“What, after all, is a video game’s subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?”
Literary crack, and to think I doubted all the actually “What, after all, is a video game’s subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?”
Literary crack, and to think I doubted all the actually legitimate hype. Repent! Page after pretty addictive page, epitomising the paradisal idea of escapism for both reader and gamer as Zevin toys with themes of greatness and compromise, protean love and friendship, and as she throws Shakespeare and Nintendo in a blender and out comes the second-best smoothie in the world, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” also achieved for me the irony of obliterating all outside time except the blissful present in which I was ensconced, cocooned, inextricably attached to the personal and professional journeys—from their meteoric rise to tragic fall—of Sam and Sadie and Marx, three so-called friends who become awkward business partners in game design and development, but whose complicated love for each other, particularly between the former two ever since their childhood encounter in a hospital gaming room, provides a steady supply of wonderful angst throughout this novel that may or may not have forever altered my brain chemistry.
Zevin’s garnered enough superlatives that it’s more interesting to consider why others mightn’t’ve vibed as much with her book. Reasons run the whole critical gamut from boring to pretentious, woke to Zionist. Another reason: that it’s conventional, which I would argue is less a cause for complaint than a net positive because in the wake of Bernhard and McCarthy, conventional is exactly what you need to foster psychological recovery. Parts that I thought were unexpectedly hilarious, with Sadie’s clearly facetious descriptions of her problematic lover from his “hirsute arms” to his “cylindrical chamber of blood sponges,” others have singled out as unforgivably bad writing. It’s not that serious. Others might pull a face upon learning of its gaming component. Disclaimer: I’m not really a gamer either, with my last playthrough eons ago being “Pokémon SoulSilver.” But here might be Zevin’s masterstroke responsible for such mass appeal: clarifying that natural alliance between gamers and readers in their mutual desire for good stories....more
“It’ll take you a moment to get your bearings. Especially in a blizzard.”
By way of a quasi-nonsequitous preamble, what would you say is the best part “It’ll take you a moment to get your bearings. Especially in a blizzard.”
By way of a quasi-nonsequitous preamble, what would you say is the best part of a sandwich? the unsubtractable factor? Some might say the fillings, others whatever sauce of choice. In “The Netanyahus,” Joshua Cohen makes the strongest paratextual case yet for the bread. Hear me out. This Pulitzer-winning novel, and ultimately well-deserved—you can even pinpoint the exact page number (234) that in an explosive literary chutzpah must have clinched the final if vaguely self-congratulatory judgment—opens with a dedication to the late Harold Bloom, a titanic name to cause traumatised flashbacks for liberal arts students the world over, before the intriguing introduction of Ruben Blum, whose homonymal connection to the real-life Bloom soon completely escaped me until the last pages, and whose distinctive voice—pedantic, self-deprecatory, long-sufferingly hilarious—wastes no time in soapboxing (of course internally, his menschish assimilation approaching outright self-erasure) about history, academia, and Jewishness.
At Corbin College, the fictive doppelgänger of Cornell, Blum quietly survives as “the first Jew in the whole entire school—faculty, and as far as [he] could tell, student-body included,” specialising in the oddly compelling subject of taxation studies and dreaming “thoughts of tenure.” That is, until of all people he’s asked to supervise the incoming Benzion Netanyahu, an exiled radical Israeli scholar for whom Blum finds himself on the hiring as well as the hesitant one-man or -Jewish welcoming committee. What follows is really “An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” the wordy as well as helpfully synoptic subtitle for this priceless campus novel-cum-farcical family drama-cum-grand political satire, in which fact and fiction flickers in and out of the other as, with Benzion unexpectedly accompanied by his ungovernably rowdy family, Cohen atomises the dynastic allure of the Netanyahus, forcing into inglorious relief their chaotic banality that threatens to dismantle Blum’s snowy sanctum sanctorum.
“The Netanyahus,” as my first Cohen, already has me besotted. Awed, even despite what I felt to be a middling second half due to an almost unbearable case of avalanchic absurdity, which could be an intentional byproduct of Cohen’s demythologising process when it comes to writing about this “Very Famous Family.” Nevertheless: still overflowing with annotative declarations of love for his style, his almighty command of language that poses such an interesting study in formal contrast, in ever-oscillating and -hypnotising magnitude between the Bernhardian sublime, given over on occasion to whole pages’ worth of brainy monologuing whether about the distinction between theological and historical time or the litany of truly wild conspiracy theories masquerading as academic theses; and the very small at the phrasal level where Cohen would speak of “knowing [something] at some cthonic lake-depth,” define dreams as “prophecy yet unmanifest,” or describe “the immaculacy of [a nun’s] habit.” And by way of atmosphere, Cohen is always situating us in snow, as when Blum looks upon “the white page of lawn,” or the “snowshrouded trash.”
Where does the sandwich come in, my Chekhov’s metaphor? After all the Netanyahuian hijinks—after the damaged borrowed car, the soiled diaper, and the smashed television set, buttressed by a uncomfortably radical reinterpretation of the Spanish Inquisition—it’s easy amid all these general shenanigans to forget about the whole Bloomian framework of “The Netanyahus,” that dedication a distant memory, Cohen’s Ariadne's thread back to the real world buried under so much snow that I was even guiltily bored during later parts of the novel. But twice the pride—in my foolish skepticism—now double the fall—harder into my now-unquestioned love for Cohen’s genius, having engineered this volte-face in literally the last six pages, in the acknowledgments. Of such eleventh-hour saving graces, I remember only books like McEwan’s “Atonement” and Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” and now Cohen’s novel-cum-real life ever accomplishing for me, to powerful effect. Next order of business: find a copy of “Witz,” a 817-page literary monstrosity. L’chaim!...more
“You could give depth to the shallow, texture to the flat, and meaning to the banal.”
Emerging from an unexpected breakWinner for the Booker Prize 2022
“You could give depth to the shallow, texture to the flat, and meaning to the banal.”
Emerging from an unexpected break in posting due to general work-related exhaustion—sleeping in proving far more attractive on my days off than corralling my two remaining brain cells into writing stuff—but doing so now on account of the incandescent lunar if not pandemoniac brilliance of this book. Sri Lankan history, mired in blood and brutality, takes an irreverent turn in Shehan Karunatilaka’s surrealist reimagining swarming with government death squads, ghosts with unfinished business, gay crimes. Breathtaking, batshit, yet in the end tenderesthearted, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” or “Seven Moons” hereinafter, dumps right in the afterlife the reader more or less possessed via second-person address by our titular character—“war photographer, gambler and closet gay”—recently disappeared under sketchy circumstances, and given the titular number of moons to make reluctant preparations for his entry into what’s called “the Light,” which is “Whatever You Need It To Be” (capitalisation his).
