The Golden Mean

 
The Golden Mean

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Concludes
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1993

 

 

The Golden Mean is the last book in Nick Bantock's original trilogy of epistolary art books about the long-distance romance between Griffin and Sabine. 
 
The series started with British artist Griffin Moss receiving a homemade postcard from a woman he never met, Sabine Strohem, who lives on a South Pacific island. He replied back with a homemade card of his own, and soon they both found they were falling in love. Sabine is also an artist; she designs stamps for the island government. And she has a psychic connection to Griffin, which is why she contacted him initially.
 
Then Sabine decided to fly to London to visit Griffin. Faced with the prospect of meeting his penpal dreamgirl in real life, Griffin panicked and went on a trip around the world to find himself. Sabine stayed in Griffin's loft, and they continued trading postcards and letters. Sabine would have to go back to the island soon, so Griffin plucked up his courage and came home, only to find his loft empty... Strangely, the date on Sabine's last card sent from London suggests the overlapped by a week without seeing each other.
 
The Golden Mean leans a bit more into the supernatural elements of the story. Griffin finally develops a psychic connection back to Sabine, just as hers to him starts mysterious waning. They wonder if they're living on parallel worlds, or what else it could be. (Normally I might refer to this as a Lake House plot, except Bantock wrote this over a decade before The Lake House!) A menacing man starts following Sabine around the island, claiming to be a scientist who studies psychics, who wants to examine her and Griffin. The strange man starts writing postcards to Griffin too. Sabine and Griffin know they need to meet, and to escape the scientist, so they agree to find each other at the Pharaoh's Gate in Egypt. 
 
Later, an African doctor gets a mysterious postcard from Sabine that suggests she and Griffin have married and had a child...
 
Although The Golden Mean concludes the trilogy, it's clear there's more story ahead! As usual, Bantock infuses the postcards and letters with the characters' personalities. Griffin's cards are more surreal, and his handwriting is neat and precise. He types his letter. Sabine's cards use more collage, she handwrites everything in cursive in what looks like fountain pen ink. The mysterious stranger uses Sabine-designed stamps, but his postcards are store-bought unlike the ones the penpals make for each other. I suppose I'll continue reading to learn what happens next!

The Story of My Teeth

 
 
The Story of My Teeth

by Valeria Luiselli
translated by Christina MacSweeney

Coffee House Press

2013, reprinted 2015
 

  

The Story of My Teeth is a kind of rollicking first-person narrative telling the life story of Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez. Gustavo has a larger-than-life personality. He's a former security guard, an auctioneer, a collector of knickknacks, a raconteur, a teller of tall tales, a man about town, a storyteller but also a bullshitter. As a character and the book's narrator, he's fun to read. The book was originally written in Spanish, and it's set in a suburb of Mexico City.

 

The Story of My Teeth is divided into a handful of chapters, and moves across the unpredictably. In the first chapter, Gustavo tells most of his life story. He grew up poor, got a job as a security guard at a juice factory, eventually got a promotion to crisis manager. He met a rich woman and lived as her kept husband, learned auctioneering, got divorced. As an auctioneer, he made his own money, bought a house and a collection of curios, including a supposed set of Marylin Monroe's teeth, which he paid to have implanted in place of his own.

 

The next chapter shows a single auction, where Gustavo sells off ten of his own teeth while claiming they each belonged to a different famous historical figure, from Plato to Virginia Woolfe. We get to read a vignette for each one. At the end of the chapter, Gustavo meets his long-estranged son, now an adult who works at the art gallery adjoining the juice factory.

 

In the third chapter, Gustavo wakes up drugged and disoriented in an art gallery. His son has removed all his teeth and stolen all the collected tchotchkes out of his house. Gustavo meets an aspiring young writer and makes him his apprentice; we learn that the first chapter was written by the apprentice taking dictation.

 

Chapter four has another auction! Gustavo and his apprentice break back into the gallery to steal back his teeth and some other things to resell. Gustavo makes up entirely fictional stories about the origin of each object to tell at auction, and we get those vignettes too.

 

The fifth chapter is a posthumous retelling of Gustavo's life by his apprentice. Seen from the outside, and without Gustavo's grandiosity, it all looks a bit smaller and sadder. This one is illustrated with photos of the real neighborhood where the book takes place. The sixth and final chapter was written by the translator, not the author. It's a timeline that covers Gustavo's life, key events in Mexican history that overlap with it, and anniversaries of events in the lives of the famous people Gustavo references in his tale telling.

 

Gustavo is an enjoyable narrator, and via his fictional auction catalogs, we get a collection of very short stories within the larger narrative. A running theme is the question of how much the value of objects depends on the objects themselves and how much depends on the stories we tell about them - and relatedly, how much depends on the truth of those stories. Gustavo freely quotes and tells anecdotes about real philosophers and other thinkers, often claiming them as his uncles or cousins. Jean Paul Sartre becomes cousin Juan Pablo Sanchez Sartre, for example, a whiny brat who yells at the other relatives that spending time with them is hell. There's also a fair number of quotes and anecdotes specifically about teeth.

 

The story of how The Story of My Teeth was written, explained by author Valeria Luiselli in the afterward, is nearly as interesting as the book itself. Jumex is a juice factory in Ecatepec, Mexico. Ecatepec neighbors Mexico City, and the way it's spoken about in the text makes me think it's a bit like the Jersey City to Mexico City's NYC. Some of the profits of the factory have been spent to amass a contemporary art collection in a private gallery next door. Luiselli got a commission from the gallery, and wanted to write something about the connection between the factory workers and the collected art. After she wrote each chapter, a book club made up of factory workers met to read and discuss it. She incorporated their ideas and feedback into her revisions and used them as her basis to write each new chapter, making them true collaborators. Some even took the photos that appear in the book.

Sabine's Notebook

 
 
Sabine's Notebook

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Continues
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1992

 

 

Sabine's Notebook is the second book in Nick Bantock's trilogy of novels about a pair of artists who are separated across the globe, but share a kind of psychic connection, and communicate in letters and postcards. Bantock's work blends the epistolary novel with the art book, as each postcard and envelope are illustrated, each letter has an actual envelope it can be removed from, and everything is written in the specific handwriting of the artists, Griffin and Sabine.
 
