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!

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. 

Lost Letters

 
Lost Letters

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger

Magnetic Press

2024 

 

 

 I feel quite torn about Lost Letters, because I really liked almost the entire book ... and really didn't like way it ended. Lost Letters is a French graphic novel that feels like it was inspired by manga and anime, and while this comparison gets tossed around a lot lately, I think that creator Jim Bishop has created something that's so influenced by Studio Ghibli that you could pretty easily imagine them adapting it for the screen. The book is marketed as being for a YA audience, and that's probably generally fine, but the ending is so dark, so sad, and because it's the ending and nothing comes after it, so un-processed, that I wouldn't really feel comfortable handing it to a teen unless I really trusted them to seek out someone to talk to afterward if they needed it.
 

Lost Letters takes place on a picturesque island with a Mediterranean climate and a population that is predominantly talking fish-people, with only a few humans around. From the start, we're following Iode (short for Iodine), a boy of 11 or 12 who lives alone with his pet pelican, and who's waiting for a letter from his mother. Iode's mother is a pilot, she and her husband are no longer together, and Iode is convinced that she's looking for a new island for the two of them to go live on, and that when she finds it, she'll send him a letter telling him to come move back in with her. In fact, he's really, super convinced that she already sent this letter, and that the only reason he hasn't received it yet is because it's gotten lost in the mail.
 
So let me say that it's obvious from the outset that this is going to be a sad book. No matter how lighthearted its adventures might appear, the audience knows, we know, that whatever the situation with Iode's mother is, it's definitely not what he thinks it is, and it's definitely not that the letter he's hoping for is just stuck somewhere else in the island's mail system, simply waiting for him to find it. And we may suspect that, on some level, Iode knows this too, and he's in denial. So we know that parts of this book are going to be sad, especially when Iode learns and finally confronts the truth about his mom, but we may also hope that he'll maybe make a new friend or two, or maybe reconcile with his father, in a way that lets him reach a point of acceptance. And things sort of go like you'd expect, right up until they suddenly don't.
 

A sample of Jim Bishop's art.
From the left: Sista, the goldfish cop, and Iode.

 

 
Iode takes the family car and drives into town on another part of the island, so he can go to the post office. On the way, he meets Sista, an older teen girl who's hitchhiking to get to town. Sista is involved in a bunch of hijinks, and basically all the action and excitement in the book emerges from her plotline. Sista is a courier for the mob, headed into town to deliver a mysterious briefcase. The mob boss is an octopus. Sista is also an undercover agent for the royal guard, who's infiltrating the mob by working her way up through the ranks as an errand girl. The royal guard is Sista's found family, filling a void in her life since she was abandoned as a child. Her handler's codename is Mom.
 
Iode assumes Sista will help him at the post office, which already has an hours-long line when they reach town. She immediately sneaks off to continue her covert operation. Iode, apparently unable to conceive of any other reason she wouldn't hang out with him, jumps to the conclusion that she was kidnapped, and calls the police. 
 
An incompetent goldfish cop (he has a humanoid robot body, but his head is just a goldfish swimming in a glass bowl, wearing a police cap) briefly takes on the case, but he's much too busy chasing glory to bother with kid stuff. Unfortunately, he does mention all this to a corrupt fish cop, who immediately tells the mafia that their secret courier is attracting too much attention, and just like that, Sista is burned, both from the mob and from the royal guards. 
 
There's a lot of moving parts between cause and effect here - including that the mob wouldn't have wanted Sista to hitchhike, or take the cablecar across town, she was supposed to walk the whole way - but to be clear, Iode made a silly, childish assumption and then called the police about it, which is a roll of the dice every time, and that resulted in Sista getting fired. In fact, without some timely help from Iode at the aquarium, that phone call likely would've led to Sista being shot, or drowned. Neither Iode nor Sista seems to realize the connection, and it's unclear to me how much responsibility, if any, Bishop assigns to the phone call, but there it is.
  
Anyway, there's a shoot-out, an aquarium collapse, a last minute rescue. Iode and Sista do start to become friends, and the next day, she joins him at the post office, and rides with him when he borrows a seaplane to chase down a mail flight, which circuitously leads to a final confrontation with the mob. It's all very exciting, even fun. Bishop's art is excellent, just the right blend of realistic and cartoony. His poses are dynamic, his faces expressive. You practically feel like you're already watching animation when you read it.
 
