The Pastel City

 
 

The Pastel City

by John Harrison

Bantam Spectra

1971, reprinted 2005 

 

 

The Pastel City is a science fantasy novel about a war between two factions of surviving humans in the ruins of a despoiled Earth, in the far future, after the fall of civilization. The war is made far, far worse by the use of super-science weapons left over from before the fall. The book is sad and elegiac, and stands out not only for the creativity of its setting, but for the overall high quality of M John Harrison's writing. By today's standards, it's practically a novella, but fantasy books tended to be shorter in the 70s. Within its compact length, Harrison fits in detailed descriptions of place, and a plot that manages to feel slow and funereal despite its brevity.
 
The book opens with a description of the world before, of the seventeen Afternoon Cultures, each of which lasted between one to ten thousand years, the last of which comprehensively ruined the Earth with overconsumption and pollution. In the millennium since then, civilization has finally returned. The two factions are the city of Viriconium, the Pastel City, and its surrounding villages; and the Northmen, who live beyond the Metal-Salt Marsh and the Great Brown Waste. Just summarizing this much gives you a taste of Harrison's worldbuilding. This is a story that takes place after the end, and after another ending beyond that. The war this story details threatens to be a final annihilation. But in the aftermath, there's also a start of something new.
 
Virconium is ruled by the young Queen Jane, still a teenager; the Northmen by her cousin Canna Moidart, who is older but was second in line to the throne. Jane is the daughter of Virconium's greatest king, who consolidated power in a series of military victories with his loyal circle of friends, the Methven. Canna is that king's niece, the daughter of his brother and the previous northern queen. The king's circle, his equivalent to the Knights of the Round Table, are all retired now, their adventuring days behind them. The one we follow most closely, tegeus-Cromis, wants nothing more than to live as a poet and a hermit and to never fight again. Tomb the Dwarf spends all his time digging up machines from the Waste. In their heyday, it seems the Methven had a storied career and adventures enough to fill an epic, but we don't meet them until they're older and exhausted.
 
If I were from Britain, I wonder if I'd recognize the retired heroes as some sort of archetypes, perhaps stand-ins for famous men from history or literature, or perhaps representatives of specific regional cultures. I'm sure in an American novel, I could recognize a Confederate, a Yankee, and a cowboy, and know where each came from and what values they represent, even if those names were never used for them. I suspect Harrison's doing something similar here, but I don't know that for sure.
 
Cromis is called out of retirement by the young queen and tasked to reassemble the other heroes of the Methven who rode beside her father, to meet the Viriconium army in the north, take over command from the peacetime general who leads it, and defeat the Northmen before they cross the Waste. Separately, a talking mechanical bird (perhaps a bit like Archimedes from The Sword and the Stone or Bubo from Clash of the Titans) repeatedly instructs him to abandon this quest and deal with a much bigger problem on the southern coast. Cromis ignores the bird and tries to obey they queen. He gathers all but one of his old allies and rushes north, getting to the Viriconium army before the big fight.
 
And it doesn't matter at all, because the Northmen have them completely outmatched. They outnumber the Viriconium soldiers, they have airship support, they manage to catch them completely by surprise. And worst of all, they have the support of 'geteit chemosit' - military automatons from the last Afternoon culture, giants who look like they're made of shadow, who are huge and strong and fight tirelessly and precisely, who are armed with lightsabers, and who steal the brains of every dead body on the battlefield.
 

The Pastel City was written a few years before Star Wars came out, but the energy swords that Harrison calls 'baan' are very, very similar to lightsabers. They hum and crackle, they make a terrifying display of light and sound when you strike two of them together, they can cut through anything, and they're potentially as deadly to the wielder as they are to an enemy. Discussing this with my friend Trey, I learned that there's a tradition of energy swords in scifi - called by many different names, dating back to the 1930s. Lightsabers are just the best known example.
 
The battlefield rout is about the halfway point of the novel, and a turning point for the story. The brain stealers are the very thing the talking mechanical bird had been warning Cromis about all this time. tegeus-Cromis, Queen Jane, and the surviving Methven abandon any attempt to stop the Northmen's march into Viriconium, and travel south to meet the bird's maker, Cellur, a figure a bit like Merlin or Gandalf - elderly, wise, extremely eccentric.
 