In the first book, Sabine reached out to Griffin because she'd finally learned who he was and how to reach him, after a lifetime of being able to (sometimes?) see through his eyes. Griffin is an illustrator living in London; Sabine lives on a small island in the South Pacific and designs the island's stamps. For Sabine, the chance to talk to Griffin is the fulfillment of a dream. Griffin is intrigued by Sabine but also fears her, and fears that he's imagining her or going insane. The first book ended with Sabine announcing she was coming to visit Griffin, but then arriving to find his apartment empty.
 
Now in Sabine's Notebook, we learn that Griffin has essentially fled in terror, afraid to actually meet the dream girl who, he's afraid, might really be just a dream. Sabine seems awfully understanding as he writes to her (at his own home address) from Italy, Greece, Japan, Australia. She's enjoying the city and its museums, though she'll eventually have to go back home. 
 
Griffin is clearly going through some sort of spiritual or psychological crisis, though I found myself thinking that world travel wouldn't really solve anything, and that he ought to see a therapist, and especially that he ought to face his fears and just go meet Sabine already. I can understand building something up in your mind so that you fear disappointment if you actually do it, but he's not even really choosing the idea of Sabine over actually meeting her. He must understand that if he keeps avoiding her, he could lose her as a pen pal too.
  
The pair repeatedly affirm that they are in love with one another, and Sabine in particular has the patience of a saint. When Griffin finally returns home, near Sabine's deadline for leaving, he finds her already gone ... but then the last postcard in the book is from her, from his address, asking why he never made it back like he said he would!
 
I'm curious to see how this situation will be resolved. I wonder if we'll learn that the pair are somehow separated in time as well as space. I don't really know, but that's my guess. Poor Sabine! Regardless of whatever supernatural is going on, she's in love with a man who prefers to keep her at a distance and to communicate in the slowest, most attenuated way possible. Bantock's artwork is again evocative - suggestive and dream-like - which fits the mood of the book and the personality of the two artists well. 

Fakes

 
 
Fakes

An Anthology of Pseduo-Interview, Faux Lectures, Quasi-Letters, 'Found' Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts

edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer

WW Norton & Company

2012

 

 

Fakes is a collection of 40 literary short stories in the subgenre we might think of as 'gimmick fiction', where the writing is very visibly constrained by some higher concept that shapes the text. Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style and Matt Madden's tribute to it, 99 Ways to Tell a Story are veritable catalogs of gimmicks, each retelling the same simple story over and over again with a different high concept each time. One common type of gimmick is to imitate the form of another kind of writing or document; not every gimmick is like that, but the ones in Fakes all are.
 
Despite the connotation of the title, the stories collected here are not actually trying to trick anyone into thinking they're really whatever style of writing they appear to be. No one reading JG Ballard's "The Index", for example, is going to be fooled into thinking that it's the only surviving remnant of the autobiography of Alexander Hamilton's secret son, who inspired and was then denounced by every major historical figure of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ballard's story definitely qualifies as ergodic fiction - where the narrative is implied rather than told, often because our only access to a character is indirect, mediated through a document supposedly prepared by the character - but most of the stories here are more straightforward than that. The most oblique is probably Donald Barthelme's "The Explanation", which is a surreal sort of interview. Also, with the exception of these two luminaries, most of the stories are from the 1990s and 2000s.
 
There are a few commonalities among the stories. One is that an awful lot of them are humorous, likely because of the playful nature of this style of writing influences what sort of story you want to use it to tell.
 
Another is that many of these authors play up the irony of a style that's usually fairly business-like or professional to talk about parts of life or express emotions that are inappropriate for that setting, such as loneliness or romantic desire, over-the-top misogyny, a too-crude interest in sex or drugs, self destruction or other symptoms of mental illness, or grief or mourning over a recent death. The effect of this disjunction is sometimes funny, sometimes sad. It almost always communicates that the narrator of the story has feelings so powerful that they can't be contained by social norms of propriety.
 
A few stand-outs for me include "Officers Weep" by Daniel Orozco, a police blotter that shows two patrol partners falling in love while ineffectually following a vandal with a chainsaw cutting a swathe of random destruction through town (it also reminded me of Carmen Maria Machado's "These are There Stories," which does something similar with fictional Law & Order SVU episode summaries); "Our Spring Catalog" by Jack Pendarvis, where we infer a publishing intern's crisis over her status in the industry and the overall direction of her life from the deteriorating quality of the summaries she writes to advertise upcoming books; "Life Story" by editor David Shields, which is told entirely in bumper sticker slogans and variations; "Reply All" by Robin Hemley, where a poetry club falls apart when one member accidentally sends a love letter to the entire email listserv instead of solely to the woman he's having an affair with; and "National Treasures" by Charles McLeod, an auction catalog where the object descriptions tell the seller's very troubled life story.
 
A few stories missed for me because there just wasn't enough going on, like a letter to a funeral parlor complaining about their use of the word 'cremains,' or an essay about depictions of the crucifixion that seemed to be straight nonfiction as far as I could tell.
 
A few others I didn't personally care for because they seemed to me to be trying to express grandiose and exaggerated inappropriate sentiments in a way that should be humorous, but I couldn't really find them funny. I found that I couldn't quite forget the reality that there are people who truly think and do things like this, which made them more troubling than funny. Joe Wenderoth's "Letters to Wendy's" is supposedly a series of letters sent by a disturbed young man to the fast food company, where he announces his drug use, speculates about other customers' genitals, plots to physically assault employees, plots to sexually assault the non-existent Wendy herself, and declares his plans to get his dock out and wave it around the store. Stanley Crawford's "Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood" is a maniacally over-controlling set of instructions for a wife from her husband governing every aspect of her appearance, behavior, inner life, and an exhaustive list of chores, all woven through with an extended metaphor about how the house is the marriage. (Incredibly, both those two were story-length excerpts from book-length complete works!) Editor Matthew Vollmer's "Will & Testament" is supposedly written by a young man just before his suicide, and supposedly sent to strangers chosen from the phone book, asking them to dismember his body and send the parts to all sorts of people, including all his ex-girlfriends and former bosses, and to then engage in a lifetime of ritual mourning on his behalf.

There's also a real bibliography at the end, listing other works that could've been included in a much, much longer collection. I was aware of a few of the book-length recommendations, but most of them, and essentially all the short stories, are news to me, and have the potential to keep me busy looking them up. 

