The Anthropologists

 
 
The Anthropologists

by Aysegul Savas
Bloomsbury

2024 
 
 
Asya, the narrator of The Anthropologists, isn't literally a social scientist, but she is metaphorically like an anthropologist as she closely observes her friends' lives and her own, trying to discern new rules for living as she seeks to make her life 'sturdier' and more settled.
 
Asya and her husband Manu met in college, both foreign students from different places, who now live in an unnamed city. I suspect that Asya may share some biographical details with her author, Aysegul Savas, who is from Turkey and now lives in Paris, but I have no reason to think this is based especially closely on herself. The couple's experiences are pretty common, I think, to young adults trying to build a life for themselves in a new place after college.
 
The book coincides with Asya and Manu searching for an apartment to buy; it begins at the start of their house hunt and ends when they move into their new place. In between, we mostly see them when they're meeting with friends - brunches, dinners, drinks, happy hours, parties, hang outs, lazy weekend afternoons. Manu works for a nonprofit and Asya is a documentary filmmaker; her latest project is about a local park. 
 
The book is told in very short chapters, many less than a page long, each narrating a single incident. Each scene is titled, but there are two that recur over and over. In each section called 'Future Selves', Asya and Manu visit an apartment and think about what their lives would be like if they moved there. In the sections 'In the Park', we read someone's answers to Asya's questions about how they use the park. These are the only scenes not narrated by Asya, instead they're like watching a snippet of her film in progress.
 
At the beginning of the apartment search, the couple's shared life is much the same as it has been up to this point, but by the time they move, it's kind of the end of an era, as other people they know reach their own inflection points and head off in other directions. Asya and Manu are each, in different ways, confronted by the realization that things are happening to their families back home that they can't fully share in because they're not there. They grow close with an elderly neighbor, and act like surrogate grandkids when she needs someone. Among their friends, one very carefree fellow starts to get more serious, a woman who's always been a bit prickly grows embittered. The move may not even be the biggest change.
 
Like Asya, Savas is a keen observer herself, and a very good writer. The Anthropologists is full of small moments, common to many couples, rendered at once specific, recognizable, universal by Savas's insightful prose. For example, there's a part about how Asya and Manu cannot speak each other's native languages, but have developed their own private little language as a couple, using words from both plus accumulated nicknames, references, in-jokes - the kind of thing my partner and I have built up over the years too, just for ourselves, not for others to hear. 
 
Savas gives Asya a casual, conversational voice, but everything she says is clear-sighted and well-spoken. The tiny chapters pass quickly, and the book itself is short, less than 200 pages, but a kind of quiet wisdom builds up along with the accumulation of small details, amounting to something that might not be profound, but nevertheless feels considered and true.

Two Serious Ladies

 
Two Serious Ladies

by Jane Bowles

Ecco

1943, reprinted 2014 
 
 
Two Serious Ladies was originally published in the 1940s, and has been kept alive since then by what appears to be a mix of historical curiosity and truly passionate fandom. From a historical standpoint, author Jane Bowles' husband Paul was an author and composer. I'd never heard of him, but apparently he's moderately famous in the literary world - he was friends with Gertrude Stein and her circle, one of his novels has been made into a movie, etc. So for someone interested in Paul Bowles specifically, or that literary milieu more generally, reading Two Serious Ladies could provide some extra context.
 
I don't remember exactly how I found the book, but it must've been a tip from a true fan. If you go looking for Two Serious Ladies online, you won't find a lot of stand alone reviews, but it shows up over and over in lists of recommended titles. Its cult following seems to be large enough that if you go looking for someone to tell you about their lesser-known faves, you're sure to find somebody trying to press a copy into your hand - especially if you're interested in "forgotten" women authors or books about women living unconventional lives. It was an interesting read for me, but I won't be counting myself among its evangels.
 
Two Serious Ladies follows two middle-aged women, Miss Goering and Mrs Copperfield, who are acquaintances but not friends in the same set of New York WASPs, as they each spontaneously and independently embark on a personal experiment to live differently, no longer bound by tradition or the norms for women of their social class. 
 
The first chapter introduces us to Miss Goering, who lives alone in a big Victorian mansion. The sister of her childhood nanny shows up one day, they get along well, and Miss Goering invites her to move in. Later she goes to a party, briefly chats with Mrs Copperfield, and allows herself to get picked up by a guy who still lives with his elderly parents.

In chapter 2, we follow Mrs Copperfield on vacation to Panama with her husband. (I'll admit this caught me by surprise; I'd presumed the new housemate was the second serious lady, and that we'd continue following the characters we'd been properly introduced to.) Mrs Copperfield is very anxious, and doesn't seem to enjoy going outside or being on vacation, while her husband is very energetic, wants to walk the whole city and then hike the jungles, and basically ignores his wife's discomfort. While he's out exploring, she ends up in a hotel in the red light district, where she befriends the elderly madame and one of the young prostitutes. She keep staying there even after her husband comes back, and tells him to leave without her at the end of the trip.
 