Cellur claims to be over a thousand years old, but to have memories that only go back two hundred. He knows how to stop the geteit chemosit, but can't make the treacherous journey on his own. He trains Tomb the Dwarf, and the remaining heroes set out to a lost city to try to turn the automatons off, no longer to save Viriconium, but humanity more generally. Canna Moidart dug up the chemosit and turned them on, but she doesn't control them. Once her army defeats Viriconium, they'll turn against her Northmen and the civilian population, war machines with the one-track minds of Mickey's brooms in 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice.'
 
The plot is interesting enough, and the worldbuilding paints a setting you could get lost in. Harrison is economical enough with his words to tell us a lot in a little space, but one of his strengths is implying that there's more - more past, more detail - lurking just outside the edge of what's written. The characters are all described in semi-mythical terms, often with repeated descriptors, like Homer's famous invocation of 'the wine-dark sea.' There are three more Viriconium books, the next two are novels written a decade after the first, which makes me think Harrison got a new idea later, rather than that he was planning a quartet all along, and the last is a collection of short stories.

Belle of the Ball

 
 
Belle of the Ball

by Mari Costa

First Second

2023

 

 

Belle of the Ball is a cute little YA graphic novel about high school romance. There's a lesbian love triangle, with all the inherent conflict and heartbreak, right at the center of the story, but Mari Costa writes it all very gently, very kindly. The result is much more of a light-hearted romcom than any kind of tale of teen angst. There are no mean girls here, just three young adults trying to follow their hearts, if only they can figure out what they really want first.
 
The cast is three high school senior girls - ambitious cheerleader Regina; her girlfriend, soccer champ Chloe; and shy, nerdy Hawkins. Regina is smart and popular, the head cheerleader who's dating the star player of the soccer team, a straight A student who's already been accepted to the local college but still has her eye set on Harvard, and a future doctor with her 10-year life plan already all mapped out. Chloe is much less ambitious. She likes soccer and is good at it, she gets good-enough grades in everything but English, but prefers video games to studying, and gets bored whenever Regina's talking to her other friends about their goals for the future. It more seems like she's along for the ride than like she genuinely wants the same 10-year plan for herself.
 
And then there's Hawkins. Shy, self-conscious and awkward, nerdy, and an accidental force of chaos, who inadvertently crashed headlong into the fault lines in Regina and Chloe's relationship. Hawkins is also the school's cat-headed mascot. At the start of the story, she asks Regina to the homecoming dance, because she's had a long-time crush on her from a distance, and she mistakenly thought Regina and Chloe had broken up.
 
When Regina realizes that Chloe's recent low grades in English are going to jeopardize her soccer eligibility and her conditional college acceptance (and thus, the 10-year plan), she comes up with a strategy to put things back on track. Regina uses Hawkins's crush to convince her to tutor Chloe in exchange for a chance to hang out with them at school. Hawkins, despite knowing this is a bad idea, really does want more friends, and friendship with Regina specifically, and follows her heart and agrees.
 
Chloe is understandably not impressed with the plan to be tutored by the person who was flirting with her girlfriend, and isn't really interested in being tutored at all. She also quickly becomes suspicious that Hawkins seems to know too much about her, until suddenly, she connects two dots in her mind, and realizes that 'B Hawkins' is the same person as 'Belle,' Chloe's kindergarten classmate and first crush, Belle, who wore a princess dress to school every day, who Chloe used to follow around the playground, wishing she could be her knight. (Separate from this, there's also a running gag that from Hawkins's perspective, she and Regina have hung out several times in group settings, but Regina literally never noticed her there until she asked her out.)
 
You might be able to see where this is going. Regina and Chloe have different visions for their futures, and care about those visions with very different levels of intensity. At the same time that they might be growing apart anyway, Chloe and Hawkins suddenly start spending a lot more time together, and any feelings of attraction either of them may start to develop have a certain sort of plausible deniability to them ... right up to the end, when the feelings become so strong they're undeniable.
 
And as I said, it's all handled in a way that's fairly emotionally mature, with a minimum of raised voices or tears. Early on, it might be easy to think that Regina is controlling or manipulative, Chloe a bully, or Hawkins a pushover, but they all quickly grow beyond that. Regina tends to dominate any scene she's in, but we spend most of the book with Chloe and Hawkins. They spend a lot of time at home studying, but a highlight - narratively, visually, and emotionally - comes when Chloe buys Hawkins a ticket to the Renaissance Fair and rents her a princess dress, the first time she's worn one in years...
 
