Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and Depraved of Chornobyl by Markiyan Kamysh

The Dead City. Dead, oh yes,. Twice dead. For the second time, with the emergence of thousands of photos and the shitty lines of official tours. Bored hipsters shot Prypyat dead with their expensive cameras; rich girls from the capital soiled the rotten couches with their tattooed backs and mapped every nook of the terra incognita on Instagram. The sense of mystery has been lost; it has escaped, vanished in the web. The aura of mysticism was scattered like ash in all directions, flying through the Internet byways to distant foreign lands. After that, abandoned apartments can’t be scary.

I’m not sure what I expected from this book, exactly. Based on the title, I’d anticipated a traditional travelogue, where a guy goes someplace unfamiliar, meets some people, talks to them, writes a little about the history of such and such a place, tells about some of their experiences, finds a good place to wrap it up, and sends in the manuscript. 

In fact, Kamysh’s book is almost the exact opposite. Kamysh is intimately familiar with Chornobyl, ”the Zone”. His father was a liquidator, one of the men who dealt with the fallout from the Chornobyl explosion, and Kamysh himself has spent large swathes of his adult life making trips in and out of the Zone, which is illegal, camping in abandoned houses, having romantic rendezvous in rotting villages, drinking irradiated water, spending time with the weirdos and degenerates who populate the Zone. There’s very little third person dialogue; Kamysh generally narrates his encounters himself, from the police to the tourists who don’t know what they’re getting into, to the taxi driver who made the 3 hour drive to the edge of the Zone until the shuttle came. There’s not much history here either, not much talk about a pre-explosion Zone.

What we’re left with is a very personal work, punkish and blase about how fucked up it is to visit the Zone over and over, a recounting of Kamysh’s various misadventures that at first seems to come from a defensive posture but which eventually reveals itself to be more complex, and more concrete. Kamysh’s identity is tied up with the Zone in ways he can’t fully explain himself. At times, he talks about it like an addiction, about the cycle of visiting, exploring, getting lost in the snow or a flood or cornered by wolves, surviving, heading home and thinking “never again” and then finding himself sitting in his apartment a week later, trying to schedule another trip. Like an addict, Kamysh seeks out the next high, taking less supplies, heading further in, staying longer. He’s also pretty sure it’s going to kill him, writing about a future where he and the other Zone addicts sit together in a cancer ward, swapping stories.

Ultimately though, the sadness that pervades the book isn’t about the addiction--which, in spite of what I wrote above, actually seems like a precious and good thing in Kamysh’s telling--but about a loss of the past, a loss both physical, as the Zone is slowly decimated by nature and by the government, and metaphysical, as the Zone is transformed from a terrifying mystery to a commodified tourist trap. I couldn’t help but think of DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America, as the Zone turns into a decontextualized postcard. And what happens to the people who need the Zone, who identify a part of themselves with it? Perhaps like the utopian city it once represented, they’re doomed to be lost, destroyed by forces beyond their control. But perhaps not entirely. Kamysh writes,  as he lights a candle in an abandoned church:

Our memories of our loved ones who are no longer with us fly away with its smoke--up to the church dome, to the bees and higher, through the cracks in the dome. The smoke will fly up into the sky; tears will drop on the hardwood floor. The candle will burn out, and I’ll forget everything. Farewell.

This church is dear to me, and I believe that out of all the things in the Zone, it’s the only one with a future, with its patch of hope, sentimentality, and infinitely dazzling sunrays rushing in every morning when I open the heavy gate and light fills a semi-dark vestibule.

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning, our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and ear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride.

David is an American in Paris: not rich, perhaps, but of the kind of class where it's typical to take the Grand Tour before returning to the States to begin a real life. He has a girlfriend, Hella, who's off in Spain thinking things over, leaving David to his friends, which consist mostly of older gay libertines. David himself once had an affair with a boy, but it left him so confused and ashamed he cut his then-friend from his life, and though he insists to men like Jacques and Guillaume that he is straight, a young bartender named Giovanni catches his eye, and their instant attraction puts the lie to all of David's claims. David begins a passionate affair with tempestuous Giovanni, even moving into his room, a dirty closet on the edge of Paris. The room becomes the novel's controlling symbol, a space of intense intimacy, beset by chaos, cut off from the world.

