The broad, noble idea of the walk

On a far-wandering walk a thousand usable thoughts occur to me, while shut in at home, I would lamentably wither and dry up. Walking is for me not only healthy, it is also of service — not only lovely, but also useful. A walk advances me professionally, but also provides me at the same time with amusement; it comforts, delights, and refreshes me, is a pleasure for me, but also has the peculiarity that it spurs me on and allures me to further creations, since it offers me as material numerous more or less significant objectivities upon which I can later work industriously at home. Every walk is filled with phenomena valuable to see and feel. A pleasant walk most often veritably teems with imageries, living poems, attractive objects, natural beauties, be they ever so small. The lore of nature and the lore of the country are revealed, charming and graceful, to the sense and eyes of the observant walker, who must of course walk not with downcast but with open, unclouded eyes, if he desires the lovely significance and the broad, noble idea of the walk to dawn on him.

The Walk, by Robert Walser, was not the kind of walk I wanted it to be. That is, it wasn't my walk. It wasn't my morning walk to the metro when I'm trying to formulate some thoughts on the book I'm reading, or the correspondence I shared; it wasn't my lunchtime meander around the office or around the office building where I try to find some new approach to a work problem; it wasn't my after-work stroll home from the metro when I blank my mind or when I replay or imagine conversations with lovers.

More manic than minimalist, The Walk is a high-detail view of very pedestrian things. Walser describes the streetscape and his encounters with the bookseller, the bank official, children, dogs, a beautiful woman, a mournful acquaintance, the tailor, the tax inspector. It's very florid but in a controlled way, without the exuberance of other writings. It rings less sincere. He holds himself apart from all people and things, like he's not really in his walk.

Susan Bernofsky writes in her introduction:

If Walser chose to tone down the first version's chattiness at certain key points, I believe it was for the sake of minimizing the divide between the writing protagonist and the walking protagonist.

When I write in my head while walking, things feel alive, but by the time I commit anything to paper, it's deadened a little. I haven't read the original translation of Walser's original text, but I feel like that's what happened here, he poked and prodded the life out of it.

To be sure, walking is a part of writing (or, for some writers, sitting and staring, or cleaning their desk). I wonder if by trying to minimize the divide, he only made it more obvious.

But one realizes to be sure to satiety that he loves to walk as well as he loves to write; the latter of course perhaps just a shade less than the former.

About
Quarterly Conversation
The Rumpus
Three Percent

The actual women weren't really people. They were just a theory.

Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you're a lot of kinds of women, you're still always just a woman, which is to say you're always a little bit less than a man.

I just finished reading a fucking amazing book and I want everyone to read it, I want to press it on all my friends, but I'm afraid that they won't get it, that they won't get me. I sobbed all morning, I sobbed into my pillow when I woke up way too early and couldn't fall back asleep, I sobbed into my morning coffee as I settled into the novel's homestretch, I sobbed over my keyboard as I swallowed up the final pages between work emails.

When I told people what I did, they'd say, "Being a mother is the hardest job there is." But it wasn't. The hardest job there was was being a mother and having an actual job, with pants and a commuter train pass and pens and lipstick.

But this is not about being a stay-at-home mom or a working mom.

I want to sob on someone's shoulder, not by myself.

I want to talk to all my friends about it, but my friends are all single and childless, or married and childless, or happily married with kids, or lesbian, or newlywed, or with a newborn, or young, so young. Not a single middle-aged divorced working mother among them (how did that happen? how do I not have friends within my own demographic?).

I want to give my ex a copy, a passive-aggressive attempt to give him a piece of my mind, to yell at him without inhibition, without fear of child support payments being withheld, to give him shit for being absent as a father to our child, then and still, and for taking so much of me and then just vanishing into freedom, not when I asked him to but when it was convenient for him.

And, oh yeah, fuck the patriarchy.

It's actually a male friend who brought this novel to my attention. It was early-going for him. He doesn't know yet.

If you don't ask too many questions and just let people talk, they'll tell you what's on their mind. In those monologues, I found my own gripes. They felt counted out, the way I felt counted out. They felt ignored. the way I felt ignored. They felt like they'd failed. They had regret. They were insecure. They worried about their legacies. They said all the things I wasn't allowed to say aloud without fear of appearing grandiose or self-centered or conceited or narcissistic. [...] I realized that all humans are essentially the same, but only some of us, the men, were truly allowed to be that without apology. The men's humanity was sexy and complicated; ours (mine) was to be kept in the dark at the bottom of the story and was only interesting in the service of the man's humanity.

That's it, isn't it? The female experience. The thing I discovered just last week.

Fleishman Is in Trouble, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, is not what you think it is. It's whip-smart, it's funny, it's oh-so-relatable in so many ways, and then it turns everything you think you know on its head. Suddenly it's a whip-smart, scathing indictment of... Fleishman. But also dating culture, porn culture, smartphone culture, marriage, careerism, consumerism, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, yoga retreats, and sweatpants. That is, life today.

Poor Fleishman. On his way to divorce. He didn't know what hit him. Neither did I. He started dating. So did I. It both excited him and exhausted him. Same. The unfairness of it all. Full-time single parenting. How would he (I) even find time to date? Or the energy and commitment to better his (my) work circumstances? It takes his lawyer to point it out to him — he's the wife in all this.

Where's Rachel in all this? What the hell happened to Rachel? Rachel Fleishman only matters as an extension of her ex-husband. It's there in the title, it's there in the table of contents. I was ready for it, I knew it was coming, but still I couldn't bear it.

When Rachel and I were little girls, we had been promised by a liberated society that had almost ratified the Equal Rights Amendment that we could do anything we wanted. We were told that we could be successful, that there was something particular and unique about us and that we could achieve anything — the last vestiges of girls being taught they were special mingled with the first ripples of second-wave feminism. All that time, even as a sixth-grader, I remembered thinking that it seemed weird that teachers and parents were just allowed to say that, and they they'd say it in front of the boys and the boys didn't seem to mind. Even back then I knew that the boys tolerated it because it was so clear that it wasn't true.

The thing is: I didn't know it wasn't true. I believed it. And then I believed it was my own shortcomings that held me back. It's my own fault that my career and salary were held back when I had a baby, that's a choice I made.

[I ranted this very rant at work a few months ago, to my (male) boss no less. Somehow it seemed relevant. I work for a company that skews heavily male. This summer, allegations of inappropriate conduct were made against the CEO. I wanted to talk about it. No one wanted to talk about it. And so one day I ranted about the lie I'd been sold.]

The older women I know, they're fighting the same fight they always were, or they've shrugged their shoulders and moved on, they know what's what, and they've done what they can. The younger women — I don't think they were lied to, they just assumed it to be true, and they haven't woken up yet. They're just starting to wake up, #metoo. Me, I'm just angry.

The lie belongs to a very specific window of American history, along with the promise of a 4-day workweek, and even Freedom 55. Reaganomics ruined us.

So that's in the book too, I think.

That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn't seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them — this was the thing we'd find intolerable.

After I sobbed for a day, I decided to find a therapist, to help me deal with my anger and resentment and how tired I am by it all. So here's the book that made me seek out therapy.

If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand, as a smart person does, the constraints of this world on a woman.

Fleishman was allergic to crazy. That's why he fell for Rachel, not crazy, not at first. But to hear him tell it, most women are crazy. At least he stands up for his women patients, and he stands up for his daughter. But poor Fleishman, he doesn't seem to understand that that doesn't make him a hero. And he really didn't stand up much for his wife.

The narrator of this story refers to a (fictional) hero of journalism, one whom a later generation was embarrassed to teach. He was finally recognized as a misogynist, or a man of his times.

