Life Between the Tides

 
 
Life Between the Tides

by Adam Nicolson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2022

 

 

Life Between the Tides is nonfiction. Primarily it's about the kinds of plants and animals that live in tidal pools, their ecology and how their foodchain works. But it's both more specific and farther reaching. Nicholson constructed his own tide pools on an isolated bit of Scottish coast that previously had none. He writes about the species that come to fill his pools. But he also talks about the history of this part of Scotland, and a variety of scientific and philosophical concepts that emerge from his observations.
Nicolson builds three tide pools - hollow spaces that fill with water when they're covered by the high tide, and retain it during the low. Each seems a better habitat than the one before. 

 
In the first section he talks about prawns, animal consciousness and intelligence, periwinkles (a kind of mollusk,) the fractal nature of shorelines, which seem longer and longer the more precisely you measure them, green crabs, the discovery of crustacean metamorphosis and the related discovery that most (or all?) zooplankton are crustacean larvae, the role of apex predators like green crabs in maintaining complex biodiverse ecosystems, sea anemones that reproduce by cloning, and the vastly different sensory worlds of pre-Cambrian and later forms of life.

 
In the second section, Nicolson describes the folk beliefs that surround the tides and gives a perspective-altering way to think of them - that it is not really the tide that 'comes in' or 'goes out,' but the rotation of the Earth that drags the shoreline through the ocean, as our sphere of stone rotates through a relatively motionless ovoid of water. He also describes the layers of stone at that point in the Scottish coast, and which geologic events produced them, including how the slow wobble of the Earth's axis produces cyclical ice ages.
 

Finally, Nicoloson talks about the Scottish people. How the barren land was settled by fisher-gatherers, who were replaced by Eurasian agricultural peoples. How the clan societies worked, and made war on each other in response to poverty and hunger. How the English mapped them and conquered them. He talks about the folk belief in faeries, who are blamed for troubles and maladies, about Malthus and Spencer, about the philosophical distinction between the physical world our senses can perceive and the invisible, unknowable minds of others.

 
I expected a more straightforward biology book, but I appreciate Nicolson's more intellectually omnivorous approach to his subject, and I like the handful of watercolors, and dozens of photographs, that illustrate the text.

Giraffes on Horseback Salad

 
Giraffes on Horseback Salad

The Strangest Movie Never Made
by Josh Frank and Time Heidecker

art by Manuela Pertega

adapted from the screenplay by Salvador Dali

Quirk Books

1937, adapted 2019

 

 

Giraffes on Horseback Salad is a graphic novel that adapts a proposal for a movie that was never produced - a film written by Salvador Dali, starring the Marx Brothers. Well, I say 'written,' but what Dali actually produced was 84 pages of handwritten notes and sketches and a 14 page proposal to MGM. There was no completed script. So this was not a simple or straightforward adaptation, and includes a lot of creative input from everyone involved.

 
Josh Frank has apparently made a career of adapting famous unfinished projects, with this just his most recent. Frank read up on Dali during the years he lived abroad because of the Spanish Civil War. He met with Harpo Marx's son -  Harpo and Dali were friends, apparently. And he got copies of the notes and proposal from a Dali archive. Frank brought in comedian Tim Heidecker to help write the Marx Brothers' banter, since Dali's notes just indicated places they should be allowed to improvise. Manuela Pertega is a Spanish cartoonist, included for her interest in surrealist art.

 
So, the first 40 pages of the book are front matter, explaining all that. A bit like the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, really. And then the last 200 pages are the graphic novel itself, which is styled and structured to look like an adaptation of a finished movie, even though the only place the 'movie' exists is as this comic.

 
Jimmy, played by Harpo Marx, is a hardworking and cleancut young businessman. He has an ambitious but loveless fiancee, and he's really going places on Wall Street. Then one night while they're out to dinner, Jimmy catches a glimpse of the mysterious Surrealist Woman, who is announced and attended by Groucho and Chico. (The fiancee has a sidepiece boyfriend, who might be Zeppo, but I'm not certain?) Jimmy is instantly smitten, and suddenly discovers he can play the harp...

 
The Surrealist Woman has the supernatural power to manifest imagery from her dreams into the real world. In controlled spaces like a restaurant, she can pass it off as an elaborate and expensive publicity stunt. Jimmy dumps his fiancee, meets up with the Surrealist Woman at her next party, and the two of them declare their love for each other. Her happiness unleashes unrestrained chaos on the world.