When none of Iode's attempts to find the letter go anywhere, Sista goes with him to see his estranged father, who tells her the truth his son won't accept. Iode's mom left five years earlier, because she had terminal cancer and wanted to enjoy one last flight before she died. She wrote a letter to explain all this before she left, and Iode received the letter. Sista takes Iode back to the beach house, where she finds the letter, right next to the mailbox, where he read it then refused to accept it and blocked it out. Sista gets Iode to face the truth, and he instantly ages five years, suddenly appearing 16 or 17. It's a powerful visual metaphor of how he was stuck, and how he's now achieved catharsis. It's sad, but acceptance is better, right?
 
And then there's the epilogue. It's one year later. The incompetent goldfish cop is now a janitor, and actually good at it. Iode is becoming a young man. He looks awkward, but time is passing for him again. And what about Sista? We see her commit suicide by walking into the ocean and drowning. Then Iode receives her suicide note as a letter. She explains that she's never recovered from the loss of her found family in the royal guard, and sees no future for herself without that job. 
 
And that's that, that's the end. We explicitly see the other characters able to accept things and move on. But Sista does not, and the way Bishop chooses to present it sees especially cruel. Her death is presented as a thing that happens to Iode, as one last chapter in what remains fundamentally his story. And as I said earlier, there's no more context, no more explanation. It's shocking, and then it's over. Why did her friendship save him, but his friendship didn't save her? I know that can happen in life, but this is fiction. Bishop didn't have to write it this way; he chose to. And his decision really soured me on a book that I otherwise really enjoyed up to that point, and made it hard for me to recommend despite how much there is to like in it.

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.

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.

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.

Field Glass

 
 
Field Glass

by Joanna Howard and Joanna Ruocco

Sidebrow Books

2017

 

 

Field Glass is a very strange, unsettling novella. It is told in the first person by an unnamed primary narrator - a soldier sheltering among civilians in a country estate that is near the front line of a war in the deep of winter. It successfully achieves the effect that I think both Kathryn Davis's Silk Road and Jeff Vandermeer's Dead Astronauts were aiming for but, in my opinion, missed.

 
The narrator is writing (or dictating?) messages to a love back home. Intermixed are much shorter dispatches by other soldiers, identified only by serial number and blood type. There is no plot really. The style is almost all description, no exposition. All sensation, no explanation. It's a style that I hardly have the vocabulary to describe, except to say that it feels very distant, the opposite of books that try to make you feel close to the characters or to imaginatively identify yourself with them.

 
We don't know where we are, or when, or what war is being fought, or what sides there might be, or which side the narrator is on. Just that it is cold, the landscape is ruined, most of the other soldiers are dead, and the narrator is trapped by an enclosing siege. I imagine a place something like the great house from Downton Abbey, and all the talk of prosthetics and artificial blood makes me think of either an alternate WWI or perhaps a not too-distant future.

 
The pleasure of reading this one comes from enjoying the use of language, which I'm tempted to call prose poetry. There's no rhyme or meter, but the sentences are dense with meaning, and the word choice is unusual enough that you have to read slowly and carefully to take it in. It's only 96 pages, but it feels like a complete experience, even though nothing is answered or resolved.

Temporary

 
 
Temporary
by Hilary Leichter
Coffee House Press
2020
 

 

Temporary is a short, surreal novel about the precariousness of temporary work. The unnamed first-person narrator is a Temp, as was her mother, and grandmother, who works job after job, hoping to find her Permanence.

 
Nearly all the jobs we see the narrator perform are fantastical in some way. She briefly fills in as the chairman of a board of diectors, as a barnacle, a ghost, an assistant to a witch. We see other temps too - replacement girlfriends and mothers. Almost all the temps we see are women.

 
The narrator has longer, more consequential placements on a pirate ship, as the assistant to a hitman, on a bomb-dropping dirigible. The compromises everyone has to make with the organizations they work within are literalized as being ordered to commit murder, with her continued placement and the quality of her recommendation on the line. How much does she want her Permanence? What is she willing to do to earn it? And what will happen to her if she keeps refusing to make that one fatal compromise? The plot reaches a crisis point when the narrator finds herself unemployed and, she fears, unemployable, and then resolves.
 

