Fleeting shapes without contour

"À propos, sometimes when we address a woman," continued the buttoned-up Walter Frommer, "we might gain the impression that she replies sensibly and thinks as we do. But that is an illusion. They imitate" — he placed special emphasis on the word imitate —  "our way of communicating, and one cannot deny that some of them are very good at it."

A bunch of ailing (and pompous and wildly irrational) men take the cure: mill about, drink, and philosophize like they're the centre of the universe. Is it Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain or The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, by Olga Tokarczuk? Why not both? Here, Tokarczuk imitates Mann (and she's very good at it), imbuing her telling with feminism, forest folk, and that old-timey feel.

There was something wrong with these mothers; it was if they did a terribly dangerous job, risking their lives in their boudoirs and bedrooms, tangled in lace, leading a lethal existence among the bedclothes and the copper pans, among the towels, powders and stacks of menus for every day of the year. In Mieczysław Wojnicz's family world, the women had vague, short, dangerous lives, and then they died, remaining in people's memories as fleeting shapes without contour. They were reduced to a remote, unclear impulse placed in the universe only temporarily, for the sole purpose of its biological consequences.

The misogynistic views on women expressed by these pompous male characters are debasing and ridiculously outdated, but according to the Author's Note, they are all paraphrased from texts by these authors: Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Cluny, William S. Burroughs, Cato, Joseph Conrad, Charles Darwin, Emile Durkheim, Henry Fielding, Sigmund Freud, H. Rider Haggard, Hesiod, Jack Kerouac, D.H. Lawrence, Cesare Lombroso, W. Somerset Maugham, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ovid, Plato, Ezra Pound, Jean Racine, Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, William Shakespeare, August Strindberg, Jonathan Swift, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Semonides of Amorgos, Tertullian, Thomas Aquinas, Richard Wagner, Frank Wedekind, John Webster, Otto Weininger and William Butler Yeats.

(I'm including the full list because it's shocking and true.)

As in the windows of a huge room, in his mind's eye he could see the shapes his future would take. There were so many possibilities that he felt strength gathering within him, but he could not find the words; all that entered his head was the German phrase "Ich will", but this was something greater that went beyond the usual "Ich". He felt plural, multiple, multifaceted, compound and complicated like a coral reef, like a mushroom spawn whose actual existence is located underground.

Is this a horror novel? In several ways, yes. There is a creeping dread, when a hand feels blindly through the moss, when mushrooms are foraged and consumed. Night noises, a strange attic, a dark forest, and some very distasteful meals. There are mysterious deaths. Mob mentality. Whom can one trust? Are these men who they say they are? There is the horror men feel at the witchery of women, and the horror that men actually thought this way. 

See also
Review
Excerpt: Woman, Frog, and Devil 

The slow and leisurely rot of a day

The imaginary anthropologist remained with me after I finished university. I would summon her to narrate the simplest interactions when I tried to untangle the layers of an argument, when I edited footage, when I was dressing up for an event. I called on the anthropologist to examine our lives as we moved from place to place, where we were never natives. What would she write down in her pad if asked to study Manu and me as a tribe of our own? Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would the tiny anthropologist point to in our makeshift apartments, where we lived without a shared native tongue, without religion, without the web of family and its obligations to keep us in place? What would she identify as our rituals and ties of kinship, the symbols that constituted a sense of the sacred and the profane?

Because it often seemed to me that our life was unreal, and I summoned the anthropologist to make it seem otherwise.

The Anthropologists, by Ayşegül Savaş, concerns itself with two people having a relationship in a language that is not either of their own, in the city they each independently chose to exile themselves to. 

Where?, I wonder, and I make assumptions. At some point it becomes clear that their shared tongue is not English. I make a game of guessing the language and city; for a minute I imagine them living in a neighbourhood just north of me. (But it's not Montreal, it turns out; rather, Paris, and I realize I haven't been in a very long time, and I want to go.)

It makes me nostalgic, remembering what it is to make a life for oneself, by oneself, away from one's family, and then together with someone else, and the life you make with the people you choose to be your family. 

We recognized in him something we recognized in each other: the mix of openness and suspicion; a desire to establish rules by which to live, and only a vague idea about what those rules should be.