What fantastically ensues, as Maali races against time to contact via phantom whispers his grieving loved ones re a secret stash of his photos exposing political corruption, is nothing less than an act of pure mesmerism, as Karunatilaka switches with psychic ease between the different registers whether here the comedic (“He was still the perfect ten, on a scale of one to thirteen”), or thither the horrific as the rug of sanitised history is snatched away to reveal fresh traumas. The way that I, moonstruck, had to hug my copy of “Seven Moons” after all was said and done, marvelling unseeingly at the perfection of those stupendous, those soulful closing pages, which against all initial deep doubts—and I did nurse several, in parts where the writing seemed to be getting too away from itself, Karunatilaka’s runaway imagination become an absolute menace—did somehow manage to stick the cleanest landing, with novel comment on national mythopoeia, purgatorial desire, the worth of a life on “this savage isle, this godless planet, this dying sun, and this snoring galaxy.” What sublimity!...more
“Treacle Walker turned the pages of the comic. ‘It has humour,’ he said. ‘A nice wit. Charming vernacular. Ah.’”
“Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
“Treacle Walker turned the pages of the comic. ‘It has humour,’ he said. ‘A nice wit. Charming vernacular. Ah.’”
“Daft,” as lone Joe would say. If “time is ignorance”—Carlo Rovelli’s words the epigraph to this book, this literary bender from Alan Garner—then my time spent in the inarticulably strange company of “Treacle Walker” is less an exercise in simple, pleasurable reading than that in compounding one’s own eternal ignorance, which retains its own special kind of pleasure. As formally accomplished as six-hundred- to thousand-pagers may be, so too are small books such as Garner’s technical marvels in their own right, coming to 152 pages though managing superheroically, without tiresome exposition, to cover whole swathes of local history and myths far beyond this ken. An otherworldly quality alights on every page, evincing somehow an aspect of timelessness in this oddball of a story, a ragbag of autobiography, folklore, and wordplay all impossibly cohering into an unusual pseudo-coming-of-age tale, whose full emotional impact arrives on the penultimate page to atomise all my initial skepticism.
Playful and elemental, surreal and bittersweet, “Treacle Walker” seems surrounded by an untouchable Carrollian whimsy, encased in an impenetrable hermeneutic circle. The confusion is constant, as is the peep of delight, on account of the titular Treacle Walker, who can heal all things “save jealousy”, and Thin Amren the bog-man, both of whose speech seeming to take sadistic joy in eschewing all clarity, in embracing riddles. Much sympathy we can’t help but feel for young Joseph Coppock, in his relatable dumbfoundment. Most words and sentences (“the outline of a horse” on the stone; “Axis mundi”) feel to the mind’s tentative touch pregnant with manifold significance, weighty with elusive meaning so that I, uncontented to let lie the sleeping references, had to chase up the origins of each, though eventually fell into Garner’s offbeat narrative rhythms and musings about perception and being, language and reality, couched in this celebration for apparent nonsense where there’s more than meets the undiscerning eye....more
Thrillifying. Yet another satire, but this one far punchier, far gutsier, in PercivShortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
"'History is a motherfucker.’”
Thrillifying. Yet another satire, but this one far punchier, far gutsier, in Percival Everett’s bold take on America’s original sin, on its perverse continuity, i.e. via lynchings and police shootings, though as noted by one character, the mysterious Mama Z, archiving the names of the dead, the murdered: “You should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings.” In “The Trees,” White bodies are suddenly dying inexplicable bloody deaths all over one town—soon the country entire—accompanied by the same dead Black body (“battered-beyondrecognition”; such interesting hyphenation), whose name will ring many a bell till bleak eternity, who keeps eluding the authorities to reappear at future crime scenes. Their families are distraught, paranoid; detectives are called in to investigate, scratch their heads. Not unlike bricks to the face, the overall monochrome feel of “The Trees,” its narrative unsubtlety, seems also a matter of historical necessity, a natural extension of the same unimaginative brutality visited upon Black, but also Asian and other bodies.
Such is the diseased spread of racism, the cancerous creep of its hatred, packed into that unforgivable slur which Everett deploys sparingly though extremely effectively—knocked me breathless each time—during various character interactions or rambling monologues whose weird humour I would be enjoying (“He was about to deliver the word of the Lawd God Jesus unto his children”) before the inevitable reminder. Provocative and unapologetic, serious and semi-cathartic, “The Trees” goes on the castrative offensive against past and present traumas, Everett painting the town blood-red as he straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, being very disarming gyrating with the former, before strangling the causes of the latter with barbed wire. Everett’s prose, favouring the dialogue, is lean, almost underdescriptive: the premise alone intrigues enough. No matter our time spent on categorising this novel—a ghost story? detective fiction? race revenge fantasy? Southern slapstick?—“The Trees” at least feels like one definite thing: a reckoning. What other book flourishes more audacity?...more
“I’m thinking in a rather vague and unstructured way about the bizarre concatenation of events that must have conspired to bring about you.”
Dumbfoundi“I’m thinking in a rather vague and unstructured way about the bizarre concatenation of events that must have conspired to bring about you.”
Dumbfounding. Was this a good choice for my first McCarthy? But how this one wrinkled my brain in all the ways from left to right, freewheeling and -careening through mathematics and metaphysics, insanity and genius, language and Lynchian characters of murky ontological status and italicised form—“some sort of spatiochemicalbiological misfit,” as said of the lead hallucination and/or bona fide person with flippers for hands—each sentence imbued with that old world quality and dark intrigue, every page weighed hellward with such heavy literary self-seriousness, wholly bare of postmodern frills amid McCarthy’s unhyphenated compound words, abandoned apostrophes, and sentence fragments galore here searching for the essence of the uncaring natural world (“The slow coil of the passing water”; “Immense spread of stars overhead in the cold”), there in barroom conversation after smoky barroom conversation philosophising without foreseeable end save the apocalyptic about taxes and belief, conspiracy and history, grief and lost beauty.
