A density of sentences

Anyway, routine returns.

Every day I read one book of poetry and one novel to be recharged by a density of sentences. I stretch and strength-train and walk for two hours a day so I can sit at my desk again for long periods of time.

Light and Thread, by Han Kang, is a short book of nonfiction that includes her Nobel lecture, as well as poems, images, reflections, and journal entries — meditations on writing, on living while writing, or not writing. (The spareness of it calls to mind The White Book.) 

For someone familiar with Kang's novels, these snippets speak to how she fully embodies her writing: she researches deeply, thinks deeply, feels deeply. 

My favourite section is "North-Facing Garden," in which Kang describes her plot of land, and the subsequent journal documenting her struggle with to plant up and maintain a garden 180 centimetres long by 40 centimetres wide. 

The biggest challenge is to maximize light — she uses mirrors to ensure the light falls on all sides equally.

While in itself the garden diary is not of great literary value, it manifests practicality and calm. Every aspect reflects an author who acts with mindfulness and intention.

I am inspired to tend my own garden — observe it, document it, learn how to nurture it. I've had four years here to begin to know the rhythm of the light, and watch how the snails, birds, squirrels move through this patch of the ruelle verte. The construction next door will be complete this summer, and then the vehicles and debris will be cleared out. I'll take stock: one lilac tree destroyed, but one left standing; a raspberry bush trampled; I'll cut back the grape vine. And then, then I can sow the seeds of what is yet to bloom.

Excerpt

No matter how small a garden, it's still a garden, so it will require a good deal of tending.

The world is a whore

In the daytime, as I walk down Vancouver's tree-lined streets, where the crocuses are in full bloom, I squint at the bright clear skies, wondering if one day all this, too, will turn into a burning wreckage. Riding the bus, I startle at a caved-in building, reminding myself that unlike every other caved-in building on the news and in my nightmares, this one has simply been bulldozed. My sister, who also lives in Vancouver, tells me that when she passes freshly dug mounds for flower beds, she sees mass graves. Sometimes I wonder if she and I are going insane, living two realities at once — the explosions peppering phone calls from Ukraine alongside the dinner parties in Vancouver with laughing, smiling friends in wrinkle-free fabrics who don't mention the war. Maybe there is no war, as conspiracy theorists whisper online. Maybe it's all in my head?

Endling, by Maria Reva, is postmodernist madcap set in contemporary Ukraine. Initially quirky in its characters and premise, a third of the way through the novel abruptly breaks off to examine its authorship and context. From there, it snowballs into absurdity.

Who peoples the main narrative thread?

Yeva: Malacologist. "Romance tour" work (the Romeo Meets Yulia agency is essentially an in-person mail-order bride service, serving aging, balding Western men) finances her mobile lab, where she documents and preserves snail species, with a fondness for endlings (last of their species). Asexual.

Kevin: Fellow snail conservationist based in Hawaii, in love with Yeva.

Nastia: Another "bride" at the agency, achingly young and beautiful, with major mommy issues. Devises a plot to kidnap a group of bachelors, ostensibly to take down the bridal industry machine, but mostly to get her mother's attention.

Sol: Interpreter in the employ of the romance tour but paired exclusively with her sister Nastia, so she acts as filter, chaperone, unheeded voice of reason.

Iolanta: Nastia and Sol's absent mother. "Pioneer. Performance artist. Crazy. Sextremist." Think: Pussy Riot.

Pasha: Ukrainian-Canadian disappointment to his parents. An engineer, not an artist, pursuing the idea of a homeland he never knew, hoping to find a Ukrainian bride with whom to build a quiet, traditional life. 

While other immigrants steered their offspring into practical careers like medicine and accounting, his parents, from his early days, scrunched their noses at all that. They did not leave everything they knew back in Ukraine, they did not traverse the roiling Atlantic just so their son could suffer the same boring engineering jobs they'd endured, and their own parents had endured. No, Pasha would transcend pragmatism, become a Deep Thinker.

Lefty: A rare snail specimen, C. surculus, not a hermaphrodite, with a shell spiraling left, rendering breeding impossible with 99% of his species. 

The yurt makers: A Greek chorus of sense and wisdom and cryptic truths and allusions appearing in the second half of the book. "The world is a whore," they say.

When we first meet Yeva, she's living out of the same van where she keeps her ever-dwindling collection of specimens; she's still in emotional recovery from losing species due to contaminated lettuce and then a further lab slipup. Yeva agrees to the use of her van in Nastia's scheme, and one night, after the tour's scheduled activities, a select group of bachelors file into the vehicle. It is the early hours of February 24, 2022. Nastia's plan had no contingency for Putin bombing Kyiv that day.

And  then in Part II, the novel ends. The "end matter" includes correspondence between the author and publisher, a grant application, (how can one go on writing fiction in these circumstances?), acknowledgements ("I would also like to thank Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for including my name on their sanctions list of Canadians who are now forbidden from entering their country, one of the biggest honors of my literary career"), and a note on the typography (Serifus Libris, "conceived as a private handkerchief embroidery type" by an entirely fictional engraver, who did not invent Scrabble; this may be my favourite section of the book.)

Part III resumes the main narrative thread, kind of. That is, the author works through some possible scenarios. While I'm not one to dismiss experimental fiction, I found the break from the traditional narrative hugely interrupted the pacing. For the remaining half of the book, the brakes were already on and my interest was grinding to a halt.

The future had been a luxury. The future didn't exist anymore.

But! We hear more about the bachelors! We meet Russians! We find the author's grandfather! Movie crews and propaganda! A potential mate identified for Lefty! And we learn what became of Nastia's mom!