In chapter 3, we return to Miss Goering. She's abandoned her big house in the city and moved into a shack outside a small town on one of the islands near New York. Her housemate and the guy she met at the party live with her, though they both seem unhappy about it. The guy's dad abandons the city to move in with them too. Miss Goering takes a ferry to a slightly larger town, meets a guy loitering on the street, goes drinking with him, and then comes back the next day to move in with him. Her other housemates are pretty shocked that she's leaving them. She lives with the guy for a week, then dumps him in favor of a gangster, who presumes she's a prostitute. The gangster takes her home with him, then out to a nice restaurant where he has a business meeting.
 
While Miss Goering is bored at the restaurant, she calls Mrs Copperfield, who is coincidentally back from her trip for a few days, with her new prostitute friend tagging along, before moving back to Panama permanently. Mrs Copperfield shows up at the restaurant wildly drunk with her friend in tow. Miss Goering is appalled by her, and then the gangster leaves to go do business, abandoning her. The end.
 
The plot of the book is very odd, because neither Miss Goering nor Mrs Copperfield seem to be acting on any kind of plan or ideology. They each have an inchoate sense of wanting to do something different, and enough money to basically do whatever they want, and so they both advance toward their unseen goals over the objections of the people around them. 
 
Most of what happens is just people talking, just chitchatting, or talking about how they live or what they want to do, or trying to convince someone to go into business or on a date. It all seems pretty prosaic, not like anyone is the embodiment of any particular viewpoint. Our two serious ladies listen, then say vague things about how they think it's nice to do this, or they don't want to do that. They're impervious to persuasion or browbeating. But they don't really espouse any viewpoint of their own. If there's a genuine philosophical argument about how to live hidden in this dialogue, it's couched in terms we might think of as vaguebooking or subtweeting. I'm not sure it's there at all. Also everyone in the book drinks heavily, pretty much constantly. A lot of the dialogue sounds like what you'd hear a bar.
 
Bowles's writing deals almost exclusively with what people say and do. There's almost no interiority, no mention of what anyone thinks or feels, beyond someone occasionally saying something to themselves, like an aside to the audience during a play. It makes the women's already sort of mysterious actions seem even more opaque. I say sort of mysterious because what they're doing doesn't especially seem to make them happy, and we don't really learn any other motive or goal.
 
Another thing I read in this style was the short story "An Hour of Last Things" by George P Elliott, who is best known for having almost the same name as a much more famous author. In that, a woman's husband dies, she goes out to buy an expensive stereo system, and throws herself a big party, and like Mrs Copperfield, it's implied but not stated that the widow is attracted to a younger woman. Barbara Comyns' book Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is similarly almost Behaviorist in its refusal to depict interiority, but is a much stronger book overall, in my opinion. I'd happily swap it for Two Serious Ladies on any list recommending short, strange midcentury novels by overlooked women writers.
 
Just because it's not for me though, doesn't mean it's not for anyone, and women breaking with convention in pursuit of their own pleasure are certainly having a literary moment right now. There's even another new reprint of Two Serious Ladies, with a new intro and new cover art, out just last year. I'm certain the cult following will continue. If you're in the mood, I'd suggest sipping gin during Mrs Copperfield's chapter and whiskey for Miss Goering, perhaps starting off listening to Helen Kane sing "I Want to be Bad" to set the mood.

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.

The Nude

 

The Nude

by Michelle Lindley

Atria Books

2024 

 

  

The Nude is a literary novel about an American curator going to Greece to acquire a newly discovered statue of a nude woman for her museum. I perhaps should've given more thought to what it meant that I saw it on a list of the best book covers for the month it was released, but not on any of the lists of the best reviewed books for that month.

 

Most of The Nude is intended to be slow-burning tension and mounting internal turmoil as Dr Elizabeth Clark becomes more and more anxious from the heat, the jet lag, her migraine headaches, her pill addictions, her increasingly erotic fascination with her translator Niko and his artist wife Theo, haunting childhood memories of her dead sister; with the Greek museum's slow-walking the acquisition, protests against the expatriation of ancient art, vandals attempting to sabotage the statue to send a message; her failing marriage back home, pressure and doubt about her abilities from her museum director back home, competition from her rival over who will take over as director after this buy... It all accumulates and Elizabeth's behavior becomes more erratic until the vandals succeed in damaging the statue and Elizabeth reaches a breaking point of her own.

 

There are two problems though, and I think they're kind of related. There's not enough tension, and not enough payoff. Although things keep happening, and it seems clear that eventually Elizabeth will become overwhelmed and act out in some way, author Michelle Lindley blends the anxious with the ordinary in a way that probably makes the book more realistic, but also seems to rob it of some of its potential power. Elizabeth belongs in a thriller, the plot structure wants to be a thriller, but it's not, you know, thrilling enough.

 

In Elizabeth, Lindley has created a protagonist who belongs in transgressive fiction. She's someone who feels fundamentally unable to fit into society, who constantly strives to appear perfect and succeed at work, but who's so tortured by her own psyche that she seems always on the brink of disaster. Elizabeth is ultra-controlled, always anxious, always unhappy. She hates her body, starves herself and recoils from casual touch, but also loves her painkillers and tranquilizers, loves to binge eat as a treat, and sleeps with men in a mercenary way to advance her career. Her migraines are debilitating and make her see hallucinatory auras; she's gone hysterically blind twice in her life and fears it'll happen again, maybe even on this trip, especially since she's taking her pills too quickly and they might not last.

