Best Translated Book Nominees: Ma Jian's CHINA DREAM (Translated by Flora Drew)

I never could have imagined Billy Pilgrim* as a moderately powerful bureaucrat in 21st Century People's Republic of China, but Ma Jian sure did. And why do we read international fiction if not to be surprised once in a while by weirdness like that?

But our hero, Ma Daode, is not unstuck in time because of aliens from outer space, but because his own greatest task is bringing about the state of affairs he is experiencing for everyone! As head of the China Dream bureau, he is tasked with a combination of propaganda and technological compulsion that will bring all of Chinese society (and eventually all of humanity) into a state of literally all dreaming current leader Xi Xinping's dream of harmony and homogeneity for China, both in daily life and during actual REM sleep. It's a terrifying idea that Ma Jing confronts here, and he does so bravely and with that most potent of dissident defenses, ridicule. 

China Dream does not concern itself with how a chip implanted into people's brains to over-write their dreams and memories with a collective one might work or be developed -- indeed, our hero eventually resorts to a decidedly non-technological means to his end -- but instead focuses on Director Ma, the deeply flawed and barely competent man saddled with overseeing this dystopian project. Ma was a young Red Guard during the cultural revolution, who turned in his own parents as Rightists for very slight thoughtcrimes but is haunted more by memories of bloody factional violence within the Red Guard than by guilt over an action that led to his parents' suicide. He copes with those memories, into which the reader is drawn repeatedly without warning, through debauchery described with enough sickening detail to make China Dream a fairly unpleasant listen for people who don't appreciate sex scenes (yo!) but at least narrator David Shih didn't get too lip-smacky about it, and translator Flora Drew struck a decent balance between writing erotica and clinically descriptive porn, so while I wanted a shower after each of these scenes I didn't also wish for some kind of memory educating soup to scrub them out of my brain.

But boy, do I wish Drew, who is Ma Jian's partner in life, could have worked on him about how he wrote his female barely-characters, most of whom are Director Ma's mistresses. As depicted here, they are uniformly two-dimensional and single-minded in their pursuit of this gross old man's affections. I'm sure this is at least partly meant as a commentary on power dynamics, but such a commentary would be even more effective if the women in the story got to be people, and got to talk about something besides their moistness. Especially since narrator Shih gave them uniformly artificial and breathy Female Speech Patterns. Yuck.

The scenes from Director Ma's memories are, however, uniformly brilliant, harrowing and nightmarish and vivid; Ma is a fully realized character whose story is compelling and serves as a scathing indictment of totalitarianism and its ultimate logical ends, of the cost in ordinary lives and ordinary dreams the pursuit of this exacts, and the ridiculousness of the equally ordinary humans who claim to be willing to pay those costs in the pursuit of a bad dream. 

This will not be my last Ma Jia read, though likely my last audio book of his work. It's a lot harder to skip icky sex scenes in the audio medium than in text, I've found. 

*The unstuck-in-time boob-hero of Kurt Vonnegut's SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

Best Translated Book Nominees : Sinan Antoon's THE BOOK OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE (translated by Jonathan Wright)

Bearing the title that it does, The Book of Collateral Damage cannot be expected to be a lighthearted and cheery read, but let's take a moment to contemplate a list of the things author Sinan Antoon and translator Jonathan Wright will make you feel like crying about over its relatively short length: a fledgling bird, a carpet, a tree, a stamp album, a racehorse, a bedroom wall, an oud (an Arabian stringed instrument kind of like a lute), a cassette tape (oh my god did I blubber at The Colloquy of the Tape), a roll of film... plus, you know, various people, including a woman whose poetry survived thousands of years on a Mesopotamian tablet only to disappear in 2003 (probably ending up in Hobby Lobby's stolen hoard)...  I mean, there's evoking empathy and then there's whatever these guys do, and I'm a complete mess and unfit for company right now and I just want them to do it to me again.

The novel, written in such a profusion of incredible poetic imagery and language that I wish my Arabic was better so I could enjoy the original*, concerns two men: an academic, Nameer, who emigrated from Iraq to the United States, and Wadood, a bookseller he met on a trip back to Baghdad. Nameer's story of academic life in an adopted country is interesting enough, if kind of just a slight variant on the male narcissist writer narrative we're sick of from the likes of Updike and Irving, but is quickly and rightly subsumed by his obsession with Wadood's life's work: a catalog of person, animal and "inanimate" (I'll explain the scare quotes in a moment) object destroyed, minute by minute, in the Iraq War.** Wadood presented Nameer with a draft of this work on their first meeting, and Nameer, blown away by its beauty, tragedy and importance, wants more than anything that it be published in Arabic for the home crowd and then that he be allowed to translate it into English for a wider audience. 

Destruction also has a tablet preserved, somewhere in the netherworld. On it are written the names of everything that will be obliterated and everyone who will die. Every night I see myself flying and I read what's written and I come back to write it in my catalog.

It's not 100% clear whether this passage, like many in the book, is meant to be understood as Nameer's or Wadood's writing, but ultimately it doesn't matter; Gene Wolfe fans like me are quite accustomed to blurred narrator identities, but unlike in a Gene Wolfe book, I don't feel like the question of who is writing what is meant to be a puzzle for me to solve; the blurring is the point; the two men's experiences dovetail. One could almost see them as one man split in two by, say, a quantum event, whether or not a family home was destroyed by a bomb in war-torn Baghdad in their youth. The man who came upon the rubble as a boy became Wadood; the one who didn't escaped Iraq and became Nameer. Who didn't really escape at all, as his fixation on Wadood and his work and his encounters with a therapist make readily apparent.

Of course it's Wadood's "Colloquies" which really set this work apart. Antoon-as-Wadood does a heartbreakingly perfect job of imbuing things like walls and rolls of film with personality, memory and emotional resonance. Hints throughout point to everything named in these Colloquies having been within or at least associated with the aforementioned destroyed home, but they could just as easily have been things all over Baghdad that were destroyed in the same attack.

Anyway, like I said, I'm a wreck now, and I've got to take a break from this project (especially since the next few of the books from the Best Translated Book Award long list that I've got, I've got as audio books, and I don't consume those as rapidly as I did back when I was stuck half-blind in the attic last year). But I've still got several to go before I read the one that actually won, so keep watching this space, friends.

And give this one a look. Just have some tissues handy. And be prepared to apologize to the ones you use and throw away.

*I loved Urdu poetry the most when I was studying that language! Which I've forgotten most of in the 20-some years since I blew off my grad school research to do that! So I know I could improve my Arabic enough to open up this pleasure to me as well, but... which flavor of Arabic? 

**Peter Greenaway fans take note: if you love Greenaway's mania for lists and catalogs, this is your novel. 

Rosemary Sullivan's STALIN'S DAUGHTER: THE EXTRAORDINARY AND TUMULTUOUS LIFE OF SVETLANA ALLELUYEVA

Some people have unbelievably strange lives, and then there's Svetlana Alleluyeva, aka Svetlana Dzhukashvilli, aka Lana Peters, aka... but better known as

Her real life, even in a bare bones outline, is weirder than any novel or movie could convey, which is to say that author Rosemary Sullivan had something of an unfair advantage as far as writing a book which would absolutely rivet its audience. As a young girl, Svetlana watched* her family disappear like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, but only later on in life learned that this was usually because they'd either angered her father or in some way posed a threat to or just annoyed one of his advisors. Usually a combination of those. When her father died his weird lingering death surrounded by people who weren't sure if they should help him, she got to watch the bizarre power struggles to succeed him and got treated as a pawn in them. She had been forbidden to marry her first love, a screenwriter who had rather glowing biopics of V.I. Lenin on his resume, because whoops, he was Jewish, but then was later allowed to marry a Jewish man (the first of many husbands; how many depends on how you count them, because some marriages were more official than others because totalitarianism). She finally got out of the U.S.S.R. only to scatter the ashes of an Indian citizen (whom she considered her fourth (?) husband but wasn't allowed to actually marry) on India's Ganges River and managed to slip her minders and sneak over to the U.S. Embassy to defect. She became a successful author and earned a lot of money with sensational but honest books but lost a lot of it in, for example, another ill-advised marriage to a member of Frank Lloyd Wright's posthumous cult. She met everyone from Isaiah Berlin to Terry Waite. She defected back to the U.S.S.R. at one point, teenaged half-American daughter in tow, because she missed the children she'd left behind in her first defection. And so on.

