Kij Johnson's AT THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER OF BEES

"Where does it begin?" she says at last. "Where does it end?"

He is slow answering and she knows he is as trapped in its weird beauty as she. "No one knows," he says: "Or no one says. My dad used to tell me tales, but I don't know that he knew, either. Maybe there's a spring of bees somewhere, and it sinks underground somewhere else. Maybe the bees gather, do this thing, and then go home. There's no ocean of bees anyway." 

No guesses as to what attracted me to Kij Johnson's fantastic short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees. My proclivities are well known to you all by now. But I mean, come on, just look at this cover. And yes, I think this bee's mouthparts look kind of weevil-y, but bees come in lots and lots of varieties and mutations and variations and I mean, she's just cute, right?

Johnson first won my devotion with her extraordinary Lovecraftian novella The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe, which took inspiration from Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, a piece HPL neither revised from its early draft nor got published in his lifetime, but which might just be my favorite thing he ever wrote and yes of course at least part of it is because Chad Fifer sold me on the space-faring kitty cats. For her take on this crazypants universe, Johnson gave me a childless spinster just like me as a tour guide, and I'm forever grateful for the resulting adventure.

So my expectations for this story collection were quite high going in, and I'm delighted to say they were more than met! For one thing, Johnson shows mastery in pretty much every sub-genre of speculative fiction here, meaning there is guaranteed something for every reader here. For another, she is that kind of writer best for short stories, a master at quickly sketched world-building that still feels complete even in just a few lines, the better to get on with the storytelling. Not everbody can do that, but Kij Johnson sure can.

I'm not going to discuss every story in the collection, though every one of them has something astonishing or thought-provoking or just plan cool to offer and only one of them is one I'd skip if there's a next time I read this collection because yuck (but yuck, too, can be a testimony to a writer's powers!).

But let's talk about themes for a moment. One is loss; many of these stories are explicitly about losing something, someone, or a whole lifestyle, and how to cope with it (not always gracefully) or, in one notable case, postpone it for a while. Another is animals, anthropomorphized or not. Another is Asia; several of these stories have explicitly Japanese or generally Asian-inspired settings and bear that extra burden of "writing the other" but bear it very well indeed.

Best among the animal stories (though not quite of the Asian) is the delightful "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles" and no, no evocation of that song is necessary, thank you. Our little heroine, Small Cat, does not fall down at anybody's door, for a start. Raised in an abandoned city house and garden in Japan by a large family of feral cats who've developed their own take on fudoki, to which she hopes to add someday, Small Cat sees the downfall of this feline paradise and decides to live out a story from her ancestral fudoki about The Cat From the North, in reverse; instead of coming from the north, she will go north, eventually going as far north as a cat can go without crossing an ocean. Her adventures along the way are by turns exciting, heartbreaking, charming and adorable.

Of the Asian themed ones, "The Empress Jingu Fishes" is a standout. The titular empress is a shaman, blessed/cursed by the gods with complete and perfect foresight. She knows when she gets married that her husband would not live long, so she loved him as well and as fiercely as she could. She knows that he will die while their kingdom is at war with a neighboring one (though not the one the gods had commanded them, through her, to attack) and before their son could even be born. She knows that their son will be a great emperor in his time and will eventually be elevated to godhood. She knows all of this while she sits by a spring and fashions a line, hook and some bait to try to catch a trout that she doesn't need purely to feel at least a tiny illusion of having a bit of free will; she is powerless against the forces that took her husband and will take her son and wants to kill something, but this is her sole opportunity to do so. It's an exquisite tale.

Other stories are closer to our own experience, or seem that way at first. For instance, "Names for Water" seems like a mundane slow burn about a student looking for excuses to skip or even drop her math class and change her major, but turns out to have galaxy-spanning impact and implications by the time its few pages are off the paper and in the reader's head. For all we know, little things like this are happening every time our cell phones ring. But probably not. Kij Johnson is much better at writing realities than the hacks in charge of the one I live in are.

She's also good at 17th century naturalist pastische, as it turns out. "MyWife Reincarnated as a Solitaire - Exposition on the Flaws in My Wife's Character - The Nature of the Bird - The Possible Causes - Her Final Disposition." is just that, both a biting satire on the pompous and patriarchal style of narration fashionable at the time and a delightful poke in the eye of the kind of patriarch who wrote that way, as it tells the story of how his much disliked wife apparently reincarnated as an extinct flightless bird, as the title gives away, but has gotten a last laugh on him right under his nose the whole time. Henry Fielding would applaud. And possibly bite his thumb at Kij Johnson, sir. As such.

Then there's the title story, "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" in which a young woman and her ailing German shepherd find themselves on a road trip like no other, compelled to follow the course of an annual migrating bee swarm so large and long that it blocks major highways for days on its northward course. What she finds at the end of the journey is terribly bittersweet and doesn't have a whole lot to do with bees, but like in my favorite Paul Valery poem, the bee isn't really the point; it's a "tiny gold alarm" there to sting us into taking necessary action. For some reason, I pictured this as a major motion picture starring Dakota Johnson. Your milage may vary.

A final favorite I'll mention, and the story that occupies the biggest chunk of the volume, is the extensively imagined and constructed "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" which takes us either to a fantasy world or a science fiction one -- it doesn't really matter which -- in which a society at roughly the medieval level of technological development must contend with a unique geographical feature if its to extend the benefits of civilization to its outskirts and other side. Not only is there a vast river of water dividing the Empire, but over top of it is another, more dangerous and weirder, river of "mist", but it's not like any mist we've ever encountered. It flows along the course of the water but it's denser than water, dense enough to row boats across but corrosive AF and prone to strange disturbances and, oh yes, home to monsters the locals call Fish but are unlike any fish you or I are thinking about. For a start, the Big Ones could destroy whole towns if disturbed enough to surface. Our fish out of water coming to this mist-river is an architect there to build a vast suspension bridge across it, the first of its kind. The majority of the story concerns this effort of his and of those he hires to help him, including two members of a family whose hereditary duty has been to ferry people and cargo across this river, who won't be needed if this giant construction project is successful. This story I'd especially recommend to people who like reading about logistics and mundane projects like building. I promise you it's not boring for those who aren't into that sort of thing; just that those who are, will especially like this one.

There are also stories about marauding tribes in another fantasy-or-sci-fi setting (and how I love that Johnson is comfortable letting these settings of hers be either, just fine with the ambiguity), a bureaucrat who is being groomed for minor godhood but doesn't want to leave his mistress, a family of foxes who beguile a young husband into madness in order to survive, and an exceptionally brutal Galactic empire and how its tactics for keeping everybody unified actually affect populations at its edges. Like I said, there's not a bad story in the bunch, though if graphic and weird sex isn't your cup of tea, maybe skip "Spar", the slightest of these stories in any case.

All in all, this was the perfect collection with which to wind down my reading year, cementing Kij Johnson as a writer to watch and filling a lot of little moments in between tasks in exactly the way I most want a collection of short fiction to do. The buzz was warranted.

Bethany C. Morrow's MEM

Why is memory this way? Why isn't it content to hurt you once? Why must it remind you of all the times you've been hurt before?

What if Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but set in an alternate Montreal in the early 20th century with a strange and analog version of that technology? But what if the painful memories scrubbed from one's mind not only assumed human form but assumed your human form and could sort of be interacted with by others, a la Gene Wolfe's A Borrowed Man? And what if we got a whole short novel of same as narrated by one of those embodied ambulatory memories, permanently 19 years old and something of a celebrity because she's not like those other embodied ambulatory memories, she's actually self-aware, makes new memories and has lived an independent life of her own for the last 20 years?

Head spinning yet? It's gonna spin some more.

Bethany C. Morrow's Mem is the firsthand account of one of these embodied ambulatory memories, called "mems", who has led a somewhat different experience than the rest of her kind does. Generally what happens to make a mem is that an obscenely rich person who feels plagued by a particularly unpleasant memory pays an exorbitant sum to a Montreal clinic to have that memory extracted, creating an eerie and uncanny but very, very limited duplicate of the rich person: it looks almost exactly like that person* and to a very small extent it moves around and might even sound like that other person, but since the mem is trapped forever in the original's bad memory, all it can do sort of pantomime the original experience on and on until its physical form wears out. Mems are kind of weird to have around, so mostly they are kept by the clinic in an underground facility called the Vault, where they live out their weird little not-lives in dormitories housing others of their very specific kind, i.e. most people who undergo this treatment have done so more than once, creating more than one of these weird echoes of themselves, so each person's collection of mems shares a dormitory.