 

There's all the ingredients for steadily ratcheting tension, perhaps with minor outbursts building toward a major eruption. But Lindley continually undercuts the anxiety with normality. There are too many possible sources of stress, but none of them get enough attention. Nothing can really build up, because it all keeps alternating. Every unsettling thought or moment is counteracted with something prosaic. Even the suspicion that Elizabeth slept with a major donor to the Greek museum, or perhaps was assaulted by him, while she was awake and ambulatory, but not conscious or forming memories, just goes nowhere and ultimately comes to nothing, dropped and forgotten.

  

None of the stress keeps Elizabeth from keeping up appearances and going through the motions; and all the other characters seem perpetually relaxed, unbothered, unhurried. It should create more frisson! Elizabeth is not fun or normal! But she's desperate to be liked, desperate for others to think she's fun and chill, and determined that no one should suspect her of being uncool enough to care what they think of her. 

 

She acts out some, but not in ways that are truly satisfying or cathartic. The migraine imagery is too brief before the pills kick in; we never get a full phantasmagoria. She's obsessed with sexy free-spirited Theo, her first time being attracted to a woman, possibly her first time actually desiring a person and not just the social advantage she can gain from them, and Theo is interested back, so when Elizabeth eventually stops trying to please everyone else and gives in to her own desires and urges, you might expect the two women to do more than kiss a couple times. But no.

 

It's incredibly anticlimactic. And I think kind of emblematic of the way that Lindley's efforts to make her book literary and realistic prevent it from delivering the pleasure that we'd get from watching real chaos. At one point near the end, Elizabeth tells us she feels feral, feels unhinged. That is what I'd spent the whole book up to that point waiting for! But even though she says it, she doesn't really do it. Instead of fireworks, everything mostly fizzles.

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. 

The Lady Matador's Hotel

 
 
The Lady Matador's Hotel

by Cristina Garcia

Scribner

2010

 

 

I first noticed The Lady Matador's Hotel in grad school at the college bookstore because of its eye-catching cover, and I've kind of been meaning to read it ever since. One of the things I've been doing this year is trying to finally get around to reading things that've been on my list for forever. I'd long since forgotten whatever it was that drew me to the book, just a vague sense there was something there that intrigued me. I feel fortunate, because it's a much better than I had any reason to expect.
 

The Lady Matador's Hotel is quite structured, which immediately endears it to me. The book follows six main characters over the course of six days, from Sunday to Friday, plus an epilogue. The action is mostly contained in the Hotel Miraflor. Each chapter gives us one scene with each character over the course of one day, and each scene is labeled by the location it takes place, like the elevator, the patio restaurant, the lobby, the roof, specific rooms. The characters do have names, but Garcia usually refers to them by their occupation - the lawyer, the colonel, the waitress, the poet, the factory owner, and of course, the lady matador. The last section of each chapter is excerpts from the day's tv and radio news.
 
The characters pass each other by and occasionally intersect; the plot is like one of those movies with an ensemble cast where everyone's following their own storyline, the sort that were popular around the time Garcia wrote this. Because it takes place in a Spanish-speaking country (in this case, an unnamed Central American nation) and involves bullfighting, it reminds me of one of the first movies like that I ever saw, Carnages. I learned that in the intervening years, the book has been made into a play. On the one hand this makes sense, as Garcia has an eye for pairing dramatic moments and scenic locales; but on the other hand, an awful lot of what happens takes place inside the characters' heads, and the what action there is gains its meaning from those interior thoughts.
 
The book's cover depicts the very first scene, the lady matador admiring herself in the mirror before dressing in her costume. She's in town for a competition between matadoras, and to fight a few exhibition matches before the big event. She provides a throughline to the book. She's in the first scene and the last, in the news each day, and each of the other characters notices her and thinks about her, the celebrity in their midst. The lady matador thinks about her dead mother, contemplates her eventual retirement, psyches herself up with casual sex, preens around the hotel, and performs for an adoring press. We get to see a couple of her bullfights close-up.
 
The colonel is at Hotel Miraflor for a pan-Latin American military conference. He's a brutal man, a killer, a war criminal. The waitress is an ex-guerilla, a former leftist militant who thought she'd retired from conflict, until the man who killed her whole family, who drove her to revolution in the first place, shows up as a guest. The waitress spends the week trying to decide whether or not to assassinate the colonel, and being visited by the ghost of her brother. On the news, we see bombings nearby as other rebels attack the conference-goers at neighboring hotels.
 
The lawyer sells the infant children of local mothers to adoptive American parents. She calls the mothers she employs her 'breeders.' The national legislature is on the brink of passing a law banning international adoptions, but she's sure her political connections and her bribe money can keep her in business. The poet and his wife are here to adopt a baby. The poet is a Cuban exile, his wife an American, and being here is dredging up old feelings and new uncertainties.
 
The factory owner is a sadsack from Korean. He's depressed and suicidal. He feels endlessly sorry for himself. He's been losing money, his workers are striking, the press accuses him of underpaying and abusing his workers. His 16 year-old indigenous girlfriend is about to give birth, and she persuaded him to book them the honeymoon suite, which he can't afford, but he plans to be dead by the end of the week anyway. He doesn't seem to know or care what will happen to her if she's alone.
 