Unsurprising then that my own awe and hair-tearing bafflement, as with the novel’s pendulumic shift between dream and life, would “acquire an oddly merging egality” as I tried to keep hold of slippery narrative threads in this incomprehensibly weird story of salvage divers and dead sisters, government agents and atomic bombs, sustained by respective themes of incestuous love and historical guilt. What even is going on? “The ups with which I put.” Although accused of borderline plotlessness, which might be valid though ungenerous, there might be a story at the broken heart of this ambitious thing, this abomination of all conventional narrative sense, which I say to McCarthy’s unlimited credit because this is his world and, in addition to the titular actual passenger mysteriously missing from a plane crash and birds as symbolic passengers for some reason, we hapless same are all just living in it deeply though (at least for me) almost pleasurably perplexed and being none of his damn business whatsoever....more
Biblical. In both lethal heft and depth, “The Books of Jacob” marks an astounding achievement of historical research and sublime imagination, bathing Biblical. In both lethal heft and depth, “The Books of Jacob” marks an astounding achievement of historical research and sublime imagination, bathing in blinding light as of a comet’s tail those hitherto-shadowy parts of 18th-century Poland, spanning across baffled Europe from Turkey to Austria to Germany and converging on our titular false messiah. Through Jacob Frank’s cult of quasi-divine personality, Olga Tokarczuk—detail by devilish detail in Jennifer Croft’s robust translation, preserving somehow the beauty of national despair like the “mournful Polish light that leads to melancholy,” or even the hilarious wordplay of “Shorr-changed” (me being too easily amused)—amply deconstructs as being in a state of ever-eternal flux those notions of religion and politics, identity and belonging, language (here “characterized by polyglot commotion”) and narrative, all under the thematic umbrella of order and chaos “ever o’erhanging Busk” and beyond. This eye-watering ginormity, a study in mighty ambition and sheer kaleidoscopic reach, is almost exhaustive to the point of readerly exhaustion, being at times for me somewhat boring, though at other times just bewitching, as we flit dizzyingly from form to form, from the epistolary and poetry to hagiography and travelogue, from excoriating condemnation—of these Frankists, Shabbitarians (or “Shabbycharlatans!”), anti-Talmundists, what-have-you’s—to ebullient praise of their infallibly (vain)glorious leader, a hoot of a character given over to adult breastfeeding and very young wives. Just messianic things. Plethoric are the moving parts, with rabbis and priests, bishops and barons, scribes and spirits; with book-burning, bloodletting, betrayals; taking place at weddings, funerals, royal court, literal court, etc. Again, even if the execution might leave something to be desired—i.e., for a tighter story, though that may be impossible, if not rejected out of hand, with Tokarczuk’s conceptualisation of her epic project as a story of stories that justifies its narrative sprawl, alongside Croft’s translation rewarding my four months’ worth of commitment with the occasional weird delight like one description of God as “an enormous omnisensitive oyster”—well, you have to nevertheless admire that ambition; sit in it; bask in the shine of this pearl of quintessential historical fiction....more
Indescribably wacky, by spiral-eyed turns postcolonially utopic in Leone Ross’ Caribbean-flavoured fantasy of an archipelago of rambunctious Popisho, Indescribably wacky, by spiral-eyed turns postcolonially utopic in Leone Ross’ Caribbean-flavoured fantasy of an archipelago of rambunctious Popisho, unblinkingly sexual as on This One Sky Day vaginas (here called “pum-pums”) take unexplained leave of their owners, and magical to such a hyperspecific degree the powers (here “cors”) feel almost mundane, all of which audacious imagination far exceeding the point of probably causing a massive enough writer’s block for me that I took an unexpected hiatus from posting further reviews here or anywhere else almost as a singular result. How do you even follow that? Other, less dramatic reasons being: surviving Christmas retail season, wading through Yanagihara’s latest, moving house, general burnout, etc. Yet my creative slump, with its timing, may well attest favourably to Ross’ oh-so-bountiful counterpoint, i.e., with the unfurling of her butterfly-winged imagination so impossibly weird/provocative/hilarious/beautiful in its multicoloured dazzlement that anything I write about it’s bound to fall short of minimal coherence, that the only thing I might do to entice you to read it is waving if not throwing it at your face, breath bated pending your reactions. This is the kind of book you give to someone less as a thoughtful gift than a social experiment, as the ultimate test of your relationship via trial by sheer absurdity. Toeing the line between bafflingly brilliant and brilliantly baffling, it’s hard to even know which, this novel demands saintly patience not so much for Ross’ writing, already impressive in that freewheeling-through-skies, devil-may-care feel her deceptively easy words have, as for the apparent narrative chaos herein contoured, evoking Evaristo and James even as Ross acknowledges them in the final pages as fellow “comrades in this word-struggle,” her story being a sustained enchantment brimming over with actual okay-this-is-happening surreal wonder borne of ghosts and grieving cooks, secret lovers and radio announcers, politicians and prostitutes, somehow eventuating amid all these island shenanigans in a pretty cogent critique of race, class, and capitalism, with plenty thematic helpings of queerness and revolution....more
“The spring itself, which by now was advanced and perhaps to him, wherever he was, seemed a glorious season, for us was only a backdrop for anxiety an“The spring itself, which by now was advanced and perhaps to him, wherever he was, seemed a glorious season, for us was only a backdrop for anxiety and exhaustion.”
So much do I appreciate short, self-contained novels like this one from Elena Ferrante, the snap and crackle of whose writing I had a feeling (My Brilliant Friend having won me over in 2018) would be nothing short of reinvigorating. Each page enthralls with a captivating examination of the unraveling mind of a woman abandoned, already happening from the first sentence with Olga’s husband’s announcement he would be leaving her. A no-nonsense kind of narrative efficiency, without sacrificing profound truths or artful prose—as Ferrante considers how Olga’s “tangle of resentments, the sense of revenge, the need to test the humiliated power of [her] body were burning up any residue of good sense” (with the delectable nuance of the detail of “any residue”)—was something I needed after getting through a certain recent disappointment numbering at a overblown 589 pages, countered so handily by Ferrante’s far tauter and sharper-edged 188 with a much better story, ultimately what most every book should strive for.
And strove for it Ferrante sure did in “The Days of Abandonment,” touching so naturally upon ideas of temporary desire and discarded beauty, habitual thought and imaginary action, motherhood and madness, somehow all without a sense of effortfulness as she lays bare and raw the consequences of said abandonment. From the initial shock to denial, the desperate striving to understand and reanalyse first principles to the inevitable mental and social implosion, Ferrante seems to sit back, opting for observation over characterisation as she watches Olga trying to keep it together (the physical “it” of her home, the metaphorical one nothing less than her fractured sense of order and by extension of her own self), all while she contends with lizards, ants, telephone companies, weird neighbours, faulty doors, lecherous handymen, and her own children, whether it’s Gianni’s mysterious illness or Ilaria’s rebelliousness maddening enough to justify Olga’s resentment of her own motherhood.
These surface matters of story, masterfully embedded alongside fascinating minutiae of behaviour, are already so engrossing in and of themselves. There’s something very darkly comic about the spectacle—the “spectacle of collapse,” to quote Ferrante’s exquisite wording—of Olga, politeness replaced by profanity because what’s the point anymore, battling these things in a decidedly her-against-the-world kind of way, perceiving even the sunlight, typically beautiful, in terms of antagonism as “a maniacal work of the light.” But these narrative elements, each a demented romp, give way to a certain species of delight when they interlock so well as part of the larger picture, i.e., one of creeping insanity; but moreover when its owner is a writer, prone to brain-tingling overanalysis (worrying about incorrect grammatical tenses, the “leaks in meaning”) and graceful turns of phrase almost Salingerian: “his artificial imperiousness,” “affirmations of derailment, or speaking of how Olga “had to maintain judgment and the clarity of memory, they always go together, a binomial of health.”
