Techniques for calming a fearful mind

There are little signs everywhere in the library now that say BREATHE! BREATHE! How did everyone get so good at this breathing thing? I feel like it all happened while I was away.

Today nothing much happened. I feel outside of time.

I burst into tears while making my morning cappuccino. The coffee was so much better at the office. Maybe it's the hormonal flood of PMS, or the onset of menopause, one or the other, I can't tell which. Maybe it's because I didn't sleep well.

I'd read an article before going to sleep about a study of coronavirus in cats and whether they could carry the virus from human to human. Apparently cats can become infected from a human and can pass the disease to other cats, and if you are sick, you should protect your pet by keeping your distance. Yesterday I'd noticed Rosie sneezing more than usual, so I drifted off to sleep thinking I must've picked up the virus on my grocery excursion, I must be asymptomatic, and Helena's simply lucky, or immune, and while I've been wallowing in the company of my cat and relishing our early mornings together when she burrows into my right hip, the whole time I have in fact been killing her, and this preoccupied my dream life last night.

I tried to work, but that didn't go very well. I'm mad at myself for having taken on work I shouldn't have to do. I'm mad at myself for not initially understanding the extent of another job. And I'm mad at myself for not being able to pay attention.

At least I had a yoga break (via Zoom, with coworkers), difficult as I find it to breathe these days. I zoned out through my other two meetings today.

I did spend some downtime deliberating over which jigsaw puzzle to purchase. My current puzzle is 2000 pieces and slow going, it's fucking hard actually, a veritable tsunami of puzzle, everything is blue. I bought it for myself at Christmas because I like to have a puzzle to get me through the cold, but this winter I went to Morocco instead, as if I knew I wouldn't have the opportunity to travel again anytime soon, as if I knew I should save that puzzle for a metaphorical rainy day. Ordinarily when I start a puzzle, I have to finish it — I forgo sleep and showers and spend all my time on it. But this is no Christmas vacation. There's no deadline — it's not as if I have to clear the table before the dinner party. So I've been pacing myself. But someday in the not-too-distant future I will finish it. I have my eye on a couple 4000-piece more-conventional landscapes, and I should pick one while shipping is still available.

I wonder if I were reading something other than Weather right now, would I also find it profoundly appropriate?

Q: What are the best ways to prepare my children for the coming chaos?

A: You can teach them to sew, to farm, to build. Techniques for calming a fearful mind might be the most useful though.

The incredulity response

"Wait," I say. "Were you talking about seconds? When you said you were so out of step and living slowly, did you mean by seconds?" She considers this. "Yeah," she says, "seconds probably."

I feel out of step.

Today I had a nap. A rainy-day late-afternoon two-hour nap. An emotionally necessary nap, not a physical one. I feel guilty about it. I need to make up work time.

Apparently thousands of masks arrived in Quebec the other day, which were then mysteriously routed to Ohio.

They are starting to fine people for being outside unnecessarily, for gathering. This is fast becoming constitutionally treacherous territory. As if groups of two or more might be "conspiring." (Conspiring to what?)

The provincial premiers plan to release their modeled projections, but the prime minister is holding back. What does he not want us to know? Is he afraid of instilling panic? What would we do as a panicked society? The toilet paper and the flour are already gone. Congregate in the parking lot of Timmie's?

Or is it a question of timing? Maybe he's timing the panic response for maximum effect. To stop us dead in our tracks.

"What it takes to survive a crisis" looks at how people respond to life-threatening situations:

People simply don't believe what they're seeing. So they go about their business, engaging in what's known as "normalcy bias." They act as if everything is OK and underestimate the seriousness of danger. Some experts call this "analysis paralysis." People lose their ability to make decisions.

The incredulity is starting to wane. We are entering another phase.

But this is a crisis on another scale. The times call for a benevolent dictator. We might be lucky. If we're lucky.

Weather is clearly about a different sort of crisis, but it's discussed (to this point) only tangentially. The feeling of crisis is broadly applicable.

That night on the show, there's an expert giving advice about how to survive disasters, natural and man-made. He says it's a myth that people panic in emergencies. Eighty percent just freeze. The brains refuses to take in what is happening. This is called the incredulity response. "Those who live move," he says.

Where can we move to?

The acceleration of days

Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?

Old person worry: What if everything I do does?

Day 21 of wfh. Today I went to the grocery store.

I woke later than planned. No reading ritual, straight to work. There is not enough separation between work and real life these days. Whatever "real life" is.

I'm trying to find the optimal off-peak shopping time. I wanted to put in a couple hours before a midmorning excursion.

Today I put on real pants, not yoga pants or cozy leggings.

I haven't done groceries in two weeks. I used to simply pick up whatever I needed on my way home from work. I haven't figured out how to shop in this new world. I made a list, but it stopped making sense as I filled my cart. It doesn't help that my local grocery store recently renovated and reorganized. I don't know where anything is anymore.

In and out, they say. Be efficient with your time and in your choices. I have a mini meltdown in aisle five because I can't find any harissa spice blend. If they've stopped carrying it, my life will change drastically.

Part of the stress of shopping lies in the mystery of what I may bring home with me. Not so much that I will be infected — I don't matter — but that I will inadvertently infect my daughter. She's not a child anymore, but I'm still responsible for her. It's not just me fending for myself.

It's a variation of the rescue distance: the further I venture from our safehouse, the more chance of encountering a disease vector that will lock onto me and breach our perimeter.

I bought flowers.

I got home in time to catch the last half of my workplace's guided meditation session. (What does "workplace" mean if it's not a place anymore?) I notice that I spend a lot of the time holding my breath.

I changed my pants. Real pants are overrated.

This evening I read a few more pages of Weather. The narrator (does she have a name yet?) tried a meditation class. Like me. She's cynical. She's a realist. She has garbage to take out.

My #1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.

The moon will be fine

It's been twenty days of working from home. I feel flabby and sluggish. And there is too much to do.

This evening I turned my bathroom into a spa, tried to melt my muscles with epsom salts. My new work environment is clearly non-ergonomic.

I miss my commute, my reading time. A few mornings last week, I sat in my nook with my morning coffee and read. I need to reinforce this ritual.

But tonight I read in the bath. Weather, by Jenny Offill. It's off to a terrific start. It's a short book and I want to savour it. I need to slow down.

Despite not having as much time to read, I feel I've been racing to get the end of too many books lately (though, sometimes legitimately so, before my library ebooks expired into the ether).

I'm a person who likes slow things, like the boy in Lost Children Archive has reminded me to be, even if I generally manage to keep up.

The narrator said her brother "missed drugs because they made the world stop calling to him." Calling to him for him to intervene? Or to succumb? I wonder if the world called to my brother too. Crazy, fucked up world.

The moon will be fine, I think. No one's worrying about the moon.