Leichter's prose is very lively, with a lot of alliteration and prosody and riffing and repetition with variations. She knows her story is silly, but tells it straight. And the emotions of fear and uncertainty that accompany precarious employment come through as authentic. It's a lot of fun to read, and by the end, surprisingly moving.

 
One of my favorite details is the narrator's abundance of boyfriends, who she sees on different days of the week - the culinary boyfriend, the tallest boyfriend, the favorite boyfriend.  I think there might be a new one every time she talks about them, and they're just a fun little extra in a short book stuffed full of fun extras.

Record of a Night Too Brief

 
 
Record of a Night Too Brief

by Hiromi Kawakami
translated by Lucy North

Pushkin Press

2017

 

 

Record of a Night too Brief is a collection of three kind of longish short-stories by a Japanese author. Kawakami seems to belong to a set of authors who write what I might call magical realism, and who seem to be popular with literary fiction lovers in the US. These stories were published in Japan in 1996, and in America by Pushkin Press in 2017. 

 
I picked it up because of the title and the cover, which is like a wallpaper pattern of lurid pink and cyan mushrooms on a dark blue background. The cover has almost nothing to do with the contents though, and I found myself comparing the title story to the film The Night is Short, Walk on Girl, which for me was a much more satisfying celebration of nightlife.

 
The title story is about one night where the unnamed narrator meets a cute girl, they hang out, kiss, then argue, and break up by morning, all while surrounded by lots of other people who are out on the town for the night. It's told in over a dozen very short chapters, each of which feels like a scene from a dream. At some points, the surreal imagery feels like a metaphorical interpretation of a realistic event. But mostly the strange characters and events need to be taken on their own terms. A lot of the imagery is related to a forest at night. Other people show up as voles and kiwis. I wanted to like this, but it felt unsatisfying. (There is one scene where the narrator and her briefly-girlfriend both have mushrooms growing on them, which is I guess where the cover art comes from.)

 
In "Missing," the narrator's older brother turns into a ghost and spends most of his time invisible and intangible. The family conspires to marry that brother's fiancee to the narrator's other brother without the fiancee noticing the switch. The narrator mostly just misses her brother and experiences erotic longings for him. We also get details about how each family has its own weird rituals and traditions that seem inexplicable to outsiders. The story certainly makes it seem like Kawakami doesn't think very highly of traditional patrilocal marriage.

 
The last story, "A Snake Stepped On," seemed like the best to me, and the publisher's notes indicate that it won an award in Japan back in 96. Hiwako works as a shopgirl at a story that sells Buddhist prayer beads. One day on a delivery, she steps on a snake. That night, the snake shows up at her apartment in the guise of a human woman, claiming to be Hiwako's mother. She also sometimes turns back into a snake or a drawing of a snake. The snake invites Hiwako to turn into a snake too. Hiwako doesn't want to, but can't muster the resolve to say a definitive no, or even ask the snake to leave.

 
Meanwhile, we learn that the shop owner's wife has a live-in 'aunt' who is also a snake. A Buddhist priest they deliver beads to is married to a snake. And Hiwako learns from her actual mother that her great grandfather once abandoned heis wife and kids for several years to go be married to a bird. In the end, the snake physically attacks Hiwako to force her to become a snake too, and Hiwako finally decides for sure that she doesn't want that, and fights back.

 
I think I might like this style of writing, but I probably ought to be more careful to read some more plot summaries and reviews to pick the next one. Then again, every description I've read of the title story makes it sound like something I'd love. There's always an element of risk in trying something new.

Angelmaker

 
 
Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

Knopf
2012
 

 

Angelmaker is, first and foremost, a rollicking good time. Harkaway tells us the story of Joe Spork, a clockmaker and son of an infamous gangster, who repairs what turns out to be a WWII-era clockwork doomsday device, decides to turn it off, and embraces his childhood lessons in crime to outwit the WWII-era supervillain who's trying to use the thing to end the world. We secondarily follow Edie Bannister, former lady super spy, long-time enemy of the supervillain, and lover of the device's inventor.

 
I don't know if Harkaway's writing qualifies as capital L Literature. I might describe it as ascended pulp, lying somewhere on the spectrum between Michael Chabon and Thomas Pynchon in his efforts to tell as fun and thought provoking story in the most interesting way he can. You'll notice the plot outline isn't that long or that complex. Instead, Harkaway fills his 500 pages by taking his time to develop his characters, filling out his world with detail, allowing information to be revealed at an almost leisurely pace, and telling each incident in a way that attempts to maximize its impact. It could probably be a bit shorter, but it's an awful lot of fun.

