Best Translated Book Nominees: Khaled Khalifa's DEATH IS HARD WORK (tr by Leri Price) with a sidebar on a movie I saw once

Once upon a time, as longtime readers of this blog or my twitter feed or other bits and bobs around the internet know, I got to go to the Toronto International Film Festival, not as press or anything like that, but just to drink, play D&D in a pub with my friends, and go to screenings of a whole lot of very cool international/arthouse films. It was a glorious period in my life, and I got to see some exceptional stuff, some of which still hasn't gotten a lot of eyeballs on it because not all distribution deals are created equal, and not everybody gets one.

One I vividly remember from my first year, 2010, was a Taiwanese gem called Pinoy Sunday, in which two young overseas contract worker types from the Philippines seized on an Allston Christmas-type opportunity and got their hands on a really nice red sofa. So far, so excellent; they lived in a dorm sparse of furnishing and lacking in comfort. All they had to do now, was get the thing from the location where a squabbling couple left it, to their dorm -- clear across the giant world-class city of Taipei. Being overseas contract worker types, they did not own a vehicle capable of transporting furniture, did not even own bicycles. The bus is quickly ruled out; a friend "offers" to help for entirely too much money, TL;DR, they wind up hand-carrying it home. And have many adventures, encountering many obstacles, saving a life here, getting arrested there. A typical Sunday. It's a charming and funny, though also moving and sad, piece of cinema that invites us to contemplate the true cost of "free", the plight of immigrants in any nation, growing up, all the good stuff. It often gets billed as a comedy but it's bittersweet.

I thought about it a lot as I started listening to the exceptional audiobook edition of Khaled Khalifa's Death is Hard Work, and I'm still trying to decide just how much of a jerk this makes me, because in making this comparison, I'm basically equating a dead human being to a sofa that got dumped on a street corner, aren't I?

Let's see.

The novel, beautifully narrated in its audio book edition by Neil Shah and translated into clear, even stark prose that lets the pure sensory impact of the scenes described shine through without a lot of frippery by Leri Price, concerns a trio of siblings whose father has just died of old age -- in Damascus, Syria, during the current violence, destruction and turmoil of that country's now ten-year-old civil war.* We begin the novel with that death, in which the father tells the only one of his children who is present that his dying wish is that he be buried next to his long-dead sister in their home village of Anibaya -- a couple hours' drive away from Damascus. And then, just to be sure that those are his last words, spends the next two hours saying nothing at all and daydreaming about his dead second wife (his children's stepmother) while his son Bolbol just has to kind of sit there and live with the fact that he just made a really stupid promise to a man who wasn't really much of a father -- because of course Bolbol said he'd make sure his father got his dying wish.

Death isn't hard work for the person who does the dying, really, is it? By the way, I'm told that a better translation of this title would be "Death is Hard Labor" because that term "hard labor" evokes things like prison sentences. The kind you risk incurring if you cross anybody in authority over anything in present-day Syria -- assuming you surive the encounter.

There are a lot of authority figures, official and un-, between Damascus and Anibaya.

But so, Death is Hard Work is essentially a road trip story that should bear more comparison with, say Smoke Signals (in which a young Native American man is charged with transporting his father's remains and brings along a friend for the trip) than Pinoy Sunday, maybe, but it's Pinoy Sunday I thought of first because once the death scene is behind us, we're watching the swift transformation, through both literal biological decay and through bureaucracy and commerce, of a human being to a commodity, something Bolbol himself realizes very early in the narrative -- and, like that of a couch through busy city streets, the movement of that commodity is very much impeded by the circumstances, physical and psychic, of the territory traversed. 

And of course, Bolbol isn't his father's only child; his acquiescence to his father's ploy sentences  his two siblings as well. Neither his brother, Hussein, nor his sister, Fatima, would have been so foolish, we quickly understand -- which is why they weren't even there to be manipulated in the first place. It's only grudgingly that they agree to help him, which is fortunate because Bolbol doesn't even have a vehicle for the trip. Fortunately, Hussein drives a minibus for a living. Perfect. Quick little trip to Dad's hometown and their obligations are complete. I mean, how is this even a novel, right?

But these are siblings, and did I mention that their dad wasn't a great one? He wasn't a great dad, which means Bolbol, Hussein and Fatima did not have easy childhoods even back when Syria wasn't a war zone-cum-exremist playground.

On top of a whole lot of tasty family drama (in which each sibling seems to embody a universal vice - Bolbol is a coward, Hussein is proud, Fatima is vain) is that of the various sides in this endless conflict; living in Damascus, the siblings have tried very hard to blend in with loyalists to the Assad regime, still in control there, but their dad was a left wing agitator of some small fame and comes from a region that is very much in the control of (I think) the Free Syrian Army, which matters more than an ignorant American (yo!) might think because his children were all three born there and it's on their identity cards as a permanent stigma, which no amount of hanging Assad's portrait in their living rooms** or other protestations of loyalty can really overcome.

So, as the siblings set off with their father and many blocks of ice to stave off decay, they're already in for it, as at every checkpoint they'll have to present their identity cards to armed strangers who will judge them by their birthplace, whether they're passing through loyalist or rebel territory -- or territory controlled by what seems a lot like ISIL.

Which is how a ten-hour journey back when there was relative peace and the roads weren't bombed-out pothole farms infested with snipers and lined with mass graves and, occasionally, fresh human corpses just left out to begin rotting in the sun, stretches out to three days while Dear Old Dad begins to bloat and stink and becomes a host to teeming maggots. And the story stretches even longer as we take turns exploring the back stories of the entire family, including the father's long-dead sister, whose dramatic death as a teenager kind of set off this whole big thing.

I make it sound ponderous and punishing, but it really isn't. A lot of this is due to the prose, which is vivid and reads like good journalism: no wasted words, precise, detailed and vivid as hell, and very, very efficient. Characters' states of minds are communicated as swiftly and completely as a description of the state of DoD's corpse as intensely as the fierce and unforgiving stare of a soldier pointing a machine gun at the minibus. In audio book form it's not even six hours long! But it turns out to be the perfect length as we discover at the end when we collapse exhausted alongside a survivor into a bleak and empty bed back in Damascus.

So to answer the question I posed myself at the beginning -- how big of a jerk am I to be mentally comparing a family's dead father to a fortuitously discovered red sofa? -- I don't feel like much of a jerk, no; as I said, the father (whose name I keep forgetting and also don't know how to spell -- one of the bummers of audiobooks is not knowing how proper nouns are spelled, and it's also a pain to go back and check something I've forgotten) is transformed into a thing pretty early on, even as he also grows into a character through all the flashbacks, but the vast divide between corpse and character is sort of the point, standing in, perhaps, for the divide between the character and his children, who it seems would gladly have traded him for a sofa not long after retrieving it from the Damascus morgue.