Like anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives

I thought about writing stuff down in a notebook for you to read one day, but you are a bad reader still. level A or B, still read everything backward or in a mess, and I have no idea when you'll finally learn to read properly, or if you ever will. So I decided to record sound instead. Also, writing is slower and reading is slower, but at the same time listening is slower than looking, which is a contradiction that cannot be explained. Anyway, I decided to record, which was faster, although I don't mind slow things. People usually like fast things. I don't know what kind of person you will be in the future, a person who likes slow things or one who likes fast things. I kind of hope you are the type of person who likes slow things, but I can't rely on that. So I made this recording and took all those pictures.

I wonder if more books shouldn't come with instructions.

Or something like artist statements. It's a common practice at art galleries, for example, to post alongside any given piece not just the title of the work and its materials, but a note about its composition — its inspiration, intention, or context. However, I dislike the layout of many of our local galleries for positioning this supplementary material such that many people gravitate to it before they see the art. I prefer to come to art cold, try to figure how I feel about it and then check the signs, to validate my interpretation, fill in the blanks, and hopefully expand my understanding.

It's rare to have this kind of reference point for works of literature. An "exhibition catalogue" of novels might be curated by an academic expert, but to know the artists' intentions, one typically must search out several secondary sources.

Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli, includes notes on the works cited. She wants to make sure we're not reading this as idiots who think she's merely name-dropping or that the allusions are decorative — they "function as intralinear markers that point to the many voices in the conversation that the book sustains with the past." She goes on to explain the echoes in the novel's structure and the threads that hold it together. She's not interested in intertextuality as a performative gesture but as a method of composition.

I was readily drawn into Lost Children Archive, and this supplementary material helps me admire the skill and craft that brought this book together. But thank goodness the notes come at the end, else I would've gone into this book believing she was an annoyingly pretentious know-it-all bent on setting herself above writers who write mere stories.

Our mothers teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.

The references, for the record, are many and varied, and not so obscure that I didn't recognize some, and introduced me to The Gates of Paradise, a novel about the Children's Crusade of 1212 consisting of two sentences (the second one being five words long, the first comprising the rest of the story), a copy of which I am now struggling to track down, by Jerzy Andrzejewski, whose name I've quite coincidentally encountered a couple of times this week in the context of him being a highly popular Polish post-WWII novelist who is sadly not so well recognized outside of his native country, despite having written Ashes and Diamonds, which Andrzej Wajda masterfully adapted for film.

Lost Children Archive starts with so many moments recollected to explain this beautiful thing of a family they've built, and the rest of the book is a roadtrip of a novel across its dissolution.

I had no trouble slipping into the car beside them, the tragedy of it all quite palpable.

It's about a sound documentarian (Pa) setting out for the Southwest on an Apache project, hunting for echoes, with family in tow. Ma is a more journalistic documentarist who is pursuing an migration crisis story in general while looking for a Mexican woman's two daughters in particular — young girls who were sent across the border to reunite with family. In the back of the car are the ten-year-old boy (his) and the five-year-old girl (hers), who are also witnessing their family fall apart while being part of it.

The children have always wanted to listen to stories about themselves within the context of us. They want to know everything about when the two of them became our children, and we all became a family. They're like anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives, but with a touch more narcissism.

One of the lovely things about this book is that it has had, for me, the mysterious power to evoke echoes of my being, reminding me of the kind of person I once was, wanted to be, could be still. It reminded me of what it was like to be a new mother and be head over heels in love with my child, of trying to see the world through her eyes, and falling in love with the world all over again, in a grown-up way. It reminded me of Lisbon Story, which would have been my first exposure to acoustemology (my brother and I experimented with sending audio letters around the time that movie was released, but how? did we really mail each other mini cassette tapes?).

Acoustemology is a sonic way of knowing and being in the world.

Sound and space are connected in a way much deeper than we usually acknowledge. Not only do we come to know, understand, and feel our way in space through its sounds, which is the more obvious connection between the two, but we also experience space through the sounds overlaid about it.

This book is a composition of multiple texts, scraps, transcriptions, with photographs and lists. No sound, but a written record of echoes of sound. (I am reminded, at times, of Clarice Lispector's incantatory attempt in Agua Viva to write the way music is composed.) So the book itself is a kind of artefact while functioning as an archive, boxing the family members' experiences.

I suppose an archive gives you a kind of valley in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, transformed. You whisper intuitions and thoughts into the emptiness, hoping to hear something back. And sometimes, just sometimes, an echo does indeed return, a real reverberation of something, bouncing back with clarity when you've finally hit the right pitch and found the right surface.

Halfway, the book switches from Ma's perspective to the boy's. I did not at first warm to the boy's voice, but gradually it becomes fairytale-like as the children set out on their own, without breadcrumbs, avoiding danger and performing trials on an almost mythological quest.

They had walked, and swam, and hidden, and run. They had boarded trains and spent nights sleepless atop gondolas, looking up at the barren, godless sky. The trains, like beasts, drilled and scratched their way across jungles, across cities, across places difficult to name. Then, aboard this last train, they had come to this desert, where the incandescent light bent the sky into a full arch, and time had also bent back on itself. Time, in the desert, was an ongoing present tense.

Review
The New Yorker: Writing about writing about the border crisis

Microchemical raptures

"The parting was vague, because the separation still seems unreal."

This last line is underlined in pencil, then circled in black ink, and also flagged in the margin with an exclamation mark. Was it me or him who underlined it? I don't remember. I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures — little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue — that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else's words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They're not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone's words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.

— from Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli.

I resisted reading this book. I hadn't liked The Story of My Teeth, despite its accolades; I assumed this Archive would be similarly overrated. But thus far (about a quarter in), I am loving it. It's touching me in all the right ways, caressing my brain and poking my heart. I want to know more about acoustemology and private languages. It makes me want to read Susan Sontag.

Those raptures for me, these days: Clarice Lispector, Olga Tokarczuk. This book too seems to be full of raptures.

Nothing but absences and holes

"What will happen?" he murmured.

"I mean, things are disappearing more quickly than they are being created, right?" I asked him.

He nodded and furrowed his brow, like someone suffering from a headache.

"What can the people on this island create?" I went on. "A few kinds of vegetables, cars that constantly break down, heavy, bulky stoves, some half-starved stock animals, oily cosmetics, babies, the occasional simple play, books no one reads... Poor, unreliable things that will never make up for those that are disappearing — and the energy that goes along with them. It's subtle but it seems to be speeding up, and we have to watch out. If it goes on like this and we can't compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it's completely hollowed out, we'll all disappear without a trace. Don't you ever feel that way?"

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa, is described as an Orwellian dystopia. The premise is that, in this closed island community, things — objects — are disappeared from their reality overnight. One day it's birds, another roses.

The Memory Police enforce these bans, and take away anyone found to be preserving "banned" objects. They also search out genetic anomalies, those few people that for reasons unknown retain the capability to remember things that have been disappeared.