Otto

 
 
Otto

A Palindrama

by Jon Agee

Rocky Pond Books

2021 

 

 

Jon Agee calls Otto a 'palindrama,' a portmanteau of his own devising that describes the fact that every bit of text in the body of the book takes the form of a palindrome, a word or phrase that reads to same forward and back, like racecar or noon. This is a children's comic rather than a picture book. Each page has multiple panels of sequential art, and the story is mostly told with pictures. 
 
The text, when it appears, is largely dialogue, but also sometimes signs and labels. An awful lot of these are longer than any of the palindromes I'm used to (which top out at like, 'Madam I am Adam,') and many of them are formed by a statement and reply, two characters working together to make one palindrome.
 
The story follows young Otto on an adventure that seemingly takes place in his own imagination, but that also involves a wider and stranger world than you'd think he could dream up alone. I've come to appreciate this as a pretty classic structure for kid's stories. In Otto's case, he's playing with his dog Pip when his mom and dad call him into the dining room to eat his wonton soup. Staring into the soup bowl, he's imaginatively transported to a beach where his parents are asleep on blankets in the sun, leaving him unsupervised. He wanders off and has his adventures before returning to the beach just as his parents are waking up, and then returning to reality as his daydream while staring into his soup comes to an end. The structure is fairly symmetrical, which suits the theme well.
 
On the beach, Otto sees a rat carrying a surf board; Pip gives chase and Otto follows. Soon he's in a desert. He briefly meets and passes by a few eccentric characters and odd food stands. He finds a doctor asleep on the railroad tracks, who's saved at the last moment by the 'Mr. Alarm' mascot from Otto's bedroom clock. He reaches a road where someone gives him a ride into the city. He sees lots of signs and advertisements, and once in town the driver points out various notable cityfolk. Otto wanders a bit, goes to the 'mueseum,' and meets more strange people, including a woman in a pink cat costume who wants his help stacking cats on a ladder. He continues wandering, through a park, a cemetery, to the lake shore and into the lake. Eventually he takes a boat ride, braves a storm, and ends up back where he started. It's fair to say Otto's dream is action packed!
 
At the end, Agee credits people who suggested a few of the palindromes to him, and of course some were simply well-known. But it seems he made up most of them himself, especially the longer and more complex ones. Whether that's something his brain was uniquely suited to, or a skill he practiced, I'm really impressed! 

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.

Gretel and the Great War

 
 
Gretel and the Great War

by Adam Erlich Sachs

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2024 

 

 

Gretel and the Great War is a mosaic novel, a series of tales that are halfway between chapters and short stories. The conceit is that a mute young woman was found wandering the streets of Vienna in 1919, in the aftermath of the war and the flu, that she was checked into an asylum, and that soon afterward, letters started arriving for her from a different asylum, letters from her father, telling her bedtime stories.
 
Each story tells the tale of a different person, identified only by their profession. There are 26 stories, each associated with a letter of the alphabet, which matches the name of the job, and each is written so that that letter or sound will show up much more than normal. At first, it doesn't seem like the stories have any connection, but soon the characters start to reappear and intersect. It becomes clear they're all part of the same social world, and the stories are being told in roughly chronological order. Almost every story involves someone getting sent to the Sanitarium of Dr Krakauer, where they presumably meet Gretel's father and relate their tale to him.
 
In true fairy tale fashion, the stories are dark but often funny, told in a manner that's playful and irreverent, but that also references any crude subject matter using polite terminology. Most of the stories involve adults caring for children - or rather, adults who have responsibility for children. They are often, in fact, quite un-caring, or else worse, they are too interested, in ways that seem sinister no matter how obliquely Gretel's father describes the nature of their interest. And as is so often the case with fairy tales, there's a moral here. The Vienna described in these tales is a sick society, where people hold outrageous, inflexible ideals, and are eager to commit acts of cruelty to achieve them. It's no wonder they go to war, and after the war, they seem even harsher and more cruel, xenophobic and antisemitic.

 
An architect aspires to design the simplest possible building facade, one that somehow traumatizes the viewer. A ballet choreographer invents a new dance step he claims is more natural than any other, and his wife dies trying to dance it. A choir master performs surgeries on the boys in his choir in his quest for the purest possible sound. He's inspired (rather than warned off) by a woman who tells him about the 'bad things' her own choir master father used to do to her and her brothers. A playwright demands such intense lighting for his play that it burns the theater down. A Serbian man wants revenge for feeling snubbed and disrespected by the ethnically German majority. Over and over people's obsessions cross paths with the theater, the concert hall, the Duke and Duchess, and their beloved youngest daughter. (Also, just about every adult in the book wants to fuck, and only rarely with their actual spouse.)
 
Gretel's mother first appears in the M story, and like many of the people we meet, she reappears later. She's a singer and aspiring actress who abandons her husband and daughter in favor of her art. Gretel herself appears in a few of the later stories too, although I don't think we find out quite why she can no longer speak. Several of the characters seem to similar to each other, and since none of them have names, it can be a little hard to keep track of them, to tell who's the same person back again, and who merely has a backstory that mirrors some of the details of somebody else's. A good portion of the book consists of stories within stories as well, tales told by character in a chapter that might be as important, or even more so, than the main story of the chapter.
 
The silly, obsessive behavior of the characters, the playful sing-song narrative voice, the word games being played with letters and sounds, all of it acts like the spoonful of sugar to help wash down the realization that these people are insane, that their society, Europe generally, but also Austria-Hungary specifically, had gone mad, that they prioritized ideas over people, that their determination to implement forms of radical simplicity and purity regardless of who got trampled or smashed to achieve it was bound to lead to disaster. Such, at least, is author Adam Erlich Sachs's diagnosis. Nothing quite covers up the underlying bitterness though, especially when I read this while watching my own country succumb to leaders who seem gleeful to inflict human suffering, which they claim will make America 'simpler' or 'purer,' but which will probably only make us smaller, meaner, poorer, with a government that's unable to help anyone who needs it, that functions solely to persecute. In the book, the Great War, when it arrives, seems almost like just another cockamamie scheme writ large, only different because this time it entangles absolutely everyone instead of just a few.
 
In setting, Gretel and the Great War is like a neighbor to Berlin or Children are Civilians Too, although it's organized quite differently than either of them. The playful language in "Gretel," the use of the alphabet and bedtime story as structuring devices makes it unlike other mosaic novels, but oddly similar to Rebecca Brown's The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary, which also uses those devices to leaven some very dark subject matter.