When Giovanni's Room begins, the affair has already ended, and David is waiting in the south of France to hear about Giovanni's execution by guillotine. Until the novel's end, we don't know what it is Giovanni has done to deserve this fate, but we understand it has something to do with David's ultimate rejection and abandonment of him. Of course, Giovanni's room is not the world, and David has a life, and a girlfriend, then fiancee, outside of it. But it's only in Giovanni's room that David can truly be real, that "real world" outside is really a falsehood, whether David is able to admit it to himself or not. Giovanni's Room is a novel about repression, and the power the social world has even over our most inner lives. Yes, David betrays Giovanni--but what world is possible where David does not? Jacques, David's older gay friend, and even sinister bar-owner Guillaume, give a glimpse of David's future, one in which he's not able to accept his sexuality until it's soured and curdled inside of him.

It took me a long time to get to Giovanni's Room. I read Go Tell It On the Mountain, which I didn't like: too abstract, too melodramatic, too internal. I thought, well, he must be one of those guys that's an amazing essayist who doesn't write fiction very well. So I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Giovanni's Room. Baldwin's long, stacked sentences bring out a lyric beauty in David's devastation, and the characters, Giovanni especially, are lively and vivid. There's a slightly antiquated quality to it that reminds me of an author I can't quite identify. At times I thought it was Fitzgerald, and at other times Forster--not even because of the gay-love-across-class-lines plot that resembles that of Forster's own doomed Maurice.

To have published a book like Giovanni's Room in 1956 seems like an act of suicide, or madness. Perhaps we've come some way since then. But it's hard not to wonder, in 2023, how many Davids are out there, how many Giovannis, gay or perhaps trans women and men, whose lives are contained in their little rooms because there's no place for them.

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Stand against that tree, he said, a rowan not much taller than me, the trunk against which I leant my forehead no wider than my face, and as his arm rose and swung and rose again, as the belt sang through the sunny air, I thought hard about the tree between my hands, about the cells in its leaves photosynthesizing the afternoon sun, about the berries ripening hour by hour, the impalpable pulse of sap under my palms, the reach of roots below my feet and deep into the earth. It went on longer than usual, as if the open air invigorated him, as if he liked the setting. I thought about the leather of his belt, the animal from whose skin it was made, about the sensations that skin had known before the fear and pain of the end. Itching, scratching, wind and rain and sun. About the flaying, the tanning. Pick up those rabbits, he said when he had finished, and don't let me ever catch you stripping again, lying around naked liked that, waiting for one of those lads, I'd say, and don't you imagine I won't do this as often as it takes, as long as you're living under my roof you'll behave yourself or else, do you understand.

Silvie, her father, and her mother are participating in an archeological experiment: they are living as ancient Britons did in rural Northumberland. They wear uncomfortable tunics, sleep in a communal hot, and eat only what they can hunt or forage. There are others taking part, grad students in archeology and their professor. Silvie's father is a bus driver, but he knows as much or more about the ancient Britons than any of them; he has inveigled his way into the experiment, somehow, and relishes it more than any. For him, it is a return to a simpler way of living that has been lost, supplanted by modern trash, modern mores. He rules his wife and daughter strictly and violently; Iron Age women who did not do as the should--foraging, washing, or simply heeding their male leaders--would not live long. While none of the other participants are watching, he beats Silvie cruelly, as he does at home.

Silvie, as many victims of abuse do, rationalizes her father's behavior. She, too, is knowledgeable about plants, can make fires and find her way in a forest; her father has after all taught her such self-sufficiency. But she soon comes to identify with bog people, the mummified corpses of Iron Age Britons sacrificed for unclear purposes to the bog's propitiatory powers They are often young women, who are unearthed with their eyes still blindfolded and their hands still tied, even after two thousand years. Their image moves from the symbolic to the literal: toward the end of the novella, Silvie's father and the professor persuade her to let them tie her up and perform a sacrifice. It's just pretend, they say, an exercise, to explore what the ancient Britons might have been experiencing, but as Silvie has seen, such games can quickly become serious.

