A sort of equipoise of contradictions

And so, a year and change later, on a particularly damp night in May, I was slumped on the the living room couch, where I typically landed when I found myself working too long. Whenever I had kept the bass thumping for hours, with the analog graphics dancing across the screen eventually looking like nothing a but a bundle of jerking, tousled striations, like a lie-detector needle gone wild — that's when I'd drop down there to rest. Sinking into its leathery depths, which comfortably embraced the whole of my body, felt like connecting to a brain-clearing machine; I got a soft calming sensation that let me review the fruits of that day's work, then joyfully, even impatiently, greet the prospect of doing it all over again upon waking the next day. 

But this time, I was there to temper palpitations brought on by too much coke. 

— from Superstars, by Ann Scott.

Sometimes I wonder about the '90s. That decade coincides with my 20s. I drank a lot. Although many of those years are a blur, I didn't quite achieve the carefree abandon I strove for. I lived alone and asserted my independence (until I met a man and settled down, and didn't). I started to travel (until I met a man, and didn't). I had a government job, until I quit because I thought I could do something more interesting, like I deserved something less soul-sucking.

I sidestepped the grunge scene. Instead, I explored my roots and listened to Polish crooners. I explored the world and listened to fado, ranchera, gypsy, klezmer. I explored inwards and listened to Leonard Cohen and Carlos Gardel. I sidestepped the Spice Girls too. Occasionally, we smoked pot.

I went to just one bonafide rave (it was early days still, was it even actually 1990 yet?), boarding a bus to a secret warehouse location. But house parties with DJs (acid house parties?). And somehow, I knew what clubs to go to. (Even in Lisbon, in Paris, somehow I knew what clubs to go to.) And still, I went to shows: from Psychic TV (1990) to FM Einheit (1998). 

At decade's end, I was working in advertising. We drank martinis in lounges and listened to Moby. It would be another 20 years before I tried MDMA.

I feel like there was another 90s, a secret 90s, a bigger, fuller, sexier 90s, I caught glimpses of it through the grunge, but I didn't give the right password, I couldn't find the right door.

Maybe now, the 2020s, maybe this is my rave era. The books and the movies. I want to rave in sunlight on THC. I want to rave with Harry Styles (DJs don't dance no more, they sit) and with Bjork during an eclipse.

Superstars, by Ann Scott, (published in French in 2000,) recounts the rave days of turn-of-the-century Paris through the eyes of a 30-ish-year-old electronic DJ, who sometimes regrets having set aside her rock-and-roll bass-guitar days and the boyfriend around which they revolved for a queerer lifestyle. It's a litany of unoriginal bad girl behaviour. (It came as no surprise to learn that Ann Scott once shared an apartment with Virginie Despentes.) 

A shattering burst of Aphex Twin's laughter exploded once, twice, and then abruptly dropped out, catching everyone by surprise, a tremendous surge of percussion, with a single cry rising from the crowd, the sudden realization that this was going to kill. The strobes came back, accelerating the movements all around me, instantly altering my perception of how far I was from everyone else. My feet were keeping time, my head following the sound. Loops overlapped, unfolded, weaved all kinds of structures, infinite trails, and my brain wanted follow them all, one after the other. One second the accent was up, and the next the accent was down. The inversions jolted me, twisted me around, brought me back up. On giant screens, spirals morphed to match the sonic whirlwind. I looked at my undulating hands as they opened and closed. My arms were now extensions of the rest of my body, first up and then down and then up again, whipping like cables, and my eager eyes were soaking it all in. Everything around me seemed a little clearer, a little more dazzling. Twinkling eyebrow rings, nose rings, earrings, beads of sweat on foreheads, water drops from drinks pearling on chins, gazing deeply, unbridled, into all their faces. All ecstatic to be there, in this strange place that they'd invaded for one night only. All transported by the magic of Total Music, by the lights and the crowd,

There's a lot of drugs. There's a record deal advance, so even more drugs, and other financial irresponsibilities. A lot of petty jealousies and emotional immaturity, all heightened no doubt because of the lack of sleep, and all the drugs. The characters spend more time anticipating the raving and enduring the aftermath of raving than actually raving (maybe this is how it is in real life). It's mostly chaos and self-destruction.

It took me a long time to find the rhythm of this book, to care what happened, to get past the unlikeable narrator. I was well past the halfway point when I gave myself over to it — like when you're dragged to a party with no way home, just have a drink and enjoy the music (of which there was very little). Although the narrator, surprisingly, demonstrated some emotional growth, the end could not come quickly enough for me. Superstars documents a precise moment in space-time with a particular drug-fuelled energy, but it's not stellar prose. 

