Kate Sherrod blogs in prose! Absolutely partial opinions on films, books, television, comics and games that catch my attention. May be timely and current, may not. Ware spoilers.
Like Paul Scott's classic Raj Quartet of decades past, this novel ought to have started with a thesis sentence that gave us a bit of a warning what was in store for us, like "This is the story of a rape." In Scott's novel, the actual, physical rape of a young woman is meant to illustrate in microcosm what the British had done to India; in Meredith Westgate's debut novel, The Shimmering State, there may or may not have been an actual physical rape, but there is most certainly a rape of a consciousness. The crime occurs after pages and pages depict a powerful older male film producer type -- the story takes place in a near-future Los Angeles -- taking choice after choice away from a young ballerina, Sophie, who is on the brink of making it big but who is still entirely vulnerable to the machinations of guys like him, who can destroy careers with a word -- or psyches with a dose of a hot new club drug that he's been evangelizing through all those same pages that he's been enjoying Sophie's discomfort at his attentions. The threat has loomed large from the very beginning. He's sure she'll enjoy it. Why does she keep saying no? The pressure that mounts is exquisitely awful; we know he's going to slip her a dose, it's just a question of when...
Whether or not he actually got into her pants after dosing her is therefore a moot point.
Anyway, The Shimmering State is the story of a rape and what happened afterwards.
It's also the story of a young man, Lucien, who has allowed first his famous artist mother to subsume his identity in the usual way - dominating his life, though in a kindly way, and overshadowing his own artistic efforts to the point that even after her death his work is getting included in shows because he's his mother's son - and then lets his grandmother more literally subsume him when he swipes a couple of her experimental new Alzheimer drugs (the same ones used recreationally by the film producer*), meant to revive her mind with somehow curated versions of her own chemically stored memories.
Lucien, I should be clear, is not the rapist.
Sophie and Lucien, we find, knew each other slightly in the before times -- before Lucien started tripping on his grandmother's memories, and before the producer slipped Sophie a mickey composed of a thrill killer's memories -- before meeting again in a rehabilitiation clinic that treats bad cases by more or less stripping all of their memories and then carefully reintroducing only the ones the patients want or need to keep to be functioning, happy humans again. Despite their erasures, Lucien and Sophie feel drawn to each other and experience what might amount to the body remembering what the mind cannot.
The story of how each of them wound up at the rehab clinic unfolds gradually, interspersed with servings of that of their progress through this weird therapy and a few episodes from the life of the clinic's head, who experiences a personal tragedy in the middle of it all that seems like it might put her at risk of joining her patients. This therapist, one Dr. Angela Sloan, looms toward the novel's end as a monster potentially worse than any villainous psychiatrist since Ursula LeGuine gave us Dr. Haber in The Lathe of Heaven. Her position doesn't quite give her the power to alter reality itself, but the control her position gives her over the most intimate details of her patients' very memories is terrifying even before she succumbs to the temptation to abuse it when someone very close to her, with whom she has made a myriad of mistakes, comes within that power. Her story thus combines elements of both Lucien's and Sophie's and should, perhaps, have been developed more to become a true third narrative rather than a mere occasional commentary on the other two. It is brought mostly to a satisfactory conclusion within the small space it occupies, at least. This may be Westgate's first novel, but she knows better than to leave plot threads dangling.
More importantly, she also knows the art of sharing intense experiences and hard-hitting emotional truths in truly lovely prose. A natural disaster interrupts our characters' progress late in the novel and gets the following terribly vivid description that gives our very homes an air of waiting menace:
What does a mudslide sound like? Movement. But what is silence, untethered? A forest holds a cracking thunder; a hillside neighborhood, its wealth in weght. What are the latent sounds of an area, in stillness, that might be released in motion? Closets of clothing, dressers packed full; giant televeisions made to appear weightless, hovering on steel brackets; cabinets stocked with spices in glass jars; refrigerators full of produce and cold meats. We live in silence that could suffocate us. Crushed under all that we own.
Or this, in which a breakthrough on Sophie's part brings back as much pain as hope:
The memory is so clear, the red Solo cup in her hand, the smell of Casey's house. She knows it is progress to conjure a memory all on her own. But, of course, it's the one that just might break her heart.
Yeah, it broke mine.
Don't snooze on this book, or this author, friends. There are pitfalls ahead of her and this novel is going to be hard to match or surpass, but if she finds herself up to the task of trying, Meredith Westgate might be a name to keep looking for when finding new things to read for some time to come.
*Your humble blogger being the Gene Wolfe dork she is, of course this drug seems like a 21st century version of the Analeptic derived from the Alzabo in The Book of the New Sun, though at least here there's no need for a dead body or the consumption along with the drug of that dead body's brain.