Here's one truth I see at the heart of Ghost Wall: those RETVRN-type trads you see all over the internet conceal an atavistic need for violence and control. Those who fetishize the past often do so not out of a desire for simplicity, but a yearning for what they consider lost structures of hierarchical control. Silvie's father is violent and cruel, and longs for a social context that will excuse, even justify, his violence. Against the forces of atavism is Mollie, a student on whom Silvie nurses a painful crush. (Silvie's dad's assumption that, when he discovers her bathing naked in a creek, she is waiting for one of the male students betrays a blinkered sense of possibility that reveals the rigidity of his mind.) Mollie sneaks out at night to see boys in town, eat ice cream, or just take a shower. It's Mollie that presses Silvie to recognize that her father is mistreating her, Mollie who is the image of the modern world, which, for all its faults, has at least embraced the idea that physical abuse is morally outrageous.

Ghost Wall asks: when we say things used to be better, what do we really mean? What are we refusing when we refuse to live in the modern world? Few of us, perhaps, go back as far as the Celts and the Picts, but attitudes like Silvie's dad's are not uncommon. Ghost Wall is even sympathetic to such thinking--without it, it's impossible to imagine Silvie's empathy with the luckless victims of the bog--but it shows the dangerous rottenness of those who only dream of turning back the clock.

Cronopios and Famas by Julio Cortazar

Death stands there in the background, but don't be afraid. Hold the watch down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that burgeon the air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell of bread.

What did you expect, what more do you want? Quickly strap it to your wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the watch's veins, cankering the cold blood and its tiny rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant.

Julio Cortazar's pieces collected under the title "The Instruction Manual" are one of my favorite creative writing prompts. Like "How to Wind a Watch" above, they employ the structures of an instruction manual with mordant humor and the language of profound things. Sometimes they are extended jokes, like "How to Climb a Staircase"; sometimes, like "How to Kill Ants in Rome," they are absurdist vignettes. Students pick up quickly on how Cortazar uses the structure to ground his more fantastical images in the everyday, and they're able to make passing imitations without much study--which I think is a testament to how well the gimmick works. But until now, I'd never read the collection, Cronopios and Famas, of which "The Instruction Manual" is a part.

Cronopios has four parts; "The Instruction Manual" is first. It's followed by "Unusual Occupations," a series of scenes about a strange family who build a gallows in their yard, take over the post office and tar and feather the mail, keep a tiger. The third, "Unstable Stuff," is a hodge-podge of unrelated shorts, which showcase Cortazar at his most experimental. Some work, and others are--rarely--a little too one-note.

The final section is the title section, "Cronopios and Famas," about the title--people? Figures? Animals? Cortazar never stops to define the neologisms; we learn little about what they refer to except that cronopios tend to be wet, and green. By their interactions we begin to learn their characters: the famas are outgoing and rigid, the cronopios hapless but sensitive. They are joined by a third group, the cruel esperanzas, doing things like getting mad at famas for dancing in one way rather than another. What emerges from these pieces is a sense of a caste system, in which people or things are slotted into narrow social roles by their disposition; there are echoes, perhaps, of the racial classifications you see in fantasy novels--proud elves, grumpy dwarves, wise wizards.

One might build a considerable interpretive apparatus on the backs of these short tales of cronopios and famas--something about social conditioning, or human psychology, or something like that. But to do that would risk missing how fun these stories are, how playfully game-like an uninhibited. It might turn you into a fama--or worse, an esperanza.

Ice by Anna Kavan

I thought of the ice moving across the world, casting its shadow of creeping death. Ice cliffs boomed in my dreams, indescribable explosions thundered and boomed, icebergs crashed, hurled huge boulders into the sky like rockets. Dazzling ice stars bombarded the world with rays, which splintered and penetrated the earth, filling earth's core with their deadly coldness, reinforcing the cold of the advancing ice. And always, on the surface, the indestructible ice-mass was moving forward, implacably destroying all life. I felt a fearful sense of pressure and urgency, there was no time to lose, I was wasting time; it was a race between me and the ice.

It would flatten Anna Kavan's sci-fi-dreamscape Ice, and rob it of its power, to summarize it, so don't read this paragraph: against the backdrop of worldwide war and a rapidly freezing world, an unnamed man searches for an unnamed girl. He describes her as fragile and pale; he worries that she will be unable to fend for herself in the ruined world, and indeed she is described as having a learned helplessness. She's at the mercy of a sinister figure called the warden, who looms large in the planet's war, and who is possessive as the narrator is of her. He races to find her, and does, and then lets her go again, only for the cycle to begin again.