There’s no adequately describing my love for this razor-sharpness of Ferrante’s writing, this sheer precision of language where, going off of pure though nebulous readerly instinct over any actual grasp of Italian, Ann Goldstein’s translation seems to unobtrusively complement. Swinging from the distance of analysis to the surprising viscerality of close-up description, from the intellectualisation of Olga’s despair to at one harrowing point observing her own psychological-that-might-as-well-be-literal defacement “revealing the viscid interior of head and throat.” And to think—that these events all resulted from that single act of Mario’s abandonment, that first sentence causing this furious cascade of consequences, in Ferrante’s purposefully flat writing at the beginning that with each crack in Olga’s civility takes on a note of acidity here, sexual profanity there, before resuming its general tone of repaved-over propriety. Ferrante’s words and sentences, even through translation, feel so self-assured that this novel is less to be read over tea than read with abandon....more
Praise be to this book, whose stylistic similarity of long, unbroken paragraphs sent me right back into the loving arms of Ducks, Newburyport, its remPraise be to this book, whose stylistic similarity of long, unbroken paragraphs sent me right back into the loving arms of Ducks, Newburyport, its remaining pages, almost the whole second half, having lately engaged my for-once-undivided attention. Next August will have big shoes to fill. But whereas Ellmann’s novel’s left me full of genuine joy, newly aware of a brighter glow in the world, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season couldn’t be any more tonally different. For all the relentless moral ugliness metastasising throughout the book, and what superstitious horrors there are as imagined by the characters almost paling in comparison to the atrocity of their actions, you almost have to admire Melchor’s single-minded drive and unblinking imagination, as her words rage around the fictional Mexican town of La Matosa. In the eye of this furious literary storm, drawn from a real-life case in Veracruz, lurks the faintly sinister aura seething around the case of a murdered woman, found floating in an irrigation canal with her decaying face a “dark mask seething under a myriad of black snakes, smiling.”
This is (or was) the Witch, to whom the women of La Matosa have traditionally if grudgingly turned in times of desperation, for “their lotions and potions”; and the direct culprit behind whose brutal murder matters less in Melchor’s view than the socioeconomical conditions which have led to it, and which may lead to still more murders, given the country’s unabating numbers of femicide. Melchor’s writing too, in Sophie Hughes’ potent translation from the Spanish, is less to be read lightly, from the privileged comfort of our couch or bed, than it is to be sucked in by, to be buried fucking alive in the sheer physical and emotional mass of her language. “Hurricane Season” reverses that rare occasion of our devouring of a good book, as we are now ourselves devoured by it, when the next neverending sentence or errant thought pushes us down maze after inescapable maze where our naive desire for meaning/truth/justice disintegrates over the annihilatory course of the novel, bestrewn with gruesome consequences of greed, homophobia, misogyny.
What is the nature of the Witch? the standing of women in this hypermasculine society? the long-since-normalised extremes to which they must resort for survival? and especially the relationship between said homophobia and misogyny? In five paroxysmal chapters, Melchor unravels these questions and then some, doing so through the psychologically exhaustive and exhausting perspectives of five vividly living and breathing people. The jealous Yesenia, whose sentences alternate disorientingly between fear and hatred. The self-hating Brando, whose forced masculinity reeks with the overpowering fumes of its own toxicity. The cowardly Munra, whose ableist pride and strategic passivity make a heady psychological cocktail. The quiet but persevering Norma, with probably my favourite chapter next to Brando’s for its rawest intensity, its Lynchian nightmarishness. The town of La Matosa, granted that place-as-character status, also gets its own chapter from whose collective consciousness, with its gossiping and speculating and qualifying and admiring and condemning, springs the mythology of the Witch, replete with rotten apples, potions, black cats.
As though a controlled explosion, “Hurricane Season” feels simultaneously calculated and chaotic. No accident that these five characters, here listed out of order in case of spoilers, progress from the outside in, i.e., towards that eye of this textual hurricane where the Witch’s murder happens in first-hand/-person: a pentagrammic structure, summoning not any literal demon save for the “searing pain that refuses to go away.” A full-body experience where I even developed a headache as a likely result, Melchor’s cyclonic prose overwhelms in its wave after destructive wave of nonstop text, which is corrosive and punishing with these characters’ burning (self-)hatreds, cannibalistic resentments, and revolting crimes described in uncompromising detail. And yet: an overall twisted poetry about it, even as a gut feeling, being nevertheless valid, is undeniable. Only appropriate, then, that Melchor should quote from Yeats’ “Easter, 1916” poem in an epigraph, with the description of a “terrible beauty” that her novel wears too well....more
“He thinks of the word ‘buboes’, its vaguely vegetal overtones, how its bulging sound mimics the thing it describes.”
Is there any denying the outsize “He thinks of the word ‘buboes’, its vaguely vegetal overtones, how its bulging sound mimics the thing it describes.”
Is there any denying the outsize literary influence of “Hamlet”? Little question of the non-rhetorical variety, too, of whether to believe or not to believe this when we see Stephen Dedalus holding stage here about its autobiographical origins or Don Gately and Hal Incandenza digging up a grave there for a very particular skull, to say nothing of its Disneyfication across an African savanna or Adam Sandler’s virtuosic delivery of that famous soliloquy for an academic decathlon. Points if you get all four right. Adding fuel to the fire, and what a spectacular fire it rages into by the end of this Promethean triumph of imagination, Hamnet feels culminative, very much conscious of the massive legacy of both text and author that O’Farrell transfigures into a sense of inevitability diffused throughout her novel. Resulting from this air of fatalism: awe after brief but momentous flashes of greatness-to-be for a certain playwright, but downright dread when it comes to his son.
“The boy, Hamnet, died in 1596, aged eleven.” So goes the historical note preceding his story, followed by the observation that his father wrote “Hamlet” some four years after. Despite vexed scholarship on the true inspiration for the play, whose possible folkloric background has been attributed to Scandinavian legend, O’Farrell embraces instead the creative license of fiction by taking the less-traveled road towards our doomed Danish prince: via his creator’s likewise doomed son. Futility, hopelessness, cherishing his every scene: hints of these feelings start to take shape the instant Hamnet opens the novel, crystallising when O’Farrell turns epidemiologist and traces in a singularly brilliant chapter the unstoppable flea-borne progress of the plague from Alexandria and Aleppo to Constantinople and, inevitably, Stratford-upon-Avon. Yet against this larger view of history, O’Farrell remembers to temper these grand moments with modest ones of humanity: from Agnes’ dauntless maternity and Judith’s sickliness to Susanna’s envy and Hamnet’s desperation.
And there is Shakespeare, more mythology than mere man, who envisions words washing over him in “an aural blur,” whose name O’Farrell coyly avoids mentioning. Mindful of him “who must be approached sideways, with caution, as with a restive horse,” she instead refers to this metaphorical horse variously as Eliza’s brother, Agnes’ husband, John’s “errant son.” Or Hamnet’s father, though a pretty absent one, busy as he is tutoring upper-class children, fighting with his father, and doing what he does best: writing. For with Shakespeare’s reputation looming large enough already, and bardolatrously praised everywhere, O’Farrell’s style of indirectness seems less an act of blasphemy than one of bold demythologisation, of deft humanisation effectively enhancing those glimpses Agnes divines of his future, lending them a still more cosmic significance. My goosebumps had goosebumps. All this would be impossible without Agnes, not only mother to their three children, but seemingly “mother to the whole town, the entire county,” giving off witchy vibes as she concocts potions, does clairvoyance, has a kestrel familiar.