I love finding out how other languages express animal sounds. Like the way in Arabic dogs say "Haw Haw" or Japanese cats say "Nyah" or pigs go "Grunz" in German. And then there are just foreign words for animals that are fun to say, and are often also versions of what sounds they make, like "Mao" for cat in Mandarin Chinese. And then there are words for insects, like the Icelandic "kakkalakki" for cockroach.
I have a new favorite one of these, and it is Chicharra, Spanish for cicaida. And, as it is frequently chanted in V. Castro's fantastically pulpy new horror novel, Queen of the Cicaidas/La Reina de las Chicharras, "Chicharrachicharracharracharra".
When I stumbled across this little gem of in the new books section of my local public library, I thought at first this might be a bilingual edition, since the title shows up on the cover in both English and Spanish, but alas, I was wrong. I was wrong about a couple of things with regards to this novel, but, you know, not alas. Because it's good.
The story starts out in the present day, when our heroine, Belinda, has to return to her old hometown of Alice, TX for a friend's wedding. Belinda has some kind of feelings about this, being herself divorced and becoming somewhat estranged from the teenaged son she's raising by herself, but she does her best to try to enjoy it... and then she discovers that the awesome wedding venue her friend has chosen is... a haunted farm!
But it's not just any old haunted farm. It's a farm where a brutal hate crime took place in the 1950s, against a lovely young undocumented farm hand named Milagros. But instead of a mere ghost of Milagros stalking the grounds and house, this farm is under the special attention of no less a figure than the Aztec goddess of the dead, Mictecacihuatl, and if you're getting Silvia Moreno-Garcia vibes, you're not alone. But V. Castro has other tricks up her sleeve than sending Belinda on a road trip with a scary skull-faced lady with a fancy headdress -- like turning Milagros into a brand new kind of monster*. The molted shells of immature cicaidas figured prominently in the torture-murder of Milagros, and so she is reborn into the undead Queen of the Cicaidas, whose legend immediately starts to grow and partakes a bit of, say, Bloody Mary but has other sights to show you as the story progresses.
This could easily have been a story of a plucky modern lady helping a nice hotel owner to purge his property of its supernatural miasma or something like that, which we've already read many times before, and it was kind of what I was expecting from the jacket copy. There are elements of this hoary old plot, sure, but there is much more, and I'm not just talking about how Belinda gets back in touch with her Mexican-American roots and especially with her Mexican side when she investigates Milagros' story and travels to the unfortunate migrant's original home to tell her family why her letters and money stopped coming so long ago. This is touching enough to make Queen of the Cicaidas stand out, but even this wasn't enough for V. Castro, who is maybe, like me, a bit of a fan of stuff like Ernest Hogan's magnificent High Aztech or something similar. I was absolutely deslighted by the unexpected turn this story took about 3/4 of the way through, when stuff happens that I'm afraid you'll have to read the novel to discover for yourself. Again, it's not a long read, but it's fun, though, prude alert: there's some graphic sex scenes near the end that I could have done without, but hey, Belinda is a lady with needs, I get it.
Speaking of, ahem, those kind of needs, I have to give this book kudos for excellent queer representation; Milagros had a girlfriend back in the day, so the farm owner's advances on her pretty person were extra unwelcome, and the modern day owner of the farm is a gay man with his poop in a group who is ready to start a family with the right partner. And no, it's not Belinda.
So, it's coming up on Halloween, you need a bit of spooky in your life that also takes on a couple of important social issues, and dishes up some godpunk and invented a whole new supernatural monster? Bow down to La Reina!
*Really, this monster/figure felt so organic to the setting that I went digging to see where she might have originated. As far as I can tell, she originated in the mind of one V. Castro, though I dunno, maybe it was inspired by the Navajo trickster god I learned about decades ago from James Hillman - variously spelled Bekotsidi or Begodchiddy, who sometimes turned into an insect in order to escape pursuit, other times, upon capture, let various insects swarm from his mouth and hair and whatnot. And dressed as a woman a lot. Great inspiration if that's where she got it, but if no, well, bravo to her for coming up with a genuinely new figure of pseudo-folklore. Who is cool AF, btw.
Also, apropos of nothing, here's maybe the person to cast if this ever gets adapted into a film. Her name is Shokotan, and for several years she made a sort of fashion statement using their discarded exoskeletons in celebration of cicada molting season in Japan. My kind of girl.