He hated women, they said, even as I could count a hundred examples in his writing of the way he worshipped them. Yes, the young women said, it looked like worship but it was actually something uglier. It was an obsession with sex and a wholesale contempt for what he saw as the condition of the sex, or its barrier, or its delivery device: the actual women. The actual women weren't really people. They were just a theory. He wrote about them the way he'd written about Vietnam — ugly, romantic, poignant, unwinnable.

Reviews
Electric Lit: The Women Who Write Themselves Out of the Story
HuffPost: "Fleishman Is In Trouble" Investigates The Gender Sympathy Gap
New Yorker: "Fleishman Is in Trouble" Turns the marriage Novel Inside Out

Excerpt.

I felt my own body obliterating every thought

It is written that one meeting is worth ten partings. Yet one parting is of greater consequence than ten meetings. For if lovers keep regular hours, then meeting and parting are as the comings and goings to the supermarket.

Basic Black with Pearls, by Helen Weinzweig, is one of my favourite reads of the year. It comes at the perfect time for me, resonating in three distinct pillars of my current thinking.

1. There's the whole question of what makes this a feminist landmark. From the afterword:

These novels describe women not only breaking away from conventions but filled with desire and ambition that are almost too much to bear, a secret from themselves. Weinzweig had to search out these books to counteract decades of reading male-dominated narratives, which she needed to reject to construct her own style: "One of the things I had to learn after reading all this male fiction was, what do I as a woman feel like," she said in a 1990 interview. "All the literary forms were men's, all the philosophies were men's philosophies ... I had to translate these forms into the female."

[I'm still not sure I understand. Is this the female experience? This banging around inside oneself? If men live in the world, do women live in their heads, like I do? Screaming to get out. Let me be in the world the way I need to be in the world, lovestruck and emotional and responsive to stimuli, unabashed and unafraid. Let me be in my head if I want to be in my head, without having to explain myself. Is that it?]

According to Quill & Quire, Weinzweig's publisher was hesitant about her idea for the book,

but was intrigued by one of her influences: Michael Snow’s Walking Woman sculpture series. Weinzweig was moved by the concept of a one-dimensional woman moving nowhere. She told Polk, "That's what I want to capture in prose."

Is that a feminist notion? Weinzweig's interpretation of the concept might be. But Snow's, I think not: "The Walking Woman was never the representation of a woman but the representation of a matrix."

Weinzweig's heroine is trying to claim some independence and adventure, turning her back on domesticity and domestic abuse. Possibly she's just flailing against a label of mental illness.

When finally she meets a new lover, he offers her some kind of heretofore unknown utopia:

There are no mirrors where I live. With me you can be whoever you are.

2. Then there's the story itself, which got under my skin in ways it may not for most readers. I find it highly relatable. [Yes, relatable; I have an imaginary lover.]

When I see that stance of Coenraad's all fears disappear: babies don't die, cars don't collide, planes fly on course, muzak is silenced, certitude reigns. That is how I always recognize my love: the way he stands, the way I feel.

What matters is the way I feel, not whether the lover is real or not.

Shirley (aka Lola Montez) and Coenraad have separate families. He's a secret agent, always in disguise. We're not sure what she is, at first, always in a black dress with pearls. Their affair has lasted decades. She has collected postcards as souvenirs of their far-flung encounters. It's an unspoken rule not to bring the domesticity of marriage into their conversation or their hotel room. He has the advantage of knowing what she looks like, always in her uniform, despite using a false name.

Does he exist? She sees him, or suspects him, in tourguides and winos. But she is never sure of him.

[I have never met my lover in person. I have seen pictures, but they change in my mind. Besides, photos are manipulable. I feel sometimes that he may be watching me, even testing me in the guise of other personas. I suspect him of being not who he says he is. But to the extent that he fills me with this feeling, he is as real as any other lover.]

In the midst of it all, just as I was concluding that I would know this man's face, this body, from now on, anywhere, with or without clothes, I felt my own body obliterating every thought.

But we are clearly outside the realm of reality and mining her memories.

Perhaps I ought to try my hand at fiction. I would have to be careful: for me the power of the written word is so great that there would be the danger of my believing what I imagined. And were it to be a love story, the hero would be Coenraad. Therein lay another problem: since Coenraad was always in disguise, in order to authenticate him, fictionally speaking, I would have to reveal him in his essential characteristics. I was not certain I wanted to do that. It was no use pretending that I could tell anyone else's story, so I might have to tell my own. For that I must rely entirely on memory.

There is something pure in this love story, that it cannot be described by its external trappings. And it points to the wider truth that we cannot validate anything that exists outside our own minds, that our reality is constructed by our experience of memory. It does not matter what is real.

3. The search for meaning is pointless. The search is random, and the meaning is nonexistent.

The novel opens with Shirley awaiting word from Coenraad ("It takes a great deal of energy to wait."). She deciphers the coded message she uncovers to mean they are to meet in Toronto. Their code is utter nonsense. They usually rely on a National Geographic to transmit messages, but as none is available, she interprets the pamphlet she finds to be the vehicle, and repetition of the word "abdicate" is a clear indication to meet at the King Edward Hotel. (Is it a simple copyediting error that the brochure is impossibly tucked between pages 25 and 26? Or is that a clue for the reader.)

She engages in all kinds of magical thinking and waits for messages that never come. She collects tribal stories of black magic. She wants her future told by the gypsy fortune teller (Coenraad believes their love was predestined; she wants signposts for what lies ahead). She ritualizes her postcards, they are a tarot that blend memories of her husband Zbigniew into shining moments of romantic fantasy with Coenraad.

This card, recalling the night Coenraad first made his appearance, filled my mind with a clarity of detail that one sees in shock, as after a blinding explosion or during a night of labor. And even when the shock is the result of violent pleasure, then the ordinary properties of wood or plastic or paint or cloth take on strange and mysterious shapes and colors. The senses sharpen as if one's very life were in danger, even in paradise.

The baker woman reads to her a letter to the Editor, from the Jewish Daily Forward. Is it laden with secret messages about Shirley's past?

What about how art speaks to us, individually, in code? Or mythology — she's desperate to understand why Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos.

Shirley goes back to her house to find her previous role has been filled by Francesca. I wonder if she is, like Lola, another alterego from whom Shirley has dissociated. Zbigniew's life has been entirely uninterrupted by Shirley's absence. Her evening in the house takes a strangely erotic turn, but a fulfilling one for Shirley, such that she can decisively leave this household behind forever, the blank canvas of her basic black replaced by multicoloured urban abstract (like a Hundertwasser).

And she recognizes that her time with Coenraad has also ended. (Perhaps Zbigniew and Coenraad are not so separate.)

I will not miss being a stranger from whom nothing is wanted and from whom nothing is expected.

[It is liberating, sometimes, to be a stranger. I would miss it. I'm not ready to leave it behind me yet.]

You can read Sarah Weinman's afterword in its entirety in the Paris Review.

New York Journal of Books:

In the end, it could be said that the most important woman Shirley meets is herself, although Weinzweig smartly complicates that cozy theory by including Shirley's history of hospitalizations and nervous breakdowns.

New York Times: Her Lover May Not Exist, but Her Doubts About the Patriarchy Are Real

The more reasons we're given to doubt whether Coenraad even exists, the more Shirley seems implicated in her own romanticized self-abnegation. And yet there's something admirably ornery about Weinzweig's refusal to deliver a straightforward novel of empowerment, a narrative of liberation, a role model — as if insisting on a flawed heroine is itself an act of resistance.

Living life more meaningfully

I mean, people have actually said to me, "Wow, I guess having cancer so young must have given you a whole new perspective on life?" And I always nod and try to look inscrutable, but in fact, if I am completely honest with myself, I have the same old skewed perspective I've always had, except now I get to feel guilty about it. Likewise with living life more meaningfully. What the fuck does that mean anyway? How do you actually do it, in reality, besides taking up yoga?

