Ethan Rutherford's NORTH SUN or THE VOYAGE OF THE WHALESHIP ESTHER

We're told not to judge books by their covers, and to that I mostly hold, but occasionally I must make an exception. When this beauty started staring out at me from A Strange Object/Deep Vellum's web page, I had to bring it into my home. I mean, look at this thing!

And once it's come into your home, this cover's baleful stare, if allowed to peek out from under or from the top of one's stack of recently acquired books to be read (on dead tree despite the pain), will compel one to read it, and soon, if only to find out what the hell this staring creature even is.

Even if the book's possessor is a stubborn old crone-in-training like your humble blogger, feeling tsundoku guilt and determined to read some of the tomes that came here before it. Compelled by this cover, I took it up out of turn. And so here we are, with Ethan Rutherford's debut novel, North Sun or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, in the very year in which it was published.

And yes, there's a whale carcass in the room that I can't ignore, viz, the last book about whaling* I wrote about on this blog, which entry is still one of the most read things I've ever written, I'm pretty sure, my old review of Moby-Dick. Which most people seem to interpret as me roasting Melville's maritime masterpiece but 1. I love an unlikeable protagonist especially if he's an unreliable narrator and 2. The tedium is very much the point of that book and as such i respect Moby-Dick as a pinnacle of creative achievement and 3. I've since read it again, after having fallen in love with China Mieville's Railsea, and found more to admire in it a second time around. I could just take that post down (since I can't just let it sink into oblivion apparently) but I can't bring myself to do so. It's a pole holding up the tent of my identity. I'm the chick who called Ishmael the annoying hipster on the boat.** I own it. 

But anyway, North Sun or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther is a book that, for the first third or so, almost feels like a very streamlined and snappy retelling of the story of the Essex, that unfortunate ship whose fate inspired Moby-Dick and is depicted in In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, book, film and podcast episode.*** And of course, in certain respects, one sea voyage is very like another, at least to start with. The action is briskly told, the periods of inaction elided over, everything described in terse sentences, quick paragraphs and severely truncated chapters that would seem to be the very opposite of Moby-Dick. For a while this feels like it might turn out to be the whole point.

But then [REDACTED] shows up not long after a pair and then a whole pack of [REDACTEDs] attack and on the heels of a second encounter between little [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and the sinister and very large [REDACTED] in the bowels of the ship -- and everything changes. The ship turns north at the Sandwich Islands -- they are not merely on a whaling expedition, but are also off to try to recover a Mr. Leander, captain of another whaling ship, who lost his charge to the pack ice and sent the Esther's eventual captain back to New Bedford, MA to tell the owners of both the Esther and the lost Dromo, that nobody was coming home from the Dromo even though its captain is married to one of the family's daughters -- and heads up to the Arctic to hunt whales, walrus and Leander.

By the time the ship is on its new heading, the reader has realized that they are sailing, not only into chillier, more dangerous waters, but also into the wild waves of Weird Fiction, as I'll get into in a bit.

Ahoy!

On the Esther sails through the choppy winter sea! She swoops her spirit up one wave and down another, proud and vain. Finally, the cold truly catches and the temperature drops. The water turns gray and leaden; every surface of the ship remains damp. The fog smothers and surrounds them. But the silence they sail through is not the absence of sound at all. Rather, it is the presence of all sound. The cold bites the men's skin; they feel it in their teeth. They bundle against it, but that's how it is.

How many chapters would Herman Melville have taken to describe this? I kid. Kind of.

But anyway, the hazards of a whaling voyage are many, even before things get explicitly Weird. For instance, while of course I'm enough of a veteran of maritime fiction to know what a shipworm is (actually a kind of clam, with a long flexible body; they use their little shells as drill bits to bore through the wood of ships) but I've never encountered them depicted as crawling free between locations on deck where little ship's boys could potentially see them. Which, this alone could introduce a note of horror for the squeamish reader -- which I am not. I am a sicko, which is why I decided to share an amusing-to-me image of these strange and destructive critters:

Thank you, Internet. You're still capable of providing some good things.

Oh, and by the way, the worms in the book, have grown to be as big around as your arm

and proportionally as long. You're welcome!

But Rutherford isn't here just to try to gross us out. He's enamored of the imagery the setting affords him, and takes full advantage: 

That morning the men have their first glimpse of clustered ice. What a sight! The northern sun glints off the Frozen expanse - her light is a dancing thing, it plays over the basin and reflects crystals in the air. The ice cakes are like glistening scraps skimmed from the pots. They see no patch of color in front of them. Everything - sky, snow, apparent horizon - is a gradation of brilliant white. Except, of course, for the sea itself, which, in the leads and channels, appears black.

Which is to say that we get some quite beautiful prose in North Sun, but with which the author never gets too carried away. The above passage, like the passage I quoted before, constitutes almost an entire chapter, and soon we are back to the plot, the plot, the plot! This is 21st century fiction for the TikTok audience, or something, lean and hungry and raring to get back to pursuit or butchery or uncanny haunting or...

Weirder things. Things which I'm not going to spoil for you but which chiefly concern the two little Riggs brothers, aged ten and twelve, though they are listed on the manifest as twelve and fourteen because, while whaling families are, as one captain observes early in the novel, monsters, they're not complete monsters. They wouldn't employ child labor or anything, I mean come on! But anyway, these two little boys, being the smallest bodies on the boat, get all the nastiest jobs, like getting lowered into the head cavities of slaughtered whales to collect all the spermaceti (you can't have a whaling story without spermaceti!) and being subject to the unwelcome attentions of the kinds of people who pay unwelcome attentions to powerless little boys (trigger warning, there, though nothing gets too graphic).

But there's also a dude who kind of fills the role of the Bond Company Stooge in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Mr. Thule (great name for a vaguely sinister figure, no?), who stays mostly below decks until they reach the ice but then emerges as a figure of unexpected force and knowledge who may be exercising some kind of weird occult powers on behalf of the ship's owners and who is absolutely unperturbed by the forces of weather, wind, tide, wildlife or the increasingly outlandishly bad luck that has afflicted the ship at least since they rounded Cape Horn, the kind of luck which has their chief harpooneer blowing his hand off in a rare bit of comic relief as he experiments with a new kind of explosive harpoon dart that can kill a whale before the animal can dive below the ice and threaten to drag a whaleboat under with him, as nearly happens soon after they arrive in the Arctic.

And there is another figure aboard about whom I'm not going to write here but who will haunt me for a long time, I think. Oh, Old Sorrel. I might even cut out this paragraph just for mentioning him at all. I don't know yet. If I leave it in, it's just because I decided to tease you, dear readers.

I didn't know how much my life was lacking a combination of Herman Melville and Drew Magary (if you know, you know. Crab) until this book found me, but now I'm craving some more whaling tales. And, fortunately for me, I have at least one more in the teetering TBR stack. And readers, that one rhymes. 

Stay tuned!

*That's not an incidental appearance of the practice in an Aubrey/Maturin novel.

**It is perhaps a mark of that post's relative antiquity that I felt the need exhaustively to define what a hipster is.

***Only the latter two have I experienced as of yet, but I have the book on deck for sometime soon. The podcast episode, by the way, is a mini-series by the guys at Last Podcast on the Left.

Antoine Volodine's RADIANT TERMINUS (Tr by Jeffrey Zuckerman)

Recently I indulged in a buddy read with my old pal, the Popqueenie, of one of my favorite Philip K. Dick novels, Dr. Bloodmoney, so that tale of post-nuclear-apocalypse and mutant psychic superpowers was very much on my mind as I settled into my second foray into the one-man genre of post-exoticism* that comes to us from the many-named author who invented it.

Radiant Terminus has cemented my interest in the work of Antoine Volodine/Manuela Draeger/Elli Kronauer/Lutz Bassman/Infernus Johannes. And damn it, I may have actually to learn French at some point because only some of his books have made it to English translation.