My experience of the insanely horrific war and genocide that tore through the Balkans in the 1990s was heavily mediated, chiefly by reports on NPR. To this day I still hear the names of those towns and regions in Sylvia Poggioli's distinctive voice.*
A book with a title like that must be working off a list, one might think, and indeed a list of seven phobias does appear in its pages -- twice. And it's not the same list. Early on, we get a list that our unnamed narrator composed after hearing from a radio report that a psychologist has recommended the exercise as the first step towards getting over those fears. Later in what is basically an appendix to Seven Terrors, we get another - only this second list, we are given to understand, is cribbed from another character's researches into a bit of local folklore that has obsessed him.
The two lists do not match, though there is a little overlap between them. And the characters in Seven Terrors do not have methodically to encounter and conquer the terrors from either list in the course of the story. Selvedin Avdic is a much more interesting writer than that, and he's got a much more serious point to make: that even though, in the point in time and space that is this novel's setting (a Bosnian village in the late "oughts" or early 2010s), the Bosnian War is well over a decade in the past and thus its horrors can be thought of as having receded to a certain degree, its having happened at all is horror aplenty for its characters to cope with, and its aftermath is still horrifying.
Our narrator, whose wife left him for another man through, as he has accepted ruefully, his own fault, has just come off a nine-month depression jag that has seen him spending the whole time in bed. His Bosnian village, a tiny mining town still half-trashed by the war, doesn't exactly offer state of the art mental health services, and hey, everybody here is coping with grief and trauma and survivor's guilt and personal hurts every bit as bad as our narrator's own.
On the very day he finally seems to be pulling himself together, cleaning up and thinking about going out for a bit, a knock at his door proves to be, not local foreboding lunatic Mikhail, who periodically invades people's spaces to deliver bizarre and cryptic pronouncements that might be reminders of the past, statements on the present or presenitiments of future doom, but a young woman, Mirna, whom our hero last knew as a little girl. Mirna and her mother were sent away early in the fighting, with the promise that Mirna's father Aleksa would soon follow, but Aleksa stayed behind to help other people in worse danger than he and his feared. They kept in touch for a while, and then his letters stopped coming. Aleksa and our narrator were colleagues, journalists at a local radio station. Does our narrator know what became of Aleksa, by any chance?
He does not, so soon is pressed upon by a tearful Mirna to help her find out what happened to her father. She has come into possession of a journal he'd been keeping in the last months before he disappeared, which shows him to have been investigating legends of supernatural presences in the local mining tunnels, and indeed to have encountered a famous one: the Perkmann.** Since his encounter, the miners who at first welcomed him among their ranks have shunned him, maybe because he is a Serb, maybe because belief around the Perkmann holds that the person who has seen him is cursed (although, Aleksa maintains in his journal, this figure is also associated with warnings of disaster, and Aleksa's encounter was in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake that occurred while he was deep in the tunnels. So maybe it really is because Aleksa is a Serb). Still fascinated by the story, Aleksa kept researching and asking around, leading him to meet other sinister figures in the town who aren't nearly so supernatural as the Perkmann, but every bit as terrifying and very, very dangerous. And also some ghostly mining horses, animals who spend their entire useful lives deep underground in the dark and are thus blind by the time they are retired and brought to the surface. To live out the rest of their lives on one of those farms that's too far away to visit and they can't visit you either it's just too far. But nobody's ever short on glue.
But this isn't really a spook story. It's one man's oblique approach to all of the mundane horrors that are too traumatic to confront directly, complicated by everybody else trying to do the same. Shattered psyches everywhere, still with jagged edges to cut each other with on the slightest approach. It's heartbreaking and sad and beautiful.
It's also, often, funny in weird and unpredictable ways. Our narrator having been a radio journalist and our author being an intelligent man who lives in the world, his account is sprinkled with references to American pop culture and some surprisingly passionate opinions about it. A footnote (yes, a novel with footnotes, but hush, this is not some David Foster Wallace infinite jesting, just some cultural clarifications and the odd tangent) veers into considerable vitriol against Vogue magazine in general and Anna Wintour in particular, which seems like a very odd thing for a novel like this to do, but it doesn't feel odd when it happens. And it reminds us that, while we may have the luxury of ignorance about people in other countries living through horrors other than ours, most of them don't have the reciprocal luxury when it comes to us. Our dumbest pop culture tidbits erupt right into their reality and thus their thoughts and discourse, even when examining hurts uniquely their own. A lot more literature is translated from our language into theirs than ever will be from theirs into ours -- and our readers barely read what is written by us, for us, let alone what's been imported from abroad. See also Chad W. Post's The Three Percent Problem.