While I love the idea of this book, I found this to be an incredibly frustrating read. I haven't read Ogawa before. This is one of her earlier novels (1994) only just recently translated into English; I can only hope her writing has matured since then.

Neither the reason behind or the mechanism for the disappearances is ever explained. Why one thing and not another? There is no warning or proclamation (although the narrator later claims to have premonitions). Citizens simply wake up and know what it is that's being removed from their lives. They don't need instructions; they simply dispose of those things. I don't mind a bit a magic hand-waving, but it doesn't hold internal consistency.

For example, in the past, boats and ferries disappeared but the physical objects remained — only the concept was undone. These masses continued to exist at the river's edge (the old man lives on his stalled ferry), but the idea that they could be used as transport or floating recreation is gone. By contrast, calendars later disappear, and the island inhabitants duly dispose of the their agendas and desk props, yet people continue to track time and mark days (if a little less precisely).

How does the narrator remember things well enough to write about them disappearing? Though the novel starts with her memory of her mother, who preserved lost objects and clearly wanted to convey their importance to her daughter, it took me a few chapters to understand that the narrator was not one of the gifted (perhaps using a third-person omniscient narrator would've made this clearer). Fruit disappears but they persist in images and in her descriptions.

It's suggested that when we run out of memories, we will have nothing left to talk about. Is that all that connects us? A common past? A commonly agreed-upon past?

And why doesn't the old man have a name? Even the dog has name. The neighbour has a name. Is this a commentary on the namelessness of the things closest to us? That a name can't contain what he was? But, "the old man" is also an inadequate label that becomes cumbersome and even silly.

Officials are, unsurprisingly, privileged. One bureaucrat serves our narrator a strange, bitter tea that keeps her awake that night — for some reason he has access to coffee, which has apparently vanished. But at the end of the novel, it seems they too may be subject to the laws behind the disappearances.

Then there's the matter of R.

"He's my editor. The first person who reads my work. He's the friend who knows the self that I put in my novels better than anyone else."

It's deeply unsettling that she should build a secret room in her house, where he's meant to stay forever. There are indications that he is capable of remembering, but why is the need she feels to protect R so deep? Does he ask for help? No, in fact, he's confused by it. Why does he suddenly change his mind and decide to leave his pregnant wife. Her argument was not particularly compelling. Her motivation, to keep him as her editor, is entirely selfish. And why is the planned disappearance so elaborate? Could they not simply have had a collegial meeting from which he never returned? And despite the sudden raids the Memory Police are known to make, it seems unnecessary to confine him to the room at all times.

She is clearly in love with him. His editing abilities are a pretext for this kidnapping. Unless, knowing it's impossible to hold on to forgotten objects or to remember them, she feels the next best thing is to hold on to someone who can.

Her treatment of him is cruel and unusual. When his baby is born, she withholds the news for hours. Yet I have the distinct sense that we are supposed to feel sympathetic toward her, even to cheer on the possibility of romance. I can't tell if that's masterly writing or simply chaotic.

Her manuscript in progress is also disturbing, and it is in many ways the opposite of her lived reality. The novel is about woman who loses her voice and resorts to typing to communicate with her lover, who was her typing teacher.

For a long time I have wanted to watch him in the act of typing. It must be very beautiful to see. The glittering, carefully maintained machine, the snow-white paper, his perfectly straight back, his expertly placed fingers. The very thought of it makes me sigh. But I've never seen him type. Even now that we have become lovers. He never types in front of other people.

Eventually her typewriter breaks; he tricks her and keeps her captive. He absorbed her voice, and later the rest of her fades away.

Writing becomes particularly difficult for our narrator when novels are disappeared. The manuscript, even when her writing is stalled, is a creation out of nothing. The opposite of disappearing.

"How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?"

"That's a difficult question," he said, using his forefinger to push up the frames of his glasses and then leaving his hand at his throat.

"I'd imagine you'd be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things."

"No, that's not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It's much like your memory, in that sense."

Everything that disappears is burned or goes into the sea. Not much is created to replace what's lost. Except snow. It seems the snow will never disappear. The snow is one big blanket of forgetting. It also feels like a metaphor for something.

Perhaps I didn't approach this book with the right state of mind. I typically embrace ambiguity and surreal effects, but this novel's construction feels haphazard.

We shouldn't have to destroy the old to make way for the new. Body parts begin to disappear. What purpose does that serve? What does it make room for?

"If we do remember something," said the old man, struggling to find words, "what do we do then?"

"Nothing in particular. We're all free to do as we choose with our own memories," R said.

"I suppose memories live here and there in the body," the old man said, moving his hand from his chest to the top of his head. "But they're invisible, aren't they? And no matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone, if no one pays attention to it. They leave no trace, no evidence that they ever existed."

I struggle also to understand why it's so wrong to relinquish the past, particularly in its material aspects. Why not live entirely in the now?

Excerpts
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

The tears you couldn't waste time crying before

The SanctuCare women went over and welcomed them and said, "You're her now, it's all right," and the Gilead women started to cry. At the time I thought, Why cry, you should be happy, you got out. But after all that's happened to me since that day, I understand why. You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you're safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn't waste time crying before.

Last week I read The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. It's a good book.

I had little interest in it in the lead up to publication — I was dytopiaed out, having finished watching the related TV series. But I was curious how Atwood would treat a sequel — in what timeframe and through which characters would she continue her story?

On publication day, a copy made its way into my house (a gift), and while I wasn't ready to read it yet, I read a review. I learned that this was Aunt Lydia's story. And then I read an excerpt, and thought twice before setting it aside.

I don't need to tell you to read this novel. You will or you won't. You know that it can't live up to its predecessor. You know that you can't come to this novel cold — you already know too much.

You know that, no matter what Atwood wrote, we won't know how the story ends until it ends. You know. The real story happening around us.

The Testaments is not a great work of Literature. It is not deeply philosophical. My daughter had The Handmaid's Tale as assigned reading last summer (going into grade 11), and I will encourage her to read the follow-up. It's a thriller with great characters (some greater than others). And it's important for other reasons.

Unlike the television show, it doesn't make you want to slit your wrists. It shows a way out.

It's also Atwood taking back her story, her characters, and having the final word, to say what she wants to say. Queen!

#fuckthepatriarchy

The spaces inside women

Bun in the Oven, ©Amelia Biewald

Do you know what carrying a child inside you does to your idea of space, of what you own? Even the poorest man takes for granted that he holds clear title to the space inside his skin. Oh, but ask a man about a woman, and he'll tell you that her body is so very different from his, that it holds empty spaces that stretch and hold mysteries, that measure time with strange and bloody clocks — whose empty spacer are those? Who holds their precious title? Ask a man again, and he'll argue that the case is not so simple when the sex is switched. The mere pockets of air inside men that erupt in belches and farts are of little account, but the spaces inside women are meant by God for so much more that women's ownership of them is clearly only ever provisional. Those empty spaces cannot be left unoccupied for no reason — they are intended to be penetrated, colonized, stuffed to bursting. The rule of men: all spaces must be filled.