Several of these characters are unpleasant people, who have done and are still doing immoral things. The country is troubled, an ex-dictator is favored to win an upcoming presidential election, and America is implicated in many of the troubles - it's Americans who come to the hotel to buy babies, CIA agents attend the military conference. Garcia sets the characters in motion and closely observes their inner lives. Her writing is psychologically realistic, without overt moral judgment. Even as the world just off-camera is filled with big dramatic events - an election, a hurricane, a fatal nightclub fire, terrorist bombings - the characters themselves remain grounded in both their immediate concerns and their introspection about past regrets and future decisions. 

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.

No One Left to Come Looking for You

 
No One Left to Come Looking for You

by Sam Lipsyte

Simon & Schuster

2022 

 

 

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a mystery set in the underground music scene in Brooklyn in the winter at the very start of the Clinton administration, in the last week of January 1993. 

 
Our narrator is Jack Shit, bassist for the struggling noise rock band the Shits, as he goes in search of his missing roommate, the Shits' lead singer the Banished Earl, and his missing bass. Jack's stint as an amateur detective starts when he gets a call from the pawn shop that the Earl was just there trying to trade Jack's bass for cash to buy heroin to feed his 'bag fever.' Jack's on the clock, because the Shits have a big show in a week. What seems like a simple task quickly becomes complicated when the Earl isn't at any of the band's usual haunts, the person most likely to've seen him is found dead, the police get involved, and Jack gets entangled with a punk femme fatale. It's like if the cast of Scott Pilgrim got trapped in the plot of Inherent Vice.

 
The mystery here isn't particularly complicated and would probably annoy whodunnit fans. For all the Jack spends his time retracing his friend's steps, going over his memories of their time together as bandmates and roommates, and even prying into some of the Earl's private business, what's really going on has almost nothing to do with the singer himself. He's just collateral damage in a feud between his father, who owns a small construction company in the Bronx, and a certain real-life real estate figure who's infamous for not paying his contractors. There's nothing else really to figure out, especially since the audience already knows what Jack refuses to accept, which is that no one with the power to hold this particular man accountable has ever been willing to do so.

 
The inclusion of Donald Trump was my least favorite part of No One Left. I am so, so fucking tired of this guy. And I know that New Yorkers have hated him since the 80s, so his inclusion isn't exactly anachronistic ... but still, I don't think if Lipsyte had really written this in the 90s that Trump would've appeared in it by name. All the bands in the book are made up. The only other real people are Thurston Moore, who gets name-checked because Sonic Youth is the most successful band making the kind of music the Shits aspire to, and Andy Warhol, who appears in Jack's mom's oft-retold anecdote about the time she almost got to have sex with a celebrity, if not for her meddling husband. If this book weren't written in 2022, I doubt Trump would've made the cut.

 
What I did like was Jack Shit's narrative voice. He's a guy who is deeply, almost religiously immersed in and committed to the Brooklyn music scene. He knows all the people, he can describe all their bands, both how they sound and their relative status within the scene, he uses all the slang. Jack desperately wants to be cool, and of course, precisely because he's such a try-hard, he isn't, and can't be. The Banished Earl, a sort-of GG Allin figure, who founded the Shits, who chose his war name based on a book he found while dumpster diving, who's the only working class boy in a band full of college kids, IS cool, with an effortless authenticity than Jack can only dream of. He's also on a trajectory to be dead by 27, unless the current misadventure ends him sooner.

 
That ironic perspective, that gap between who Jack wishes he could be and who the reader clearly sees that he actually is, is what makes him such an appealing narrator. Jack's other friends soemtimes slip up and still call him Jonathan Litpak. His band isn't popular; even within the scene it's somewhere between obscure and unwanted. Lead guitarist Cutwolf barely seems to care about his friend's disappearance; drummer Hera has already joined another, better-liked group. The big concert Jack's so worried about is the Shits opening for two other, bigger acts. The cops find him annoying. Multiple characters repeatedly lecture Jack for being a tourist, a gentrifier, a wannabe. 

 
But Jack has a determination borne of commitment, of being a true believer in Art generally and his own art in particular, and his never-say-die optimism had me routing for him to find his friend and his axe and to get to his concert in time, even if it'll probably be the Shits' last-ever show.

 
Reading about Jack trudging through the snow, ducking into cheap bars and diners, running into people he vaguely knows, trying to project the persona of who he wants to be, reminded me of winters when I was in college, when I walked and bused all over and my favorite places had all-night hours and dollar specials. It reminded me of grad school, when the overlap between the trans community and anarchist community meant that I, a total square, got to hang out with people who turned their rental houses into communes and never used their government names, and when I got really into a couple local bands and went to all their shows. But my nostalgia isn't really a reason for you to read this. I kind of think you'd be better off with Pynchon. But if you like 90s alt rock, dramatic irony, and Nick Carraway narrators, you might still give it a try

Green Dot

 
 
Green Dot

by Madeleine Gray

Henry Holt

2024

 

 

Green Dot is a literary novel about a young woman's affair with an older, married man. Hera, our narrator, tells us on the first page that every other story like this showed her what she should expect, told her how it would end, but she was certain that, for her, it would be different.
 