As for the translation itself, it's resulted in some beautiful English prose that carries some startling and original imagery. One never knows, on this end, what images are carried over wholesale from the original and what are developed by the translator to mimic the effect of something untranslatable, but Coral Petrovich has one way or another given us some stunning English sentences like "At first, a terrible nervousness overcame me, I could have slid out of my skin like soap from a fist." That's one of those that's going to live rent-free in my head for a long time, like Haruki Murakami/Jay Rubin's bit in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle "I glanced at the phone in the living room. It sat on the table, cloaked in silence. It looked like a deep-sea creature pretending to be an inanimate object, crouching there in wait for its prey."
I don't imagine that, in this dreadful eternal year that is still basically 2020, a lot of us are actively looking for stories that remind us that our imagination holds no horrors that are really worse than what we do to each other in real life, but sometimes it is good to see it in a highly original form, and so for that if not for any of the other reasons I've sort of given here, I recommend that you set aside a little time -- and at 149 pages, you won't need much for the actual reading so much as for coming to terms with it after -- and spend it with Seven Terrors.
*I'm Gen X. I was a 20-something in the 90s and too poor for anything but snowy analog broadcast TV and commuted the six miles to work on foot to save time and bus fare. NPR was pretty much my lens on everything.
**Who seems to be a local version of a figure in German folklore called the Bergmonch.
Many years ago, I decided it was finally time to take on a bit of Robert Silverberg, after a particular book of his, The Book of Skulls, had been recommended to me so many times I'd gotten tired of hearing about it. Forewarned against Silverberg's rampant misogyny, I still felt so entirely slapped in the face by it that I actually fantasized about how great it would be if an edition of it could be published without any women in it at all. I mean, think about that for a moment: I was wishing my own gender out of a book. I mean, kind of on the Thumper principle -- if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all? The Book of Skulls told a really cool story and wrestled with a lot of interesting ideas and depicted some characters who were quite hideous all on their own and I didn't need to see them mistreating women all along their cross-country journey to prove that.
Well, now I seem to have found a companion volume, perhaps a companion author to Silverberg as well. Except instead of a speculative fiction tale of a search for immortality and its costs, composed by an author widely renowned within his genre (but only within his genre), this one is straight-up literary fiction, composed by an author internationally acclaimed but again only in the circles of International Literature and translated fiction. But they have a lot in common.
Albert Cossery, a 20th Century Egyptian Man of Letters (known as "the Voltaire of the Nile") who wrote his letters in France and thus in French, was a terribly interesting and terribly talented man, but as I was warned in James Buchan's introduction*, he did not have a terrific attitude about women. But so don't a lot of terrific writers; Chuck Pahlaniuk, say -- the popular American novelist I was most reminded of besides Silverberg as I took in Cossery's short novel from around the middle of his long but lazy career, The Jokers.
As one might expect from the title, suggesting to us 21st century westerners nothing so much as everybody's favorite Batman villain, The Jokers concerns itself with a special kind of discontents in one of Cossery's unnamed imaginary Middle Eastern/North African cities. Their city , which is impossible not to imagine as basically being William S. Burroughs' Interzone, is ruled by a pseudo-military dictator known in the book simply as "the governor" who has banned begging and is flogging its population sort of half-assedly towards striving to appear a busy and modern city-state, with its people bustling around in a parody of purposefulness amidst glittering mid-century edifices that are mostly just cheaply constructed shells of same disguising the same old mud-brick architecture the place has always had. I could have used a lot more attention being paid to the state of affairs prevailing in a city run this way, but alas, I only got a very amusing opening prank at the expense of a police officer that I could definitely see happening in 2020s L.A. or Portland or NYC.
Anyway, our heroes want nothing to do with this prosperity play, of course, but can't be bothered to organize anything so effortful and banal as an actual armed uprising against the regime. The three we chiefly get to know -- Karim, an educated and capable young man who could easily fit into the machinery of state and do well there for himself and for his people, but who'd rather loaf around, seduce prostitutes and then not pay them, and make and sell kites; Heykal, a successful businessman who learned his trade in the prison system but never learned to read; and Urfy, who runs a small school with his mother, or used to before dementia took hold and left her pretty much helpless and hopeless. -- have convinced themselves that ridicule alone can topple the governor, but not just any ridicule. It must be ironic AF.
Their plot revolves around a poster campaign which will plaster the governor's face all over the city above an absurdly fawning encomium to him that will provoke the citizens to mirth and the rest of the nation and the international community to assuming that the governor is so insecure and pathetic that he has felt the need to mount this over-the-top propaganda campaign. It's an entertaining idea and one that I might have once thought entirely plausible, but now I just imagine a plot like this during The Former Guy's presidency and realize that the governor, were this to happen in real life, would probably just eat up the flattery, and the international community's sniggering would not bother him one bit.