Sullivan gives all of this an immediacy and a felt impact largely through intimate interviews and hard-won access to enough of Svetlana's private (?) papers to be able to share Svetlana's perspective on matters in her own voice. Wisely, Sullivan foreshadows very little; if we don't already know what Stalin and his cohort were really up to from sources other than this book, we are not enlightened, in the course of the narrative, until Svetlana is. So at first Joseph Stalin is just a weirdly distant daddy whose children enjoy (?) considerable privilege but don't understand that they do because they're so insulated from the rest of society and aren't even told the truth about why certain family members (including Svetlana's own mother) aren't around anymore, and only later do we come to see him in anything like the way the rest of the world does -- and we get to share Svetlana's whiplash as her home country goes through crazed cycles of revering and reviling her father's memory, sentiments that she bears the brunt of once her father is dead, both in the U.S.S.R. and in her other homes of India, the United States and the United Kingdom. As she observes of the cult of personality around Stalin even decades after his death, "Tragically, many, even in the Gulag, continued to insist that Stalin knew nothing. It was evil advisers who were responsible.."

In the process, we get a timely reminder, as the present moment has brought many socialist ideas back to the fore, that we can't blindly trust people who espouse them to stick to them or the credo behind them. Once upon a time, Stalin and Beria and Khruschev would have agreed that eating the rich and defunding the police are good ideas, but not for the reasons that most of those now proclaiming them (myself included) generally mean them. The price of freedom is vigilance, and if a second socialist revolution ever occurs here in the West, the revolutionaries will do well to keep each other in check and remain vigilant against power grabs, ideological purity tests, authoritarianism in the guise of fairness, and any notion that ends justify means. It's really, really hard work, and I hope that we are smarter than the poor, starved, hidebound Russian populace of 1917 were and can learn from their experience. Sharing this book widely can only help.

*Ok, "watched" isn't quite so much the word as something like "noticed week's later that it had been a weirdly long time since she'd seen a person", but hey. We don't have a word for that, do we?

Best Translated Book Nominees: Burhan Sönmez' LABYRINTH: A NOVEL (Translated by Ummit Hussein)

I've never been less certain that the people who wrote the jacket copy for a novel read the same book that I did than in the case of Labyrinth: A Novel, my latest read from the long list for the Best Translated Book Award.*

The marketing for Labyrinth describes it variously as a crime novel and a heady political tale, but I see neither in this rather nice and moving story of a young semi-famous blues singer/songwriter/guitarist in Istanbul, Turkey who wakes up from an apparent suicide attempt with a wicked case of amnesia. Intriguing premise for a crime or political novel, right? I mean, was it a for- real suicide attempt or attempted murder? If it was really a suicide attempt, what brought this young, well off, good looking young musician to such a pass? Something terrible on his conscience to do with crime or politics because this is, you know, a crime novel? If it was a murder attempt made to look like suicide, who wanted him dead and why? Did he witness something he shouldn't? Was he a bad guy himself? Or a political dissenter the current regime in Turkey wanted quashed?

But, uh, nope. None of this really gets asked or, really, even answered in the text of the novel (and I'm a Gene Wolfe fan, so I'm used to really really having to pay attention when mysterious things get mysterious in fiction). Well, maybe a little bit about why our man, Boratin, would suddenly decide one night to exit his taxi while it was stuck in a traffic jam on the Bosphorus Bridge and jump right off said bridge to his suddenly intended death, but only a little bit. Like, nobody he asks has any idea, his therapist isn't much help, and then Boratin is more interested in figuring out what to do with his life moving forward than in solving this mystery of his past. 

The only clue we're given is that two of Boratin's favorite musicians, pre-swan dive,were Kurt Cobain (who committed suicide at age 27) and a Turkish guitar god named Yavus Çetin (who committed suicide at age 30). And yes, I looked up Yavuz Çetin and wow is he a revelation. See below where I'll link to a playlist I made for this novel.

Anyway, so unless I really, really read this one wrong (not impossible!) this is neither a heady political nor a crime story, but that's fine, you guys. Because it's a good book, a fine story, and worth reading on its own merits and not only because it will lead you to the discovery of some kickass Turkish pop music. 

Boratin as we get to know him (and he gets to know himself) via his friends and family, emerges as a very kind and generous young man who inspires considerable loyalty in his friends and bandmates and whose widowed sister really misses him and loves him devotedly even though he's not been to visit her and her son in years. There might well be something to this last bit -- why has he avoided his family for so long? -- and maybe his friends are lying to him about what he was like before the Bridge, but what about the neighborhood people who fall all over themselves to extend affection and gratitude to him when he happens by? Was he like, actually some kind of gangster or police informer or something and they're actually all scared of them?

That question, that idea, only occurs to me because of the jacket copy, I must emphasize. There is no textual evidence to support or even suggest it, no furtive glances, no signs of fear on the part of other characters, no unexplained suggestive imagery bubbling up from Boratin's subconscious... Without this crime/political designation I would have read Labyrinth as an elegant and moving account of an amnesiac coming to terms with his condition, deciding whom to trust with the truth of it, choosing how much effort he wants to put into recovering his memory, and determining his best course forward. That's more than enough for a good novel right there, and this is a good novel, especially since it also vividly depicts a place not a lot of us are ever going to experience any other way. Even if we get to 21st century Istanbul or have already been many times, we're not going to experience it the way a hot young Turkish musician is going to.

And that, my friends, is what I read for. And listen for: here's the promised playlist. Yavuz, man. Dayum.

*The winners have been announced for this, so now I know what to save for last!

Hilary Mantel's THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT

History is always a spoiler for historical fiction, so I knew, as the virtual pages of The Mirror and the Light dwindled, that I was about to lose a beloved friend and I emotionally braced for it, but even so, I cried when it happened... in the book. Of course it really happened over 500 years ago.

Hilary Mantel definitely fills the role left empty lo these many years by the late Dame Dorothy Dunnet, and Mantel is a more than worthy successor, but she hasn't aped the mistress' achievements so much as inverted them. Dunnett wants us mystified by her heroes, guessing at their motivations and what they're going to do next, unable to penetrate their facades. Thorfinn, Lymond, Niccolo, all are observed from the outside; we get accounts of their deeds from the point of view of everbody else they encounter, spending a bit exploring the interiority of each of their friends, enemies, lovers, employers, lords. And nobody does this better than Dorothy.

This is not where she and Hilary Mantel overlap. What they share is a commitment to research and to world-building (as my friend Connor Wroe Southard explores in his latest) and an utter lack of fear of going long to create as complete a portrait of their ages and milieus as they can. Mantel just assumes a bit less erudition and command of languages on the part of her readers, is all, which can make her seem a bit more accessible than Dunnett, but beware: Mantel doesn't suffer foolish readers either. The first and, to a degree, second books in this trilogy were famously difficult for many readers (and, at first attempt, for me as I discussed on this blog long ago) due to Mantel's commitment to the tightest possible focus on her protagonist that didn't require an out-and-out first person narrator; we hover practically on his shoulder for hundreds and hundreds of pages, a bit baffled at times until it dawns on us (or is explained) that in Hilary Mantel's Tudor England, "he" means Thomas Cromwell 99% of the time, even if he is not named in a sentence or paragraph and someone else, say, King Henry VIII, actually has been. I found this incredibly off-putting the first time I read Wolf Hall, but have come to not only embrace it but possibly prefer it to the first person narrator to which authors usually resort when they want to achieve this level of intimacy with a protagonist.

And intimacy there is, right up until the moment the axe falls, and throughout the account of the last, greatest and most troublesome act of Thomas Cromwell's career. He has been intimately involved in the getting of all of Henry VIII's replacement wives. Queen 2.0, Anne Boleyn, absolutely relied on him until she found, to her surprise, that she could not, and Cromwell took advantage of her fall to take down a whole bunch of men who had treated Cromwell's original Patron (Cardinal Thomas Wolsey) badly after Wolsey repeatedly failed to get the Pope to annul Henry's marriage to Queen 1.0. Anne's reign and downfall encompass the second novel Bring Up the Bodies, which ends more or less right as the headsman from Calais executes her publicly with a sword inscribed, as we learn in this third book, "mirror of justice, pray for us," the first of many references to mirrors and lights, here.*

The Mirror and the Light takes us through the reign of Queen 3.0, Jane Seymour, whose rise together with her family from Wolf Hall owes, again, a lot to Thomas Cromwell, and who might have proven a boon to the whole country had she survived after giving birth to Henry's only legitimate son, and then the campaign to find Queen 4.0 (who winds up being Anne of Cleves, but not with much success). But Queen Search is the least interesting plot here, as other events overtake the Henrician court, such as the famous Pilgrimage of Grace (the original astroturfing plot, generally thought to have been engineered by Europe's Catholics as a way to bully Henry back into the Roman fold), the future Bloody Mary's early stubbornness about her status, that of her mother, and whether or not her father could actually be the head of a church, and the continuous plots of various cadet branches of the English royal family to unseat the Usurper Henry and replace him with one of their own blueblood sons. Cromwell is in the thick of all of this, and his fierceness on Henry's, Mary's and also Margaret Tudor's (Henry VIII's niece, a princess of Scotland being raised in Henry's court) behalf earns him lots of new enemies and intensifies many old conflicts; many of his rivals, new and old, remind him throughout this book that since Cromwell owes all that he is and has (which has come to be quite a lot, as Cromwell even finishes his life with the title of Earl of Exeter -- a title that once was held by one of those cadet branches of the royal family until the last male of the line dies childless, and remember, Cromwell's dad was a scary drunken abusive blacksmith from the slums) to the king, if the king ever turns on him, he's done for. Cromwell basically just says, of course, and continues to do so right until the end, giving this book a greater air of tragedy even than the early scenes in Wolf Hall when the sweating sickness raged through his household and killed all the ladies and little girls.