Hera's voice is really what makes this novel work. Madeleine Gray has created a narrator who's both witty and wry but also chatty, smart without being boring or distant. She's very quotable! I'm actually going to include some quotes in this review, which I don't usually, because so many jumped out at me that I went back and wrote them down. Most of Green Dot is told in the present tense, as though it's happening now, but from time to time, the slightly older Hera who's actually doing the telling will add some of the benefit of her perspective, often humorous.
 
I like that Hera is aware of her mistakes and willing to admit them, but also has had enough time to forgive herself for them. She doesn't pretend they didn't happen, doesn't make excuses, but also doesn't just excoriate her younger self either. I think something I appreciate in coming-of-age stories, something I maybe can't enjoy them without, is that double perspective, that recognition of where the younger version could've been better, where the older self has finally learned. Without that, I think you just get a celebration of irresponsibility, you get a refusal-of-age, a desire to stay young, learn nothing, make the same mistakes forever.
 
The first part of Green Dot is the funniest. When we first meet Hera, she's finished college and moved back in with her dad. She's Australian, and considers herself a lesbian. She has friends she's been close with since high school, and all of them have jobs, partners, all of them have started building adult lives. Hera doesn't have or particularly want a job, but she does want to be an adult, so she gets a job as a comment moderator for a newspaper's website. Her observations about office life are great, as when she first realizes that indeed, not only did she not want a job, she specifically doesn't want this job: "I smile the smile of someone who is satisfied because her predictions about everything being awful are correct. I smile the smile of a young woman who, at the behest of her partnered-up girlfriends, goes on a Tinder date with a guy who looks like a wanker in his profile, and on the date the first thing he talks about is his love for Elon Musk, and she just sits there, ecstatic, holding back a tear of self-congratulation, thinking, Yes, exactly. Exactly as I imagined." (33)
 
The whole time Hera's working at the newspaper, she's bored, unsatisfied, waiting for her life to start. She both wants to be included in the office social life, such as it is, and also finds it all unbearably cringey. "I want to die but, devastatingly, this does not occur. I am very much alive, and sitting on a rolling chair." (37)
 
Eventually she meets Arthur, a reporter who feels like the one person in the place who's on her same wavelength. Hera has one running IM chat going with one of the other moderators, and starts another with Arthur. He invites her out to drinks with the other journalists. The second time, they go out for a late dinner after the drinks. And then Hera brings him home, and they have sex.
 
And then, then, immediately afterward, she finds out he's married.
 
From here, the rest of the book repeats in cycles. Hera and Arthur are happy together. Hera learns something that makes her realize she ought to break up with Arthur, but decides she doesn't want to. She tries to live with it, but it makes her more and more unhappy. She finally talks to Arthur, who promises he'll tell his wife about the affair and leave her. But he doesn't. Hera gets sadder and sadder. She tries to make a break from Arthur, but he convinces her to take him back, and for awhile, they're happy again, until the next crisis, when the cycle starts again.
 
But it's not just a cycle; it's a downward spiral, and with each turn, it gets worse. Hera gets sadder and more stressed. Her life contracts as she spends less time with her friends, less time doing anything she enjoys, and more and more time waiting for Arthur. She wants to be available and ready, whenever he can find a few free hours to slip away from his wife. She wants to be on her phone, on Instagram, the app they use to communicate, in case he messages her, in case even just his green dot appears, indicating he's online, indicating he can see she's online too. To try to get away, Hera quits her job at the newspaper, she moves away. But she also keeps coming back.
 
The first turn of the screw is the happiest, maybe even moreso than when they're first tentatively dating, before the first time they have sex. Hera and Arthur sneak around Sydney, renting cheap hotel rooms, trysting in parks, avoiding parts of the city where anyone might know or recognize them. Hera's closest friends know about the relationship. They don't approve, but they try to support her. "You cannot tell your friends that their relationship is doomed because their partner is trash. You cannot even tell your friends that their partner, though they may not be trash, is nevertheless just not that good." (152)
 
But what Hera discovers is something I learned too, when I was trying to stay in the closet about being trans - when you're keeping something big enough and important enough secret, it's almost impossible to build friendships. People may like you, but they don't really know you, and you can't feel any mutual recognition or connection like that. "If you are trying to make a friend in a new city, you don't want the potential friend's first piece of knowledge about you to be that you are an unsuccessful homewrecker. A homewrecker is bad enough - but one who did all the bad things and still didn't get the guy? That's not only morally bankrupt, it's pathetic." (186)
 
Hera could 'come out,' could tell the truth about herself, but she doesn't. "They all think I'm single and so are constantly trying to set me up with their housemates, lauding Bill's pasta-making prowess or Tina's bouldering strength. Bisexuality is a curse in this way: you must fend off double the terrible set-ups." (236) She goes on some dates, with young men and women her own age. She even sleeps with them, but only ones she doesn't really like. She prevents herself from forming emotional attachments that might lead her away from Arthur.
 