— from Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, by Dexter Palmer.

Saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one

The dictionary tells us that to be interested by someone is to feel "attentive, concerned, or curious." Curiosity is a friendly emotion and even a moral position. Those whom we make the objects of our curiosity we don't prejudge or condemn. We don't fear and loathe them. My therapist, in our time together, often urged me to "stay curious" and it was a nice thing for him to try and make me do, unsuccessful as he was, because curious is a nice way to feel.

I'm not very good at psychotherapy.

I thought I was going to be the sort of person who goes to psychotherapy, and says things like, "My therapist says [insert something enlightening here]." Instead, I'm the kind of person who dreads going to a session because I have nothing to talk about, and afterward dissects it with friends, making snide comments like, "You wouldn't believe what my therapist said." Skip the session and go straight to the drinks, I say.

[I attended only three sessions, not counting the appointment I made for me and my ex when our marriage was falling apart, only it wasn't supposed to be about our marriage, it was supposed to address his anger and his drinking, but then he bailed at the last minute; I went anyway — it was an opportunity to vent, which I needed, and I came away feeling like I knew what I was doing, which maybe I didn't. That was a cognitive-behavioural therapist, and I wonder if it makes a difference. I know CBT is a form of psychotherapy, at least, so claims the current psychotherapist whom I'm no longer seeing. But I still don't have a grasp of what kind of help would benefit me, and the only clarity she offered is that "it's all psychotherapy — all therapists, counsellors, psychologists engage in some kind of psychotherapy..." Anyway, the first session was underwhelming, predictable the way her eyes lit up when I told her my father died when I was seven. The second session was a little more emotional and made me feel inadequate as a parent. But the third session was deflated, like we didn't know what to talk about, I just rambled on about my recent vacation.]

One thing about psychotherapy: it made me feel kind of stupid, that I wasn't careful with my words, that my definitions of things like, say, emotions was a little sideways, which is quite possibly true but a dangerous hole in my ego to pick at when I make my living from words — people pay me to pay attention to them and fix them and make them better. But maybe I've been doing it all wrong. 

To David, love meant declaration. Wasn't that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn't that the whole point?

Reading Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi, is a lot like psychotherapy, and a bit of a trust exercise in itself, one which didn't really pay off for me. I just couldn't bring myself to care about it. Maybe if I tried harder I could find something meaningful, significant, worthy of my worry, but I just didn't care. 

(The book is described as being set in the early 80s, but I think that's a bit early for the Morrissey t-shirts and Sade references.)

It did lead me to reminisce about high-school drama club, and all the drama that went along with it. I was surprised to find that most of my class were overthinking, Smiths-listening introverts like me, only a couple attention-seekers among us. The drama teacher, Billy, insisted we call him Billy. He wrote that play we put on about teenage pregnancy, very eye-rollingly after-school special. I remember the cast party where I made out with that guy I didn't even like and got very drunk. The star, Billy's pet, what was her name? I heard later that they'd been having an affair, but then she dropped out of school and married Billy's student intern from the university.

Trust Exercise is kind of like that too; when you're a teenager everything seems boring and exciting at the same time. Exaggeratedly so. Then there are the teenagers who turn into adults who haven't ever gotten over high school.

It's a #metoo kind of book, but I don't think it has anything important to add to the conversation, and I'm surprised by the accolades it's received.

Whom do you trust? Trust the teacher, your friends, witnesses? Trust your memory, trust in yourself? Why should you trust the author? The novel has three distinct parts that tell the same story through a different filter. They can't all be true, not in the same way.

Therapy can seem like revision of memory. It can seem like you're saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one. It can seem like therapy won't get its goddamn grubby mitts off you. At best therapy demands uncomfortable humility from the person with total recall, and at worst it can remind me of my mother — the difference being that therapy wants the emotional truth, while my mother runs screaming from any emotion or truth that's not hers.

What is the truth? Does it even matter? I don't care.

Excerpt.

Culture as class performance

From Normal People, by Sally Rooney.

On readings:

A couple of weeks ago Connell attended a reading by a writer who was visiting the college. He sat at the back of the lecture hall on his own, self-conscious because the reading was sparsely attended and everyone else was sitting in groups. It was one of the big windowless halls in the Arts Block, with fold-out tables attached to the seats. One of his lecturers gave a short and sycophantic overview of the writer's work, and then the man himself, a youngish guy around thirty, stood at the lectern and thanked the college for the invitation. By then Connell regretted his decision to attend. Everything about the event was staid and formulaic, sapped of energy. He didn't know why he had come. He had read the writer's collection and found it uneven, but sensitive in places, perceptive. Now, he thought, even that effect was spoiled by seeing the writer in this environment, hemmed off from anything spontaneous, reciting aloud from his own book to an audience who'd already read it. The stiffness of this performance made the observations in the book seem false, separating the writer from the people he wrote about, as if he'd observed them only for the benefit of talking about them to Trinity students. Connell couldn't think of any reason why these literary events took place, what they contributed to anything, what they meant. They were attended only by people who wanted to be the kind of people who attended them.

And later, at the pub:

Connell's initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything.

See also The cult of Sally Rooney.

A final depth of debasement

But here is what you need to understand — here is why you are in danger. Here is why you must speak, and why you must not allow us to speak for you. Because history is an act of continuous collective imagining, and the perception of truth is a constant, unending negotiation, with others, and with oneself when one is alone.

It took a few chapters for me to warm to this book. While not exactly Dickensian, it's weighted with a cast of colourful characters, social inequalities, and 18th-century thinking. Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, by Dexter Palmer, feels claustrophobic, but ultimately that adds to the experience. I love this book.

It's the age of progress and of backward medicine. It's the Age of Reason, but very few people are actually enlightened, and fewer still care enough to struggle to achieve that state. Much is made of the village's surgeon diligently working his way through John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

The story revolves around Mary Toft, an actual historical figure who allegedly gave birth to seventeen rabbits, albeit dead, partial, and dismembered. (Yes, it was a hoax.)

The book is not really about that. It's about the people who believed her.

Dr John Howard is the attending physician, the man midwife, who struggles to reconcile what he sees with own eyes with what he know to be possible. Young apprentice Zachary is confused, but he respects his elders and generally keeps silent while he observes and grows into his courage. His father is a man of the cloth who is also called on to witness the abomination and can offer no insight into the strange workings of his God.

The Atlantic calls it a novel tailor-made for the scam era: why would anyone believe the unbelievable? What profound evidence would bring a person to disregard common sense? It's as if strength of one's conviction is directly proportional to the humiliation that would be suffered by revoking it. As Dr Howard surmises, perhaps the only difference between a hoax and a miracle is the number of people who believe in it. When we find we our not alone in our belief, no matter how peculiar, when it is shared, the belief is shored up.