Meanwhile, Anne Boleyn's family still seethes over her fate, for which they blame Cromwell, and they plant the final seeds of Cromwell's destruction with another daughter of the family, the vain and silly Kat Howard, who will be Queen 5.0 and gets married on the day of Cromwell's death. Queen 2.0 and 5.0 share an uncle in Thomas Howard (fabulously played by my beloved Bernard Hill in the TV adaptation, which showed that Hill is just as good playing a dick as he is a hero or a coward. Ahh, my Bernard!), who rages through the whole trilogy but has especially good scenes in this book as he and Cromwell occasionally seem on the verge of finally becoming friends, or at least calling a truce, until Howard's pride in his lineage always wins out; Cromwell is a Nobody and needs Put In His Place and nothing will be right in the world until he is.

Again, all of this is taking place in an immersively detailed world, which I was able to flesh out even more thanks to a lot of references to contemporary music of the time. There were enough of these for me to construct a pretty good playlist on Spotify, to which I added some other stuff that I'm reasonably sure would be familiar in Henry's court, and, of course, a selection of Henry's own musical compositions. Of course Henry composed music. He was a Renaissance Man if anybody was! Anyway, everything I could find that was mentioned by name is on there, along with some of my other favorites from Henry's lifetime in Venice, Florence, the Holy Roman Empire, etc. I listened to it a lot as I finished the book, and it was a great balm on my poor heart as I watched Cromwell arrested, imprisoned, questioned, impugned and executed.

Now, excuse me. I think I need some alone time.

*The overarching metaphor of the book is teased out there; before electricity and incandescent or LED bulbs, the light of a candle was often magnified by placing it in front of a mirror to bounce the rays back into the room. As Cromwell discusses often with his king, a ruler must serve as both things, mirror and light, setting a good example to his subjects and magnifying the benefits of good behavior into his realm. Um, about that...

Best Translated Book Nominees: Donatella Di Pietrantonio's A GIRL RETURNED, Translated by Ann Goldsmith

I understand it's a fairly common fantasy among children, to imagine (usually when they're angry with their families) that their parents aren't their Real Parents and that their Real Parents are far richer, kinder, grander people who will buy their long lost children all the toys they want and let them eat candy bars for dinner just as soon as the Real Parents sweep in and claim their suffering darlings and take them away from those wicked people who limit the kids' screen time, make them share with siblings and eat green beans.*

This isn't that story, all though we could call it that-story-adjacent. Let's say it's that fantasy meets the harsh realities of, not just the modern world, but the world as it's really always been but that privilege has allowed a lot of us to pretend isn't anymore. And also, kind of an inversion of that fantasy.

A Girl Returned (L'Armintua in the original Italian) allows an unnamed young girl to share with us what it's like to be unceremoniously ejected from a loving and comfortable home in the city and sent to a miserable hovel near the mountains to live with a Real Family she didn't even know she had, who barely even speak the same language she does,** and don't share many of her assumed to be natural expectations for what a bright young girl in Italy can have for her future.

The mystery of why this has happened is a constant pull on the narrative, and we do get an eventual explanation for it, but this isn't the focus of the novel, either. But so, what is?

For me, it's two things: what it's like for the narrator to discover she has siblings and to suddenly be thrust into close quarters (as in sharing a bedroom) with them, and how the author and translator can convey, just via the very careful deployment of articles and possessive pronouns, how our narrator's perception of her Former Family and her Real Family are shifting from scene to scene. That may sound boring, but it isn't, and I'm pretty sure this book would still be a highly engaging read if the reader wasn't paying attention to those little parts of speech, as they are grace notes rather than The Point, but since I noticed this fairly early on and found myself really interested to see if it was just my imagination based on a few flukes or something deliberately done for effect, I found this aspect of the novel fascinating.

Where this is really interesting is how our narrator interacts with her two mothers, the one who raised her into her early teens, and the one who gave birth to her. For a long time, she refers to the first as "my" mother and the second simply as "the mother" of the Real Family, with all of the emotional distancing that implies and more (the relationship is difficult and often borders on hostile, even after the narrator comes better to understand the circumstances of the Real Family's mother's life and stops trying to fight her new circumstances). As the various and colorful members of the Real Family come into focus for her, then and only then are their names revealed, first her sister Adriana, just a little younger than she, then baby brother Giuseppe***, fun and disturbingly attractive eldest brother Vincenzo and another older brother, Sergio.****  All the kids share a bedroom full of rickety furniture, dirty bedclothes and many other signifiers of poverty; to the narrator's credit, she doesn't dwell on her disgust, as first she is just too shocked to register anything properly and by the time the shock has faded not only has her little sister latched on to her tightly (as the cover art depicts, the two share a narrow mattress and sleep head to toe, continuing the practice even after the narrator's guilt tripping Former Family buy them bunk beds, even though Adriana is a persistent bed wetter), but sister and the RF mother have thrust responsibility for a lot of baby Giuseppe's care on our narrator, who has been brought up with enough decently not to take out her dismay and disgust on a helpless infant.

Meanwhile, her relationship with Vincenzo, who is secretly the real man of the family, providing better for them with his odd jobs and shady dealings (about which more in a moment, and TW for some othering/racism when we get there) than the mostly absent father does, is constantly on the verge of becoming inappropriate, especially since he still sleeps in the kids' bedroom and does what young men do in the night, until Circumstances Intervene, just saving this book from developing a major ick factor, but it still had a minor one that some readers might find not so minor and that lies in the descriptions of the shady company Vincenzo keeps, called in this text not Roma but Gypsies, and pretty much every stereotype about them gets an airing here. I suspect this is deliberate, whether on the author's or the translator's part isn't clear, to convey our narrator's perception of the described people (her Former Father was a kind of policeman, and had a policeman's stereotypical tendency to stereotype others, and there is a minor educational story arc of our narrator taking baby steps toward unlearning the unconscious attitudes she picked up from him, but in the process, well, there's some casual othering some readers might not be willing to forgive in the service of a very minor arc in the novel).

I love books like this, that not only demand I empathize with the unfamiliar experiences and point of view of the character but also change my attitudes about the characters around her as her own do. A Girl Returned achieves this with what appears like effortlessness, but I suspect it was actually a lot of work. And it pays off.

*I never had it, but I happen to have done a pretty decent job of picking parents. Who are still married to each other after more than 50 years and were just cuddling on my sofa while we watched TV tonight. I know I'm astonishingly lucky and I don't take it for granted.
**(I'm not sure if this is a matter of accent or dialect but I suspect it is accent; I'm okay with not being sure because this means that author Donatella Di Pietrantonio and/or her translator into English, Ann Goldsmith, did not burden me with any attempt whatsoever to show me in dialogue how differently the Real Family and their neighbors speak from our narrator's Former Family. The narrator mentions a few times that they talk very differently, and that is fine. This is not poverty porn or armchair anthropology or anything like so tedious. There's much more interesting stuff going on.
***Interestingly, the kids born after her become people to her considerably faster than her older siblings or her biological mother and her husband (who, unless I misread, might not actually be the narrator's father but is at least Giuseppe's father?).
****Sergio never really emerges as a person and, to be honest, might not actually be a sibling; it wasn't clear to me but ultimately didn't matter.

Best Translated Book Nominees: Christos Iknonomou's GOOD WILL COME FROM THE SEA (translated by Karen Emmerich)

Blogger's note: this is my first read off the long list of books nominated for this year's Best Translated Book Award. I'm going to see how many of them I can read before the short list and eventual winner are announced. They all just sounded too interesting not to try out!

"Back then they sent people to the islands by force, now we come here on our own."

The four linked stories that comprise Christos Ikonomou's  Good Will Come From the Sea are set on a fictional Greek island that, like the rest of Greece (and the rest of the world), is still feeling the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, and of earthquakes that have been wrecking Athens. But that description, as bland as this book cover, doesn't begin to convey those impacts, which are not abstractly economical (though they are that, too) as much as they are very, very human, in the form of a new kind of migration pattern that proves the source of enough different kinds of agonizing tension to power many more than just these four excellent stories, and not just, as the pulled quote above conveys, because earlier in Greece's history the Aegean islands were where repressive governments sent uncooperative citizens to contemplate the error of their ways with a little help from jailers and torturers.