Whether stereotypical or not, a common criticism I’ve seen for the book, this characterisation of Agnes at least probably fits the superstitious nature of Elizabethan society, but moreover makes more immersive O’Farrell’s fantastical moments where we teeter at the porous barrier between ephemeral life and inevitable death, between theatre and audience. O’Farrell’s language, also accused of being excessive, instead for me flows, soars, what-have-you’s, managing to feel appropriate in its Shakespearean context where an overenthusiasm for metaphor can be forgiven. But more than that, in the face of death “hovering in the shadows” the language feels insistently, defiantly alive—in its confidence as well as tentativeness, in its present tense and onomatopoeic “scuff-thud, scuff-thud” of feet or the “psht-psht-u-psht of milk jetting into the pail.” It is one thing to call “Hamnet” a (damn good) examination of grief, motherhood, history, and legacy, but another to say how viscerally, cathartically happy it left me....more
“‘Alfa, the world is big. I want to see it. The war is a chance to leave Gandiol. God willing, we will return safe and sound.’”
Intense. When it comes“‘Alfa, the world is big. I want to see it. The war is a chance to leave Gandiol. God willing, we will return safe and sound.’”
Intense. When it comes to war novels, which I don’t normally read outside of Heller, Pynchon, and Tolstoy—either go big or go home—it’s not a genre whose books I go out of my way to find. But since its fresh International Booker Prize, “At Night All Blood is Black” has had a certain irresistible je ne sais quoi, drawing me in like moth to flamethrower. The slimness of the book, making it seem more novella than novel, is nothing less than astonishing to me for so deftly managing the always-heavy subject matter of war in its psychological context. From the wet bleakness of the trenches to worse fates among the barbed wires, the raw viscerality of frontline violence to a grief-stricken disintegrating Black mind, David Diop locates in this impersonal theatre of war a keenly human voice both traumatised and long suppressed. Spectral traces haunt the fictionalised perspective of young Alfa Ndiaye, behind whom echo voices of other African soldiers under French colonisation, traditionally silenced in a forced collective amnesia under white history.
But how does this book stand on its own? transcend the conscious machinations of narrative to become a state of pure experience? By tunneling deep into Alfa’s battered psyche, its web of multiplying fissures like so many trenches, Diop develops such a thick outline of Alfa’s character, progressing with such liquid ease through his emotions from his horror and guilt to vengeance and even their total absence, that Alfa’s humanity feels distinct as he bonds with rare friends, regards the absurdity of war, dreams of home. Its loss, then, i.e., that of his humanity, comes with great tragedy in the grisly aftermath of the death of Mademba, his childhood friend/”more-than-brother”/war buddy, whose earlier merciful killing Alfa denied him. Thus unravels Alfa’s mind in its inexorable descent towards insanity, succumbing to if not embracing the inhumanity of his actions of severing and collecting German hands, in a series of incidents damned breathtaking in its mounting carnage.
Formally speaking, being where the real action lies, that aforesaid slimness of “At Night All Blood is Black” might be its most remarkable aspect for the creative restraint it puts Diop under, forcing him to make each paragraph, sentence, word count. Whereas longer novels’ve wasted whole pages saying little, Diop manages to wreak total emotional havoc through phrases as simple as “the perfumed letter” or “the blue smoke,” with both the precision and damage of the master artilleryman. His repetition: as relentless as machine-gun fire when applied with Pavlovian consistency to the gruesome details of war, brought into stark clarity by select metaphor; but also demonstrates the circular nature of madness. Divided into 15 chapters, in a compact-enough book at not even 150 pages, Diop’s writing seems to follow what I call the 10-page rule: introduce a character/idea, establish an emotional context/connection to Alfa, then utterly destroy that character/idea, somehow plausibly without exceeding those 10 pages. Yet Diop does that marvelously, from chapter to chapter, spinning out entire lives only to cut their threads.
Also can’t be overstated is the fascinating achievement of the novel as a collaborative effort between Diop and his translator, Anna Moschovakis. Diop even writes this process of translation into Alfa’s story: when Alfa’s interpreter, in his fear, must choose his translated words with care, lest the messenger be shot/eaten. Something strangely three-dimensional happens here when Diop, of French-Senegalese descent, is writing in French that approximates the linguistic rhythms of Wolof in Alfa’s thoughts, with Moschovakis’ English as the third uppermost layer. In her Booker interview, she provides a brilliant insight into the process, calling Alfa’s Wolof on its bottommost level a “ghost-language” that “both admits and resists mediation by the colonial languages of French and, now, English.” This book has it all, whether at the macro level with these deliberations of language or a targeted decolonisation of history, or the micro level with tender moments like the relationship between art and memory, or the longing of a son for his mother....more
“Today, though, he simply gazed at them without curiosity, not in the mood to analyze or conjecture, content to give sensation precedence over thought“Today, though, he simply gazed at them without curiosity, not in the mood to analyze or conjecture, content to give sensation precedence over thought as he sat there waiting for the train.”
Yet there is plenty of both, i.e., sensation and thought, as we sink into the daydreaming of this novel. Our perspective, obscured by subjectivity, is like “the scratched surface of the window on,” yes, “a train taking us somewhere else,” our first instance of this choice imagery that would inform the pleasant plotlessness, the unhurried meandering, of Anuk Arudpragasam’s Proustian sensibility set already into perpetual motion from his first paragraph spread alluringly over two pages, then his second over another two, and so on. A Passage North with the deceptive simplicity of its story about Krishan on his funeral-bound journey across Sri Lanka amid the blues of sky, the greens of foliage, the browns of dry paddy fields, the unchanging reds of his train—mesmerises instead with the technical complexity not of his language in and of itself, given the everyday quality to his words, but of his long, sinuous sentences, their “dense, trancelike clarity” exerting a strangely hypnotic pull not unlike the oversoothing rumbling of the train.
Staring out the window, we glimpse trees and villages passing by, yes, but also Krishan’s mental landscapes flitting past, where fleeting impressions of the outside world become secondary to an all-embracing curiosity alighting on higher ideas: the recontextualised concepts of beauty and freedom, the hairline distinction between desire and yearning, the superimposed nature of perception. Political prisoners, cloud messengers, and deities all lend this mellow novel its secret animation even as Krishan, externally, may be doing nothing more than going on walks, trying to read on trains, looking at someone. Such’s the transfixing expansiveness, the unselfconscious inner truthfulness, of Krishan’s thinking as well as the siren song of Arudpragasam’s writing carrying us from sentence to sentence, sustaining our enchantment, against the otherwise sobering backdrop of war and loss, love and guilt, politics and religion.
I finished this book earlier this month, though am today years old after realising how nowhere in “A Passage North” is there a single line of dialogue. Probably a mark against me as a reader, but also several points in Arudpragasam’s favour as a writer for managing to create a sense of eventful conversation even with the quasi-dialogue feel of Krishan remembering who said what (“Krishan asked how [Rani]’d fallen,” “Rani’s daughter replied that of course it had been an accident,” and so on). Story-wise, even if story seems anathema to Arudpragasam whose preference leans more towards cerebral atmosphere, the Rani in question refers to Krishan’s grandmother (Apamma)’s former caretaker, the news of whose death in the first chapter (of ten) obligates Krishan to take his “Passage North” to pay his respects. Structured into three parts, even their titles—“Message,” “Journey,” “Burning”—telegraph their contents, in a decidedly open-and-shut case of the destination mattering less than the journey in senses both geographical and figurative.