He found them at flea markets and on the street, always with an idea of ways he would put them to use, though he never did. His true passion was collection, the accumulation of expired things, their foggy poetry.

It makes me more generally nostalgic for youth, for having to make do, for carefully choosing one's indulgences. For deciding what kind of person one wants to be, living in that neighbourhood, having those things, knowing these people.

After a day of hanging out in the park:

I love a good day of rotting, Ravi said,
That's what I wanted to film. The slow and leisurely rot of a day.

Those are the best days. "I knew little beyond the fact that I wanted to film daily life." (Remarkably, I am soon thereafter reading Pond, which is nothing but daily life. If there is a theme to my reading this year it might be this, the mundane.)

It's a little bit about living outside of oneself, like all writers do, while looking on usually kindly, and at least honestly. The Anthropologists charmed me.

We sensed smugness in the foreigners' repeated disclaimer that they were doing work on themselves, as if the psyche were a house for remodeling, its parts identifiable as rooms and walls and beams, its leaks and fissures possible to fix. And it seemed there was always a limit to how genuinely we would be able to know them, because the constant calibration of their own well-being wouldn't allow true intimacy.

I discovered this novel when it showed up on Barack Obama's list of 2024 favourites, and I read it in February 2025.

Excerpts 
Future Selves (published as a short story) 
Daily Life 
Anthropology  

Review
Everyday Magic (Massachusetts Review): "preserves time and room to make art out of daily life, not just survive it."

Also:

Her dedication to the “infraordinary” has evocations of Lauren Elkin’s No. 91/92: diary of a year on the bus and of writer and teacher George Perec who, in Attention to What? (1973), urges us to found our own anthropology by questioning “our teaspoons”.

(Note to self: Elkin again. Look this up.)

Things mattering and then not mattering

It seems easier on balance not to read the news. Some do and some don't, but it's easier not to. When they look at the planet it's hard to see a place for or trace of the small and babbling pantomime of politics on the newsfeed, and it's as though that pantomime is an insult to the august stage on which it all happens, an assault on its gentleness, or else too insignificant to be bothered with. They might listen to the news and feel instantly tired or impatient. The stories a litany of accusation, angst, anger, slander, scandal that speaks a language both too simple and too complex, a kind of talking in tongues, when compared to the single clear, ringing noted that seems to emit from the hanging planet they now see each morning whey open their eyes. The earth shrugs it off with its every rotation.

I finished reading Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, a couple of weeks ago. I'd picked it up just after, I think, it was awarded the 2024 Booker Prize, but before it was longlisted for the Tournament of Books. 

I started reading it in December while enjoying days at the spa, my copy has the steam-curled pages to prove it. I loved its meditative quality, I drifted on that for a while.

At some point in their stay in orbit there comes for each of them a powerful desire that sets in — a desire never to leave. A sudden ambushing by happiness. They find it everywhere, this happiness, springing forth from the blandest of places — from the experiment decks, from within the sachets of risotto and chicken cassoulet, from the panels of screens, switches and vents, from the brutally cramped titanium, Kevlar and steel tubes in which they're trapped, from the very floors which are walls and the walls which are ceilings and the ceilings which are floors. From the handholds which are footholds which chafe the toes. From the spacesuits, which wait in the airlocks somewhat macabre. Everything that speaks of being is space — which is everything — ambushes them with happiness, and it isn't so much that they don't want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded — grown so big, so distended and full, that it's caved in on itself.

(I could use that kind of ambush.)

But then, you know, I stopped caring. Not gonna lie, it was kinda boring. I couldn't remember what, if anything, had happened. I wasn't really sure who the characters were or why they mattered — their backstories were irrelevant, none of them had character. 

Do you know what I'll look forward to getting back to, when the time comes? he says. Things I don't need, that's what. Pointlessness. Some pointless ornament on a shelf.

I'm all about pointlessness, plotlessness, slow reading, slow living, stasis. And this novel offers moments of awe. But the world keeps turning. We gaze at the beautiful painting, then move on.

Harvey renders Sagan's Cosmic Character in a grippingly poetic way; one wonders what does human history matter against the cosmos. Not a bit. Except when you're in it, it's everything. 