The Bus on Thursday, by Shirley Barrett, is laugh-out-loud funny, kind of dumb and possibly offensive.

Eleanor is diagnosed with breast cancer, has a mastectomy, undergoes reconstructive surgery (but not the nipple yet). When she finally feels ready to get back to work (although it's more about avoiding support groups), she take a job as a teacher in some remote village, where the previous teacher — beloved by all (that is, Eleanor hasn't got a hope in hell of stepping into her shoes satisfactorily) — had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Weirdly, no one's really bothered enough by the event to have gone looking for her.

Meanwhile, her BFF gets married and pregnant and is generally insensitive to her situation, particularly as far as dating goes. And her ex-boyfriend — they broke up because he definitely didn't want kids, and isn't it ironic that now Eleanor possibly won't be able to have kids anyway — has been dating some busty girl who is now very pregnant.

And work is just horrible. It's a one-classroom situation and she can't live up to her predecessor, she's always saying the wrong thing, and really, some of the kids, the people in this town are just shitty.

She starts "dating" the guardian, the older brother, of her problem student. A body turns up. Townspeople continue to be incompetent. Everything seems... inappropriate.

A large number of people seem to think the cancer is her own fault, to the point where she starts thinking, "Am I so despicable a person that even my own body can't stand me?"

It's a comedy horror story, which is often the way with life with cancer — it can be a real mindfuck. And then the story gets weird.

A kind of rough sketch of it

The sound of her voice in the empty house reassures and splits her: she's both a woman preparing for lunch and a woman watching a woman prepare for lunch, objectively observing her actions, putting down a record of their purity and triviality, her innocence. Nothing to see here.

Happy Like This, by Ashley Wurzbacher, is a collection of stories about smart, perceptive, and mostly self-aware women.

The first story, "Sickness and Health," takes the form of a dissertation by a sociology student embedded within a group of students with factitious disorders. But of course, the line between the observer and her subjects breaks down. I would happily have spend an entire novel within this sociological breakdown. At first I was disoriented by the form of this story, but I found it wholly engrossing and was disappointed that it came to an end.

I'm writing this weeks after having read this book. It's probably not fair of me. But this is how I feel. These stories have promise.

I'm turning into a woman of a certain age, the kind of woman who says, but you're so young, you don't even know what love is, you don't know what death is, you just wait and see. I'm not sure I like that about myself. I've always taken some pride in being open-minded and non-judgemental.

Some stories are definitely stronger than others. The first two are excellent. But most of them, I realize now, were fairly forgettable. They are all about women, and the different forms (un)happiness takes — what they think happiness might look like. But they are about youngish women — Wurzbacher is observant, but limited. I couldn't help but think that these stories embraced a relatively naive view of love, death, relationships, happiness.

That said, I'm not a big fan of short stories in general; I think it's hopelessly difficult to pull off a satisfactory resolution to a short story. Wurzbacher at least kept me reading, while inside I might have been stewing about how she has so much yet to learn — in life, if not about writing. I look forward to reading full-length work from her in a couple decade's time.

She brought him with her to carry the machinery, and that was where it began: the two of them twisted between flannel-lined sleeping bags. He often brought along a case of beer, and on one particular night, she had drunk too much and he just enough, and they made — not love but a kind of rough sketch of it, like a rehearsal.

This instant-now

A few weeks ago the poster in the metro caught my eye. I had to go see it. Momenta 2019, Biennale de l'image, presented works around the theme. The Life of Things. "The exhibited works testify to the different ways in which objects are experienced and what they tell us about how we think and live. Objects sometimes bear the fragments of the living, and, in other contexts, they have their own life."

Elisabeth Belliveau, Still Life with Fallen Fruit (after A Breath of Life, Clarice Lispector), still, 2017-19, video, 4 min 15 s.

The image that so engrossed me was a still from a video, Still Life with Fallen Fruit, by Elisabeth Belliveau, after A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector, as it turns out. I took it as a sign. Time to read more Lispector...

I opted to order Agua Viva, I don't know why, and when I opened it and began to read, I slammed it shut, holy shit, it's so eerily perfect for my now. Am I ready for the now?

Let me tell you: I'm trying to seize the fourth dimension of this instant-now so fleeting that it's already gone because it's already become a new instant-now that's also already gone. Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And to capture the present, forbidden by its very nature: the present slips away and the instant too, I am this very second forever in the now. Only the act of love — the limpid star — like abstraction of feeling — captures the unknown moment, the instant hard as crystal and vibrating in the air and life is this untellable instant, larger than the event itself: during love the impersonal jewel of the moment shines in the air, the strange glory of the body, matter made feeling in the trembling of the instants — and the feeling is both immaterial and so objective that it seems to happen outside your body, sparkling on high, joy, joy is time's material and the essence of the instant. And in the instant is the is of the instant. I want to seize my is.

— from Agua Viva, by Clarice Lispector.

The texture of orchid petals and the colour of Limbo

I'm reading The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington, and for such a slim book it's slow going. It started off riotously funny and clever but then I was stopped cold by the winking nun.

While he spoke I was able to examine a large oil painting on the wall facing me. The painting represented a nun with a very strange and malicious face. [...] The face of the nun in the oil painting was so curiously lighted that she seemed to be winking, although that was hardly possible. She must have had one blind eye and the painter had rendered her infirmity realistically. However the idea that she was winking persisted, she was winking at me with a most disconcerting mixture of mockery and malevolence.

I thought, I need to pay careful attention, so for a few days I lived my life and danced my dance and read something "light" and "escapist" (though that book turned out to be neither really), until I thought I was ready to devote some energy to understanding what Carrington had laid before me.

And I read the words and I read more words and I flipped back the pages and I carried it with me, even while I skimmed other texts about eloquence and nonmainstream sexual practices and pearls.

The early pages of the novel put me in mind of The Crying of Lot 49 — the humour, the secret society, the sense of conspiracy and paranoia, and the reference to Remedios Varo.

Once Marian arrived at the institution, I couldn't get Yoko Tawada out of my head, these people with their strange manners, these surreal images.

Where I'm at, the text is a correspondence within a secret book within the book, folding in on itself. I love these buried-treasure texts — reading becomes an archeological dig, a trip down the rabbit hole.

I thought perhaps some research might enlighten me on this section of the book before I backtracked my way through it. Most summaries of the book gloss over this episode entirely, leading me to believe that it is insignificant. Some readers confess to finding it boring. I wondered briefly if anyone had actually read it, apart from the handful of academics who wrote their thesis on obscure subjects: Carrington's surrealist treatment of space and time, gothic aesthetics in Carrington's surrealist use of myth, that surrealist women could be both muse and creator, something about gender and the divine.

Internet searches for the winking nun eventually led me to René Magritte. In the May 1933 issue of Le Surréalisme au service de révolution there appeared a drawing by René Magritte of a sexually transgressive nun, entitled Vierge retroussée (Trussed-up Virgin)

Winking beneath a halo, the robes of this "virgin" are pushed back to expose a pair of gartered black stockings and a provocative pair of pumps, indexing both her sexual transgressiveness generally and her residence within a homoerotically charged convent environment more specifically.

While my searches began to procure more and more references to his drawing, it was days before I managed to track down the image itself.

In the meantime I learned that "winking nun" might be a veiled reference to a vulva. Certainly Magritte's nun's draped robes have a certain vulvular aura about them, topped by a hooded clitoral winkle.

Carrington's nun is not obviously sexualized, at least, not on the surface. In fact, Marian surmises she has some physical affliction that contorts her face.

Confined to a patriarchal institution and not bound by societal norms, what could she possibly be winking about?

