He existed now in a liminal zone

"Such a shame that a tough fellow like him could pass away in the blink of an eye," Sister Zhou said, and sighed. "I can't help but to think that sometimes a man can be as frail as a mosquito! One swat might not kill a mosquito, but it can surely kill a man."

This novel is grim, but not quite in the way the title might imply. The Morgue Keeper, by Ruyan Meng, does not delve into the tedium or unpleasantness of the occupation per se. Rather Qing Yuan, framed by his proletarian and somewhat absurd experience, bears witness to all manner of death, physical and spiritual. 

Set amid Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, Qing Yuan's existence is indeed meager, but he seems to hold no resentment against the regime that executed his father for hiding some gold. He is kind and compassionate with his coworkers, his neighbours, the local beggars.

When an identified female corpse, mutilated beyond recognition, comes into the morgue — "a heap of gore and waste" — and no one claims her, he starts asking questions, looking to restore her dignity. This clinging to humanity allows Qing Yuan to rise above his day to day, and even harbour hopes of having a family one day (a neighbouring widow becomes a romantic interest).

One day, Qing Yuan is arrested. He is carted away along with several other employees of the hospital and imprisoned. Then the torture begins.

The charges relate to his family's capitalist past. But it's clear that anyone disgruntled or overzealous might've played a role. This is a state where neighbours denounce neighbours, children denounce their own parents. Struggle sessions, akin to Two Minutes Hate, punish transgressors and strike fear in everyone. This is an intense read, a dystopia that's a direct descendent of 1984, only it's real. It's 1960s China, the squalor and desperation of Worker Villages.

Qing Yuan is ultimately released by the authorities but he is shunned. His actions are scrutinized, his home repeatedly vandalized. He seems broken beyond repair.

He had long since given up on the city. Nothing stirred any connection to his past. In fact, he realized, he was wrong to say he had given up on the city. The city had given up on him, discarded like a dead baby from the hospital the moment he’d been conscripted to the morgue. He existed now in a liminal zone, between a past to which he could never return and a future that would never come. The eternal present, what many a sage declared the one true refuge, had seized him like a spider in its web. He had become a shadow whose life had been bent to a single purpose, the cleaning of humans, dead, on their way to becoming shadows themselves.

But then there's a kitten.

Excerpts 
Chapter 1 
Chapter 9 

Review 
Metropolitan Review: The Exilic Style 
Interviews
Bookish: Quiet Tragedies and Small Acts of Kindness 
Zona Motel: It's Terrible to Be Yourself  

Perspective gave us depth

Michelangelo Buonarroti to Giorgio Vasari; Rome, 21 June 1557:

Brunelleschi's discovery of the laws of perspective was like Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to mankind. Thanks to him, we have been able not only illuminate our walls as Giotto once did with his golden fingers, but to reproduce the world as it is, identical in every detail. And so it was the the painter could imagine himself God's equal: because now, we too could create reality. And that was how we came to try, poor fishermen that we are, to surpass Our Lord. We  could copy the world as faithfully as if we had made it ourselves, but that was not enough to quench our thirst for creation, because our ambition as artists, intoxicated by this new power, now knew no limits. We wanted to paint the world in our own style. We didn't merely wish to rival God, but to alter His work by redrawing it to suit our desires. We distorted perspective, we abandoned it. We erased the chequerboard floors of our predecessors and let our figures float in the ether. We played with perspective the way a dog plays with a ball, or a cat with the corpse of a sparrow it has killed. We turned away from it. We scorned it. But we never forgot it.

How could we? Perspective gave us depth. And depth opened the gates of infinity to us. A terrible spectacle. I can never recall without shivering the first time I saw Masaccio's frescoes at the Brancassi Chapel. The wonder of his foreshortened figures! There stood man, life-sized at last, having found his place in space, his substance given weight, cast out of paradise but standing on his own two feet, in all his mortal truth. Far from constricting the imagination of artists, perspective gave us the image of infinity on Earth. The image only ... yes, of course. In reality, we could not claim to equal the Creator of all things, but we could, better than any priest, proclaim His word through mute images or stone statues. Painters, sculptors, architects: the artist is a prophet because, more than any other man, his mind contains the idea of God, which is infinity itself, that unthinkable, inconceivable thing.