Costa's art is friendly and accessible. Aside from the black outlines and white negative space, all the tones are shades of pink. It's not just an accent color, this is a very pink book, and all the shades are different saturations of fuchsia pink (or what you might call 'Barbie pink'). Costa gives us a diverse cast, both ethnically and in terms of body types. The general absence of mean-spirited intent makes this a light read, and the art style complements that.

Ancillary Justice

 
 
Ancillary Justice

by Ann Leckie

Orbit

2013 

 

 

 Ancillary Justice is a space opera about someone who once served an empire seeking revenge against it for the war crimes she was ordered to commit. It's a book that's very clearly responding to some earlier works, and that was obviously influential enough that several more recent books are responding to it. Crimes of military conquest and revenge for them drive the plot of Justice; the worldbuilding focuses on the many sources of status inequality related to ancestry, on the cultural power of empire, and on what it might look like to truly do without gender and gender-based sexuality in a context that is otherwise still very unequal.

 

Ancillary Justice is narrated in the first-person by Breq. In the novel's present day, Breq is a lone woman on a mission of revenge, but in the past, in the flashbacks that take up at least a third of the book, Breq was both the giant troop carrier ship Justice of Torren, and more specifically, the twenty-troop unit One Esk. Even more more specifically, Breq's body was One Esk Nineteen, though that doesn't matter, because the twenty-troop unit is the smallest subdivision of the spaceship's mind that has any degree of individuality whatsoever. 

 

Breq is a former ancillary soldier, one of the shock troops of the Radchaai empire. Ancillaries are AI minds in human bodies. The ship and all its ancillaries function as a single mind; Breq is separated now because the ship Justice of Torren was destroyed, and all the other bodies dead. Breq retains absolutely none of her memories or personality from before she was made an ancillary. Her mission of revenge is about the incident that destroyed her ship-body and her other ancillary soldier-bodies. Her mind and personality now are the same as the ship's were, just with less processing power.

 

Ancillaries are a bit like Borg drones from Star Trek, the troop carriers a bit like Borg cubes. They're not quite the same, Breq is no Seven of Nine, but for sure, the Borg are one of the earlier ideas Ann Leckie is engaging with. 

 

The two other most prominent touchpoints, I think, are Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and the Battlestar Galactica remake tv series, both of which attempt to explore war and empire in a context without gender inequality. LeGuin wrote Darkness about people who are genderless - and who indeed have no biological sex at all except when they're reproducing, and the same person can father one child and mother another. LeGuin used he/him pronouns to refer to all the characters in that book, and I suspect that some less-careful readers may have missed that they're not really supposed to be men. 

 

The Radchaai have the same range of biological sex characteristics that we do, but they have no concept for gender and make no gendered distinctions among themselves. Reversing LeGuin's choice, Leckie has Breq refer to everyone as she/her. It's a choice that makes Radchaai gender unmissable. It also dates the book, already, because I'm fairly sure that if Leckie were writing it for the first time today, she'd refer to the Radchaai using they/them. (Fairly sure, but not completely certain, because it's certainly a provocative and attention-getting artistic decision.) It's a reminder of both how recently and how successfully the current ideas of nonbinary gender and singular-they pronouns have gained mainstream recognition to describe ways of being that, even ten years ago, were harder to talk about. Not because no language for it existed, but because the words were less widely known, more specialized. For decades, some people called themselves genderqueer or used ze/hir or e/eir pronouns - some people still do! - but not as many as now call themselves nonbinary or use they. The new language is more accessible, maybe, or resonates with more people's sense of self, perhaps.

 

Anyway, Leckie writes the Radchaai not as lacking characteristics that we would think of as gender-markers, but as mixing and matching them according personal preference rather than societal norm, so that most of them would look queer to us, and to non-Radchaai people. Breq starts the present day portion of the book on a non-imperial winter planet, where the locals have binary gender, and she struggles to use that part of their language correctly. The flashbacks, to before Justice of Torren died, when Breq was still a starship and an army, take place on a recently annexed swamp world, where the locals are still reluctant to give up their own culture to become Radchaai, and are divided by a racial caste system.