It's also very much an exploration of what life would have been like in post-nuclear Marin County in Dr. Bloodmoney if [REDACTED] hadn't [REDACTED] [REDACTED].** Except instead of the remains of luxurious and affluent northern California, we're in what's left of an old collective farm from the heyday of the world-encircling Second Soviet Union, and instead of the aftermath of a nuclear war, we have a world slowly devastated by Chernobyl-type accidents as the Second Soviet Union, under constant attack by pockets of fascists, slowly receded from its high water mark, leaving collective farm/village complexes like Radiant Terminus to fend for themselves without regular and competent maintenance of their neighborhood nuclear power plants. 

Oops!

We begin our story following the desperate retreat of a trio of survivors of the battle that lost the fictional territory of the Orbise. Slowly dying of radiation sickness and out of food and water, the three have one hope left: if the most able-bodied among them can make it to the next settlement and bring back some water and food.

Unfortunately for this barely-survivor, Kronauer (yes, one of the author's heteronyms), the next settlement is Radiant Terminus, where the nuclear plant has not only failed catastrophically but its core has completely melted down and later sank deep into the earth. The residents now use it as a sort of all-purpose garbage disposal, which they can only do thanks to the heroic efforts of "one of the most valiant figures of the second Soviet union, a legendary survivor, sagging under medals and highlighted in various enlightening stories," the Gramma Ugdal. The Gramma Ugdal, who is only ever referred to this way, has mutated into an immortal woman who cannot be harmed by radiation and thus has become famous for rushing in to help after countless nuclear accidents. Since this is so, she can safely handle contaminated carcasses, bits of furniture and farm equipment, whatever needs disposed of, and push it down into the melted-down core to its destruction. She has found, furthermore, a way to, at least partially, heal radiation damage in some others by the use of various altered waters. And that's not all. Sometimes she can bring them back from the dead. And if she can't with her waters, there's someone else around who probably can.

For the Gramma Ugdal is not the only immortal in Radiant Terminus! Her former husband from her long-ago (like 100 years long ago) youth, Solovyei, is also immortal and their reunion was unexpected and consequential, for he has powers even greater than hers*** for all that he has lived in obscurity where she became an international hero. But see, Solovyei is this novel's Hoppy Harrington, a figure of menace and bizarre psychic powers, who absolutely dominates Radiant Terminus and its environs by dominating the minds and bodies of its people. None of whom has the first idea of how to revolt against their god-king, all of whom have at least been led to believe that they literally owe him their lives, and many of whom are pretty sure that they only even exist because Solovyei has, Borges-like, dreamed them.

Solovyei also has a special hell set aside for any man dumb enough to involve himself, even in the most innocent way, with one of his three weirdly beautiful mutant daughters by "unknown mothers." Take poor Schulhoff, who legally married one of them and seemed genuinely to love her, but whom Solovyei has made to forget her utterly and roam the earth, as he explains upon meeting our veteran, Kronauer: 

Solovyei has made sure it will never pass. He makes me walk from forest to forest, from lake to lake, and when the absence of the woman I love seems a little less unbearable, when the loss makes me suffer a little less, he reintroduces himself in my head and he revives my urge to remember. He whistles in my head until I collapse. He keeps whistling, he sings his sorts of poems. It lasts for days and nights. I can't escape it. I can't die. I'm stuck within his clutches. Within his dreams. No death is available to me. I also wonder if maybe I'm actually inside one of his dreams. It won't pass and I can't escape.

Thus while we might have been expecting a tender reunion between the Gramma Ugdal and her Solovyei,  and a nice autumn twilight love story, what we get instead is a Twilight Zone episode. The one with Billy Mumy as a terrifying and omnipotent child. Except this time he's a gigantic full-grown man with yellow eyes and an axe in his belt and three beautiful mutant daughters and a conviction that no male human being ever born has ever meant anything but harm to the female of the species and must be punished for his bad intentions. And if a man Solovyei encounters actually doesn't have bad intentions towards those daughters, well, not only does Solovyei not believe it but he'll actually warp reality to make his preconceptions true. And then administer "appropriate" punishments.

Yikes.

So, half Hoppy Harrington and half Palmer Eldritch, let's say. Or maybe, the malevolent supercomputer I AM. And a little bit of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz - Solovyei loves to inflict his poetry on the entire village via a loudspeaker system.

But come to think if it, what Solovyei reminds me of the most is Dr. Haber, the subtly-terrifying-until-he-abandons-subtlety villain of Ursula K. Leguin's The Lathe of Heaven, who parlays his hypnotic control and medical/psychiatric power imbalance over poor George Orr to dream his way to world domination. Like Haber, Solovyei appears to have swollen his physical dimensions to match his massive self-conception; the first thing everybody notices upon meeting him is that he is simply huge, with a big axe shoved through his belt for extra intimidation. It's a classic diversion on both characters' parts, minimizing their actual threat by distracting their victims with the display of a quite different one. Few are guarding against a psychic attack when the likelihood appears to be that the opponent is going to just step up and tear one to pieces with his bare hands.

For all this, though, what Radiant Terminus seems most concerned with is the impact of literature, of Volodine's imagined post-exotic canon, on the people who have read it. The literary star of this novel is one Maria Kwoll, a post-exotic feminist whom even Andrea Dworkin might consider extreme. Because one of Solovyei's daughters is the village librarian and grew up on Kwoll's works, she has made sure that nothing written is left to be read except those works and things like machinery repair manuals and agronomy pamphlets. The result is a village of people, not only utterly under Solovyei's control, but also under Kwoll's influence: to them, sex is inherently aggressive and gross, it's impossible for a male human to think about anything else anyway, and everything such a creature says or does is in "the cock's language."

Which means that yes, even Solovyei is a Kwollite. Kwollian?

There's another element of Radiant Terminus that I can't help but single or for praise: its inventiveness in dealing with the altered landscape of a world that has suffered a thousand nuclear accidents. Volodine conjures up a whole alternate herbarium for his world. It's as if he decided that the Voynich manuscript was an accurate rendering that had just come unstuck in time. We get to learn a bit about them through the character of Kronauer, whose wife was busy on a project to identify all the weird new flora before the fascists murdered her, and about whom he thinks as he mentally catalogs what he sees on his journey to Radiant Terminus: 

Molle-guillotes, malveinés, ashrangs, smallglory captives, willow benaises. Damsels-in-flight, masquerats, four-o’clock beauties, pituitaines, sweetbalers, or midnight Jeannes.****

Like I said, I might have to start working on my French, which I can already kind of parse because of years farting around with Portuguese, Latin and Spanish, just so I can explore the rest of Volodine et al's works set in this bizarre world.

I hope there are lots more Crones in it.

*My first being Manuela Draeger's Eleven Sooty Dreams, another book with a prominent and formidable grandmother-who-isn't-a-grandmother figure -- which I simply love. As for what "post-exoticism" is, it's a sort of Marvel Cinematic Universe but for a group of imaginary and revolutionary writers who form the cultural milieu of a worldwide Marxist-Leninist society, the Second Soviet Union, that was hugely successful and utopian until it wasn't. The post-exotic works of Volodine et al are now its autopsy in print, melancholy and lovely and weird as hell. So, you know, pretty close to being my ideal reading material.

**If you know, you know. If you don't, go read Dr. Bloodmoney.

***Oddly, this gives an author the best excuse ever to use an omniscient narrator, for Solovyei can read minds even at infinite distances in addition to his other uncanny abilities, as is made plain when, almost exactly halfway through the novel, he is revealed to be possessing a crow that has been following some of his banished citizens around. These passages are written in the first person omniscient, but most of the rest of the book is in a very traditional third, which seems like a missed opportunity to have one of the best bastard narrators of all time. Le sigh.

****Those "Jeannes" have a longer name, by the way; they are Jeanne-of-the-Communists. Volodine is nothing if not committed to the Second Soviet but.

Robert K. Merton's ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS: A SHANDEAN POSTSCRIPT

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke, 1675.

Memes are older than the Internet. We just used to call them "aphorisms" or "quotations" or "folk wisdom". And back before we called them "memes" they were pretty hard to trace to sources. Pretty hard but also, as mid-century intellectual delight Robert K. Merton has proven in his utterly wonderful On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, a whole lot of fun! 