Our mem, however, officially referred to as "Dolores Extract No. 1" to designate that she is the first mem created for a person named Dolores, was different right from the start. Visually she is and remains a perfect copy of her original at the age at which she was extracted; the same tone of brown skin, the same vividly copper-colored hair -- a sign from the moment of her creation that something unusual had occurred. Not only that, DE1 was aware of herself as a person, capable of expressing wants and needs, remembered incidents and conversations and overall just really seemed like she might actually be a person. Eventually, her creator decided to release her into the world to live as such a person, under his and his wife's help and guidance. DE1 first lived with them but eventually moved into an apartment of her own, furnished fully with help from the colleague's wife Camilla (who very early on adopted DE1 as a kind of daughter, for reasons that seem entirely not-sad or sinister at first). Not long before our story begins, DE1 gets fixated on a movie, going to see it multiple times a day for a week and deciding to model herself on the movie's heroine a bit, even to taking on her name of Elsie.

As the novel begins, however, Elsie has been recalled to the Vault with no explanation. Having no legal status as an autonomous being, she has little choice in the matter and complies, and it's all a huge shock. For 20 years she has not only enjoyed considerable autonomy, but also been a bit of a celebrity -- the Mem who Remembers, feted at parties, written about, studied, admired (it helps to be permanently 19) -- but now she is not even a person. The clinic staff make little or no eye contact with her, are unambiguously uncomfortable in her presence even before she tries to have conversations with them, and quickly stick her in the dormitory where other Dolores Extracts live, currently occupied only by a very late mem, very faded and discolored and just lying in a fetal ball on a bed, only to "expire" that very night. Imagine watching a pale and shuddering copy of yourself -- or rather, of the person of whom you are also a copy -- just fade out and die before your eyes...

But there is worse in store for our Elsie, like the reason she's been summoned back to the Vault. The technology that made her has continued in its development, and her Source wants to take advantage of one that poses an existential threat to Elsie, who is, after all, her Source's property to dispose of as she will. Tears in the rain.

All of this gets resolved in unexpected ways as Elsie comes to a new understanding of herself, including why she isn't like other mems, is treated with a fair amount of physical violence, and teeters on the brink of a doomed love affair. I wonder if Bethany C. Morrow ever thought about writing for the soaps. She'd have been brilliant. Which to say there is a lot of High Emotional Drama to this story.

I stumbled across this looking through my "included with your subscription" selection on Audible, so this is another novel I listened to late at night when I couldn't sleep.  Narrator Soneela Nankani and her pleasant, sweet voice were ideal for this; nice to listen to, but not so much so that I fell asleep, though this was largely due to the Drama. Nankani wrang every last bit of it out without getting too melodramatic, and proved a perfect match for this story, with a light and delicate voice that sounds like a 19-year-old's might, but with a performance that actually sells that the character is twice as old as she appears, and is realizing that she'll just keep getting older without aging, even as everybody she has known gets left behind by time... or will they?

*Usually a bit paler, less vividly colored all around, like an old color photo that's starting to fade out, except of course color photography isn't a thing yet because this memory-extracting technology was developed at the dawn of the 20th century.

Rivers Solomon's AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS

 I can never resist a generation ship story, especially during another pass through the weird contained world of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun*, this time along with the boys from the Alzabo Soup podcast and their listeners, so when I found out about River Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts I ran, didn't walk, to my local library when I found out their copy was at last available, and now on hold for me.

Only it wasn't a hardcover. Sad trombone. And they didn't have the ebook in that lending pool, either. Sadder trombone.

But then I noticed that the audio book edition is part of the "Included in your subscription" selections and my head exploded into candy, especially once I listened to the sample and heard the narrator, Cherise Boothe, who has a pleasantly androgynous voice and a true talent for a variety of accents and speech patterns that makes her the perfect choice for this material.

The Matilda, on which this story takes place, is a hell of a generation ship, you guys. Like, Snowpiercer in space, only so much worse. Because it's basically a plantation in space, you guys. With all the horror that implies.

Our main characters are immediately people I wanted to cherish close to my heart even though I knew that they were both going to be in so much danger. There's Aster, born and raised and stuck in the levels of the ship referred to as the "Tarlands"**, where a hereditary underclass that just happens to be highly melanated live in semi-squalor between shifts doing manual labor on the gigantic ship's complicated array of enormous Valley Forge type farm modules where the whole ship's food supply is grown and tended to by hand. No cute little Hueys, Deweys or Louis, here. But at least no short-sighted bureaucrats are ordering that all of these modules get scrapped as economically unviable.

Everybody who lives in the Tarlands has to do a daily ten-hour shift in the farm modules, even if, as Aster is, they are devastatingly intelligent, educated, inventive and creative. Since Aster is all of these, Aster is perpetually stressed out, especially since she also serves the Tarlands as a sort of space age medicine woman, with a secret botany lab carved out of some forgotten sections of the ship where she experiments on everything from plant genetics to pharmaceutical development in addition to serving as an old-fashioned sawbones, in which role we first meet her as she is required to amputate a child's gangrenous foot -- the child having gotten severe frostbite when the upper decks of the ship decided to dramatically reduce if not outright cut off the power and heating to the Tarlands when their ancient ship myseriously stopped functioning at optimal levels. Better that than sacrifice their recreational uses for that power.

Aster gets away with this side work of hers largely due to her close-but-ambiguous*** relationship with an upper decker, Theo, himself born of a Tarlands mother but was light-skinned enough to pass as an upper decker and thus whisked into his father's privileged world. Theo has grown up to become an actual shipboard physician and, as the son of a late"Sovereign" of the vessel and nephew of the brutal warlord who is poised to become the next Sovereign (and as the novel begins, the current Sovereign of the ship is suddenly very unwell), Theo is actually the ship's Surgeon General despite still being in his mid- to late 20s. Raised at least partially by the same foster mother as Aster was, he has grown up as Aster's playmate and friend and most trusted confidante despite the difference in their stations, and uses (and abuses) his privilege to shield her from the consequences of her disregard for regulation and protocol as they hit adulthood. That they have sort of noticed that maybe they have developed feelings for each other that are not exactly of the sibling variety crops up, but really, for the most part, Aster considers herself mostly gay and Theo is taking advantage of some botanical decoctions of hers to sort of subtly transition into even more of a "girlie man" than his evil uncle already takes him for. A fraught and fascinating pairing, is Aster and Theo's... and then there's Giselle, another foster sister, who is cantankerous, moody, sexy, attention-grabbing and mean as a snake... 

That's all just setting up the pieces before Solomon starts moving them around the board in a bloody spaceborne chess game from hell. Aster's roommates perpetually come under undue scrutiny by sadistic power-drunk guards acting on the Lieutenant's imprimatur, who single out Giselle for sexual abuse and a pair of openly lesbian lovers for good old fashioned beatings. Aster's own movements keep getting curtailed as the Lieutenant, who fancies himself even more of a god-king than the usual "sovereign" of the Matilda does, begins to tighten his grip on the whole ship but especially upon those dark-skinned "animals" in the Tarlands, even to resorting to the good old fashioned "low diet" of Nelson's navy, to keep the Tarlanders' just healthy enough to work but not so energetic or capable of cognition to actually rebel against his increasingly cruel tactics.

Ah, but while the Lieutenant and his thugs are excellent at authoritarianism, terror and violence, they don't really understand the ship they and their ancestors before them have occupied for over 300 years and on which their descendants are likely to be stuck for hundreds of years more before it arrives (assuming it doesn't break down en route, or collide with an asteroid, or...) at the "promised land" of some unspecified exoplanet out there that might not even have been chosen back when the Matilda was launched. But there are other people aboard who do understand the ship, and one of them happens to have been Aster's mother, Lune, who was a genius engineering type despite the circumstances in which she lived, and who taught herself many secrets before giving birth to Aster and then disappearing, presumed dead...

BUT, someone else seems to have covered Lune's tracks, tearing pages out of precious library books and having "checked out" all the important ones 29 years before the events of An Unkindness of Ghosts. Aster's story shifts then into a detective narrative of sorts as she uncovers clues, interviews witnesses and does all the usual gumshoe stuff while also performing all of her other responsibilities and trying not to get brutally assaulted in the process because curfews keep getting tighter and Theo's passes start getting honored less and less frequently. Eventually she pieces together what needs to be done (and Book of the Long Sun echoes some more) but not before things come to a truly violent head that even seems to have troubled audio book narrator Boothe. So, some trigger warnings for violence and sexual assault and racism are in order, very much, yes.

But it's a fascinating enough tale to reward the (comfortable, white) reader who bows to the need to live with and digest narratives like these -- even though that reader is probably the one most likely to use the story's unabashed brutality as an excuse not to finish it. Don't be that reader. Be the reader that finishes it and honors Aster's and Theo's and Melusine's and Giselle's and Mabel's and Pippa's and Vivian's stories, and the Lieutenant's too, because they echo stories from our collective past, and warn us what our collective future is going to be like if we keep ignoring the lessons the past is always, always trying to teach us.

Let's take better versions of ourselves ad astra.