Because it’s too tantalising, albeit on-the-nose, not to link the titular “North” with that place of one’s consciousness, after ruminating at flowy length here on the politico-religious history of the region, there on the still-lingering effects of trauma represented by Rani, having lost both her sons in the war, Arudpragasam inevitably arrives at the connection: “that he’d been advancing not from the island’s south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches.” What strikes me about the scope of Krishan’s thinking, then, as he explores the notions of pride and the slow creep of mortality through Apamma; of activism and even queerness through Anjum; of grieving through Rani as its own kind of death, or at least a disengagement from life—what has me a little floored about the depth of his thoughts—is Arudpragasam’s choice of title. That it’s “A Passage North,” and not “The Passage North,” shows how this process of deep introspection is not unique to any one person, but a universal yet very individual experience, this realisation, still potent, being akin to that moving idea of sonder....more
Bewilderment—synonymous with confusion, discombobulation, etc. But who needs to be etymologically hip to know its archaic fo“Fierce as death is love.”
Bewilderment—synonymous with confusion, discombobulation, etc. But who needs to be etymologically hip to know its archaic form might concern the (heightened) state of wilderness, i.e., to “lead astray, lure into the wilds”? Be-wilder-ment: the lips parting then rounding with the tongue taking trips, here and there, to form the word expressing that thematic lodestar—as well as actual stars, in their infinite numbers—by which Richard Powers would navigate this fascinating paradox of a novel, whose human emotions approach the planetary, yet whose fantastic alien worlds, lovingly imagined, would hum in their almost-real and -microscopic detail. Scale awes as a conscious part of his style, a habitual bedazzlement where he would invite you to appreciate the very large ideas of, say, the Fermi paradox, which wonders at the existence of extraterrestrial life in such incomprehensible vastnesses as our hitherto-silent universe; and then to comfort us deeply with the very tiny when a butterfly would land on young Robin, “walk[ing] across his closed eyes before flying away.”
Beautiful image, to be sure, and to briefly swoon over as one does every time Powers elsewhere waxes dendrological, describing hiking and camping in such lush prose I could smell the petrichor, see the unpolluted starlight, feel the wetness of those “mossy boulders” both Theo and Robin would make their admiring way around, “and the world changed from damp cove hardwood into drier pine and oak.” Wilderness, in that original rejuvenating process of bewilderment, is where Theo takes his son, Robin, as a form of escape from a world hopelessly embroiled in power plays, seemingly past all points of no return. Nine years old, yet already so massivehearted, boundlessly curious, Robin is neurodivergent reminiscent of Christopher Boone, though with outbursts beyond seismic. He occupies the emotional core of “Bewilderment,” whose bedevilments range from politicians to teachers, doctors to social workers, in a perhaps very simple them-versus-the-world position that Theo takes about raising Robin alone, yet also more broadly against the self-beclowning human race.
As my first Powers, “Bewilderment” is again a true paradox, not only for dealing with those astrobiological ones, from Fermi to Olbers’, as part of Theo’s profession that makes this novel read delightfully if all too passingly as a campus novel when he teaches a class on these never-not-mesmerising topics, leading to sentences about Theo’s supercomputer producing “Gaian melodies, unfolding in time,” or the bubbling primordial soup of “the molten Hadean Earth.” The science communication, noncondenscendingly delivered when Theo would get into his more cosmically sweeping moods, is this novel’s true bewitchment, and almost makes me wish Powers had gone full non-fiction instead. It’s why I stayed up, those eons ago, till the dead of night absorbing Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything as he hops daintily from paleontology to quantum mechanics to geology; or some years later savouring the morbidly entertaining Spillover from David Quammen, who writes so cinematically on zoonotic diseases, who contextualises them as the screenwriter par excellence.
Because fiction—having skimmed “The Overstory” and had the opposite reaction from amazement—doesn’t seem to be in Powers’ wheelhouse, or at least too comfortable in it, “Bewilderment” can read glaringly surface-level when it comes to plot and character, the majority of which latter Powers seldom develops beyond their cardboard origins. A kind of belaboring of the title, peppering in similar words like astonishment, puzzlement, etc., seems to share the same forced coyness, the brick-to-the-face subtlety, which underlies his weird avoidance of explicit real-world references like Greta, Trump, and TED, yet substituting them with fictional counterparts in such a way as seems either painfully redundant or, giving him some benefit of the doubt, a hidden reenactment of the many-worlds theory because what’s one more scientific concept thrown in? But with that said, while astounding with its childlike marvelling at the biodiversity of the natural world, and speculating about other ones to the point of frisson, “Bewilderment” does so well to manifest that “self-delighting” aspect of the Yeatsian soul....more
Delightful. Perspective turns prismatic in “The Promise,” with Damon Galgut’s laWINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021
“Trouble down below. Fire underground.”
Delightful. Perspective turns prismatic in “The Promise,” with Damon Galgut’s language retracing the efficient logic of a Joycean sentence, aclamour with the eccentric/eclectic voices of his darkly tragicomic characters reminiscent of Saunders’, the familiar twin themes of family and fall registering as more than faintly Faulknerian. What unsurprise that Galgut names Faulkner as his main influence, refurbishing the specificities of Southern Gothicism in the South African context. And so this white Swart family, beside their stalwart black servant, Salome, feel microcosmic of South Africa, whose rainbow nation has struggled between violence and hope, self-deprecation and -celebration. But Galgut is careful not to let allegory swallow the psychology of his characters, each as hypnotising as the last, in their absurdly small-minded, hilarious thoughts that ring of authentic humanity. Around them, along the peripheral outer circle, span likewise memorable secondary characters: skeevy priests, unhippocratic doctors, homeless visionaries.
Family tragedy befalls the Swarts from the first line of the novel, and would continue to befall them throughout the four parts of their Poe-esque story that, instead of following a rise-and-fall trajectory, travels along the more gripping lines of fall-and-fall-harder. Galgut finds in the inevitability of death its cyclical nature, a death spiral writ large that structures a narrative interested not only in death as a total endpoint, but as a quasi-paradoxical continuation of life, i.e., the reluctantly ongoing and flailing lives of whoever remains. The singular event of despair brought about by Ma’s death, then, fractures into multiple angles of unique viewpoint: the dreamlike denial from Amor, the youngest Swart daughter functioning as our voice of conscience with the thunderstruck clarity of her innocence; the silent schadenfreude of Aunt Tannie who never liked Ma; the howling grief of Pa; the performance of grief from Astrid and the stoicism of Anton, the older Swart children. What unity grief brings them, though, is short-lived with each reminder of the titular promise.
Thickening with these people’s bitter disillusionment, self-serving conservatism, and incorrigible gossip—all rendered in Galgut’s writing by turns mischievous, inquisitive, even blunt—the undulant bubble of their white subjectivity comes precariously close to popping each time the question of Salome arises, each time they remember-then-forget she exists. “They didn’t see me,” Amor thinks, “I was like a black woman to them.” Hidden from her parents, Amor is the only witness to that deathbed “Promise,” extracted from her father by her dying mother who wanted Salome, after her years of service to the Swart family, to have the bit of land from the family property. Of course, there wouldn’t be much of a novel if there weren’t equivocation or outright resistance that met each mention of the promise, kicked into the next decade. Or if there weren’t total denial, either from her father playing dumb, or a collective denial of the truth of Amor’s words, given not only her young age, but also her freak accident of being struck by lightning that everyone thought had since left her odd (“she was never the same after that”).