"It might be the Zurbarán school," she said, looking uncommonly thoughtful. "Probably painted in the late eighteenth century. Spanish of course, an Italian could never have done anything so enchantingly sinister. A nun with a leer. Unknown master."

"Do you suppose she is really winking, or is she blind in one eye?" I asked, anxious for Georgina's opinion on a more personal aspect of the lady.

"She is definitely winking; the bawdy old bag is probably peeking at the monastery through a hole in the wall, watching the monks prancing around in their knickers." Georgiana had a one-track mind. ""It is beautiful," she added. "I wonder the Gams let it hand amongst their hideous possessions. Everything in the house ought to have been burnt long ago apart from the leering abbess."

Certainly the painting had a force all of its own.

[...]

"Yes," said Georgina, "how those Spaniards understood the painting of black drapery. So much more superbly blackly depressing than anyone else's black. The old Lady's habit had the texture of orchid petals and the colour of Limbo. It really is a wonderful painting. Her face surrounded by that white starched frill is as luminous as the full moon, and just as bewitching." Somehow I felt that Georgina understood the painting of the leering abbess better than I ever could.

I think my obsession with the winking nun is enhanced this week by my having attained some tangential psychological epiphany in a highly sexualized context. I'm learning how to be in my body and outside of my body at the same time. This is one of the magic tricks of great sex, but it's also a lesson learned from aging. I think Carrington knew it.

As for the abbess's tractate, it tells of falling into ecstasies and a witchcraft of salves; sexual acrobatics, cross-dressing, and a sinful ointment. Nocturnal restlessness, inner turbulence. Ultimately the abbess's body is bloated with death and bursts, giving birth to an angel.

As yet I can find no lay explanation of this history, but if I understand the summaries, it sets off something like a grail quest. Perhaps the body is the vessel.

A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts

English teaching at school is, unfortunately, obsessed with what a poet thought, as though that were of any interest to anyone. Rather than being taught about how a poem is phrased, schoolchildren are asked to write essays on what William Blake thought about the Tiger; despite the fact that William Blake was a nutjob whose opinions, in a civilised society, would be of no interest to anybody apart from his parole officer. A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.

— from The Elements of Eloquence, by Mark Forsyth.

Blessed is he who leaves

This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads — this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.

What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps, newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, election results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.

What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize readings of their own barcoded poetry.

Move. Get going. Blessed is he who leaves.

– from Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk.

Last weekend I saw Memory Is Our Homeland, a documentary film charting the story of Polish refugees during World War II. This film covered the journey of Poles through Siberia and Iran to Africa. My mother's story is similar, though it veered east to India.



I've always known this story as part of my family history. It's a personal narrative. What this film helped me understand was its broader political significance. Most people don't know the history of the Soviet invasion of Poland and the deportation of Poles by Soviets, because the Soviet government wanted to keep it quiet. How tightly that government (no doubt with a little help from the British) controlled the release of images once Poles were allowed to mobilize. How they propagandized their involvement in the

It's still a bit puzzling to me how it was determined who left and who stayed. (Which was privilege and which was punishment?) Did some people not hear the news in the street? Did they miss the train?

Flipping through Tokarczuk's Flights in recent days reinforces my interpretation of events. They were homeless, even while the tyrants directed their trajectory. The tyrants redrew the borders. It's no wonder people chose not to return, for it would be to a different geography, land they'd never known, under the tyrants' control.

(It's eerie how Tokarczuk reflects many of the issues of home and identity and belonging and memory, as if these attitudes are embedded in the Polish psyche, the cultural subconscious.)

Far from home, at a video rental shop, rummaging around the shelves, I swear in Polish. And suddenly an average-sized woman who looks to be about fifty years old stops beside me and awkwardly says in my language:

"Is that Polish? Do you speak Polish? Hello."

Here, alas, her stock of Polish sentences is at an end.

And now she tells me in English that she came here when she was seventeen, with her parents; here she shows off with the Polish word for "mummy". Much to my dismay she then begins to cry, indicating her arm, her forearm, and talks about blood, that this is where her whole soul is, that her blood is Polish. This hapless gesture reminds me of an addict's gesture — her index finger showing veins, the place to stick a neeedle in. She says she married a Hungarian and forgot her Polish. She squeezes my shoulder and leaves, disappearing between shelves labelled "Drama" and "Action".

It's hard for me to believe that you could forget the language thanks to which the maps of the world were drawn. She must have simply mislaid it somewhere. Maybe it lies wadded up and dusty in a drawer of bras and knickers, squeezed into a corner like sexy thongs acquired once in a fit of enthusiasm that there was never really an occasion to wear.

To what extent are you your language?

If you can't speak Polish, are you still Polish? If you haven't been to Poland in 80 years, are you still Polish? If the only land you knew as Poland is no longer Polish territory, are you still Polish? Yes.

We are the individual nerve impulses of the world

And Frankfurt? That great air travel hub, that state within a state? What do you associate that with? Yes, yes, the spitting image of a chip, a computer chip, a razor-thin plate. Here there can be no doubts — they tell us what we are, dear travellers. We are the individual nerve impulses of the world, fractions of an instant, barely that part of it that permits the change from plus to minus, or maybe the other way around, and keeps everything in constant flux.

— from Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk.

I was thrilled to hear that Olga Tokarczuk was the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Her Primeval and Other Times currently ranks as one of my favourite books ever.

And Flights... I realize that while I posted excerpts from Flights, I never wrote about it in full. Partly because I don't know how to. It sprawls, in a most beautiful way.

Also, it's a book that I read over many months, making it harder to synthesize. Its fragmentary nature leant itself to these bursts of attention, after which I could consider at leisure. However, this method of reading means I have trouble seeing how the novel hangs together; for me, its parts were more valuable than the whole.

It's about... travelling, flying, airports, encounters in airports, things overheard, taxis and hotels, guidebooks and maps ("nothing cures melancholy like maps"), the Earth's nipples, the passage of time, and here I find a fragment on overnight trains ("for cowards")...

Coffee or tea? That's the closest to freedom the railway gets. Had these passengers just got one of those cheap flights, they would have been there in an hour, and it would have cost them less money, too. They would have had a night in the arms of their longing lovers, breakfast at one of the restaurants on rue je-ne-sais-quoi, where oysters are served. An evening Mozart concert at a cathedral. A walk along the riverbanks. Instead they must fully surrender to the time taken by rail travel, must personally traverse every kilometre according to the age-old custom of their ancestors, go over every bridge and through each viaduct and tunnel on this voyage over land. Nothing can be skipped, nothing bypassed. Every millimetre of the way will be touched by the wheel, will for an instant be part of its tangent, and this will be an unrepeatable configuration for all time — of the wheel and the rail, of the time and place, unique throughout the cosmos.

As I skim through it now, I am losing myself in this book again. Language, anatomy, the anatomy of airports, anatomical drawings...

Drawing is never reproducing — in order to see, you have to know how to look, and you have to know what you're looking at.

Obsession, obligation, women who walk away, whales drowning in air. The journey of Chopin's heart.

Memory and perception (isn't that what all books are about?).

You can read a beautiful review of Flights in the Glasgow Review of Books.

Last year, I convinced my sister to go see Tokarczuk at her local bookstore, and she was gracious enough to record some of that conversation for me. Politics and Prose has now posted Tokarczuk's talk in full. But one of my favourite segments is the clip above regarding an aspect of the writing process, immersion in one's subject, the controlled psychosis.

Tokarczuk says that egocentric obsession is narcissism, and she contrasts this with the interest and research in something outside yourself, which is therapeutic — writing frees you from yourself. (But when the subject of examination is the self, the self in relation to the world, as my writing has been of late, what kind of obsession is this? Can I be freed from myself by going into myself?)

Singing myself into stupidity

"Scientists have even begun studying the chants," said Frère Sébastien, "trying to explain the popularity of the recording these monks made. People went nuts for it."