People who have lived on the island for generations witnessed that and let it form their society and grew accustomed to it, but now are suddenly having to deal with a new, semi-voluntary influx of people who, again, are just as Greek as they are, but because they come from Athens and grew up in higher socioeconomic classes above the natives' own, are referred to behind their backs and, in hostilities (which are many) to their faces as "Foreigners." The "Foreigners", in turn, refer to the natives as "Rats", perhaps alluding to the island's weird cave-riddled geography that the natives know intimately and the Athenians can barely navigate? If I'm being charitable here? Which nobody in these stories is, neither the Foreigners (not even, much, to each other) nor the Rats, all of whom are now trapped together by circumstances but none of whom are adjusting especially well.

All four stories are from the perspective of the in-migrants from Athens, who have left behind broken lives of relative privilege and prosperity and are still in shock but striving to rebuild in a new place... and finding it very, very difficult. Their prior values and cherished illusions are getting shown up as laughable and flimsy, they're facing real privation for the first time in their lives, and their support networks are disintegrated or diminished. They're still perservering, for now, but as each story opens, they're facing crises that may break them. And, I'll warn you right now, readers: don't come to these stories looking for happy endings or neat resolutions. Mysteries don't get solved. Resolutions may be fulfilled beyond the confines of a narrative but you don't get to see it.

But you do get to explore the interiority, and hidden resilience, of some very interesting characters as they struggle with the disappearance of loved ones, with vandalizing assaults on barely-started enterprises, with the question of the responsibility to act on knowledge they wish they didn't have about harm happening to a helpless other. As the protagonist of my favorite of the four, "Kill the German", a paraplegic who lost the use of his legs trying to blow up a sex shop and now uses mobility aids on an island not at all designed for his kind, observes to himself as he frets over the fate of a young girl pimped out by her family to a rich old man:

The world is constructed in such a way as to deprive each of us of the possibility of doing any personal good. No, that's not right. Let's take it from the top. Ready? Okay. The world is constructed in such a way as to relieve each of us of the responsibility of doing any personal good. We are all free to do bad in a thousand ways, but good is always someone else's affair.

We're all dealing with this right now especially, wherever we are in the world, eh? Only a lot of us have discovered that the government/social safety net/network of private charities we've always counted on to mitigate the sob stories the daily news brings us was never so robust as we thought, even in the free and prosperous West, and it maybe really is up to us to help each other out directly, even though we risk a lot in doing so.*

As we wring our hands at what the COVID-19 virus has done to and, more importantly, revealed about our world (though yeah, lots of us already knew from first-hand experience that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were very unevenly distributed), I feel like the characters, both Foreigners and Rats, from Ikonomou's stories would laugh at us, bitterly. Which is to say that these stories feel uncomfortably prophetic, especially for readers like me who live in remote places to which everybody else (*cough* Neil Gaiman *cough*) dream of or already have active plans for retreating, and have already seen the effects of decades in-migration by people who visited here once and decided to retire here but who are used to or demand "better" than what we have to offer, which is to say I was disposed to identify perhaps more with the Rats (none of whom really get developed as characters in these stories) than with the Foreigners, but Ikonomou is so damned good that he made me care about the Foreigners -- which is one of the big things that literature, that art, is for, isn't it?**

"If you're in need, if you are on the outside, you're a foreigner everywhere." another character observes. And your turn to be one might be next, is the not-so-subtle message here. So why not start being decent to one another now? Because here's the alternative, and it ain't pretty. 

So while these tales of people facing hostility, subterfuge, corruption, distrust, envy, sabotage, from people who are supposed to share the same culture as themselves, more or less, awaken empathy, they also are every bit as disturbing as any of, say, William Gibson's recent fictions of his post-Jackpot world.*** Passages observing the effect of long-term unemployment may soon come to feel a bit too familiar to a lot of people who have taken gainful work for granted , for instance. So I really can't decide if this is bad pandemic reading or good, but it's possibly the best pandemic reading? Because it is full of some sweet and amusing moments, too, like my favorite, which takes place in a new family-run taberna:

One of the ladies points at the light fixture on the ceiling. And the kid turns bright red and says no, no, no lamp, lamb, lamb, you know baaa, baaa. The old ladies start laughing and say okay okay and Petrus picks at the menus and comes over all in a huff and asks me who wrote the English menu.

And some frankly lovely prose, as when a man in search of his missing son (delivered into the employ of a shady local syndicate on his orders, no ifs ands or buts) pauses and observes the sea as he climbs to the top of the island's ridge to get a better look around: "The waves tipped with white like frothy eyebrows over the water's countless blind eyes" and wouldn't we all just kill to have sentences like that published under our names? And of course, how much of that is Ikonomou and how much is translator Karen Emmerich?

One bit that I think is mostly Emmerich comes as my paraplegic friend contemplates some old wisdom that I get from Jorge Luis Borges but think he probably got from Bishop Berkley or somebody, but phrased as succinctly and elegantly as I've yet seen in English: "Fathers and mirrors should be hated to an equal degree because they alone have the ability to make people multiply." Maybe it's really economical in the original Greek, too, but I'm thinking this is the translator's hand showing, gracefully.

So, as I said on Twitter the other day, if the rest of the books on the long list for Best Translated Book are anywhere near this good, I'm going to have an emotionally challenging but very satisfying set of reads ahead of me. Gimme!

*And, of course, in the U.S. and, it appears, the U.K. especially, we're also dealing with sizeable populations of people hell-bent on preventing us from helping each other, sometimes with the threat of deadly force.
**Not that my foreigners are going to be in quite the shape of these Athenian migrant-refugees, of course. I live in the Billionaire Wilderness.
***He seems to be buried in tweets whining to him that he predicted our current plight too damned well and maybe wasn't writing fiction but is some kind of pre-cog wizard. At least no one is mocking him for not foreseeing cellphones anymore?

Rodrigo Fresan's THE DREAMED PART (Translated by Will Vanderhyden)

Late last year while I was still on my extended blogging hiatus, I snagged a Humble Bundle of Latin American Speculative Fiction that contained, among other wonders, Rudy Ch. Garcia's The Closet of Discarded Dreams, which is one of the most delightfully batshit things I've encountered in many a year, in a life that contains regularly scheduled viewings of Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, just to put that in context.

At last I have found a companion volume. I mean, besides The Atrocity Exhibition. The three books would definitely be shelved together if I ever get around to devising a personal psychohistorical organizational scheme for my library.*

The third being, of course, Rodrigo Fresan's second Tres Partes novel, The Dreamed Part.

Fasten your seatbelts, Little Buckaroos. And, uh, ware mild spoilers for The Invented Part, but I'll keep 'em light as best I can.

Where the first of the Tres Partes** gave a master class in next-level story structure and explored the inspiration Fresan took from F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night and The Kinks' very greatest song "Big Sky" and possibly Alan Moore and David Gibbon's Watchmen and maybe even Clark Ashton Smith/Robert Shea, and from Fresan's own biji ,all while telling the story of a Writer, his glamorous and weird parents, his mad sister who married into an even madder family, and a pair of his fans whom he maybe kind of manipulated (sort of posthumously) into becoming lovers and then maybe kind of kept trying to rewrite their love story over and over and over again, but then again maybe he didn't, it's just that kind of book?... (INHALE) The Dreamed Part, The Dreamed Part gets weird. In the best possible way, as you should expect after I brought up Rudy Ch. Garcia and J.G. Ballard.

The Dreamed Part is again divided into discrete segments, but this time there are only three of them. The first takes up our Writer, now suffering from extreme insomnia about which he waxes bilious and lyrical for many pages and seeking the help of some Sleep Professionals and no, I don't mean fancy bed salesmen. These are scientists, and while they poke around his body and psyche, one of them, whom he calls Ella, which is a woman's name in some languages and a feminine personal pronoun in Spanish, turns out to be the literal (he insists) Woman of His Dreams. She has dreamed about him, too, and they become lovers, but oopsie doopsie, in the midst of their love and her work in uncovering the causes of his insomnia*** and trying to treat it, her Institute accidentally creates a whole new sleep disorder, which proves to be highly contagious and soon affects everyone except for the Writer: nobody can dream anymore. Which means everybody is starting to go more than a little bit insane, except the Writer, although he's kind of going crazy trying to chronicle and make sense of it all. How is the world going to get itself out of this terrible pickle?

Ha, like we're going to get a resolution there, because suddenly we're back in the world of the Writer's sister Penelope, whose adventures among her bizarre clan of in-laws were my favorite bits of The Invented Part (and, I have since learned via the Two-Month Reivew boys, another Fresan novel, Mantra is basically all about that family and of course I've already got it lined up to read sometime later this year after I'm done with a quixotic little project I'll tell you about in the next post). Turns out Penelope channeled her resentment of her brother's appropriation of her in-law ordeals for his own fiction, together with her obsession with the Bronte family and especially Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and her own weird imagination and wrote a series of young adult novels that landed in the publishing calendar right after the Twilight novels and profited mightily off those books' fans' collective hangover and earned her a fortune. Her fiction gets just enough description here (in flaky pastry layers, of course) to make me, though not by any means her target audience, desperately want to read this batshittery: the Bronte sisters are reimagined as something between YouTube stars and podcasters who broadcast baroquely interesting fiction from their home on the Moon. I want to read the LunaBrontes' stories, and I want to read the story of the LunaBrontes. But, you know, tough.