Like I said, that summary entirely fails to suggest the experience of reading Ice. It has been called a science fiction book, but it seems more to me to make gestures toward science fiction: the rapidly advancing ice sheet that crushes everything in it path emerges not from the logic of science but the logic of dreams. Like in dreams, knowledge is transmitted without medium; the narrator doesn't need to pass by the ice sheet to see it, or even learn about it, he only needs to tell us about it--and war and social upheaval get the same treatment.

The point-of-view changes without notice or fanfare; from the narrator's to the warden's to an omniscient third person's. Kavan deftly uses these POV shifts to suggest an overlap between the narrator and the warden, who are sometimes enemies and sometimes very possibly the same person. Even basic storytelling logic is interrupted: in several scenes, the girl dies, and in the next the narrator is hunting for her again. Are these merely dreams or visions? It's a trick question, the whole book is a dream, the whole book is a vision. Ice is a book that should not work, and it's greatest achievement is that it does. It's one of those books that makes you think, I didn't know you could do that. It flies in the face of every convention, and attempts to slot it into genre are sure to fail. 

It seems to me that Ice speaks to us today with a kind of prophetic vision of climate change. Here the temperature is going down, not up, but the novel captures the kind of hallucinatory existence that must accompany the end of the world. Like Joy Williams' Harrow, it's a book that understands old forms will never be able to tell the story of the world's end. And there's something familiar in the ambiguous nature of the narrator, who sometimes positions himself as the girl's savior and sometimes as her torturer, himself as implacable and unstoppable as that sheet of ice. He is implicated with it: "I could not remain isolated from the rest of the world," he writes, "I had to take an active part in whatever was going on." His dogged pursuit of the girl, too, speaks of the relentless patterns of abuse disguised as masculine care.

Some have said, apparently, that the novel is an allegory for Kavan's heroin addiction. Maybe so. I can see it in the book's hallucinatory cycles, and the fear of being pursued by something you can't fend off, or pursuing something you can't tear yourself away from. But addiction is such a private disaster, one that draws one inward, toward collapse. But such inward, psychological readings seem too small for Ice, which says quite plainly: the crushing ice is coming for everyone.

Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg

I don’t know how to explain why I feel more alone now. Maybe it was because we shared memories. Memories only he and I knew, even though we never spoke of them when we met. I realize now it didn’t matter that we didn’t talk about them. They were a presence in the hours we spent together at Cafe Canova, those oppressive, never ending hours. They weren’t happy memories because your father and I were never happy together. Even if we had been briefly and occasionally happy, everything got sullied, ripped up, and destroyed. But people don’t love each other only for happy memories. At a certain point in life, you realize that you just love the memories.

Like Waiting for Godot, Happiness as Such revolves around an absence, really a pair of absences--the physical absence of exiled son Michele and the metaphysical absence of the elusive happiness of the title. The main characters, like Michele’s mother Adriana in the excerpt above, try to articulate something about both absences, what they mean, what they look like, what it would mean if they were present. But the “as such” in the title is a guiding principle here--no one gets much closer than a facsimile of either, though sometimes it’s enough for them.

Michele, pursued by the authorities for his involvement in revolutionary activities, has left Italy, and in his wake his family--especially mother Adriana and sister Angelica--and his friends--maybe-baby-mama Mara and bestie-and-possibly-gay-lover Osvaldo--are working to clean up the mess he’s left behind. Much of the book is either epistolary, comprised of letters between those left in Italy and Michele, or dialogue. There’s no direct speech from Michele, but most of the other characters spend time conversing, often about where, exactly, Mara and her baby are going to stay, whether or not Osvaldo is gay and if he was Michele’s lover, and what, exactly, is going to be done with the property belonging to Adriana’s recently deceased husband, especially the unfinished tower that represents the ways the various relationships in the book have been left permanently unresolved by the father’s death and Michele’s absence.

Michele himself doesn’t come off so well, his political involvements facile and his actions directed only at what will bring him the most short-term happiness--that word again. He won’t come to his father’s funeral, won’t send more than cursory responses to his mother’s letters, won’t help Mara with the baby, won’t tell the family what to do with the tower which was actually bequeathed to him. Instead his letters are filled with excuses, evasions, grand statements of future plans that come to nothing, requests for pretentious books. He’s an infuriating character, made worse by the love that the closeted Osvaldo has for him, love that’s exploited so Michele’s every whim can be met.