The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales

 
The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales

by Alex Rose

Hotel St George Press

2007

 

 

A little while ago, I read a novel called Impossible Views of the World. The title refers to a specific kind of forgery, one that purports to be from a particular time, but that could not have been made then, because it relies on knowledge or techniques that weren't available at the time. In the novel, author Lucy Ives claims that such forgeries are especially desirable, precisely because of the false hope they offer. By being better than the real thing, they offer the hope that the world is secretly more interesting than most people know, that those secrets are attainable to the discerning connoisseur, who proves themself better than others just by being in the know.
 
It's that same desire, I think, for hidden esoteric knowledge, that lies at the heart of Alex Rose's The Musical Illusionist. Rose is self-consciously channeling Borges and Italo Calvino here, writing fictions in the style of nonfiction, in the idiom and syntax of truth. This is a collection of short stories written to sound like a museum catalog, with text like a guided tour between sections, illustrated mostly with public domain maps and diagrams. (I suppose this also resembles the SCP, but that seems more coincidental than deliberate.)
 
Rose invents things that don't exist, that couldn't exist in the times and places he says they're from, and presents them as artifacts from a plausible but unreal past. His inventions are false, but not overtly fantastical, relying on extensions of real phenomena rather than magic. And he always introduces them, these fictional things, after first talking about things that are real but little known, real but unusual - the sort of things that show up in wunderkammern and cabinets of curiosity and Atlas Obscura articles. In the chapter on a display of microorganisms, for example, he first discusses the extreme environments that archaea live in, before suggesting the existence of a foot-long, single-celled macro-bacteria that lives inside certain animal livers. The line between truth and fabrication is blurred. I think all the extremophiles he mentioned are real, for example, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn he slipped a fake into the list.
 
The tour guide sections are formatted interestingly. Each sentence crosses the spine to cover the whole two-page spread. (It would've been impressive if you could also read down each page, but Rose didn't manage that trick.) The stories themselves are formatted normally. The guide claims that you're visiting an underground library, that you can only reach it by waiting at an abandoned subway stop after hours, that you'll see the exhibits out the train windows. Each story describes one exhibit, and there are sometimes several on the same general topic in a row. The phenomena being described kind of get less plausible as you go, but it's not a very strong trend.
 
If there's one danger, in fact, it'd that the stories themselves are a little boring. There are stories about time, about language - but in general, there are no characters, and unlike Invisible Cities or Einstein's Dreams, which invite the reader to think about their own experiences of place and time, there's no personal connection either, so they feel detached from humanity. Mostly they're like, 'imagine this thing - isn't it cool? wouldn't it be cool if it existed?' And it would, but also, there's a limit. Real things that fall along the boundaries we draw between concepts, or that somehow fit outside of our usual organizing schema, definitely are cool, and learning about them can challenge how we think about the world. But Rose's objects are more like thought experiments.
 
The title story, for example, purports to tell the story of a French composer living in the mid-19th century, who manages to write extremely postmodern, avant garde music that like, sounds like it moves around auditorium as though thrown by a ventriloquist, or that somehow amplifies and incorporates all the audience noises of rustling coats and squeaking seats into the performance, or that's basically atonal noise, or that is silent, but is accompanied by a projection of colored lights onto a white sheet so precise and vivid that each audience member's brain synethetically generates their own experience of music, etc. And somehow one man has the skill and fortune to write all this, an orchestra capable of playing it, and countless audiences who never riot and burn his concert hall down in shock or disgust. It's a mix of things that are possible but couldn't be done as impressively as described, things that supposedly happened a hundred or so years earlier than reality, things that rely on knowledge of modern music theory or advanced neurological imaging, and things that probably wouldn't work at all, allegedly working perfectly. It's kind of interesting to imagine, but at the same time, Rose somehow doesn't engage or move me as much as other authors writing in this way have.

Une Semaine De Bonte

 
 
Une Semaine De Bonte

A Surrealistic Novel in Collage

by Max Ernst

Dover

1934, reprinted 1976

 

 

Une Semaine De Bonte is the Dover Press reprint of Dada artist Max Ernst's series of five collage pamphlets, whose collective title translates to A Week of Kindness. It's slightly tempting to claim that Ernst invented the photocopy cut-up zine with this series. The first four pamphlets / zines / chapters are each named for a weekday, Sunday through Wednesday. The fifth covers Thursday to Saturday; Thursday is further divided into two sections, Friday into three.
 
This is an art book but not, I don't think, a graphic novel, because the images don't seem to be sequential or to convey any narrative. Ernst made collages by cutting up and reassembling lithograph illustrations. In this case, he used whole images from popular fiction and embellished them with details from like, Gustave Dore's fantasy and Bible art. If the illustrations are anything to go by, publishers at the time put out a lot of the same kinds of things we like today - mysteries and true crime, romances and domestic soap-operatic dramas full of affairs, rivalries, jealousies, conflict between attractive nicely-dressed people in well-furnished houses. But the embellishments take those familiar scenes and make them surreal and uncanny.
 
Each day is associated with an element and an example. Sunday is mud, and the Lion of Belfort, a famous French statue. The images in this section show men with lion's heads, wearing in suits or police or military uniforms. They're variously wooing, dating, or kidnapping and holding captive topless and naked women. (Probably most of the women in the book are like that, but especially in this chapter.)
 
In addition to the changes to the people, Ernst added other strange details to many of the scenes. Any mirror or portrait or statue now shows a naked woman instead of whatever was originally there. And the pictures are invaded by life - a giant blood vessel from an anatomical diagram, a sword replaced by a femur, a bird with the face of a state, the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And so on.
 
Monday's element is water, and the example is water. Here we have women, nude or in nightgowns or showgirl costumes, and we have ocean waves infiltrating domestic spaces, often while men stand around looking stern and confused. In several, the women are in bed sleeping, and it looks like they're dreaming the water, like their dreams have become real, as the ocean replaces their bedroom floors.
 
Tuesday's element is fire, its example the Court of the Dragon. These are mostly scenes in ballrooms and parlors. In most scenes there is a dragon, or perhaps a snake or bat. In most scenes, someone has bat or bird wings. Often someone is crying. Why so much despair?

On Wednesday the element is blood, the example is Oedipus. Men with various birds' heads commit acts of violence, fighting, shooting, stabbing, carrying off tied-up naked women (again, as on Sunday), or running away. There are huge feathers and giant insects about.
 
