I saw a man pick it up in a fistful, so that alone must have hurt. He hurled it against a wall, kicked it when it was down. I didn't see how Love could live. Love got up and begged for more. It got more of the same treatment only worse. Love is Rasputin. Then Love must have tired and, pulling a knife out of its beehive hairdo, slit the guy stomach to neck. Not pretty. But a clean cut. Now Love must be just as much a lonely stinkpig as the next guy. Meaner 'an hell. What happens when love comes to town.

Sister Carrie is about Carrie Meeber, a small-town girl who seeks her fortune in the big city. She falls in love with a rake named Hurstrwood--oh, wait, no. That's Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. In this one, Carrie is Asian-American, and her American Dream involves getting involved in two of the United States' most sinister industries: advertising and prostitution. She works for a pimp whose name is, you guessed it, Pimpo. The narrator, who reminds us time and again how omniscient he is, seems to seeking out information about Carrie's exploits, having risen from a humble prostitute to something of an underground legend. She may have killed a man, perhaps one named Valmouth, though it's possible that she and Valmouth are actually the same person. She has fallen for, and had a child with, a guy named Chuck, and both, perhaps, are on the lam? I don't know. It's actually really hard to tell what's going on in this book, if anything really can be said to be "going on" at all.

Lauren Fairbanks' avant-garde novel was a little too much for me: a little too avant, a little too garde. when I was able to let the spiky, irreverent language wash over me (check out the passage above), I entered into a state that resembled something like enjoyment. But ultimately I found the discursive, non-sequential nature of the narrative to be a little too much to penetrate. It reminded me of some of the more difficult books by John Hawkes, but I walked away fairly sure that there was nothing much that I had missed, because questions of fact and story really are irrelevant to Sister Carrie. It could be described perhaps as choral, with all the voices of the underground figures, from Pimpo to Carrie's mom Zenobia, layered over each other, but Carrie herself remains truly elusive, even to the book's end. And even now I fear that describing the book has laid a kind of sense or system that the book is trying hard to repel. So I'll stop here.

Airships by Barry Hannah

Unable to swim, he had maneuvered to fall off an old-timers' party yacht in the Hudson River. His departure was not remarked by the revelers.  They motored on toward the Atlantic and he bobbed around in the wash. He couldn't swim. But he did. He learned how. Before he knew it, he was making time and nearing the dock where a small Italian liner was dead still, white, three stories high. Nobody was around when he pulled up on a stray rope on the wharf and walked erect to the street, where cars were flashing. Day after tomorrow was his seventieth birthday. What a past, he said. I've survived. Further, I'm horny and vindictive. Does the fire never stop?

"Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed," one of the best stories in Barry Hannah's collection Airships, is narrated by a Confederate officer who meets his hero, Jeb Stuart. General Stuart suggests that the officer shake hands with his Black ensign, George, something the narrator hasn't done and isn't too happy about being constrained to do now. Except George takes one look at the narrator and correctly clocks that his interest in the General exceeds the bounds of simple admiration: "Ain't shaking hands with no nancy." I wonder if a reader from outside the South might find the humor in this, or if it would only confirm certain at-least-partly-true suspicions about the South. For my part, I love the way the story skewers the myths and pieties of the Old South. None of these people--not the officer, nor the ensign, nor even Jeb, a towering figure in Southern legend who's clearly happy with the myths he inspires--is quite what they seem. They're not too far off, in fact, from the whopping fish-tale swappers of the opening story, "Water Liars."

Many of the stories in Airships are about the South, though what they have to say about it is not always easy to parse. Mostly, I think, they tend to see the South as a place where, perhaps contrary to its reputation as a place of rigid social hierarchies, grand collisions happen. I was really delighted by "Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa," a story about a white guy who chides a Black one for eating a banana with too much enthusiasm, which ends with the Black guy coming over to the white one's house to watch him eat bananas. Some of the stories are snappy and short, but the collection is held up by a series of longer novellas, the plots of which are so ridiculous I'm not sure I even want to waste time describing them. Take, for instance, "Return to Return," a story about a talented young tennis player driven mad by the attentions of his mother's long-time lover; is it even worth talking about how he ends up with a shady doctor named Baby, stabbing people in Central Park? It's a little easier, maybe, to guess how we get from the homemade mortar shells of "The Testimony of Pilot" to the fighter jets of the Second World War. These stories proceed by a strange logic, almost more like an unraveling then a building up--nothing about them is predictable.

Hannah shares DNA, I think, with a writer like Charles Portis: both write shaggy-dog stories about Southerners that are wildly funny. But Hannah's stories have a disquieting strangeness underneath them that begins with the way they pack a truly staggering amount of information into a paragraph, a sentence: check out that first paragraph above from "Green to Green," which piles absurdity upon absurdity. As a result, Hannah's prose is decidedly clunky and unmusical, though I don't even mean that as a criticism. The shorter ones have the air of someone flipping over a bag and letting all their bobs and bits onto a table; the longer ones can be said, by their end, to make a certain kind of sense, though I would challenge you to identify that sense at their beginning. All in all, I found them frequently difficult to penetrate, but always incredibly funny, energetic, and fun.

You Glow in the Dark by Liliana Colanzi

He switched off the lamp. In the dark, as he suspected, the salt became an incandescent snow. He rubbed at that substance and the glow spread over the palm of his hand. Awed and puzzled, he observed the celestial combustion. There between the blue glow and the shadows of the scrap metal behind him, an idea began to emerge in his brain like the head of a mushroom pushing up after showers. He would make a gift for his wife; the most beautiful, shimmering, unusual ring. He smiled.

The title story of Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi's collection You Glow in the Dark reimagines the true story of a Brazilian scrap metal dealer who came upon a bit of uranium. Not knowing what it was, he fashioned a piece of jewelry out of it for his wife, with predictable results. Colanzi tells the story through a series of brief vignettes from different vantage points and in different registers: not just the scrap dealer or his wife, but a young receptionist who, evacuated and bused out to a different town, where the fate of her own has already become known, is pointedly asked: "Do you glow in the dark?" Another, heart-rending section, details the numbered lots of buried radioactive ephemera that had to be abandoned: a doll, a dress, a diary, and even the remains of family pets. In this way, Colanzi circumscribes the rippling effects of the disaster, like the spread of the radiation itself, and the havoc brought on innocent people by capitalist neglect.