In the end (SPOILER), Michele is killed during a protest in Bruges, cutting short all the stories being told here. The tower is sold, unfinished, to developers, and the people who’ve revolved around Michele find themselves unmoored, uncertain what to do next. But they talk, and talk, and talk. “You can get used to anything when there’s nothing else left.” Angelica says, and it’s easy to imagine these people moving on, recentering their lives on something besides the void that was Michelle.

Voices Made Night by Mia Couto

Suddenly, the ox exploded. It burst without so much as a moo. In the surrounding grass a rain of chunks and slices fell, as if the fruit and leaves of the ox. Its flesh turned into red butterflies. Its bones were scattered coins. Its horns were caught in some branches, swinging to and fro, imitating life in the invisibility of the wind.

One of my favorite stories from Mozambican writer Mia Couto's collection Voices Made Night is "The Girl with a Twisted Future": a poor man hears of a contortionist whose snake-like transformations attract gawkers from miles around, all willing to pay for the privilege of witnessing these oddities. The poor man instructs his daughter to begin practicing to be a contortionist, too; at night he straps her to a curved barrel so that her bones and spine will soften. It doesn't work, of course; the daughter becomes crippled and sick. When he brings her to see the contortionist's manager at last, he's told that contortionism is no longer the thing--what people want to see are steel teeth that can bite through anything. The poor man's schemes begin again, but his daughter's body is too ruined to match them.

The protagonist of Couto's stories are all like this poor man: dreamers made desperate for poverty, looking to make ends meet in absurd and uncanny ways. In "The Whales of Quissico," a man forsakes his life to go to the sea where he's been told beached whales will deposit whatever you wish for from their mouths. In "The Day Mabata-bata Exploded," an indentured cowherd runs from his boss because his herd's bull is exploded by the bird of lightning. In the first story, "The Fire," a man begins to dig his wife's grave before her death, because he's afraid he won't be able to afford a spade later, but the digging brings on an episode of fever that kills him instead. (The moments where he insists that his wife get in her grave before he dies, so that he can get his money's worth, speak to the viciousness poverty inculcates.)

Couto's stories have the air of fables or fairytales. Magical realism is often revealed as falsehoods: the storied whales are actually enemy submarines; the bird of lightning is a landmine. In "The Tale of the Two Who Returned From the Dead," two men who make their way back to their village after being carried away in a flood are informed that they cannot be accepted back into their village, because they have been declared legally dead and therefore must be ghosts. In "The Talking Raven's Last Warning," a raven tells people's fortunes, but only in a language its owner can hear. For Couto, magical realism is the language of poor men's dreams; impossible dreams that take impossible forms. Yet dreams have their power, too, as Couto shows in "The Ex-Future Priest and His Would-be Widow," about a woman who uses witchcraft to force her cold husband to please her sexually--though he can only do so while they are both dreaming.

These stories are small but powerful, and though they are quite fable-like, they avoid easy morals and clean lines; they eschew happy endings, and clear endings at all. It's easy to see why Couto's name comes up every year when Nobel Prize season rolls around. Among other things, these stories point toward the complex realities of a multiracial Mozambique, reeling from the history of Portuguese colonialism and the dictatorship of Salazar. I enjoyed them a lot.

With the addition of Mozambique, my "countries read" list is up to 75!

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

War disarms? War takes away hope and meaning, makes everything grey, and sucks life out of the city and the street, leaving nothing?

What do you mean? War is a great help for us. It provides us distraction from ourselves. It absolves us from seeing ourselves close up. It's been some time now that we've been peeking into ourselves through war only.

In one story from Ukrainian writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets' Lucky Breaks, "The Transformations," a woman named Olga makes things transform: a pot of kasha becomes a flower; a tablespoon becomes an Easter egg. Sometimes Olga transforms objects intentionally and sometimes by accident, sometimes her powers fail her. These transformations have something to do with Kyiv in the summer months, when it "empties out"; Kyiv, too, is liable to be transformed. Are Olga's transformations merely a kind of change, or a disappearance--what happened to the kasha and the tablespoon anyway? Are they gone, or merely different? Could Olga's transformations represent the power of war to transfigure and erase--the war that rages in the distant provinces of Donbas and Donetsk? Or might we read Olga's powers as a hopeful gesture, of an incipient ability to make the world into what one wishes?