Thursday is blackness, its first example is the rooster's laughter. Roosters and men with the heads of roosters abound, committing more acts of violence. The nude women here are being accosted or tortured, or else they are corpses. Pools of dark blood mar the floors. The men crow in triumph for their misdeeds. The second example is Easter Island. Men with moai statue heads lurk behind curtains, spying on women, watching jealously the embrace between ordinary, human-headed lovers.
 
Friday's element is the Interior of Sight, and its example is Three Visible Poems. It's divided into sections. In the first, Ernst has collaged together images of plants and sections of anatomical drawings, especially skeletons. In the second has a lot of shoes. The third is just two images - a row of disembodied shaking hands that recedes toward the vanishing point, and two rows of eyes, looking at each other, that does the same.
 
Saturday, the element is unknown, the example, the Key to Songs. We see women in bed, in postures like they're falling or suffering violence, their faces frightened or angry.
 
I would say that Ernst succeeded in creating a lot of striking, provocative imagery. In part though, his success comes from the provocation of seeing so much violence committed against nude women by fully clothed men, images that must have been popular enough in the fiction of his time, that he could find so many examples to work with. I especially liked the water images, where it seemed like the boundary between dream and life had ruptured, and the ocean poured through the tear.

Mickey's Craziest Adventures

 
Mickey's Craziest Adventures

by Lewis Trondheim

art by Nicolas Keramidas 

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger

Fantagraphics

2016, reprinted 2024

 

 

For whatever reason, a lot of early science fiction stories are framed as though the actual author of the piece is a mere intermediary, simply delivering to the audience a work composed by someone else. They'll have an introduction where the author claims to have found the whole manuscript stuffed in a glass bottle on the beach, or else the first chapter will be a mundane account of their golfing weekend where, oh by the way, they happened upon a mysterious diary in the bedside table in their guest house, and then the rest of the book is the fantastical contents of the found document.
 
Mickey's Craziest Adventures is like that - the intro claims that author Trondheim and artist Keramidas were out garage sale shopping one Saturday, when they discovered an incomplete run of a rare Mickey Mouse comic, a collector's dream!, one that Disney has never reprinted, and that you, the casual fan, may never even have heard of. This is the metafictional setup, like in those early scifi stories, the conceit that what you're reading is actually more authentic than it appears, that it has an older and more compelling provenance. I should note, I absolutely love that sort of thing, even as I admit I don't fully understand all the reasons for it.
 
Anyway, supposedly, this rare comic, 'Mickey's Quest,' has a standalone story in each issue, plus a serialized tale that covers its entire run, that only gets one page per issue and is always 'to be continued...' So that ongoing tale is 'Mickey's Craziest Adventures,' and this book supposedly collects as much of it as Trondheim and Kermidas could find, chapters 2 through 82, with about half missing.
 
Keramidas's commitment to the bit is impressive. In addition to using faux faded colors to imitate the look of an old comic (like Ed Piskor and Tom Scioli used in their X-Men and Fantastic Four Grand Designs), several pages are also faux distressed, with the appearance of fake foxing, mildew, coffee stains, and in one case, a torn bottom corner.
 
Something like every other chapter is 'missing,' though you sometimes get a larger gap, or a few directly sequential pages in a row. The effect is a comic that's all set-pieces and action sequences, with a bare minimum of connective tissue. Each page is a spectacle; working out the plot requires paying attention to the details. In actuality, media companies in the 1960s expected that their readers (and viewers) might not catch every issue (or episode), so Trondheim's careful use of dialogue to let us know what we've missed without bogging down the forward momentum is period-appropriate, not just a way to write a comic that's all killer, no filler. Even into the 1980s and 90s, this is a pretty accurate representation of how I experienced any sort of ongoing series I liked. (The only thing missing is repeats and chapters out of order!)
 
I gave a copy of this book to my brother-in-law a few years ago, because he's a fan of the classic Disney comics this one is mimicking, like Carl Barks's Uncle Scrooge comics that the show Duck Tales is based on. He said that this really is Mickey's craziest adventure, but for Donald, it's just top half. Despite the title, this really is Donald's comic too. Mickey's nemesis Pete and Donald's enemies the Beagle Boys have teamed up to steal Uncle Scrooge's gold, so Mickey and Donald team up too to get it back.
 
What follows is a madcap chase around the world, involving a stolen shrink ray, a jungle, a desert, a meteor crashing into the earth, an underground lost world of dinosaurs and mammoths, detours to the Himalayas and the moon, a half dozen secret lost cities full of treasure, a visit to Atlantis, and finally finally a climactic confrontation where a frustrated Mickey beats the tar out of everyone to retrieve the stolen fortune.
 
It's a wild ride, and I had fun racing to keep up with it. Beyond paying homage to the comics of old, the metafictional conceit provides a good excuse to present a story that moves at a much faster clip than modern audiences are used to, and that forgoes as much exposition as possible - transitional text that's expected, but apparently ultimately unnecessary - to craft a story unapologetically that leaps from high point to high point, sprinting across its entire length with scarcely a pause for breath.

Griffin and Sabine

 
 
Griffin and Sabine

An Extraordinary Correspondence

by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1991 

 

 

Griffin and Sabine is both an art book and an epistolary novel - it is a story told in the letters exchanged between the title characters, letters that are beautifully, even tactilely reproduced on the book's pages. On the first page is the image of a postcard. Turn the page, and on the back is the image of the back of the card, handwritten message, address, stamps, airmail notice, and all. Each page is like this. Some are full letters. Again, first you see the image of the front of the envelope. Then, not just an image, but an envelope fixed to the page. Open it and take out the letter to read. This is a remarkably hands-on book.
 
The first card is from Sabine. She lives on a small island in the South Pacific. Griffin lives in London. Sabine has a kind of magical or psychic connection to Griffin, and is reaching out to establish conscious, verbal contact. Griffin is initially skeptical, then surprised, but as they exchange postcards, they quickly develop rapport, and learn enough about each other to realize they make good friends, regardless of how they've met.
 
Griffin has a small stationary shop and designs postcards professionally. Sabine works for the island government designing stamps, which are popular enough with international collectors to be a good source of revenue. They share their life stories, their views on art. Their friendship maybe begins to turn into attraction. Griffin seems to be the more reserved of the two; Sabine the more free-spirited.
 
I'm not sure if their unusual meeting and exchange of letters is the catalyst (although it seems like it is), but for whatever reason, Griffin starts decompensating, and begins falling into depression. The end of the book is clearly just a pause in the story, as one of the pair makes a plan to visit the other in person.