"And have they any explanation?"

"Well, when they hooked up probes to volunteers and played Gregorian chants it was quite startling."

"How so?"

"It showed that after a while their brain waves changed. They started producing alpha waves. Do you know what those are?"

"They're the most calm state," said the Chief. "When people are still alert, but at peace."

"Exactly. Their blood pressure dropped, their breathing became deeper. And yet, they also became, as you said, more alert. It was as though they became 'more so,' you know?"

"Themselves, but their best selves."

"That's it. Doesn't work on everyone, of course. But I think it works on you."

Gamache considered that and nodded. "It does. Perhaps not as profoundly as the Gilbertines, but I've felt it."

"While the scientists say it's alpha waves, the Church calls it 'the beautiful mystery.'"

"The mystery being?"

"Why these chants, more than any other church music, are so powerful. Since I'm a monk I think I'll go with the theory they're the voice of God. Though there's a third possibility," the Dominican admitted. "I was at dinner a few weeks ago with a colleague and he has a theory that all tenors are idiots. Something to do with their brain pans and vibration of the sound waves."

Gamache laughed. "Does he know you're a tenor?"

"He's my boss, and he sure suspects I'm an idiot. And he might be right. But what a glorious way to go. Singing myself into stupidity. Maybe Gregorian chants have the same effect. Make us all into happy morons. Scrambling our brains as we sing the chants. Forgetting our cares and worries. Letting the world slip away." The younger man closed his eyes and seemed to go somewhere else. And the, just as quickly, he came back. Opening his eyes he looked at Gamache, and smiled. "Bliss."

"Ecstasy," said Gamache.

"Exactly."

"But for monks it's not just music," said Gamache. "There's also prayer. The chants and prayers. It's a potent combination. Both mind altering, in their way."

When the monk didn't say anything, Gamache continued.

"I've sat here for a number of services now and watched the monks. To a man they go into a sort of reverie when singing the chants. Or even just listening to them. You did it just now, just thinking about the chants."

"Meaning?"

"I've seen that before, you know. On the faces of drug addicts."

— from The Beautiful Mystery, by Louise Penny.

It's one of few memories I have of my father. I was 4, and he took me to church. My mother must have been not feeling well, it was just him and me. I'm sure I fidgeted; I was a good kid, but even then I remember not believing in God. A stern look from my father was enough to still me. But what I remember is him, afterward, amused, telling my mother that I hum along with the priest's chanting. The chanting – that was the only reason I tolerated mass.

I've been self-conscious about my humming ever since. It's stronger than me, the instinctive urge to hum along with almost any type of music. Humming, chanting, is weirdly both physical and spiritual, whether I'm practicing yoga or blissed out on sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.

Home sick in bed for a couple days last week, I glutted on Louise Penny, downloading whatever my library had readily available. In brief:

The Beautiful Mystery is set in a monastery in Northern Quebec, completely removed from the village of Three Pines and its inhabitants. Featuring a small, reclusive order of monks once thought vanished, the rule of silence is lifted so that the brothers can help the investigation into the murder of the choirmaster, who was responsible for the recording of chants that brought the order out of obscurity. Although they indulge in chocolate-covered blueberries, Chief Inspector Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir wrestle with powerful personal demons in this one. Monks, music, and manuscripts — this book was heaven for me.

The Long Way Home, on the other hand, is dependent on some familiarity with the cast of regulars in Three Pines. Gamache's wife plays a larger role than I remember in other books, but this is only natural as she is now a resident of the community, the couple having decided to retire there. While the cast travels first to Toronto and then across Quebec to the stony mouth of the Saint Lawrence, the story journeys into the heart of Quebecois art, with a layover at the Garden of Cosmic Speculation.

The Hangman is disappointing. You need to know that this story was written as part of a series designed to encourage adult literacy. It's simplistic, not nuanced at all. It has the kernel of a good story, but the plotting and characterization are thin. Chronologically the events of this book fall between numbers 6 and 7 in the Inspector Gamache series, but it hardly matters, as there are no developments in the greater character or story arcs. It's short, easy to read, and still compelling, and therefore suitable for its target audience, but you won't miss anything if you skip this one.

If I had a cottage, I'd be sure to stock its shelves with a complete set of Penny's books.

Perhaps the cinnamon shop was the only mystery left in this world

We'll just pause the second crash for a moment to go back and think about the old woman who crashed into the big van earlier on. She's crashed into a van, she's waved away some ladies in white coats, but what no one knows, other than us, is that this is the last day of her life. And yet she's not going to play a bigger role in this novel than that, she's just going to float in the water, just like the novel's only little log. All she does is wave off some ladies n white coats and then: disappears from the story, which is quite symbolic, really, given that the day we meet her, this day, is the day that she dies. So what about this old lady? What about this old lady's entire life? What about the fact that she's taught French grammar at the University of Bergen ever since she got her degree, that she likes coffee with brown sugar, that she doesn't have children, that she's sharper than most people and that her specialty is the French imparfait tense, which can be translated as the "past continuous," and that she'll shortly have a fatal heart attack in a parking lot, possibly triggered by the stress of crashing into another car, and thus, forever, pass into the passé simple, the "simple past" tense? And what about what she was doing early this morning, not knowing that it would be the last time she's do it, those little, everyday things, like drying herself with a hand towel? What about the fact that the old lady, as she walked to her car to drive into town and find a lot that was slightly out of the way, which was where she was heading when she turned onto the road and hit a reversing van, what about the fact that she was thinking about something she'd dreamed during the night, something very strange: that she was at home in Ørsta and that is was December and dark and there was snow everywhere. And that she walked down the small pedestrian street with shops on either side, and everything was closed and there were Christmas stars in all the windows and plastic spruce garlands with yellow and red lights strung between the shops on either side. And these crisscrossed the street with their yellow and red lights as far as the eye could see, and she passed a shop she'd never noticed before, a small green storefront squeezed between the other stores, with a sign that said CINNAMON SHOP. And she went over to the window and looked in and saw that it was true, there was cinnamon everywhere. Cinnamon in small glass bottles in the window, cinnamon in small glass bottles and small paper bags on the shelves behind the counter. Cinnamon in kilo bags. Loose-weight cinnamon under the glass counter. How, she thought, does a shop like this survive? Don't people buy cinnamon in the supermarket? Where they can buy whatever else they might need, cookies, coffee, and bread, she thought in her dream as she stood in front of the window. How much cinnamon would you need in different forms and weights to make you go to the cinnamon shop to buy it? This is what the old lady was pondering, very much awake now as she headed to her car for her last drive in this life. What does one say, she wondered as she pulled her car keys out of her pocket, when one goes into a cinnamon shop? I'd like some cinnamon, please? Isn't that obvious? Or should you say: Do you have any cinnamon? Not, that would make a mockery of the cinnamon shop. The person standing behind the counter would give you a look that clearly said: Idiot. This is a cinnamon shop: of course we have cinnamon! Perhaps, for that reason, it was a silent shop, where there was no need to say anything other than please and thank you, which could be alternated, depending on which transaction was being made (handing over money) (handing over cinnamon) (accepting money) (accepting cinnamon)? The old woman didn't know, but she thought about the feeling she'd had in her dream as she walked away from the cinnamon shop that stood alone in the middle of the pedestrian street, in the December dark one evening in a dream, after closing time, with Christmas stars shining in every direction, and the cinnamon shop's green wooden facade gently illuminated by all the stars: perhaps the cinnamon shop was the only mystery left in this world, and thank goodness for that, thank goodness for the cinnamon shop, thank goodness that it was there, squeezed in between the multitude of other consumer stores, and only sold the one thing, cinnamon, and was so baffling, so utterly baffling, and yet at the same time totally banal and simple and obvious in its existence.