*And yes, just to address it, I do plan to finish "SUNS SUNS SUNS" sometime soon, since so many people still seem to be reading it even though I petered out several years ago. But I've got some original fiction very much related to this material that I'm working on this year and next, so it's gonna have to be squeezed in. I find myself wanting more to write about Book of the Long Sun than Book of the New Sun, but I don't like that BotNS is still incomplete on here.

**Yeah, yeah, it's not subtle. But look at what's going on in this endless year of 2020 And Some Months and tell me that subtle is going to get the job done.

***Really close but also really ambiguous. Because both of these characters, in addition to other burdens of their respective births, are also kind of gender fluid. Aster is what we'd call assigned female at birth, but she is powerfully muscled, has hard and masculine features (by her own description) and more than a touch of hirsuitism. Theo was always a bit too girly for his family's liking but eventually found their favor by his choice of profession, even though some of the medicines that Aster makes for him have some estrogen-like effects on him. Cherie Booth voices both narratives brilliantly, which is why she was the best possible choice for this audio book.

James S.A. Corey's LEVIATHAN FALLS

 I finally allowed myself to finish my first read-through of Leviathan Falls, the absolutely perfect concluding volume of the two-headed author monster we call James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, but had my mother not been patiently waiting to read it after me, I might still be dragging my feet and would not yet know that it is an absolutely perfect conclusion to one of the greatest science fiction series I've ever read. Though I had inklings right from the start because Corey hasn't let us down yet, not even a little bit.

I realize there is a bit of a lacuna with regards to this series on this blog because I read its later volumes during my hiatus. I'll write about them someday, especially about Tiamat's Wrath which wrung my heart out completely just in time to drown it in tears, or something, but we're here to talk about endings, how to stick the landing, and how they should now just go ahead and teach this series in every writing class ever.

Leviathan Falls was completed during the pandemic, but this shows in only the best of ways. As the unknown threat that destroyed the Builders* looms ever larger as an existential threat to all of humanity, no matter how far we have scattered via the physics defying technology the Builders left behind, we are reminded again and again, that we are in way over our heads, here. When the Builders began defying physics, they harnessed energies from a whole 'nother universe and damaged it terribly, earning them the wrath of whatever kind of force called that other universe home, and that force wiped the Builders out completely. Now that humans have sort-of harnessed some of the Builders' left-behind technology like a civilization sized John Frum cult, we've inherited the Builder's exterminating enemy as well. But where the Builders actually understood their technology and, to a degree at least, the forces it harnessed, and seemed to have a degree of unity within their civilization-or-species as to look to us like a hive mind, we, as series heroine Naomi Nagata observes several times, are having to do it all with humans. Who have not evolved beyond what they were when confined to just one gravity well, that of good old Earth. Jumped-up primates with brains that weren't even capable of the level of civilization we associate with, say, the Stone Age without a great deal of violence, coercion, kluges and savagery. Why, at the very height of our material culture (late 1950s/early 1960s USA, say), we were still involved in a Cold War with others of our same species, only allowed a minority subset of our population to own property, move freely about the country, hold political power, etc.

I make it sound like there's a lot of preaching in this book but that's not it at all. It's just that the very plight the Expanse's civilizations finds itself in mirrors our own current jackpot of existential threats, and it's the flaws of our individual primate brains that stand in the way of implementing the solutions that people are just barely capable of dreaming up. As people in our own world deny climate change, refuse life-saving vaccines and public health measures, etc, people in the Expanse's world, though many have been kept in the dark about the overwhelming nature of the Big Threat, are also incapable of seeing the big picture and following through on the strategies devised to save it. For instance, it's been known for a few novels now that the Gate system that has allowed humans to colonize distant solar systems within fractions of a human lifetime has its limitations, and a big one of them is the frequency with which it will bear traffic.** Exceed the discovered safe volumes and speeds and some ships "go dutchman", as in the Flying Dutchman, a famous ship from the Age of Sail that disappeared without a trace. While in previous novels, traffic through the gates was controlled, first by the Transport Union (a somewhat ad hoc authority cobbled together out of the remnants of Belter culture to supervise the weird not-space between the Gates) and then by the Laconian Empire (originally a renegade Martian military faction who stole a sample of protomolecule, disappeared through a Gate and emerged years later as a powerhouse of such overwhelming force that its leader, Winston Duarte, wound up being the Emperor of Everything); with both of those forces removed from the board, the Gate network is a free-for-all. Our girl Naomi has devised a brilliant way to manage traffic and keep anybody from dying/disappearing/whatever it is that happens to people when ships "go dutchman" but it requires things like cooperating, giving a shit about other people, being patient and other things that individual humans still aren't very good at, left to their own devices. Sigh.

But while this is going on, Naomi and what's left of her crew are back together on the Rocinante, and while Jim Holden has even more PTSD than he already did after years and years and years as a captive of the Laconian Empire, and while Alex Kamal has his mind on other things from time to time like the fact that out there in the churn is not only his son but a newborn grandson whom he might never even get to meet, and while Amos Burton has been transformed into something kind of unearthly even though he still mostly acts like our favorite Murder Mechanic, it's still the Rocinante's crew and it's as wonderful for us as it is for them to have them all breathing the same recycled air. And beloved characters from past novels turn up here and there, too, notably Elvi Okoye and her husband Fazal, now Science Big Shots for the remains of the Empire, and young Theresa Duarte (heir to the Empire but no she doesn't have blue skin or red eyes) and her aging but still intrepid dog, Muskrat are along for the ride, too, and you KNOW you've always wanted to see what it's like to have a dog in space. In zero G. Oh, man, if your head doesn't explode into candy every time Muskrat is center stage, see a therapist soonest.

We even get to see [REDACTED] again!

We only get to enjoy this a little bit, though, because not only is the Big Threat out there threatening, but so is Winston Duarte, who, through protomolocule monkey business over the course of several novels has metamorphosed from capable miltary officer to renegade leader to founding father of a nation state to immortal dictator of all of humanity and has since become... something even stranger and more dangerous. He poses very nearly as big a threat to humanity as the Big Threat, and is incommunicado unless he feels like manifesting as a sort of super-intense hologram of himself where he's least expected and there were so many times in these last few Expanse novels that I was nearly won over to liking him a bit so even this revelation of his inhumanly inimical intent hits hard in the feels, even before his daughter Theresa comes looking for him.

All of this is resolved satisfactorily, which would be awesome just for this novel, but also the whole giant series, which has covered the Rocinante's crew's entire adult lifetimes into old age, is also resolved more than satisfactorily. Even as I sat there sort of guarding myself the way someone anticipating a gut punch flexes her stomach muscles, I was in awe of how well all of this was being accomplished before my eyes, even as, a few times, I shook my mental fist at the two-headed author-monster for emotional distress inflicted on the way. So while I swore in the months before Leviathan Falls was finally released that I was not ready to see this go, no, not ever, I am pleased that it was ended so perfectly.

And I'm busily trying to carve out time to read the whole series again from the beginning as one, big expanse of novel, someday. Amidst all my other projects.

It's worth it.

*The eventual name of the civilization-or-hive-mind that were the original creators of the protomolecule that has been wreaking havoc with humanity since Leviathan Wakes first graced our literal and electronic bookshelves a decade or so ago

**Not can: will. For all we ever learn the Gates can handle whatever we throw threw them, but the Big Threat notices if our traffic through them gets too dense, and it strikes when it notices.

Polenth Blake's WERECOCKROACH

"Once this is over, I'm sure people'll want goot things to read. Distraction is good."

Personally, I'd be hitting the cute animal videos. It wasn't that I didn't like books, but you never know if a book will be good all the way through. A fun mystery has a weird rant about why women are all liars or that cute gay couple ends up being thrown in a meat grinder. That's not as comforting as watching cats sit in boxes.

 Rest assured, none of those terrible things happen in this novella, which is even more comforting and as fun as watching cats sit in boxes, especially if you understand that cockroaches are so much like cats that they spend a lot of time sort of comfortingly stroking each other with their antennae in their down time and, if something grody happens like being picked up by a disgusting yucky human being, they immediately freak out and need to clean themselves thoroughly to get rid of our cooties.*

Being as I am the kind of person who writes sonnet cycles about brand inspectors trying to manage small herds of cow-weres**, having at one stage of life kept a small family of Blaberus craniifer as pets in a college dorm room, and being also the kind of person who enjoys various portrayals of insects in literature, Polenth Blake's Werecockroach feels like a Christmas present from a complete stranger intended specifically for me. So of course right off the bat, I have to share my only complaint, and that is that Werecockroach isn't about 700 pages long. Good thing my beloved Clark Thomas Carleton wrote me another volume of his Antasy series, coming soon to a blog near you.

Werecockroach, at just 79 pages, is a light little whisp of a thing compared to the lit-chonks I tend to review on here, but its subject matter and wonderful cover of course made it a must whatever its length. And a lot gets packed into those 79 little pages; it is light in form rather than content.