Many of the stories here are in this polyphonic mode. Some of them take big swings that don't connect, as with "Atomito," a story very reminiscent of "You Glow in the Dark," which imagines a nuclear fallout in the Bolivian community of El Alto as being in the shape of, perhaps enspirited by, the cute cartoon mascot of the local plant. Much more successful, I thought, and perhaps the best story in the collection, was "The Cave," about a single cave over the course of thousands of years. In prehistory, a cavewoman paints the handprints of her newborn twins before killing them (such births are taboo); later these same handprints are wondered at by tourists and interlopers. A fungus grows in the cave that turns out to be the birth of White Nose Syndrome, the disease which has been decimating bat populations for years, or something like it. In the future, the cave becomes a node in a teleportation game. What might have been cheesy or forced is, I thought, quite effective, turning the cave which is at heart a kind of absence into a historical presence. Perhaps it works because the manifold nature of the stories keeps them from being too easily summed up or resolved; the best ones feel as if something else is going to happen next, just out of reach of the story.

With the addition of Bolivia, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 118!

An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree. We only have to find the spring and release it.

An Imaginary Life is the story of Ovid, the Roman poet of the Metamorphoses, who was exiled to the Black Sea by Augustus for being a little too cheeky with his writing. As Malouf points out in his afterword, not much is known about his life there, which makes it a fertile opportunity for the imagination. (This is, perhaps, one meaning of the title.) What Malouf imagines is that Ovid, despondent to find himself among rustics who do not speak his language, struggles to reconcile himself to his fate, until, when on a hunting trip, he discovers a feral boy in the woods. The locals know all about the boy, and Ovid convinces them to capture him and bring them into the town, where he forms a connection with the boy, teaching him the rudiments of speech. Later, when sickness strikes the village, the boy is blamed by superstitious elements, and Ovid and the boy run away, even further into exile.

I think An Imaginary Life is a pretty bad title for a book that ought to be titled something along the lines of Metamorphoses. As in the passage above, Malouf often writes beautifully on the topic of metamorphosis and transformation. There is the metamorphosis of Ovid into the new person he has become at the edge of the Empire. There is the metamorphosis of the boy, who resembles something like the halfway point of Ovid's characters, stuck between human and beast. But for all that, I was surprised how little An Imaginary Life was interested in making literary connections to the work of Ovid. The fanciful "feral boy" story might have belonged to anyone, and feels a little grafted on to the story of the great poet. But maybe that's the kind of critique that looks for the book that isn't there rather than the one that is. The book that is here is often lovely, elegiac, though I found it a little slow and at times bordering on mawkish. It's a genre of book that I really love--here I'm thinking of John Williams' Augustus, Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Robert Graves' I, Claudius--but compared to those, this one felt very forgettable.

Entering Fire by Rikki Ducornet

Septimus, jealous of my love for plants, despised them all. He attempted to justify this hatred when he insisted that plants, the whores of the natural world, fornicate with whatever comes their way: the wind, bugs, bats, birds, bees, snails, slimes and even men. In fact, the beauties of Evangelista's Palace were far more promiscuous--if less adventurous--for they copulated with only members of their own species.

My son had a morbid hatred of females, and whores in particular. Whores, like orchids, are the female archetype par excellence, painted, scented, seductive. Beneath their masks, the women of the Palace were fragile, luscious, and unique. But the men who visited them were so blinded by lust they never saw what was there, only what was painted there.

Rikki Ducornet's Entering Fire has two narrators: the first is Lamprias de Bergerac, a Victorian botanist and world traveler who spends most of his life absent from his family in France, exploring the wilds of the Amazonian jungle, where he adopts the free-love ethos of the women at the roadhouse known as Evangelista's Palace, and eventually falls in love with an Indigenous woman named Cucla. Lamprias is a recognizable kind of 19th century adventurer, who approaches all things, places, pants, and pussy (sorry, I couldn't help it) with the same sense of gleeful adventure and abandon. The other narrator is his son, Septimus de Bergerac, whose resentment at being abandoned by his father curdles into a rejection of everything his father stands for. Septimus, in turn, turns toward the savage nationalism and racism that will come to dominate the European landscape in the early 20th century.

It's a bold move to start your book with the words of an anti-Semite. You have to trust your reader--and your publisher, frankly--intimately. The first victim of Septimus' anger is his half-brother, the son of Lamprias and a Chinese woman whom he brings back from his travels named Dust. This son is named, somehow, "True Man," and his beauty and symmetry are an indictment of Septimus' own physical ugliness. Septimus delights gleefully in True Man's ultimate destruction--hanged for a minor crime--but it's the whole kit and caboodle of his father's worldview that he seeks to ultimately destroy. We get to watch as Septimus' Nazis take over Europe, and then collapse; Septimus flees (where else) to the South America that his father had loved, like so many other Nazis. But this turns out to be only a pit-stop on the way to the Catskills in New York, where his father and Cucla have taken up residence, and Septimus--slowly disintegrating thanks to the syphilis he's contracted from the women he despises--sets up a final watch on his father. 

Like with her other (incredible) novel, The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet seems to be really interested in the particular shape and pattern of history. How did the Victorian era, with its interest in open science and exploration, curdle into the inwardness and smallness of fascism and Nazism? (Of course, the seeds of race science were sown beginning with Darwin, someone whom Lamprias much resembles, but the novel, I think, is as loathe to blame Darwin as it is Lamprias.) In doing so, I was really struck by how Ducornet identifies racism as something psychological, even psychosexual or Oedipal, the son striking out at the father who abandoned him, Septimus' dalliance with Jewish prostitutes (whom mostly he wants to, like, kick him in the chest). And Septimus' seizing on whiteness as a way to obviate his own ugliness, both physical and mental, seems to me very shrewd. In fact, I was struck at just how recognizable Septimus' racial resentment is, its essential smallness and pettiness, its need to be made large by associating itself with a larger historical movement, which, of course, is all imaginary:

Time is on the march and Time is on my side. Like fish and bread I am multiplied; the armies of Hitler, upright and invincible, fan out in all directions like the spoke of a wheel. And France--the France of philosophers, Protestants, dissimulators, atheists, heretics, impostors, the spontaneous, the autonomous and the perverse--lies crushed beneath this wheel.