Perspective(s), by Laurent Binet, is a historical epistolary novel, some 176 letters involving some twenty correspondents, including the likes of Michelangelo, Catherine de' Medici, Benvenuto Cellini,

I had high hopes for this mystery (artist stabbed dead with a chisel! scandalous painting gone missing!) but mostly it's boring and confusing.

Sadly, with a few exceptions, the voices don't vary. I had trouble keeping the characters straight (it's probably easier to read this on paper vs digitally, to be able to flip back a page or two to identify who is writing to whom and reference the list of characters). There were times it didn't seem worth the effort.

I'm betting Binet is a gamer (hmm, a quick google search confirms the influence of video games on his previous novels), and specifically a fan of Assassin's Creed (and why not? indeed, Ezio's adventures constitute the basis of my knowledge of Borgia-era Italy). In one (rare) action-packed sequence, Cellini's parkour efforts to elude the palace guards seem lifted out of the Brotherhood's playbook:

As I descended from the ramparts, I heard some guards climbing the stairs. Since I had no business being up there, I would have had no excuse to justify my presence if they had seen me. So I hurried back to the roof. But you know the palace better then I, so you know that there are no hiding places up there. I ran to the wall; a leap from that height could be fatal, even to me. But God rewards the brave: at the foot of the wall was a cart loaded with hay, left there by some groom. It all happened in a flash: the decision, then the execution. I climbed onto the parapet, arms outspread like Christ on the cross. I closed my eyes and I dived. During my fall I heard the cry of an eagle. My landing was as soft as on a feather bed, and in a second I was up on my feet again, completely unscathed.

The video game immersion affords a suspension of disbelief; here it feels laughably out of place. (But yeah, I kinda loved this bit.) On the whole, this novel of art theory and politics comes off as dry. 

The novel did make me consider how trends in art are formed by outside forces (it's simply not as obvious me in work predating the twentieth century) and artists throughout history use their work to voice their agreement or dissent. Of course a change in the papacy would dictate whether or not nudes were held in disgrace. "We other Florentines still understand and appreciate the beauty of the human body rather than considering it a diabolical obscenity." 

As Vincenzo Borghini notes to Giorgio Vasari, "You know as well as I that it is not men who change their tastes, but politics that change men." And Michelangelo recognizes, "These are cruel times, my friend, for the defenders of art and beauty." Another action sequence plays out through a Calvinoesque slo-mo lens, the intersection of math and art overlaying reality.

I saw the lines being drawn through space, forming a geometric grid, and I recognised Alberti's diagram, his pyramid of spokes converging on a single point. It was the laws of perspective taking shape before me, as clearly as if I had traced them myself with a ruler; I touched the surface of things, because it was no longer the real world that I could see in all its depth. Or rather, it was the real world, but I saw it as if through the camera obscura devised by Master Brunelleschi — may his name be honoured until the end of time! — and in the space of a second the world appeared to me as a flat surface, adroitly squared, in all the dazzling clarity of the theory that was revealed to us by those supreme geniuses: Brunelleschi, Alberti, Masaccio ... may you all be crowned in glory, you eternal Tuscan heroes! And so, as the killer was about to fire at me, because the fuse, as I told you, had almost completely burnt down (this too, I could perceive with perfect lucidity), I saw — yes, I saw! — the vanishing point drawn on his forehead as if by Alberti himself and (recalling those words of the great master that gave me heart: "It is in vain that you bend your bow, if you do not yet know where to aim your arrow!" — and I knew; in that instant, I knew exactly!) I pulled the trigger, and the bold shot from my crossbow, following the perfect trajectory that my mind had calculated and that an invisible hand had traced through the air, embedding itself exactly midway between his eyes. He fell backwards, his shot missed, and — hearing the detonation — I felt as if I had been woken from a long dream that had lasted no more than a second.