Anything to keep from facing themselves and each other. 

You know, the Hard Work.

*Which, wow, I always forget this conflict basically started as part of the Arab Spring. Remember that? And how excited we were for a whole lot of people in a whole lot of countries who were looking like they were going to fight and win for democracy and civil liberties and whatnot? Yeah.

**A flashback to when their father first arrived from the home village, frail and failing, to live with Bolbol turns on the point of this portrait, with the father ultimately winning out as Bolbol finally fails to put the picture back up until it sort of disappears in the kipple of his house, where it becomes an emotional irritant to Bolbol nonetheless as he lives in a passionately loyalist neighborhood and is already a figure of suspicion and hostility there.

Kim Bo-Young's I'M WAITING FOR YOU AND OTHER STORIES (tr by Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu)

There is only one story in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and it's a humdinger.

There are only two stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're both humdingers.

There are four stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're all humdingers.

There are nine stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're all humdingers.

There are 37 stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and not all are humdingers but are still very good indeed.

There is only one story.

I sound gimmicky as hell, but those are the kind of thoughts that kept running through my mind as I marveled at what South Korean speculative fiction hot shot Kim Bo-Young and her two translators have achieved here. Including making me marvel at the porousness of the boundaries between the stories within it, how they relate to each other, and how the whole came together as, originally, an engagement gift written for a friend.

I suppose most usefully this book is talked about as a collection of four stories, though the first "I'm Waiting for You" and the final "On My Way to You" are really two point-of-view chapters in a shared story, with the middle "The Prophet of Corruption" and "That One Life" serving as a story and its sequel, though perhaps since "That One Life" is much shorter and more contained, it's really a story and its coda. But even so, not only do they all feel like they're set in the same story universe, they feel like they chiefly concern the same two characters.

I'll explain.

"I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way to You" are each epistolary stories of 15 letters each*, with "I'm Waiting for You" presenting a bridegroom's and "On My Way to You" his bride's experiences as the pair each struggle with the consequences of fateful decisions that displace them in space and time. Our bride embarked on a trip to Alpha Centauri before her wedding that will delay that momentous day by a few months, in her subjective time, but nine years would go by back on Earth. It's the ultimate escape from her family (and there are suggestions that it's an abusive one); they are emigrating to Alpha Centauri and she's riding out with them and then coming straight back because doing so qualifies her somehow for better jobs and there are tax advantages as well, so on paper this seems like a great idea. 

Our bridegroom, for his part, has decided to shorten those months with a spaceship journey of his own, on a sort of voyage to nowhere that is undertaken solely so that people like him who have been Left Behind Because Relativity can keep up with those who have left them. As the bride explains it, 

...you came in with an armful of pamphlets on interstellar marriage and said that if you saved up for about four and a half years, you'd be able to buy a ticket to take what they call the Orbit of Waiting. You explained that it was a ship that circled around the sun at the speed of light so that the passengers could get to the same time as other people traveling in from other stars.

This is already plenty weird and engaging even before things inevitably go wrong on both trips, and not just messages go astray and get out of sync. Poignantly, our groom returns to Earth several times in his struggles to re-sync with his beloved, only to see destruction and decay advancing to the point where he is only able to return to his lonely time-delaying journeys, ultimately aboard a one-man ship, through improbable luck and what sometimes feels like divine help. Which, I'll get to that. 

Meanwhile, in "On My Way to You" his bride has her own struggles more or less re-enacting the story of Aniara, except instead of cults and existential despair she encounters class war and megalomania as the captain of the ship she is rescued by devises a scheme to keep visiting the disintegrating port in Korea, seeding it with families each time until there's a population there that will regard he and the upper echelons of the ship's personnel as gods and will rebuild civilization per His direction.

The other story-pair at first seems to have nothing to do with these most star-crossed of lovers, concerned as it is with a sort of speculative fictionalization of Buddhist ontology. We find ourselves among a protean collection of characters in "a" bardo rather than "the" Bardo that we have occasionally encountered when western SF writers play with these concepts (cough, Kim Stanley Robinson). Each character (and I'm using the term very, very loosely here, as you'll see) has their own bardo in which they reflect on the lessons learned in their most recent lives in the Lower Realm and regain their memories of all of their other lives, all the way back to when they first divided into a small number of individuals from an original single all-encompassing consciousness. Which they can choose to undo at any time if everbody consents except for those occasions on which somebody's consent really isn't necessary because all of this malarkey about separate entities is really just an illusion anyway. I am me, this grass is also me (and I can divide myself into millions of other little entities that are all blades of grass anytime I want, or reabsorb all of those blades of grass on the ground right now that are also really just me).

Our main character in these is a being called, most of the time, Naban, who being one of the small number of original entities that were the result of the first division, has a lot of power and responsibility. Naban interacts with several others at this level as they try to figure out a source of corruption that has emerged in the Dark Realm (where the bardos are), with "corruption" essentially being defined as "persisting in the belief that separate things are actually separate things". At first it seems that the problem rests with one of Naban's original "children" (also called "students"), Aman, who really digs being their own being, resists merging or sharing, and has persuaded all of their own children that the Lower Realm is real and their separateness is real and Differences Matter -- and seems to be in the process of convincing many of the other Aman-level and even maybe some Naban-level beings of the same. But is Aman really the source of corruption, or, since Naban originally "created" Aman, is the ultimate corruptor Naban? All of this is explored in a series of sort-of-chapters that could almost stand as stories in their own right, some of which, as Naban deals with yet another possibly corrupted entity, take place on a bardo formed as a spaceship that is later docked on an asteroid (and an asteroid impact on Earth seems to have been part of the problems besetting the world in "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way to You". Hmm. There are lots of little motifs like this that unite the stories artistically), and have Naban considering the use of lasers and torpedos to get through to that stubborn Aman. Who is Naban. And yet doesn't think they're Naban. Or anything but Aman and Aman's children. Who are not Aman. Except they are.

Really, this story gave me a bit of a headache, but it never gets boring if you're willing to meet it at its level, which is, as you see, incredibly heady and challenging and rich. I had to take a day off after reading it before I proceeded with "That One Life", which takes Naban down into our own Lower Realm, but one in which the corruption from the Dark Realm and the Lower Realm have developed a wicked feedback loop and a whole lot seems to be going wrong. Naban themself is exhibiting this in their very nature in the Lower Realm as they've incarnated as a 15-year-old-girl who is immortal, the better to watch the corruption and decay, and the better, also, to continuously pursue Aman through many incarnations in which Aman is Naban's spouse or child or friend or lover or boss or commander, until one of their fellow entities, Tushita steps in and explains what Naban has forgotten from the previous story and it all sort of works out?

For I am Naban, one who remembers the beginning of time. For I know nothing in the universe is not me. For I know that no one part of a whole is more valuable than another; one is simply larger or smaller. For I know corruption arises when one tries to exclude another from a world. For I am not corrupt now.