Looking back, I think maybe I have not said enough about Lamprias' half of the book, which is as lovely and free-spirited as Septimus' half is unsettling and difficult. Lamprias, perhaps, is guilty of many things, including abandoning his family (although the racist nastiness of both Septimus and his mother makes it hard to think so), abandoning Dust and True Man to their fate in that horrible household, and doing as he wished. But Lamprias' adventures among the whores and cutthroats of 19th century South America seem to capture something Ducornet really admires about the figure of the Victorian adventurer. Lamprias' tragedy, perhaps, is that he simply lives too long, all the way into the 1950s--long enough to be hauled into an interview by the House Un-American Activities Committee!--and long enough to receive a kind of final bittersweet triumph over his son's revenge

Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer

Stella had always been a little clumsy and shy, and even when she was cheerful, her regular, wide face was immobile. Then it blossomed from within to her lips. Stella had been very happy for a short time, but she was unable to learn the rules of the game, she couldn't adapt and she had to perish.

Killing Stella is narrated by Anna, a dissatisfied housewife whose husband, Richard, cheats on her constantly. She's reconciled herself to this life, which is mostly miserable, though she maintains her grip on family life by nurturing an intense attachment to her son, Wolfgang, who seems not to have much of an attachment to anyone. Another, younger daughter, Annette, is still too young to understand just how dysfunctional the family is. Into this world comes Stella, the teenage daughter of a friend, who upsets the delicate balance that Anna has struck: she isn't happy, but it might be much worse. We know from the beginning that Stella's visitation ends with her demise--killed by a passing truck--and Anna must tell us, by way of expiating her own guilt, an glee, how it came to be.

Anna's theory is that Stella was fated to die. She begins to waste away quickly in the household, falling into spells of depression and tearful explosions. Stella, Anna reasons, has fallen in love with Richard, and is tortured by Richard's lack of regard. Is that true? Or is it only Anna's projection onto Stella, derived from her resentment toward her husband's philandering? The trick of Killing Stella is that Stella herself is always something of a black box. Anna tells us that there was no other fate for Stella than to step in front of that truck, and the logic of this seems to emerge from the teenager's declining demeanor as well as a sense of Anna's own fatedness: she is stuck in this marriage, and anything that threatens to disrupt it, for better or worse, must eventually be expelled. No, the real central character here is Anna, whose conflicted feelings about Stella are terribly frightening. It's not suggested that Anna had any hand in the death, of course, but her claims to feel guilty are unconvincing, and her insistence that Stella's intrusion in their life necessitated her death only makes her feel, somehow, more implicated.

Even for Short Book February, this is a slim little book, a snapshot of misery and resentment that is incredibly dark. Unlike The Wall, which has become a book I recommend to everyone anywhere I go, nothing unfolds and no one changes, except perhaps for Wolfgang, who hightails it out of Dodge. The Wall is about a woman trapped beneath a glass dome, but the barriers that enclose Anna seem somehow even smaller, and more impermeable.

In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi

But you, Maya, where are you really from? What woods did you come out of? Stone by stone, you build your own edifice. You've raced through your life with your elbows close to your sides without ever looking back. The result of the race: if you admit everything you owe to others, it's because you're also well aware that you didn't engender yourself, and to a certain extent you are still determined by your place of birth, your family, your culture, and your origins, since a generic, self-engendered human being does not exist. At least not yet.

In Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A. Waberi's In the United States of Africa, 20th century history has been reversed: the "United States of Africa" are a prosperous conglomerate of wealthy and technologically sophisticated states, while Europe and America have plunged into civil war and famine. French, Swiss, German, Spanish, Italian refugees flock to the capital of Asmara to find work and food, where they form a despised and unfortunate underclass who live and die invisibly. Against this backdrop Waberi tells the story (in second person) of Maya, a sensitive young sculptor who discovers that she is half French, and who becomes increasingly socially aware of the plight of her European kinsmen, ultimately fleeing to troubled France to find her birth mother.

Part of me thinks: what's the point of this? There is, or could be, a kind of facileness in simply reversing the polarity of society in this way. At best, it reveals the way our language fails at universalism and becomes absurd when its applications become reversed, talking about, for instance, the "warlords" of France. At its worst, it becomes a kind of easy joke, a "what if" repeated a couple hundred times. But I think that's all redeemed by Waberi's writing, which is clever and erudite, full of cultural knowledge and allusion that gets pulled apart and remixed in ways that keep the worldbuilding fresh and curious. (Interesting to see how, for instance, Black Americans like Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain part of the historical scene--don't get too tripped up on the "well, what if" of that--and become celebrated figures after whom schools and airports are named.) 

The second person narration keeps us at a distance from Maya that keeps the focus on the topsy-turvy world, I think. She never quite emerges as a real character in a way that might elevate the imaginative qualities of the book even further. And yet there are scenes of real pathos, as with Maya's disillusionment upon discovering her destitute French mother, who has little to provide her, a victim, like so many, of world circumstances, and Maya's flight back to the safety of Africa. Change the victims, let the exploiters become the exploited, and still the shape of the world feels tragically familiar.

With the addition of Djibouti, my "Countries Read" list is up to 117!

Zama by Antonio di Benedetto

Nature, as she exists in this country, is most gentle, and for that  very reason I'm at pains to keep my distance from her. For she is childlike and might captivate me, and in my moments of lassitude when I'm barely half awake she may bring me sudden, treacherous thoughts that persist far too long and give neither satisfaction for repose. Nature holds up the mirror of external things; were I to submit to her wiles I might recognize myself there.