Of course, the comparison doesn't really hold, because Cossery's unnamed city is nowhere near the Big Player on the International Stage that the United States is; it's much easier to laugh at what one has no very great reason to fear. I'm pretty sure the home of Karim, Heykal and Urfy is not a nuclear power.
On the other hand, their plot reminded me more than a little bit of one of my favorite short films of all time, Mat Nix's Me and the Big Guy, in which an ordinary citizen of a totalitarian state modeled on Orwell's 1984 uses the always-on two-way video screen in his home/cell to annoy the dictator into leaving him alone. Again, we now know that this wouldn't work; TFG would never stay tuned in to the film's nebbish protagonist long enough to get annoyed once the initial flattery got stale. Still, it's a glorious little ten minutes I hope to embed here if YouTube hasn't taken steps to prevent that sort of thing nowadays.
The characters in The Jokers entertain no such hopes of being finally allowed to plot revolution in peace, of course; plotting revolution is work, and besides, what would they find to laugh at smugly, to feel superior to, to trade witticisms about, without the greatest joker of all, their city's fearless leader, to kick around?**
Interestingly, Cossery kind of lets us see what it would be like for them in a scene which has Karim having to submit to a police interrogation, which turns out to be the job of an old frienemy, Hatim. Hatim is a bit excited as soon as he sees Karim in the wating room, because he considers Karim a worthy foe, the kind of revolutionary that makes policing worthwhile -- but Karim, as part of the Big Joke, denies any dissatisfaction with the current regime at all, even seizes the opportunity, when the Governor Himself passes by, to kiss the Governor's hand and praise him as a Good Father to His People. Hatim senses this isn't sincere but can't see a way past the irony and is left deeply unsettled by the pointless encounter. Again, I can't help but think, wouldn't it be lovely if this worked? But alas...
I sound like I hated this book, but honestly, I didn't; I generally don't make the effort to write about books I don't like, both because I really don't have the spoons to waste and because I agree with W.H. Auden, who opined long ago that writers of bad reviews are usually just showing off. Better to let bad books sink into obscurity. But so, no, I didn't hate The Jokers, even with its misogyny that I haven't even gotten around to really describing yet, because Albert Cossery, and his translator Anna Moschovakis, have produced a really engaging and compelling little novel here, with just enough of a plot to keep it all going and a lot of ridiculously entertaining scenes, such as one midway through when Heykal, just moments after putting up the very first poster in a casino bathroom, watches a drunk stagger in, try to take a pee, look up and see the dictator's face staring down at him above a ridiculous paragraph of praise to him, and keels over stone dead -- while the dictator himself is sitting in the VIP section of that same casino, fending off the Jokery trio's young friend Soad's badgering attempts to get him to join her on the dance floor. And I like Cossery's insistence on idleness being a virtue, and his dandy-heroes could be my heroes if they would only include people like me in their plans. I can write poster copy, too, guys. Never mind that I could theoretically also have a baby. Guys? Guys?
But so, let's talk a bit about Soad, a 16 year old girl whose father is close in the governor's counsels, and who gladly turns over all the information she can because she has a crush on Heykal. When first we meet her, Humbert Humbert-ish-ly, the first thing we learn about her is that she has a wispy, underdeveloped body. The only point of view we get from her is either fawning admiration of Heykal or waspish hatred for a famous singer, a middle aged woman, who was her father's mistress for a while. Everything else is just cavorting and giving Heykal the eye, which only ever brings Heykal to ponder how much the true object of his admiration is Urfey's poor mad mother, about whom he rhapsodizes emetically:
All the tenderness in him went out toward the face of the old madwoman, Urfy's mother. Her insanity was what he admired more than anything; she existed on a plane free of corruption, an extraterrestrial universe of inviolable purity, immune to the usual abominations. Heykal, who cared about nothing, was jealous of Urfy's crazy mother, this sublime being buried in a basement in an unsavory part of town; the schoolmaster possessed the one thing that could actually move Heykal.
Never mind the poor woman's actual circumstances.
But back to poor Soad. Toward the novel's end, she gets the Susan Pevensie treatment; her father, sensing that the governor's ship is sinking and he's not going to have the mental or economic resources to deal with raising a teenager on his own, has finally given her her late mother's jewelry and made her start dressing like an adult so she can quickly be married off. Her last scene with Heykal is as bad as anything C.S. Lewis wrote about Susan; now that her hair is up and her jewels are on she has no attraction for Heykal, who suddenly shifts to equating her to all the other women in the cafe where they've met for a last exchange of intelligence:
There was the little girl*** and her mother, and apart from that just two other tables occupied by ladies gorging themselves on cake and blabbing quietly to each other. Heykal was nauseated by the women's voraciousness.