We have but three characters to manage, but what characters they are. Rin is a agendered asexual aromantic person*** whose last residence burned to the ground before our story even gets going, who has managed to locate a new living situation in London, with two young men who strike Rin right away as rather unusual people in their own rights, though at first they merely come off as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and a roommate who is way more tolerant of the theorist's eccentricities than is quite usual in modern day London. And the flat they're willing to share with Rin is very small and tight, with narrow corridors and rooms into which a bare minimum of furniture just barely fits, but that's fine with Rin, who has few belongings to stash, now, anyway.

Before long Things Happen that would ordinarily be the entire focus of a big fat novel, but here just serve as a reason to drive our three new friends out of their overly cozy living quarters and out into the big weird world which quickly exposes, well, the title gives that bit away (which is why I'm keeping the Things That Happen secret). How Rin reacts to the discovery that makes this title make sense is not what you're expecting; nor is how a whole group new group of maybe-friends talk, which is 100% hilarious and was just what I needed this week as the last of this wretched year 2020 And Some Months dwindles and seems to be fixin' to drag the wretched year of 2020 And Some More Months in on a gust of apocalyptic winds here in Casper, WY, USA.

Suffice it to say that I feel like Polenth Blake is maybe my new best friend, or at least someone whose work I'm always going to be on the lookout for. Hiss!

*Yes, these are actual observations made once upon a time by Your Humble Blogger.

**That being, of course, a being that transforms from a bovine to a human at the full moon.

***Whom I imagined sounding exactly like Abigail from Unwell.

Michael Cisco's THE DIVINITY STUDENT

I was sent to suffer and learn and to join the Eclogue. From dictaction: you split off and are the ghost sent to encounter my soul as a stranger, bring with you the offering of the first. lost image of us together. When you are caught dreaming, look in a mirror to wake yourself. I correspond to San Veneficio in this way -- its soul is brought to me by the saints who are my eyes and ears.

No, the above passage is not written in fungi on the wall of a "tunnel" in a weird wilderness, but rather the notebook of a mad scientist who kind of combines Herbert West and Dr. Hill, who... Let me start again, here.

It's been a while since I knowingly picked up a book that I knew would scramble my brains without using a whisk, and the year's almost over, so why not give The Divinity Student another try?

Like a lot of my friends, I first came across Michael Cisco and his super-surrealist stylings via a Humble Bundle yoinks ago (the same bundle that brought me Stephen Chapman's The Troika. When they said weird, they meant it). The Divinity Student was the first one out of there that I tried to read, but I didn't make it past our nameless hero* being killed by a lightning stike at the summit of a mountain hike** and reanimated by the faculty of his divinity school via the time honored tradition of *checks notes* removing all of his internal organs (well, except we learn later that he still has lungs. Ah, but then... did they leave him his original lungs, or make him new ones?) and stuffing him with paper that's covered in writing, any paper, any writing will do.  I want to draw a parallel to the legend of the Golem but I'm really not equipped to do it well, so I'll just gesture vaguely that-a-way and move on.

If there is any religious overtone to The Divinity Student besides the obviousness there in the title, it is Christian, though, rather than Jewish, as this resurrected super-being winds up gathering up twelve... not disciples... not assistants... twelve people whose participation, after a fashion, are necessary to his quest which, about that...

The Divinity Student is then dispatched to a city to take up a post as a "word finder" which could have been a sort of active and social job, wandering the streets and talking to people and picking up the latest neologisms and slang like a lexical Cayce Pollard, but instead he is set to work sifting through ancient tomes looking for ancient words that have been lost, forgotten, or had heretofore not been noticed at all by the dominant culture. As though he was interning for Gene Wolfe, am I right, friends?*** But that's only his cover mission, see? Or so he is told as soon as he starts to converse with his fellow word finders over meals and whatnot.

The plot, though, isn't what is important at all. It's the prose, and the dreamlike quality of it. Any two-bit surrealist can stick a bunch of incongruous images together and call it art, but it takes real care and attention and a very particular cast of mind to make us not only see a weird image, but to feel that we are part of it even as it flows and changes into a completely different weird image in the way that dreams actually do. And Cisco is a master at it, one that, perhaps, I had to read Jeff Noon's Nyquist series, in which the hero is subject to unending weird compulsions, entranced, retrieved, re-entranced, bossed around like Alice knocking around urban wonderlands and acquiescing to increasingly bizarre behavior that still kind of fits into a time honored structure, before I could really appreciate what Michael Cisco is up to, here. More even than the Nyquist books, The Divinity Student wants to draw you right into the experience of being a reanimated marionette of a man who may or may not be succeeding in ripping out his strings and tying someone up in them.

Us. He's tying us up in them.

Before too long, our man has a sidekick, possibly the best single element of this book: Teo Desden the butcher, whom the Divinity Student first consults on an errand and later sort of befriends. Teo actually has a personality and motives of his own and is really entertaining and charming in an off-putting but amusing way, as in exchanges like this one:

"This is going to involve more than one corpse, isn't it?" The Divinity Student pauses. "Yes, possibly as many as twelve..." Teo suddenly gets excited. "Listen, the bodies, what are you going to do with them when you're through?" 

 Of course I got all of the Sweeney Todd vibes, especially having earlier seen what Teo can really do in this crazy little scene-within-a-scene that also gives us a look at Cisco's prose at its most straightforwad, if still a little weird:

The Divinity Student watches a fly zing in through the open door. With a speed that defies vision Teo uncoils, sending a four-inch steel blade silent across the room flashing once under the fluorescents and the fly runs right into it. Two black halves drop to the tiles, the knife lands on its hand on the sideboard and slides an inch to rest, just tapping the base of the mirror.

Oh, did I mention that the main room of Teo's butcher shop has a giant mirror in one wall like you'd expect in a ballet studio, the better for Teo to admire and cultivate his balletic moves with meat and cutlery, I guess? Like I said, he's an actual character, is Theo. I'd read a book just about him, continuing my habit of always falling in love with sidekicks and background characters instead of heroes...

But while Teo is showing off his knife work, the Divinity Student, whom we've already seen takes the longest and most convoluted way around to the solution to any problem he encounters, is busy building a divining machine, and look out Rube Goldberg, it's a doozy. Where one would expect a divining machine to be intended to make predictions a bit easier to comprehend and absorb, the Divinity Student's machine is an elaborate and colorful and magical contraption that... bascially creates fancy Rorschach blots for him to stare at and try to interpret later. I mean, this thing makes my brain itch.

Oh, and he also gets a girlfriend of sorts, Miss Woodwind, the boss's daughter, who comes as close as we're going to get to an audience stand-in, or such is how she feels toward's novels end, when she finally gets fed up with the nonsense and yells at him "What are you doing now... Come on, answer me! I've been here all this time waiting for you, at least you could tell me what's happening!"

I feel you, girl. And I think I'm going to have to read this one again sometime before I can even remotely feel like I got an answer.

Does it sound like I'm not sure what I just read? Well, I'm not sure what I just read. But I liked it, and I'm going to read Cisco's follow-up to this, The Golem, pretty soon.

*Why are so many of the books I'm taking up lately about people whose real names -- or names at all -- are withheld from the reader?

**Of the kind I've taken many a time, and if you make it to the top of Medicine Bow Peak, you've been at risk of this same thing happening. I've never not encountered lightning up there. It's a phenomenal, and phenomenally beautiful, hike, though!

***Also, there's another belovedly Wolfean element central to this weird plot, in that our hero is obliquely taught a bizarre way to harvest the memories and experiences of the dead in a way that isn't as cannibalistic as the analeptic alzabo but is almost as gross.

Jeff Vandermeer's HUMMINGBIRD SALAMANDER

What if William Gibson wrote a fourth book in the Bigend trilogy, but left out Bigend and just focused on its weird questing structure through a world that's 20 minutes into the future while also making it a little bit of a Jackpot story? What if Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road, but started the story a little while before the hopeless devastation? What if Margaret Atwood wrote a fourth Maddaddam book but used an actually tough woman with actual agency as her heroine?

What if Jeff Vandermeer wrote a novel recognizably set in our world?

Ladies, Gentlemen and Enbies, Hummingbird Salamander.

Herein we meet a character we will only know as Jane, a high level security consultant with a messed-up past in the form of an abusive grandfather, a gently but sadly mentally ill mother, a barely-there nothing of a father, and a devastatingly handsome older brother who gets away with too much mischief for his own good. Jane was the baby of the family, but quickly grew into its mountain, a huge and powerfully strong, physically imposing woman who had a brief wrestling career before drifting into security -- growing up with the family she did meant she had all the requisite skills for that, including talent with firearms and the fearlessness needed to use it.