I mean, this would be a great lesson for all the people who are least likely to take up a speculative fiction short story collection written by a Korean woman that was also translated by women** (and while both translators have done a beautiful job -- Sophie Bowman helps give both the bridegroom and bride distinctive voices in "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way To You" -- I'm really just stunned at how Sung Ryu handled all this to-me-incredibly-unfamiliar material and made me feel, at least while I was reading it, that of course I understood it and it just felt like a neat spec fic story until I was done and it punched me in the brain). But it's not really much fun to read for all the feeling that one has earned some kind of merit for doing so.

At least it's not very much fun until you realize how the piquant Buddhist ontological filling of this speculative fiction sandwich really informs and is almost just another iteration of soft and tasty starship-crossed lovers bread. I find myself now, having read the whole thing, feeling like the bridegroom and bride are Naban and Aman in one of their lives. Possibly more than one of their lives. Because everything is Naban and Aman, and it's only dumb decisions and silly delusions that ever keep them apart, right?

I did not go into this book expecting a giant profound take on St. John-of-the-Cross (Songs Between the Soul and the Bridegroom)****, but I sure did get it!

Clicking around on the internet, I see that Kim Bo-Young has actually been tickling my brain for quite some time, as she worked on a little old hit film that became a TV series called Snowpiercer, and that this is far from Kim Bo-Young's first collection, and isn't even her first collection in English. She's already a Big Deal in Korea, and deserves to be one everywhere else, too.

I think I'll be attempting to merge with some of her other books very soon in This Life.

*And yes, each of these letters feels like it's own little story. See what I did there in that ridiculous introduction to this piece?

**And hey, by the way, August is Women in Translation Month! And bonus: there is an exchange of letters between the two translators (as well as a lot of cool other supplementary material, including a glossary of terms and names in "The Prophet of Corruption" and "The One Life) that gives us a glimpse of their relationship with one another as real life friends, and the interesting challenges posed by Kim Bo-Young's work, including matters of gender and the prayer-like cadences of some passages, that are super fascinating reading for fans of translated literature.

***I wonder how this, my favorite bit from that, in an old translation by Roy Campbell, would come across in Korean: 

Diffusing showers of grace
In haste among these groves his path he took,
And only with his face.
Glancing around the place,
Has clothed them in his beauty with a look.

Zhao Haohui's VALLEY OF TERROR (tr by Bonnie Huie), with a slight sidebar on StoryGraph

I spent a lot of time while reading Zhao Haohui's Valley of Terror feeling like I had been let down a bit by the people who'd recommended it to me last October, when I asked Twitter for a couple of "spooky reads in translation", but then I saw that something rather clever was going on.

I really couldn't tell, from chapter to chapter, whether I was reading a supernatural horror novel disguised as a Sherlock Holmesian* detective story, or a Sherlock Holmesian detective story disguised as a supernatural horror novel. Was there going to be a Scooby Doo "it was old man so-and-so with this bag of mundane tricks" ending or was it going to end in some kind of exorcism? 

The tension between these two possibilities was maintained almost until the last chapter! And this made up for what, for me, were still some pretty annoying flaws in the novel that I'll discuss a bit below. But overall, the effect earns Valley of Terror a WOW! from me.

But first, a bit about pace. I'm not usually a reader much concerned with pace, but as I've started migrating my book-tracking from the problematic and Tech Giant-owned GoodReads to The StoryGraph (so far not Tech Giant-owned, with a very different recommendation engine, and all the tasty bar and pie graphs a dork could ask for), I've been unable to avoid noticing it. Every time you mark a book as finished over there, you're asked to describe it in terms of moods ("challenging", "dark", "adventurous", "lighthearted" etc) and pace.

Now, this might be a whiplash effect from my previous read having been Marcel Proust's Swann's Way** but boy did Valley of Terror feel fast-paced. Zhao, at least as translated by Bonnie Huie, is all about the terse declarative sentence, the quick establishing description, and above all keeping the story moving. If you're looking for a brooding noir-ish crime read where the personal drama of the detective is half the story, this ain't it. We're dropped right into the action -- a plague of absolutely mind-shattering fear has descended upon a Chinese city, with at least two people dead before we've even finished meeting our detective, Chief Investigator Luo Fei (and learned how very respected he is; everybody, barring one character I'll talk about in a bit, is either very wise and learned with a shining reputation who commands awe and respect from everybody else, or is basically just a figurant there to express that awe and respect). One went tear-assing out of a college library late at night and ran six miles in 40 minutes, essentially running himself to death, dying with an appaling rictus of terror on his face; the other suddenly left a wedding where everybody else was having such a great time they didn't notice that he was scared out of his mind, so scared that he tried to hide his head and entire body in a toilet and drowned. Also with the rictus.

And really, I almost feel like I took longer than Haohui does in describing this set-up. Dude is snappy! As in lickety-split, our Sherlock Holmes-analogue, Luo, has picked up a Watson-analogue at the local university, renowned psychologist Dr. Zhou, who has a living patient on his hands with a problem very like what the corpses seem to have experienced. Except he doesn't speak Mandarin; he only speaks a minority language, Hamo. And they don't even know who he is! Every bit as resourceful as Holmes and Watson, but with greater resources, they turn to the internet to solve this dilemma, and again, almost before we know it, BOOM! A third team member appears in the form of fringe historian Yue Dongbei.

And here's where Valley of Terror first threatened to get tiresome, because there is a lot of cliched sparring between Respectable Scientist Zhou and Crackpot Yue, even though the Crackpot has actual insights into the case; he had hired the living patient to go into the Back of Beyond to investigate a paranormal legend for him!

Thankfully, though, here is also where things get really fascinating for the Western reader, because the paranormal legend involves a lot of very real Chinese history that this American, even though she took four years of Mandarin in college and has struggled mightily to preserve what fluency she attained by watching a lot of Mandarin-language TV and movies over the years, didn't know much about. 

Way back around the time that Charles I was making everybody angry in England, the Manchu were invading China, and their forces were duking it out with the Yongling emperor's over territory near the modern day nations of Myanmar and Laos, with the almost-defeated Yongling forces left to the charge of one very capable and resourceful leader, General Li Dingguo, after the emperor fled to Myanmar (Burma back then). Li led something between a guerilla campaign and a siege defense in a mountainous region for years, achieving feats of military brilliance and command of logistics, but coming to a tragic and lonely end.*** BUT! In Yue's version of this history it is commonly believed that Li's prowess and incredible feats of derring do were only possible because he could command actual demons! Demons which were devilishly hard to overcome, as was Li until finally he and his supernatural aid were trapped in a vial via his blood. The vial is now a terrible, sacred treasure that must be guarded, lest the terrible monster Li escape and reincarnate and seek revenge on Those Who Brought Him Low.