 
The fiancee helps lead an effort to arrest the Surrealist Woman, which succeeds, and she's put on trial, with Groucho acting as her defense and Chico the prosecution. Jimmy sneaks in 'in disguise' looking properly like Harpo, and they escape into the streets of New York, where they fight a war between the forces of bourgeois order and surreal chaos, including flaming green giraffes running through the city.
Jimmy and the Surreal Woman briefly retire to a house in the suburbs where she manifests his dream of comfort and safety, but then they both agree this is too boring, and the commit to living dangerously and artistically. 

 
Frank's commentary in the front matter suggests that Jimmy was intended to be a semi-autobiographical character. Dali came from a respectable family, and perhaps especially while he was abroad during the Civil War, may have questioned whether his flamboyant lifestyle and persona were really the right choice.
 

Pertega's art really captures the prevailing balance of power at any given moment between conventional order (shown in linear panels in grayscale,) and surrealism (shown in color in irregular, cross-cutting panels are lack an obvious chronological order.) The manifestations of the Surrealist Woman's emotions into reality reminds me of a similar effect used in the Shade, the Changing Girl comics.

RUR

 
RUR

Rossum's Universal Robots
by Karel Capek

translated by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair

Dover

1921, reprinted 2001

 

 

RUR is a stage play, and it's most famous for introducing the word 'robot' into the global vernacular, based on the Czech word for drudgery. Capek's robots are artificial humans, more like the replicants from Bladerunner than the mechanical servants from The Jetsons or Forbidden Planet or Lost in Space.
 

Capek imagines robots being put together in a factory, but what they are made of is a lab-created alternative primordial soup, something other than the originator of all Earthly life, but that nonetheless can easily be prompted to form an sort of living tissue, and assembled into any sort of organism. 

 
Robots are like humans, but slightly simplified. They experience no pain or emotions; in particular they have no desires, they don't want anything. The most expensive robots will live for 20 years and can do white collar jobs. The cheapest are short-lived manual laborers.

 
In act 1, Harry Domin, manager of the Rossum's Universal Robots company, receives a visitor to its island location - Helena Glory, daughter of the president of whatever mainland jurisdiction they fall under. She's there to tour the facility and (secretly) to attempt to encourage the robots to form a labor union and demand better working conditions. 

 
Domin explains the bit about how robots work, and goes on to rave about how great it is that the price of food and manufactured goods are falling, and that all the human laborers are being thrown out of work. He dreams of a future with no scarcity or poverty, when every human can focus on living the best sort of life.
Domin also introduces Helena to the only five other human managers on the island (all men) and all of them instantly fall in love with her. Domin proposes marriage, and Helena accepts. Were the straights ever okay? Sadly for all of us, Domin does not propose by asking 'are you are or are you ain't my baby?' in what might be the greatest oversight of a potential pun in the history of literature.

 
In act 2, a decade later, Domin gives Helena an anniversary present - a private gunship that all the humans on the island will use to flee. Helena finally looks at some of the newspapers lying around and learns that more and more robots have been having epileptic fits and then refusing to work. (Capek means for this to signify that they have been developing human-like souls.) 

 
The global masses of unemployed have been protesting and rioting, and countries have used armies of robot soldiers to massacre their own citizens by the hundreds of thousands. Helena burns the newspapers, and perhaps one more document... 

 
No communication has arrived to the island for over a week, but today the mail boat is arriving right on time, which Domin assumes means good news. He proposes to start selling 'national robots' instead of 'universal robots' so that racism against other robots will prevent them from organizing again in the future.
 

In act 3, we learn that Domin was wrong, and the arrival of the boat is not good news! An army of robots has arrived to seize the factory. Domin plans to bargain for their lives by offering the robots Dr Rossum's original notes about how to make the artificial primordial soup, since without those notes, no more robots can be made. He's just full of good ideas. Unfortunately, would you care to guess what that additional document Helena burned was? The robots seize the factory, and one human survives, taken prisoner so he can help recreate the formula.

 
In act 4, a year later, we learn that the surviving human architect has not had much luck rediscovering the greatest ever advance in the unrelated field of biochemistry! He might be the last human left alive on Earth. The lowest grade robots are already dying out, and even the most expensive models will all be gone in 20 years or less. 