As we meet her, she's at the top of her game, able to pick her own assignments, seemingly happily married to a man who seems physically to be her exact counterpart, raising a teenaged daughter and losing touch with her in that sad and wistful way that mothers and teenage daughters almost always lose touch... and then one day a barista at her habitual coffee shop hands her a mysterious note from a mysterious (and recently deceased) woman she's never heard of, that gives her directions to begin a mysterious quest that will send her careening all over California (with a brief side trip to New York), break her family to pieces, put her in the line of fire of every kind of firearm known to man, bury her briefly in a pile of taxidermied animals (what is it with this year and people hiding inside piles of dead animals in literature? Stephen Graham-Jones had one of his heroines doing it, too), almost burn her alive and basically live the nightmare life of the unwilling participant in an espionage thriller, all while uncovering a plot to maybe save earth's dwindling natural ecosystems as the human world that's all but destroyed them starts collapsing.

But never once does Jane despair or feel sorry for herself. This lady is tough, smart and competent as hell. It's actually a pleasure seeing her get herself out of impossible situations even as we share her self-disgust at falling for ruses or incorrectly interpreting the very cryptic (we're talking digits written on the insides of the glass eyes from a taxidermy animal levels of cryptic) clues or not noticing secret doors the first time around.

And yet somehow all of this ends on kind of a hopeful note, even as Jane lays down, possibly to die, after watching everything she loved or even sort of cared about crash and burn around her; what she has learned about the mysterious woman who arranged for her to get that fateful note, that woman's relationship to her own family and wreck of a childhood, and the titanic and mad project the woman had concocted to give Nature a second chance has let her hope, and that lets us hope, too.

But, of course, there isn't a real life counterpart of that mysterious woman; we've had too many examples of what actual people who control the kind of resources this one did in Hummingbird Salamander actually choose to do with them, and it's not great. But maybe, just maybe, one of them will stumble across this book and get a better idea? Or something?

Annalee Newitz' THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE

It's been a while since I indulged myself in some fun time travel shenanigans, and my trusted guides to all things cool, the maginificent Prince Jvstin and the ever-correct Popqueenie, have often mentioned Annalee Newitz as a trusted source for the kind of shenanigans we like, so I kind of feel some egg dripping down the deepening crevices in my face that it took a big fat sale at Audible to get me to finally actually read them.

Better late than never. Even if it's time travel. Or especially if it's time travel?

The Future of Another Timeline starts off the way more cool science fiction adventures should, at a great big punk rock/riot grrl concert in the late 20th century. As described by narrator Laura Nicol, it's a thrashing good time that takes no prisoners or bullshit and just brings back all the great memories of wishing I had grown up somewhere where things like that actually happened in the late 20th century, instead of somewhere they have both kinds of music, country and Christian. It's so on the nose that at first one could easily not notice that this scene is not taking place in our world. My first clue was the Wonder Woman tee shirts celebrating the terrific Tim Burton Wonder Woman film that came out in the late 80s.

Oh. Oh...? Oh!

Before we know it, we have a woman folding herself -- well, not exactly, but she is observing the trail of effect caused by her own younger self in a world where time travel is not only real but also not a secret -- and in an incredibly intriguing way. Machines that make time travel possible are buried deep in ancient geological features in several out-of-the-way locations all around the Earth, including one on the border between Manitoba and Saskechewan, and another in the nation of Jordan, and are the subject of general knowledge. Nobody has to have that awkward conversation in which they have to try to persuade someone that no, really, they're from the future, not even in the late 1800s. AND... Nobody has to make the same tired observation about something being bigger on the inside. Etc.

I think this is a first, for me.

But, somewhat more conventionally -- because cool world building and neat set pieces do not a novel make, one needs a story -- there is a sort of temporal cold war between at least two factions over how much "editing" can happen and what kind of world that editing is to try to make for everyone. Agents from each side keep meeting up at different points in a history that is not, as currently understood by the "geoscientists" of this world (delightfully, since the time machines are buried in shield rock, time travel and its various academic offshoots are the province of geologists), governed by the "Great Man" theory -- someone once traveled back and killed off the tyrant who originally conquered almost all of Europe in the early 19th century, only to see some other guy named Napoleon rise up and take his place and do pretty much the same thing, for instance -- but can still be altered through patient nudging of social movements. A well-executed leaflet campaign can do more, in this world, than a well-aimed shot from a gun, whether that gun be period or anachronistic. I like this. So much.

But so, does this mean that Annalee Newitz has found a way to make the bog standard "time police" motif of science fiction into a fresh and new... metaphor for Culture War? In fact, they have. Meaning this is a hell of a novel to have been reading right when the United States Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe vs Wade, the law of the land for most of my adult life that has established abortion as a Constitutional right and done the most since the 19th amendment to uphold in no uncertain terms the right of a little over half of the human race to enjoy a certain standard of basic humanity to a greater degree than any generation born before us.

Which, along with other pesky ideas like offering education to all regardless of whether or not they have functioning uteruses, letting such people vote, choose their own marriage partners (or none at all) on their own terms, etc. (to say nothing of the rights of people who are not white, cisgender, heterosexual, or Christian) are very much in the crosshairs of one of the factions involved in this version of the Time War, the Comstockers (named for and kind of led by Anthony Comstock, of Society for the Suppression of Vice fame).*

I think he's rather well represented in this, the best book trailer, maybe ever, by the way. I'd like to think the real Comstock had nightmares just like this.

But, back to the Temporal Culture War. Its other faction, to which our time traveling concert goer, Tess, belongs, call themselves the Daughters of Harriet (as in Harriet Tubman, who in this world was once a U.S. Senator). Headquartered in California in the year 2022, they meet in secret to plan operations to preserve the freedoms they have gained, to extend them to other marginalized people, and to expand them. Operations in pursuit of this goal include missions such as sending Tess back to the famous Columbian Expedition of 1893 to hook up with some sort-of-Algerian belly dancers getting ready to take the Midway by storm and open a lot of closed minds -- unless the Comstockers can succeed in persuading the Respectable White Ladies of Chicago that the dancers are a threat to the good moral character of their city and must be shut down. While there, Tess befriends a dancer, a crusading young muckraker, and no less a personage than Sol Bloom, who all enthusiastically join her cause.

Meanwhile, there are shenanigans going on in the sixth century, BCE that have the potential to render all of the Daughters' efforts moot forever. DRAMA BUTTON PUSH ALL THE DRAMA BUTTONS YOU GUYS.

In lesser hands, this could be an awful, hectoring, didactic bore of a read, or a chaotic mess, or both, but Newitz maintains a high standard of storytelling, especially character drama, focusing on Tess's adventures in time but also on the somewhat ordinary suburban life of her younger counterpart, Beth, the Riot Grrl who originally went to that great punk show in 1992 but whose teenage years seem destined to have rather a higher body count than any teenager since J.D. met Veronica and all the Heathers in suburban Ohio back in 1989, if you know what I mean. How very.

The novel comes especially to life as an audio book, by the way; Nicol has just the right kind of California cool to her delivery to sell Beth's story especially, but imparts just enough gravitas to Tess's chapters to help us see her as the kind of woman Beth might could become if wibbly wobbly timey wimey all works out. As an extra treat we get something that only an audio edition can bring us -- a sound clip from fictional band Grape Ape's hit single from another timeline "What I Like to See", and an interview between Newitz and Desi Lopez about the making of the book trailer and the writing of the seriously catchy song featured in it. Popqueenie and I agree, if Grape Ape had been a real band in the 90s, we would have moved heaven and earth to be at every show.

All in all, The Future of Another Timeline is one of the most amazing balancing acts I've ever seen in book form. There are so many things that could go wrong with it, and none of them do, and it still has plenty of surprises for even the most jaded time travel reader. It's a tremendous accomplishment and has definitely turned me into a Newitz fangirl. Which, I really already should have been, because of Io9 and Charlie Jane and all...

I would (ahem) read any number of sequels to this if (cough) certain parties felt like making those a thing. As such.

*That jerk's best appearance in literature since his side-cameos in various Robert Anton Wilson joints in the 70s and 80s.

Roberto Bolaño's 2666: The Part About the Crimes (tr by Natasha Wimmer)

Blogger's note: I'm covering this giant doorstop of a novel part by part. This post is the fourth of five. To read prior entries in order, start with The Part About the Critics" HERE, then "The Part About Amalfitano" HERE, then "The Part about Fate" HERE.