Centuries later, this vial was looted from the region, smuggled into our man Luo's home city, and was in the process of being sold by unscrupulous traders to a collector from Myanmar a few months before the first scared-to-deaths occurred. This shady transaction was interrupted by none other than Supercop Luo, who in the process had to fire his weapon and managed to break open the blood vial! Did something escape from that vial besides some really old but well-preserved blood? Something that, say, can elicit mind-shattering fear in any unlucky human it/they encounter? SPOOKY!

We're still not even like 1/8th of the way through the novel, here, by the way. Lightning pace! Next thing we know Luo, Zhou and Dongbei are off on an adventure to the village to which General Li retreated centuries ago, to find Li is worshipped by the rustic locals, all of whom are descended from his defeated troops, as a rain god. A local Big Man, Chief Bai, a descendant of General Li's lieutenants, keeps the cult alive through a Scooby Doo mechanism: when the locals pray for rain, they make offerings and perform a ceremony and, if the "rain god" is pleased, his statue "cries" tears supplied on the sly by one Chief Bai -- or rather, one of his assistants. Except just as our investigative trio turns up, that assistant turns up in a state of severe shock and the General Li statue is crying blood!

Does this sound like good, pulpy fun, or what? But wait, there's more! Like a remote village populated by a minority tribe, the Hamo (kind of maybe based on a real life tribal people of the region, the Miao, maybe?), speakers of the language Dr. Zhou's terrified babbling patient was babbling terrifiedly in and believers in a version of the legend of Li Dingguo in which he is a terrifying villain who could summon demons and inflict sanity-destroying terror on his foes. The local belief system is upheld by yet another chieftain type, descended from the mighty Hamo warrior who originally, legendarily, defeated Li and put his blood in the vial, and a beautiful priestess, formerly the keeper of this vial who is descended from the lovely woman who was integral to the original plot to bring Li to justice.

See? So pulpy! So fun!

Continued tiresome arguments between Dr. Zhou and Mr. Dongbei aside.

And the annoying tendency for Zhao to describe his characters' physcial appearance in moral terms; we don't really know what anybody looks like in terms we're used to in western fiction, but we are often told that someone has an "honest" or "forthright" face and this is only my second modern Chinese novel but is that really a convention of Chinese fiction, that there are facial physiognomies that automatically convey trustworthiness or the lack thereof? Because, yuck.

Oh, and Zhou is constantly having leaps of insight that we're meant to just run with like being able to tell from a faint and messy footprint in damp mud that a dude was six feet tall, which, yes, deduction is mighty, but we're not treated to any deductive reasoning here, the other characters just say something along the lines of oh yes, of course, you learned that in police training!

And like I said, for a lot of the time I spent reading this, I was pretty annoyed at all of this, until I noticed how well the Big Mystery, the tension I mentioned above, is kept suspended. And so no, I'm not going to tell you which it is, but I am going to tell you that if you like mysteries, want to explore a different setting (and by the way, Zhao is a pretty competent scenery pornographer; China's equivalent of a Tourism Bureau should be slipping him a little something something for making people want to come visit Hunnan; it sounds beautiful), or like their spooky mysteries laced with a lot of historical drama. I might check out more of Zhao's work one of these day.

*With this title, and a bit of dialogue early in the novel evoking yet another Holmes mystery, I can't help but thinking a bit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear, eh wot?

**Which, yes, I'm finally going to read all of In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past but no, I've decided I'm not going to inflict my thoughts about on this blog. Plenty of ink and pixels have been spilled on long dead Proust, most of it by people with smarter and more insightful things to say about it than I. Too long; didn't write: how did "Swann in Love" escape the 90s trend of adapting classic literature into a snappy teen movie? It's exactly a teen movie plot!

***I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on this but you know who really went down a rabbit hole on this? Zhao Haohui, who has a nifty afterword about it that basically tells the whole historical tale of General Li Dingguo and it's a pretty great story.

Virginie Despentes' Vernon Subutex trilogy (translated by Frank Wynne)

"When Lou Reed is cast as the messenger of fate, you can be sure that the news is not good." - Virginie Despentes in Vernon Subutex 3

I really want to know if cool-as-fuck filmmaker/writer/all around bad ass lady of La France Virginie Despentes is a "pantser" or a "plotter"* -- a bit of a new experience for me since I usually don't care to know this about anybody. But here, here it matters to me because I'm still making my mind up about how Vernon Subutex ends. 

Spoilers for the whole damn trilogy to follow, obvs. I mean, it says "WARE SPOILERS" right up there in the blog header but none of you ever read that, apparently. So, to reiterate, WARE SPOILERS FOR VERNON SUBUTEX, in both its book and televisual forms.

The trilogy starts off as quite a naturalistic piece of contemporary fiction, for all that it's written very much in the mold most famously established for most of you as performed by George R.R. Martin's still-incomplete A Song of Ice and Fire; the storytelling comes from an omniscient third person narrator but brings us into the intimate point of view of a different character (and there are almost as many characters in Vernon Subutex as there are in ASOIAF) every "chapter" (though the book isn't divided into chapters per se -- lots of fun for someone writing a longish piece and using the ebook version for reference), starting with our eponymous hero, Vernon Subutex (not his real name -- which, the surname is actually the name of a drug used to treat opiod addiction, so I guess in America we'd call him Vern Methadone? -- but you don't get his real name until the very, very end, and there's no point in spoiling that here), freshly evicted from his Paris apartment not long after he finally had to give up and close his famous record store, Revolver. His couch surfing introduces us to many of the other characters whose lives we are going to share for many hundreds of pages (and this includes the dogs**), but the most pivotal figure after Vernon is one we only meet in flashbacks: his boyhood friend Alex Bleach (not his real name), world famous pop star and stud about town, recently dead of a drug overdose. Bleach was paying Vernon's rent, you see, but that stopped when Bleach's heart did, touching off most of the events of the novel.

Bleach also left behind, on Vernon's old digital camera, a slightly crazed videotaped confessional and a sample of some weird new aural ideas he's been playing with, that now constitutes his "last interview" and serves as a McGuffin for most of the first book, which I am going to refer to as Frenchie for the French bulldog on the cover of the otherwise boringly named Vernon Subutex 1. As soon as word gets out that this "interview" exists, the core clique from his old record store days goes bananas, as, not much later on, do certain members of the Cultural Exploitation Class of 21st Century Paris, namely an extremely powerful film/TV/music producer, Laurent Dopalet (whom I mentally christened Larry Dope immediately, because I am a child), who is pretty sure Bleach's tape will expose a crime or two on Dopalet's conscience that could possibly topple him from his seat atop the cultural and economic heap.