Here

 
 
Here

by Richard McGuire

Pantheon

2014 

 

 

Here is a very strange, nonlinear graphic novel. Each two-page spread is a single large panel that depicts the same spot in space at a different moment in time. Most of these panels take place in the 20th century, when there's a house there, with one corner of the living room exactly lining up with the spine of the book and the edge between the two pages. In most spreads, there are additional, smaller panels stacked atop the background, showing different moments.
 
There's no direct interaction between the moments - if we see a phone ringing in 1957 and someone saying "hello" in 2014, it's a juxtaposition of two moments that look interesting beside each other, not someone hearing and answering a phone that rang decades earlier. The effect is like a collage - moments that do not coincide are placed in conversation. There's not really anything else quite like this that I can point to, to tell you that Here is like it. Reading the book feels like listening to music. I felt I could almost hear the soundtrack in my head.
 

Richard McGuire wrote the first version of Here in 1989. It was 6 pages long. The newer, expanded version is just over 300 pages, and was published in 2014. I found out about it from an excerpt in The Best American Comics 2016, which I read last year. Last year also, Here got adapted as a Tom Hanks movie, which is almost unimaginable to me. I have to think that either the film is very different from the comic, or else audiences expecting a typical narrative film were in for quite a surprise! (After seeing her in The Congress, Robin Wright fans ought to be more used to this sort of thing.)
 
There is no narrative here, not really, just moments playing off each other, like visual jazz. Even within this set-up McGuire plays around with pace and time. As you turn the pages, you might get sequential moments that are like the panels in a conventional comic, or like a flipbook showing a somersault in slow motion. A few times, you get a dozen moments all on one page, as when the original builder constructs the house, or when a bird flies in through an open window. Very often, the background is a different time from any of the moments of activity.
 
Most of the moments show the inhabitants of the house between the 1950s and 2014. But we see the history of the land from millions of years in the past, through every century since the 1400s, and into the future. These aren't shown at all chronologically, but we do get more past in the first half of the book, and the future doesn't show up until the final third. McGuire's omniscience shows us a catastrophic flood in the 2100s, and a tour group on a boardwalk atop wetlands in the 2200s.
 
Aside from the family who lives in the house, we also see two Natives having a tryst in the woods in the 1600s, Ben Franklin fighting with his son in a house that's visible in the distance in the 1700s, an Impressionist painter and his girlfriend picnicking in the field in the 1800s. We see multiple juxtaposed Christmases, pages of overlapping Halloweens. We see people telling jokes and stories, arguing and fighting, mothers holding babies, people sleeping on the floor or the couch. We see a number of spectacular sunsets.
 
Although the art style and storytelling techniques are totally different, Here reminded me a bit of Building Stories, which also covers a fair swath of time, and centers on only a few locations. Here is much weirder and more experimental, less like an epic narrative and more like a dance performance. It's hard to even judge how effective it is, because there's no other thing that uses the same techniques to serve as a comparison. But I'm glad I read it.

The Real Dada Mother Goose

 
The Real Dada Mother Goose

A Treasury of Complete Nonsense

by Jon Scieszka
art by Julia Rothman

adapted from the book illustrated by Blanche Fisher Write

Candlewick Press

1916, adapted 2022

 

 

Like many of the children's books I read, The Real Dada Mother Goose was recommended by my sister, and I'm really glad I listened to her!
 
I had a copy of the book this one is based on, growing up, a black-and-white checkerboard hardback of The Real Mother Goose, illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright, originally published in 1916. It's been a long time since I've read Jon Scieszka, who you might remember from The Stinky Cheese Man or The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, but what he's produced here is wonderful. It's both a playful expression of human creativity, and hopefully an inspiration to kids to remixing something they like to create something new.
 
The book has six main chapters, plus a section of notes at the end. Each chapter has a reprint of the first verse of a nursery rhyme, and then six variations on it. Each variation is like a little game, applying a specific procedure to the text to change it in a specific way. There are chapters for 'Humpty Dumpty,' 'Jack be Nimble,' 'Old Mother Hubbard,' 'Hey Diddle Diddle,' 'Hickory Dickory Dock,' and 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.'
 
I'm pretty sure the variations include actual Dada tricks and games, as well as others that Scieszka added. In many of the games, words are put in some kind of code, Morse, pig latin, a rebus, the Military Alphabet, simplified Egyptian hieroglyphics. Sometimes there are substitutions, using the same rhyme scheme with new words. In others, the whole form is changed, creating a haiku, a pop quiz, a comic strip.
 
The notes section explains some of the more complex games so that child-readers will have the instructions they need to try making their own variations. They also give some history of Mother Goose, and dada, and they explicitly confirm that - like cartoonist Matt Madden - Scieszka was inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. I think this could be a great resource for someone who wants to cultivate their own creativity, but could use a little help getting started.
 
Whenever the original text of the rhymes is repeated, it appears in black, while new words are printed in blue. Artist Julia Rothman has a bit of drawing depicting dada geese hard at work remaking the rhymes, but a lot of what she's done here is to collage and modify the original images, breaking them up, rearranging their parts, adding something new - exactly the same way Scieszka does with the text. Again, it could easily inspire kids to add to existing drawing as a way to get started on their own art.
 
I probably want a copy of The Real Dada Mother Goose for myself, and if you have a creative child, you probably want it for them too.

Building Stories

 
 

Building Stories

by Chris Ware

Pantheon

2012 

 

 

Building Stories is cartoonist Chris Ware's masterwork, a collection of 14 smaller comics that together make up one larger graphic novel. Each of the smaller comics is a different size and shape, and they're all collected in a large box. There's one like a Little Golden Book, one hardcover, one the size of a daily newspaper, a trio of comic-book sized comics, a 4 panel board that unfolds like a boardgame, and several others. Supposedly you can read these in any order, although there's a suggested order on the back that I followed, and that felt satisfying.
 
The majority of Building Stories follows one woman across a decade or so of her adult life. She has dark hair, a prosthetic leg from a below-the-knee amputation after a childhood accident; she aspires to be a writer or an artist, and her sections are narrated by her in a stream-of-consciousness style, like we're listening to her internal monologue, or reading her diary. Throughout her life, she's self-conscious about her weight and wants to be thinner and prettier, she worries a lot about the current state of the world, she ruminates a lot on her past choices, she's lonely but has trouble connecting with others, even her husband, and once their daughter is born, she worries a lot that she will never have an important accomplishment apart from being a mother.
 