Anyone who's spent more than ten minutes reading this blog knows that my favorite novel, probably ever, is Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which I'll be reading again later this summer as not one but two of the Discord Servers I hang out on are brewing up giant buddy reads of this book. 

I'm going to encourage all of them to try to track down a copy of On the Shoulders of Giants (or OTSOG, as Merton himself has charmingly dubbed it and elucidates late in this work as a versatile new word which by all rights should have entered our vernacular but has largely been replaced by the less amusing but also less opaque "humblebrag") as either a companion read or a chaser. It's just the perfect example of what I've always imagined as the ideal way to live a life, as Casaubon attempted to do in Eco's novel:* be the "Sam Spade of Culture "

The mystery here being, while most modern people think it was Isaac Newton who first said "If I have seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants,"** intellectuals know he was condensing and paraphrasing a much earlier thought. A meme. But where did he get it? And where did that person get it? And the person he (or she, or [singular] they, but let's be honest, probably he, at least in that for most of recorded history only men got to record their thoughts in any durable way. So probably he, though who knows if he got it from his wife or sister or mom?) who passed it on from distant antiquity? But how distant? 

Helpfully, once Merton has spent many pages (in the form of a letter to Bernard Bailyn, whom I chiefly know as a the author of The Idealogical Origins of the American Revolution***, a book beloved of libertarians, both with and without the capital L) teasing out the history and provenance of the phrase all the way back to the 12th century and perhaps to even earlier, he presents us with a helpful table suitable for copying out and hanging on the wall to remind us all that no idea is truly original, that immature artists borrow from the mature artists who originally stole them from Oscar Wilde, etc.

But so, OTSOG would really seem to have no business being as entertaining as it is, but the fact remains: this is the most fun I have had with a piece of non-fiction in years. This is because Merton, while a serious scholar, indeed the "father of modern sociology" (who has a lot of fun in one of this book's many digressions considering this matter of intellectual fatherhood of things like anatomy and physiology and many other arts and sciences) is also a very funny and playful writer, at least in this work, which, after all, takes its subtitle from the novel that was post-modern before there was any modern of which to be post-, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It is a very Shandean work with its wide-ranging and curious approach to its subject, its willingness to stray off its mapped-out path (but always to find its way back. Eventually) and its overall tone, which, get ready for that.

Consider this, a meditation on the word "stand" into which Merton enters after spending some time comparing versions of the aphorism, in English and other languages, some of which are ambiguous about the position of the dwarfs in relationship to their giants -- standing versus sitting:

The OED**** requires 38 columns of tight-packed print to set out 104 meanings of the word and its various formations. After studying a few dozen of these meanings, one suffers and an attack of paranomasia. One doesn't know whether one is standing on one's head or on one's feet. In such cases, one must suppose, the only sound position is a stand-pat policy if one is to stand committed to truth and be prepared to stand the consequences. This may stand one a high price, but as things stand, to stand firm may stand one in good stead and may indeed be the only way to stand off abominable ambiguities. One must simply stand one's ground if one stands for something rather than nothing. If, I say, one stands for standards, if one is more than a stand-in for a scholar, if one wishes to preserve one's scholarly standing and to stand on good terms with one's peers, then one must take a strong stand. In the end each of us stands under the heavy obligation to stand guard and to stand to our guns in the face of the standing threat to single-sensed clarity. To stand upon ceremony in these matters or to stand much upon one's dignity would only mean that we have little else to stand upon. United we stand, provided that we do not stand upon our differences but stand together, side by side, rather than stand apart, aside or astrut. We must stand by not, not back, if we are to stand off the standing threat or at least bring it to a standstill. Only so, do we even stand a chance; only so, can we achieve a common understanding. This is no mean venture and the question is: can you stand it?"

This is merely my favorite example of the kind of writing to be enjoyed in OTSOG. There are so many others, so many fascinating nuggets of information and of speculation about the information he has found. When I first started reading OTSOG I was ashamed to realize that I had owned my personal copy for over 20 years; as I read, though, I found that only now, and maybe not even only now, had I the personal resources to appreciate its many pleasures: I already knew the names of most of the scholars Merton discusses, from my own academic studies and also from my repeated readings of things like Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a trilogy of novels teeming with historical figures, including Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Samuel Pepys, who figure so deeply in the middle sections of the delicious gossip on offer in OTSOG.

It even gave me a clue or two as to where some of my other favorite works of fiction may have gotten some of their ideas, including, of all things, that of Tim Powers! A detail from his The Stress of Her Regard was very likely taken from a source mentioned in OTSOG, which Merton discusses when quoting from Tristram Shandy as the hero's father, still awaiting Tristram's birth, is trying to clear up a footnote:

Should you think this is just another invention of Stern's parturient imagination, you would be badly mistaken. There actually was an ignorant physician and man-midwife, William Smellie, who did indeed... mistake the caption of the drawing of a petrified child just taken from its mother's womb as the name of an author.

How could I not think of the detail in The Stress of Her Regard about a baffling section of a medical text being mistaken for the removal of a petrified infant when it was "really" (in Powers' delightfully magic- and monster-riddled version of the early 19th century) instructions on how to implant a tiny statue into a human body, to create a link between Powers' stony monster race and humans, to allow to monsters free reign in our world?

I have no idea how easily a copy of OTSOG may be to find these days; my own I got at an out of the way used bookstore in the middle of Wyoming at the tail end of the 20th century. It was exactly the sort of weird medicine I needed right now as we begin a summer full of stupid foreboding and anti-intellectualism at levels not even the most hidebound clerical authorities of the "dark ages" seem to have striven for. I needed its reminder that it is fun to be smart, that knowing things can be a source of enjoyment second only to finding things out. Your own joke about dwarfs and giants and seeing far here.

*Eco, you may note if you can read the crummy scan of the cover art that I had to use here, wrote an introduction to the edition that I own and it is every bit as charming and witty as we might expect from the god who created Causaubon, Diotallevi and Jacopo Belbo.

**In a letter to fellow Baroque Cycle character Robert Hooke. I'm not going to pretend to be the intellect that Merton is; I first learned about Robert Hooke (and Samuel Pepys and many others besides) from Neal Stephenson.

***Who, based on copyright dates for the original editions of these two books, might well have been working on that very book while Merton was writing him this "letter." So yes, I might be reading that again soon...

****The Oxford English Dictionary, the latest edition of which runs to 20 volumes in print; it has since ceased to be published in print due to its mass, which is now measured in megabytes. Over 500 of them. 

Raymond St. Elmo's LETTERS FROM A SHIPWRECK IN THE SEA OF SUNS AND MOONS

To a certain degree, I'm still trying to figure out the freaking ocean of words I just swam through, as I contemplate the very unusual and ambiguous Letters From a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons, by Raymond St. Elmo. I mean, I know I had fun shaking my head over the combination of godpunk, sea adventure, star-crossed romance and epistolary interrogation it contained, but did I ever actually figure out what was going on? Enough to write a coherent post about on this here blog? 

Let's find out.

Interviewer: Describe how to kill Typhon.

Oh, there are as many ways to kill a god as there are to destroy a man. Personally my favorite is to melt him down in confusion and despair. 

Readers here who are also readers of Gene Wolfe have already raised their eyebrows at the mention of the ancient Autarch and god-king of the Whorl, but this Typhon is merely (?) a storm god, one of a cargo hold-full of mostly dead and/or forgotten deities being carried aboard the good ship Unicorn from San Francisco, at which point the last of them was collected, to the mysterious and uncharted island of Theodosia.

Typhon could also be our protagonist, cloaked in the body of Clarence St. Elmo*, the blind old sailor rousted out by the unknown Interviewer for purposes unknown but urgent for that entity.** A mad scientist on the island on which Clarence and a few of his crewmates from the Unicorn thinks Clarence is Typhon, anyway. 

Clarence has been adopted, though, not by Typhon, but by the Egyptian god, Thoth, who appears to him with advice and wry commentary in the form, usually, of a sea bird, though occasionally he's got a vaguely human form, shrouded in black.

But all of this is just distraction, as far as the Interviewer is concerned; they claim to have dredged up Clarence to help in a search for two green leatherbound books, one in Etruscan and the other a French translation of the first -- allegedly. As for Clarence... He's just this poet, you know? 