But the heart, no, the guts of the story, behind the willingness to believe, or to hope, is humanity's depravity. What depths of perversion are people capable of devising?

"If I were to use a woman's mouth as a chamber pot — and you would be surprised how little money it takes to acquire this service, if one has agents in the proper quarters: the money I paid her was replaced in my coffers in the time it took me to finish pissing — then we would both be aware that the perversion was one that required human inventions, and so the woman would believe she was a lesser person than I am, but she would still consider herself a person. To do what she did was humiliating, without doubt, but it is not a thing an animal would do. Slaves, I imagine, must think the same way, when they see that their chains are forged by human hands, that their freedoms are circumscribed by human laws. They may view themselves as lesser people, which would please me, but they would still view themselves as people, which is not entirely satisfying. Such a transaction of humanity favors me, but it is not quite as favorable as I would wish: I want a better bargain, and I know I can drive one.

"What I want, Zachary, and what I have yet to see thus far, is to witness a human not merely humiliating himself but doing a thing that he knows only an animal would do, not a human. A final depth of debasement from which one could not return. Do you understand?"

Lord M expounds to Zachary on the "value" of his finances as a preamble to a freakshow's main attraction and the theory of the cat. The lords for some years have been conducting a social experiment, establishing a betting pool of sorts, to determine how much money would induce a man to eat a cat, alive. Without implements of human inventions, without preparation, such that the cat dies in the process of being eaten.

But only a human would draw up a trial such as this, and no animal would be motivated by money, so Lord M's net gain remains somewhat muddled. Zachary is horrified, no less by the entertainment than by his companions' enjoyment of it.

I find myself thinking a lot about this book long after turning the final page. (I am continually astounded to discover people's limits or lack thereof, by which I am learning to define my own boundaries, in matters of all nature, but especially those that are usually hidden and sexual — sex is after all a very human act.)

"Cities are complicated," said John. "They can be both the beautiful thing you believed them to be and the dark think you did not imagine they could be. The one does not obscure the other."

Zachary was silent.

"People, too," said John more quietly.

Palmer succeeds in making everything about this novel oppressive — from Mary's domestic circumstances and her cramped birthing chamber overflowing with medical professionals to the bustling markets and gin bars of London. At the end of it, one craves the fresh air of Enlightenment.

About Mary Toft
Atlas Obscura: Why Historians Are Reexamining the Case of the Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
The Paris Review: An Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits
OMG Facts: This Woman Made Doctors Believe She Gave Birth To Rabbits
US National Library of Medicine: The Doctors in Labour; or a New Whim Wham from Guildford

Excerpts
Chapter III: A Concerned Husband
Chapter IV: A Birth

Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head

At this moment she remembers leaving a flask in Connell's car the day they drove to Howth in April, and she never got the flask back. It might still be in his glovebox. She eyes the glovebox but doesn't feel she can open it, because he would ask what she was doing and she would have to bring up the trip to Howth. They went swimming in the sea that day and then parked his car somewhere out of sight and had sex in the back seat. It would be shameless to remind him of that day now that they're once again in the car together, even though she would really like her flask back, or maybe it's not about the flask, maybe she just wants to remind him he once fucked her in the back seat of the car they're now sitting in, she knows it would make him blush, and maybe she wants to force him to blush as a sadistic display of power, but that wouldn't be like her, so she says nothing.

It's a beautiful college romance, the kind I nostalgically wish I'd had. Only it's not. It's messy, even toxic. They're together for all the wrong reasons. But when they're together, it's the rightest reason, it doesn't make sense to not be together. Only when they're outside of it does it sometimes become clear that it's reinforcing a negative pattern, it's feeding negativity, corroding the self-worth that ironically they feel only when it's validated by the other.

Normal People, by Sally Rooney, is about normal people — people who think they're not normal, who aspire to be normal, but of course they already are.

Connell and Marianne's on-again, off-again relationship is all about power. Superficially there's a lot of social cachet they're individually getting from the relationship, in different ways and at different times. But both of them know they hold power of the other, while both are in thrall to the other.

(Can two people ever love each other equally? Does one person always love the other more? Which one has the power?)

She comes to sit down with him and he touches her cheek. He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him. The idea frightens him so badly that he pulls his chair back and stands up. His hands are shaking. He doesn't know why he thought about it. Maybe he wants to do it. But it makes him feel sick.

Connell's a bit of jerk really. And I don't feel good about the fact that I'm willing to let him get away with it. He's certainly a better man than many in the novel (or in life) and and on the whole he's "good" for Marianne, they're "good together." He uses her. Repeatedly.

Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves, says Marianne.

Maybe this is the thing that bothers me about the book. You're led to believe that Connell is good for Marianne.

Is she really the not normal one in this relationship? She's certainly damaged, with a dysfunctional family who has abused her. But she's also coping, exploring her selfhood and her boundaries. Normal.

Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches, as if it isn't of any interest to her, which in a way it isn't. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks "warmth," by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.

Does Connell hate her? At times.

Last night he spent an hour and a half lying on the floor of this room, because he was too tired to complete the journey from his en suite back to his bed. There was the en suite, behind him, and there was the bed, in front of him, both well within view, but somehow it was impossible to move either forward or backward, only downward, onto the floor, until his body was arranged motionless on the carpet. Well, here I am on the floor, he thought. Is life so much worse here than it would be on the bed, or even in a totally different location? No, life is exactly the same. Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head. I might as well be lying here, breathing the vile dust of the carpet into my lungs, gradually feeling my right arm go numb under the weight of my body, because it's essentially the same as every other possible experience.

The death of a friend instigates a depressive episode for Connell. Normal. Loving family, financially disadvantaged (relative to the company he keeps), good looking, academically and athletically gifted. Aspires to little more than social acceptance, including having the right girlfriend, being a saviour. Normal? Certainly ordinary.

You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.

Normal People was bumped up my reading list because it's shortlisted for the 2020 Tournament of Books, and it's in the same bracket as one of the most powerful books I've read in recent memory, Fleishman Is in Trouble. I was worried for Fleishman — Normal People is compellingly readable, and sweet and smart and romantic. But ultimately, I didn't find it realistic or relatable, which Fleishman is in spades. Normal People remains lovely, but Fleishman made me reexamine myself and my world and caused great psychological upheaval. So.

Review
The Millions: Me, Myself, and You

Excerpts
January 2011
March 2011

Prayers bore them

You're blaming the robots, right? That's what everyone did. The robots didn't mean to start trouble. They weren't happy about what happened. It was a mistake, and they don't like it when they make mistakes. It was no different from when a nuclear reactor blows up and for years afterward radioactivity rains down from the sky making people sick. It was better than that, even, because the robots wanted to make things better. It wasn't their fault they didn't understand the poem.

[What poem?]