Diego de Zama is a moderately powerful colonial figure in 18th century Paraguay. Unlike many of his fellow administrators, he is an Americano, born in South America, not Spain. His wife and son are back at home in (I think) Lima, while he toils in a relative backwater. He is professionally and romantically frustrated, obsessed with women of "pure" European blood, unlike his own. His amorousness leads him into several complicated relationships: with Luciana, the wife of another administrator, with Emilia, a peasant woman who bears Zama's child, and others. At one point, unable to pay for his room in the hotel (his salary from Madrid being humiliatingly delayed), he moves into the house of an old man where either one or two women are living. He grows obsessed with her--or them? The intractability of this mystery, punctuated by sudden glimpses of a woman at a window or at the end of a hall, is indicative of the strangeness and indeterminacy of Zama.

I read Zama at the beach. This was, I think, not quite the ideal choice, though some of the salt marshes recall the stinking swamps of Zama's Paraguay, which is, at the novel's opening, captured by the corpse of a monkey moving in and out with the tide. But I wasn't prepared for just how weird Zama is. I hate the word "difficult" when applied to books, because books can be difficult in different ways, but Zama is a book whose fundamental reality is subject to obfuscation and slippage. It's strange that Zama himself is an Americano, because he seems to have absorbed already a colonial's perspective on South America as a strange and exotic place where strange and mysterious things might happen.

One thing that is clear, though, is that Zama's life is a series of frustrations. He's entirely unable to get his request for a transfer sent to Madrid, and is thus indefinitely separated from his family and forestalled from professional prestige or advancement. His fellow administrators treat him with dismissal or even unexplained hostility, even going so far as to sic beggar thieves upon him. The final of Zama's three sections ends with him enlisted in a platoon tasked with hunting down an infamous murderer and thief. But Zama is the only one who knows that the murderer is actually one of the party, and the dilemma this puts him in--whom to ally with, whom to betray--is typical of a book in which the colonial apparatus appears more as a knot of shifting allegiances and alliances. There is no way for Zama, no path forward for advancement or even stability, and there is no choice that can prevent him from suffering the final destiny that meets him at the novel's end.

The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami

It takes about half a year to reach this "final conclusion," Nishino said with a laugh. It's like the laws of physics. Why is it that, eventually, all girls end up adhering to the same formula in their response, no matter whether they are chubby or skinny, laid-back or uptight, conventionally beautiful or idiosyncratically striking, pescatarians or red-blooded meat-lovers? Nishino inclined his head in wonder.

"Nishino, do you really believe that all girls are exactly the same?" I asked.

"I could be wrong," Nishino said leisurely. "All the girls I've ever known, at least, they've all been the same, down to the last."

Well, then, the girls you date must all be pretty boring, I thought fleetingly, but I immediately regretted feeling mean toward all the girls Nishino had dated whom I had never laid eyes on.

Hiromi Kawakami's The Ten Loves of Nishino collects ten stories, all about, or related to, women that have been the lover of Nishino. The women range in ages, professions, attitudes, etc. Nishino himself something of a mystery, a little bit aloof and hard to pin down. The stories, when taken together, only give one oblique views of Nishino, who never has the opportunity to speak for himself like the women do. But overall, there is a sense of someone who is magnetic and charismatic, but difficult to read, and someone to whom love, in its permanent marriage state, never seems able to attach. Like the women of the story, Nishino struggles with a single question over and over again: Am I really in love? Or do I just think I am? And if I'm in love now, when will I fall out of it? Or have I already?

Real love is the big theme of The Ten Loves of Nishino. I found this interesting, but perplexing: is "love," in its romantic comedy aspect, being satirized or undermined here? How interesting or meaningful, exactly, are we meant to take this question? My favorite of the narrators was Manami of "Good Night," who is not a lover of Nishino but another man named Yukihiko, who undermines her own relationship by insisting that Yukihiko has fallen out of love with her, until she ultimately persuades him of the same truth. This felt like a familiar story: a pair of people who end up convincing each other, by way of themselves, that a relationship couild never work out. But I do have to admit that when Nishino said that all women end up the same, I agree with him--at least in the context of the stories, where the women began to bleed together and get mixed up for me.

The most interesting thing about The Ten Loves of Nishino is what I least know what to do with: one of the narrators describes seeing Nishino as a young boy, suckling at his own sister's breast. He explains that she had recently given birth to a baby that died, and that in her mental distress she turns to him to relieve the horrible pain of her breasts filled with milk. "Are you in love with your sister?" one of the lovers ask, but we can see that whatever kind of love Nishino bears his sister is more difficult and more complex than the rom-com love he bears toward these women, less easily categorized and thus less easily understood. This quasi-oedipal relationship lies in the background of all Nishino's failed relationships, but how much it explains is entirely unclear.

A Small Island by Jamaica Kincaid

Again, Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty--a European disease. Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might belike; I mean, supposing you were to think about it), are the descendants of those noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.

A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid's jeremiad about her home country of Antigua, beings in the accusatory first person: suppose you are a tourist, visiting Antigua for the first time. You see the beautiful green hills and blue waters of Antigua, and you see the poverty: the dilapidated library, the school, which looks like a latrine, and you have a kind of sense of superiority to what it is you lay your eyes on. There is an Antigua that has been fashioned for you, but still you cannot help but see what you might think of as the "real" Antigua, and you--you!--do not think about why or how this "small place" in the middle of the Caribbean sea might have inherited corruption and degradation from the colonial powers of which you, whether you know it or not, are a belated representative. It's a pointed and really quite vicious accusation. Kincaid doesn't mince words: "An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that..." She goes on to say the one thing that you will not and cannot imagine is that the people of Antigua despise you, and what is worse, they laugh at you.

A Small Place contains other sections, but they're all as frank and forthright as this one, and for that, I really enjoyed it. One section details the astonishing corruption of Antigua's leaders in the decades between independence from Britain and the 1980's in which Kincaid was writing, but Kincaid makes it clear that these methods were learned from the colonists, and reflect a kind of rapaciousness that the English taught to their subjects. One thing that really struck me, and will stay with me as I think about colonialism and its consequences, is that Kincaid describes the Antiguans of the colonial era not thinking of the English as racists: what they thought was that they were "ill-mannered," or in some cases, "puzzling," because they spent their time among people they clearly did not like. This provides an interesting response to modern critiques of (God help us) "wokeness," which might be described by its critics as a tendency to see racism everywhere, because the Antiguans, as Kincaid describes them, didn't see racism at all; they saw boorishness and ill manners--the sad and sorry traits that lie, perhaps, at the bottom of racism.