Yes, what about that? What about the fact that the old lady was thinking about all this before she died? And, taking a wider perspective, what about the role that such dreams play when you're going to die? What kind of existence could one say they'd had? They've existed, because they've been in someone's head. But they've never been shared with anyone else. They've existed, they were vibrant and vivid in their existence. What happens to the dreams on's had when one forgets them the minute after one's woken? What happens to the dreams one's had and never told to anyone because one dies before one gets the chance? Did they fly out of her, did she forget? Did they fly out of her like small butterflies when her heart crashed, when all that remained of her was a dream about an absurd cinnamon shop, something invisible that disappeared out of her body, along with herself? Sadly, we will never know the answer to these questions.

— from Wait, Blink, by Gunnhild Øyehaug

Who wants to fall? So much better to climb into love.

There's a review I read over a year ago about a book I'd never heard of that struck a chord. It had taken months from the time I'd dipped in a tentative toe to being fully immersed in online dating and recognizing its erotic potential. According to the LA Review of Books, Allegra Huston's Say My Name was about

a woman's emotional and physical reawakening after half a lifetime trapped within both a stale marriage and the limits of her own perception about who she is and what she ought to be.

So, relatable.

It's been retitled as A Stolen Summer; I don't understand the reason for the change — neither title is particularly fitting or evocative.

I read it in one sitting. Part of me wants to justify my guilty feeling of indulgence in this book. On some level I am dismissive of this novel — both the story and the manner of its telling. It's a love affair between a 48-year-old woman and the 29-year-old son of an old friend.

Here, Huston describes How To Write a Sex Scene, and demonstrates some smarts and humour about it. (There's also an excerpt.)

Sex is one of the great motivating factors of life on earth. Yet in the past, women writers couldn't describe it frankly without being considered "loose." (Some didn't mind, but they lived in Paris.) Men didn't dare write good sex out of fear that they might out themselves as being not very good at it. And thus the mark of quality literature became, not great sex scenes, but scenes of morose men drinking in bars.

The truth is: I wholly enjoyed the evening I spent with this book. Beyond a doubt it was compelling, and despite some quibbles, it's given me a great deal to think about. While I don't find it exactly enlightening, it's given me an outlook on how some women my age and some younger men approach their sexuality, and their life.

A few things strike me as unrealistic in this novel.

Eve is my age (a year younger actually) with a 24-year-old son. No one in my college-educated crowd got married and had children that young. People tend to "settle down" at an age slightly older than in generations past. So this scenario makes the book feel a little outdated, and a little incongruous with the otherwise instant-download and text-infused modern setting.

Micajah is a truly exceptional young man. Not so many men are attuned to the workings of the female body at the age of 30; it takes a great deal of enlightenment, and experience and confidence. Most don't even express an interest in learning till years later, when they somehow begin to see outside themselves. Younger men often turn to older women in the hopes of learning something.

"It's hard to explain."

"Try. I'm good at this kind of thing."

"What kind of thing?"

"Understanding baffling concepts that make no sense to anybody but the person who has them." He He places his finger in the crook of her elbow. "I already know you don't cheat."

"Actually, you know the complete opposite," she says slowly, feeling that she no longer knows herself.

"No. What you did — what we did — was absolutely true. That was you."

He's right. Looking back from the perspective of that rooftop, it's her life with Larry that was, in larger and larger proportion, a lie.

Even though this novel sets out out to turn common elements of the romance novel upside down, to do so it has to acknowledge them. So, while Eve is aware that this romance has no future, she has to consciously work at being OK with that. This is a broad generalization, I know, but it seems women think about love and romance in terms of forever instead of in the moment, they think about the future of things instead of the now. Huston and her protagonist are relatively smart about this, but it makes me sad that love isn't easier for more women. Maybe I'm just lucky to live among a more enlightened group of friends, and not among suburban Jersey housewives. We know we don't need a man to be fulfilled.

"We could stop and get takeout," he says.

This is the step that will bring her into the sunlight — as long as she's strong enough not to care how big the patch of sunlight is or how long it will last. She will be agreeing to premeditated sex with a man she barely knows, someone shockingly unsuitable who has already shredded her self-control — yet who makes her feel, wen she is with him, like herself, in a way she cannot recall ever feeling before.

She remembers her mother hanging out five children's worth of laundry on the clothesline in their backyard, the tired corners of her mouth weighing down her smile. What would she say? Eve is suddenly overcome by a longing that her mother could have taken a lover, seized even an hour purely for herself.

"Okay." She smiles. "Chinese."

Fate has given her a gift. In honor of her sacrificed, sacrificing mother, she will allow Micajah to break her heart.

(Even if it's short-lived, why does it have to be heartbreak?)

Is this an erotic novel? I don't think so. Yet it's suffused with something. It's never cheesy, it's mature, and still sexy.

One thing that drew me to this novel is that it features a musical instrument, a badly damaged, intricately carved viol d'amore. I would've loved to hear more about its history and restoration, but that would've been a very different novel.

Coincidentally, this week I read about a book of poems about walking and the poet talked about how love is about falling, it's a different motion and momentum. So this line from A Stolen Summer really stuck me:

Who wants to fall? So much better to climb into love.

"Man must not lie. Man has a small head."

He tossed the book away and turned over to lie on his back.

France was to blame. Yes, France was most definitely to blame. He was never like this at home.

[...] Here in Biarritz life was completely different — mad, fun, even a little seedy. Yes, that was the word: seedy. And there was the perpetual rush of the ocean. And the bracing air. And these stupid books. And the eternal waiting, the constant premonition of love...

Isolde, by Irina Odoevsteva, is a gem of a book, unexpected and a page-turner. Originally published in 1929, it is gut-wrenching and tragic. It's mostly about Liza, who is just fourteen years old at the novel's start. That summer in Biarritz, Cromwell falls in love with her, and christens her Isolde after the novel he's reading. She adores the attention, and her brother Nikolai is quick to recognize the opportunity to milk Cromwell for extravagant evenings at the casino and the use of his car. When they return to Paris, Liza's boyfriend Andrei joins in the excesses.

Liza and Kolya's mother, meanwhile, is mostly absent. She insists they call her Natasha, never Mama, as she presents herself as their aunt charged with the orphans' care. She is always on the lookout for a man to fund her lifestyle. One such lover is the hapless Bunny – married and irresponsible, driving his own family to the poorhouse for Natasha's sake. He has difficulty accepting that Natasha prefers another, and that she has no use for him with his money gone:

His desperation and pain had disappeared. He felt quiet, calm and light. He felt like it wasn't Fanny lying next to him, not his wife, but his grandmother, and they had wrapped themselves up in her chequered shawl. It smelt of cinnamon and onions. And it wasn't Fanny sighing and sobbing at his ear, but his grandmother teaching him in her monotone voice:

"Man must not lie. Man has a small head. He'll lie and then he'll forget what he's lied about. Not like a horse. A horse has a big head. A horse can lie if it wants to."

(Oh, the foolish men, who never consider the consequences.)

Even while Liza condemns her mother's behaviour, she emulates it. Sadly, Natasha begins to see Liza's youth and beauty as a threat. And she leaves with her lover for Nice, never to be seen again.

There's probably a thesis in here about women's age and sexuality — the women are grandmothers and asexual, or caretakers and asexual, or they are young, beautiful, and privileged and burgeoning with sexuality. We encounter Cromwell's mother only two or three times, but have a very clear picture of the kind of woman she is:

She got back into bed. As she pulled up the cover, her hand brushed her naked breast and immediately recoiled in disgust, as if she had touched a toad, so repulsive was her naked body to her.