I mean, they're just hanging out in a cafe? Having a nice conversation and a bit of cake? They're not, like, wolfing down a ten course meal and talking with their mouths open and spitting crumbs everywhere and looking his way and licking their chops? They're just there? Where they maybe are often because they like to be idle just like Heykal and his friends do? They might even have a more sophisticated understanding of what's going on in the governor's circles? Or just be nice, ordinary people who are hurting no one? But anway... then poor Soad arrives, proud of her new grown-upness and knowing that she looks nice, but when she makes the error of fishing for a compliment, she's told she looks "Superb!... You remind me of my grandmother!" And when she reacts to this as any teenaged girl might, Heykal gives her a dirty look and muses on how
She had just voluntarily crossed the border that separated her from childhood; from now on, she would no longer be able to move him. She was a woman now, and she knew how well he was defended against the ploys and duplicity of her sex.
What? You thought I brought up Lolita by accident?
I really wonder what it was like for Anna Moschovakis to translate stuff like this from the French. Here's another choice passage:
Karim was relaxing. He leaned against the stone parapet that ran along the cliff road and studied the languid asses of the woman strolling by, so plainly visible beneath their light dresses. How different they all were! They came in every shape and size. In the veiled gray light of dusk, these amazing asses took on a life of their own, promising him sensuous delights. The owners of the asses were, for the most part, so ugly that even a sex maniac would run screaming, but Karim barely noticed; he seldom looked at a woman's face.
I mean, maybe I could convince myself that Karim and Heykal are being satirized for their horrible attitudes toward half the human race, if I was being paid very well to do it, but I know that publishers, even the famous NYRB Classics line, pay as little as they can get away with for translations. Let's hope she got a grant.
I'll stress again that I did not hate this book, but I did hate how I felt after finishing it: hopeless, tired and more than a little skeeved out. So I'll say I can see why this book and this author have garnered admiration, but I'll say also that someone is going to have to make a very concerted and sincere effort to get me to read any more of Albert Cossery's work. Humor and style aren't everything, and my TBR pile is still approaching the infinite, y'all.
And, apropos of nothing, I haven't read any Houellebecq beyond his Lovecraft book and The Elementary Particles, either.
*Which I only skimmed at first; I tend to prefer to take my fiction as it was written and only to turn to forewards and whatnot afterwards. Kind of like people who try not to see trailers before they see an actual film, I want a pure experience if I can pull it off.
**In other words, they remind me a lot of a guy who was one of my best friends from age three until we graduated high school, whom I wanted to punch right in the junk when we met up for drinks in 2016 and he told me he really hoped one Donald J. Trump would be the next President of the United States because it would "never be boring." Anybody who values politics as entertainment being more important than at least trying to make other people's lives a little bit more bearable seriously needs a punch in the junk at least once. But I kind of used to do that to him sometimes when we were little, and I was in a public place, so I refrained that time.
***Before Soad's arrival, Heykal has been all but flirting with this little girl, even to the point of imagining spiriting her away from the cafe and her "monstrous" mother.
My sister and I have almost caught up on the available episodes of FX's goddamned delightful new series, Reservation Dogs, which hits all kinds of right notes with me that aren't all just remembering how much I love Smoke Signalsalthough of course I screamed in Episode Four when Gary Fucking Farmer showed up as an old time pot-smoking bar-fighting "uncle" to one of our teen protagonists and stole the show every bit as much as he did in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and, to a lesser degree, in Smoke Signals, so hell yes, I realized it was high time that I checked out Stephen Graham Jones, especially since every recommendation algorithm the internet throws at me (possibly, in 2021, already all the same algorithm? Or I'm even more predictable than I think I am, which is very, but maybe it's very very) has been showing me this book for going on a year now.
Deep breath.
Also, it's spooky season. And while once again I'm at least partly wanting to focus on Spooky in Translation like I did last year, it totally felt like it was finally time to check out The Only Good Indians, which already had my attention based on that title and cover alone. I've had close encounters with deer, elk and moose that have left me seriously thanking my lucky stars I didn't get stomped or gored or worse, so I was primed for a good old fashioned animal revenge tale but with Blackfeet -- but I got so much more.
The Only Good Indians -- the title, of course, refers to the terrible old adage that the only good Indian is a dead Indian but the book, if nothing else, is interested in showing us that like the rest of the human race, all Indians are complicated, flawed people, trying their best, sometimes doing their worst, often punished by circumstances disproportionate to their failings, and haunted by a history of living in a land their ancestors cherished long before European settlers showed up and started coining adages like this one and committing genocide.