 
When the guy calls for a specific 'robotess' to be dissected for his studies, he learns that she and one of the male robots are in love with each other, each willing to die to save the other from destruction. The guy decides that these two have human souls and will be capable of sexual reproduction, and so sends them off the island on a boat so they can restart humanity anew.

 
What's particularly impressive here is that in addition to coining the term 'robot,' Capek has invented the entire robot uprising genre whole cloth, laying out like 90% of the themes that every future robot story will include, including the fear of robot soldiers being used to kill protesters and other civilians. 

 
Capek's novel At War with the Newts is another parable about humans encountering another form of sentient life and immediately enslaving them. Although RUR feels like it's less about literal slavery, and more about wage-slavery and the conditions of factory work. For example, the belated plan to prevent a global robot uprising via nationalism and racism is a pretty on-the-nose parody of capitalist plans to prevent global Communism and other forms of worker solidarity.

Chess Story

 
 
Chess Story
by Stefan Zweig
translated by Joel Rotenberg

NYRB

1943, reprinted 2005

 

 

I heard about Stefan Zweig when he was mentioned as one of the inspirations for the Wes Anderson film The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I suppose is more of a commentary on my reading and movie-watching habits than it is an account of Zweig. But I gather that he was Austrian, writing during the 1930s and 40s, and that his writing often touched on the aspects of life that were negatively affected by Nazism and WWII more generally.
 

Chess Story is a short novella that takes place on a luxury passenger ship sailing from New York to Argentina. The tale is related by someone who I think of as a Nick Carraway Narrator - someone who is close to the action but only barely takes part in it, and who mostly exists to let us know how interesting the actual protagonists are. This particular narrator doesn't even get a name. His one distinguishing trait is, as he tells us from the beginning, his interest in meeting people with monomaniacal obsessions.
 
On the same ship is riding the recent world chess champion Czentovic, who caused quite a scandal in the chess world by seeming to come from nowhere, and by being very different from the other, more intellectual chess players. Czentovic's life story is related to the narrator by his friend who read about it in the newspapers, and is a bit starstruck to have a celebrity onboard.
 
Czentovic was the son of poor farmers and was orphaned as a teenager. He was taken in by the village priest, who tried to educate him, but the boy was a slow learner, and remained illiterate, incurious, and willing to (very slowly) do any task assigned to him without complaint. One day the priest accidentally discovered that the boy was a chess prodigy, so they went into town, then the city, and soon he was winning tournaments across Europe. 

 

Because he knows he is seen as dull and dim-witted, Czentovic has made it his policy not to interact with anyone (outside of playing chess) except for other farmers and laborers. The way Zweig describes both Czentovic's play style and his reception in the chess world reminds me of the way that the first computers able to play chess at the master level were received, though of course he was writing like 40 years earlier.
 
The narrator is curious about what he perceives as the potential monomania of a chess savant who shows no other intellectual gifts. To lure Czentovic out in the open where he can meet him, he starts playing chess with some of the other passengers. My favorite (and the most important, in terms of the story) is a nouveau riche businessman whose expectations of deference and respect go so far as to treat anyone actually playing against him to win as an infuriating insult on his dignity. He is happy to shell out $250 for Czentovic's fee to play against the grand master once the narrator's plan succeeds in drawing him out.
 
Czentovic plays a match against all the other interested passengers working as one, with the businessman having the final say on moves, of course. During the match, a passenger who hadn't been played before starts offering advice midway through the game, allowing them to force Czentovic to a draw. He readily agrees to a rematch, and the narrator tries to interview this newer, even more mysterious chess prodigy in their midst.
 
Mystery man B is a fellow Austrian with a supposedly famous last name, which is why the narrator identified him only by his initial. He readily agrees to tell his story, which I think is the longest of the four main scenes in the novella. B used to work as a lawyer and wealth manager, quietly helping the Austrian royal family and several monasteries maintain and hide their property and holdings. When Hitler came to power in Germany, he sicced the Gestapo onto B and others like him in order to confiscate that wealth.
 
B was imprisoned in a hotel room, in total isolation except for his questionings. He was going crazy from the lack of human contact and intellectual stimulation, but then he managed to steal a book from one of the guards. The book was a collection of the lists of moves of 150 famous chess games. B taught himself to memorize and visualize the games, then began replaying them by rote in his head, then learned to understand them and appreciate them as he recreated them in his mind.
 