I saw some useful poetic fodder in the situation. It's just my nature. I considered putting seaweed in my hair and appearing to them as my own drowned ghost. The idea made me laugh, then the laugh made me check. I did have seaweed in my hair. Maybe I was my own drowned ghost. The idea scared me so I combed it out with my fingers and headed on.

To arrive at the above situation, shipwrecked and pondering how to approach some other castaways, Clarence first allowed his beloved's father and fierce, ancient aunts to chase him away from her, so very away that he left their hometown of Maidenhead, NJ for San Francisco and thence joined the crew of the Unicorn. Which brought him to a weird island complete with lighthouse, a seminary run by the aforementioned mad scientist, the Master of the Green, and many other features atypical of your standard Robinson Crusoe-esque fare. Like a bunch of gods and ex-gods rampaging around and wreaking havoc. Only some of whom seem to have been along for the ride on the Unicorn. I think. Were there already some feral gods or ex-gods on the island? I never decided for sure.

Meanwhile, back on the voyage, Clarence wrote his beloved K. (all we ever get is this initial, never a name) a series of longing letters which give the novel its title, and the Interviewer has only secured his cooperation by convincing him they have a way of seeing that she gets them, since she didn't in real life? 

Except what is the reality of any of this, here?

While trying to figure all of this out may feel like too much work to some (my own dear personal mother, who spotted this book in our shared ebook library and was intrigued by the title, started it before I did but DNF'd it for this reason), it is a fun exercise for the Wolfe-pilled who actively seek out this sort of thing -- but it's not the only reason to give this book a try! 

There's also the enjoyment of watching perhaps the most ill-advised sea voyage since Ishmael signed on to the Pequod. The Unicorn, we learn, is a perfectly fine ship but its crew mostly abandoned it long before it reached San Francisco; they were terrified of its cargo of statues of forgotten gods, you see. Also, the captain is kind of a freak show. The result is that the ship can attract no kind of competent or experienced crew, so nobody has the first idea what to do when things immediately start going wrong in ways both predictable and un-.

I'm bouncing around in chronology, here, but guess what: so does the novel! It's all part of the puzzle box, one which I'm not sure I've solved yet. Truly, I am not sure I understood this novel. 

But the experience of reading it was fun enough to make me more than willing to try it again sometime. So maybe stay tuned...

*As though we are perhaps meant to wonder if he is not an ancestor of the author of the novel Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons? Except I think "Raymond St. Elmo" is a pseudonym? But who knows. All I could find poking around in the wreckage of the internet was that St. Elmo has written a bunch of other books that seem even weirder than this one. But few biographical details.

**Or entities. Sometimes the Interviewer uses plural pronouns in referring to itself/themselves. And frequently sounds, as does Clarence sometimes, too, like a piece of software or otherwise artificial being.

Jared Pechaček's THE WEST PASSAGE (Narr by Steve West)

Ok, bear with me here. Things are gonna get weird. I know, I know, when are they not? But this is in the upper reaches of the kind of weird that I really, really like and often find it very difficult to adequately describe. This risks me accidentally talking you out of giving this book a try, which is one of the reasons I didn't blog about this book when I first read it back in December*. And I'd almost rather just leave you stumbling around and maybe happening upon it by chance than accidentally talk you out of trying it. 

But this is a really weird, really cool, really unusual book. Even by my standards. 

So.

The West Passage, Jared "By the Bywater" Pechaček's debut novel, is kind of the answer to "what if we could return to the great castle of Gormenghast centuries after Titus Groan rode off to become Mervyn Peake, and the Bright Carvings and everything else were left to rot, and no new Master of Rituals had been appointed, and so everybody had just sort of half-assedly continued some half-remembered versions of all the ceremonies and customs... but those customs actually all turned out to have, like, existentially important functions. Like keeping terrible, deadly eldritch beings in check? And making the seasons happen? Which, the castle is so big that different parts of it experience different seasons?"**

Can you imagine that?

Ok. Now imagine that instead of the Earls and Countesses of Groan there were... bizarrely shaped, multiply-eyed, terribly powerful, inscrutable, gigantic eldritch "ladies" in charge of it all, but they seem to have mostly gone mad or lost interest in doing whatever it is they do when they're not conferring arcane and possibly pointless forms of authority and/or literally changing the minds of whatever puny, hapless humans happen to blunder into their presences?

Oh, and here and there are bits of really odd technology and whatnot still in use, baroque and Rube Goldbergian and not necessarily being put to their originally intended uses. They kind of remind me of some of the contraptions of, say, the goblins in Jim Henson's Labyrinth. 

So that's the setting. How about the story?

It's a bit simpler. A bit.

We meet two apprentices from the Grey Tower (the only tower that's no longer under the direct control of a Lady). Kew was the apprentice to the tower's late Guardian, who trained him pretty well in Protecting (against what? Nobody seems sure anymore) but died without passing on the title and whatnot that would give him the authority to take over for her. There is only one way for him to get what he needs to do the job now, and that's to go find a Lady. And give her a cryptic message from his late boss: something or other is waking up. And it sounds like that might be bad?

Maybe?  

Our other apprentice-about-to-rise, Pell serves with the Grey Women (not Ladies, human women) who perform the rites and duties associated with death and birth. Pell helped with the services for Kew's mistress, witnessed one error, committed some others herself, and is now pretty sure that it's her fault that winter has come way too early to the Gray Tower and she must travel to other parts of the Castle to find out how to put it right. Is she correct in this?***

Maybe?

The West Passage, then, is kind of a double quest narrative, though one in which neither of our plucky young heroes really have any idea about the nature of their world, their rulers, or what they're supposed to be doing. Kind of like everybody else.

And the quests? Might not really be the point anyway. 

The atmosphere in which all of this takes place is deliciously strange and borders on the nonsensical, Lewis Carrol as interpreted by Jeff Noon via Mark Lawrence. It's not exactly hostile but it's not not hostile. Everybody remembers different bits of lore differently (delightfully, the old lore is referred to as coming from "story times," and the really, really old lore from "song times"), and many are desperately, jealously clinging to different bizarre privileges that may or may not be actually important to the overall survival of this world. 

What I'm still not adequately conveying here, though, is the sheer mad inventiveness of it all. For instance, at one point, thinking that a bee is merely something somewhat like what you and I would also call a bee, Kew, sure that he's done for, gasps to it "Tell them I tried," just to say some last words to something, if not someone. Only moments later, the bee turns out to have treated those words as a message, and to have delivered them to someone "with the face of a trout." Which Kew is not at all surprised by, and I don't think it's just because it's more surprising that someone is there at all than that it has a fishy head. And before we know it, Trout Mask Replica (not his real name, but come on) is asking Kew, who is still surrounded by hungry jackals, if he has seen any lizards about. "You'd know a lizard if you saw one. Big suckers. Teeth like boats."

There are tons of weird little one-offs like this, sending the message to us that this world really really isn't ours, that pretty much all the nouns should be in scare quotes, or at least the animate nouns should be, and that the more you pay attention to what's going on, the less certain you should be that you understand what's going on. I'm not going to accuse Pechaček of deliberately misleading his readers, but I'm not going to absolve him of this, either.

Let's just say that never has a book seemed more dissimilar  from my first to my second reading - and it was only a few months between them. I need a lot longer than that to forget things. But I was definitely watching the wrong pair of hands the first time around. 

So of course I'm thinking about Gene Wolfe, here. And you know I don't mention him lightly. And also of Jeff Vandermeer, of whose Area X this world could be a descendant, the Palace a thousandth mutant iteration of the Lighthouse, the Ladies and other creatures the descendants of Ghost Bird and her dolphin-husband.

But, of course, maybe it's always been this way, here. Beehives have always been things you can saddle up and ride out to someone's rescue. Fancy cakes were always made and decorated, not to be served and eaten, but to be tipped immediately out onto a midden heap almost as high as the Castle is tall. Butterflies have always been part of funeral rites in which they suck the corpse dry.