And the whole thing is filled with remarkable prose, because Kincaid is really a terrific prose writer. Her precise and cutting way of writing, I think, is really well disposed to a jeremiad like this one. She doesn't pull any punches, but neither does it seem one-sided or unfair, whatever that might mean in this case. Funnily, for someone so skilled at writing in the English language, Kincaid repeats a really familiar critique: "For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?") It is especially tragic to think of Kincaid, a talented and incisive writer if ever there was one, describing herself as having "no tongue." Tongueless though it may be, A Small Place lashes powerfully.

Norwood by Charles Portis

The train was slowing for the block in Philadelphia when Norwood suddenly awoke. He was asleep one second and wide awake the next. A thin wall of sunlight was coming through the doorway crack, with a lot of stuff dancing around in it. Something was wrong. It was his feet. He felt air on his feet. He sat up and there wasn't anything on them except a pair of J. C. Penny Argyles. Somebody had taken his thirty-eight-dollar stovepipe boots right off his feet. "Son of a bitch!" He got up and climbed over the floor and pulled sacks this way and that but there was no one to be found, and no boots.

Norwood Pratt works at a gas station in Eastern Texas, but he dreams of being a country music star on the radio show Louisiana Hayride. His sister Vernell has recently married, and brought into Norwood's house, a cantankerous old veteran named Bill Bird. Norwood takes a job offered to him by a smooth-talking local magnate named "Grady Fring, the Kredit King," driving a pair of cars--and a reluctant female passenger--to New York. Norwood figures out quickly that the cars are stolen, and the girl more or less the same, and dispatches both, but still continues on to New York in hopes of recouping seventy dollars owed to him by a buddy in the Marines. In typical shaggy-dog fashion, the friend has gone back to Arkansas--basically Norwood's backdoor--and New York is a hellhole. Among other things, I love how small the stakes are of a novel like this one--seventy dollars was probably a lot more back then that it is now, but it ain't that much, either.

I love the collection of characters Norwood picks up on his journeys. Besides Grady Fring, whose unctuous patter is among the novel's best bits, there's Edmund Ratner, a little person once billed as "The World's Smallest Perfect Man," and a "wonder-chicken" named Joanna who can answer any question. Portis has a real talent for making individual characters stand out; even someone as minor as Mrs. Reese, the mother of the man who owes Norwood money, who only cares about her familial connections to local judges (a Southern archetype I wonder if Yankee readers will get), pops out memorably on the page. And I liked the sojourn to New York, which is clearly in its "bad old days" era. Among the first things that Norwood sees is a group of Puerto Rican teenagers roasting marshmallows over a burning mattress. Still, even in New York, Norwood, a wandering Odysseus, is treated with kindness by some and suspicion by others, the same as in Memphis or on a Trailways bus.

Norwood was Portis' first novel, and it shares a lot in common with The Dog of the South, which is the only other one of his books I've read. Both are road trip novels and both are riotously funny, though I think Dog of the South has a clear edge in almost all of the novel's shared qualities. One way in which Norwood is different is that it's much gentler and more kindhearted. The Dog of the South is a hopeless tale, in which the narrator's quest--to hunt down his missing wife, along with his credit cards--is clearly doomed from the start. But Norwood, who is a gentle soul underneath his cowboy cool, comes back enriched. He does get his money--which is probably the novel's biggest surprise--though, generously, he loans much of it away immediately to the World's Smallest Perfect Man. And what's more, he comes home with a new fiancee, Rita, whom he has picked up on the Trailways bus. The final image, of Norwood arriving home, carrying a sleeping Rita in his arms to his own couch, adds a touch of unexpected sweetness.

The Seers by Suleiman Addonia

A throaty voice somewhere inside me--and I can't remember when or why I had labelled the voices I held inside me as a way of distinguishing between them, as if to give the multitude of my identity a voice--rose from a long slumber, ready to hurl accusations of selfishness at me. But that voice of reason soon incinerated between my thighs, pulsating, pumping out a sensation. I opened the window and invited the London night into my room. And London arrived carrying conversations of people on the verge of being born, dying, creating, singing, seducing, of killing and being killed, speaking in hundreds of different languages, and of Anne about to fuck someone somewhere.

Suleiman Addonia's novel The Seers begins with its narrator, an Eritrean refugee in London named Hannah, fucking a man in the ass with a strap-on in a public park. I'm not sure, but it the whole novel might take place mid-thrust, as Hannah looks back on her difficult and solitary journey from her war-torn country, and reflects on the self-awakening she's had since coming to London. That self-awakening, as she describes it, is pointedly sexual: it begins with a crush on a fellow refugee living at a halfway house, Anne, who scorns and humiliates her (something which, as it turns out, turns Hannah on). Hannah is guided--but also repulsed--by the diary of her mother, who describes her own predilection for men's butts and assholes, something which Hannah herself pursues with a similar gusto. As we see her in flagrante delicto with her lover in the park, she is as happy and whole as she's ever been, having learned to pursue her desires in this country as a way of being truly herself.

That description might make The Seers sounds a little silly, overwrought, or even gratuitous, but I was genuinely impressed by it. Addonia relates the whole story as a single long paragraph that stretches for 120 pages--which doesn't make it easy to find a place to pause between readings, but which effectively gives the sense of an orgasmic stream-of-conscious. Addonia makes good use of a few strange flourishes, as when he has certain sections narrated by (not through, by) Hannah's eyes, or when she describes some of the great English writers she has come to embrace get up and walk around from their graves at night and talk to her. As with anything, I suppose, the proof is in the pudding; these flourishes work because Addonia treats them with sincerity and skill. The Seers is a novel that carries you away on a flood of ecstasy, with pain and struggle mixed in equal measure, and I thought it was ultimately very affecting and convincing.

With the addition of Eritrea, my "Countries Read" list is up to 116!

Weather by Jenny Offill

It was the same after 9/11, there was that hum in the air. Everyone everywhere talking about the same thing. In stores, in restaurants, on the subway. My friend met me at the diner for coffee. His family fled Iran one week before the Shah fell. He didn't want to talk about the hum. I pressed him though. Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.

Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill's Weather is a washed-out academic working at a local library. Her former mentor, Sylvia, asks her to fill in answering questions she gets emailed in connection to her podcast, like "What are the best ways to protect children from the coming chaos?" At home, she has a husband and a son, as well as a brother, Henry, who seems to be on the road to a family life himself until he relapses and becomes, we sense not for the first time, the narrator's burden to bear. Lizzie's own marriage pulls under the strain of Henry's presence, and her husband takes a little break, during which time Lizzie considers sleeping with a handsome journalist she's been flirting with at the bar. He's a war correspondent, and the world they share is a little like war, turned topsy-turvy by a recent event that is, but is never quite outlined, the election of Donald Trump in 2016. An emailer asks the difference between a disaster and emergency--well, which is this? And how does it fit in with the larger dread Lizzie feels as she imagines her future "doomstead," where she plans to be safe--she hopes--with her husband and son?

The most notable thing about Weather is its clipped, various style: each section takes up about a half a page at most. I've seen this work in other books, like Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever, where it's used for great comic effect. Weather tries to be comic, too, though perhaps it is too anxious and depressed about the state of the world to really rise above a general wry cleverness. Moments in Lizzie's life are mixed in with questions from the emailers, yoga mantras, other bits and bobs. It's all woven together, and cleverly and effectively enough.

But I have to admit this didn't work for me, for reasons I'm not sure I can really articulate. It might be that the little bits all seemed a little bit too neat, too clever. It might be that the non-narrative pieces, pulled from history and culture in the fashion of a librarian pulling cards out of catalog, felt as if they were simulating meaning rather than creating it. Or perhaps it was just too obvious that there was a hand there, manipulating the pieces, putting them into places. I don't think the reason it didn't work for me is that its vision of Trump's election as a kind of ambient disaster already seems a little bit passe here at the beginning of Trump 2--but I have to admit, it didn't help. It seemed to me to capture a kind of woeful liberal handwringing and malaise that has aged very poorly. But even saying that, I feel like I might have been more kindly disposed to another version of the same thing, and maybe the reason it didn't work for me is that it just didn't work, no more no less.

Transcription by Ben Lerner

And now I felt that Thomas had arranged the exchange he was listening in on (but surely he wasn't listening), that my mentor was conducting this electronic opera, orchestrating these interferences, crossing wires, worlds. Impossibly thin glass filaments underground, underwater, in the lungs, in the cochlea, vibrating with the small waves hit them--You call this fiction, but it is more.

In the third section of Ben Lerner's new novel Transcription, a man named Max is describing his relationship with his father, a respected but somewhat eccentric academic named Thomas. Thomas, Max describes, grows sick during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Max is told by the hospital that he should say goodbye to his father. The iPad they use for these last goodbyes is on the fritz, so Thomas must deliver his last words over the phone. When I read this, I had to put the book down for a moment--it brought back so strongly the memory of telling my own father that I loved him over the phone. Like my own father, Thomas is too weak to respond, and it's unclear whether Max has been heard at all. Unlike my father, Thomas recovers somewhat miraculously. Though he dies somewhat later, the question remains: what has been communicated and how? Have the iPad, the phone, led to a true message being sent and received? 

Max's section isn't what you'll find in most summaries of Transcription, which begin with the narrator of the first section, the classic Ben Lerner stand-in, who has returned to Providence to interview Thomas, his mentor. The narrator accidentally drops his phone in the toilet, and is unable to record the conversation, which he is meant to write up, so he attempts to do it from memory. Later on, he confesses this somewhat sheepishly, but what he thought would be a funny anecdote turns out to enrage people, because the interview has come to be considered the (now) dead Thomas' last words. I will say that Transcription is not what I expected from this description: I thought we would get some sort of metafictional text, a cobbling together of reportage and memory, that asks us to comb through and interrogate it in order to separate the truth from falsity, or to show us that such a task is in truth impossible. But Lerner mostly plays it straight; whether the reported conversation is original or not seems not to be the question.

Instead, the novel seemed to me about the way that technology has shaped the way we communicate with each other, for better or worse. Whether the conversation is genuine or not, did Thomas' belief that he was being recorded change what he said? Can the medium, even when not in use, change the message? Lerner explores these ideas in a dozen ways, including the shame and frustration that the narrator shows in not being able to FaceTime his daughter before bed, nor let her know that he can't. These themes show up in the hospital iPad, obviously, but I thought they were most interestingly explored when, in the third section, Max describes the struggles he's had with his daughter, who engages in severe food refusal. The only thing that works, it turns out, is to let her watch YouTube while she eats. Is this a distraction? Or a lifeline? Can it be both? We all worry about the "iPad generation," of course, but even the technology that steals our attention, or worse, turns out to have its lifesaving uses. For better or worse, we're all wired now, and though we make a practice of lamenting what it's done to us, it is easier than ever to be heard. 

As with most of Lerner's books, this sounds a lot more simplistic in my rendering than it is on the page. I respect and admire his ability to explore the themes that seem so vital to us, and yet are so difficult to talk about; you never leave one of his novels thinking that it's not really relevant to you or the world in which you live. This one won't have the staying power of The Topeka School or Leaving the Atocha Station, but I think I'll remember what it expresses about our wired--or I suppose, now, wireless--world for a long time.

Emily Dickinson Face to Face by Martha Dickinson Bianchi

Her love of being alone up in her room was associated with her feeling for a key, which signified freedom from interruption and the social prevention that beset her downstairs. She would stand looking down, one hand raised, thumb and forefinger closed on an imaginary key, and say, with a quick turn of her wrist, 'It's just a turn--and freedom, Matty!' She read her letters there, never opening one until she was alone--not even so much as a note from a neighbor. Her loneliness has been much deplored; but where and with whom would she not have been lonely? her kind of loneliness was the gift whose riches she herself pronounced beyond the power of 'mortal numeral to divulge.' And what society of her contemporaries would have made up to her for the loss of that precious guest of her solitude she named 'Finite Infinity?'