I may be a tiny bit mad at Fresan for not having just written those things, but that's about as profitable as being mad that Jorge Luis Borges in his "lofty laziness" only ever bothered to spin his ideas out into sketches that sometimes barely count as short stories. Is that an Argentina thing, maybe?

Anyway, in Penelope's section further light is shed on the weird, sad core plot of these novels, which is almost completely a story of serial devastating losses in the Writer's life, all of which are still shrouded in mystery going into this section. His and Penelope's yacht-setting glamor-genius parents are legendary desaparacidos, last seen alive on Christmas Eve when they stage an armed takeover of a department store as a political statement-cum-marketing stunt; there is a little boy who was like a son to the Writer's adult, unmarried, childless self who we gradually figured out was Penelope's child by her comatose husband, who has also disappeared. We get more of an idea, again, in layers of storytelling that cast a few different people as culprits, of the truth behind the first disappearance than the second, but there is, of course, another novel to go.

The third section brings us back to the Writer, but while it has lots of funny lines and entertaining observations and amusing digressions (an account of a U.S. government agent detailed to spy on Vladimir Nabokov and his wife is a particularly fun standout) it has really no plot at all, beyond "how the Writer feels coping with all of this loss and what it has meant to him to be the Writer but to have nurtured other, lesser writers to heights of fame and fortune he'll never enjoy because he can't sell out his Art, and also what it's like to be the literary executor of his own sister who also eclipsed him" and in a lesser writer's hands than Fresan's this would be deadly, watch-checkingly dull but manages not to be because there are just So Many Good Bits.

I'll share a few, out of context, just for fun. For instance, from an excursis on a particular cultural loss, that of prints of pre-digital movies that, passed from theater to theater and country to country and end up warping, via physical wear and tear on the film, warping into something other than the auteur's original opus:

Classic and artless movies that, because of their poor condition, become avant-garde. New and involuntary versions of The Time Machine or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Movies that, when seen again in fragments, end up revealing new meaning and utility: movies about a group of kids ritually devoured by subterranean monsters and about a divorced father who invents likes to amuse his children.

Or an aphorism that should probably just be the motto for this dreadful year of 2020 C.E.: "Bad fiction can be comforting during times of bad nonfiction."

Or, perhaps, my favorite, and this is a long'un but a good'un:

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf!, wolf!!, came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf!, wolf!, and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow, because he lied too often, was finally eaten up by a real best is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

A fair chunk of this longest third section concerns the Writer's mostly-internal relationship with two writers whom he blurbed early in their careers who then both became International Public Intellectuals based on their sort-of highbrow but still very popular novels, a man and a woman, both of whom he calls IKEA because of their global appeal and the essential characterlessness of their work. Snippets of remembered conversation with them are gold, as when the Male IKEA (who used his international reputation and financial resources to rescue the Writer from a bizarre and tight spot in The Invented Part), tells the Writer "I can't say I envy your books, but oh, what I would've given for some desaparacidos parents..." with an implied chiding of the Writer for not having exploited their story the way IKEA himself milked a much tamer anecdote for a whole novel "soon to be adapted for the big screen, starring Sean Penn in the lead role as moi."

So yes, ultimately, as Fresan has the Writer observe many times of himself, Rodrigo Fresan is a writer's writer, and these novels are writers' novels. Ordinarily I have little patience with writers who only want to write about writers and writing (I overdosed on metafiction my sophomore year at Bard, for a class that should have been called Forms of Postmodern Fiction but wasn't, in which we read Pynchon and Borges and Marquez and Vonnegut and Gass and I've blocked out the rest), but Fresan has kept me going on with just enough tiny, hard-to-follow breadcrumbs**** of a grandly tragic plot and lots of passages of, yes, great writing. At least part of which must be attributed to the work of translator Will Vanderhyden, though I'm too out of the Spanish language literature loop to be able to comment specifically on what Vanderhyden has brought to the table (apart from, anecdotally, coping with some 50 extra pages worth of additional text that Fresan added to the material between these books first appearing in Spanish and Vanderhyden's getting to start working on The Invented Part. of course).

But I'll have a better feel for that soon, because Vanderhyden is still at work on the third volume, The Remembered Part, which means I should be waiting patiently but upon finishing The Dreamed Part I realized I didn't feel like pausing, thank you very much, and I'm not afraid of a little hard work and the Kindle edition of La Parte Recordada was not expensive at all and so, though Spanish is my very worst language, I'm already reading the third volume. Very slowly, with the aid of a dictionary and the Kindle's often laughable but at least serviceable (usually) language translation utility. I'm still going to get the English translation when Open Letters will let me have it, and I'll read it eagerly, but you know, until then, like I said, I Am Impatient.

We'll see how far I get before the English edition is published. Heh. If I finish ahead of time, perhaps I'll blog about this third volume twice, once on what I gather from reading it badly in Spanish and once after I've read it in Vanderhyden's very good English prose.

So far it's a lot of weird meditations on the significance of the color yellow in international traffic semiotics, mostly. Seems appropriate for my reading speed in a language I last studied in high school in Saratoga, WY in a classroom full of stoners and jocks who were only interested in curse words...

*Except alas, I don't own physical copies of any of these because they're all books I fell in love with long after I lost the ability to read books printed on dead tree or type with my actual hands.
**Slight excursis here to observe that every writer or would-be writer now owes Fresan a debt of gratitude for this triptych (I guess trilogies are only for genre fiction, but since this is Literature these three more-or-less sequential and deeply inter-related novels are called a triptych instead. Whatevs.), which at least in part exists to give a comprehensive and unassailable answer to that annoying old question of "where do you get your ideas?" Now we can point to these three books, each named for a component of inspiration as explicated in incredible detail within the work, as the best possible explanation, and from there we're all set. If our interlocutor has read, or at least heard of, them, then we're all set; they'll get it immediately. More likely, though, they won't, but they won't want to look foolish to us or their viewers/listeners/readers, and so they'll bull on through with an "oh, of course" and shuck and jive through the rest of the conversation to avoid admitting their ignorance, and we can steer matters elsewhere to our liking (having probably gained a certain cheap ascendancy hereby). But what if the asker of the impertinent question not only doesn't know Fresan but also has no problem admitting it, you ask? Well, then you get to steer the conversation away from answering the question and talk about Fresan instead until their eyes glaze over and they move on to some other annoying topic. Thank you, Rodrigo!
***Which turns out to have an ulterior motive as the work on the Writer is subsumed in the Dream Institute's larger goal of turning dreaming into just another tool for performing cognitive labor with tangible economic benefits. So this first section of the book feels like the weird love child of the Doctor Who episode "Sleep No More" and Jose Saramago's Blindness.
****I'm talking approaching Gene Wolfe level of difficult to spot and follow, here, not because they're secrets well kept, but because they're scattered so widely and scantly.

Rodrigo Fresán's THE INVENTED PART (Translated by Will Vanderhyden)

Some books seize one with a handful of ideas she can't shake. It might be a direct quotation from the text that does it, or a particular image (more than a decade since I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, for instance, I still think often of the comparison of a phone someone is waiting to hear ringing to a camouflaged creature lying in wait for prey on the sea floor). Sometimes it's something more complicated than that, as is most certainly the case with the reference-maniacal first volume of Rodrigo Fresán's Tres Partes trilogy,The Invented Part. 

I can't tease out where it first occurred to me that, buried under the literary and pop cultural references in this novel (which, get ready for those; this guy is maybe the Robertson Davies of my generation) was a prolonged meditation on what the invention of writing has done to us humans and an attempt to decide whether it was as good a thing as writers and readers who eat sleep and breathe various forms of literature (yo) think it is.

Of course the ability to record our experiences, hard-won knowledge, and ideas has been a boon to us in that it has spared generation after generation from having to figure out a lot of basic stuff for itself. Science, medicine, engineering, architecture, what's edible and what isn't without various degrees of prep work and how best to do it -- a lot of vital practical survival-level stuff is transmitted that way. New research is only possible when old is done; we can't, for instance, come up with a vaccine for COVID-19 if we don't have a pretty good body of work on how to develop vaccines to draw on. This is a far better prospect than, say, waiting around for a bored semi-dilettante to notice that a small population of service workers has a mysterious immunity to a disease because of exposure to a similar one and rack his brains to figure out a way to harness the fruits of his obsession with comely young dairy maids.