Why does Hera do this to herself? It's because, from the very first time they fuck, she falls in love with Arthur. She wants a life with him, wants to marry him, live openly with him. "People write about desire all the time, and I read the poems, I see the films. I've had sex a fair bit, I'll not pretend I haven't. But nothing can prepare you for that moment during sex with that one person with whom it all makes sense, like, Oh. Oh, I see now. I understand." (128)
 
She spends the whole book languishing in a diminishing half-life because she's convinced it's only temporary. She's convinced that he'll divorce his wife, that he'll be with her, only with her. She's convinced that the happiness she feels while they're having sex will be how she feels all the time when they're really together, when they're together openly. "When Arthur is inside me and my eyes are on him and our bodies move in tandem; I remember that I was not always sad, and that one day I might not be again. Perhaps this seems to you like a low bar for love. But trust me, and if you know you know - it really, really isn't." (146)
 
While Gray writes Hera as flippant and sly most of the time, when she talks about her love for Arthur, she's utterly vulnerable and sincere.
 
If you've ever had a one-sided crush on someone, you know how hard it is to make yourself stop wanting them. How impossible it feels, especially at first. And at least, in that endeavor, you're aided by the knowledge that the other person doesn't want you back. Hera doesn't even have that. "The fog clears in my mind: no thoughts, just ecstatic pleasure. I understand why people start wars, I understand why people blow up their lives. If the choice is this or not this, I will destroy everything else every time." (228)
 
To all appearances, Arthur genuinely loves her too. He is pained (not as much as she is, but still) by the hurt he's causing Hera by not getting a divorce. He sincerely seems to not want to hurt her, but he is, he is, because he keeps making her the same promise, and keeps not fulfilling it.
 
I don't really need to tell you how Green Dot ends, do I? Hera told you, on page 1, what happens. She told you this story goes the same way these kinds of stories always go. What makes this book special is the excellent narrative voice, and the unflinching way Gray shows us the comprehensive destruction of Hera's entire life and sense of self in pursuit of a goal that isn't even hers to achieve, that can only be achieved for her, by a man who keeps telling her he will do something and then keeps not doing it.

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea

 
 

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea

by CD Rose

Melville House

2024

 

 

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is a recent collection of literary short stories by CD Rose. Overall this collection was fine. Rose is clearly trying to push on the boundaries of the short story form, sometimes in ways that employ an identifiable gimmick, sometimes just by working against established expectations. The first story in the collection, "Ognosia," named for an essay by Olga Tokarczuk seems to take, in turn, the perspectives of almost a dozen different people in a bar one evening, a kaleidoscopic effect I don't think I've ever seen before. In several other stories Rose tries alternating paragraphs of two very different plots or styles, but I never found this braiding or interlacing very successful any of the times he tried it.

The best story was "Proud Woman, Pearl Necklace, Twenty Years," which shows us a single class session from the perspective of the teacher of a class for adult English as a Foreign Language students. He writes the title phrases on the board, asks the students to play 20 Questions about Guy de Maupassant's story "The Necklace", then retells it to them and helps them express their reactions.

Most of my other favorites were probably mostly the gimmick stories. "I'm in Love with a German Film Star" is a list of songs that the narrator associates with a specific actress, possibly fictional, identified only as 'Magda,' whom he has a crush on, and a vignette about each song explaining the association.

"What Remains of Claire Blanck" is a series of mostly empty pages, with the notations for footnotes placed as though at the end of specific sentences, and the notes themselves at the foot of each page. The notes are a mix of identifying the role of a sentence in the non-existent story, explaining some of the supposed imagery (always something white or blank), and playful touches like praising the way something is written.

"A Brief History of the Short Story" is actually three very short stories. In the first, an old French man spends his morning in a cafe and reads a newspaper story about America. In the second, a minor Soviet bureaucrat goes to buy vodka before some friends come over, and happens to read a story about the old Frenchman. In the third, a young American author reads the Russian story while hanging out in a coffee shop, then sees a newspaper with the story the Frenchman read. I liked this one, but thought it would've been more successful if the third part reenacted the newspaper story instead of just featuring it as a prop.

Near the beginning, there are three stories in a row that supposedly give non-fictional accounts of minor figures involved in the early days of photography. Near the end, there's a trio of stories, including the collection title, about famous people having a day off. "St Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed" is the best of these three.

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.

The Strange Library

 
 

The Strange Library

by Haruki Murakami

art by Chip Kidd

translated by Ted Goosen

Knopf

2014 

 

 

The Strange Library is an odd little book. It's just under a hundred pages long, but the font is quite large, and every other page or so is taken up by an image, so it's somewhere between a short story and a novella. The story within is never referred to as a dream, I think most people would call it magical realism, but the events follow a dream logic, and reading it is like listening to someone describe a particularly well-remembered dream. I would not say this is Murakami's best work, but it was nice enough for what it is.
 
The narrator goes to the library to return a couple books and check something out. It's the afternoon, and he needs to go home soon, because it's almost dinner time and his mother worries. But just like anytime you have a goal in a dream, obstacle after obstacle appears in his path, to delay and sidetrack him, over and over.
 
He can't find the book himself, so he gets sent to the super creepy reference librarian, who finds 3 books, but they're for internal use only, so they can't be checked out. The narrator wants to go home, but the librarian guilt trips him about the effort it took to go find the books, so he agrees to stay a bit late and read for a little while.
 