Duplex, by Kathryn Davis, is one of the strangest and most beautiful books I've read in a long time.

This book is exquisitely sad, and I'm not sure why. It reminds me of e.e. cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town," only instead of being a poem, it's a string of fairytale pearls, but with robots and magic and you can't tell whether anyone's alive or dead.

I don't understand what it's about. And I want to reread it immediately.

It's set in a suburban community of duplexes, where one can hear the neighbours living their life next door. Sometimes the noises raise eyebrows, and other questions.

It's a thin wall between one existence and another, and that wall is porous. As I write this, the novel clicks into place...

Davis explores all the duplexes we live in and how their two sides seep into each other: life and death, history and mythology, dream and reality, past and future. (This novel may have affected me more deeply as I read it on holiday — my vacation world and my real life were similarly separate but interwoven.)

Duplex is neither science fiction nor fantasy, despite the drone-like scows, the mind-reading robots, and the magician.

This is a book primarily about girls and women, about their disappointments, and I can't help but feel it's meant as warning. This is the life you have. This is the life you could have. Could have had.

After she returned home the girl washed the breakfast dishes. She stood there with her head bowed, crying into the sink, leaving the nape of her neck exposed all the way through the many different layers of her house and the debris floating in the upper atmosphere to the X-ray vision of the operational apparatus of the scow hovering in the air above.

Think of them like gods, Janice said, because that's what they are. The nape of a human neck is especially easy to see through — that's why they love it when we bow our heads. It doesn't have anything to do with praying. Prayers bore them.

Unlike the boy she had a crush on the apparatus could see through the girl perfectly; it knew it wasn't meant for her but that didn't stop it. It was her fate, which had nothing to do with love. It had nothing to do with the boy and the note, either. Things just worked out this way sometimes.

It's very difficult to summarize this book, but I can give you no better recap than this one:

The main plot, if there is one, concerns a woman who, as a young girl, falls in love with a neighbor boy. A sorcerer in a metallic gray car steals the boy's soul, however, and in a Faustian transaction the boy becomes a famous baseball player. This girl, Mary, later marries the sorcerer, perhaps while hypnotized (so little of this episode is rendered in the story). Mary then becomes the mother of Blue-Eyes, a machine-daughter who started life as a yellow Teddy Bear. Mary leaves the sorcerer late in life, is transported through a wormhole, and performs admirably with poorly identified but heavy cosmic stakes on the line.

That leaves out some of the mythological elements, and the robots who live down the street, but otherwise nails it. Since the first resident we're introduced to is Miss Vicks, schoolteacher and one-time lover of the sorcerer, it seemed to me the story was told through her lens on the community. At times it seemed Mary's story was one of her lives that could have been, perhaps even directed by her.

Some reviews of this book focus on the element of time, the clockwork lives, the ticking, the surprise of aging.

Bookslut:

Despite clocks and calendars, the big events in our lives always feel like they come out of nowhere. Even when we expect them, even when we know they must happen, even when, like old age, we constantly watch them approach.

Slate:

Like the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or the wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia, the duplex functions as both a physical place and a point of access to a different world—one in which past and future collide.

Washington Independent Review of Books:

As the novel continues, the boundaries between these characters become increasingly fragile, even permeable. Davis plays brilliantly on the claustrophobia of American suburbia, and the duplex houses in Mary and Eddie's neighborhood serve as an ideal site to explore the proximity that both separates and interweaves their occupants. Duplex is obsessed with halving and doubling, with hinges and doors, with places where you can go "forward and back with equal ease." Some characters split into doubles; others seem to live multiple lives.

The Rumpus:

The narrator confides, "I think the robot was trying to warn her about what was going to happen. I think this because the story of what was going to happen is also my story, the story of girls everywhere." This declaration is open to plenty of interpretations. Is Duplex also telling the story of girls in our world, outside of this odd street, where time and space connect like a hinge on the door of a duplex?

Excerpts
Body-without-Soul
The Rain of Beads (audio)
Descent of the Aquanauts
Through the Wormhole (account required)
[Full text online.]

That's nothing compared to what it felt like. Nothing. You can't even begin to imagine. Supposedly the sound the girls made was so loud no one could sleep. It wasn't like being torn to pieces, because pieces are big. It was like having the smallest parts of your body like the corpuscles and peptides and nuclei and follicles rip loose from one another, every single one of them. The parts were so small they were practically invisible and all different colors, the main ones being red and yellow and blue. They were gorgeous if you didn't know what they were. There was nothing left of the girls. Nothing for the doctors to replace with new parts, nothing.

The mathematical irradiation of things

I have so much to say and no words for it.

— from Agua Viva, by Clarice Lispector.

The outer edges of life

Where have you gone, Saul? All that beauty blown to bits. Who were you? What languages do you speak? Are you a son and a brother and a father? Are you an acquisition? How do you get along with your female colleagues? What is the point of them, in your view? What is the point of yourself, in their view? Are you there to do something for them? Or are they there to do something for you? Are they a foil for your ambitions or are you a foil for theirs? In what ways do you thwart, oppose, derail or support each other? Which way do you vote? Are you a good historian? Did you ever play football? Cricket? Ping-pong? Are you curious about other people? Or do you walk on the outer edges of life, indifferent, remote, tormented by the affection human beings seem to feel for each other? Are other men envious of you? Are you loving? Have you ever been loved? Yes, I have been loved and I am loving, I said to the man in the mirror, I am all those things I am I am and I need to know what happened to Walter Müller.

I find this book challenging, and I can't decide if I like it. I definitely don't love it — it doesn't resonate with me emotionally. But intellectually, there are so many interesting things to pick away at.

The Man Who Saw Everything, by Deborah Levy, came on my radar a few months ago. I was feeling arty, sculpting and writing, and questioning my muse about the state of musedom: how does one find a muse, how active is the role of the muse, etc. I asked my women friends if they have or know of any male muses. "Why would anyone want a male muse?" In my research, Levy's novel came up as a counterexample that proves the rule — that musehood is a female domain, a state of grace bestowed by male artists.

In The Man Who Saw Everything, Saul is Jennifer's muse. She's a photographer, and her exhibit, "A Man in Pieces," features Saul's disembodies body parts.

"It's like this, Saul Adler: the main subject is not always you."

It's like this, Jennifer Moreau: you have made me the main subject.

Saul is unsettled when he appears at the gallery, grappling with his (in)significance. But Jennifer explains it to him clearly: "It's not about you. It's about me." Art is never about the muse.

I have never had a free conversation with my body. I have silenced my lovers with my body and controlled the kind of conversation they wished to have with their own body. I have never been free.

Then there's this element of fractured time, reminding me of books like Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Philip K Dick's Martian Time-Slip, something by Ursula K LeGuin. But it is very much set in our world.