Stephen Graham Jones is not interested in litigating that here -- or at least not much, but in depicting his characters' lives as they are both on and off a reservation, a certain degree of litigating that here can't help but happen -- so much as focusing on four friends who happen to be Blackfeet, Ricky, Lewis, Gabe and Cass, and their moral universes. As young and stupid men, the friends went on a frustrating late season elk hunt on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and after an unsuccessful morning make a desperate and dumb decision to go hunt on a parcel of land that is reserved for elderly Blackfeet only, breaking U.S. law and risking prosecution, but also breaking their own codes when they come across a herd and massacre a bunch, including a cow elk who turns out to be pregnant out of season and is suspiciously -- maybe even supernaturally -- hard to kill. As the men start field dressing their kills, it draws late, so late that darkness is falling, and there is at least one game warden out there on patrol who just might catch them, and so they make the horrifying decision to waste a whole lot of the meat. They're just going to take hindquarters and leave the rest to rot and scavengers. And then they start on the pregnant cow elk that was so hard to kill. Her calf is still alive, struggling in its amniotic sac. And Lewis makes a vow not to let any of this cow go to waste. Furthermore, as he promises after the game warden catches them in the act, he'll give all of her meat away to the elders who are the only ones who should have it anyway. Freezers don't fill themselves, especially when a hunter is maybe a bit too old to hunt.
But of course, once that meat is given away, Lewis can't really control what happens to it, can he? He can't stop it, from say, working its way down to the bottom of someone's freezer over the course of a few years until it's out of the freezer geezer's reach until the geezer dies and... But we don't know for sure something like that happened...
So these guys, as the actual story begins (almost exactly ten years later and with an absolutely bonkers scene in a North Dakota honky tonk parking lot), are carrying a heavy moral load, which alone would make for a fine story, but SGJ isn't interested in focusing on that. We're here for a horror story, folks, and there was indeed something supernatural about that pregnant cow elk. Supernatural and conscious and very, very patient. If Lewis' promise isn't kept 100%, Hell is coming with sharp hooves and big teeth and 500+ pounds of fury.
But might not look it.
We get to know these men and, to a degree, the women in their lives, very, very well as the supernatural force they unleashed begins stalking them. They are, in their different ways, trying (if not always succeeding; one is basically a dead-beat dad, after all) to be better men than they were; perhaps they have learned from their transgression. A different writer might focus on that and give us a story of redemption.
But not this one.
Stephen Graham Jones is an astonishing storyteller. The Only Good Indians is tightly plotted, superbly crafted, turns over like a fine engine on a lovingly restored antique motorcycle. The characters will capture and then break your hearts even before they start suffering their spectacularly gory and intricately executed comeuppances. The supernatural elk spirit avenging herself doesn't use her teeth or hooves or bulk unless she has to, because she also has human-level smarts and cunning. The traps she sets for them are worthy of a human Patricia Highsmith character (I invoke her because she is the absolute mistress of the animal revenge story) and display a level of insight into these characters weaknesses that we have discovered right along with her. As a horror villain, she is utterly unique (though the episode of Reservoir Dogs featuring Deer Woman shows us that she is a villain with roots in tribal culture and let me tell you, seeing that episode on the day that I finished reading this book was a trip!), compelling enough to feel both frightening and sympathetic.
A final note: I wouldn't be surprised at all if Stephen Graham Jones doesn't someday turn his hand to writing novels about sports. They'll be brilliant, if several passages in which various characters work out their stuff on makeshift basketball courts* are anything to go by. The slow-building climax to the story even heavily features maybe the most tension-riddled, high stakes game of one-on-one ever committed to the page. But even the basketball stuff is kind of heartbreaking, as a subplot with an eighth grade girl who is a basketball phenomenon shows us: at just 13 or 14 years old, she is already all too familiar with the kind of racism a powerful Native American sports team faces when they play other schools. I only know of this by anecdote, though: I grew up in Wyoming, which only has one reservation and one Native American high school, which dominates in basketball every year. One thing that was always cool was when they came to play in my home town, against my school, because it seemed like the entire Wind River reservation came to town to watch the game and support their teams. It was always the best attended game of the year, with an absolutely packed and boistrous gymnasium, a special night (and yes, they usually beat our asses). I'm pretty sure it's like that for most of their away games. I'd like to think it's not just because they turned out in tremendous numbers that they got what always seemed to me to be a pretty good welcome (but my perspective might be skewed because my dad and their bus driver, the extraordinary Gary Medicine Cloud, were good friends so these games were something we tended to look forward to in our family), but the young woman in this novel, Denorah, has had experiences that suggest it's otherwise elsewhere. I don't know if Blackfeet basketball mounts a small invasion of other towns when they travel for games or not, but is that part of the difference? I couldn't help wondering about this as I read.