As Brent noted in his review, Lucky Breaks is all about disappearances, about refugees. Women disappear from their jobs and then reappear later as if nothing is happened; they are taken away because they are found standing in the middle of street screaming. The grand motions of war and dispossession, for Beloruts, find expression in small things: the discarded umbrella that a woman chastises as if it were a person, the mitts of the witch who catches babies in them, and who works other kinds of evil magic on her small town. Nearly all of the characters are women, and they live small women's lives. They are cosmetologists and florists, and the pointed ordinariness of their lives is not erased by the emergence of small and fantastic things, curses and omens, bits of magical realism that reflect, perhaps, the strangeness of life during wartime.

To be honest, I didn't connect much with Lucky Breaks. I liked a few of the stories, like "The Transformations," and another about a perpetually sick woman who is unable to handle the stress of being suddenly and consistently well. Others were enigmatic, too shapeless or slight, to hold my attention, but if I'm telling the truth, I probably ought to have read them at a time when I was feeling less sleepy. The photographs that appear throughout its pages connected for me not at all. More knowledge of the specifics of the war in Ukraine might have helped, too, but there is still quite a power in seeing the familiar names of the nightly news--Kharkiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia--emerge as real places from which real people emerge, or disappear.

This is the first book I've ever read from Ukraine--which brings my "countries read" list up to 74.

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

How old was your brother?

Twenty-one.

Didnt he have girlfriends?

He tried. It never came to anything. I wasnt jealous. I wanted him to see other girls. I wanted him to see the truth of his situation.

That he was in love with you.

Yes. Bone of his bone. Too bad. We were like the last on earth. We could choose to join the beliefs and practices of the millions of dead beneath our feet or we could begin again. Did he really have to think about it? Why should I have no one? Why should he? I told him that I'd no way even to know if there was justice in my heart if I had no one to love and love me. You cannot credit yourself with a truth that has no resonance. Where is the reflection of your worth? And who will speak for you when you are dead?

Alicia Western is an outlier: a brilliant mathematician, a musician of genius--though not top ten in the world, sadly--and beautiful to boot. But her life is wrecked: bereft at the apparent loss of her brother, lying in a coma in France, she returns to Stella Maris, a mental institution in Wisconsin where she's committed herself twice before. It seems unlikely that it will be able to give her what she's looking for, even if she knew what that was. Stella Maris takes the form of a long dialogue between Alicia and a doctor at the institution.

Some of the things she tells him we know already, if we've read The Passenger, the "first" of the two companion novels McCarthy released last year: Alicia has a mathematical mind that rivals only that of super-genius Alexander Grothendieck, her idol; greater than even her brother, who is also a kind of genius. We know that she is in love with her brother, and feels no compunction about the incest taboo. We know that she is harried by visions of a Vaudevillian dwarf she calls the Thalidomide Kid and his band of performers. If we have read The Passenger, we know some things also that Alicia and Dr. Cohen do not yet know: that Alicia will commit suicide, that Bobby will wake up from his coma. But Stella Maris signals to the reader how badly Alicia's voice--clever, cruel, desperate--was missing from that other novel. We hear more about the mathematics that Bobby, turned deep sea salvager, only touches on, and we learn the depth of Alicia's despair.

All that math stuff, is there something to it, or is it only the rendition of a dilettante and wordcel? It certainly doesn't have the ring of mathematical perception that, say, Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World does, but as a dilettante of a much higher order I suppose it's not for me to say. (Does it keep McCarthy up at night to think his are the second and third best books of the past few years to feature Grothendieck?) For McCarthy, who recently wrote about the theory that language developed as a kind of parasite--a claim repeated by Alicia in Stella Maris--math is a way of searching for the elusive heart of reality, purer than words, and yet Alicia seems unconvinced that numbers are any more "real" than words.

After Godel, all mathematicians must face the reality that even mathematics cannot describe the world with accuracy and wholeness; what Stella Maris suggests, in typical McCarthy fashion, is that this is perhaps a lesser horror than what we would find if we were able to see and describe the world. Alicia tells Dr. Cohen of her childhood vision of "the Archatron," a malicious figure who lives in a realer world behind gates of falsehoods. (To call this gnostic, like much of McCarthy's worldview, is a cliche that remains frustratingly accurate.) She insists over and over that the Kid has his own kind of reality and does not emerge from within her; does he come from somewhere like the Archatron's realm?