Then he got bored again and tried to play mental chess against himself. This led him to spend every waking and dreaming second trying to split his mind into a black-self and white-self, playing the two halves of his mind against each other, endlessly and furiously, until he essentially did go crazy and was released from the hotel into a hospital. From there he was able to escape Austria, which is how he ended up on the boat.
 
The narrator doesn't mention it, but in B he actually does find the monomania he was looking for. There's an irony to that, because everyone considers B a dilettante because he's not a professional player. There's also some irony in the fact that the two greatest chess players in the world are playing an anonymous match on a boat, both of them entirely unlike the larger community, one an autodidact facing his first true opponent. 

The next day, slow stolid Czentovic plays against manic insatiable B, with results that seem inevitable based on what we have learned so far about their personalities and how each would affect the other.
 

Chess Story is quite short, but it's dense with detail, and it's told in a very lively fashion. I'm not entirely sure what about Zweig's writing might have inspired Anderson, aside from the general milieu of WWII-era central Europe, although the way the two long origin stories of the main characters are nested within the much briefer frame story of them meeting and then playing against each other, that narrative structure, seems like a possibility. I can see why NYRB liked Zweig enough to reprint him, and I might try to seek out more of his writing another time.

Love in the Library

 
Love in the Library
by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

art by Yas Imamura
Candlewick Press

2022

 

 

One of my coworkers is often on the lookout for new children's books and, like a lot of us, keeps an eye out for books that have been banned or challenged in some way. So it was through her that I got my hands on a copy of Love in the Library to read.

 
Love in the Library made the news not because it was banned by politicians or challenged by activists, but because the publisher tried to convince the author to change the book's content. Maggie Tokuda-Hall refused, Scholastic relented, and the book was published as she originally intended it.

 
I'm not excusing Scholastic's actions, but this is a prime example of the chilling effect that rightwing politicians and activists are hoping to cultivate. They want publishers scared to print, libraries scared to shelve, and teachers afraid to assign books that depict America's history of racism (among other topics.) What this incident shows me is that the book bans are working, they're having their intended effect, not just on the availability of these books after they're published, but on their ability to make it into print at all.
 

Love in the Library is a lightly fictionalized account of how Tokuda-Hall's grandparents met, fell in love, got married, and had their first child while they were both imprisoned in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during WWII.

 
Tama works in the camp library, and the book is centered on her experiences. We see how she was plucked away from her old life, how harsh and degrading the conditions in the camp are, how difficult it is for Tama to retain any hope for the future. George comes to the library every day - ostensibly to return his books and check out new ones - although Tama finally realizes he can't read that fast, and that he's been coming every day to see her.

 
So the book itself functions to tell a bit of family history, and to introduce children to a shameful episode from American's relatively recent past. After the story is an author's note where Tokuda-Hall explains why she wrote the book, and where she calls out some of the more egregious examples of state-sponsored racism happening in America today, mostly to do with immigration policy. 

 
This note is clearly aimed at adults, and provides context for understanding how the book might fit in to discussions of contemporary events. It was this afterward, rather than any of the main text, that Scholastic asked Tokuda-Hall to change.

Fantastic Four: Full Circle

 
Fantastic Four: Full Circle
by Alex Ross

Abrams Books

2022

 

 

I associate comic creator Alex Ross with two things. The first is his painted comic book art, which is beautiful and distinctive. The second is his fondness for stories that either retell the origins of a comic universe (like Marvels and Justice,) imagine its cataclysmic end (like Earth X or Kingdom Come,) or that remix the old tropes into something new (like Astro City.)

 
So Fantastic Four: Full Circle is a little bit of a departure, although it's still unmistakably Ross's work. The art is more traditional ink illustration, though his use of color is creative and shifts with the different lighting conditions. Only the last page of the book takes place in daylight, so Ross really gets to show off the effects of different sorts of light.

 
The story is seemingly a direct sequel to the F4 issue "This Man, This Monster," where a guy who sort of looks like the Thing kidnaps him, fully adopts his appearance, and tries to replace him, before ultimately sacrificing his life to save Mr Fantastic in his first encounter with the Negative Zone. Fortunately, that issue (newly recolored by Tom Scioli) was included as bonus content in Fantastic Four: Grand Design. I say that's fortunate, because I wouldn't be familiar otherwise, and since this story builds directly off those events, I wouldnt've understood Full Circle as well without reading its inspiration recently.