Adding to the fun is the book's habit of breaking up the narrative with odd passages that, say, invite us to consider what mistakes a character has already made in the course of a quest. It's again hard not to think of Labyrinth, which adds a lighthearted bit of whimsy here and there to leaven the heavy duty strangeness. 

If she'd gone that way, she'd be headed straight to that castle. 

And yes, sometimes, just sometimes, things hit that level of cute.

Believe it or not, all of this insanity comes to a very satisfying conclusion, one of the best I've encountered in recent years of reading weird fiction and Weird Fiction. While I would gladly spend much, much more time exploring this Palace and the world in which it exists, there aren't any cliffhangers, plot holes or loose ends leaving me clamoring for a sequel. Sometimes it's okay to write a stand-alone.

But I'm sure hoping Pechaček's got something else in the hopper that'll be ready to show us soon. I really get the feeling that, as many other reviewers have commented,  including my boys over at Death//Sentence, Pechaček is only getting warmed up.

This is cause to celebrate. And maybe to create an elaborate cake for... reasons.

 *Which, I mean, it was December, but also, caveat listener: narrator Steve West has a very deep and rich voice, distractingly so. He's like Jot Davies on a diet of virgin's blood and truffled chocolates. 

**As in when it's summer in one wing, it's fall in the next one over. Probably. But it's not quite as big as that suggests. Though it does take a few days' walking to get from one wing to another, so, still pretty big.

***Oh, by the way, both of these questing characters get new names in the course of the story, and one of them switches gender. Because this world is just like that, yo.

Adam Erlich Sachs' THE ORGANS OF SENSE

It was well known at that time that meteorological conditions in Prague were usually connected to conditions in the Emperor's mind, a phenomenon that certain churchmen as well as the vulgar attributed to the action of demons flitting in and out of the emperor's head, which evidently they could, on this theory, enter at will - "anything of course can be explained by recourse to a head entering demon."

While the title and stunningly odd cover art of Adam Erlich Sachs' stunningly odd The Organs of Sense suggest that this weird little novel will chiefly concern itself with how we apprehend the world directly, the text is occupied with a very different but related matter: how most of what we say we "know' about the world actually comes at many removes from such direct apprehension. 

Told as an encounter between a young Gottfried Leibniz (he of the monads and the famous dispute with Isaac Newton over which of them could claim to have invented calculus*) and an elderly, blind astronomer, The Organs of Sense never lets the reader forget the chain of custody through which the facts and ideas being discussed are coming to us. We are constantly reminded, for instance, that our knowledge of what happened in this encounter and what was said comes to us via later writings of Leibniz.** And very, very often, we are also reminded how various anecdotes the astronomer shares with Leibniz reached the astronomer, as when he relates a story in which the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II punked his art agent over how dumb it was for that agent to hold forth for an absurd length of time over the various technical and art historical qualities of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's painting, Water, without having once mentioning fish. I mean... Look.

Anyway, the astronomer originally heard the story from Emperor Rudolf's Court Chamberlain, who presumably had to oversee clean-up efforts after Rudolf convinced his art agent that he was facing severe punishment for being a phony and a blowhard and the art agent wet himself. 

So yes, there are some amusing moments in this otherwise very serious book. 

But why has Leibniz traveled out of his way, right after being denied his doctorate for his first learned publication, to meet an unnamed blind astronomer in his remote mountain observatory? 

Because not only does this astronomer claim to have invented the telescope (a feat usually credited, in a prefiguring of Leibniz' future in the calculus dispute, to someone more famous) and has in fact built the longest one then in existence, but he also claims that doing so led directly to the loss of his eyes (he is not only blind but has empty hollows where his eyes were, but, as we soon learn, his tear ducts are still intact and functional); and not only has he invented and built the greatest of telescopes but lost his eyes, but he also claims he can still see through said telescope***, and that in doing so he, alone in all the world, has predicted a total solar eclipse for the very day and location on which and to which Leibniz has made his scientific pilgrimage. 

Leibniz wants to be there to see whether or not the old guy is right.

And meantime, they have a few hours to kill. During which the astronomer relates his story to Leibniz and makes a frequent show of putting an empty eye socket to the viewfinder of his telescope, "looking" for a moment, and then jotting something down with a quill. He is adding to his catalog of stars, which he is determined will be longer than anybody's.

Of course I thought of this scene from what is perhaps my very favorite movie of all time, Peter Greenaway's**** Drowning by Numbers:

Will the eclipse actually happen? Will we find out how the astronomer still "sees?" Will we get to find out what he's been writing down? Will his dad ever realize his dream of being re-appointed the Imperial Sculptor?

Speaking of the astronomer's dad, fans of a fictional trope that's turning up a lot in late 20th and early 21st century fantasy fiction makes an appearance of sorts here: that of an actual, physical city that is a tangible representation of a human creator's memory palace. I'm speaking mostly of Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City and of Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft and maybe also Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's Gogmagog and Ludluda. Is that enough to call it a trend or a trope? I feel like Christopher Priest and Susanna Clarke may have played with it, too. At any rate, the Vienna of Emperor Maximilian's day, the astronomer insists to us via Liebniz, via Liebniz' translator, was a physical representation of the mind of the astronomer's father, who had designed most of its facades and buildings and sculptures during his time as Imperial Sculptor to Maximilian. Who was later fired by Rudolf when Rudolf dumped all of Maximilian's functionaries and moved to imperial court from gold and marble Vienna to "black-spired" Prague.

And it is in Prague that the astronomer, or so he tells Leibniz, who tells us via his unknown translator, loses his eyes and loses credit for inventing the telescope and loses his dignity to become, well, the punchline of a shaggy dog story, the point of which really seems to be that "learning math is important, actually."

To the point where I almost think that conveying this is, actually, the point of this novel, for all that it mostly consists of amusing scenes of Hapsburg court politics and pseudoscience and discovery and madness, feigned and un-.

By the way, this is also very much an alternate history in addition to its other attributes: the Rudolph II of The Organs of Sense seems much the same as our historical Hapsburg, but book-Rudolph  had fewer children with his mistress and gave them different names, though the Prince Heinrich of the novel shares the outlines if not the details of the real eldest son's, Julius', main claim to fame, as a murderer. Heinrich comes to relate this story in considerable and exhausting detail to the astronomer while the astronomer is disguised as a priest come to hear Heinrich's confession, adding yet another layer of indirect storytelling to the text. 

Which Sachs' continues to emphasize, so at least once we are reminded that one of the princesses told something to Heinrich, who told the disguised astronomer, who years later told Liebniz while they awaited an eclipse that may or may not happen, who relayed the tale as part of a journal article, which a translator then rendered into English, from which Sachs derived the story he is telling us. 

Got that?

*A significant factor in the vast and convoluted plots of Neal Stephenson's incredible trilogy, The Baroque Cycle, a perennial favorite for re-reads, chez moi.

**And yes, adding still further to the chain of custody through which this story has passed, our actual narrator for this overall account is the unnamed translator of this fictional account of this fictional event in the life of the very real Leibniz.

***Yes, of course I'm thinking of how Paul Atriedes can still "see" in Dune Messiah. This astronomer's "vision," too, may be "oracular."

****Duh!

Rick Harsch's THE MANIFOLD DESTINY OF EDDIE VEGAS

Did you ever wonder what kind of books our culture would have to enjoy if, instead of ho-hum Europe, the Old World, James Joyce had spent his expat years in the United States? Specifically the western United States? Specifically specifically the years when this part of the world still mostly belonged to its indigenous inhabitants and there were no railroads or interstate highways or even JC Penneys? Which, sure, that means Joyce would have needed access to a time machine, but I'm already deep in the realm of counterfactual conjecture here, so, why not?

But so anyway, did you ever wonder that? Because I think I have the answer. So, did you? Wonder that? No?

Oh dear. 

Well, anyway, I want to tell you about Rick Harsch's The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, a book that I've already mentioned twice on this here blog, which I was insanely excited to read while awaiting my copy but, yes, also dreading a bit because it's another maximalist  chonk of a novel that is only available in print. Meaning yep, another On-Dead-Tree-Despite-The-Pain read for Your Humble Blogger.