I might be introducing this theme too soon, but the last chapter or so of Schauzer (boringly named Vernon Subutex 3) strongly indicates that we're to have been perceiving this trio as a sort of loose allegory on the good old Gospels, with Bleach our John the Baptist, Vernon our Jesus, and either Larry Dope or a sinister instigator-or-surrogate we don't meet until the third novel, Max, as the Devil. This is, of course, a blasphenomenal way of messing with the Bible as all of these people spend vast amounts of their time in this story either drunk off their asses or blasting their sinuses with grotesque amonts of cocaine, not to mention the company they're all keeping, including porn stars, trans people, homeless people and a trans porn star. Actually, that part is rather Christ-like, never mind. We're not meant, though, to see these figures in this light for our era, anymore than your average tavern regular in Galillee would immediately have perceived gossip about that carpenter and his band of misfits a Holy Story in the making. At best we're supposed to be getting a warts-and-all (so many warts. So many warts, you guys) "real" back story, before Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul (George and Ringo) (remember this is a story about a dealer in vinyl records, so I couldn't help it) et al filtered out all the less than savory bits of the Greatest Story. The final chapters of Schnauzer (aka 
Vernon Subutex 3. Snooze) give us a telescoped Olaf Stapledon-esque capsule future history of the world years, then decades, then centuries after the events of the Subuteuch. Vernon is, by the end of this future history, an actual Christ figure, whose cult has survived by imitating Vernon's own course through life after his eviction from his Paris apartment. We'll get to that.

And so you see now, perhaps, why I'm really wondering if Virginie Despentes is a pantser or a plotter. Had she set out to make Vernon a Christ Figure all along, or did that idea come to her somewhere along the way as a great way to add a whole 'nother layer of Fuck You to the establishment in this Punk Prose trilogy? I find that I prefer one answer to the other as I dictate these lines right now, but we'll see where this goes. This isn't a book review; it's an essay. I'm entertaining some ideas about these books, figuring out what I think about them as I write.

I didn't embark on this journey on my own, by the way. I'm a fan of and, I guess now, a participant/occasional guest on, The 2 Month Review Podcast, a show that takes up a different Great Big Book (or, often, a trilogy that can be read as a single Great Big Book, as is Vernon Subutex or CoDex 1962) every two months and, once a week, holds a livestreamed discussion about a pre-arranged section of its text that is later also released as an audio-only podcast. As they frequently focus on works, as in this case, that have been translated from other languages, hosts Chad W. Post and Brian Wood are often joined by professional translators (including the translator of the American edition of Vernon Subutex, the incredible Frank Wynne), booksellers, other writers and the odd literary fangirl like me (here's a link to my episode). It's a great show and the two months spent on Vernon Subutex are among the program's most entertaining (and profane) to date. Anway, along the way we challenged each other often on a lot of important questions, the biggest of which was just how redeemable certain despicable characters (and the two villains mentioned so far aren't necessarily the most despicable of Vernon Subutex' cast), just how much of a punk Virginie Despentes really is, whether the Canal+ television adaptation of Vernon Subutex is worth watching (SPOILER: it is), and above all, the music. This is a story about a vinyl record dealer. Music is a big, big, big deal.

Music, Music, Music

Virgine Despentes masterfully uses music choices to convey information about her characters. This is terrific for people who are of her moment (and she, as I'll discuss later, is a very, very Generation X writer) but I suspect that older or younger readers will have to do a bit of work to catch what's she's trying to say about all of these people she made up. A seriously attentive reader who doesn't know who the hell the Eagles of Death Metal are (to give but one obscure-ish but rather important example) would do well to keep a browser window open to YouTube, or Pandora, or whatever service they use to check out new tunes, while reading. I found this aspect of the book particularly enjoyable (except when I found out that villain Larry Dope shares my love for Jordi Savall and his wonderful soundtrack for the film Tous les Matins du Monde), though I, too, had to check out a lot of new-to-me song selections because I spent the 90s (when these characters were all in their prime) writing for a local scene music magazine in Boston and if it wasn't a Boston or Boston-adjacent band, or at least the kind of nearly-unknown indie musicians who sent us their stuff gratis in the hopes of a review, I didn't hear it unless it was playing in the aisles of Restoration Hardware or the bodega where I got my milk and eggs. Now at last my excuse to get to know Osees (known in Vernon Subutex by their old moniker The Oh Sees), for example, was at hand!

By the way, if you're a freak like me who likes to listen to music and read simultaneously (I do it for particular reasons related to my medical issues), or just want to hear a selection of the stuff that gets talked about in the books, the 2 Month Review Boys and I have a playlist going on Spotify. It's not comprehensive in that we haven't included every single song mentioned in the novels, and sometimes we have taken the liberty to add songs that we feel suit the flavor of the music Despentes invokes but she just might not have heard ofm like my personally beloved The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. A lot of the selections are taken directly from DJ Mixmaster ChadPost, who usually just picks a single great song for a "season" (he earned my love forever for choosing the very best Kinks song, "Big Sky" for the seasons about Rodrigo Fresan's Tres Partes novels . The boy has taste, is what I'm saying), but for Vernon Subutex he went wild and chose a different song for every episode! By the way, if you have suggestions for the playlist (SJ, I'm thinking of you), I'm always open, to adding more. This thing is a work in progress! Get in touch with me on Twitter where I'm @katesherrod.

Anyway, Despentes doesn't just use music as a character descriptive shorthand; it's also a plot driver in a very special way, one that is an element of the story that could potentially lead some to classify Vernon Subutex as speculative fiction. Before rock star Alex Bleach died he had started experimenting with binaural beats, an audio phenomenon that, as currently understood, can only occur if a person is wearing headphones. The effect is acheived when two slightly different tones at a certain difference in frequency from one another are played, one to each ear, causing the listener's brain to perceive a third "phantom" tone "in between." Musicians sometimes use them to tune instruments, but more germaine to this story is that a lot of people consider this phenomenon to have therapeutic value for stress relief, improved concentration or motivation, or just deepened meditation, but there's not a lot of hard scientific evidence to support these uses as of this writing. 

In the Vernon Subutex universe, however, not only has Alex Bleach discovered a variety of these that can work via the sound system at a rock concert or DJ session, but that also can promote a kind of neural harmony, or at least a truly overwhelming urge to dance together that amounts to neural harmony, amongst a whole crowd of listeners. As the plot of the novels moves from the search for the "lost interview" of Alex Bleach to Vernon's adventures after he and his precious tapes are recovered by his friends and a small group of new acquaintances, Vernon begins a new life we could characterize as "will DJ for food." He's always had a freak talent for assessing a person and figuring out what kind of music that person likes or would like if they could just be exposed to it -- a great ability in a record dealer (I love how, throughout the novels, he is referred to always as a dealer, never as a seller or record store owner; music as drugs is as omnipresent an idea as are drugs themselves), vital in a guy who "pays for" his upkeep by spinning at private parties or, later on, at "Convergences" he and his friends begin to throw in out of the way places once word spreads about the incredible experiences people have at his DJ sets. They think it's just his music choices, his talent for segues, his ability to read the room, but it's also Alex Bleach's sonic mumbo jumbo, mu hah hah hah!