It seems strange to even have a book like this, Martha Dickinson Bianchi's memoir about her famous aunt. We think of Emily Dickinson locked up in a room, never seeing anyone, never even venturing downstairs for her father's funeral. And yet, as Emily Dickinson Face to Face tells us, Emily was social, a favorite aunt and beloved family member that seemed to have been treasured by everyone she knew, even as they found her eccentric habits a little bit annoying. (As for the funeral thing, well, it also makes clear that Emily was devastated by her father's death, and perhaps retreated even further into isolation after it.) And yet, in passages such as the one above, Dickinson Bianchi--an accomplished writer and novelist in her own right--makes it clear that isolation and solitude were part of what animated the writer, and one feels the strong impression of a brilliant person whose self-sufficiency comes from an abundance of her own capacities.

Because Dickinson Bianchi was a child when she knew her aunt best, what we get most of is a child's impression of an older adult. Emily, as her niece describes her, was particularly beloved by children, and had a way with them, though it's a little like the way that children get attached to someone who remains a little withholding of themselves. The images that struck me most, I think, were of Emily walking to and fro in Amherst with gifts and notes. The notes, as Dickinson Bianchi describes them, were made of the same wit and cleverness as her poetry, as are the clever little letters she would write her niece, and especially the letter she would write to Dickinson Bianchi's mother, Sue, whom as we now know, was deeply romantically entwined with Emily. Are these little letters poems? Why not? I mean, are the poems poems? This is part of what I love about Emily Dickinson: her poetry flouts all the little fence-posts we put up around the entire concept of poetry.

Emily Dickinson Face to Face is a slim little vignette (it is short book February, after all), and so there's little here to really hold on to. Biography-heads looking for a close and intimate look at the poet might want to look elsewhere. But it might be enjoyed by those looking for something a little more like a poem by Emily Dickinson: brief, vivid, contradictory, mysterious.

Sugarcane with Salt by James Ng'ombe

Khumbo stepped into the September sun, now throwing its rays fiercely, but threatened by heavy, dark clouds around it. He knew though that the rains were still a month or so away, and that the bush fires must already have forced hundreds of mice from their underground hideouts into the hands of the scheming and salivating herdboys. The first rain, zimalupsya, when it came, brought with it an aura of ecstasy as expectant mothers rushed out in search of anthill soil which they sucked to satisfy the insatiable greed of the new life within them. Those who didn't have an anthill in sight--although they would not give up looking for this most treasured delicacy delivered by the spirits from underneath through the medium of ants--those who had to look for alternatives, went for the mudwalls of the house, kitchen or nkhokwe, and extracted a lump or two.

Khumbo Dala returns to Malawi from eight years in an English medical school, and finds the place deeply changed. The sugarcane fields that were once privately owned by small farmers have been swallowed up by large conglomerates, who no longer tolerate the friendly theft of a cane or two by hungry children. The school where he was once a student has become increasingly Muslim, and these changing demographics threaten conflict. His family, too, has changed, in ways he did not expect: his mother has given birth to a white child and split from his father; his brother has married a Muslim woman his parents don't approve of (who happens to be Khumbo's childhood sweetheart); the same brother has also gotten mixed up in the drug trade, running hemp. But Khumbo too, has changed. Not only is he now a doctor, but he has a white fiancee, who will soon follow him to Malawi. The two changes push Khumbo in opposite directions: is there a place for him, here, in the country of his birth?

These themes are, in some respect, a little predictable for a novel of mid- to late-century Africa. Sugarcane with Salt is often no more or less than what it presents itself to be; the prose is workmanlike, the story realist to the core, though intricate and interesting. The part I thought was the most engaging, actually, came at the end: Khumbo's brother, arrested by the Malawian regime, who seeks to make an example of him, commits suicide in prison. Tradition demands that Khumbo marry his brother's widow Chimwemwe, and become father to their young son. The fact that Khumbo and Chimwemwe are former lovers only complicates things, and it throws a wrench in his relationship with the Englishwoman Sue, who is already feeling threatened by Khumbo's attentions to a young schoolteacher named Grace. The three women represent different approaches for Khumbo, and perhaps might be thought of as traditionalism, moderation, and radical internationalism. I was interested in the way that, at the end of the novel, Khumbo's situation puts him at the heart of the competing pressures of a modernizing Malawi.

With the addition of Malawi, my "Countries Read" list is up to 115!

The War by Marguerite Duras

I couldn't stop my self--I started to run downstairs, to escape into the street. Beauchamp and D. were supporting him under the arms. They'd stopped on the first-floor landing. He was looking up.

I can't remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and recognized me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn't want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking, I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry. I found myself in some neighbors' apartment. They forced me to drink some rum, they poured it into my mouth. Into the shrieks.

The first section of The War, Marguerite Duras' collection of memoir pieces about her World War II experiences, depicts the author in the war's waning days, waiting to hear news of her husband, who had been captured by the Nazis and taken to Bergen-Belsen. News is difficult to come by; it's all private whispers and hearsay. In her mind, he is already dead; and the death follows her around like another husband, always with her, even as it is not yet known. Miraculously, he's discovered alive by her friends in the Resistance, but in a deeply weakened state. By the time he makes it back to Paris, he's too weak to even eat--many returnees die, we're told, because their shriveled stomachs burst as soon as something solid is put into them. It's no happy homecoming, but something out of a horror movie: "The war emerged in my shrieks." What follows is a long and arduous process of getting him back to strength. At the end of it, when he's well enough, Duras tells him--and us--that she is, as she has always intended, divorcing him to marry her fellow Resistance fighter D. (presumably, "Duras").

What's funny about The War, which seems to have been cobbled together from several disparate pieces, is that it really isn't interested in the war's progression, but by its end. The war only becomes real, and most horrible, for Duras, when its most ravaged victims, like her husband, begin to return. The other two pieces deal more directly with Duras' experiences in the resistance, but they, too, take place toward the war's end, when Germany is already losing its hold on its possessions in Europe, and this gives the pieces a kind of bitter irrelevancy. One tells about an agent of the Gestapo with romantic designs on Duras; she goes out with him for months as a prelude to identifying him to the Resistance to be killed. The third is about literal torture: the bloody beating of a man expected of collaboration with the Nazis. There's a black humor to the single question he keeps refusing to answer: What is the color of the ID that let you into the Nazi administrative building? Finally, after beating him so badly he's likely to die, he admits that it was green--Gestapo green. Both of these figures, marked for death by the Resistance, have a kind of innocence and naivete that makes them strangely sympathetic, and the fact that the war is in both cases practically over makes their token stubbornness seem mean, vain, and sad.