I first learned of the existence of this novel, of author Rick Harsch, and of the cult publishing phenomenon, corona/samizdat, when I saw a few BookTube videos about Philip Freedenberg's and Jeff Walton's America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic, which, on the most pathetic level of reality at least, is about what happens to a writer and illustrator while they are waiting for a copy of The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas to get shipped to them from faraway Slovenia.

Which means I was expecting another heavy dose of crazy, extremely post-modern meta-fictional shenanigans. But that's not quite what I got.

Not that I am in any way disappointed by what I did get. Far from it!

Because this is not the quintessential American experience, for that is too grand a theme. This perhaps is the quintessential endangered American experience. Canada, Mexico, the entire south - that will define the American experience over time. This will all be seen as excrescence, rude corruption of being hyper-aware, vapid, utterly disconnected from enduring life. This America, this United States of, has been making last stands from the beginning, practicing the last stand until they get it right and finally can indeed stand for the last time. No, this scene here, this man and his undershirt oiling his gun before a silent television, this scene has nearly been perfected to extinction.

The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is a much more conventional narrative, more in the vein of, say, Cryptonomicon than of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots or any of the other, weirder fare I tend to favor. Like Cryptonomicon, the narrative is more or less divided into two sections, taking place in different eras of history. We get a lot of background on some of one of our main characters' ancestors, who had colorful and thrilling adventures in the USA's frontier/Old West period (and one of whom was an Indigenous woman) in one narrative, while the other traces that character's, Donnie Garvin's, travels with his brand-new best friend, Drake Fondling, in early 21st century Europe and the United States, while also following a bit of Donnie's father's efforts to catch up with the duo. And since a decent amount of the novel takes place in and around good old Las Vegas, there's also more than a little bit of a more grounded/mundane Last Call here, too.

There now, I've mentioned two of my favorite, most fun reads of all time, so that must mean that Eddie Vegas* is fun, too, right? Well, yes and no. As I said, the narrative is pretty straightforward, even mundane, for all that at one point one of Eddie's ancestors gets lifted into the air and bodily flung at a grizzly bear, whether as a weapon or as a distraction doesn't really matter, and somehow survives to become one of Eddie's ancestors. But what one really reads this novel, and, I suspect, most of Harsch's work for, is the over-the-top wordplay. I have a lot of examples of this, and the text includes several lists that other reviewers have correctly categorized as "Rabelasian", but here are some passages that I marked with my little book darts (one of the pleasures I'd almost forgotten of reading a physical book that I own is using these cunning little tools) and then more or less just flipped to at random.

For instance, raw recruits looked at him and thought "Sure is rough out thar"; Douglas Stompett, Chief Factor and father figure for future factoti for a fee (fie!) (Foe of fumblers) and Friends of the Hudson's Bay Company...

And

On the walls of the spaces where the politics of his parents and their friends were diminished by upright plastered scorn were thematic reproductions, a Chinese room, a surrealist room, an impressionist room -- What of a childhood that renders Dali trite? a Dalit rite? a trolley ride, a trollop's rights, a flop all right, a polite oversight, a maggot white, a dollop bright, a scallop of shite, a pallette of, a mallet of... on the fucking head...

And

The Sick Man of Europe was such a healthy metaphor, diseased body parts still being sold off a century later, the moribund fellow fascinating in his decrepitude, shrinking as they do like healthy verdure under a too intense dry sun, the regimen of the new model of health was ignored until it was too late, the doctors all gone psychotic like any Freudian subject over-thrilled with the death of the other.

That last passage is from a whole chapter of profoundly insightful musings Harsch attributes to the character of Ethel Gravel, another of Eddie's formidable female forebears (I couldn't resist), a woman of profound historical imagination whom one might fear is going to waste in a still-backwater-ish Reno, Nevada of the early 20th century, but whose business acumen, general intelligence and indomitable will have assured her descendants' the kind of start in life that will allow sons to become dilettante scribes and professors who marry improbably named poets and have children whose own potential seems poised to be harnessed to ridiculous business ventures by heirs to mercenary company fortunes and oh, you just have to read this book to see all of the unlikely but compelling goings on. I haven't even begun to describe the compelling small figure of Nordgaard, or of Setif, or of Hermione, or of...

But as this all comes to an end, what The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is really about is just plain old love, especially that between a son and a father, against whose relationship the entire world has seemed to conspire but who have chosen to care about each other anyway, to share their thoughts and feelings in the least toxic example of masculinity I've encountered in this sort-of-genre of maximalist "Brodernism." Even if the hundreds of pages preceding the novel's satisfying denouement weren't as entertaining as they are, it would all be worth it just to enjoy this at the end. Bravo, Mr. Harsch. I'm already looking forward to my next read from you.

*Eddie Vegas is the name a character assumes in the novel, but we don't know which character takes on this alias until about halfway through. This adds the pleasing note of ambiguity that perfects many a book, in my opinion.

Dubravka Ugresic's FOX (Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac and David Williams)

Is Fox a novel? Is The Rings of Saturn? What kind of a book is Landscape and Memory?

Does it matter for anyone who isn't a marketing executive or bookstore clerk? 

Dubravka Ugresic is one of those writers whom I always think was a Nobel laureate but isn't (I even had, always second guessing myself, to double check before posting this). A child of the former Yugoslavia now categorized as Croatian (but who ended her days in the Netherlands because politics), she had the kind of international reputation that leads to enthusiastic promotion by the likes of Open Letter Books (one of my favorite indie publishers and not just because Chad has had me on their podcast, honest!) and to my grabbing all of her works available when they have a sale. But then I get decision paralysis gloating over my hoard and then a library book I'd requested yoinks ago would suddenly come available (but as an interlibrary loan) and then one of my friends would publish something new and then...

So I slept on Ugresic despite my enthusiasm. To my shame! Because Fox is the kind of all-but-uncategorizable opus that is one of my favorite kinds of things to read: a guide through the vast and diverse catalog of the art that has fed the writer's imagination and scholarship through a rich and fascinating career. 

All brought under an inventive rubric to bind it all together: the role of the image of the fox in various cultures of the world. And it's not merely as a generic trickster figure. 

I mean, do you see why I mentioned The Rings of Saturn?

So, just for fun, I tried to keep track of writers and works Ugresic brought under the Fox's sway. And yes, lots of these are new to me and yes, my TBR groans anew under their figurative weight and halfhazard stacking.

§ Mikhail Bulgakov, whose The Master and Margarita I have adored for decades and which Ugresic is reminded of upon her arrival in Moscow for graduate studies in the 1970s.

§ Russian/Early Soviet (as in murdered by Stalin's NKVD early) writer Boris Pilnyak and his great novel, The Naked Year, as well as a piece around which Ugresic based her first chapter, "A Story About How Stories Come to be Written."

§ Japanese author Jun'ichiro Takizaki, a contemporary of Pilnyak, whose novel Naomi Pilnyak likely encountered during a sojourn in Japan and, Ugresic posits borrowed from for a somewhat fictionalized biography of one Sophia Vasilyevna Gnedikh-Tagaki -- who may or may not have existed! The biography might not either. Ugresic is a bit of a trickster herself, maybe?

§ Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher and critic I've always meant to explore but had never determined where to start. I now think I'm going to look for The Arcades Project, which Ugresic discusses in the context of having met a cosmopolitan figure she only designates as "K," whom she met in Japan while touring scenes from Tanizaki's life.

§ Japanese feminist and communist Yuriko Miyamoto, once a friend of Soviet film deity Sergei Eisenstein, whose works like Mileposts/Landmarks/Signposts (Dohyo in Japanese) look like they're going to be hard for me to find. She's sure sounds fascinating, though! And yes, she met Boris Pilnyak and fictionalized their unpleasant encounter.

§ Isaiah Berlin, a Russian-British scholar and professor whom Ugresic imagines having imagined Miyamoto's and Pilnyak's encounter while writing his essay contrasting writerly types, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" which was largely about Leo Tolstoy.

§ Peter Bruegel the Elder, whose painting "The Beggars" features peasants whose ragged clothing is festooned with fox tails; Ugresic thinks of this while contemplating the sight of modern Japanese tweens donning cute fox ears and tails over their clothes in tribute to the good old kitsune of Japanese folk tradition.