I don't read sports fiction, am not even sure if that's a thing apart from in the movies, but if Stephen Graham Jones ever decides to write some, I'll for sure read it. And I'm pretty stoked to read his newest novel, which is, I'm told, horror fiction not centered on his heritage, too.
Basically, I'm a fan now. Wow!
*One of these is a dead ringer in prose for the court my dad built for my sister and I when we were kids. A friend of his with a concrete business had a client flake out on him and he had a mixer full of stuff going to waste, so my dad made some kind of a deal with him to pour it into some hasty forms he threw down, then he put up a basket and made a backboard for it out of plywood. The concrete was already too far set to really get it leveled out, and wasn't really meant for this purpose, so it was a bumpy and unpredictable surface upon which to learn to dribble, etc. And the backboard was much narrower than regulation. But damned if that didn't turn my little sister into a deadeye shooter, and a pretty good guard who was ready for surprises! I regret that I never got to see her play as a high school starter; we were only in high school together for one year, my senior year, and I was on the speech team, which has a season from November through March, with the kids on the road every weekend, so I didn't get to see her then, and I certainly didn't see any of the rest of her career once I was thousands of miles away at Bard. Le sigh.
All this is very sad, I know, but as I said in the beginning, I have no intention of glossing over the less savory aspects in this story.
So observes our narrator fairly early on in Her Mother's Mother & Her Daughters, an example of my favorite kind of historical fiction that both celebrates and decries the very complicated racial and sociopolitical make-up of the modern nation of Brazil as it, and its people, transform through over 500 years of history.
If you really enjoy big fat historical novels by the likes of Edward Rutherford and Ken Follett, the kind that tell the story of a place through multiple generations of the families that call it home, but you're tired of the exclusively European/North American settings, I may have found the perfect book for you!
Brazilian author Maria Jose Silveira explores her country's history through the lives of twenty generations of a single family, traced matrilineally. She begins with a young native woman, Inaia, in 1500 or so, right when Europeans are first starting to plunder South America, and continues all the way to the present as she sketches in the experiences of Inaia's descendants and those the various men of various races and nationalities who father those descendants. It's an incredibly cool way to tell the story of any place, but it really comes into its own when, as in, say, Sarum or Russka, the locale is one that has seen multiple invasions over centuries, diversifying the culture, the language, and the DNA -- all definitely the case in Brazil!
The accounts of each woman are brief but involving, with each character given just enough time to catch your sympathy, make you share her love for her daughter (usually), and break your heart as she fades into history. The quote I pulled to begin this entry, for instance, is from the story of Maria Cafuza*, the first seriously enslaved member of this family -- for while her mother and grandmother were both in conditions of semi-servitude, they chose their own baby daddies and enjoyed a degree of freedom that Maria, also the first of the family with an African daddy, can't even dream of; even her early childhood is cruel as she watches both of her parents die under torture at the hands of an infamous slave-catcher who believes in making a fatal example of would-be escapees. The description of Maria's parents' deaths drives home Silveira's point about Brazilian history having plenty of unsavory bits, and is fairly graphic so, content warning; translater Eric M.B. Becker didn't pull any punches, either.
Later generations see the establishment of cattle ranching as an economic powerhouse for Brazil, the first gasps of an independence movement, civil wars, the arrival of the Portuguese royal family after they run away from Napoleon, the design and building of a newly independent Brazil's national capital city of Brasilia, finally visit the Old World (especially France) and hit the ground running in the 20th century, with the most recent daughter of the family anticipating the birth of twins even as she struggles in that very Generation X way to figure out what to do with herself in a world that doesn't really know what to do with her, either. Things change, but also remain the same: the women of Inaia's line don't just witness history but actively participate in it, display qualities of courage and of selfishness, creativity and vanity, and always putting at least a little hope in the next generation. So while the book frequently made me wince at the violence and cruelty on display, it left me, too, with more than a little hope for the future, or at least curiosity about it -- though of course the novel ends before Bolsinaro rises to power. But hey, Brazil has seen all this shit before...
Exceptional stuff, this!
*Cafuza is a term used by Spanish and Portuguese colonizers to denote people of mixed indigenous and African ancestry. If nothing else, this novel is a great guidebook to the bewildering array of racial designations used in colonial South America. In Maria's case, when she's called a cafuza, people are ignoring the fact that she has a white grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great grandfather, but nobody in her world is very interested in the pedigrees of their slaves.