About midway through the novel, we flash back to Liza's early childhood. I felt this section lagged a little. On the whole, Natasha's motivations are already quite clear; this background made me mildly more sympathetic toward her. But this section goes a long way toward explaining Liza's relationship with Russia and some of her actions later in the book.

Liza is itching to grow up, but she still longs to be mothered. How differently she might've fared if her mother had not abandoned her.

She reaches out a hand and plucks an apple from the fruit bowl.

She no longer has a heart in her breast. It's empty and silent there. Her heart is this red apple. This is it — her heart. It's sitting in the palm of her hand. It's exposed, it's beating, it flutters and it loves. It feels everything. She squeezes it with her fingers, and her heart feels pain. What should she do with it? What should she do with her heart?

She holds the apple out to Andrei.

"Eat this Andrei, it's a gift from me to you."

Andrei takes the apple indifferently, rubs it on his sleeve and then digs his strong white teeth into it, taking a big bite.

"This pain is going to be horrible," Liza thinks. "He's eating my heart." She clenches her fists to stifle a cry of pain. But it doesn't hurt at all. She looks at Andrei in surprise and watches his white teeth chomp on the apple. And it doesn't hurt at all. "It's not my heart. I'm just drunk. Drop it. Don't eat it, Andrei."

Andrei throws the apple core on the floor.

She doesn't love Cromwell, or his cousin. She doesn't know Russia enough to love her, but she loves the idea of Russia. I think she loves Andrei in a similar way, for what he represents. And Liza's heart is eaten alive.

"You know, Andrei, I keep thinking," she said slowly. "I keep thinking how difficult and dreary life must be if childhood is as good as it gets. And if it's all downhill from here, I don't want to grow up." She shook her head. "And, you know, I don't think I ever will."

"Nonsense, Liza. It's only because you're fourteen. Fourteen is the worst age. You'll be fifteen in March and it will all be much easier then."

She shook her head again.

"Oh, no, no. I don't believe that. It won't get any easier, or any better."

It doesn't get any better.

At the intersection of truth and wishful thinking

Then he'd gotten back up, and walked some more. For hours.

[...]

He only stopped when he'd met himself again. The Armand who'd been standing on the side of the quiet road, in the middle of nowhere, waiting. At the intersection of truth and wishful thinking.

I showed up at bookclub a couple years ago, for a book I hadn't entirely enjoyed. The usual bookclub host was out sick and couldn't make it — she'd asked one of the other bookstore employees to fill in, someone who hadn't read the book. One other reader showed up. It was a quiet evening at the shop, so the bookstore clerk on duty sat down and had a beer with us.

That other reader though. I want to say her name was Marion, it was — she was — of another era. She must've been seventy-something, elegantly grey, incongruously carrying a plastic shopping bag to haul some notes, a shawl. She couldn't possibly have ever worked, apart from arranging tea or some fundraising down at the club. She was visiting from Texas, and had a night in Montreal before embarking on her adventure. What better activity than attending a book club about a book she happened to have recently read. The book in question was short stories by Teffi, but that doesn't matter.

She drawled loud and slow, her head bobbing gently. And she told us she'd stopped in Montreal on her way to Three Pines. Of course she knew it was a fictional place; but she needed to see the village that inspired it. Marion was on her way to the Eastern Townships to meet Louise Penny, and to celebrate the launch of the latest instalment of the Inspector Gamache books. That would've been Glass Houses.

This is only the fifth book I've read of the series, now fifteen strong. But it's peopled by characters so familiar, in a place just down the road. They don't call these cozy mysteries for nothing.

Louise Penny is a frightfully astute observer of the human condition.

Men and women going about their lives. Apparently quite normal. On the outside. Their skin stretched across the void inside.

Glass Houses has two main narrative threads. The "present day" courtroom drama in a sweltering July, and the events of the previous November, including the murder for which someone is now standing trial. We don't know the nature of the crime, who the victim is or who the perpetrator, until we are quite a way into the book (some readers may find this frustrating).

As is typical of Penny, there's a healthy dose of real-life Quebec politics thrown in, this time a drug crisis, the organization of the drug's trafficking within Quebec and across international borders, and the failure of authorities to clamp down — all issues in the news in recent years.

At the core of the book is the concept of the cobrador, a debt collector who dresses like Darth Vader (or Death, or a plague doctor). Penny's version is a collector of moral debts. It turns out almost everyone believes the cobrador could be there for them.

Gamache and others have to decide if their job is to uphold the law or to do what's right. Gamache is Churchill allowing Coventry to be bombed, for the greater good.

And Lacoste remembered the advice given to Mossad agents. Advice Lacoste had found abhorrent, wrong on every level. Until it had been explained.

The instruction given the Israeli agents, if they met resistance during an assault, was kill the women first.

Because if a woman was ever driven so far as to pick up a weapon she would be the most committed, the least likely to ever give up.

Kill the women first.

Lacoste still hated the advice. The simplicity of it. The baldness. But she also hated that the philosophy behind it was almost certainly true.

To be honest, I thought Marion at bookclub was crazy. Maybe because I'm afraid of becoming her. But I haven't forgotten about her. In fact, I rather admire her. Why shouldn't I be like her, following the paths of my favourite imaginary people?

And let me admit now how much I loved to be enveloped in the world of Three Pines. I could stand to spend a little more time there. I'm going back to read the ones I've missed.

It wasn't really, he knew, about less fear. It was about more courage.

Sex short circuits all imaginative exchange

C: Ann thought it was a great project, more perverse than just having an affair. She thinks it'd make a good book! When Dick calls shall we tell him we're considering publication?

S: No. The murder hasn't happened yet. Desire's still unconsummated. Let the media wait.

It didn't occur to me when I started writing letters a year and a half ago, unsent, that I was working within an already established art form. In fact, I didn't think of art or work at all. It was therapy.

What makes it a letter and not a diary entry is intention and direction. I needed to say something to someone in particular. At first it was the recovering heroin addict ex-boyfriend. But as those feelings resolved themselves, I wrote to some version of myself. Finally the letters became stories I tell my (mostly) imaginary lover.

This is not quite how I Love Dick unfolds, but Chris Kraus has done something similar, projecting an impassioned love affair on a man she barely knows.

So. Highly relatable.

Chris and Sylvère, together some ten years, are dining with Dick, an academic acquaintance of Sylvère's, and they go back to Dick's place and drink some more, by which time Chris is totally crushing on Dick, and when she confides in Sylvère the next day, they begin writing letters to Dick that they never send. They create ménage à trois where none existed, and explore its outcomes, without any basis other than Chris's love (imaginary or real?) for Dick.

My coworker noticed it on my desk — she's read it — asked me how I liked it, but when I said relatable, she gave me a funny look.

I mean the imaginary love affair part. I have no idea what else this book has in store. Oh god, they joke about a murder, maybe that goes somewhere. I hope she doesn't think I plan murders.

Have Chris and I spent this past week in turmoil just to turn our lives into a text?

(Yes!)

On the car ride home I started reading Research Into Marriage, then underlining, footnoting and annotating all the passages that could relate to me and you. It's an exercise both adolescent (me!) and academic (you!) ... my first art object, which I'll give you as a present.

I want to go back to the beginning and annotate this book as it relates to my own imaginary love affair. So badly. Every bit that makes this book so relatable. I will make an offering of it.

I'm about halfway through this book when I start rereading, pencil in hand. I had been swept away by this book as a model of what I could do with my own writing; I want to slow down to better understand it. On rereading, this book is not what I was experiencing at all. The text was merely, magically, a trigger for my own interior experience, but already it's not a story I recognize, it's telling a different story from the one I thought I was reading. Those lines of insight I thought would stay with me, the passages I wanted to mark when no pencil was in reach — I can't find them anymore.

There's a comment about Schoenberg and I remember the lovely novel I read last winter that I never got round to writing about.