 
Late at night in the F4 skyscraper, the Thing is making a midnight snack, when the interior of the building is suddenly attacked by thousands of alien bugs, vermin, and creepy crawlies. Human Torch burns them up, and the team discovers that the monsters were pouring out of the dead husk of a man who once kidnapped the Thing, who was last seen falling forever into the Negative Zone. This aggression will not stand, so they put on some new science costumes and cross the dimensional barrier in search of answers.

 
The team sees a lot of weird sights, and Ross clearly has fun with this environment. Ross's showpiece is a blacklight-colored spread of Janus the Negative Man, source of the monstrous incursion. He wants to turn them into vermin-filled husks too, as revenge for some college feud with Mr Fantastic. They defeat, or maybe just escape Janus, and on their way home discover a Negative Earth. 

 
This alt history planet turns out to be home to a super-advanced science civilization, and also the guy who kidnapped the Thing is alive and well here. (Who knows where his corpse husk came from then?) He ended up on Negative Earth after saving Mr Fantastic, and feels like that experience made him a better person. Now he wants to repay the Four by helping them get home safely. They do, just in time for the kids to wake up in the morning and welcome everyone back. And the Thing finally gets to have his snack!

 
Full Circle feels like its meant to be an entry-point for new Fantastic Four readers. You've got an acclaimed author and artist showing off one of the most interesting places the team has traveled, while they go on a self-contained adventure that nonetheless gives them the opportunity to reminisce about a number of their past exploits and old foes. I think it invites you to go delve into the F4's back catalog though, much more than it seems to open the way to any new adventures. You get a lot of signposts showing where they've been, but none suggesting where they might go next.

This is How We Fly

 
 
This is How We Fly
by Anna Meriano
Viking

2020

 

 

This is How We Fly is YA novel, set in the real world, narrated in the first person by a girl who just graduated high school and spends her last summer before college learning to playing quidditch in the park.

Ellen has a White father, a Latina mother who died when she was young, and a Latina stepmother who she increasingly finds herself fighting with. Ellen is a vegan and a feminist. She is Very Online, in a way that seems to amplify both her frustration at the state of the world, and her sense of IRL social isolation.

Ellen also, at least 4 or 5 times throughout the book, wonders if she's really happiest being a girl who's a tomboy, or if ... ? (She doesn't actually think these words, but I gather that she's considering if a nonbinary or transmasculine identity would feel more authentic.) This is something I haven't seen before in a character who does not eventually come out as trans.

Meanwhile, Ellen's stepmom wants a respectable daughter who eats the same food as the rest of the family, dresses in appropriately feminine attire, and doesn't keep picking fights about social injustice.

After an especially nasty argument, Ellen's dad grounds her for the rest of the summer. The one exception is that she's allowed to leave the house to go play sports, which even includes letting her follow up on an invitation to play real-world quidditch, based on the fictional game invented by JK Rowling for her Harry Potter novels.

Ellen definitely needs to get out of the house, where she does chores, gets in fights, and spends most of her time doomscrolling Tumblr. She feels like her family doesn't want her and can't wait for her to move out of the house. She thinks her high school friend Xiumiao is ditching her to make news friends with people who'll be going to the same college, and even that best friend Melissa, who invited her to quidditch, would rather be friends with the other players than with her.

Author Anna Meriano represents Ellen's feelings naturalistically, but also lets the audience see that she might not understand her own situation completely correctly. In each case, Ellen feels torn between wanting to get closer, wanting to respect the other's desire for space, and feeling resentful and pushing away as well, and ends up enacting a complex mix that worsens each of the relationships she wishes she could improve.

Through the twice-weekly quidditch practices and skirmishes, Ellen learns to get in touch with her physical body and to enjoy using it competitively. She begins making new social connections with teammates and some friendly rivals. She gets the satisfaction of doing something well (which also carries over to trying harder at her summer project of clearing out the garage.) And she even makes a couple romantic connections with some cute, kissable quidditch guys.