A projection and a centrifuge

Such that I began to write a book about the real, breathing body of Ravicka, which I couldn't reach by walking toward it and couldn't reach by attending to it, as I might attend to any other subject in my books. I couldn't reach this Ravicka, which was two-dimensional, a projection and a centrifuge. I couldn't reach Ravicka, because it lay in a book and I had placed it there and put inside it the Ravicka I could reach, the Ravicka of our days and our coffee. I wrote the real Ravicka into a book and put inside it the only Ravicka I had. Yet, inside that Ravicka, the one in which I wrote my books (and L. and Z. wrote their books), was that of the first, and though it was placed in a book and had a fiction growing out of it, it was real and breathing: it contained fictions but it breathed and remembered us and held out the possibility of future architecture, where, even though our buildings were in motion and the terrain was constantly reshaping itself, were were part of a conversation. You looked into the book to say these things but the language you needed was outside in the physical city, in that theatre that would not show itself.

Somehow (how? what was I looking for that day? was it possibly to do with The Taiga Syndrome? I wish I could connect the dots, trace the line from the book or author and the keywords I used to search), I fell on a then-freshly-published article (and this tab, along with 112 others, has been open ever since), "The New Patron Saints of Lesbian Fiction" (which namechecks Lauren Elkin — is that how I got here?), which captivated me with its nondefinition of a type of book, my go-to genre: plotless fiction. 

How the fuck had I never heard of Renee Gladman before?

That very afternoon I head to the library to research Havana, and in a slight detour, I find Gladman, and based on the book's size and cover image I choose to bring home with me Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, as if maybe I am crossing some metaphorical bridge, I've always loved bridges; the first of the Ravicka books is not available, and I hope it is not essential to my understanding of this, the third (why would I even think that?).

I am obsessed with this book, I don't understand it at all, like it's all white space and I don't have enough distance to see what's revealed in relief. It's very spatial, I keep thinking of Mieville's The City and the City, like it's a topography overlaying something else (also the paths mapped out in Auster's City of Glass, how many books of late have me hankering nostalgically for a mysterious quest), maybe it's an invisible city a la Calvino, a fiction atop a reality. (I misspell reality as reliaty, as if it's something you can rely on.) 

As a country this was our crisis: getting other people to see what we were seeing.

Weeks later I return the Havana books and decide to recheck the stock of Gladman and find nothing Ravicka-related, whereas my memory has a clear visual on the Houses of Ravicka, which I remember deciding against, because houses versus bridge. I check the online catalogue, and it shows as available. (Mysteriously, yet another Ravicka book is listed but "not available" — not checked out and due to be returned, just not there, I speculate it was never returned.) My intuition leads me to the French shelves. And there it is. One English novel nestled among French translations of Gladman's other work. I leave it there. I'll know where to find it. Only when I return a few days later, it's been correctly reshelved.

It's about writing a book, and the title of the book and the first sentence of the book, and all the words and what the words mean, it's a book about architecture, and the physicality of writing the book — the position of the writer, the space within which the writer is enclosed. And then people are leaving, an exodus, for creative reasons or political ones, they're burning down their houses, but they're not burning. Maybe the houses are metaphorical. Or the burning is.

(I don't know how to write about books anymore, do I want to write about books anymore?, books are mysterious things to write about, what do I hope to prove, not to summarize or convince, maybe distill and understand, sometimes just to remember. I could write about art but I don't know how to write about art, I'd need to learn the language of art, and the language of writing about art, much like I don't know the language of writing about books, look at me writing about writing and about not writing and about not knowing how to write.)

What is the crisis?

There is breathing and not-breathing, the books are bodies, and sometimes the buildings are bodies, and Ravicka is a breathing body, but also the bodies are bodies, and they are lines, like the buildings are numbers, but along with the leaving (disappearing, maybe being disappeared) there is also love and longing, something clandestine, I think.

We were holding space and making space through stillness, looking for structures to reflect what we were seeing, which was nothing.

I want all the Ravicka books so I can tear out their pages and lay them out like a map, and then eat them.

Reviews 
The Rupture 
Music & Literature 

Excerpt
Six enclosures