I Love Dick. I Love Dick. I Love ... (I need to make this book my own.) I Love Marc. Making My Marc. Making My Mark. (That's not clever, it's cheesy.)

[How would he react to having his name changed? I don't think he'd like it, it's no longer the truth. Maybe he'd rather remain anonymous. Of course, him being imaginary, I don't even have to tell him, he'd never find out about this. I'll tell him. Of course I'll tell him. I tell him everything. That's almost the fucking point. Does he know that he's now an art experience? Maybe I've always subconsciously known that that's what he was meant to be, what we were meant to be. He has no agency of his own, only that which I bestow upon him. I create him.]

And then Chris went alone into her room and wrote a letter, thinking she would send it, about sex and love. She was all confused about wanting to have sex, sensing that at this point if she slept with Dick the whole thing would be over. THE — UNEXAMINED — LIFE — IS NOT — WORTH — LIVING flashed the titles of a Ken Kobland film against the backbeat of a carfuck 1950s song. "As soon as sex takes place, we fall," she wrote, thinking, knowing from experience, that sex short circuits all imaginative exchange. The two together get too scary. So she wrote some more about Henry James. Although she really wanted both. "Is there a way," she wrote in closing, "to dignify sex, make it as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?"

And this makes me sad because it becomes clear to me that she does not understand sex the way I do, it is complicated and not grotesque and it is entirely cerebral, my imaginary lover and I agree that creative juices and sexual juices flow into each other, the nature of exchange need not be verbal, it becomes something else.

Slightly deranged scrutiny

I'm not sure why I decided to read Mary Karr's The Liar's Club — tragically depressing memoir is not my go-to genre. Of course, I knew about it, and it must've been recently impressed upon me that this was the mother of my generation's memoirs. And what the hell, all reading is research.

But it is good — compelling and funny and full of quirky characters and attitude. Karr wasn't just born into a memoir, she finely crafted one. It's dark and disturbing and lovely.

Read it.

Karr's a poet, and I wondered that I wasn't finding more quotable passages, but I know that poetry isn't about a choice word, it's a rhythm, it's the timing of a punchline and a punch to the gut. It turns on a dime from charming dietary quirks to alcohol-fueled danger, from naive neighbourhood antics to sexual abuse. This is not an easy book.

What's magical about The Liar's Club is that despite her traumatic childhood, there's a whole lot of love, and something like awe for the parents who neglected her and failed her in so many ways.

Much later, when Mother could be brought to talk about her own childhood, she told stories about how peculiar her mother's habits had been. Grandma Moore didn't sound like such a religious fanatic back then. She just seemed like a fanatic in general. For instance, she had once sent away for a detective-training kit from a magazine. The plan was for her and Mother to spy on their neighbors — this, back when the Lubbock population still fit into three digits. According to Mother, this surveillance went on for weeks. Grandma would stirrup Mother up to the parson's curtained windows — and not because of any suspected adultery of flagrant sinning, but to find out whether his wife did her cakes from scratch or not. She kept the answers to these kinds of questions in an alphabetized log of prominent families. She would also zero in on some particular person who troubled her and keep track of all his comings and goings for weeks on end. She knew the procedure for taking fingerprints and kept Mother's on a recipe card, in case she was ever kidnapped. Grandma even began to collect little forensic envelops of hair and dust that she found on people's furniture when she visited them. Mother said that for the better part of a year, they'd be taking tea at some lady's house, when her mother would suddenly sneak an envelope with something like a dustball in it into the pocket of her pinafore. Whatever became of this evidence Mother couldn't say. The whole detective-training deal got dropped as abruptly as it had been undertaken.

When Grandma came to our house, she brought with her that same kind of slightly deranged scrutiny.

In her introduction to the 10th anniversary edition, Mary Karr observes, "a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it." I've this summer had occasion several times over to corroborate this.

I love this story about Grandma and her spy kit because I read it while visiting relatives this summer, and my crazy aunt (by marriage) pulled out her shoebox of quartered recipe cards, on which she had jotted down everything she knew about us. Which wasn't much and was slightly wrong and oddly selective. For example, she had my ex listed as an accountant (not quite, but maybe if you squinted), and she didn't have a clue what I did for a living. So I know people, even family, do strange things for unaccountable reasons.

And Karr's family gets up to some crazy shit.

The Liar's Club is how she referred to her father's coterie — blue collar workers who drank together at the Legion and told outlandish tales. Her trips with Daddy to the Legion trailed off at puberty. She returns once when she's home from college.

Something about the Legion clarified who I was, made me solid inside, like when you twist the binocular lens to the perfect depth and the figure you're looking at gets definite. Maybe I just liked holding a place in such a male realm.

It's a peculiar thing to title this book, because it's her mother (in my view) who leads the book; with so many secrets, her mother is the biggest liar of them all.

You can read Lena Dunham's foreword to the 20th-anniversary edition at The Paris Review.

See "They're Liars, and That's Just the Least of Their Problems," by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times.

The weight of absence

"Melancholia, as you call it, germinates in the mind, but blossoms in the body."

The Therapist by Nial Giacomelli is a slim novel with weighty aspirations. It's wholly atmospheric and a little strange.

I didn't enjoy this book much, and most of that's on me. It covers depressing subject matter, the kind of emotional drama that just isn't my jam. It's about grief, a couple dealing with grief, and I think I can just leave it at that so as not to spoil anything for you. I have yet to read a book that takes on grieving as a theme in a way that resonates meaningfully with me.

We sit beneath a painting of the sea and talk about the weight of absence. How after the accident we had both begun to see the body of our own grief. We had watched as it was born, fusing bone and knitting skin. How over the course of several weeks it had come together in the shape not of a man, but of a boy. And how gradually it had taken residence in the house, bringing with it a furious anger.

I didn't like the narrator. He comes across as a selfish asshole husband. Now, this is kind of the point, as it's very much tied up in the blame that is thrown around the guilt everyone denies or wallows in. But the aha moment came too late for me to care — I deeply loathed the asshole for being in his marriage in the way that he was and didn't give a shit about his redemption. I put this one on the author — maybe it's a question of the timing of certain revelations of the narrator's character. Maybe this is a woman's reading of his character, but I disliked him too much, too early. That is, I can appreciate what the author was trying to do with this character, but it didn't work for me.

She suffered stress headaches, much like she had as a teenager, migraines that would blossom like cactus flowers in the depths of her eye sockets. She was struck by a terrible malaise that kept her bedridden. And though I knew only stories of her youth, I was forced to watch helplessly as the wounds of her depression reopened across the geography of her body.

While grief takes up residence in their bodies, a plague is ravaging America. People are becoming transparent, until they disappear. They become one with the dead before them. Our couple lives in terror of the disease encroaching on their own remote territory. I would've preferred to focus on that epic apocalypse, or on the neighbours (the kind of Joneses you want to keep up with, despite them having their own deep troubles) rather than the intimate one. (But there's a point in here too about grief and how intensely private it is; it refuses sometimes to let the world in, it can't be fixed from the outside.)

By day we explore the geography of the continent and at night we explore the geography of each other. Two shapes that come together as one.

The metaphor was crafted to death. The words "body" and "bodies" occur more than 100 times in this 125-page story. Body-related imagery combined with geographical references abounds.

An infographic appears showing landmass consumed by an acreage of growing red dots. It looks like an X-ray, an organ riddled with tumours.

Taken individually, many of these sentences are stunning, but the whole of them felt overwritten and tiresome.

They walk like a chain gang into a makeshift compound, a shanty town of relief tents that look like white pustules against the landscape.

Shame on me, but life et cetera, and I skimmed through the final pages. Something about the incorporeality of love and what love can then embody. The resolution is not entirely clear to me, nor do I understand the nature of the eponymous therapist.