By the way, if those Convergences don't make you think at least a little bit about this scene -- the activity, not so much the dialogue --  in Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster (2015), I think you probably haven't seen the film yet. Do something about that!

Warfare

Conflict is what drives most novels, and there are so many kinds of conflict at play in Vernon Subutex you'll want to keep a first aid kit handy while you read. Class war is a big one, as a lot of economic anxiety that is actual economic anxiety (as well as the kind that is disguised racism) can't help but surface when your title character teeters on the edge of homelessness before plunging right in; Vernon's couch-surfing days take him from a typical one-bedroom working class apartment to a well-appointed family home to a posh divorcee's epic pad to an unbelievably fancy converted loft space owned by a coke-hoovering day trader who lets artist types crash for free as long as they amuse him and obey his arbitrary rules. Vernon takes all of this in stride, but other characters with whom we spend time along his journey have definite opinions and resentments about the stunning inequalities on display here, to say nothing of those we can't help but encounter in scenes devoted to top-of-the-heap mogul Larry Dope's world of truly obscene power and privilege -- or the precarious lives of an unbelievably charismatic group of homeless people who briefly take Vernon in before being absorbed into the Subu-Circle. But wait, there's more.

There's also a pretty strong element of generational warefare here. Almost all of our point-of-view characters, including all but one of Vernon Subutex' original and expanded social circle, are Generation X, and French Gen X-ers seem to have most of the same baggage we American ones do; written off as worthless slackers before we were even old enough to work full time, kept at the bottom of every employment hierarchy because the people ahead of us decided "don't trust anyone over 30" needed switched to "don't trust anyone under 30" right around the time we were hitting our 20s and early 30s, convinced by the Regan/Thatcher/Mitterand years that all of this was just fine because there wasn't going to be a future anyway because Nuclear War would end it all, bombarded non-stop by the pop culture juggernauts of our elders and only able to create little pockets of our own culture at the margins of society, trapped in a demographic that was only relevant to the all powerful force of Marketing for like five years in the 90s, etc. A handful of other characters are Zoomers, kids who either grew up at Vernon's record store or are the children of pivotal characters. Amusingly enough, it is this handful of Zoomers who are the only ones who actually do anything about the crimes of the villains But the villains? Oh, the villains. While there are some reprehensible characters among the Xers and Zoomers, the villains, the authors of the greatest evils in the trilogy's many plots, are Boomers: Larry Dope and a douchebag-come-lately who doesn't even show up until the second half of Schnauzer called Max.

Larry was born with a silver coke spoon up his nose but still felt that he had to be ruthless AF to get anywhere in the entertainment industry, even though, as we learn from his few POV chapters, he really doesn't care at all about art or music or cinema. Late in the trilogy we get to spend a chapter with him while he binges The Walking Dead, for shit's sake. And expends what little energy he has to expend on trying to think of a way he can replicate the success of that pap for himself -- this after having driven at least one employee, the lovely and capable Zoomer (I think) Anais, quite round the bend insisting she scour the internet (especially Instagram and What's App, two services Larry Dope does not even begin to understand) for the Next Big New Thing for him to capitalize on. But he also sets her to help one of the two greatest characters I've encountered this year, The Hyena, in tracking down the Alex Bleach tapes, not because he's interested in the potential artistic or technical accomplishments they might represent, but because he's pretty sure Alex spilled the beans on some Very Bad Things Larry Dope did years ago that would Ruin His Reputation and maybe even get him French Cancelled. Said Very Bad Things involving a now-dead Gen X porn star named Vodka Satana (not her real name) who was Alex Bleach's Great Love but who, being a Gen X porn star from a marginalized community, Larry Dope treated as way less than human and ultimately considered competely disposable.

Refreshingly, though, one source of conflict that is largely absent from these narratives is transphobia or homophobia (though I prefer the terms transmesia and homesia - the suffix in these denoting hatred rather than fear, but the larger culture still insists on saying -phobia. Sigh). This is not, as you might expect, because there is an absence of LGBTQ+ characters; quite the contrary. Two who, while not central to the plot are still significant, are Marcia, a trans woman from Brazil, and Daniel, a trans man who used to be a porn star along with Vodka Satana and their dear friend Pamela Kant (Pamela becomes a very important figure in the Subu-Circle once it goes semi-nomadic; Daniel mostly tags along but also bonds more closely with the Zoomers than most of the crew). They're both terrific characters, though Daniel, Daniel is one of my favorites (though as presented in the television adaptation, he is something else; he is a dead ringer for "tranpa" Buck Angel, a problematic figure in trans circles for his insistence that [from what I can gather; I'm a cis woman in White-oming so all of my understanding of this culture is mediated by Twitter and YouTube] in order to actually be trans, one has to have had gender confirmation surgery. Anyway, Daniel is styled to have such a strong resemblance to him that it can't be a coincidence, which is wild. In the book, when I first encountered him, I remember thinking hey, here's someone who was a porn star before transitioning to a man, like an Anti-Buck Angel [Angel famously became a porn star with the schtick "the man with a pussy" after transitioning]. Neat. And I was picturing him as vaguely David Bowie-ish because I'm a cis woman from White-oming and Bowis is my go-to image for androgynous allure. But then, well, take a look at this here pair of images:

Eloy Irref as Daniel in the Vernon Subutex television adaptation

Buck Angel in some random photo I grabbed off of Google images

Anyway, as I mentioned on the episode of 2 Month Review that I crashed, this resemblance feels like it must be meaningful, but I'm not knowledgable enough to parse out what is meant. Except that Eloy Irref is purty). Daniel never claimed any dysphoria or anything like that, just decided that he was tired of experiencing life as a woman and was ready, after a career in porn, to try something new. Daniel is enjoying life as a great-looking man to the full, especially how no one talks down to him, he gets hired right away when he applies for jobs and gets no flack if he wants a raise or a promotion, he feels safe walking the streets even late at night, etc. I love this for him and I'm all for this as a valid reason for someone to transition if they really want to. The only other time I've seen this treated with this breathtaking simplicity is in the transition of Lady Donna to Lord Dono in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga (though there, Donna became Dono mostly so she could inherit a title in a stupidly patriarchal society). Catch up, Western Civilization, for shit's sake.

As for the other trans character, Marcia, she is to a small degree the object of a brief hit of internal transphobia on Vernon's part when he meets her at the coke fiend's loft, but it's very brief and I doubt she even has time to realize it. She's so beautiful and so cool that Vernon falls in love with her faster than he can deal with his mixed-up feelings, and then, even though her transition isn't quite complete, decides it doesn't even matter: she's the gorgeous girl for him. And she returns his feelings. Which causes big problems but not because she's trans! And ultimately, she plays the pivotal role in making sure the Subu-circle's flame is carried into the future. 