It strikes me that Stella Maris is, on some level, about the relationship between genius and non-genius. McCarthy's spent the last couple decades hanging out among professional atom-smashers in New Mexico, and presumably he knows a thing or two about geniuses and what they are like. Alicia's knowledge is like a curse, partially because she perceives more than others, and partially because she understands the limits of her own perception better than anyone else can. She returns to Stella Maris looking for someone, perhaps, to talk to, and though Dr. Cohen is insightful and articulate--McCarthy does well to give him a life of his own, and make him something more than a Socratic prompter, though not much more--they both he will never wholly understand what he has to tell him. It's the reason she lusts for her brother; he's the only person in the world that shares her intellectual atmosphere. When they are together, she reasons, they have moved into a place beyond taboo, beyond society. The fact that he is a little less genius than she may account for his reluctance to follow her into that place. Though Stella Maris has not been all that well received, it seems to me that making Alicia's genius believable is no small authorial feat.

On its own, Stella Maris is--well, not bad, but unsatisfying. It's slight, underdone; constricted by the need to remain in dialogue. Sometimes, when Alicia stops talking like Alicia and starts talking like Cormac, the seams show. But at the same time, it's almost impossible to imagine it being incorporated into The Passenger without making it unbalanced or redundant. In the end, the double novel seems to have been the right choice. The Passenger speaks to Stella Maris and Stella Maris speaks back to The Passenger. I said I think that we'd be grappling with The Passenger for a long time, and while I can't say that I think Stella Maris is a great novel, I don't think it'll be jettisoned, because together the two books seem more to me than the sum of their wholes.

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

Here, where I live now, nobody understands any of it. There’s no one I can explain to what it’s like for the lights to go out every day in a small village. How we sat around as if inside a bunker, warning ourselves by a bonfire when we managed to light one. How we were next to one another knowing that, in time, all of us would go our separate ways. We huddled against each other by the fire, but later we forgot who we sat next to, what kind of children they were, what kind of people.

To be a refugee is to live in fear of disappearance. Writer after writer--Kundera, Hrabal, Sam--speak at length about the disappearances around them, whether people, buildings, ideals, even history itself. To be displaced is to be reshaped against your will, and the ultimate act of resistance, futile as it may be, is to resist this involuntary transformation, to build new shrines, find new ways to communicate, preserve the real history by scratching it into stone, if necessary.

Not all of the people in Belorusets’ book--is it a novel, a short story collection, an experimental work?--are refugees, but all of them have found themselves displaced, either in their home country of Ukraine or out of it, by the seemingly endless aggression of the empire-mad leaders of their neighbor, Russia. Of course, everyone is talking about Ukraine now, with the current invasion ongoing, but there aren’t many dates here, a sobering reminder that what’s happening now has happened before, and will likely happen again.

The residents “interviewed” here, in these short, fictional pieces, don’t talk much about the big picture, about the endless loop of siege and unsettling peace. They’re focused on preserving what they can, or at least surviving whatever’s next. An umbrella, a trip to the cosmetologist, a meal around a campfire, a romantic liaison (one that might include the unnamed interviewer). Some of the tales here are fanciful, like the woman who can change herself into a variety of inanimate objects, or the much-feared neighborhood witch, but most are grounded, first person narratives of normal people, mostly women, caught in the endless churn of displacement.

In addition to the interviews and the somewhat obscure framing story, there are also photographs here, images that chronicle a city in decay. There are two or three sequences, and it’s often difficult to know which series each photo belongs to, by design. Sometimes even what’s depicted isn’t entirely clear--is this one a man napping in a field or a dead body?--and in that sense, the photos serve both to disorient the reader and ambiguate the interviews themselves. While the introduction, written in character by the narrator, claims there is no connection between the stories and the images, the brain makes connections anyway, places this smiling man in this sad story, this dilapidated building in this park. The stories and images both refuse closure. They stand as a concrete witness to experiences, to times, that may well disappear, be rewritten, presented with the full realization of their inability to say just what they mean.