In 1988, Saul was hit by a car at the crosswalk on Abbey Road. Jennifer breaks up with him, and he travels to East Germany for his research as a historian. In 2016, Saul is in a hospital bed, having been hit by a car at the crosswalk on Abbey Road.

I realized there was glass everywhere and that some of it was inside my head. I had gazed at my reflection in the wing mirror of his car and my reflection had fallen into me.

It's not clear if both realities can be true. How is it that in 1988 Saul can whisper to the East Germans reassurances about the future? Saul in 2016 cannot recall anything of the last 28 years, and he does not grasp the severity of his condition.

Luna's green eyes were like mirrors. I could see myself smiling in both her eyes, as if I had become a double self, which in a sense was right. I was learning to not be myself in the GDR.

There's a lot going on here, about Europe, history, male tyranny, Brexit. About dismantling states, relationships, selves.

Yet the fact that I was searching for someone who might be there, as if their absence were more threatening than their presence, as if lack of surveillance were more peculiar than constant surveillance, reminded me of how I felt after my father died. It was hard to believe he was no longer here to find fault with all I said and did and to punish me for my flaws. I think I was paranoid way before I arrived in East Berlin.

I began to regard my own eyes and ears as advanced surveillance technologies.

Review
Atlantic: Deborah Levy's Disorienting, Captivating Fiction
New Republic: Deborah Levy's Time Warp

As though you were dissolving

A strange notion, said Lena, that somewhere there might be another person like me. Not just someone who looks like me and is living the same life, but who thinks and feels like me as well. I think I like the idea. It's like having a best friend who knows all there is to know about you and who you know all about, without your needing to talk about it at all. No, I said, it's as though you're not a whole person anymore, as though you were dissolving. It's an awful thing. Perhaps everyone has a doppelganger somewhere, said Lena. You were just unlucky enough to meet yours.

There's something beautifully melancholic — romantic, even — about The Sweet Indifference of the World, by Peter Stamm. (I love this title.) It reminds me of Patrick Modiano, this fog of memory and haze of longing. There's a lot of mood, and it's a challenge to decide if there's any substance to it or not.

Usually I would just sleep till noon or so. I can well remember my curious afternoons when I felt simultaneously very tired and strangely alert, that sense of having fallen out of time, and following my own irregular rhythm.

Christoph invites Lena to hear his story, how her boyfriend Chris is shadowing his life, living it over again only 20 years later. Lena is herself a double of Christoph's love, Magdalena. The life of the young couple clearly reflects that of the "original" duo, at least the broad strokes.

They're not too concerned about why or how this should happen, though it does raise some troublesome concerns about primacy and agency.

It's a great premise for a story (an otherwise essentially plotless one), and it's gently executed.

But. Maybe I've read too many women authors lately, but I had trouble connecting with this book. Christoph tells us what he's feeling, but it didn't make me feel anything.

At some point, we anticipate something physical, or at least romantic, to develop between the narrator and the younger Lena. The narrator seems to want it. And then the book becomes just another middle-aged white man exercising his privilege to relive his youth. Maybe the author feels the older Magdalena's actions balance this flaw, but this element of the book just left me feeling sad and tired.

We walked through the densely clustered stacks. The books were arranged following some inscrutable system. Lena pulled a thick volume off one of the shelves and flicked through the pages, it was a rather tattered copy of an anthology of English poetry. Did you ever write poems? she asked me. Someone once said prose writers write about the world, poets write about themselves. I said. Do you think that's true? asked Lena. I shrugged. Maybe the opposite's just as true.

The creatives are rude

"That's the thing about corporate philanthropy, it's not obvious what you get out of it. You do it for a lot of reasons, like public image and employee morale. But also in a bigger sense, it's one way big business convinces people that you don't need the government to support public services. If corporations are benevolent and investing in plant-a-tree day and nice buildings then people won't pressure government to do its job and interfere. Philanthropy is the cornerstone of neoliberalism, as they say."

Oval, by Elvia Wilk, is described as reality-adjacent. It's about sustainable housing, sustainable living, the gig economy, and the redistribution of wealth. And the weather is crazy out of control.

I admire several things about this book.

Although Oval is set in a near-future Berlin, technology (very realistically) keeps breaking down. For example, they can't get the bluetooth on the speaker system to work, so it's wired, ruining the whole aesthetic. Some vital equipment is encased in a storage space with a stainless steel door, which defeats the climate sensor entirely. Technology fails us, not in disaster events, but in everyday ways.

Anja skidded down the slope, which was becoming muddy from overuse by feet. It still hadn't been paved or even scattered with gravel, since Finster didn't want to admit that the state of the pathway could no longer reasonably be called temporary. Rather than upgrade the provisional solution to make it slightly more functional in the interminable interim, it was ignored, as a signal that something better, something great — the best possible path — was coming.

This near future is a gig economy where art degrees are parlayed into consultancies — not just liberal arts, but fine art, conceptual art, performance art. (It makes Tom McCarthy's corporate anthropologist of Satin Island look quaint.) "Thinkers" in this world have more value than scientists.

His job was twofold: to generate press-garnering experiments on the edge of what could be called traditional corporate boundaries, and in the process to enhance the corporate culture and strengthen corporate values from within. He was not supposed to be tinkering with one specific issue in any specific area — say, urbanism in Lagos or sanctions against vaccines in the Philippines — he was not to make this place or that place a better place, but to make Basquiatt a better place and therefore to help Basquiatt make The World a better place. He showed the institution how to think better, how to critique its its institutionality. He kept the institution hip and fresh just by being there. His creativity was both the means and the end.

Everything is covered by NDAs. I don't recall the specific terms of my employment contract, but I suspect I talk about work far more than I should. Oval's NDAs are so vague and so broad, and their employers' reach so vast, encompassing housing and insurance and the company you keep and the borders you cross, it leaves people with very little to talk about. This goes some way to explaining the rampant recreational drug use. (Also, "Berlin, the last place on Earth you can smoke in indoors.")

Everyone's into clubbing and posturing (and I wonder if this is what it is to be young and prosperous in Berlin today).

"The only real difference between the people working in the creative industry and the people working at the airline counter is that the creatives are rude," he said. "Everyone we know assumes they're intellectually and morally superior to normal people, but our friends are just as normal, just as conservative and boring as anyone else. The main difference is that they're rude all the time. And they pan that rudeness off as authenticity."

And that's where reality TV rears its ugly head. But Oval isn't about that either.

It was all so compelling and swift and readable. I was halfway through before I realized the story had barely touched what the back cover promised. This novel is not about flipping real estate or reengineering our brain's reward centres. Not obviously, anyway. Not exactly. Not at first.

Anja and Louis's eco-house is falling apart, as is their relationship, which may or may not have something to do with his mother having died. While Louis has grief issues, Anja has body issues — she doesn't eat enough, is intensely insecure, and develops a rash. They're avoiding the house and each other.

People liked to think they were having a relationship with each other, but really they were having a relationship with the relationship itself.