(Ann Scott in interview sounds set in her ways, with some archaic views on sexual consent, and definite opinions about the boring state of literature in France. Millennials aren't writing books, she says. Maybe it's true. However, literary experimentation is dead thanks to capitalism, she says — this I believe.)

Behind, above, around: enormous now, the supremacies of sound had risen up, giant machines, bigger than a person, that shot thunder through to his insides. He looked up, nodded, and felt like an idea borne of the boom-boom-boom of the beat. And the immense boom-boom said: one one one —

and one and one and —

one one one —

and —

cool cool cool cool cool...

He saw Hardy and Leksie, faces and eyes, hurtles, scrambled, shoved, shaken in the midst of the rhythm. Saw broken and blessed, trusting and tender, myriad signs, quick, terse, plain, each blotted out by the next in waves of sympathy. He looked and danced and saw beauty.

From the margins came legs and light, feet, flashes, paces and bass, surfaces and murmurs, equivalencies and functions of a higher mathematics.

He himself was the music.

Then there was a quick cascade of steps, almost tumbling, somehow, from within the  rhythms and sounds.

A cascade of nouns,

pertaining to the curtailment and velocity of thoughts correlated to music, with that feeling of contrary facets in aggregate, with the total mental perspective in this moment of simultaneity and the solace of the automaticity of internal processes.

In this direction there would —

A sort of equipoise of contradictions, which without —

And overwrought —

So time, processes, remained intact then. And the conceptual union of opposites: like how before the creation of the world, the so-called spirit of God...

But that, alas, is unthinkable.

And he saw that it was good.

— from Rave, by Rainald Goetz. 

In contrast, Rave, by Rainald Goetz, (published in German in 1998,) feels like drugs. Not in a "can't put it down" way. Goetz's prose magically mimics the experience of being on drugs. It is not always a pleasant experience, it is often confusing and overwhelming, an overstimulating barrage of words that are simultaneously noise and texture and philosophy. Time passes and stands still. It's a testament to his craft, I would stop midsentence, midparagraph, and let it roll over me, I would roll in it, I was rolling, in awe.

Rave was exhausting and beautiful, but possibly pointless. Interestingly, I found there to be more familiar cultural markers in Goetz's German setting than Scott's French one. Rave's narrator is self-reflective and philosophical, aware of the context he finds himself in, alert to the cultural moment.

The difficulty was a fundamental one: how would a text about our lives have to sound? I had a sort of inkling of sound inside me, a bodily sensation that writing had to articulate.

a kind of: Ave —

[...]

You couldn't get the text by just starting with the meaning, it had to be conceived differently, through prayer, through the endless iterative pronunciation of the words with the mouth, becoming as it were part of the words oneself by speaking.

The language is playful; situations are funny, and how the drug-addled mind processes them is funny. The critique of Kraftwerk's stage presence is funny. This review indicates layers of sonic references and suggests why a reunified Germany might be ripe for this musical subculture. "The others were dancing their acid-truth-dance on the alp."

Rave excerpt. 

Reckless as it might have been, at the same time this experience was yearning to understand itself. And yet wanting at the same moment to forget itself again, to destroy understanding, to have some new experience reveal that understanding to be nonsense invalidated through novelty, tumult, coolness.

I approached both of these works more as artefacts than as entertainment. Part of me hoped for some insight into the what life looked like for a handful of acquaintances and peers who hail from Western Europe. (How mainstream was rave culture? Do I gravitate toward hedonists?) Mostly, these novels have confirmed the rave experience as something distant and foreign and not nearly as cool as it ought to be.

Below, the men sit and smoke. Above, the young women stand there with their faces.

Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline

On days of heavy snowfall, I used to extend my coat sleeve to watch the flakes settle on the fluff on its dark fabric and dissolve. It make me dizzy to consider the innumerable combinations of coruscating hexagonal crystals like the ones I'd seen in the book that made up each grain of snow. For days after, I had woken from sleep and, while my eyes remained closed, imagined it was still snowing outside. I had seen snow drift down around me indoors while I lay sprawled on the floor, working on some tedious holiday assignment. Flakes landing on my hand, from which I'd just removed a hangnail. Flakes landing on the loose hairs and eraser dust strewn across the floor.