But I hadn't dreamed it. I had remembered perspective. And this is what I want to tell you, Master Michelangelo, my dear Master. In our thirst to find a new style of painting so that we can surpass (or, rather, circumvent) the perfection achieved by our forefathers [...] have we not forgotten what underlay the very essence of that perfection? It is not that we are unaware of it; we all studied Alberti's theory. But, little by little, all of us, [...] we have attempted to free ourselves from it, we have left it behind, we have disdained it. And we have begun to elongate our bodies, to make them float through space, to stretch out where we should foreshorten, to turn our landscapes into dreamscapes, and rather than cutting them up in accordance with mathematical principles that we consider too severe, to twist reality. Order and symmetry have become anathema to us. 

The resolution, if I understand who dun it correctly, is a ridiculous bit of fiction squeezed between verifiable historical facts — it remains historically plausible, but kinda pointlessly so. (And I'm relieved — not for the sake of any historical personage's reputation, but for Truth — that Binet's readership is relatively limited in number and generally smarter than the average bear so that the none of this gets mistaken for historical fact. I fear for humanity not having sufficient general knowledge to accurately recognize dramatizations and artistic license.)

See also 
The French Exception: On Laurent Binet and French Literature. 
For a substantial excerpt of the novel, see the US publisher's publicity page.

What happens to a person in solitude?

I want to shake off a day full of words and meanings. Not that they're superfluous, just that I don't need them anymore.

The Cut Line, by Carolina Pihelgas, follows a young Estonian woman's reclamation of self during the long hot summer after she leaves a fourteen-years-long relationship. Liine was 18 when she met Tarmo; when it's revealed that he is fifteen years older than her, the toxic control he held over her becomes apparent.

What if he's right that no one else would have a use for me. Doubt is like a cobweb — very delicate, but when you touch it, it clings to your fingers. Gray and sticky.

I can picture cut lines: wounds from the knife the narrator brandishes in her imagination, against herself or her ex (the epigraph is a line from Ariana Harwicz; for more knives and toxicity see Die, My Love). Or the cut line is how she mows the grass as short as possible. Metaphorically, it's a line between past and future. It's the line Liine draws that delineates her self from others.

We feel the tone shift from despondency toward occasional langour and back again.

The sheet metal that covers the woodpile is rattling the wind. The hooded crow sways on the oak tree and caws. The quiet murmur of the clover and golden silence of the mayweed. They sing inside me as if my innermost being is the center of everything, both living and dead.

Liine is staying at the family cottage farm. She works the garden, the land. She becomes attuned to the insects. The sound of helicopters and gunshots at the nearby military base is a constant reminder that there's a world outside, that there's a war in Ukraine. Her feed relays extreme heat, water shortages, famine, hurricanes. She scrolls articles about climate anxiety. While a relationship breakup may be a universal experience, a timeless story even (one remarkable if negative effect of this book is how it managed to permeate my mood, stirring up bad relationship memories of my own.), the backdrop is very today.

The language is beautiful. This is not a plot-driven novel. Liine's mother and sister provide counterpoints, in their living situations, how they process the past, what they value. But Liine is determined to find her own way. She comes across a stash of letters belonging to her great-aunt, which open her eyes to the possibility of other, affirmative ways of being. Liine's evolution over the summer is subtle and authentic. 

And then I'm in a place where nothing moves forward anymore, everything only goes backward, turns back on itself, tells me about the meaninglessness of my existence. Reality is a snake coiling up, but there's no room for me here. I'm excluded from all living things, from all breathing things. Without other people, do I even exist? What happens to a person deep down, right at the bottom, in solitude?

I breathe. I breathe. Is it possible that here in this old house, far from everything, I could turn into something else, into a plant, say? Doesn't that make me like something that's poked its head out of the ground; something pale green that's stretched out, caught some sun, maybe even managed to grow some flowers, but not borne fruit? And is then cut down and trampled to pieces. Don't I have roots, then, somewhere deeper still? I should just go back to bed, curl up under the blanket and cry a bit. I need to stay beneath the soil, in the ground, here in a safe remote place until I find the strength within me to sprout new shoots.