 
(Harkaway probably deserves to be better known and liked by SF/F fans. How many thousands of pages have fans of Malazan the Fallen, Wheel of Time, or even Game of Thrones slogged through, often while complaining about how much they don't like these long series they're reading?) 

 
I could also describe this one as Cryptonomicon meets The Rise and Fall of DODO. During WWII, orphan turned girl-spy Edie gets connected with a religious order of monks who build extremely well-made steampunk devices to better know God, and revere the words of John Ruskin. Edie works in a mobile code-breaking lab inside a train, then gets recruited to ride a steampunk submarine to South or Southeast Asia, to rescue a lady scientist who's building a machine for a supervillain who seems a bit like an attempt at a non-racist Fu Manchu. 

 
Shem Shem Tsien had a mother of minor British nobility and a father in the royal family of a tiny principality bordering the British Empire. Using what he learned at Oxford, Eton, etc, he killed the rest of his dad's royal family and took over the country, Doctor Doom style. The lady scientist, Frankie, thinks she's building a device to prevent wars, but Tsien wants to use it, initially for something like world domination and later for divine apotheosis. Edie disguises herself as a man, has the obligatory dinner meeting with Tsien, then rescues Frankie and blows up her lab. Later, Edie and Frankie become lovers.

 
Frankie's machine is supposed to save the world by letting people Know the Truth. Not just to perceive the world through our imperfect senses, but within its field, to correctly and philosophically Know what's true and what's not. The first time she tests the device, she accidentally kills a nearby village, because it turns out the human mind can't handle unlimited truth. In theory, if left on, it would collapse all quantum waveforms and usher in a perfectly deterministic world and/or universe, with consciousness either vanishing or only allowing minds to observe the unstoppable, uncontrollable behavior of their automaton-like bodies. Doomsday, indeed. Frankie later fine-tunes the device to operate at a much lower level, and much much later, geriatric Edie gets Joe Spork to fix it so she can turn it on, to make the world better by giving us more Truth without overwhelming everyone or destroying consciousness and free will. 

 

Edie's parts of the book were honestly my favorite.

Joe fixes the machine and reminisces about his childhood growing up as a Prince of Crime under his gangster father. After fixing it, he realizes that both a shadowy X-Files-like government agency is after him and that he's being chased by Nosferatu-like monks who somehow belong the same Ruskinite Order as Edie's friends from before. He gets help from hypercompetent legal fixers who used to keep his dad out of prison (well, the children of the original fixers), and becomes the boyfriend of a particularly lusty lady investigator. At some point he's captured by the government and tortured by the vampire monks, but his lawyer friend and fixer girlfriend get him out again, and this experience prompts his decision that obeying the law won't protect him, and the only way to stop the device is to lean in to becoming a gangster in his own right.

 
Harkaway tells the first ⅔ of the book through a mix of a little present-day action and long flashbacks, so that we learn the history of the device at the same pace Joe does. Joe's arrest serves as a kind of fulcrum, and everything after that is a madcap attempt to defeat the somehow-still-alive Shem Shem Tsien before he can turn himself into a god and everyone else into philosophical zombies. Harkway has sympathy for the idea that knowing the Truth is often a good thing, and several characters have non-machine-assisted revelations that help them make better decisions afterward. He shows a glimpse of what perfect-knowledge induced paralysis would look like, and gives us at least one chance to feel that moment of knowing the truth without him having to directly tell us, so that we can feel what the characters are feeling at that time. (Incidentally and unrelatedly, that "inception" moment is what the best teaching feels like too.)

 
I will probably switch it up by reading some shorter stuff after this, but this was easily one of the best and most enjoyable things I've read in awhile.

The Taiga Syndrome

 
 
The Taiga Syndrome

by Cristina Rivera Garza
translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana
Dorothy Project

2018

 

 

The Taiga Syndrome is a Latin American detective story. It's marketed as a novel, but barely 100 pages long, with pretty generous font size and margins.

 
A rich man hires a woman who used to be a detective to find his second wife, who has run off with another man to the taiga, presumably in Canada or Russia. The wife has sent her husband a telegram at each stop along her journey, and the rich man wants the detective to retrace it. 