As for the more common arguments expected of people like me as far as why the written word is simply the best, well, yes, written literature, poetry and prose, is a source of tremendous pleasure, a vehicle for communicating vital values like empathy and imagination, all that, but also... but also... For us later generations, it's also developed into a tremendous burden. Usually we celebrate this. As Rodrigo Fresán directly delights in quoting in The Invented Part, we love to say "so many books, so little time." Paradise is a kind of library, heaven is unlimited time to read, all that. But it creates a kind of anxiety, and it's maybe worse for creatives, who know pretty early in life (unless they're dolts) that the chances that any idea they're ever going to have is completely original to themselves are laughably slight; know also that it's far less embarrassing, once one has expressed an idea, to be prepared to have it compared to other iterations of that idea and to be aware of those iterations before some heckler throws a long-winded speech-barely-in-the-form-of-a-question that might be intended to express fellowship (hey, I love that thing your thing reminded me of, too!) but also tends to feel like intellectual one-upsmanship (what, you've not read/watched/ listened to this thing? But that means I know more about this than you do, even though I'm in the audience and you're sweating behind the podium. Loser.). It's good to know on which giants' shoulders we were first allowed to see farther. But boy, don't that create some anxiety! One will never have read every relevant thing, let alone all the things that don't at first seem relevant but some interlocutor is surely going to bring up someday.

This is of course why it's so vital for a functioning human to learn as soon as possible how to admit to imperfection, to say "I don't know" or "oops" or "really? Tell me more!" Mastering that, one has a decent chance of finding literature to be a pleasure again, which, let's be honest, a lot of academic programs feel designed to convince us it's not. I know it took me over a decade to return to reading for pleasure after my years at good old Balloc Reged Orc, to say nothing of wanting to write for something besides a piddling paycheck or a spot on a cool new band's guest list! Neglect this ability to acknowledge our limitations, and, well, just look at the goddamned White House these days. 'Nuff said.

The Invented Part, inasmuch as it's conventionally "about" anything, tells at many removes the story of a well-known "cult but not bestseller" writer of fiction. Not in a straightforward, genre fictional sequential manner, of course, no no. It's cut up into seven narratives that are scattered all along the timeline of the Writer's life. The book teases us with lots of mysteries including hey, where the heck has this guy gotten to? Is he dead? A fugitive? In hiding? But no, this is not a chase narrative. It's barely a narrative at all. It's narratives about narratives, maybe. A whole section of it is a tour of "The Writer's" but probably really Rodrigo Fresán's own biji** disguised, very thinly, as fiction -- a tour of his biji with invented parts added. Maybe all novels are, and Fresán is just letting the stitching show a bit more.

But what am I doing trying to describe this book when, in its seventh section, this book describes itself very well:

A book that would include, disappeared, the Greatest Desaparecido of All Time. A book about someone who disappears and then reappears in order to make everything disappear or change or start over;*** like someone crumpling a page into a ball and throwing it toward the circle of that waste basket at the foot of the desk and, did it make it or not?

ANYWAY...

Throughout this book of his, he, his Writer protagonist and various other characters who orbit the Writer (most of whom want to be Writers themselves) are struggling with that burden of so much accumulated culture that I've touched on above, culture which includes a lot of things like MFA programs and writers' workshops and conferences as well as all of the books and movies and symphonies and plays and sculptures and ballets and poetry slams and historical dioramas and taxidermy of extinct animals and... I'm exhausted just listing it all. Is there anything new left to make? There must be, because we still all have the urge to make it. Does it really matter if it's actually new, though? Can't it be ok to make something that's just a little bit new? Or even just to be a basic bitch? And then, do you actually want to be a creator or just to live the glamorous-looking life of one?

For the record, Fresán is a Creator, a Writer, a Goddamned Artist. His prose, ideas, characterization (particularly of the highly entertaining Karma family, a family I could only wish was the actual subject of a show some streaming service or another was suggesting to me called -- or did I just imagine it? - The Karma Family) are all fantastic but it's the structure that steals the show here.

I learned from the entertaining and often enlightening (I only learned of Fresán's existence from them, after all!) Two Month Review podcast that Fresán wrote The Invented Part's seven segments more or less simultaneously, which is perhaps the only way to achieve what he did, which is a book that feels like, if just the right language and orthogonal system could be invented to print it in, could have the first half of the book laid down in wet ink on first half's pages, and those pages pressed onto the blank second half's worth of pages to produce a perfect mirror image of the first half that would be the second half of the text. This thing is practically a giant palindrome, basically. But not in a gimmicky way. It actually feels natural.

But, while there's a near-drowning here, a house fire there, a giant green cow that decapitates and rapes horses (in that order) somewhere else, it's not a book crammed with incident. Observations galore, ditto riffs on major mid-20th century pop culture and a refreshingly aromantic hero. But plot? Not a lot.

This is, in other words, not a book that is going to appeal to everyone (though I've not done what plot there is justice at all. I mean, the Large Hadron Collider is involved. Our Writer tries to Doctor Manhattan his way out of ordinary life!), but it appeals to me, and I'm eager to dive soon into its sequels, The Dreamed Part and The Remembered Part. But... I hope one thing gets left behind in The Invented Part, you guys, I'm not going to lie, and that is...

Mr. Fresán is really, really down on ebooks you guys. I mean, really down on ebooks. Sometimes it feels like he's got a mini-rant about them every few pages. And, of course, I read this as an ebook because that's really my only option. My physical disabilities have gotten worse and I can only read a physical book for maybe ten minutes a day and I can only do that if I know for sure that I'm not going to need my hands/shoulders/elbows/neck for anything else for the rest of the day (and of course, last year, I also couldn't read most print in physical books because my rapid-onset super-dense cataracts meant I needed the largest print possible, which would also necessitate, in physical book form, the largest actual books possible, which I definitely could not manipulate). There are days when I can't even use my e-reader, no, not even propped up on a stand to vaguely swipe at with a pinky to turn pages. And I'm not alone in this, not by a long shot. So, to be rebuked every few pages, or at least every chapter section or so, for my "choice" of how to read a work is not fun, especially when the experience of reading this book is otherwise such a pleasure.

I don't think I ever want to know what he thinks of audio books, you guys. But I do want to know about the parts he's dreamed and remembered so, watch this space for more Fresániana soon, Little Buckaroos. I already have The Dreamed Part ready to go as an ebook...

But first, just for a petty act of symbolic vengeance on Fresán for his (possibly unintentional? At least I hope so?) ableism****, I'm fixing to re-read Gene Wolfe's A Borrowed Man and imagine Mr. Fresán as E.A. Smithe, or rather his clone that is owned by a public library.

And if I find out that Fresán also hates audio books, you'd better believe I'm getting the third book, The Remembered Part, in that format (if it exists). Assuming he doesn't lose me in the second (spoiler: I accidentally started reading the second book first, which yes that is a downside to ebooks because I've made this mistake before and, no, I don't think he's going to lose me).

*See also everybody from Zelda Fitzgerald (not herself really a character in The Invented Part but boy, her husband kind of is) to June Mansfield to "Shakespeare's Sister" of Virginia Woolf essay fame.
**Biji is a term in Chinese literature for a notebook somewhat artfully assembled over time, more than a scrapbook, not really a journal or diary, a gathering of quotations, observations, original lines that might turn into larger works later but might be just fine on their own. Some have become quite famous, national treasures, the originals in museums that sell spiffy new copies of them to be read or just to show off on a shelf. Some are working tools for writers and other creatives. I'd argue that the form has now probably mutated into the Bullet Journal phenomenon, though I doubt any of the original practitioners of the art would have much nice to say about incorporating calendars and task lists so thoroughly into a notebook. Anyway, there's a more formal and traditional explanation of the genre in the abstract for this paper.
***Which, get ready for the sixth segment, in which the Writer basically becomes Clark Ashton Smith's Tsathoggua as interpreted by Robert Shea.
****Also maybe some classism; in one of the many anti-technology-but-I'm-not-a-Luddite rants, the Writer's ire spills over a little bit onto sound recording technology, too! "But with the gramophone many others -- who would've been hard pressed to hear their favorite Mozart or Beethoven piece more than once or twice in their lifetime -- renounced the ability to read scores and play an instrument." WHAT??? Privileged classes always had access to all of those thing -- concerts, music lessons, free time and energy to cultivate the skills taught in those lessons, but your working stiff out in the fields, you think he or she, even if a skilled "by ear" player of a fiddle or guitar who knew all the local folk songs by heart, encountered Mozart and Beethoven's stuff a whole lot, do you? Anyway, that's probably me being bitchy, but would I have been as sensitized to this kind of crap had I not already been pummeled repeatedly by the Writer's ebook opinions?

William Gibson's AGENCY

Please, tell me I'm not the only person who's already imagining a white-haired Tilda Swinton as Ainsley Lowbeer if The Peripheral and/or Agency ever gets adapted for the screen. Even if it's a century hence and it's a digitally recreated Swinton loping around with an omni-use "tipstaff" protecting continua from hobbyists.*

I didn't realize until my second reading of this book's predecessor, The Peripheral, that Lowbeer was going to be the Hubertus Bigend of this trilogy. Partly this was because so many of the other characters were so interesting that Lowbeer kind of faded into the background a lot (a "problem" Agency doesn't have, but we'll get to that) but mostly because she didn't feel that much like a character yet, more a figurant -- kind of like Hubertus Bigend!