Boy, Duras could write. The first section, about her husband's return, is some of the most effective and chilling writing I've ever read about World War II--which is maybe the most written-about event in all of world history, you know? I enjoyed all three parts, which I sense were never really intended to be grouped together when they were written, but it's that first section--the war emerging with the shrieks, the rum being poured into the shrieks--that I think will stay with me.

The White Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan

It is true that there would be times when his wild surges of blood subsided for a moment, when he, as it were, came to observe his own face--and looked away. He would then become almost afraid of himself... the sight of his own hand, still bloody from helping with the flaying of seals. Or his uncut, unkempt beard. The suddenly alien sound of his deep voice. Unbidden, visions of his grandfather's terrifying aura would visit him. And the mute silence the name of this "ogre" invoked. The petrified stare in his mother's anxious eyes on the only occasion she had allowed his grandfather's name to pass her lips.

The titular bear of Danish Nobel winner Henrik Pontoppidan's The White Bear is Thorkild Muller, a priest who has spent the bulk of his life preaching to indigenous Greenlanders. As a young man in Denmark, Thorkild is a wayward rascal who offers his services to the Danish in Greenland, thinking he'll basically fuck up his schooling so bad they'll never actually put him in a parish, but as it turns out, he's underestimated the inevitability of bureaucracy. He's a poor and talentless priest, but there comes a moment when he decides to toss away the proprieties of Danish civilization to live among, and like, the Greenlanders, even taking a wife among them. When he returns, as an old man, to Denmark, he has gained fervor and intellect, and even becomes popular among regular parishioners. But he's too wild for the Danish church, who essentially chase him back to Greenland. It's a slim, almost parable-like story, that pokes fun at a buttoned-up Danish culture and suggests that what the Danes perceive as Indigenous "wildness" may represent a truer and more genuine religion.

I'm a sucker for stories about the Arctic, and about Indigenous peoples, but I actually preferred the other novella in this small duo. Titled "The Rearguard," it focuses on a recently married Danish couple living in Rome, Jorgen and Ursula. Jorgen is a notorious painter working in the school of social realism, and Ursula is drawn to him because she admires both his talent and his passion, though she herself is the daughter of an bureaucrat who represents nearly everything that Jorgen despises. Like the young Thorkild of "The White Bear," Jorgen's red hair represents his fiery idiosyncrasy, and the reader has some sympathy with Jorgen's enthusiasm for tearing down the pieties of civil society in favor of a socialist utopia. But, like many would-be revolutionaries, Jorgen turns out to be a total boor. He can't go anywhere without making a scene; he chews out his fellow painters for their violations of his own orthodoxies. Ursula, too, often bears the brunt of his overflow of passion and vitriol; also like many would-be revolutionaries, he makes few distinctions among his targets, and the young marriage founders as it's just beginning. I found this the stronger of the two novellas because Jorgen is a really well-done character--Pontoppidan captures his proud, irascible voice in a way that made it more memorable.

OK, so I'm going to start keeping track of the Nobel Prize winners I've read. With the addition of Pontoppidan, I've read 59/122, so not quite half. I probably won't read them all, but maybe it'll be a nice way of discovering some new things.

Duplex by Kathryn Davis

In a contact dream the dreamer's mind got swallowed by the mind of another dreamer, usually someone who lived in close proximity though not in the same house; this phenomenon occurred most often in the very young or the mentally ill, whose brains lacked such walls as the mature brain erected over time, brick after brick of old passwords, the secret location of a soul, schoolmates' birthdays, how to sew a dress, how to recognize a prime number. People living in duplexes were especially susceptible, which was why the sorcerer had bought such an isolated house in the first place.

Kathryn Davis' Duplex opens on a sunny suburban street: Miss Vicks looks out on a street of cars, lawns, children playing, some of whom, like Mary, are in her class at elementary school. It's all a very ordinary scene, perhaps pointedly over-ordinary, and then a car drives by, and Miss Vicks recognizes its driver as the sorcerer who is called Body-without-soul. Also, he is her boyfriend. From there, the novel explodes, because anything is possible: the neighbors across the street, we learn, are robots. The youngest (?) robot, Cindy XA, is a friend of Mary's, when she isn't in her true form, which is the size and shape of a needle. Mary's childhood sweetheart Eddie has disappeared; later we discover that he has sold his soul to Body-without-soul (who has always, for obvious reasons, coveted it) in order to become a baseball star. And across the wall of the duplex, Mary and Miss Vicks share their dreams. Is this why Body-without-soul pursues Mary, as he pursued Miss Vicks, as she begins to grow older?

Needless to say, Duplex is a strange book. One of the strangest things about it, and one if its great strengths, is how it staggers forward in time. Miss Vicks grows old, dies, and Mary follows her, having had a daughter of her own. Death stalks these characters, as it does all of us, I suppose, but in each case death has a strange appearance. For Miss Vicks, for example, it involves following a wall on horseback, the other side of which can be seen but not penetrated, and ending up in a strange underground room. But Davis is canny about signifying to us exactly where and when we are; time moves forward in leaps and bounds, but she never quite signifies how far along its track we've moved. I suppose that's how aging is: we don't really notice it until a detail pops up to inform us that time has kept on passing.

Since reading Labrador, I have read several of Davis' novels, some of which I liked (Versailles, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf) and some which I really didn't get (The Thin Place, The Walking Tour). I feel like I've been chasing the high of Labrador all that time, and Duplex is far and away the closest I've gotten, though it doesn't (how could it) surpass that novel that first blew me away. It's so strange, so baffling and difficult to penetrate, that it's hard even to talk about. And yet, beneath the surface, it seems to me to resonate profoundly with much that is human: growing up, being initiated into sex and love, chasing one's ambitions, and then growing old and dying. Cindy XA looks upon these human acts with a bemused and disdainful eye, and the book does too, perhaps, as if saying: human life, isn't it all just a little strange?