The other recurring characters, whose stories are more minor and seem to complement the main woman's, are an unhappily married couple who live downstairs from her for awhile, the old woman who owns the apartment building, and Branford the Bee, who is a fictional character the main woman reads stories about to her daughter, and also a real bee who intersects with other characters' stories at various points, and also also, I think maybe Branford's perspective might be pretty similar to the main woman's husband's viewpoint.
 
The unhappy couple fight constantly - he finds her ugly since she's gained weight, she is sick of his lack of affection, critical comments, and his attempts to control what she wears and where she goes. The old woman lives alone. She never had a steady boyfriend or got married, which she blames on needing to take care of her sick mother. They both kind of seem like alternate lives - things that could've happened to the main woman but didn't.
 
The Little Golden Book, which was my starting point, shows all three - the main woman, the unhappy couple, the old lady - over the course of a single 24-hour day. It's narrated by the apartment building itself. At this time, the main woman has graduated art school, lives alone, and works at a florist's shop. This is the day she'll meet her future husband for the first time and hook up with him at a party.
 
In the graphic novel, the woman remembers art school, her first boyfriend who got her pregnant, her abortion, and her time working as a live-in nanny for a couple of working professionals.
 
In the newspaper, the woman and her husband move from Chicago to the suburbs. She worries a lot about her identity - she doesn't want to be a suburbanite mother - and she deals with a couple of major losses, including her best friend who dies at 40.
 
The trio of comics revisits each of the main three and brings some resolution to their stories. And then the game board shows kind of a narrative diagram that maybe summarizes and maps out everything else in the box, including points of intersection you might otherwise have missed.
 
What Ware has produced here, despite its formal experimentation, feels very much like a very classic novel. It's a book about the ordinary lives of ordinary people, told through close observation of their thoughts and behavior. We see a few big moments, but also a lot of little ones. We range across time to cover entire lives, but also focus closely on specific days or periods.
 
Ware is very frank and unsentimental about sexuality. Characters are shown naked or undressed as the situation calls for. Everyone wants sex, but they all have a terrible time trying to fulfill them, and each person's own feelings of self-doubt or self-loathing end up being bigger obstacles than the presence or absence of someone else wanting them.
 
A recurring theme, especially for the main character, but also for her sort-of doppelgangers, is passivity and regret. She continuously feels like she's not living the way she wants to, including being unhappy as a wife and mother; she continuously wishes she'd made different choices, and also keeps doing things she'll regret later, in part because she keeps fixating on the past. But this is true of all the characters. You might ask, why can't they be happy? But they literally don't know how.
 
The main woman feels overwhelmed by the twin burdens of keeping up with what's going on in the world, and being a mother. Over and over, we see her not paying attention to her husband or daughter who are trying to engage with her, because she's thinking about the news, or housing prices, or oil, or she's stuck in the past regretting a previous time she ignored someone who needed her. She ignores the moments she has now in favor of regretting not treasuring the moments she could've had in the past. It's infuriating and very human.
 
I think Ware has captured something that's true for a lot of us, where you might feel a bit dissatisfied with your daily routine, but you don't know how to change it, don't even know how to set aside some time out of it to plan or prepare or act in a different way. It's very easy to make resolutions, and very hard to change habits. But the alternative is spending decades saying 'any day now, I'm going to do something different...'
 
Ware's art is famously very controlled and precise. In some of the smaller formats, I struggled to make out what was being shown in a tiny panel, or to read some miniature text. In a few of the larger ones, it wasn't always clear how to follow the panels in the correct narrative order. In terms of scale and scope, artistic consistency, experimentation, in terms of telling an ordinary human story from multiple allied perspectives, Ware has done something truly impressive here.

Was She Pretty?

 
 
Was She Pretty?

by Leanne Shapton

Sarah Crichton Books

2006

 

 

Leanne Shapton's Was She Pretty? is so lean and spare, it almost reads like poetry. The jacket copy acts like an unofficial prologue or introduction. Shapton, we are told, was inspired by finding photos of her new boyfriend's ex-girlfriend around his apartment, and set about interviewing people about their and their partners' exes. The book itself mentions none of this. Instead, we start with a quote from Kierkegaard, about being a link in a long chain, and then dive into a series of two-page spreads that pair a tweet-length sentence about someone's ex with a drawing by Shapton. I sort of assume the sentences are all true and based on her interviews, but I don't know that for sure.
 
The entire book is in Shapton's cursive handwriting, rather than being typeset. The drawings are almost doodles, composed solely of thick black outlines and no shading, the same weight as the text, drawn with the same pen. From the text, we learn the name of the person who has the ex, possibly the name of the ex, and some factoid. For some reason, most of the exes are former girlfriends of men. There's only one queer person mentioned. Early on, there is a chain, showing us someone's ex-girlfriend, then her ex-boyfriend, then his ex-girlfriend, and back a few more links. But mostly we get singletons, occasionally pairs. The facts are notable, but don't tell us much. I don't know if Shapton's boyfriend's ex is in here.

I know some people really like really pared down, cut to the bone writing. Haiku, in particular, is supposed to evoke a whole complete image in just three short lines. I've never been able to fully appreciate that though. Maybe, it's the sociologist in me, but what I wanted most from this book was more. More detail, more depth.

The people we're introduced to by name, who are they to Shapton? Her family? Friends? Coworkers? Her own ex-boyfriends? Random strangers who agreed to talk to her? Besides the one key fact, the thing you might say to distinguish one ex from the next, what else is worth knowing about them? How do they impact your current relationship? How does your current partner feel about the memory of them, the clues they left behind, their lingering presence? For most of us, stumbling on reminders of our partners' past loves is the closest we'll ever get to being haunted by ghosts. But I feel like that scarcely comes through at all, even though Shapton's starting point was grappling with her own jealousy and the recurring image of a woman she'd never met.

I liked Was She Pretty?, but reading it made me wish for another book, a different, longer book that uses the same conceit, but whose author allows themselves more words, more space, more detail, more art, more.

A Field Guide to the North American Family

 
 

A Field Guide to the North American Family

by Garth Risk Hallberg

Knopf

2007, reprinted in 2017

 

 

A Field Guide to the North American Family is a novella-length collection of literary short stories that narrate a turbulent year in the lives of two neighboring suburban families. Field Guide also employs a number of gimmicks that only partially work together.
 