The strangest thing, snow, I recall Inseon saying. Had she been picturing scenes similar to the ones I'd imagined? How does something like that fall from the sky? she's said, eyes directed not at me but at the window, as though she were quietly disputing someone outside, someone invisible. As though she found it difficult to accept its beauty.

We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, is a haunting novel, lyrical, dreamlike. Lulled by its beauty, I was blindsided by its grimness. Nightmare-like.

The novel centres on events concerning the inhabitants of Jeju Island and the massacres beginning in April 1948 and continuing through 1949. the military hunted and killed residents, including children and infants. The ruling government body at the time? The United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), and then Syngman Rhee elected as the first president of the Republic of Korea (having previously served as president of the Korean Provisional Government, until he was impeached; see Ed Park's Same Bed, Different Dreams), who escalated the eradication of "rebel forces." 

On days when American reconnaissance planes dropped a blizzard of propaganda leaflets, leaflets that said anyone who turned themself in wouldn't be punished, my aunt would whisper to my mom that he might give himself up after reading the message. That since he was slight and looked younger than his age, he probably wouldn't be shot on his way down from the woods. 

This story is another chapter in the seemingly eternal battle between the hero Americans and the godless commie Russians (as the story has been framed for us westerners). I am stunned that the reviews are not directly addressing the subject matter of this novel and recognizing it as an indictment of American hegemony and interventionist politics.

She would recount what my father had told her about the torture he's endured at thte alcohol factory. How a man in a miltary uniform with no insignia who spoke the northern dialect had treated him. What the man said each time he stripped my father and tied him upside down to a chair. 

We'll slaughter every last one of you commie sons of bitches, wipe you clean off the face of the earth. We'll stamp the life out of you rats if there's even a drop of red in you.

Some estimates of the dead on Jeju number as high as 80,000. 

It's no coincidence that some thirty thousand people were killed on this island that winter, and another two hundred thousand were murdered on the mainland the next summer. The governing U.S. military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that's what it took to stop their communization.

It wasn't until 2003 that the South Korean government issued an apology, and 2019 that the police forces and defense ministry acknowledged their role. The United States government has been called to apologize for its role in the incident, but has yet to do so.

In the four years between the first time I had the dream and that early summer morning, I had parted ways with several people in my life. Some of these partings had been by choice, while others had caught me entirely unawares; I'd fought the latter with everything I had. If, as various ancient faiths say, there exists in a celestial realm or a netherworld an immense mirror that observes and logs everyone's movements, I'm sure the last three to four years of my life as recorded there must resemble a snail coming out of its shell to push along a knife's edge. A body desiring to live. A body pricked and nicked. A body spurning, embracing, clinging. A body kneeling. A body entreating. A body seeping blood or pus or tears.

I take the title to mean the dead never leave us, history haunts us, our family haunts us. Even the pet bird leaves traces. We are mired in the lives of the dead.

There's a great deal of ambiguity regarding the present day circumstances of the novel. Is the narrator's journey to Jeju real? Does she die in the snow? Is all of it a dream? How does her friend materialize here, she is in a hospital in Seoul, has she crossed to another realm? Is the bird resurrected?

Kang's descriptions of snow are otherworldly. I wish I'd read this a couple of months ago when we were still blanketed in white instead of during the spring rains. The snow here also serves many literary purposes: it hides and protects, it numbs, it purifies, it preserves.

Yes, this is a powerful book, with cinematic prose and highly metaphorical imagery. But honestly, can we just express some outrage about the fucking atrocity, and how the fucking United States persists in interfering: Haiti, Vietnam, Cuba, Panama, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and literally dozens of other countries to varying degrees. Could they just fucking stop?!

Each time I am lured into sleep like I'm being pulled toward a warm light, I force my eyes open with my hands. I can't tell if it's drowsiness or the thin layer of ice over my lashes that is keeping them sealed.

Faces appear to me in my fading consciousness. Not the faces of dead strangers but of people who are living, albeit far away on the mainland. They are exhilaratingly clear. Vivid memories play out before me. In no particular order, and without context. Like a thousand dancers spilling onto the stage at once to each perform a different movement. Their bodies, suspended in their poses, shimmer like crystals. 

I don't know if this is what happens right before you die. Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline. Nothing hurts anymore. Hundreds upon thousands of moments glitter in unison, like snowflakes whose elaborate shapes are in full view. How this is possible, I can't say. My every pain and joy, all my deep-rooted sorrows and loves, shine, not as an amalgam but as a whole comprised of distinct singularities, glowing together as one giant nebula.

Excerpt: Crystals

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.

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.