We just passed the twelfth anniversary of the internet publication of the greatest book review ever written, and I was today years old when I realized that yes, in fact, "The Part About the Crimes" is the A Feast for Crows of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Especially as rendered in audio format by the talented but exhausted-sounding Scott Brick, whose habit of giving every sentence a rapid rise and quick plunging fall in pitch to convey a certain kind of drama just drives home the repetitive, almost liturgical quality of so much of this part of the novel, by far its most depressing and demoralizing oh my god too many hours, which, its title tells us right away we should not be expecting a walk in the park, but even by the standards of something explicitly about the tidal wave of femicide that is the primary thread in this big fat tapestry, this is grim stuff. I think this whole damned city of Santa Teresa must all be the kind of paid up subscribers to Black Dawn (see my post about "The Part About Fate") that drop everything when the new issue arrives in the mail and don't do a damned thing until they've read the whole magazine cover to cover. Or at least, that's what the cops do. When they're not relentlessly trading dated and exhaustingly horrible and sexist "what's the difference between women and X" jokes, anyway. Yuck.*

The stuff between the repetitions isn't much better, either. For instance, about midway through this part, a side character from "The Part About Fate", a Mexico City sportswriter named Sergio, pops up again, now back in Santa Teresa to write about its seemingly dual crime wave (we'll talk about about the Penitent later) in his new role as a crime reporter, takes a prostitute to bed and has a weird conversation with her that still kind of makes me want to scream.

Smoking a post-coital cigarette**, Sergio starts demanding to know what the unnamed prostitute knows about the murders, and gets pretty shitty when she tells him she has a "vague idea" about them. He berates her for not having solidarity with all these other whores who have been murdered since she is one herself, then she reponds, not by expressing sympathy or regret or concern or fear, even for herself, but by pointing out that Sergio has made a category error. The women being murdered in Santa Teresa have not been prostitutes, but, mostly, workers, employees of the maquilladoras. She emphasizes the word "workers" and just generally conveys the idea that as far as she is concerned, what she does for a living is not "work." Again, I'm kind of applying 21st century standards to a book set and largely composed during the 90s, but even back in those far off days, before we all as a society (or at least the left-leaning half of society) agreed that "sex work is work" we did refer to prostitutes as "working girls," so, uh, no.

I mean, I know I'm being picky and even a little precious about this scene in a novel section that basically exists to drive home that the failure to regard women as fully human has big social and individual costs that disproportionately (and often fatally) are paid by those same women, but hey, it's also an illustrative passage of how grim this part can be. But this is "The Part About the Crimes" at its lightest.

Overwhelmingly, "The Part About the Crimes" is about repeating one archetypal scene over and over and over and over again (I think the official femicide body count for this novel is 109, but I can't remember where I saw that and might be too lazy by the time I've written this post to track it down), just like Brienne of Tarth repeating Sansa Stark's description to every character she meets, except way more grim. It mostly goes something like this:  In (a month of a year), a (woman or a teenager or, a few times, a tween), who may or may not have a name, is found dead and unceremoniously dumped somewhere -- in a field, alongside a highway, etc. -- where she won't necessarily be noticed right away but (with a few grim skeletal exceptions) but is likely to be noticed after a reasonably short period of time. We get a description of her clothes. We learn whether she has been shot or stabbed or strangled. We get the important information as to whether or not she was raped and in what orifices. We find out which of Santa Teresa's Finest gets assigned her case. We get a half-assed account of his half-assed efforts. We are then told that the case was "closed" or "shelved", but here these two terms are basically interchangeable for verisimilitude; in real life, cops don't just say "we gave up."

Over and over and over again.

And while not every murder victim gets a name -- either because by the time she is found she is no longer identifiable, or simply because nobody ever shows up to claim or identify her -- every cop does, and gets a little vignette about as detailed as Stephen King's slapstick death stories midway through The Stand, usually with cameo appearances by other cop characters, but ultimately the cops' stories blur together and fade from the reader's  memory exactly as the murder victims have from the city's, because 2666 is not a whodunnit. There is not going to be a hero detective who puts it altogether and solves the crime spree.

Very few people, apart from the odd journalist (and what about Guadelupe? The female journalist? Who had an appointment with a locked up tall German towards the end of "The Part About Fate" but whom Oscar just leaves behind to drive to America with Rosa A?) even see that there really is a crime wave, let alone of the scale that it is. A few cops put their heads together about a few murders they're working on that share some grisly signature details and speculate about a serial killer, but that's only for a few of the murders, ignoring the vast number of dead women who did not have one breast sliced off and the nipple bitten off the breast that's still attached. Some of the individual murders do get solved, kind of by accident, in that they turn out to be the sadly predictable final outcomes of domestic violence, but on the whole, only we, Bolaño's readers, ever see the really big picture.

And really, this pretty much tracks for how murder investigations work in the real world. Real Cops don't solve crimes.

But anyway, this part, about the crimes, isn't just about the femicides (the recitation of which kept making me think of the sad but wistful continuing Roll Call of the Dead in Sjon's amazing CoDex: 1962). There's also a serial church desecrator on the loose! And his crimes are bizarre and spectacular and the closest thing to almost kind of funny that "The Part About the Crimes" gets.

Well, except for this one bit, when the femicides, in attenuated form, briefly have come to the attention of the powers that be in Santa Teresa, which is, I think, Natasha Wimmer making a smart and amusing choice in presenting in the sing-song of a children's book rather than the hard boiled no-nonsense crime talk we're expecting in such a scene:

Life is hard, said the mayor of Santa Teresa. We have three clear-cut cases, said Inspector Angel Fernandez. Everything has to be examined by a magnifying glass, said the man from the chamber of commerce. I do examine everything with a magnifying glass, over and over, until I can't see straight, said Pedro Negrete.

Pretty much the whole rest of the novel handles dialogue in the conventional, subject-verb forms of English prose, in which the scene would have looked like this:

"Life is hard," the mayor of Santa Teresa said.

"We have three clear-cut cases," Inspector Angel Fernandez said.

"Everything has to be examined by a magnifying glass," the man from the chamber of commerce said.

"I do examine everything with a magnifying glass, over and over, until I can't see straight," Pedro Negrete said.

The fact that this exchange is followed by a remark from the mayor that "the important thing is not to stir up any shit" may shatter the stylized children's book feel but drives home the real point being made, that this whole scene is a rote performance of professional concern, rather than a genuine attempt to communicate anything. It's the only time I actually smiled in this whole section. Thanks, Natasha!

But I haven't even got to what passes for the protagonists of "The Part About the Crimes", if there can be said that there are any. I reckon on two of them: Klaus Haas, a big tall German guy arrested on flimsy and circumstantial evidence for one of the 109 murders, who has various adventures in the Mexican jail where he awaits sentencing for so long that he eventually just calls a press conference to try to point the finger at another party for the killings; and the magnificently named Congresswoman Azucena Exquivel Plata, who has a disappeared friend, Kelly (real name, Luz-Maria), Kelly being linked, of course, to a series of orgiastic parties out on the ranches outside of Santa Teresa, to which many young and/or underage women are brought to be debauched. Hmm. The former gets involved in all kinds of inmate scuffles and, though he is himself so tall as to almost count as a giant, portentously keeps announcing to his fellow prisoners that The Giant is coming and they'd best be scared; the latter burdens us with the story of her insanely privileged life and her friendship with Ghislaine Kelly while she interviews/interrogates a private detective she's hired to find her friend.

Can these characters be protagonists, though, when one is only barely there and the other isn't even mentioned in passing until about the last 20% or so of "The Part About the Crimes?" Well, there's nobody else who comes close to qualifying, so, yes?

Speaking of that last 20% or so, it really veers off in its own weird direction, cutting up four different narratives into very small pieces and layering them on top of each other like so many jenga blocks to really drive home how much reader/listener annoyance Bolaño and Brick are going for. The Klaus Haas narrative bits start feeling like they're leading to a shaggy dog story, but you're never sure because just when they get interesting, you're torn away to another piece of Azucena's story, then to a bit about a figurant, Kessler (an American law enforcement consultant who is just sort of touring the scenes of all the crimes and letting everybody cater to him), then to another bit of corpse porn, then back to Klaus. Who, yes, sounds like he bears a more than passing resemblance to another absurdly tall German guy, whom, 700 years or so ago, three literary critics traveled to Mexico to find and bring back to Europe to accept his Nobel prize, Benno von Archimboldi. But Klaus is, of course, too young to be Archimboldi. Isn't he?

This brings me to the one thing that I'm still really impressed by in this section of 2666. Bolaño is playing a lot with the ideas of detective fiction, and several times seems on the verge of setting up one of his many interchangeable cop-or-journalist*** characters as the Detective Who Will Solve It All, only to Lucy-yank away the football from our Charlie Brown expectations. But I'm a Gene Wolfe girl, so I became convinced right away on my first reading (and still believe it on my second, here) that we, the readers, are meant to be the Detective. If this was Gene Wolfe's 2666, I'd be sure of this, confident that if I took the time to read this book six or seven times and make careful notes of which of the bodies got which treatment and was associated with which model of car, and, probably, drew myself a detailed map of Santa Teresa and its environs, and made a careful study of the onamastics employed, I could accurately solve every single one of these murders, which, of course, have not all been committed by the same guy, or even the same guys. Factor out the domestic violence/honor killings and you're left with, I think, three, possibly four parties (depending on if Klaus Haas is guilty of anything besides slightly knowing one of the victims and standing out as a ridiculously tall German in this city of maquilladoras and nightclubs.)