I speculate that William Gibson maybe noticed this and, with this new book, chose to dial back the other characters to let the spotlight shine on Lowbeer, which is laudable, because Lowbeer is cool as shit, but, ah, I'm not quite sure it worked. Because Lowbeer is still mostly a peripheral (heh) character, acting as a sort of dispatcher if not a commander, while most of the action is performed by really boring people.

Ostensibly, the protagonist of Agency is Verity, a young woman in the middle of an exciting if precarious career as a sort of "app whisperer" in 2017.** She's just been hired to test an exciting new product that lives in a Google Glass-ish set-up but is startingly un-app-like to the point of pretty much laughing itself to death at the mere thought of being administered a Turing test. That's right, William Gibson has finally made an Artificial Intelligence into an actual character! But one so awesomely powerful and resourceful and such a quick study that our Verity basically becomes a Lemmiwinks.*** Which could still be cool, only pretty soon the cool AI (named Eunice because the actual name is an acronym I can't remember but corresponds to EUNISS) is absent, and Verity is just left to enact Eunice's plan to Save the World only no one ever, you know, tells Verity the plan (an, to be honest, I still don't understand how all this to-ing and fro-ing Saved the World), so she's just ferried around on motorcycles by surly coffee shop waiters or in funky helicopter-type things owned by her Tech Billionaire ex-boyfriend or, in one ridiculous scene, actually disguised as a dummy and hauled up many stories in a sling, and at this point I just decided Gibson was trolling us with this title. I mean, Lowbeer works for an Agency in the future and there are a few agents of an Agency or two sort of lurking around in Verity's present, but also there is a fully autonomous AI (the world's first!) exercising bucketloads of Agency but, like Lowbeer, only at a remove and meanwhile our heroine has so little Agency she has to hang there in the sling and not move while she is ratcheted up to the penthouse suite via the building's exterior.

Oh, and kind of the least interesting character from The Peripheral shows up and does some stuff, which, whatever, but also the most interesting character from The Peripheral shows up and let's talk about Coner for a moment. Spoilers for The Peripheral, obvs. but it says Ware Spoilers right in this blog description text.

Coner is from the "stub" explored in the first book, which is basically a near-future West Virginia in which 3D-printing has become commonplace but also so advanced that it can be used to manufacture drugs, so think of the Opioid Crisis dialed up to 11 and in this world, in addition to the rather delightful heroine of The Peripheral there is Coner. Coner is a veteran of an unspecified war but we can just assume, really, that it's still in the Persian Gulf area only now there are "haptic recon" units, i.e. soldiers with implanted technology that allows them to, e.g., operate drones a continent away in a very intimate fashion. Except, you know, it was still imperfect tech, so most veterans like Coner are a bio-mechanical mess even with the implants out, and also still have PTSD. But then there's Coner, who also managed to get himself actually blown up, and lost all but one of his limbs and a good bit of his torso and now depends on very advanced nearly-full-body prosthetics to live a very limited existence in his backwater timeline. He gets a taste of other possibilities in The Peripheral, in which the quantum computer that allows contact with The Past from Lowbeer's world doesn't just allow conversation but a limited degree of action via the control of, in Coner's world, dopey telepresence drones that are basically an iPad stuck to a Segway, and in Lowbeer's the full experience of running a vat-grown nearly-human body as though it were your own. In The Peripheral Coner gets to spend some time in a top-of-the-line martial arts training body, and since he was originally a military powerhouse even without his implants, well, just imagine. There's a great line in Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, in which a "console cowboy" who's been neurologically maimed and can no longer access cyberspace falls "into the prison of his own flesh." Now imagine if that flesh consists of, like, one messed up arm, your chest and your head. That's Coner, after.

But Lowbeer is a benevolent goddess, as well as one that needs mortals to do her bidding, so she has made sure that Coner still gets opportunities to be in better bodies via the mysterious quantum computer.**** As long as he does her bidding once in a while; here he is dispatched to Verity's world, but of course her world doesn't even really have very good iPads on Segways yet, so he's controlling, e.g. hobby drones and various smart devices, while still being very much the Coner that I grew to love in the first book. He gets some fantastic scenes and pulls off some exciting stunts and, really, his bits are the best in this book. I would absolutely read a book from his point of view, telling his actual story. Hint to the universe.

Having him as the POV character instead of Verity would instantly have made Agency a better read, at any rate. Not that, and I feel I must stress this because I feel like I'm bitching a lot, not that Agency isn't a pretty good read. It has lots of interesting ideas and poses lots of interesting questions and contains both Ainsley Lowbeer and Coner, plus a bit of Eunice, so, you know, it's fine. I was never in danger of DNF-ing it. BUT, I didn't risk sleep deprivation and un-done chores to devour it, either. It's not Gibson's best work, is all. But it's still more than worth the reading, and I'm still in for a sequel or two, but please, Mr. Gibson, some more Lowbeer? Please?

*If you're new to this series, and it seems many are opting to go ahead and plunge into Agency without having first read The Peripheral, in Ainsley Lowbeer's far-future post-apocalyptic time, someone has stumbled across a mysterious quantum computer that can connect to digital communications technology in the past, but every time contact is established it creates a new timeline, because Lowbeer's timeline is not one in which contact was ever made. Certain people in Lowbeer's world are so rich and bored that they connect to and interfere with the past for fun. These newly-created timelines are formally referred to as "continua", informally as "stubs" (as in Wikipedia perhaps?), and the people who fart around with them are the "hobbyists" I referred to above. Most just act like tourists but there are a special few who treat the past as their personal Let's Game It Out and deliberately try to ruin everything for everybody.

**Not our 2017, though. See, a continua hobbyist, one who makes Josh from Let's Game It Out look like a merciful angel/fairy godmother who can't coddle his NPCs enough, manipulated events so that in 2016 Secretary Clinton, and not Game Show Host Trump, won the presidential election, only, get this, it was part of a strategy to lead to armagedddon, meaning somehow the outcome I think the lion's share of Gibson's fan base and Gibson himself would have preferred is painted as the Darkest Timeline, an intriguing idea that did not get nearly enough exploration here.

***A South Park joke, referring to a character who has little or no, umm, agency, but is simply bossed around and sent on fetch quests by others. A fetch quest is... why am I explaining all this shit anyway? This is the internet. You can look it up. I've been spending entirely too much time with octogenarians who believe stuff on Facebook (and yes, 80+ year olds use Facebook. It's 2020. Hi, I'm Kate, and this is 2020, and honestly, this is the first time I've made that joke. I get a turn, too, right?).

****Which, I'm trusting there's a third volume of this Lowbeer series in the works, and I hope we get some answers about this tech. Nobody in Lowbeer's world knows where it is or who originally found it, let alone who developed it or how it works. An undercurrent I could have just imagined faintly suggests that maybe Lowbeer's native continuum isn't the "original" and is just as much of a stub as the ones its hobbyists play with, but I'm hoping it's not quantum McGuffin turtles all the way down, you guys.

George Eliot's Felix Holt the Radical

I have decided a few things, upon finishing George Eliot's excellent and under-appreciated Felix Holt, the Radical. I have decided that Charles Palliser didn't write a Dickens homage when he gave us The Quincunx. I decided that Mary Anne Evans, aka George Eliot, is still my favorite writer of the 19th century and yes, I'm aware she's got a lot of competition. And I've decided that the novel has a totally misleading title, though yes, Felix Holt is a Radical. 

I mean, if a title contains a character's name, that character is usually a main character, if not the main  character, right? Gulliver is not a bit player in the account of his travels. Moll Flanders is not fridged in her novel. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is at least a sort of goal in human form in that story. But I'd argue that Felix Holt is nowhere near being the hero of "his" book, for all that the young woman I'd nominate for runner-up for the most important character would argue otherwise. Not that she'd be an impartial judge in this case. But we'll get to that. 

No, I'd argue that the pivotal figure in Felix Holt, the Radical is neither Felix nor his love interest, Esther Lyon; neither the dominating Harold Transome nor his scheming foil Matthew Jermyn. As to why, well, I'll remind my readers that the phrase "ware spoilers" is in the description text for this here blog first and then go on to say that...

If I were in charge of giving this book a title, I would have called it something like The Portrait of Mrs. Transome, or maybe Arabella's Agony, or if I were at a modern publishing house and determined to follow a certain annoying trend in titles, I'd slap on something like The Candidate's Mother. For it is the mother of Harold Transhome who is the fulcrum of the book, for all that her first name is only mentioned twice in the whole thing and then only indirectly. Were there not two passages in which her brother is musing on how she might react to things, we would know Arabella Transhome (neé Lingon) simply as Mrs. Transhome. But without her decisions in the novel's backstory there is no story, and it is she who bears the greatest and most enduring sorrows Felix Holt, the Radical has to dish out, as the author is careful to point out fairly often. 