Wow, just imagine what things were possible if the marginalized were always just given a chance to be people!

But, speaking of the marginalized, there's a ton of xenophobia on display in Vernon Subutex that is sometimes as shocking as the actual violence itself (of which, let me add again, there is plenty). At least two of the POV characters have running dialogues with themselves about how Those Filthy Immigrants have made everything worse in La France and often entertain thoughts that do not even stop at genocide as they wander down boulevards and weave through bars and beat the shit out of their wives and girlfriends (Patrice) or lovingly care for their daughter or their dog (Xavier). A third, possibly Zoomer aged or maybe even Milennial (you can tell this is a Gen X book because Milennials really don't factor in at all), is an out-and-out neo-Nazi who, seeking to attack the other greatest charcter I've encountered this year (Olga), assuming a passerby who's stopped to chat is one of Olga's People (homeless), beats him up so badly the poor slob ends up hospitalized in a coma. Did I mention there's a lot of violence in these books? There's a lot of violence in these books.

BUT, reprehensible and seemingly irredeemable as these characters are, Despentes leads us deeply enough into their souls and experiences, lets us see enough of their loves and longings, that by the end of Schnauzer we're devastated by their fates. Well, the Boomers are still 100% hatable throughout, but, hey, they're the villains, you know? These other guys like Patrice and Xavier are just our Worst Friends.***

They're also, occasionally, kind of funny, as when Xavier, surveying a row of yachts in port, internally rants "There’s only one flag that flies on these yachts: the flag of tax evaders who stash their money in offshore accounts, who cook the books, who aren’t subject to the same laws as everyone else" and eventually, because there's still a little bit of Angry Lefty in his bourgeois heart, concludes "Where are the fucking terrorists when you need one?" I was right there with him while he raged at the exploiter class and even got carried away with it enough to laugh out loud at his wishing terrorism upon them and BOOM, Despentes got me! I'm complicit in his shittiness, which shittiness I feel acutely just a sentence later when he then goes on, of course, to abuse the stereotypical Muslim Terrorist that lives rent free in his head for being so stupid and always picking the wrong targets. Whomp whomp.

But so okay, let's talk about terrorism

Terrorism and its impact on 21st century French life is as central a theme to Vernon Subutex as any examination of the negative impacts of late stage capitalism; perhaps even more so, as Despentes starts to explore the impact of terrorism through the aforementioned, frequently Islamophobic, inner dialogues of Patrice and Xavier and the Nazi thug, and also by allowing us to spend lots of time with some characters with Muslim backgrounds: the family of the aforementioned Vodka Satana (not her real name) who began her adult life as the wife of a secularized Muslim professor, Selim, had a daughter, Aicha, with him, but then left them to live a more adventurous life. Terrorism isn't up front and explicitly a factor in their lives so much as part of their entire lived experience as minorities within a larger culture that isn't as tolerant of them as maybe it should be -- at least at first. Which makes their fates, in the shorter term and the longer, extra poignant. I've already mentioned what became of Vodka; Selim and Aicha get much more page time, with Selim having devoted his entire life to raising Aicha and sheltering her from the truth about what her mother went on to become. For her part, once Aicha reached her teens and young adulthood, she decided to reject the "secular" part of her father's identity. Aicha as a young adult wears hijab, prays the requisite number of times per day, knows her Koran pretty well, is as devout a Muslim as a young woman with an apostate dad in a non-Muslim country can be. Watching her pull away from him is affecting, but in spite of it all, its the strength of character she developed under his care that lets her come to understand his choices and those of her long-dead mother when she finally learns the truth about Vodka Satana, surrounded by Vernon Subutex' strange circle of friends. Then and only then does terrorisim explicitly enter her life, but not in the way you'd probably expect.

It's through the Subu-Circle that she meets another Zoomer, Celeste, whose father was a regular at Vernon's store in the back in the and brought her there from time to time. Celeste works in the bar that becomes the Subu-Circle's indoor hangout, and has grown up admiring Vernon and all of his let's-admit-it-kind-of-lost friends, so when she finds out about Aicha's mother and the revenge hate-on Aicha has developed for one Larry Dope, Celeste is in. And then they find their perfect accomplice: Larry Dope's somewhat-estranged privileged-but-knows-it-but-isn't-commited-enough-not-to-renounce-his-privilege son, Antoine aka Tony Dope. And this trio, together with a small cell of South American immigrants with a taste for direct action, begin a cycle of terror all on their own.

As the implications of this just begin to hit the Subu-Circle, so do a lot of more famous, larger scale incidents. The attack on Charlie Hebdo, for one; the November 2015 Paris attacks, including the shooting at the Bataclan concert hall, for another. Neither of these incidents were even a twinkle in a perpetrator's eye at the time the first book, Frenchie, was written; possibly not even Poodle (Vernon Subutex 2) had hit the stores yet. Schnauzer, though, is almost centered on these tragedies, as the Subu-Circle, already somewhat rocked by the revenge plot effected by Aicha, Celeste and Tony Dope, disintigrates over a possible inheritance (oy), and later reunite at least partly in shared grief over these incidents and the chilling effect they've had on public spaces in France in general and the night life these characters are still partial to in particular. 

But lest you think it brings everybody fully back together, persuades people like Patrice and Xavier that they were wrong, or anything that simple, rest assured, it's not that simple, as when Olga, who originally bonded tightly with Xavier over their mutual love of dogs even before he accidentally took a coma-inducing beating for her at the boots of some neo-Nazis, tears into Xavier pretty quickly on recconecting:

Are you fucking dumb or what? People weren’t even out of the Bataclan and there you were, already on Facebook writing #stopIslam? I couldn’t ring you at the time because I didn’t want to freak out the people in the bar I was stuck in, but I was dumbfounded that you’re this far gone. Have you no heart, or just no fucking brain cells? #stopIslam? What the fuck do you mean by that, dipshit? Stop Islam from what, you ignorant twat? What the hell is going on inside your head when you write shit like that? We should kill all refugees? Haven’t we had enough death as it is? Or maybe you haven’t had enough, dickwad? Hasn’t there been enough grief, enough anguish without you adding a sprinkle of your fuckwit frustrations?****

OLGA IS THE BEST, YOU GUYS. You don't have to agree with me, except you absolutely have to agree with me.