So the librarian takes him through a vault door into an underground labyrinth that supposedly leads to the reading room. Instead it leads to a jail cell where the narrator will be imprisoned for a month while he reads and memorizes all three books. And yes, there'll be a test at the end where he has to recite them verbatim. Oh, and his jailer is a man wearing a sheep costume. The basement that's larger than the building it's beneath is a recurring feature of my dreams, and probably a lot of other people's too, and the impossible test that's coming too soon is a classic nightmare scenario.
 
From there, our narrator has to figure out how to get himself back out. There's no cop out 'and then he woke up' ending here - although the details are all dreamlike, Murakami treats them as obstacles that have to be overcome with a realistic escape plan.
 
At least a third of the pages had full-page images. To me, it mostly looked like designer Chip Kidd chose graphical elements from Japanese poster art, and then zoomed in and cropped the images to make them look stranger and more unsettling. Their relationship to the story is sometimes fairly direct, but often oblique, and in only a few cases, several images in a row appear to tell their own sequential narrative that complements the text.

In the Country of Last Things

 
In the Country of Last Things

by Paul Auster

Penguin

1988

 

 

In the Country of Last Things is a dystopian novel set in the capital city of an small, unnamed, fictional European country. The country is effectively a failed state, and the city is stuck in a condition of disorganization and lawlessness that resembles a warzone, although no fighting is happening, and the causes of the breakdown of society or the ongoing crisis are never stated. Auster has written the novel as the first-person account of a woman who traveled to the city to find her missing brother, and became trapped there herself. It takes the form of a book-length letter written by the narrator, Anna, to an old friend back home, explaining what's happened to her.
 
Structurally, the book isn't organized into chapters, only unnumbered sections with short breaks between them. In terms of plot, there are basically four parts. The first part is primarily exposition about the city. There is very little law anymore, and theft and murder are effectively legal. Private toll collectors defend spots of turf and demand money, food, or sex to pass by. Corpses and shit are collected by the city government and burned to make methane for fuel - these are virtually the only municipal services that exist. One of the only remaining occupations is private trash collection. This too is burned for fuel. Scavengers also hunt for lightly damaged objects to resell, and bandits survive by robbing scavengers. There is little food and many are homeless.
 
Anna explains that this is a place where things are lost, or taken away, and never return. Loved ones die, buildings collapse, streets are ruined, nothing is ever fixed or repaired, and nothing but conflicting rumors remain afterward, if anyone knows anything at all. We see this again and again, across the rest of the book. Only once in the book is one single lost thing ever returned. All the rest is a chronicle of repeated dispossession.
 
Anna arrives in the city, finds not the slightest trace of her brother, and becomes a scavenger for her own survival. In the book's second part, she helps an elderly woman who is also a scavenger, learns more about the city, and becomes the old woman's caretaker as her health fails and a killing winter cold sets in.
 
In the third part, she meets someone who knew her brother, another journalist who came to the city to look for him before Anna did. They become lovers, and partners, until he becomes lost to her too.
 
In the fourth and longest part, Anna works in a charity hospital and tries to help the city's poorest and most vulnerable. The book ends with Anna writing her chronicle of events thus far, and preparing to attempt an escape.
 
Throughout, Auster thinks about the nature of attachment and loss. Arguably, due to the arrow of time, all of life is the progressive ending of one thing after another, a series of losses that can't be recovered, not just in this city, or in war, but everywhere, always. But life is also always new things starting, and continuations of everything we haven't lost yet. Anna comes to the city hoping to remain above it. To go, find her brother, and get out, without forming attachments, without getting involved. When we're young, we don't necessarily think we're invincible, but we usually think we're special, lucky, blessed. Bad things will happen to other people, an pass over us like the Angel of Death during the Biblical plague. But it's impossible, for Anna and for all of us. She's dragged down into the mud and shit. She does things she's not proud of, makes mistakes she regrets. And she can't help but make friends, fall in love, to care, to try to help. That too is life.
 
Books like this, set in imaginary European countries, are sometimes called 'Ruritarian romances,' named for the fictional country at the heart of Prisoner of Zenda, although it somehow feels wrong to call a nightmare dystopia like this a 'romance.' I do like Ruritanian settings though, and they work well for dystopias, like Alan Sillitoe's Travels in Nihilon or Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole. Sometimes it's surprising that there's no corresponding tradition of American fiction set in a fictional state, but I suppose that the names and boundaries of the US states have been pretty consistent compared to the way various European regions and principalities have repeatedly been absorbed in war, split apart, or gained independence after a conflict. And DC Comics have their fictional cities, their Metropolis and Gotham and others, which is maybe the closest domestic analog.

Children are Civilians Too

 
Children are Civilians Too

by Heinrich Boll

translated by Leila Vennewitz

Penguin

1970, reprinted 1995

 

 

Originally printed in 1970, a couple years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Children are Civilians Too is a collection of German author Heinrich Boll's short stories published 1947-1950, with the majority from 50.

This collection fits 26 stories into about 190 pages. The earlier stories, especially, tend to be on the short side. There are a lot of 3-5 page entries, only a handful 10 or longer. Almost all of Boll's stories are told in the first person, really only a couple have a third-person narrator. For the most part, these are not stories where much happens externally. Instead we stick close to our main character while they complete a single task or experience a single emotion, usually a kind of acceptance of loss or disappointment.