Louis as an art consultant is spearheading a pharmacological solution to income inequality, a pill that makes people more generous. It turn out that people perform generous acts only because it makes them feel good (as we suspected all along), and as it's triggering economic pressure points in the brain, it's the act of spending that causes well-being, regardless of the recipient of the benevolence. It won't be over-the-counter either; Louis intends to drop it on the scene, dress it up as a street drug.

In a world where her structural critiques were cast as personal insecurities, no one would ever believe that she was politically opposed to O; they'd only believe that she was having problems with her boyfriend.

Anja's body issues felt very out of place in this novel. Ditto the occasional feminist outburst, and the melting mascara. Maybe this is supposed to be just another dimension of a fully fleshed out character, incidental to the plot. Or maybe it's intended to say something about appearances and authenticity.

After her lab was shut down, Anja is also working as a consultant, but this arrangement seems to have been carefully designed by her employer just to keep her mouth shut. Her science experiment involved some organic structural compound — it's not clear whether it's a problem or a solution that's being suppressed.

Anja goes off-grid and maybe a bit crazy, but somewhat ironically, she finds herself living self-sufficiently, resourcefully, sustainably. While Berlin burns, she ultimately find her authentic self.

Review
Full Stop

Excerpts
From Chapter 1
Chapter 9 — the gym
Chapter 17 — the drug

Tragedy belonged to other people

I didn't expect to enjoy Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips, as much as I did. It's about girls gone missing, after all. Grim subject matter.

Rather than follow the investigation, the novel shows how the disappearance of the young sisters ripples through the community. The peninsula of Kamchatka is so closed off from the world that it's difficult to believe the girls could've been removed from it, whether by road, sea, or plane.

Laura Miller in the New Yorker notes that:

Dead-girl mysteries are often set in such sleepy, half-forgotten corners of the world: small towns, rural backwaters, suburbs that pride themselves on their tranquillity and safety. Dead girls don't just force detectives to reckon with their own capacity for evil and virtue; they also cause them to turn over the rocks in insular communities and expose wriggling secrets to the light.

The disappearance affects people in indirect ways. Keep your daughter close. Keep your girlfriend close. Suspect everyone; discover nothing.

Tragedy belonged to other people.

Each chapter takes a different female character's perspective, one as each month passes after the incident. With increasing temporal distance, the women are unravelling, but they are bound to their lives. They ache to go far away and go nowhere. They ache for love and sex, and for men to be responsible, to be aware of them, to treat them fairly. The men are traditional and entitled, even when they are incompetent; they are oppressive, even when they are absent.

It's also a xenophobic society, racist, with an indigenous population whose social realities and concerns are largely ignored. A native girl who disappeared years earlier was written off by authorities (and much of the community) as a runaway; nobody cared enough to look for her.

Some people pine for the Soviet era.

These are the stories of women who are smart and accomplished, with so much potential, all of them made to disappear within their own lives.

She, too, believed in the migrants' power — not the power to steal children, but the power to take a woman, to transform her, to turn her life that was growing smaller all the time into an existence that was dark and mighty.

Excerpts
August.
October.

The most fantastic and uptight and uninhibited person alive

Knots, by Gunnhild Øyehaug, is a heartbreak of insightful short stories. I stumbled upon this book in an outlet store, and it felt familiar and right to be reading it while visiting family and traveling home. It felt fantastic.

[I read Wait, Blink, a novel by the same author, just a few months ago and while I haven't (yet?) managed to write about it here, I was deeply moved by it.]

Most of these stories make me ache. Øyehaug uses repetition of certain phrases to great rhythmic effect. A few characters make appearances in more than one story. Everything is knotted together.

"Can't we sit down for a while?" she says. I nod. We find two green chairs and sit down. I look at her and think, almost in wonder, that this is the girl, this is the girl who straddled me and rode me hard on the jangling hotel bed less than an hour ago. That her fair hair had swayed back and forth above me. That she had had no one to bump into then, no boats to lose control of, no parents who thought that their child was hopeless at this, that she should let go of her inhibitions and not be so uptight. I am gripped by love, want to shake her, tell her that she's the most fantastic and uptight and uninhibited person alive. But I know that if I lean over and whisper that in her ear, and that I want to be with her for the rest of my life, that it's very likely that we'll do just that, stay together for the rest of our lives, I know that she won't say anything, her eyes will slip away, but she'll take my hand and squeeze it. That's all. Because she's not in love with me. I know that. I know she's in love with someone else in this town. Obsessed. Someone she tries not to talk about. Someone she tries not to look for on every street corner, in every gallery we go to. Someone we were supposed to meet here by the pond two days ago, but who didn't show up, someone she thinks she sees everywhere — I can feel it in the hand that's holding hers, a a faint start, she thinks she sees: a tall guy, with broad shoulders, a thin dark line. An ex. She looks at me: "Shall we go and get something warm to drink? I'm cold," she says. She's done with longing. Or rather: she wants to long a little more, as we leave the pond and she thinks that it's perhaps the last time that we'll pass this place. We stand up, and she takes my hand. Always takes my hand.

[From "The Girl Holding My Hand."]

The stories are simple, understated, short. I want to say that they're very female, but even though I read more women than men last year, I don't really know what that means. It's not the domesticity and the love and sex, but something about the matter-of-factness and the poignancy; everything is obvious and tragic. At any rate, they speak to me.

I can't pick a favourite. There are scenes of hurt and tenderness. There's death and violence. There's a deer. There's Rimbaud. Performance art and Arvo Pärt. There's when you need to pee, and when you need to run away. Longing and fear and regret. In "Transcend," a woman longs for an eternity of total fusion and considers protesting her current situation by not having an orgasm. "Meanwhile, on Another Planet" has a very Cosmicomics feel about it.

Excerpts
"Nice and Mild"
"It's Raining in Love"

Reviews
New Yorker: A Norwegian Master of the Short Story: Gunnhild Øyehaug dramatizes the critical consciousness, by James Wood: "She can produce stabs of emotion, unexpected ghost notes of feeling, from pieces so short and offbeat that they seem at first like aborted arias."

Blog // Los Angeles Review of Books: Something Like Love but (K)not: Gunnhild Øyehaug's Radical Fictions, by Kasia van Schaik: "erotic, mysterious, awkward, precise."

It seems pertinent, even polemical, then, that the characters in Øyehaug's stories are all concerned with the need to be seen and heard. From lonely women to existential deer to two-timing husbands stranded in snow banks, Øyehaug's characters yearn for acknowledgement and reciprocity, and for the equilibrium that such a bond, or knot, promises. Most often, though, they’re denied recognition.

In the place of recognition, the characters are left with a sense of longing, paired with a deep-seeded disappointment, which announces its presence on every page of this book. Øyehaug's work constructs an ecology of longing. Of failed epiphanies. Of unsatisfied women.