 
The man suspects his wife has 'Taiga Syndrome,' supposedly the urge one feels, when deep in the wilderness, to go even deeper and get completely lost.

 
So the detective flies off, she hires a man to be her translator, and they find the tiny village that was the missing wife's last known stop. She and the translator spend the majority of the novella trying to find out what the missing wife and her boyfriend did in the village and where they may have gone next. They make a few unsettling discoveries that are unrelated to the couple.

 
Eventually they do find the missing wife, who tells them that she's not going back. The detective returns home and reports to the man who hired her, he gets angry and beats her up.

 
The book is narrated first-person. The text is spate, and a bit dream-like, especially as things get weird. It reminds me a bit of Anna Kaven's Ice. The narrator occasionally likens the missing couple to Hansel and Gretel and herself to Red Riding Hood. I also initially thought the narrator might end up replicating the wife's story, but no, she solves the case and goes home. The whole story is quite brief and stays at an emotional remove, many events are implied rather than described. It really is much more like a long short story than a short novel.

I previously enjoyed Barbara Comyns' Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, from the same publisher.

Sea of Tranquility

 
Sea of Tranquility
by Emily St John Mandel

Knopf

2022

 

 

Sea of Tranquility is a time-travel story, you realize very quickly, and also a bit of a mystery story, which emerges as you go.

 
A few years before WWI, a man goes into the forest and sees something strange, then meets an odd man who asks him about it. 

 
Then in 2020, a woman goes to a concert and sees a video of the same strange thing, and when she meets the composer after the show, the same odd man is there asking the composer about the video, and she remembers that she saw him as a child, and he looked exactly the same age.

 
Then in the 2200s, an author who grew up on the moon is giving a book tour on earth. (She's obviously a stand-in for Mandel.) Her book is about a pandemic and has just been turned into a prestigious tv show, and also a real pandemic is starting while she's on tour. And on the tour she meets an odd man who asks her about a scene from her book where something strange happens in a forest.

 
And finally, we switch to the perspective of the odd man and learn why he's investigating the strange thing in the forest. He also lives on the moon, in the 2400s, where time travel is real, and mostly used to investigate strange things in the past.

 
Mandel's writing style is very clear and spare. There's no flowery prose, and not a lot of description or speculation. Her vision of the future is hardly different from the present. The one really speculative element is her vision of future history as a series of pandemics and lock-downs, like 2020 happening over and over again, forever, surprising everyone anew each time.

 
In the 2400s, people sometimes wonder if they're living in a simulation. This provides a motivation to time travel, and also maybe seems like the reason Mandel sets part of her story on the moon, where the sky and weather are definitely simulations.

 
This isn't a fast-paced story, and there's no 'action,' but the book is a quick read. It's quite clear, calm, and straightforward, which is impressive for a time travel story. The characters are well drawn, even though the prose is spare and the worldbuilding is minimal, and I credit Mandel for saving a few unexpected surprises for the last section of the book.

 
I'm certain this won't be as famous among time-travel novels as Station Eleven is among post-apocalyptic novels, but I'm glad I read it. I think I might try her Glass Hotel next, and maybe Eleven after that.

Ice

 
 

Ice

by Anna Kavan

Peter Owen Publishers

1967, reprinted 2006

 

 

I'm usually reading more than one book at once, usually 3-5 at any one time, so when I finish two in short order, it's not because I started and finished a whole new book after finishing the one before, it's just because I finished two around the same time.

 

Ice is a first person narrative of a man repeatedly trying to find and save a woman he loves as the world ends. The world is ending because it is freezing, glaciers are advancing from both poles and will eventually meet and cover the equator. In the mean time, governments are collapsing, refugees are fleeing, warlords are making war.

 
The narrator is supremely unreliable. At times he is obviously hallucinating, at others the reality of anything he says is unclear. What is clear is that he does not love this woman but wants to control her, he hurts her, and she flees him. The most obvious true thing is the thing he lies most fervently to himself about.

 
The writing is in short, staccato sentences, the atmosphere is dreamlike or hallucinatory, and it's a good book to read in the cold of winter. The book reminds me of The Third Policeman or Travels in Nihilon, the narrator specifically reminds me of Humbert Humbert from Lolita. I liked this one, and it was very fast moving.