The Hungates and Harrisons are neighbors on Long Island. Oldest son Gabe Hungate and oldest daughter Lacey Harrison were born about the same time, and the two families have been close ever since. Over the course of the year, Mr Harrison dies, Mr and Mrs Hungate get divorced, Gabe and Lacey date then break up, and Gabe gets in an accident that leaves him covered in severe burns.
 
The stories present all this in a roughly chronological order, and from a variety of perspectives - accounts from all 8 family members (Gabe and Lacey each have a younger sibling), from friends at school, and from an omniscient narrator, presented in a mix of first and third person. As you read each story (typically vignette length, less than a page), you have to figure out who it's about and when it happens in order to add it to your understanding of the overall narrative.
 
Each story has a title like "Divorce" or "Sibling Rivalry," and they're arranged alphabetically, as though Field Guide really was an encyclopedia of family topics. The stories are sometimes closely, sometimes only barely related to the titles. Adding to this gimmick, each story is cross-referenced with a number of others, like social scientific encyclopedia entries would be. Supposedly, these references provide an alternate, non-alphabetical reading order, although since there are like 4-6 per story, I wasn't sure how to actually use them in that way.
 
The last gimmick is that each of the 60-something stories has an accompanying photograph and caption. Each photo was taken by a different artist, and their connections to either the title or story tends to be oblique. The captions are only a sentence or two long, and are written more like natural science, as though the title topic was an animal species. So they'll say things like 'Due to a growth curve similar to that of Depression, a robust Divorce population has become common wherever Love dwells in large numbers.' The captions have no relation to the stories at all. If Hallberg had leaned into that style, he would've ended up with something much weirder, and possibly more interesting, akin to Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String.
 
As it stands, I'm not sure the payoff is worth all the effort, or more importantly, if the story is even worth telling, or the gimmicks do anything to enrich it. I don't think I would have been interested in this narrative if it had been told conventionally, and I can't help but feel that the format is wasted, reduced to little more than a recurring page layout, used in a way that doesn't take advantage of its unique storytelling possibilities.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

 
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
by Italo Calvino

translated by William Weaver

Harcourt Brace

1969 and 1973, reprinted 1976

 

 

The Castle of Crossed Destinies is like Italo Calvino's Canterbury Tales or his Decameron, although unfortunately, I only mean that in terms of form and content, not quality. This is not Calvino's best work.
 
Calvino is known for using gimmicks and tricks to provide structure to his work, and then to tell stories within the lattice his rules have established. In this case, he takes a deck of tarot cards, lays them out in a grid, then tries to come up with sensible stories by following one card to the next, up and down the columns, and across the rows.
 
In fact, he performs this party trick twice, once using an Italian tarot deck as his inspiration, and then again using a French deck with different art. (I believe that these two novellas were originally published separately; in English they only appear in a combined edition.) His second attempt is notably better than the first.
 
So, the conceit here is that Calvino and other storytellers are in a castle or tavern, they are all rendered mute, and they take turns telling their stories by laying out the tarot cards. Calvino interprets what they must mean, and we are led to believe that everyone in the castle has the same interpretive experience and achieves the same understanding. Then, once the grid is finished, Calvino looks at the completed layout and sees other possible stories.
 
Also, the interpretations are supposed to be based less on the traditional symbolic meaning of the card and more on its specific artistic rendering. Aiding this process is the fact that on each page, images of the cards mentioned on that page are reproduced in the side margin. It both makes the book visually very interesting to look at, and being able to see the cards he's describing definitely enhances the reading experience. Once the full tarot grid is assembled, that's reproduced too, once for each version. This is what the French tarot grid looks like:

 

 
In the first version, Calvino spends so much time explaining how he slowly, haltingly, confusedly moves from looking at the card art and watching the storytellers' facial expressions and body language to arriving at a narrative that the stories are overwhelmed by his imaginary translation of their telling. In the second version, he still points to specifics in the art a lot, but gets out of his own way a bit more, which helps a lot.
 
The images on tarot cards are meant to be archetypal, and Calvino's stories all feature archetypal medieval characters - though the plots tend to go off the rails compared to the originals, and they often end in chaos, either with an apocalyptic disaster, or else with several stories converging until it seems like every character is the same character and every tale is the same tale.
 
So we get a lot of knights and queens, nuns and alchemists, Faust and Parsifal, Hamlet, Merlin, the paladin Roland. Angelic women, Death, and the Devil all show up repeatedly. We don't get much in the way of characterization or interiority. What the cards produce are characters and events, not really motive or psychology. Whenever Calvino stops narrating the translation process, the plots can move at a breakneck pace.
 
As a thought experiment, this is interesting. As a work of fiction, I don't think it's particularly successful. Calvino's playfulness, his allusions to classic literature, and his subversion of traditional story endings are all kind of fun, but for me, they were outweighed by the belabored way he showed his work of moving from card to text.

Ex Libris

 
 
Ex Libris
by Matt Madden

Uncivilized Books

2021

 

 

Matt Madden is like a one-man graphic novel Ouilipo movement, and Ex Libris is like his version of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, although I think Madden is actually more ambitious here. 

 
In If on a Winter's Night, Calvino writes a dozen short stories in the style of other authors, each one allegedly the first chapter of a complete book, and links them with a framing story about a reader who's trying to finish at least one of these books, but keeps being thwarted by misprinted editions that never have the right second chapter, only the new first chapter of the next book in the chase.

 
In Ex Libris, Madden does give us excerpts of a couple dozen fake comics, each in a different style, but he uses them differently. The overarching story here is about a reader in a rented bedroom, recovering from a bad breakup, and feeling trapped. The rented room has a full bookshelf - but all of the books on it are comics. What's more, the reader sometimes feels like the comics are speaking directly to them (they are!) and that they sometimes contain eerie parallels to the events leading to the breakup (they do!) The reader gradually realizes that they're not just metaphorically trapped in a bad situation, they're literally trapped in a comic. And then they realize a way to escape.

 
It's hard for a review to do this one justice, because what Madden is doing is easy to understand as you read it, but hard to describe or give examples of. There's a recurring visual spiral motif that seems to represent the sense of being drawn into something. The comics-within-the-comic are full of characters who also feel trapped and are also trying to escape. The scenes where the comic panels the narrator is looking at 'talk back' to the narrator's internal monologue are probably my favorite.