Despite its flaws, it's a charming novel. It manages to be funny during wartime. I was rooting for the entire cast. I'm still rooting for Ukraine! Endling is a reader favourite in this year's Tournament of Books.

See also
Article: How One Snail Inspired Two Novels on Two Different Continents  
Podcast: Snail Sex Tape 

And behold! This amazing bit of pâte-sur-pâte porcelain work I came across in an antique shop a couple of months ago. I am in thrall to this late 19th-century piece, not least because of its weird subject matter. Unexpectedly, the aforementioned Snail Sex Tape shed some light on the symbolism that might lie behind it.

The body remembers and suffers and thinks

We hope time will pass quickly. We have but one single life on this earth, a split second of earthly existence in the endless expanse of time, and yet we don’t feel that it can pass quickly enough. Yes, I get it. It is hard to live your life in a way that matches that knowledge, perhaps it is impossible. I positioned myself so that no one cold see my face, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and told myself that all was well, I could sense the presence of my irritating, mortal fellow human beings, their breathing and the sounds they made when they moved, when they tried to keep warm by rubbing their arms, shifting their weight from one foot to another, how they moved up the steps as more people arrived, the queue compacted and it grew more crowded around the entrance, their impatience and their fears. There are no people anywhere else, only here on our little planet; there may well be plenty of intelligent life out there, but there are no people, not in any of the billions of galaxies, we are a rare and threatened species, and so wicked towards one another.

What a wallop, this novella, so simple and so beautifully articulated.

Ostensibly about the narrator's loss of virginity when she was sixteen, Repetition, by Vigdis Hjorth, recalls that November night forty-eight years ago when nothing much happened, but something happened, so much happened. 

Unni thought my mother worried about me like most mothers worry about their daughters, they feared they might be raped or attacked by strangers, but what my mother was afraid of was what I might end up doing of my own free will.

It's a story triggered by what the narrator witnesses at the symphony one evening, watching the dynamics of the family seated near her. This small private drama played out in public is what prompts the narrator to recount her own story, the strained and antagonistic exchanges with her mother, the nonexistent relationship with her father. She tells of the loss of childhood and innocence, but in a way, that loss is merely repeating the loss of childhood and innocence that the narrator already understood to be already lost.

I took out my diary and wrote: It will happen tonight. The event that no one ever forgets. I will write about it here, on these blank pages that my fingers are stroking as they write, pages that smell of expectation, that is the smell of white paper, the event you will never forget because no one ever forgets their first time.

Finally we learn that that's not the story the narrator is telling at all. And we never know what she actually wrote in her diary, what upset her father to render him drunk and sobbing. What they never spoke of again.

[The narrator's experience that night in November reminds me a little of the the summer I was eighteen when the boy from the bakery touched me between my legs and asked me if I felt a tingling and I said yes and he said that's an orgasm, my dear, and remarkably I didn't correct him, is it possible I didn't want to hurt his feelings, this boy who didn't think I might, despite my general inexperience and technical virginity, know what an orgasm was, and that this wasn't it, I should feign gratitude that he could educate me better than I could educate myself, how patronizing, I realized, even then, in the moment, the situation was laughable really, I don't remember how it ended between us, did I even see him again, in the end I was still a virgin after all. So the narrator's experience is quite different from mine actually, but she lets people believe what they want to believe. (In some ways she seems more powerful than I ever was, completely orchestrating the situation and empowered by its outcome, at least in front of her peer group, but also, that's just my reading couched in my own experience, we don't really know how that played out. The aftershock of the event that November night is most strongly felt at home, among her family, and the fallout manifests mostly as confusion for the narrator.]

The narrator is, of course, a writer. And this novel is very much about writing as document, as investigation and analysis, as therapy and redemption, as truth. She describes how her writing evolved, how her approach became clinical to excise all traces of her self, in order to ascertain what her heart and mind truly had to say. But then things changed.

I repeat and recall and relive and retell and redress because childhood lasts, youth lasts, our childhood and youth constitute a future that starts over constantly, it is an ongoing process. I home in on it again and again because the body remembers and suffers and thinks, the body knows, it is not just the mind. The mind will hit a wall and when I write, I chip away at is, that is why I write, I work on the wall to discover what parts have substance and significance, yes, I rewrite and I reproduce like Munch painted several versions The Scream, I repeat and I vary the repetition, shamelessly, with my heart on my sleeve and suffering inevitable heartburn in order to process and understand and put it behind me or to reinforce the bitterness and excitement inside me, in order to change myself through repeating and varying patterns. 

I first read Hjorth a few years ago while I was vacationing in Norway (where I saw several versions of The Scream) — A House in Norway, but I thought it might be a fluke, that my reading was coloured by my travel experience, the sting of the air and water, the feel of the land, but then I read If Only, wow, what a book, what a toxic relationship, I think I could never be so blindly hopeful, or drunkenly desperately reckless or accommodating or self-debasing, and also Is Mother Dead, about the narrator's relationships with her sister and her mother. Why didn't I write about those books here? Anyway, Hjorth's writing is insightful and compelling.

In Repetition, the technique of repetition, that haunting echo, is sublime. "Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life."

Excerpt.

Anything you want to forget will come back to you, it will haunt you so vividly that it feels as if you're going through it all over again, often causing you the same overwhelming and unmanageable feelings as it did the first time; you fear the intensity might kill you and so you fight its return, you resist, but you can't prevent or shield yourself from the pain that follows and so you are forced to relive it. However, when it has been re-experienced and relived yet again, when the paralysing pain subsides, you will often find that you have gained a fresh insight into the significance of that particular memory; it was the reason it came back, in order to tell you something.