All the strands of Ellen's story come together during the big, summer-ending regional tournament. She kind of two-steps-forward one-step-backs her way through her problems, making almost all of them worse while also finally asserting herself as an independent young person, and finally communicating honestly with Xiumiao and Melissa, both the cute boys she's kissed, and her dad and stepmother.

Compared to Loveless, which I use as a point of comparison mostly because they're both realistic contemporary YA, I think This is How We Fly has both more complex and more authentic emotions. Meriano is unafraid to let Ellen be flawed, and I physically cringed from her fights with her stepmom. Ellen responds to what she thinks other people are thinking, and they respond to her responses, which often results in a worsening dynamic.

I feel like Meriano got this one in just under the wire. It came out in 2020, but must have been finished earlier, and the book shows a time right before the weirdness of that first pandemic year, and before JKR descended from flirting with transphobia to becoming one of its loudest proponents.

I liked Harry Potter, and perhaps even moreso, I liked the creativity of the Harry Potter fandom, with its 'wizard rock' bands and its real life quidditch teams. It's both disappointing that Rowling does not accept trans people, sad to see the once-thriving HP fandom collapsing, frightening how much power Rowling has to share her message of hate, and also deeply weird that she often adopts a male pen-name (Robert Galbraith) to share it.

The Queen in the Cave

 
The Queen in the Cave
by Julia Sarda
Candlewick Press

2022

 

 

After seeing her art in Duckworth, the Difficult Child last year, I've really wanted to seek out more work by Julia Sarda. Most of her illustrations appear in books written by others, but The Queen in the Cave is entirely her own.

 
Queen is a children's picture book. Like Lorena Alvarez's Nightlights, it tells a story that can either be read straightforwardly as a ghost story, or seen as a complex and ambiguous metaphor for a young girl's turbulent emotions as she grows up. Read the second way, there isn't a single, simple interpretation, I don't think, although this may be a case where 'if you know, you know,' and I just don't.

 
Oldest sister Franca gets touched by an idea (or a ghost?) and can no longer read, make her collages, or focus on anything at all. She is convinced that there is a queen in a cave out past the family yard, and drags younger sisters Carmela, dressed like a witch, and Tomasina, dressed as a clown, on a journey to go meet the witch.

 
They go through the yard to the forest, passing through nettles, and having increasingly frightening encounters with insects, bats, and a parade of ghosts. Carmela and Tomasina are scared and want to turn back, but Franca insists they continue on.

 
At the cave, they meet the queen, who looks identical to Franca, except she's filthy, covered in mud and leaves, with wild eyes and flyaway hair. Franca wants to stay and celebrate and dance. Her sisters are scared, and she ignores them, so they leave, return home, have dinner, and go to bed. (I did wonder, at this point, about their parents! But they are never mentioned.)

 
Sometime in the night, Franca returns, looking halfway between her old self and her feral doppelganger, after hours of dancing and playing in the cave. Carmela wonders if someday a coven of witches who look like her will call to her the way the queen called to Franca.

 
Sarda's art is stylized, with very clean lines and colors. She makes good use of negative space for her backgrounds, but then fills the foreground and intermediate space with detail - from the tchotchkes on shelves in the girls' house, the the increasingly phantasmagoric creatures they meet on their journey through the woods.

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr

 
The Many Deaths of Laila Starr
by Ram V
art by Philippe Andrade
Boom! Comics

2022

 

 

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr collects a 5-issue comic book miniseries about the goddess of death repeatedly being reincarnated to meet the man who will invent immortality at different points in his life.

 
The man who is destined to invent immortality, Darius, is born in Mumbai, which is the main setting for the story. The gods are more-or-less explicitly Hindu. In her goddess form, Death resembles Kali, although she's never called by that name.

 
In the first issue, Death is called up to the top floor of heaven, here depicted as a corporate skyscraper, where the boss, who looks like Brahma, informs her that the man who will eventually invent immortality is being born, and so she is being laid off. Her severance package is to be granted a mortal life. 

 

Death is reincarnated into a young woman, Laila Starr, who just died in the same hospital where Darius was just born. She goes to kill the infant to stop his invention, but finds that, as a mortal, she can't, even though as a goddess she's taken infants by the millions. Then she accidentally steps into traffic and dies again.

 
In each issue, Death / Laila is re-reincarnated thanks to Pranha, god of life. Each time she meets Darius at a significant moment related to death, and each time she dies by accident after the meeting.