BUT I'M NOT SURE. This is still the only Bolaño I've read. Is he a craftsman on Gene Wolfe's level? None of my Bolañeros and Bolañeras seem to have read Gene Wolfe (it's a mission of mine to get them to one day, when they're ready. They're getting there), and I don't think any of my Solar Cyclists have read Bolaño, so I'm the only one in a position to compare them that I know of. And I want to be sure, before I start reading Bolaño like Wolfe, that it would be worth the effort. I'm not a young woman, my TBR pile is huge, I've already given up television in the interest of reading as much of it as I can before I join the Roll Call of the Dead, and I'm longing to re-read all of Dorothy Dunnett again before I punch out, too.

Anyway and otherwise, man, all I can say is that Roberto Bolaño must have been thinking a lot about Dunbar's Number while he was writing this. This is best illustrated by one of the cop stories, the account of the sheriff of Huntsville AZ, Harry Magaña, summoned to Santa Teresa by a citizen of his fair city who was recently in Santa Teresa with a friend, only to lose track of that friend until she turned up murdered. All excited to play white knight, Harry comes barreling into Santa Teresa fixin' to investigate the hell out of this one murder, with or without the cooperation of the local constabulary. He catches the situation's brutality like a virus and meets a mysterious fate in Tijuana and could now be the Santa Teresa PD's poster boy for Not Getting Too Hung Up on One Case, punished for caring about a single person among 109. Gulp.

And so, onward to the fifth and final "Part About Archimboldi." Which I only dimly remember, and might not remember accurately at all because I'm starting strongly to suspect that "The Part About the Crimes" may have made me lose patience with this doorstop. Did I finish it, or did I not?

Watch this space, true believers.

*Which, I grew up in a law enforcement family and turned around and took employment for ten years with that same law enforcement agency (as a dispatcher, not a sworn officer) and this is the most accurate depiction of cops I've yet found in literature. When I say yuck, I mean yuck. I was still eyeball deep in my own law enforcement career when I first read 2666 so I thought maybe this time around it wouldn't hit me as bad but, nope. I'm still projectile vomiting in my head at this.

**And man, do all of these characters smoke in this novel. I know it was the 90s and whatnot but WOW. Of course, I've been reading lots of other international literature in which this keeps featuring. Everybody in Drive Your Cart over the Bones of the Dead smoked. The very freaking pages of The Morning Star were sucking on coffin nails, etc -- and those are both novels written and set in this century -- so I'm maybe more sensitive to this than usual but man, oh man, this novel brought to you by the international tobacco industry.

***One of these is a late entry in the contest to become my favorite character, the hilariously named Mary-Sue Brava, a reporter from Phoenix who gets hung up on the disappearance of another journalist who was one of only like four people to show up for Klaus Haas' press conference. I would like more of her, please, but nobody cares what I want. Anyway, I don't care that your name is Mary Sue, Mary Sue, I still love you.

Marie Ndiyae's THAT TIME OF YEAR (tr by Jordan Stump)

What's that, you say? You're trying to figure out what to read next, but you can't decide if you want an existential and Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare, a Lovecraftian horror village with some weird traditions, or a re-read of The Stepford Wives? Problem solved, my lovelies. And it's waiting for you in just 128 little pages.

Marie Ndiaye is a new author to me, but she feels like she could become a favorite based on That Time of Year, which does indeed fit all three descriptions above and is incredibly economical in the way it goes about delivering its dose of the howling fantods.

The novel starts out with a bog standard thriller/crime hook: a man who is regretfully at the end of his vacation suddenly can't find his wife and child, and is baffled at the cheerful unwillingness to help him the locals exhibit. At first this seems like it might just be a case of hostility towards a tourist who has outstayed the tourist season (meaning yes, of course I identified with the unhelpful locals) but quickly we realize that something much weirder is going on. And, of course, nobody is what they seem, no, not even that weird lady who seems to just sit in the window of the nearby charcuterie and stare at the nearby hotel and right into our hapless hero's room all day and all night. For yes, one of the first things that we realize is that this charming village, where our man Herman has a summer home, is a weird sort of mini-surveillance state -- one effected via peer pressure rather than technology -- once the visitors have left for the year.

No one here felt any surprise at what had befallen him, much less troubled themselves over it for long, and when they saw the missing pair on the village streets or, who knows, on the roads in the hills, they would simply say hello to them, without fear or surprise or any particular joy. They might not even bother to tell Herman.

There are plenty of mundane spins that can be put on the state of affairs described in That Time of Year. Who's to say this isn't at least in part a town closing around a distressed woman and child trying to escape an abuser, for instance? Or maybe he's been cleverly fooled into believing he ever had a family and now the scales are falling off his eyes. Or maybe he's gone mad and the villagers are treating him with that special awkward attentiveness paid to the potentially dangerous guest who must be humored for now in the hopes that he'll eventually get better, or be picked up by the gendarmes and taken away.

Making matters worse is the weather, which, apparently, turns gloomy and cold and permanently rainy every year precisely on September first, which only the locals know because no visitors ever say beyond August 31st. It only ever stops raining when summer and the summer people arrive. Ndiyae and translator Jordan stump keep it beautifully ambiguous whether the villagers consider this to be a matter of the summer people bringing the nice weather with them as a sort of reverse Brigadoon, or whether the weather just chases them away at summer's end. By the time the reader is brought to consider it, either seems a reasonable possibility, helped along by bits of dialogue like this, from an interview between an increasingly distraught but also increasingly tired and helpless and permanently soggy Herman and the village's menacingly imposing but strangely impotent mayor:

Have you noticed, Monsieur Herman, you can't even see the hills anymore! By the eighth or ninth of September the horizon disappears, everything's gray; this is nowhere, we're in the very middle of nowhere!

I mean, I've said something similar to the odd visitor overstaying their welcome in my little hometown, where the mountains don't disappear (quite the opposite; they gain a postcard perfect snowy cap and turn the main street of downtown into something everybody wants to photograph but no one ever does successfully) but it does get colder than a well-digger's ass and windier than a the last day of a joint legislative session in Cheyenne and stays that way until... until... Wait a minute, did Marie Ndiaye just disguise my cold and windy hometown as a cold and rainy French village for her novel?

Probably not, but still.

I've definitely watched more than a few summer people start out October as blustery as the weather and kept warm by hubris alone, who by the next May look diminished and miserable and sad and have often convinced themselves that maybe it's okay to be a snowbird after all, though.

Now, excuse me. I think I'm going to have to go hunt down a copy of The Cheffe. Because Marie Ndiyae wants to mess with how I think about restaurants and food, and after this experience I definitely want to let her.

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard's THE MORNING STAR (tr by Martin Aitken)

I haven't been able to stop giggling since I realized, about 2/3 of the way through Karl Ove Knausgaard's return to fiction writing, that the novel in question has a Tl;dr in the form of an Of Montreal song, but it totally, totally does.

   

I wish I could remember how I even heard of The Morning Star. The pathetic native app on my phone that Alphabet still seems to insist is a reasonable replacement for the much-missed Google Reader has sussed out that I can be induced to read a lot more literary websites than it previously thought so almost every day LitHub or something grabs me with some crazy niche listicle of "new historical fiction coming out this fall" or whatever, so I suspect it was one of those? Or was it somebody on Twitter? Anyway, I owe somebody some half-assed gratitude; half-assed not because the quality of this novel is such -- anything but -- but because it's gotten me sufficiently interested in its author that I might have to track down some of his other work, most of which is massively multi-volumed, Proust style, and some of which rejoices in the stomach churning title of My Struggle in its English language editions.

Good thing that I a) Use an ebook reader and but b) Never go anywhere anyway, so the likelihood that anyone but my family members who share my big river account will actually see me reading such a thing is small.

But anyway, The Morning Star, hilariously and surely intentionally paginated by the Arbitrary Antarctic Avian in its hardcover edition at 666 pages. I see what you did there.

The titular star appears in the sky above the area of Bergen, Norway one night in 2023, shining its weird light over the messy and mundane lives of several characters whose direct experiences we share and an odd assortment of other figurants, including an infamous black metal band, three of whose members turn up butchered in the nearby wilderness, possibly at the hand of the missing fourth, and other strange phenomena like home invading badgers and giant swarms of crabs emerging from the sea to cause traffic hazards on the highway, possibly just confused by the giant glowing meatball hanging in the sky but maybe also drawn by a sinister power inherent in the giant glowing meatball hanging in the sky.

What does it mean, the meatball? What even is it? Is it natural or supernatural? Is it going to be hanging in the sky forever or is it going to burn out in a few days? Our characters barely seem to care, but they've got a lot of bigger stuff going on. Some of it is mundane and painfully ordinary; some of it is bizarre and unexplainable.