Indeed, after a lyrical opening that introduces us to the story's setting by having the reader imagine a stagecoach journey through the heart of 1830s England, from scenes of pastoral rural idyll and skirting its dark satanic mills and fully industrialized blight to bring us to a pleasant liminal zone between these extremes, Arabella is the first character we actually meet as she fusses her way through a morning in her stately though not perfectly maintained country house, awaiting her favorite son and fretting about how their meeting will go. Harold Transhome is her talented and capable younger son, gone for decades making his own way in the world because primogeniture, returning now to England to take over the family estate after the death of his doofus older brother has left him the heir. At first we think Arabella is merely anxious to see her darling and meet his little boy (by a woman he is generally understood to have married while abroad but whom he confesses late in the novel was actually his slave), but then we find that she's even more worried that he'll find fault with the management of his patrimony, not by his dead doofus brother or by his still living but senile father, but effectively by Arabella herself with the help and advice of the family lawyer, Matthew Jermyn. Who maybe cut some corners and skirted some rules in the course of keeping it all together. And also seems to have gotten pretty rich in the process somehow. 

And then we get the hint that Arabella has some even deeper and more unpleasant secrets yet for us to discover. And then we meet Harold himself, handsome if a little portly, confident, easy going, rich and expansive and full of plans for making the most of his family's property, which excites Arabella at first until she realizes that he has no interest in her explanations of how things have been run, opinions on his plans, or even in her participation in those plans. He's going to fix things up pretty for her, buy her some nicer clothes, redecorate her rooms and give her all sorts of things, but he doesn't care a whit for her thoughts or feelings and her disappointment at this is crushing but somehow not entirely surprising; we find she's kind of expected this and maybe even feels like she deserves it. She's just going to have to gracefully fade into the background and be a useless if still rather beautiful old woman (at age 55!) and just do embroidery and maybe cuddle her grandson now and then. 

Oh, and by the way, Harold is going to stand for Parliament. Wonderful, that is entirely suitable for a scion their genteel and well-propertied family! Oh, but he's not running as a Tory, or even as a Whig. No, his time abroad making his own fortune has led him to disrespect the status quo. He's going to run as a Radical. And he expects his mother and Mr. Jermyn to help him. 

But this is a novel about Felix Holt, the Radical. Riiiiiiight.

The next important people we meet are Mr. Lyon, a widowed Dissenting preacher, and his pretty and accomplished and very ladylike daughter, Esther, who seems on first meeting is merely going to be a figurant rather than fully a character -- it is a long time before the omniscient narrator gives us anything from her point of view. Theirs is a simple life. He preaches to a small congregation and she earns money for her little vanities by teaching French to Young Ladies, which she does very well because she is half-French herself. We learn that the story of her birth is very tragic and romantic, as (DRAMA BUTTON) she was already alive when her lovely French mother was taken in as a beggar by her soft-hearted preaching papa, who later married the poor woman and raised her daughter after she died young, i.e. Mr. Lyon is only Esther's step-father, though she doesn't know that. This all becomes important later on but for now we're just shown Esther as an unexpected adornment to her father's simple home, a vain girl whose years of exposure to the lives and households of her betters have left her with expensive tastes and maybe a little conceitedness.

Such is how Felix Holt -- remember Felix Holt? This is a novel about Felix Holt, the Radical -- certainly sees her when he starts calling on Mr. Lyon out of a shared concern over the plight of the poor and the overworked, whose ranks Felix has voluntarily joined despite having been raised and educated to be a doctor like his daddy was before him, which means, yes, Felix threatens to be That Guy. And he comes off as super self-righteous at first, very much That Guy. His late father made a fortune in patent medicines, which raised their standard of living and led Felix's mother to grow accustomed to the Finer Things, which she always assumed Felix would continue to provide for her but no, he's learned that daddy's drugs not only cured nothing but often made things worse, and he forbids her from continuing to make or sell them, which he can totally do because Patriarchy, and now she lives with him in a crummy house in which he teaches school to the children of the working poor and the indigent and he just seems a tiny bit punchable on this first meeting, does Felix Holt, except he's not there at the Lyons' house to pat himself or anyone else on the back for virtue, but because he's worried that the upcoming election will lead to considerable Trouble among the people he and Lyon both seek to serve, none of whom can vote but all of whom can be gotten rip-snorting drunk, turned loose on the streets during speeches and on election day and encouraged to commit mayhem on behalf of the candidate whose agents have generously been plying them with ale and gin for weeks and what can we do about it?

The Transhome and Lyons/Holt storylines take a while to intersect as we explore the nature of the coming elections and the general socioeconomic state of the era*, but when they do it's head-on, and it's all lawyer Jermyn's fault as Harold's campaign manager/ratfucker, ultimate author of Operation Get the Miners Drunk to Scare Away the Voters and much else. Holt shames Harold into trying to put a stop to it before somebody gets hurt, but Jermyn convinces Harold that it's way too late for that but overplays his hand because he, like Arabella, still just can't believe Harold has become a Radical but kind of thought he'd done so cynically and would act a good Tory MP once elected but what's he doing hanging out with the likes of this Holt fellow, Something Must Be Done.

Which is weirdly where the Quincunx stuff comes in. That novel concerns an inheritance case in which various versions of a will and codicils thereto have a valuable estate tied up in court for decades but in the control of the most powerful claimants. The conditions that will allow them to maintain control require that another family with a better claim not die out entirely, for if that happens the machinery of inheritance law turns the estate over to a still different set of claimants. The tale focuses on the very last child of the otherwise extinct middle party, who has grown up in poverty, been orphaned, is hunted by one branch and cynically protected -- but to a bare minimum -- by the other. When I first read it many years ago, I took it as a sort of Dickens pastiche even though it was set decades earlier than Dickens' own time period. 

Now, though, I see it was not only more of a George Eliot homage, but a neat inversion of a state of affairs in Felix Holt, the Radical. When Jermyn finds that he not only has lost control over his candidate and client family but also might be sued into poverty by his candidate on the grounds that he gave Arabella decades of bad advice and profited from her resulting bad decisions, he revisits a decision of his own made long ago, in which he manipulated affairs behind the scenes in an inheritance dispute over the Transhome Estate! Moreover, it was a dispute just like the one at the heart of The Quincunx, only in this novel we've been getting the side of the winners of that dispute, whose counterparts were the villains of The Quincunx. The hero-victim figure of The Quincunx is only represented as a minor but rather amusing character in Felix Holt but takes the important step of dying in the last third of the book here, though, which means the losing family, whose claims Jermyn worked hard to squash by hounding the last scion to an early grave long ago, though, turn out to have just one more descendant!!!! But only Jermyn knows who that descendant is! So of course he thinks this is all the leverage he needs to keep Harold in line.

But he thinks wrong. Harold made his own fortune, so he's not quite as worried about losing the estate as he might otherwise be, and for good measure comes up with a counter move that looks to thwart Jermyn's threat... but this only means Jermyn has to go for the nuclear option.

The nuclear option relates also to decisions made long ago, but not only by Jermyn, which brings it all back around to Arabella. Arabella, who was a seriously beautiful woman in her youth (as a large and dominant portrait of her that still hangs in the drawing room of her home attests) but already not very happy in her marriage. Arabella, to whom managerial responsibilities seem to have fallen long before her husband hit senility but needed a man's help because Patriarchy, and who was there to turn to but her doofus husband's handsome young lawyer? Arabella, who seems to have just gotten sadder and more tired and withdrawn over the decades...

Oh, there are some agonizing scenes between Arabella and Jermyn. All of his shady dealings were for her sake. He could have gone somewhere bigger and made more money and been more important but he stayed, again for her sake**. And while her number one son was doofus like his daddy, her number two son was smart and handsome like his daddy and of course this was going to turn into Star Wars a little bit. Search your feelings. 

And yes, the election happens and riots happen and Esther and Felix fall in love and there is supposed to be a preacher fight but there winds up not being a preacher fight (which is too bad, because I'm thinking George Eliot could have written one hell of a preacher fight. Heh) and Esther and Felix turn out neither of them to be as insufferable as they first seemed but really, who cares? Arabella done screwed up (though her situation wasn't super great to begin with) and was made to pay and pay and pay and pay for it and per the epilogue she kept right on paying until the day she died. 

Oh and meanwhile? Jermyn, while manipulating her and her family's resources for decades had gone ahead and married someone else and had three beautiful daughters and also lived in the days when a man could have a totally shady career for decades and then just relocate to another county and have a perfectly nice life. 

So, anyway, Felix Holt. Who he again?

Great book, though. 

*Which is a stonking mirror of our own times, right down to people (including the author. Especially the author) waxing nostalgic over the halcyon days of yore when people weren't so bitterly partisan, elections were fair and straightforward, etc. People were pining for kinder, gentler, less political times. IN 1833.

**Which, did she ever ask all that of him, I wonder?