 

I'm pretty sure that Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire is responding to Ancillary Justice. The Teixcalaanli empire seems to build on some ideas from the Radchaai empire, though Martine focuses even more on language than Leckie does. But a few times, Leckie comments on the way that in the Radchaai language, the same word means 'a citizen of the Radch' and 'a civilized person', that they have no way, in their native tongue, to conceptualize people who are civilized, but not part of their civilization. Martine builds on that, and shows us the empire from the perspective of an about-to-be-conquered person, not a regretful former-conqueror. Martha Wells's popular Murderbot novellas also strike me as possibly being about a character who's like Breq, but who is truly portrayed as genderless because Wells doesn't use 'she' instead of 'they' or 'it'.

 

In the present-day, on the winter planet, Breq finds a recently-revived participant in a planet-wide civilian massacre from a thousand years earlier. Breq drags her along on the errand that brought her to the planet - trying to find an alien weapon, a gun that can penetrate Radchaai forcefields. 

 

In the flashbacks that alternate every-other chapter, we watch as the ancillary bodies of One Esk serve a Radchaai lieutenant who is trying to prevent a local leader from fomenting a racist lynch mob of upper caste conquered peoples to attack members of the lower caste. The lieutenant succeeds, but then she and One Esk are ordered to massacre a hundred members of the upper caste, and later, just before Justice of Torren is destroyed, One Esk is ordered to execute the lieutenant.

 

In Leckie's telling, war crimes, the execution of innocents and civilians, are catalysts of social and political change. They are moments that shock of the conscience, even of experienced soldiers, moments that force them to decide if they are most loyal to their empire or to the ideals they think their empire represents, when the two suddenly come in conflict. Leckie's soldiers almost always follow their orders, but then regret it, and try to make amends, and make things different afterward. We learn of countless reforms to the Radch in the thousand years since the planetary genocide, and Breq is set on her path of revenge because she regrets and resents the final killings she committed before almost all of her was destroyed.

 

Once Breq has her alien gun, and we've fully learned why she wants to use it, the final third of the book takes us to a Radchaai space station, to confront the person who gave the orders, the Radchaai emperor, Anander Minanaai. Like the spaceships and ancillary soldiers, Minanaai is one mind in many bodies. Except that, just like Justice of Torren both is and is not quite the same as One Esk, Minanaai is not quite one unified mind. Parts of her support reform, parts oppose it, and every part with a secret agenda wants to keep her whole self from consciously acknowledging the split. She's even willing to kill an entire starship, or an entire space station, to keep that acknowledgment from spreading from one part of her to the rest. Guys will literally blow up a planet rather than go to therapy, amiright? Anander Minanaai has the same problem as King Gnuff, her mind is simply too physically large, the distances her thoughts have to travel too great, for her to maintain a fully unified, singular self.

 

Ancillary Justice is the first book of a trilogy. I read it when it first came out and loved it then, but at the time I never followed up with the two sequels, I think because of how busy my life was at the time. On my first read, I also think I failed to fully understand some things about Breq and Anander Minanaai that are more clear to me now. Back then, I didn't get that the whole of One Esk was a single mind, without any more granular individuality attached to any of the ancillary bodies. Also, the most conservative, revanchist part of Minanaai's mind accuses the most liberal, reformist part of being sabotaged by aliens. On my first read I thought this was true, but this time I think it's a lie, a self-delusion, and an excuse that justifies the killings she orders in her attempts to roll back the reforms. In the next book, I think that all of Minanaai will have learned the truth about the split within herself, and her internal conflict will probably erupt into a civil war across the Radch. 

The Yellow 'M'

 
The Yellow 'M'

Blake and Mortimer 6

by Edgar Jacobs

translated by Clarence Holland

Cinebook

1956, reprinted 2007

 

 

The Yellow 'M' is an early Franco-Belgian comic about a mysterious villain's crime spree in London. At first, the criminal just seems exceptionally competent, but he evades capture in ways that are truly superhuman, which suggests the involvement of a mad scientist in the whole scheme... The Yellow 'M' is the sixth book in Edgar Jacobs's collected Blake and Mortimer comics, although I gather it might be the most popular, and it was the first one of the series reprinted in English.
 
Probably the best known Franco-Belgian comics, for American audiences, are The Adventures of Tintin. The Blake and Mortimer comics are visually very similar to Tintin, with the same ligne claire art style, with fairly realistic drawings, thin outlines with no shading, and flat colors. (The best known FB comic characters are probably the Smurfs, but most Americans would known them from their cartoons, not their books, and they're stylistically very different.)
 