For all the voices reverberating throughout the novel, in the chaotic midst of these people’s self-doubt, hopes, dreams, anxieties, judgments, and prevarications that could too easily become an unreadable cacophony but here takes polyphonic flight, Salome’s voice seldom speaks up, her thoughts occurring even less often. Her self-effacement, whether by dubious design, nevertheless exposes the inconceivable self-centredness and hypocrisy of the Swart family and other similar white people of South Africa, even as they wax congratulatory about Mandela “beaming down on all of us like Father Christmas,” anticipate Mbeki’s inauguration with “the choirs and the bands and the parties,” or bemoan Zuma’s corruption “eating away at the timbers,” himself “the fat termite queen… at the heart of the nest.” The objective fact of the promise, presented very simply by young Amor whether in her first or fourth decade, inevitably gets stuck in the muck and mire of the Swarts’ untranscendable political realities that Galgut shows to be insulated by very petty concerns.
What distinguishes Galgut as an absolute talent, on top of the already well-balanced story combining the dysfunctional family narrative and nation-making, is his experimentation, his pure style. Whether it’s a dazzlement of sustained metaphor depicting the Swart family’s collective dreaming against the backdrop of their home/farm/land as raft/shallows/ocean, or his constant return to the importance of words by noting the physicality of words like the way a question can “drop[] to the floor, unasked,” each page spellbinds in one way or another, even in its abandonment of grammatical convention. The Guardian's review of the book argues that Galgut “aspires to a Joycean universalism,” reasonable enough in light of said polyphony. Yet incomplete thoughts like these, recurrent in Ulysses, offer simple though no less potent delights in their anti-prescriptivist audacity: “One day I’ll.” “Only last night he.” More remarkable, though, is the almost unnoticeably smooth way, the instinctive flow, with which Galgut switches perspective from character to character, through nothing more than a word.
But the pièce de résistance of Galgut’s novel really comes through in the humanisation of the ultimate perspective, the third-person narratorial voice traditionally all-knowing, but here feels unknowing, yet wanting to rectify their own ignorance, is even impatient about it: a roving consciousness as enraptured by this book as us, but also more curious about the world beyond the Swarts’ physical and Galgut’s narrative boundaries. In one stretch of pages, there is a sense of gathering courage before this (can I say cute?) incorporeality leaps from a priest and gloms onto a homeless man, traveling well away from the main story. And that’s okay, the world is alive with the sound of possibility. Imagine a sentient camera, as Galgut’s inclusion of Fellini’s epigraph almost invites us to, its filmic eye absorbing as ours might the sordid details of these disturbed individuals, rolling at the selfish postponement of the promise, staring off into the distance in heavy thought about religio-capitalist power, doomed legacy, unaddressed colonialism, the meaning of life, “etc., etc.”...more
“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” ENTRY FOR THE FOURTH DAY OF THE EIGHTH MOWINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021
“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” ENTRY FOR THE FOURTH DAY OF THE EIGHTH MONTH IN THE YEAR PIRANESI CAME INTO MY LIFE
Captivating, in all senses of the word best discovered on your own for maximum effect. Yet consequently, reviewing a book like Piranesi then becomes a precarious balancing act where, rather than giving the usual book-wide overview of its 245 pages that would undermine it, i.e., said effect, the first 79 pages would have to suffice. Plenty of praiseworthiness here, though, as Susanna Clarke’s achievement of stunning imagination makes these early foundational pages less an act of incredible worldbuilding than one of loving encouragement for our exploration of a world already built. From the first counted hall to the 7,678th, her House now rumbles in its play with Bachelardian space, now roars in its demonstration of the Burkian sublime, by turns striking fear with its treacherous waters, and provoking awe with the innumerable birds and majestic statues (each of them in their individual splendor of existence pregnant with meaning) that populate its halls.
And the House moves us to boundless wonder as well with the unknowability of these infinite halls, as opulent as they are mysterious. Piranesi’s scientific zest prompted even me, as if some late-blooming student of Darwin, to start doodling in the margins amateur sketches of albatrosses, cumulus clouds, and assorted depictions of the statues from honeycombs to royal crowns. In lazy cartography, I even tried keeping track of those many halls, listing down the 88th Western Hall as the domain of angry gulls, the 57th as that of “golden Light,” “the 192th as that of “Absolute Darkness.” Presented with Piranesi’s character, from his irresistible curiosity to indefatigable love for the House’s paradoxical natural wonders, and being only the purest character I’ve had the unrepayable gratitude to meet in the same vein of Klara of Kazuo Ishiguro’s likewise generous imagining, there’s little else to do but follow in his example— short of expressing my thoughts in Piranesi’s style of idiosyncratic capitalisation that lends the whole prose a bas-relief charm.
In one formal master stroke, Clarke frames “Piranesi” the novel entirely as a series of journal entries. Piranesi the character thus comes very much alive, very much sympathetic with his every act of unhesitating empathy, whether towards the birds, the bones of his Dead (whom he talks to so “they know they are not alone”), or the Other, the only other living human inhabitant of the House, whose general indifference doesn’t stop Piranesi from bidding him hearty farewell. “‘Goodbye!’ I called to his retreating back. ‘Goodbye!’” So endearing, hence my raised hackles in what I’m sure is a healthy reaction when others dare bash the novel, being such an inextricable part of Piranesi’s character. It feels personal. The journal format of Clarke’s novel gives it a certain malleability, too, letting him record his observations about the House, trace his own thoughts as they gamely adapt to thickening plot, and reflect on the practice of journaling as an act of self-empowerment, plus even stylistic liberation allowing for other such forms as lists, notes, textual analyses.
“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” Although these entries do start off trying to prove the truth of this statement, its more precise variation would ultimately credit such qualities to Piranesi himself, tirelessly sustained throughout this lean novel bursting at the seams with originality and ambition that set the mind to boggling, the more so in the context of Clarke’s chronic fatigue syndrome as she examines the workings of memory and madness, loneliness and selfhood. Evoking both Lewises with her Carollian flexibility of language and especially C.S. Lewis’ penchant for fantasy, even quoting from the latter’s Magician’s Nephew as her first epigraph, Clarke manages to construct a work of true escapism all her own, though not into her House with its neverending halls, vestibules, and plinths. Instead, she stages our disappearing act through total immersion into Piranesi’s character with his uncynical outlook and powerful inner strength, feeling altogether rarefied as her expression of the ideal better than even the statues. Piranesi: how sweet, how lovely, how Good....more
“the fact that what is with this constant monologue in my head, the fact that why am I telling myself all this stuff”
The fact that how am I supposed t“the fact that what is with this constant monologue in my head, the fact that why am I telling myself all this stuff”
The fact that how am I supposed to review this, only the most overwhelming and challenging and even aggravating novel I’ve read this decade, yet also its most rewarding, empathetic, and biggest-hearted one, somehow after all its profusive domestic minutiae and virtual noise culminating in the most soul-nourishing joy. Over the past nine months (how appropriate for something so thematically bound to motherhood), the first few of which I spent on reading and annotating and underlining “Ducks, Newburyport” in caffeine-fueled pomodoro sessions at cafes before lockdown, the uniquely self-doubting and nerve-wracked voice of our narrator has buzzed around and bogged down and blabbed at my mind near senseless. Her spiraling stream-of-consciousness, exhausting to behold, can indeed get trying after some thousandth “the fact that…” clause. And temporarily, I did lose steam around the 500s, escaping into shorter, more forgiving novels, before returning with fresh mojo and made short, adrenaline-rushing work of pages 600 to 1000.