 
She meets Darius as a child, when he runs away from home to attend the funeral of his parents' untouchable gardener. She meets him at a party just as he's passing from being a teenager to being an adult, after his best friend died. She meets him as a middle-aged scientist when his medical research still wasn't far enough along to save his wife. And finally she meets him as an old man on the island of Goa, and she learns what has become of his invention.

 
Although it happens for quite different reasons, the multiple reincarnation reminds me of Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon's comic series Daytripper. For obvious reasons, this comic is somewhat sad, although it's very well written. By turns it both mourns and accepts. 

 
Andrade's art has kind of a sketchy, scribbly quality to it. What I especially like are the colors, which are vibrant and beautiful, especially in the issue set at a house party, which is narrated by a cigarette that Laila and Darius share.

Meander, Spiral, Explode

 
Meander, Spiral, Explode
Design and Pattern in Narrative
by Jane Alison

Catapult

2019

 

 

Meander, Spiral, Explode is an examination of the techniques for pacing fiction, and a call to other authors to write narratives that fall outside the traditional rising action / climax / resolution format.

 
Alison based her list of narrative structures on Peter Stevens' book Patterns in Nature, which identifies recurring shapes that arise from organic growth. For each structure, she identifies several existing works that she thinks exemplify the technique. A few of her examples are works I'm familiar with from the creative writing classes I took as an undergrad, and at least one I've read on my own.

 
In terms of pacing, Alison notes that the text can have a 'gap' when we leap over a certain span of time with no narration, 'summary' that moves very quickly over events, 'scenes' that take place in something like real time, 'dilation' where the narrative slows down, and 'pauses' where the text continues even as the plot has stopped. She notes that varying the pace is an important form of authorial control over the way the story is told, and mention Tobias Wolff's short story "Bullet in the Brain" as an example of writing that really shows off these different speeds.

 
The 'wave' structure of a story is the familiar dramatic arc - the rise / crescendo / collapse. 

 
'Wavelets' occur when a narrative vacillates back and forth between two themes, perhaps eventually having one win out over the other, or perhaps concluding with the tension or indecision intact. 

 
'Meanders' often tell a simple story, but pile digression on top of digression to slow the pace and reach the conclusion only indirectly. 

 
'Spirals' employ ordered repetition to show change happening within a routine.

 
'Explosions' contain some key event that everything else flies away from or orbits around. The key events is sometimes too powerful to show directly, or sometimes can only appear at the end. Alison didn't mention them, but I thought of the two key deaths in The Time Traveler's Wife as both behaving this way, as well as Snowden's secret in Catch 22.

 
When the elements of a narrative are ordered spatially, rather than over time, we can think of the story as forming 'cells' and the reader as creating a 'network' of connecting lines in their heads as they read. Alison spends a lot of time talking about WB Sebald's The Emigrants here, because it was the book that inspired her to think about non-arc narrative structures. I think her better example though is Susan Minot's short story "Lust," which is a non-chronological list of sexual encounters that moves from mostly ones that make her happy to mostly ones that leave her unfulfilled. Alison doesn't discuss it, but Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is famously 'spatial' in the way she means it, and his book Mr Palomar is an even better example of how you can still get movement via theme instead of plot, as the vignettes move from the physical to the spiritual.

 
Alison's last structure is the 'tsunami,' which she describes as a wave made of cells. Her one example is David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. If I were her, I would have moved her discussion of "Lust" to this section, because I think her point about thematic movement makes more sense here, while in truly 'cellular' stories, the sense of change comes primarily from the reader's accumulated knowledge rather than from any change in the content.

 

One kind of story structure I've thought about before is one I call, in my own head, the science fictional story structure (SFnal structure, for short.) I imagine it looking like ever expanding ripples in a pond, which I suppose would make it a variation on Alison's explosion structure. 

 

The SFnal structure takes advantage of the existence of certain rules about how the fictional world works, and explores the implications of those rules, often moving from the smallest to the largest. In particular, I think this structure can be playful, by looking for anything that's vague or inconsistent in the simplest statement of the rules, and wiggling a curious finger into those cracks to try to pry them open. 

 

The way that the first season of Person of Interest keeps looking for all the possible ways the investigators could be misled by the single clue their computer gives them is an example of the SFnal structure, I think, as is the surprising reversal at the end of the film Colossal.