I'm mostly going to focus on the mundane, so I don't get yelled at about spoilers. The bizarre and unexplainable stuff is what both of my readers would be most interested in, so I will leave that behind the spoiler wall.

Arne is spending a pleasantish summer with his wife and kids at their summer home -- pleasant-ish because, well, the wife seems to be on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and keeps talking in her sleep about how she would like to maybe have sex with their neighbor Egil.

Egil has been making a documentary film about the black metal band mentioned above (and how can we not think of Aaron Antes & Audrey Ewell's amazing Until the Light Takes Us, here?) and for that alone might be the coolest character in the book but he's also saddled, about halfway through the novel, with a surprise childcare gig when his ex-wife decides to take off on a trip with her new boyfriend and puts their ten-year-old son on a bus to (approximately) where Egil lives before she even tells Egil about it, thus forcing him to scramble to prepare and then to confront the fact that either the ex has really done a great job poisoning their son against him or his little boy is really a foul-mouthed little prick of a child.

Meanwhile, the girl Egil had a crush on in school, Kathrine, has grown up to become a priest, and is suddenly experiencing a troubled marriage after she delays her return from an annual conference because she just doesn't feel like seeing her husband yet (despite the fact they have two kids whom she misses), only to finally come home to accusations from him that she's having an affair.

Then there's Jostein, an arts reporter for the local newspaper who turns a sour interview with a promising young artist into a hostile one-night-stand while his wife, Turid is having her own problems we'll get to in a moment and his son is having his own Dark Night of the Soul (really, this novel is the most like a Bergman film in prose of any I've ever read, and I haven't even gotten to Egil's many intense existential and religious crises which make up at least 25% of the book yet, oy!). The next day, he gets the a tip-off  about to the scene of the crime where the members of the black metal band have been found horribly dismembered, and rushes there, ready to scoop the world. And remember, this is still the mundane stuff.

Meanwhile, Turid works in a mental institution where she has the usual employee issues with a bitchy boss and a dispiriting job until suddenly one of her most problematic patients waltzes right out of the facility and into the night. Meanwhile, she and Jostein have both gotten faintly worrying messages from their son Ole, but are each assuming that the other is having a more ordinary night and will deal with their boy.

Then there's Solveig, a young woman fresh out of high school and working a dead-end job in town, living in an attic apartment whose landlords, a nice family who occupy the rest of the house, are away on vacation BUT their crazy drug-addict of a son has shown up to terrorize whomever he finds there, even if he's never met 'em before, but of course disappears by the time the police appear.

And there are still more characters, each of whom gets at least one turn in the first-person spotlight, giving you their excuses for bad behavior, disappointment with other characters, misunderstandings of loved ones' meanings, and, every once in a while, reactions to the giant glowing meatball hanging in the sky.

And slowly, things get weird, but never quite as weird as a genre fiction reader might be expecting, for while some possibly supernatural things happen that occasionally might seem like modern takes on, say, the biblical plagues of Egypt or stuff out of Revelations, mostly they're pretty tame by weird fiction standards, because Knausgaard isn't interested in weird fiction; he's interested in god and the afterlife and what it means when we both believe in these things and yet also know they probably aren't true. I didn't bring up Bergman films for nothing, is what I'm saying. I mean, the last 50 or so pages of the book is just Egil's essay about the meaning of death. Though the essay contains maybe a clue or two about some of the dangling plot threads in other people's stories, I'm not sure.

It's all almost farcically, stereotypically Scandanavian. But we like that stuff, don't we? We do. And while ultimately this is kind of a frustrating read -- the plot-before-the-essay ends with someone telling a character who has awakened from a coma that all of the stuff he's worried about -- with what he's worried about being the entire plot of the novel, including so many unresolved questions like who killed the black metal band -- is no longer of concern to anyone compared to what happened in the two weeks he was comatose, and do we get to find out what happened in the two weeks he was comatose? Do we buggery. Perhaps we can go back and tease it out, Gene Wolfe Reader style, someday by re-examining the narrative of his coma experiences, but not right now; the book (the actual, physical book printed on dead trees, which means reading it was a physically painful experience that is the main reason I'm not interesting in going back and teasing out dangling plot threads Gene Wolfe Reader style) is due back to the library where others in my city are anxiously waiting to be frustrated the way I am right now.

Reviewers who have referred to this as a shaggy dog story are not wrong. BUT, it's a really good and interesting shaggy dog story, with lots of good character drama, scenery porn and quality speculations on natural philosophy (are the laws of nature actually immutable laws, or are they merely reflections of matter's habits of "thought"?), theology, eschatology and whether or not a guy can actually drive his recently-crashed-in-an-unreported-drunk-driving-accident car clear across Norway with one headlight and no blinker without getting stopped by the police. So while I'm kind of shaking my fist at Karl Ove Knausgaard, I'm also impressed enough to, as I indicated above, want to read more.

Just not on dead tree. Oh, my aching hands.

John le Carré's SILVERVIEW

Even Proctor was impressed by the homespun nature of these exchanges, given the scale of things to be ironed out, but he had been long enough in the job to know that momentous happenings had a way of acting themselves out on small stages.

Is there anything more wistful, more beautifully sad than sitting down to read a writer's last published novel? Yes, yes there is, and it's reading that writer's posthumously published novel, which I finally had to do even though I'm cheating a bit because I still haven't read all of the rest of John le Carré, but I decided for once to at least try and be in sync with the man's true fans.

And this is the right year for me to read Silverview, because this is also the year that I discovered the pleasures of literature from the Balkans, especially the work of Selvedin Avdic, whose work is intimately concerned with the aftermath of the brutal and horrifying conflicts that took place there mostly in the 1990s but are still being felt to this day, as his horror novel Seven Terrors vividly showed me.

Silverview isn't set there or then, but its central concern is very much concerned with that place and time, specifically a multi-ethnic village a British intelligence agent came to cherish for its peacefulness amidst the horrors, what happened to it and to the family he all but adopted, and how that affected him, his own family in Great Britain (especially his marriage, the small stage upon which these big events first take place), and his Service afterwards. Our man this time is one Edward (or Edvard) Avon, son of a devout Polish Catholic who was an eager collaborator with the Nazis; in Avon's adulthood he attached himself as passionately to socialism/communism as his father had (at least claimed to be) to the Church until he became disillusioned with that cause and adopted another: the would be do-gooding of the western world, eventually in the form of British Intelligence.

Not that we know this for a while, because this is a John le Carré novel and we're going to get to know the other people in his life first, chiefly a youngish man who made a lot of money as a trader in London, became disillusioned by it, and decided to move to an East Anglian village and open a bookshop even though he turns out not to know very much about books. Julian is the kind of guy a lot of us enjoy disliking, in other words; born to the right-ish parents, raised to be a certain kind of successful, successful at what he was supposed to succeed at, and now just blithely assuming he'll succeed at something new with all the confidence that only having enough money to be able to afford to lose a lot of it without pain can give a guy. But of course, if it weren't for guys like him, a lot of little villages out there would never have book stores, or record stores, or groovy little coffee shops that aren't owned by behemoth corporations that over-roast their product and force everybody to adopt faux-Italian vocabularies for just so we can order a damned cup o'joe.

We still don't really have to like these guys, though.

But Edward Avon does, right away, for reasons that aren't clear until much later in the book. Avon is now living in that same East Anglian village and wins our hearts immediately for insisting that if Julian is going to run a bookshop in East Anglia, he had better already know W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn by heart. Which was just what I was thinking as I sank into Julian's story!

Then enter one Stewart Proctor, holder of one of those ambiguous positions within the secret service in which he commands a lot of resources and personal loyalty but seems still to have to answer to a lot of shadowy figures behind the scenes. We don't know why he's in this story for a good long time (relative, of course, to the fact that this is not a big, hefty doorstop of a novel) except that it has something to do with Edward, or with his wife, Deborah (a spy's spy in her own right) or maybe just their daughter, Lily? He circles around this story like a rather kind-looking shark until suddenly he strikes and fills the waters with, not blood but maybe adrenaline? For all that everybody in this story except for Julian and Lily are on the far side of age 60 if not 70, as if this is le Carré's version of All Passion Spent. But with, you know, spies.

And the odd terrifying lawyer, which I was already picturing being played someday by Janet McTeer, who once played Vita Sackville-West (author of All Passion Spent) in a TV movie. Rawr.

The novel is accompanied by a fond note from le Carré's son, who writes under the name of  Nick Harkaway, who describes the not-as-difficult-as-he'd-feared task of getting Silverview ready for publication in terms of wondering whether he dared "put eyebrows on this Mona Lisa" and for those who might raise their own eyebrows at the implied comparison, yes, this is a Mona Lisa. It is a masterful work from an artist very much in command of his powers and a lucky last gift to his fans. I wanted the experience of reading it to last a while but of course I read it in a day and a half, and now must return it to the library because lots of other people are waiting.

Ah, me.