Because there is a point. An inevitable human connection to be formed, only if we allow it. Because among its mass of digressive information, overthinking and overworrying about the umpteenth school shooting or poisoning of the environment, manifold random observations with absolutely no context—somewhere in this multimaniacal 1000-page-long sentence broken up at more or less regular intervals of every 80 pages or so by a parallel, more conventionally-written story of a mountain lion and her cubs—out of all this seemingly endless plotlessness (Lucy Ellmann herself having admitted to finding plot boring, finding character far more fascinating), there arises from this incomprehensibly ambitious suburban epic a very deep fondness for this one Ohioan woman, whose swallowing sprawl of post-traumatic insecurities, apocalyptic fears, and keenly human failings are second only to that of her abiding love for her family: her husband Leo and her children “sulky Stacy, pedantic Ben, obsessive Gillian, and pell-mell Jake.”
Given the narrator’s position as mother and wife struggling with her desires to be respected for her efforts and yet viewed as her own person, her commitment to her family contextualises much of this bombardment of impressions. Provoking nothing short of pure awe is the mind-boggling range of topics zooming past the narrator’s attention that makes “Ducks, Newburyport” the encyclopedic novel par excellence, going from astronomy to architecture, colour theory to dentistry, film to baking. And so many films, mainly those starring Harrison Ford (prompting me to rewatch “Air Force One” on one occasion) and Meryl Streep (“the fact that Meryl Streep’s kind of a funny name when you think about it”). But being the narrator’s livelihood if not a whole political philosophy, there is even more baking, from wedding cakes to birthday cakes, madeleines to lemon meringue pies. She has serious opinions against brownies, whose popularity she hopes to “counteract… by making tartlets” and, more extremely though perhaps plausibly, she considers “the fact that maybe [her] pies are even antidotes to gun violence.”
Key to making some sense of this unabating madness, to finding Ellmann’s method, is to understand how much of it ties back to the narrator’s family-oriented priorities and her direct experiences. Not necessarily all, though, the rest being pure subconscious noise, a textual drone to be filtered out. Otherwise, when I start marking up discrete sections of the text with pencil and ruler is when our narrator starts thinking more extensively about the aforesaid astronomy or architecture, which generally signals a prelude to a family trip to see a solar eclipse or a Frank Lloyd Wright house spanning some several pages, and I adored the narrator’s agonising over the logistics of these occasions; and when even more pages are devoted to analysing seemingly entire movies, that’s when she’s actually watching them in real time, usually with Stacy, her combative teenage daughter whose conflict with the narrator throughout the book, causing her no end of anxieties because she’s scared of her own daughter, numbers among one of my favourite parts for its serious emotional payoffs.
As we delve more deeply into “Ducks, Newburyport,” becoming wiser if not endeared to the narrator’s psychological quirks, there starts to emerge certain patterns to her thought, specific linguistic habits that I appreciated as anchor points. She says “crazee” instead of “crazy” a lot, and gets “het up” instead of “worked up,” putting me in mind of the substitution of “map” for “face” and those iconic “howling fantods” throughout “Infinite Jest.” And how positively deafening our narrator’s fantods get when, thinking always of her family, her expansive paranoia and climate anxiety coils tight around the narrative text like with so many tentacles, supercharged to near-unbearable yet desensitizing effect with each new random headline and instance of the equivalent to doomscrolling, from “Eight Killed in Crash Horror” to the inexorable spread of microplastics. Ellmann’s book offers itself up as proof negative of that view of reading as escapism, an argument at best shaky—nothing is ever truly apolitical, ever entirely free of bias, even in the fantasy and sci-fi novels we read—and at worst destructive, a head-in-sand abdication of all responsibilities towards our collective future.
Ironically, apart from her maternal love for her children to whom this world would be tossed like an increasingly hot potato, our narrator’s motivation for being so current with the news isn’t so exclusively noble, stemming as it does from a similarly head-in-sand strategy of avoidance towards her own traumatic past. In the early hundreds, as we’re engulfed by Ellmann’s torrents of words—learning as we read to locate distinct chunks of actual story about that trip to the supermarket or helping one of the children with their homework, or remonstration against pornography or the aurora borealis—we’re along the way not so much presented as blasted with strings of noncontextual words from names to acronyms to whole lists of Ohioan waterways. Yet aside from nostalgic lullabic phrases, some things do recur and stick in our mind: “euphoria,” “ducks,” “Newburyport,” “broken,” whose full emotional picture Ellmann methodically assembles piece by illuminating piece as her novel unravels.
“Unravel” may be an apt image for Ellmann’s structuring technique in “Ducks, Newburyport,” considering the shape of the verb typically describing its spiraling action. For as in nature with the chaos left in the wake of a tornado or hurricane, some sense of the spiral arises even as we sink inescapably into the quicksand of the narrator’s all-consuming thoughts and perceptions, memories whether real or self-delusionally reconstructed. A mathematical characteristic of the (logarithmic) spiral, because why not go further, is its property of self-similarity, which becomes self-explanatory in light of all those constant phrasal callbacks. Further muddying these swirling metaphysical waters with another, infinitely echoing refrain, Ellmann unhelpfully blends in dreams upon dreams documented by our narrator sometimes passingly, other times in absurd, hilarious detail: “I dreamt about trying to rehabilitate six or eight mozzarella balls,” or that “I dreamt I ate one tiny piece of ham, and that was it, that was the whole dream.”
Ha. But in the depths of this Nietzchean abyss, we can see past this incessance of forced lightheartedness, past this perpetual distraction of film trivia, caramelisation techniques, or mispronunciation worries. See reflected back at us, instead, the past/present/possible future state of our doomed world as Ellmann lays bare across five hellish pages the bloody colonial violence inflicted on the Moravian Indians, the rampant weaponised ignorance or indifference today as forests burn and oceans overflow and viruses spread, and the death-spiraling acceleration of this planet towards uninhabitability as the end result. And yet, after finishing “Ducks, Newburyport,” and remembering those moments of surpassing beauty about nature from any given tree to our narrator thinking about even “the dreams of a carrot secretly growing deep in the ground,” as well as those ones of her raw vulnerability reminding us of our own capacity for compassion, I find it blessedly harder now to despair in the face of Ellmann’s call for radical empathy, and also because of the fact that my heart is so very full....more
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