Most of Boll's stories are about soldiers or veterans. They're not about combat, but about moments in between. There are several stories about soldiers enjoying a night out drinking while on leave; in one, "That Night We Were in Odessa," they're broke but pawn their possessions so they can get schnapps and sausage, a good last meal, because they expect to die the next day when they're redeployed.

We also see soldiers in field hospitals. In the title story, a man with a head wound buys baked goods from a Russian girl who sneaks on-base. In my favorite, "Stranger Bear Word to the Spartans We...," the injured soldier realizes he's being treated in his old high school, which he left less than a year earlier, his own handwriting is still on a chalkboard, copying out a classical quotation. In "Lohengrin's Death," it's a little boy who dies in the hospital, if a morphine overdose, after breaking his legs while trying to steal coal from a moving train.

Veterans after the war often want work or have a poorly-paid and low-status job. Or perhaps they hope in vain to see someone again, perhaps at a train yard. Even former bootleggers want straight jobs, and will take whatever task they can get. In the sole scifi story, "My Sad Face," an unemployed man is arrested and rigorously beaten, according to police regulations, for failing to look as happy as the law requires, in a futuristic totalitarian state.

I would say that these stories mostly speak to their specific time, and to Germans who had to reckon with the fact that their country, their public, had largely accepted the patriotic justifications for war, and gone into it willingly, eagerly, while the conditions for soldiers were awful.

Boll doesn't mention the Holocaust, and there's no real hint of the idea that it was wrong of Germany to inflict war on others. But he does pretty thoroughly dismantle any image of being a soldier as noble or romantic or heroic. Boll's soldiers are working men with a particularly shitty job they were told would be better. In some ways, it reminds me of Americans' attitude toward our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can see now that our justifications were hollow, and that the wars were bad for 'the troops' they were supposedly fought in support of, but we mostly don't think about what we did to the Iraqi or Afghani people, what they suffered, how many of them died.

I think Boll is better known for some of his other writing, but "Stranger Bear Word to the Spartans We..." is very good. It's probably my second-favorite of his stories, after "Action Will be Taken!," which isn't in this collection.

The Travelling Cat Chronicles

 
 

The Travelling Cat Chronicles

by Hiro Arikawa

translated by Philip Gabriel

Berkley

2012, reprinted 2018 

 

 

Hiro Arikawa's The Travelling Cat Chronicles is a short, sentimental novel narrated by the cat, Nana, as his human Satoru revisits old friends in an attempt to settle Nana into a new home.

I know that almost all authors are trying to provoke emotional responses from their readers, but in Arikawa's case, I was consciously aware that she was trying to manipulate my feelings, and I resented it. By chance, I watched the documentary Objectified in between chapters while I was reading this. One of the product designers, in defending his own commitment to minimalism, said 'When the poet's sentiments are overly visible, the audience may become uncomfortable', which struck me as an accurate summary of how I felt most of the time while reading this. But knowing someone is trying to provoke you does not, by itself, defend you against it, and Arikawa got me to cry through the last two chapters.

So, I don't like that, but I know that many people do. A friend pressed this book into my hands, and when I complained that I felt manipulated, several others spoke up to say sometimes they want that. This was a best-seller in Japan before getting translated; I recognize that I'm the outlier here. And I sometimes enjoy YA that accurately captures the intense, amplified emotions of adolescence. But a big part of my complaint isn't that this is emotional, but that, to me, the emotions often felt forced, overstated, inauthentic.

The book is mostly narrated in the first person by a cat, but the way Arikawa imagines Nana talking isn't how I imagine a cat talking. That's not to say I'm right and she's wrong, but it means that I experienced most of the narration as feeling false.

Nana is a stray black-and-white kitten who likes to sleep on the hood of Satoru's silver van. Satoru names Nana for the Japanese word for 'seven', which is what Nana's tail looks like. Nana gets injured, so Satoru adopts him, and they live together for several years before Satoru suddenly starts trying to give Nana away to one of his old friends, for unstated reasons. Each attempt involves a van-ride and a trip down memory lane, which like, resolves some unfinished business between the two of them, before they decide Nana won't work out here, and the pair return home.

I did worry that was all a shaggy dog story, that we'd find out there was no reason, that Satoru never intended to give up Nana, and all that was a pretext for him to go reminisce and fix his friendships before keeping Nana in the end. But Satoru really is putting his affairs in order for a reason, and that reason is why the last couple chapters are so sad. The one thing I thought Arikawa captured the way it really feels is watching someone you care about be very sick and not being able to do anything to help them.

Satoru goes to visit his childhood best friend, then his buddy from middle school, the the couple he was pals with in high school and college, and finally moves back in with his aunt who raised him after his parents died. She kept having to move for work, which is why each chapter of Satoru's life was in a different location. We see that not only is the one spot of tension between Satoru and each of his friends healed, but his visit helps each of them fix something that's wrong in their life right now. Nana intentionally sabotages each visit so he can keep going home with Satoru, until they get to the aunt's house, which becomes his permanent new home.

I have a hunch that if you like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants or The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing or The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, then you will probably like this. I really haven't meant to read so many sad books recently, and I'll probably seek out something different for my next few reads.