And of course, terrorism is how the Subu-Circle meets its untimely end -- which brings me back around to wondering about whether Virginie Despentes is a plotter or a pantser. Given that the two terrorist attacks in France that the rest of the world probably knows the best hadn't even happened when she started writing Frenchie -- was terrorism already so much on her mind as a thing that happened in Paris that she'd already planned to incorporate it into these novels from the start? Possibly. After all, terrorism has been a fact of French life for over 200 years. France colonized Islamic nations back in the day, and is now welcoming immigrants from those nations in great numbers, and not all of those immigrants are happy with how they're treated once arrived, to say nothing of how their entire nations were treated throughout history. Modern French citizens who aren't blind jingoists like Xavier and Patrice feel some responsibility for all of this and have complicated feelings about Muslim immigrants and how they are treated, how they respond to how they are treated, and how much responsibility a modern Parisian bears for it all -- sort of like Americans with our history of bad behavior all over the world. I can definitely imagine Despentes having already had this on her mind, held this in store for her characters, all along.

On the other hand, I can also imagine her feeling, whatever her original plans, that she was obligated to incorporate these historic tragedies into fiction set so very much in the same historical moment they occurred. There's no way these characters she'd created would be able to ignore, especially, the Bataclan shooting, any more than they would ignore the death of Lemmy from Motorhead or of David Bowie (both of whose deaths are prominently discussed). But she could have acknowledged these horrors in her novel without making them So Very Much the Point. Conversations about them, changes in plans, maybe some dramatic gestures or acts on the part of certain characters, even attacks on certain characters (I don't imagine Selim, for instance, would have had a very good time of it after Charlie Hebdo, being a college professor and teaching privileged and politically conscious French students and all), would suffice. But Despentes takes terror attacks right through to the end of the novel (barring the Olaf Stapledon-esque extended epilogue that takes the Subu-Circle's spiritual descendents far into the future) and detonates the whole thing with a rampage by a character we don't even meet until the penultimate chapter! At the instigation of Max, a character whom we didn't meet until a decent ways into the third book (though this is admittedly possibly ultimately at the instigation of one Larry Dope, whose patronage Max seeks)!

It's this last-minute seeming denouement that has me really puzzling over how I ultimately feel about these books. I'm more of a genre reader than a literary fiction reader, so my standards for a satisfying ending and a quality read are a bit different from those of Despentes' target audience, but I can't help but be annoyed that Max and Solange feel so tacked-on as characters, for all that Despentes did her usual fantastic job of showing them to us as well-rounded ones. Max's and Solange's choices make a fair bit of sense given what we know about them; it's just that they come into their prominence so hastily when we've spent several hundred pages with everybody else. I mean, maybe that's the point -- we never know who's carrying the gun containing the bullet with our name on it, and in this day and age if it's not someone we share a home and even children with, then it's probably a total stranger who doesn't even consider us a whole 'nother human being, we're just meat in the grocery store/train station/nightclub/elementary school/dancing like loons in an empty field in the middle of the night that doesn't know it's meat yet. But in a book that is so much about a very particular set of characters and the trajectories of lives that have come together and exploded apart and come back together again, I want what I want, and what I really wish had happened was that Max and Solange had been part of the story from way further back without having had, necessarily, to actually encounter the other characters -- as genre authors pull off all the time! They could at least have been introduced somewhere in Poodle, say. There was room. Heck, there was room further back in Schnauzer: we got a whole chapter about a woman who was a Janey-come-lately to the Subu-Circle's Convergences who herself mattered very little to the larger story except in that she is part of the convoluted path that brings Max into the group's orbit. I'd much rather have seen more of Solange's life than hers.*****

So, okay, clearly I'm still kind of peeved about this ending. But does it spoil my enjoyment of the books? I've gotta say no. Way too much of what is here is way too good, and, oh, guys, I haven't even really talked about my two favorite characters, but this is getting long, even for me, even though it's about three books. But if you haven't read them yet (but still read this piece?) and I haven't convinced you to give Vernon Subutex a chance yet, you don't deserve to meet The Hyena or Olga. You don't even deserve to meet Cokehead Kiko. 

Go on with ya. Or at least head on over to Topic (one of a zillion streaming platforms, yeah yeah, but it's a keeper if you like international TV shows and movies or just want to practice your foreign language comprehension. Me, I like both. Ask me about CSI: Taipei sometime) and feast your eyes and ears on the only extant season to date of Vernon Subutex: the TV show, which adapts the whole of Frenchie. It's not a long season; you can definitely watch it all during your seven day free trial.

*A "pantser" is a fiction writer who composes a tale "by the seat of her pants" without any, or with very little, idea of where the story is going, often without even a clear ending in mind. She just lets the story happen in drafts and hacks it into shape later. A "plotter" envisions most, if not all, of the story ahead of time, has a clear ending in view, and keeps steering her material toward that ending, unless a better ending comes to her mind in the course of writing.

**Which, get ready for the dogs in this book, although the damned schnauzer on the cover of Schnauzer remains a mystery. The other two are named in the story and are beloved pets whose fates matter. Unlikely friendships form over the mutual love of dogs. The welfare of the dogs is never ignored or discounted in decisions made by the characters even as they become more and more untethered from the ordinary world. Get ready for the dogs. I'm choosing, until proven otherwise, to believe that the unnamed schnauzer of Schauzer is a pet Homeless Superheroine Olga adopted sometime between the breakup and reformation of the Subu-Circle. She's not the kind of woman to go that long without a dog in her life, homelessness be damned.

***A term I use to describe those people in your life to whom you are close like best friends but with whom you always seem to get into terrible trouble when you actually hang out with them, who bring out our worst judgment or worst impulses or are most likely to, say, call at 4am needing bailed out of jail for something stupid as opposed to the ones who are most likely to, say, answer the phone at 4am when the psychic wolf pack is chasing us down through the bloodstained snow of the soul. Also, characters like Patrice and Xavier for certain represent the shockingly large contingent of our generation who did, in fact, get more conservative/reactionary as they aged, who listened to the Dead Kennedys with us in the 80s and were definitely down for Lynching the Landlord but then maybe married well to a landlord's daughter or realized they sold more screenplays if they wore Armani jeans or lost out on one too many promotions at the factory to people with darker skin and emerged in middle age as full fledged reactionary fucks whom you really don't ever want to speak to again/wish they weren't pooping all over your Facebook feed but someone else in your life still loves them and so you do your best to tolerate them and just, like, mute them when they get too obnoxious on social media and don't go to too many gatherings where you know they'll be. I'm still astonished at how many of my passionate angry young friends have grown up to be Trumpkins, you guys. Still angry, but now angry at all the people they used to be angry for.

****Oh yeah, this is a very 21st century story. A whole lot of it takes place on or because of Facebook, and the Greatest Character, the Hyena, is a masterful grey hat hacker on whose good side you really want to stay. She doesn't get to stretch her skills as much as she might, though, because most of the other characters are really stupid about cybersecurity, but still. 

*****But yeah, easy for me to say, I'm just some literary fangirl with a blog and why don't I write my own damn novels if I'm so smart. Shut up. At least I'm blogging again. Even though it's physically painful to do so. Phooey.