Captain Blake is in MI5, and Professor Mortimer is a physicist. They solve mysteries in London in the late 1940s and early 50s (which was present-day at the time they were written), and I gather that a lot of their adventures are like this one - initially fairly realistic, but increasingly science fictional as the uncover the fantastic methods employed to commit the crimes. In The Yellow 'M', for example, the pair eventually uncover that the mastermind behind the crime spree is using hypnosis, various psychic powers, and a machine that projects something like radio waves to remotely dominate people's minds!
 
At the start of the comic, 'the Yellow M' is the codename the London police have given to an unknown criminal who's been on a very successful burglary spree. He announces his crimes in advance, manages to commit them despite increased surveillance, and signs a yellow M in chalk at each scene. (In the earliest Batman comics, the Joker gets his start by announcing he will poison specific people and then succeeding. I wonder if this was a common villain plan back then?)
 
We witness the Yellow M's latest crime, the theft of the crown from the royal Crown Jewels, from the perspective of the beefeater guards. They're totally outmatched. Only one even sees the thief, and he's knocked unconscious, with no memory of the encounter.
 
Blake gets assigned to the case because the local crimes have become a matter of national importance, and he calls in Mortimer to consult. At this point, the Yellow M switches from stealing to kidnapping, abducting several gentlemen who belong to the same club as Blake and Mortimer, including a newspaper editor and a judge. It seems like the Yellow M is going after anyone who investigates him, but Mortimer intuits another connection between the victims, an old libel case from before WWII, involving a scientist who claimed to have discovered psychic powers...
 
Eventually Blake and Mortimer figure out who's responsible, and find their hideout, a facility constructed for official use during the Blitz and abandoned after the war. I hope it doesn't spoil too much to say that 'the Yellow M' is not just one man, working alone. It turns out that the investigators know one of the criminals better than his own partner does, and they use that one advantage as a wedge to drive them apart. (The villain they know is recurring from an earlier book in the series, so if you read them in order, you'd recognize him too.)
 
Because Blake wears a uniform and works directly for the British government, he's quite unlike Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. And while he's able to fight as well as a soldier, he's no superhero. He catches the super-powered thief with police work, not superior martial arts. Mortimer is the one with the most intuition, and the one who finds the vital clue, but mostly does that by researching court cases and newspaper scandals in the library. His status as a scientist maybe lets him understand how the Yellow M's machines work, but he doesn't have any genius insights or deductions. It's more like teamwork and proper procedure win the day, allowing competent but ordinary investigators to solve and stop an extraordinary crime.

Alphabetical Diaries

 
 
Alphabetical Diaries

by Sheila Heti

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2024

 

 

The basis of Shelia Heti's Alphabetical Diaries is a real diary she kept for about a decade. But that original document was doubly transformed. First by a Dada-like game of putting every sentence in alphabetical, rather than chronological order. And then by curating and editing, until however long 10 years of diary entries is has been chopped down to a slim 200-page volume. It reads a bit like poetry. Both because it consists of only Heti's favorite sentences. And because it's so utterly unlike any traditional narrative, because the sentences arrive in a succession whose logic is utterly divorced from time order.
 
There's a book about writing I like, Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte, where she picked out hundreds of well-written sentences from literature to use as examples. Heti's book is a little like that, too, except without any meta-commentary on her choices. Without any instructional purpose.
 
What emerges from Alphabetical Diaries is a very attenuated, highly asynchronous look at the life of Shelia Heti. I sort of presume that her selections hit the high points, and cover the most important events of her life during this time, and not just the ones that sound best. But I don't really know that for sure.
 
She writes a lot about two tumultuous, on-again off-again relationships she had with men, Lars and Pavel, both of whom she seems to have been unable to either make it work or decisively break up with. I don't know if those are pseudonyms. She also has a couple other boyfriends, and I think at least one girlfriend. Or maybe just fling with a woman. When she writes about sex, she's very frank. In a way I'd probably find embarrassing if I knew her, but that I find admirable in a writer. She talks about occasions that were very nice, and a few that seem to have troubled her. She repeatedly mentions one time (or more?) when she was tied up, which seems like it was both. In Stephen Moore's histories of the novel as an artform, in his summaries of various books, he always talks about the treatment of sex, as though that's one of the key markers of literary merit. I feel like I'm doing that here too. But it's obviously important to Heti (and to a lot of people, especially in their late 20s and early 30s) so it makes sense that it's an important part of the book.
 