And all of this is just from the first chapter. At this point while I was poking around trying to decide what to pursue, I found that somebody has already written a pretty detailed annotation of Fox so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, here. But there's so very much more; it would take a lifetime (as indeed it did, for Dubravka Ugresic) to properly explore it all and I'm already middle aged. And still haven't tracked down and read everything that W.G. Sebald set me haring after years ago!

I mean, she also describes a visit to the Tokyo train station that the hero of Marshland is accused of bombing, but it looks like that weighty tome was not part of Ugresic's literary universe - or at least she didn't mention it here. A pity if she never got to read it; she'd really have liked it, I think.

Fox is also a travelogue, in which international literary star Dubravka Ugresic explores places like the tourist trap Pompeii has become, her accounts of same frequently reminding me of those of fellow globetrotting scribe Umberto Eco, who left this ancient city out of his Travels in Hyperreality probably out of the same thinking that allowed me to live nearly a decade in Boston without ever once visiting the Bull & Finch.*

As I watched the human circus, the frenzied waiters reeling from the tempo, the countless plates sailing above our heads, the voluntary humiliation to which we acquiesced as if we had paid for the right to be humiliated; as I watched our stampede emptying the lunchroom so the next group could stand paid in, I suddenly longed for great Vesuvius to do it's damndest, spew its lava all over us, carbonize us, and blanket us with 20 tons of volcanic ash...

But what is most on Ugresic's mind as she visits various places, contemplates the real or imagined biographies of real or imagined artists, has a romantic encounter with a noble squatter in a house she inherited from a fan of her work back in her new-old homeland, is the plight of refugees of all sorts. Whether they're arriving, desperate and near-drowning in leaky boats on the shores of Lampedusa while she lunches with a possibly-fictional widow of a possibly-fictional writer of international renown, flees from Stalin's NKVD or later authoritarians to more permissive regimes in the east or west, or are simply a nice little old last ekeing out an existence in South London, all but forgotten but for a handful of people like Ugresic who have read her one book, migrants and refugees, who have to partake of all of the qualities of the fox, peek through at us from every page with gently reproachful eyes. At us and at Ugresic, who does not exempt herself from responsibility from their plights. She may have done things here or there to help, donated to causes, looked the other way on property violations, but she could always have done more, just like all of us. Even though she is, herself, a victim, too, of what happened in the former Yugoslavia, which she describes in unforgettable terms: 

From outside, it all looked as if this were happening inside a glass snow globe with the snow swirling. But, inside, instead of snow they're swirled blood. When somebody picked up the globe and shook it, miniature people inside the globe conducted a miniature war, burned books as big as poppy seeds, erected miniature borders, opened their miniature camps for the ethnically unsuitable, raised fences and barbed wire, revise the school books, erased everything old and established everything new, they died in miniature, we're expelled in miniature, blew up miniature homes, everything went on in miniature - and over it all flurried that soothing artificial snow.

That's certainly how it looked to me as a barely 20-something watching it all on the evening news from halfway around the world. And I still only know it via literature, but, let's be honest: the only way I know anything is either through literature or through a few years working (very badly) as a field entomologist.

Ugresic's books, by the way, were among those deemed unsuitable and removed from school and library shelves, presumably to be burnt, as she learned some 25 years later when she returned to Croatia on a visit. So she was, in a sense, doubly exiled, for all that she was welcomed and, in a small degree, feted in the West as a writer of international reputation. She just wasn't nationalist enough to please her new/old nation. A lot of us may come to know how that feels.

Her accounts are not totally mournful, though, witness a late chapter devoted to famous literary emigré Vladimir Nabokov, his wife Vera, son Dmitri, and the small band of women whom they met in New York City when the women took on Nabokov as a language tutor, in exchange for which they, especially the "human footnote" Dorothy Leuthold, guided the Nabokovs through their early explorations of the United States. As she relates charming anecdotes from this period in the Nabokovs lives, she muses also on how people mentally colonize environments that are new to them, appropriating things and people with whom they are not yet familiar by, for instance, bestowing them with diminutive nicknames such as "Dasha" for Dorothy. After whom, famously, Nabokov dared to name a species of butterfly he discovered in the Grand Canyon with her. He was famously very knowledgeable about butterflies and moths so perhaps he could indeed be sure that he was indeed the discoverer of this variety, but it's still kind of adorably presumptive to not only name it but to bestow it with his chauffeur's name. Though I'm sure she considered it a nice tribute -- what if she didn't want to be so remembered? The right to be forgotten is a right that not a lot of us think enough about, I suspect. Especially since the internet is going to make that close to impossible for a while yet.

Dubravka Ugresic left us mere months after I first discovered her and scooped up all of her then-available English translations at Open Letter. I've still got several more to read, and I'll no doubt tell you all about them right here. I, uh, hope she wasn't one of those who'd rather be forgotten.

But if that was the case, she shouldn't have written such fascinating books.

* Aka the "Cheers" bar.

Carlos Hernandez' THE ASSIMILATED CUBAN'S GUIDE TO QUANTUM SANTERIA

I'd be damned if I was going to let my son's body pose for eternity like a movie prop in Everest's death zone so that overprivileged jetsetters could get an extra thrill off him.

Right from the first paragraph of the first story in Carlos Hernandez' wonderfully titled collection, The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, I realized I'd found a writer who truly makes the effort to think about things differently. "The Aphotic Ghost" concerns a man on a mission to retrieve the frozen body of his son from the "garden of corpses" left on the slopes of Mount Everest.

And yet the story's title refers to the depths of the ocean where little or no sunlight penetrates.

Zounds!

I usually take up a short story collection or an anthology at a time when I know I have a lot of waiting around in lobbies and examination rooms ahead of me, or when I know I'm going to be interrupted a lot. It's nice at such times to have small, discrete chunks of prose, whether fiction or essays, that can occupy the waiting, that can accommodate the interruptions. Sometimes this means I finish such a book over the course of weeks or months. I've been reading Gene Wolfe and Phillip K. Dick this way for years.

I read The Assimilated Cuban's Guide straight through, almost non-stop, without even my usual habit of dipping into novels and big non-fiction books on the side. While there were no continuing plot or character developments to tempt me onwards, I kept going as if they were, so delighted by what Hernandez had just shown me that I couldn't wait to see what else was in store.

Some of the stories, like the pithy and improbable "American Moat" are as much long-form jokes, complete with punchlines, as stories; others, like "More Than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give" and "The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory" make both sharp political points (which "American Moat" does, too) and will tug the heartstrings and jerk the tears of any reader with a feeling left in this sorry world.

Still others, in true speculative fiction fashion, entertain the classic "what ifs" of the genre, concerning themselves with lofty concerns that might be risen by continued use of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (the unicorn story again) or an invention that lets a person briefly experience the existences of their own alternate selves in other universes, used in "Entanglements" to allow a disabled veteran to live for a while as versions of himself that didn't lose his legs to an IED. 

The "quantum" part of the collection's title isn't just there as a buzzword.

Vacavito was no longer limited to two hands and two feet. He could play duets by himself. He commissioned over two dozen works that would be impossible for any other person alive to play. The 97-note smash that ends Gazón's 'Singularity Sonata' is still considered one of the defining moments of 21st century music.