Heti writes about her writing. About having trouble finishing a book, about the books she wants to write. She writes about what sort of author she wants to be. What kind of person. How she wants to live. She writes about a man named Lemons who is either her publisher or editor or agent. She writes declarative sentences. Instructions to herself. She writes about money troubles. She writes a lot of sentence fragments. A noun phrase. A different noun phrase. A particularly evocative or surprising noun phrase. That stand alone here with no context. And then she writes longer sentences, the kind I often like myself, that pile clause on top of clause, and that can hold a whole little narrative within it, with a setup and conclusion all there together, still in the same sentence, which is practically the only way you can get a complete anecdote in a book like this.
 
Chapter I is the longest, more than twice the length of any other. Which isn't surprising, really. It'd be longer, but Heti often forgoes the starting pronoun in sentences where she's the subject. So she'll say something like, 'went to the beach,' instead of 'I went to the beach.' Which is how a lot of people write their diaries, I think. A is second longest, I think, and the T chapter is probably third.
 
I really enjoyed this one. I know I'm kind of a sucker for a good gimmick. But this is a really good gimmick! A good idea, executed well. I also kept thinking, as I read it, how very normal Heti's life sounded from the outside. Even as she kept worrying that she was doing something wrong. I worry about that myself, all the time. And it made me wonder how my life looks from the outside. If it looks normal too?

 

 

A different noun phrase. A good idea, executed well. A is second longest, I think, and the T chapter is probably third. A noun phrase. A particularly evocative or surprising noun phrase. About having trouble finishing a book, about the books she wants to write. And because it's so utterly unlike any traditional narrative, because the sentences arrive in a succession whose logic is utterly divorced from time order. And it made me wonder how my life looks from the outside. And then by curating and editing, until however long 10 years of diary entries is has been chopped down to a slim 200-page volume. And then she writes longer sentences, the kind I often like myself, that pile clause on top of clause, and that can hold a whole little narrative within it, with a setup and conclusion all there together, still in the same sentence, which is practically the only way you can get a complete anecdote in a book like this.

 

Both because it consists of only Heti's favorite sentences. But I don't really know that for sure. But it's obviously important to Heti (and to a lot of people, especially in their late 20s and early 30s) so it makes sense that it's an important part of the book. But that original document was doubly transformed. But this is a really good gimmick!

 

Chapter I is the longest, more than twice the length of any other. 

 

Even as she kept worrying that she was doing something wrong. 

 

First by a Dada-like game of putting every sentence in alphabetical, rather than chronological order. 

 
Heti writes about her writing. Heti's book is a little like that, too, except without any meta-commentary on her choices. How she wants to live. 

 

I also kept thinking, as I read it, how very normal Heti's life sounded from the outside. I don't know if those are pseudonyms. I feel like I'm doing that here too. I know I'm kind of a sucker for a good gimmick. I really enjoyed this one. I sort of presume that her selections hit the high points, and cover the most important events of her life during this time, and not just the ones that sound best. I worry about that myself, all the time. If it looks normal too? In a way I'd probably find embarrassing if I knew her, but that I find admirable in a writer. In Stephen Moore's histories of the novel as an artform, in his summaries of various books, he always talks about the treatment of sex, as though that's one of the key markers of literary merit. Instructions to herself. It reads a bit like poetry. It'd be longer, but Heti often forgoes the starting pronoun in sentences where she's the subject. 

 

Or maybe just fling with a woman. 

 

She also has a couple other boyfriends, and I think at least one girlfriend. She repeatedly mentions one time (or more?) when she was tied up, which seems like it was both. She talks about occasions that were very nice, and a few that seem to have troubled her. She writes a lot about two tumultuous, on-again off-again relationships she had with men, Lars and Pavel, both of whom she seems to have been unable to either make it work or decisively break up with. She writes a lot of sentence fragments. She writes about a man named Lemons who is either her publisher or editor or agent. She writes about money troubles. She writes about what sort of author she wants to be. She writes declarative sentences. So she'll say something like, 'went to the beach,' instead of 'I went to the beach.'

 

That stand alone here with no context. The basis of Shelia Heti's Alphabetical Diaries is a real diary she kept for about a decade. There's a book about writing I like, Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte, where she picked out hundreds of well-written sentences from literature to use as examples. 

What emerges from Alphabetical Diaries is a very attenuated, highly asynchronous look at the life of Shelia Heti. What kind of person. When she writes about sex, she's very frank. Which is how a lot of people write their diaries, I think. Which isn't surprising, really. Without any instructional purpose.