So says a widow of her late husband, a world renowned concert pianist, in the collection's best story, "Fantasie-Impromptu No. 4 in C#min, Op. 66." The story is named for a famously challenging piano composition by Frederic Chopin, often used by pianists to showcase their virtuosity. The pianist in question, Vaclava Balusek, went into precipitous decline from Parkinson's Disease at the height of his career, and accepted a neural implant that, connected to a properly equipped concert grand piano (he has one custom made, a steampunk-looking baroque monstrosity with nine extra keys that is a centerpiece of the story), allowed him to play the instrument with his mind. The resulting tale of the impact of bio-cybernetics on the arts is unlike anything I've encountered, moving and full of surprises -- and brings back a character Hernandez clearly loves to write, intrepid reporter Gabriella Reál, from two other excellent stories in the collection, "The International Studbook of the Giant Panda" and "The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory." In "Fantasie-Impromptu..." Gabby manifests as a more fully rounded figure than she gets to in her other appearances in this collection, as her back-story as a lifelong fangirl of Balusek is brought up close and personal with his widow's experiences and the decisions and the criticism facing her regarding a unique relic left behind by the pianist. I would read a whole novel about Gabby*, or about his fiery Cubana widow, Consuela Oquendo. Or what becomes of Balusek's piano, because check this out: 

At first glance it might pass for a traditional grand, lacquered to a gleaming black and oozing old world, Austro-Hungarian charm. But soon you'll notice the brass-and-glass touches that a generation ago would have been called Steampunk: the scroll work on the brushed metal hinge of the fallboard; the rectangular portholes in its body, framed by verdegris-veined copper; the gorgeous, Rube Goldbergian system of pulleys, wheels and hinges that make up the gloriously over engineered pedal lyre. It's the kind of grand piano some billionaire archgeek would order as a showpiece for a living room, more for the eyes than the ears.

And then there's the title story, which brings together most, if not all of the themes explored in the other stories together in a bittersweet story of grief, family, science and a little boy-genius amateur stage magician (who grows up to teach physics at Cal Tech) who is already making up his own Ebo (essentially, a sort of prayer/spell/ritual in the Cuban/Yoruba syncretic philosophy of Santeria) to bring a smile back to his widowed father's (himself revealed as a cabeza of Eleggua after the death of his wife/the boy's mother ruins his allegiance to her Catholicism) face. What a great capstone to a great collection! 

*And I'm in luck, there: looks like Hernandez has fleshed out even more of her back story and made her a plucky schoolgirl heroine in a couple of middle grade sci-fi romps. I'm certainly not above enjoying one of those once in a while!

D.G. Compton's THE CONTINUOUS KATHERINE MORTENHOE, aka THE UNSLEEPING EYE

If there was one thing she hated, it was people who thought and talked of morning but their health.

We are reminded of this fact about the heroine of D.G. Compton's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (originally published in the U.K. as The Unsleeping Eye, which I think is a better title for reasons I'll get to in a bit) many, many times as circumstances slowly and inexorably force her to become just such a person as she considers herself to hate. Plagued by vague symptoms for a few years -- while living in a world that has conquered illness and injury to such an extent that old age is the only thing that kills most people -- Katherine learns in the very first chapter that she, aged a mere 44 years, is that great rarity, someone who will die young. In four weeks, in fact. 

But The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (I really do prefer the other title, but this is how it's more generally known, especially since NYRB published the edition that I read, with the above cover and an insightful-as-always introduction by Weird Fiction Connoisseur Jeff Vandermeer) is not merely about a dying woman and how she chooses to spend the time she has left. That would be a fine read on its own, but it's probably not something I would choose, even with the added angle that this novel has, that Katherine is, in our modern parlance, a generator of A.I. Slop -- she cranks out romance novels to order at terrific speed by entering numerically coded prompts into a computer, which then spits out the text. The result is then published under several different pen names based on sub-genre rubrics, market trends and existing fan base expectations. Cough.*

This novel was originally published in 1974.

But no, it is neither our heroine's terminal status nor her so-of-the-moment-it-hurts profession that drew me in to this work. For in addition to experiencing her sudden and unexpected twilight with a loving and compassionate husband, Harry, by her side, Katherine Mortinhoe is, basically, The Truman Show. Except instead of living in a giant domed TV studio populated with actors in on the secret, Katherine's intimate agonies and kinder moments are being documented by a single camera. Well, two cameras. 

Implanted in the eyes of a journalist who is stalking her and her husband.

Without their consent. 

Yeah.

Beautiful Katherine Mortenhoe and her beautiful husband make a beautiful couple doing beautiful things in a beautiful world, while she prepares beautifully to die. It's also beautiful..

The story of a dying woman navigating her last days in a society unused to death being anything but a dramatic accident that kills too soon for medical intervention (as we get to see, a bit graphically, at one point) or what discreetly awaits the end of a long life, that would be a fine novel to read, but that really isn't this novel. And this is why the original title, The Unsleeping Eye, is better. Because this book is as much about Roddie, the "Man with the TV Eyes" as it is about Katherine, and it is also, to a lesser degree, about the hungry attention of that "pain-starved public," though not as much so as I'd expected. 

See, since Roddie just had the cameras implanted in his head (it's left ambiguous whether they have fully replaced his eyes as cybernetic prostheses or have just been grafted onto and into them) his body and the "TV Eyes" are still integrating, and for the time being he cannot spend any time with them closed, nor in darkness. He literally is the unsleeping eye. "Weren't the latest sleep deprivation drugs amazing?"

But Katherine, too, has unsleeping eyes of a kind, except when her condition makes her lose consciousness for a while. But, very aware that she's only been given a month to live, she's very, very conscious of time passing and lying in bed at home is both a waste and, due to her society's sense of entitlement to her as a spectacle, not really an option. Other unsleeping eyes want to witness.

I was expecting a lot more from this perspective, that of the television audience, but apart from the way a few people react on meeting Katherine, either with her husband or with Roddie, in person is pretty much the sum of what we get. We are just meant to understand that the public is always watching, always waiting, tapping their feet impatiently and glancing at the clock, eager for their daily dose of vicarious misery. No, D.G. Compton did not anticipate the demise of appointment television. But we all know how I feel about evaluating science fiction based on the accuracy of its predictions, don't we?

The thing is, beauty isn't in the eye of the beholder. Neither is compassion, or love, or even common human decency. They're not of the eye, but of the Mind behind the eye. I had seen, my mind had seen, Katherine Mortenhoe with love. Had seen beauty. But my eyes had simply seen Katherine Mortinhoe. Had seen Katherine Mortinhoe. period.

Well, of course Roddie develops a certain affection for his subject, which she almost seems to return -- platonically, platonically; she is married and Roddie is still very emotionally, if not domestically, involved with his ex-wife and their child. But friendship, respect, appreciation and, yes, compassion. His TV eyes are still what is actually seeing Katherine, but it's his mind, still very much his own no matter into how much hock he has gone to his employees for his body, who is observing her. And starting to feel a certain kind of a way about what he is in the process, simply by being around her, of doing to her.

Two other really fascinating aspects of this terrific little novel are worth touching on here. One is the seriousness with which personal privacy is taken in its world; upon realizing just how much her experience is in danger of becoming public property, Katherine goes to the authorities and gets a "three day personal grief" certification, which takes the form of a badge she can wear and a sticker she can put on the threshold of her apartment. Universally, this badge and sticker are respected by members of the public and the press, even as the latter scheme to get around the letter of the law behind the emblems. But for the three days its in effect, Katherine and her husband can invoke "PG" and everybody back off, even the most intrepid of paparazzi. To read about this in our own year 2025, in which we cheerfully and thoughtlessly violate our own privacy dozens, if not hundreds of times a day, for no reward but clout and maybe a hint of fellow feeling, is quite an experience. One might almost envy Katherine and her co-nationals.

The other notable thing is the disease which is curtailing Katherine's life. It's given a fancy syndrome name I can't recall any longer (or look up because it was a library book for which others were waiting), but what it boils down to is a severe and fast-acting neuro-degenerative condition caused by the overwhelming input of too much information by too many means into a simple human brain that evolved to work with good old Dunbar's Number of people and information sources and experiences and means of communication. As a person whose entire career has been spent manipulating information with computers to a degree unusual for her society, she's one of only a handful of people who have ever manifested with the full-blown syndrome, making her a profound medical curiosity as well as a social one. Suddenly, her situation doesn't seem so enviable, does it?

Or as improbable? Except, of course, we still live in a world where health care is only sometimes successful in staving off death, unfairly rationed, etc., etc.

But so, a question: would it be a worthwhile trade off to have people wandering around with TV Eyes who can record and broadcast our every move and utterance to the world without our knowledge or consent, in exchange for universal healthcare and longevity for most?

Oops, I see what I did there. Ha.

*Because this novel was written back when the basic assumption about our culture was that we would always have standards for our art, even our machine-assisted art, she spends more time editing and proofreading the computer's output than she does on the prompts. Ah, me...